Coming Through the Rye (12 page)

“Well, kid, how's Dad?” he began. “Don't look so woebegone. We can't afford to let them think we're down and out. That never pays. Is Dad better?”

“He's like death!” Romayne shuddered.

“You don't mean he hasn't come to yet?” the young man asked anxiously. “I thought he'd be on deck by this time. But perhaps it's just as well he shouldn't till the Freemans get back. They've got to straighten this whole thing out. They will, too; don't you worry. I've got a pretty good handle on them, and they don't know it yet. I took care for that. I didn't go into this business with my eyes shut, Little Sister, and I've got something up my sleeve that will make them squirm. You'll see the whole pretty machine turned upside down just as soon as I get a chance to talk to the judge.”

“Then you knew it all the time?” exclaimed Romayne as if the last straw had been taken from her.

“Hush!” said Lawrence roughly, glancing fearfully toward the door. “Don't talk so loud! You never can tell whether you're alone or not in a place like this. You don't want to make things worse than they are, do you?”

“How could they be worse?” moaned Romayne, dropping her head down upon the table.

“Don't be a fool!” said her brother in a low tone. “I guess it would be worse if I got a long sentence in prison, wouldn't it? Cheer up, Little Sister. I'll soon be out, and then I'll make a few people hurt for this. That dirty sneak of a Sherwood will be the first one, too. He thinks he's so holy and so wise and so righteous! I'd like to rub his nose in some of the filth that he talks about! He says he's cleaning up the city, but he's really cleaning up a lot of notoriety, and you'll see him spreading himself in one of these offices he's never done talking about and getting a bigger cut than anybody else in a few months. I'll bet he's been as bad as the rest of them himself, or he wouldn't be so sharp to find out things.”

Something seemed to be choking Romayne. In spite of herself, she did not like to hear her brother talk this way about the young man. Somehow the memory of the steady look in his gray eyes reproached her for even listening to it. She sat up straight and looked intently at her brother, as if she were older than he, as if she had a right to question his actions.

“Stop!” she said sternly. “We have no time for such talk. They may not let me stay long. Tell me. Did you know all about this beforehand? Were you really breaking the law? Did you know what Father—”

“Shut up!” said Lawrence, rising angrily. “I told you you
must not talk
about things like that. That has nothing to do with it, anyway.”

“Oh, don't!” said Romayne wearily with tears rolling down her white cheeks. “It has all to do with it, whether you are guilty or not. Oh Lawrence! How can I ever respect you again?”

“Oh rot!” said the young man, flinging away from her and glaring across to the other side of the room. “You're a nice one to come to see a man in trouble and begin to charge him with all sorts of things and say you don't respect him—bah!”

Romayne was sitting in troubled silence with bright tears chasing down her cheeks. She felt as if her reasoning powers were taxed beyond their comprehension with the problem before her. She wanted to say something to comfort Lawrence. Two natures were striving within her, one that loved her brother with a deep and agonizing love and longed to help him at all costs, and one that loathed the thing he had done, the person he had become, and could not rally to regard his personal trouble at all while he had shut himself away from respectability by his own act.

At last she looked at his angry back and said timidly, “Lawrence, what did you do it for? Why did Father do such a terrible thing?”

Lawrence laughed an unpleasant, desperate laugh.

“That's a great question for
you
to ask! As if you didn't know that Father was desperate to get money for you, position for you, clothes and automobiles and good times for
you
! And you sit there in your self-righteousness and ask
why
we did it!”

“Oh Lawrence!” Romayne collapsed in misery once more.

The young man let her cry for a moment without attempting to comfort her, and watched her speculatively with frowning brows. He had a problem of his own right here in molding this little sister of deep ingrained principles into an implement fit for his questionable uses. Yet he must use her.

“Now look here, Romayne—this has got to stop!” he said at last, touching her lightly on the arm. “Of course I know you didn't realize all this, and it isn't in the least your fault, but now that you know it was for you, don't blame Father, and don't blame me. Get to work, and help us out of our scrape. That's your work, and you mustn't be too darned particular and sentimental about things either. This is serious business, and you forget all your finicky little ideas about right and wrong for a while, and do as you're told. Did you deliver my note last night?”

Romayne lifted eyes large with a newly remembered trouble.

“Lawrence, what have you to do with Frances Judson? You haven't surely ever
gone with
a girl like that, have you? No, I didn't deliver that note! I
couldn't
when I found where it was. I had just been there in the afternoon to see her little crippled sister, who is in my Sunday school class. I couldn't take a note from my brother in prison! I
couldn't
! Not until I understood what it was about. I knew you wouldn't want me to do it.”

“There you go again with your foolishness!” said Lawrence angrily, rising and taking a furious step away from her. “I thought I had a
sister
! It seems I have
nobody
!”

Romayne was sobbing once more, softly, with a desperateness about the sound of it that showed him he was going too far. He remembered that Romayne as a child had never been able to stand fault-finding. It seemed to unfit her for doing anything. He sat down and took a different tone.

“Listen, Little Sister, you have made a mountain out of a mole hill. That girl is nothing to me. One of the fellows brought her along the other night for the ride when we were taking a load down to ship it for Dad—”

Romayne shuddered at the easy way in which he spoke of the business that seemed to her the depths of disgrace.

“She's not a bad sort as girls go nowadays, but I had nothing to do with her, only she had some evidence, and I had to ask her to keep dark about it.”

