Coming Through the Rye (10 page)

She straightened up in her seat after glancing out.

“I think there is some mistake,” she said to her silent escort. “I will not take the message tonight. I would like to go home now, please.”

There was a note of humility in her voice that had not been there before, and Sherwood felt his own heart go out to her in her despair. If only he were her friend now and could help a little—really help!

They went swiftly back to the house, and Romayne looked up at the light in the upper window and remembered how she had glanced up that afternoon with such satisfaction. How soon and how swiftly her satisfaction had been swept away! How gladly now would she welcome back the hard sweet days when she and her father had lived in a little old house on an uninteresting street and were happy companions together! How happy poverty could be if she had it again, along with her utter trust in her father and brother!

As she passed through the hall, she threw just one glance toward the narrow open door, but she caught the gleam of the row of bottles with their labels: P
URE
R
YE
W
HISKEY
.

How indelibly that was stamped on her brain! And to think that she had been living in a house with all that hidden peril and had not known it, had, in fact, been hiding its presence and protecting it by her own presence there. Could it be that her dear father had realized that and had been willing to put her in such a position? She felt as if she were entering a charnel house.

She fled up the stairs that the men who were visible beyond the narrow door might not see her. She felt that she could not bear their eyes upon her. When she reached the top of the stairs, she found her knees were all but sinking under her. Where was her fine vigorous strength of the morning? Oh, how had life fled away and left nothing but death? Death in life!

She went once more and stood by the bed, listening to her father's hoarse unnatural breathing, taking his twisted hand in hers and wondering how a single moment like that could have changed and distorted his form and features. Her heart was bursting with its heavy burden.

The nurse had shaded the light and motioned her to go and rest, and Romayne slipped away to her own room. She took off her hat and then remembered that she had yet a mission to perform. Perhaps even now men were on their way to her brother's room.

She slipped down the hall again and was about to open her brother's door when she noticed there was a light streaming from the crack below. She drew back as the door swung open and saw two men, one with a flashlight, going through her brother's pockets. It was too late! The papers he had wanted destroyed were already in their hands! So she had failed to do even so much to help him! She made a little sound like a moan and turned to go, but her foot slipped on the polished floor, and she would have fallen if someone had not caught her. She looked up and found that Sherwood was steadying her with his arm. A sudden feeling of fury came upon her that he should be present everywhere as if he was at the bottom of all her trouble. Her overstrained nerves recoiled, and she stiffened away from him.

“So that was why you were so anxious to go with me to see my brother!” she said the scorn. “You went to spy!”

He looked down at her sadly.

“You poor little girl!” he said. “What I heard made no difference. This would have all been done anyway.” He swept the room with his gesture. “This has all been arranged since yesterday. I had nothing to do with it except as I have been obeying orders.”

“Oh!” she moaned. “I wish I might never see you again!” and the tears flowed down in a deluge.

The young man recoiled at her words as if he had been stung again, but his voice was steady.

“If you will go into your room and stay an hour, I will do my best to make your wish come true,” he said and walked away back to Lawrence's room once more.

Romayne hurried into her own room, locked the door, and fell upon her trembling knees in a deluge of tears.

Presently in a blinding search for her handkerchief, a bit of paper fell from her pocket, and she remembered the note she had been trusted with. She stooped and picked it up.

It had fallen open, and her eye caught the words:

The signature was a disguised
L
.

R
omayne dropped down upon her bed weakly with the paper in her hand. She felt as if all the strength of her body were slowly ebbing from her through hands and feet. Her fingers seemed lifeless. The effort to keep her hold upon the flimsy paper seemed almost too great to be accomplished, yet she grasped it as if by so doing she were in some way withholding the words it contained from a ruthless and unsympathetic world. Her thoughts were in a tumult. All that had happened before seemed climaxed in that note of her brother's.

It was not that she had not already appreciated the shame and humiliation of the discovery of the evening to the full, but somehow this note to this common little painted girl so far below her brother socially, so much beneath him in education and breeding, so low in the moral scale, seemed suddenly to reveal to her the depths to which they all had fallen, and to sweep away in one stroke any illusions she might have entertained concerning her brother's innocence in these other matters.

Then Lawrence
did
know about it all.

Then he not only
knew
but was also deep into the business himself.

Then that was where all his money had come from! It had seemed so wonderful that he should have stepped right into a great salary just because Grandfather used to know the grandfather of the man who was at the head of the business. Probably Lawrence's salary at the office was after all but a mere pittance. Probably he kept the position to better hide his real business! These last suggestions only hovered in the back of her mind. She had not yet gotten adjusted to the idea of Lawrence as a deceiver. Never had she thought of anything like dishonor in connection with this brother who had always seemed to her just about perfect.

It was true that Lawrence had been away at school for years, and she had seen but little of him except at vacation times. But he had written her the most charming letters, cheerful and breezy, telling her of all he did and of all his friends. Ever there had been an atmosphere of refinement and righteousness about him. How could it be possible that he could have descended to this?

She read the note over again, trying to torture its phrases into a mere business communication, or possibly a message he was transmitting to Frances from some friend of hers, but the truth stared her in the face. Lawrence must have had some kind of friendship with this low-born little ignorant child, whose limitations would necessarily have taken him among people with whom he did not naturally belong. Dimly she understood that a relationship like that must be one of temptation, must carry him to places where his own ideals would be cheapened by the contact.

