Coming Through the Rye (7 page)

“I see,” said the officer, writing something down. “And now, could you just tell me where you went after you got into the car?”

“Why—” Sybil Mary paused thoughtfully and bit her vivid lips as if she were trying to recall. “Why, I don't really just remember. We go on so many rides. It mightta ben to the park, and it mightta ben out Fielding Road. It was real dark that night, and I don't recall.”

“Could it by any possibility have been toward Pine Woods Inn?”

“I—don't—think—so.” She drew her brows thoughtfully. “I've never been there much.”

Suddenly the interrogator turned to Frances.

“Which one of the men waited on you at your table that night, Miss Frances? Did they call him Jim or Joe?”

Sybil was raising her eyebrows at Frances and signaling all sorts of warnings, but the miserable Frances was beyond using subterfuges.

“Joe, I think,” she answered with quivering lips, and then she saw what she had done and, putting her head down, sobbed bitterly to hide the angry glances of her friends.

“That will be about all, thank you,” he said to Mrs. Judson as he closed his little notebook and put it in his pocket. “I'll leave your daughter in your hands, Mrs. Judson. I'm sure you know what is best to be done
for the present
, and if all goes well, I hope we sha'n't have to trouble you again. I shall have to ask these other three girls to take a little ride with me. There is an automobile waiting outside, and it isn't a dark night tonight.”

The three girls looked at each other with frightened glances, and Frances stopped sobbing and held her breath.

“Oh—I—gotta date—” began Sybil Mary.

“That's all right,” said the officer. “This date comes first. Just step right outside.”

“But my grandmother will worry,” persisted Sybil Mary.

“You should have thought of that sooner,” said the officer, taking firm hold of the shrinking girl's arm. “If it becomes necessary, we'll see that your grandmother is informed where you are.”

“I'll tell you where Lawrence Ransom is if you leggo of my arm!” she ventured at last as the man opened the door.

The officer led her on grimly silent.

“He's arrested,” affirmed Sybil Mary anxiously. “You don't need me. They got him half an hour ago.”

But the officer herded the girls out and closed the door behind them.

It was not until the sound of the automobile outside had died away among the city noises that Mrs. Judson turned to her cringing daughter.

“So it seems we have
two
fools in the family,” she said dryly. “It ain't just the time I should ha chose to find it out, but I s'pose it don't matter. It's well to know just what one is up against.”

There followed a pause, during which Frances's slender young shoulders shook pitifully under their flimsy silk covering.

“So that's what you ben doin' all these evenin's when I thought you was staying overnight with Mary Johnston studying stenography so's you could help pay for Wilanna's operation!”

The shoulders shook still harder.

“I never thought my girl would disgrace me!”

The mother's voice was dry and empty.

“One woulda thought you'd had enough of drinkin' with your Pa takin' them spells. But I s'pose it's in the blood somehow and just came natural. I tried to do my duty by you, but it seems I ain't. Well—it ain't too late to begin. Frances May Judson, I ain't never spanked you enough. I know that. You was such a kinda pretty little thing. I never thought you'd grow up to be
bad!
I done wrong. I can see it now. But I'm gonna give you one good spankin' yet that you'll remember all your days. After that ef you wantta leave home as that bold-eyed huzzy told you, I s'pose you can go, but you'll have that spankin' to remember wherever you go, and mebbe p'raps it'll remind you what you oughtta ben. But anyhow you ain't gonta have no more such carryin's on while you stay in your home! You can just make up your mind to that. Now you can go upstairs to my room and take off that silly rag you've got on and get ready, and when I come up, I'll tend to you.”

“But, Mamma”—Frances lifted a woebegone face—“I ain't never done anything dreadful. I didn't steal any car, nor have anything to do with any folks that did—Larry was tryin' a car to buy—”

“Ain't it bad enough to go with a young man that drinks and carries whiskey round in his car? I ask you, Frances May Judson, was you brought up to do things like that? You, a baby, that oughtta be goin' to school yet, runnin' round in the night to hotels in the woods, dancin' with men you don't know their names! I ain't got words to tell you what I feel about it. It's no use.”

“But Mamma, he's a real classy young man, and his car was something swell. We didn't have whiskey either. It was a real refined kind of wine!”

“Fiddlesticks end! Don't talk like a fool! As if liquor wasn't liquor! You can't refine the drunk out of it, can you? Ain't it breakin' the law jus the same if it's refined or not refined? Whadda they have a law for ef it ain't the best thing to keep it, d'ya s'pose, Frances May? And waddaya think a classy young man wants with a girl like you outta that ten-cent store, an' her papa runnin' a truck? You don't s'pose he was meanin' to make
real
friends with you, did you? Them kind don't. They wouldn't wipe their feet on you before their own home folks. They just run with you to act crazy, and then they throw you away and don't care what becomes of you. Talk about classy young men, Frances Judson! There'd be some class to you ef you kep up that sortta thing. You wouldn't be even in the workin' class. You'd be outside where folks don't count you at all. There ain't never any of our family been like that, child. We've always ben respectable, an' that's a sight cleaner an' better than bein' classy. Some time you'll find that out. Now go upstairs, and I'll do my duty by you.”

Sobbing bitterly, Frances went slowly upstairs, the tears making long streaks on the bright flimsy silk, the pretty little streamer that was meant to go around her neck straggling down her back at halfmast and dragging on the stairs unheeded.

Into her mother's bare room she crept in the dark, still sobbing, and on the other side of the thin wall her little invalid sister Wilanna lay in her bed and prayed.

“Dear God, don't let my sister get drunk and get in jail. Please don't let her! ‘For Jesus' sake,' like my Sunday school teacher said. And please, dear God, if You've got any more time you can spare, won't You see what's the matter with our home? It's got something the matter all through. Amen, and I thank You.”