“I read the note, Lawrence; I thought you would want me to,” said Romayne sorrowfully. “You promised her rides—”

“Oh well, forget it! She's nothing to me, of course. Say, Romayne, are you going to help me to get out of this, or are you not? We have no time to waste like this. Come out of this stillness, and let's get down to business. Can you possibly rouse Dad enough to ask him a few questions? They are mighty important, and I've
got
to know them, or everything will go to the dogs. I've written them out here so I won't have to waste time talking about them. When you go home, you see what you can do to get an answer out of Dad. Better memorize the questions so you can get them off at a moment's notice if he rouses. It's most important. I sha'nt know how to manage my case if it comes up in court without knowing just what Dad did in that meeting. Ask him if he signed the papers. Be sure to get the answer to that even if you don't get the other two.”

“Lawrence, Father is just like the one dead. His face is all twisted out of shape. He doesn't look in the least like Father.”

“A stroke, I suppose! But he may rally, even if it's only a minute or so, and you've
got
to watch out and be ready. It might mean everything for me if you don't.”

“Oh Lawrence!” Her head went down, and she sobbed softly. “Lawrence, have you done something else—something—even worse?”

“No! No! No!” said Lawrence crossly, flinging himself around in his chair. “Of all things! I didn't think you'd go to pieces this way. Of course, I know you've had a shock, but you ought to pull yourself together and be able to help a little—you're all I've got to depend on, and you seem to be worse than nothing.”

“Oh, I'll help—Lawrence—I'll do anything I can—but I don't honestly believe Father'll ever speak again! If he does, Lawrence, it would be
terrible
to trouble him with things like that!”

“H'm! You'd rather have me in prison all my days—or worse perhaps—”

Romayne drew a deep shuddering sob, and the door opened into the next room. The attendant had come to tell them that the time was up!

She started up with a frightened look at her brother, shrinking from his reproving eyes, which taunted her with having wasted precious time. But it was not his wish to appear before the warden as being out of harmony with his sister. He forced a smile.

“Never mind, kiddie,” he said kindly, “you'll come again, and anyhow I'll be out of here in a day or so if all goes well. You just remember what I told you.”

“Oh, I'll try!” She trembled forth and then flung her arms about his neck once more to kiss him good-bye, and whispered, “I'll do what I can, dear, but oh,
you don't know
how desperately
sick
he is!”

He patted her on the shoulder with another smile for the attendant's benefit, but he whispered fiercely in her ear:

“
Make
him answer those questions
somehow
, kid; there
must
be a way. If I was home I would find out! You
must find out for me
. It is the only way to get us out of this hole!”

Romayne went home feeling more depressed and horrified than when she came. Here was her brother not only acknowledging his crime but also even treating it lightly! Now that she was away from him, her forebodings concerning the girl Frances returned in full force. Somehow he had not convinced her. She felt sure that he had known Frances pretty well, or he would never have written her such a note. It wasn't, of course, important in the present situation only as it revealed what her brother had fallen to, and gave her a sense of utter alienation from him, a feeling of being entirely alone in the world with this awful trouble. Was ever any other girl in a place so awful as this, she wondered as she went wearily up the steps and let herself into the house. No one in the world to turn to for help! No friends that she cared to call on, now that the shame was assured. No relatives whom she knew well enough to fall back upon, no one to take charge of her poor little affairs and see what could be done for the brother and the father! In fact, now that she was positive that it was really so, she preferred fighting it out alone rather than to have to acknowledge the truth before any relative she knew, even if they were near enough to be of any service.

She went upstairs at once to the sickroom, but the same monotonous breathing showed her there was no change here. A new nurse was in charge who looked at her with cold eyes, and in answer to her few wistful questions assured her that her father could not hear anything that went on and would probably never rally from his present state, although it was quite possible that he might linger for days and even perhaps weeks. Such cases had been known.

Romayne went from the room almost glad that it was so. Never would she wish to disturb her father with the questions her brother wanted asked, yet even as she thought this, her heart gave a great wrench to think she was deliberately wishing to save him at the expense of her brother, who was young and whose life would be ruined if he had to begin his young manhood with a record of imprisonment.

She waited for the doctor that afternoon and bravely asked him what the prospect was. The doctor shook his head. He had read the papers, which had highly colored versions of the story, of course, in spite of even Sherwood's earnest efforts to hush it up.

The doctor felt it would be the kindest thing in the world both for the man and for his daughter if he never rallied from his present state, but he admitted that there was a possibility that he might. Yes, he said, it might be possible if he rallied that he would be able to understand them. It was hardly likely that he would ever regain his speech. There were certain indications—but he did not wish to commit himself even on this point at present. They would just have to wait and see.

So Romayne settled herself as best she might to “wait and see.” Where had she read something like that? “Sit still, my daughter, until thou know how the matter will fall.” Her mother had read it to her once. Could it have been out of the Bible? Was anything ever harder to do than to wait?

The days that followed dragged like centuries. Her agony of mind was intolerable. She spent hours going over the situation, vainly seeking a ray of hope. It seemed to her that she compassed the entire universe with her futile struggles to find a way out of this maze. And ever was growing in her heart a settled purpose, that if those waxen eyelids should open again with recognition in them, she would be ready with something to say. She might get no answer herself, but she must get something across to her father, some word of comfort or hope or cheer. For if her way was dark and hard, how much more must be his, who had brought all this upon them all? And another thought was growing along with this determination, and that was that if he should rally and get well, he would be under the condemnation of the law.

She had never realized before what it would be to be under the law. To have freedom taken away and to be shut up and ordered what to do, even when to eat and sleep. She had never sensed before the shame that would attend a man and his family through the remainder of life after he had once broken the law.

Of course, there were those who could commit crime and slip through somehow by that amazing mystery they called “pull” and get free and enjoy themselves. But her father was not one of that sort. He would feel the shame and disgrace to the end of his days. If she needed any proof of that, she had the memory of his look that moment he stood in the door before he fell.