Something rose up in righteous anger within her soul toward the pert little flapper who had presumed to be intimate with her brother.
Her brother!

And then her pride winced at the thought that she could no longer hold her head up at the thought of her family. Not that she had ever boasted or been unduly proud of herself, but always she had been glad that she had been born into a family who were Godfearing, law-abiding, educated, refined people, above doing anything low or mean or beyond the pale of culture.

Now! Now where was she!
The daughter of a bootlegger!

Down went her head into the pillow once more, and the tears welled forth, strangling her for the moment.

Back came the vision of her father's white face and hunted look just before he fell.

Like a rock upon her heart fell the conviction that her father had known what those men had come for, and that there had been guilt in his look!

Then there surged from her heart a reaction. She would not believe that of her father! He had
not knowingly
sinned! It might be that he had come to suspect something. There might have been things in the business to make him uneasy. But surely, surely he had not known all! They had been using him as a blind to the world to hide their illicit operations.

As she recalled it now, her father hardly ever went down into the cellar—not in the daytime—and he could not have gone at night without awaking her. Why, she could remember but three times when her father had gone down into the cellar. Twice to arrange about the coal and open the chute and once when those great packing cases had come from the West. He had gone down and arranged where they were to be put. There had been several of them, more it seemed to her memory than had appeared when she went through the cellar with the young officer. They had probably been split up for kindling wood long ago, or else her memory had made more of them than there were. And—oh yes—she could remember when Father went down to superintend the fixing of the wall where they said a part had fallen down. She hadn't been down herself—but she was sure her father could not have known of those packing cases in the cellar filled with bottles. Now she remembered—the man who brought them worked a long time unpacking the boxes and bringing up those specimens, and her father had been busy in his office, arranging them as they were brought up. Very likely he hadn't known a thing about what was going on. Whoever was employing him had just kept things camouflaged, and, of course, it was all the better screen for them to have her father unaware of what was going on down in his cellar. No one would have dared suspect a respectable man like her father! She would tell that detestable young man about it in the morning if he dared come near the house again—or, no, she preferred telling someone who would have more authority. She would go to the Judge's secretary and explain it all out and ask them to see that the impertinent young man was told. Of course her father was all right!

Having convinced herself bravely, she got up from the bed and washed the tears from her face. By and by, reconnoitering to see that all was quiet below, she stole down the hall to her father's door again.

Softly she turned the knob, opened the door, and stepped inside. The nurse sat silently by the window, looking out into the deep midnight sky. Long afterward Romayne remembered the impression of stars against the midnight blue of the sky as she stepped inside that room, and then went to look at the white twisted face on the pillow, her heart breaking with the agony of thinking how he lay there unable to speak for himself. But
she
would speak. She would clear his fair name! And she would go back now and spend the night in praying. Lawrence might have gone wrong, but Father,
never
! She would not believe it.

She went back to her room after a little while. It was too terrible to stand there and watch that living death of her beloved.

She changed into a little plain housedress that had been her work dress before the rise in their fortunes. Somehow she felt more honest and strong in that than going about in her pretty new things that might have been bought with doubtful money. Not that she was going to believe that they had yet, but she felt better and more like her old self in the old dress.

In almost a businesslike way she knelt beside her bed when she was dressed and began to pray that God would help her to vindicate her father. But when she tried to frame the sentences, the words would not come, and it was just as if a preventing hand had been laid upon her soul forbidding her prayer. How strange! And then she set about it again, in a fury of anger that anyone should suspect her father—yes, and her brother—her dear brother! Surely there must be some mistake about him, too. That note—well—there would be some explanation. When day came, she would go again to the prison and find out from Lawrence and get the thing straight. Why had she not made Lawrence realize their father's condition? Now she remembered she had been dazed herself.

Again, for the third time, she tried to pray that everything would be set right in the morning.

So through the night she struggled to pray, framing sentences that her inner consciousness told her did not fit the case, yet trying to reach the gate of heaven with a petition that was more a demand than a prayer that the Most High would work a miracle and undo all the sin that had been committed.

When the first crimson streak of dawn sent a faint rosy light across the window, making half-visible the furniture in her room, Romayne suddenly rose from her knees with a set face and started downstairs. She realized that she was fighting to believe what her good judgment told her was a lie, trying to believe a thing because she wanted it to be true. She had to clear away these doubts that were in her own heart before she could pray to be heard. She had always believed in prayer from her childhood but never practiced it very continuously. Still, she had prayed in faith many times and received a comfortable feeling in return that now all would be well because she had given it into the hands of God. But this time it was different. It was as if her prayers reached no higher than the ceiling and then fell in broken fragments around her feet. It seemed that if it were possible to see the invisible, she would be able to see her vain words lying in useless unaccepted heaps around the room.

Romayne found a light in the lower hall and went on past the arched doorway toward the back of the hall to the cellar door. She was going down to investigate for herself without any curious eyes upon her.

She had opened the door and snapped on the cellar light when she was suddenly confronted by a blinking officer who had evidently been dozing in the front room.

“Is there anything I can get for you, miss?” he asked courteously.