Then Wilanna closed her eyes and tried to think of her prayer going out the window and up through the skies on wings like a bird to heaven. Wondered if it would have trouble finding the way in and how it would ever get to God with all the singing of the angels, and how He would know it was hers.

But her sad little heart was comforted with the thought that she had done all she knew how to do, and her teacher with the pretty dress had said God would hear.

Mrs. Judson came heavily up the stairs after locking up the house, and grimly performed her duty by her eldest child. With set face and dry eyes, she chastised the shrinking Frances, utterly subdued now and thoroughly frightened. Mamma seemed suddenly a new strange person whom she did not know, whom she had vastly sinned against without knowing.

And when the sad rite was over—which might as well have been performed upon Wilanna's poor little suffering body so fully did she bear the pain for her sister—Frances slunk away to the next room and shrunk sorrowing into the other side of her sister's bed, still quivering with sobs. Then a little skinny hand, hot and nervous, slid softly over and lay upon the heaving shoulders with a little patting motion on the coarse nightgown.

Its comfort reached to the repentant young sinner, and gradually she turned to the little sister till their arms were about one another, and their tears mingling together. And so they slept.

But in the bare front room at the window the sad-eyed mother sat, staring out across the roofs of the opposite houses, past towers and steeples and tall buildings, to where in the distance like a battlement against the sky the grim walls of the jail arose.

So she sat the long night through and thought her sorrowful thoughts, visualizing the man who sat alone and awake in his dark little cell, sober and repentant now. She thought of him as he was years ago when she gave up a good home and parents who loved her to try the world with him. His hair had a glint of gold then where it turned into curls about his brow, and his eye was Irish blue with a twinkle. The world had looked good to her when she left her world for his. She was not so bad-looking herself in those days, with a pink dress and her black hair braided smooth and bound around her head. And when the little baby Frances came, how proud they had been to see her father's twisted smile in miniature and her cute little ways! And now here!
He in jail!
And
Frances—what
?

She held her hands together hard where they smarted from the pain she had administered, and her heart ached with the horror of it all! She thought bitterly of the rich man who had financed the saloons where her husband got the drink, and kept them protected and going in spite of the law, and wondered again dully, as she had wondered many a time before, why God didn't kill the devil, and why such rich men had to be in a world with poor people who couldn't help themselves.

And, then, weary to exhaustion with her vigil and her sorrow, just as the first streak of dawn crimsoned the battlement in the horizon, she dropped her head down on her arms, and the tears flooded her face. The morrow was here, and what would it bring to them all?

I
t was very still in the room. Only the soft tread of the doctors overhead and the subdued voices intermittently broke the utter quiet. It was almost as if there were no one in the room.

Evan Sherwood was not easily embarrassed nor upset, but he felt as if he had just completed the murder of an innocent.

Romayne, after that first long shudder as she sank into the chair, had not moved. She did not sob, nor even quiver, yet the whole attitude of the little despairing figure expressed utter anguish. Suddenly he felt that he had done a terrible thing in thus revealing to this gently reared girl the folly and sin of her beloved father. He should have saved her this terrible knowledge at all costs. He should have gone all his days in the light of her contempt rather than shatter her faith and joy in her father. He should have let her walk upon his very soul and trample him under her poor little feet, rather than to have brought this awful shame upon her!

How was it, he questioned his own heart in the silence, that he had so far forgotten his first resolve to keep the daughter out of the affair at all costs? Was it that she had hurt his pride by her imperious ways and her scorn of him?

The quick blood crept into his face. He felt that he had dishonored his purpose in yielding to a personal feeling. What did it matter if she despised him? He would probably never see her again, and far, far rather that she should be torn from his pedestal and she crushed under the shame of it. Still, could she have been kept in ignorance of the truth and kept her faith in her father even if he had not revealed the truth to her? Somebody would have made her know, and perhaps even more sharply than he had done. Well—let somebody else have done it, then! Anything rather than that he should bear this deed on his soul the rest of his life! He felt that he could not forgive himself.

The stillness of the little crouched figure became intolerable to him. He felt as if he could not stand it. His soul swelled with sorrow for her. Such a frail little thing, so beautiful, so tenderly reared, and so utterly cast down. A frenzy seized him to do something for her if only to show his sympathy. He stepped forward and touched her ever so lightly on the shoulder.

“I'm so sorry,” he pleaded in a gentle voice.

She shrank from him as if his touch had been upon raw flesh.

“I did not want to hurt you …” he began again, trying to search his mind for something that might be said under terrible circumstances like this. What could be said? He had only shown her the truth, and there was no way of taking it back even if that were a right thing to do. It was too cruel that men had to sin and their children must suffer for it.

She shrank still further from his touch and lifted her face dry of tears, with a terrible look of despair and horror in her eyes.

“Don't!” she said sharply. “You do not need to offer me sympathy—
now
!”

Her lips were white and trembling, but she was very quiet otherwise. There was a look in her face as if she had suddenly grown old, very old, with the sharpness that sudden great sorrow and revelation of sin brings.

“I know,” he said simply, with miserable humility in his voice. “I must seem terrible to you. But I wish you would believe me that it was not my
pleasure
that brought me here. It was to save others from awful suffering! I did not know about
you
. I did not realize that there would have been you or anyone except the wrongdoer to suffer—”

“Don't!”
she said so sharply this time that he started as if she had struck him.

“Of course!” said he. “I am a fool! I should have kept my mouth shut. I am only making things worse. But at least you will let me do something for you. I could send for anyone you want.”

She swept him with a silencing glance.

“It is too late!” she said significantly, and then with a little despairing gasp like a suppressed moan, “and it would not have mattered anyway, of course. But oh, won't you
go
now? Haven't you done all the awful things you had to do? Couldn't I be alone?”