WHEN Grace reached home that evening her absence of the preceding night was barely mentioned by her mother, and Ethel did not refer to it at all. The conduct of another member of the family had aroused grave apprehensions in the domestic circle and any suspected derelictions of her own were suffered to pass, or were accepted in a spirit of resignation, as a part of a visitation of an inscrutable providence upon the house of Durland.
Roy had turned up in the early hours of the morning much the worse for dalliance with a contraband beverage that had served him ill. There was gloom in the kitchen where she found her mother and Ethel preparing supper and after satisfying herself that she was not the cause of the depression she summoned courage to ask her mother what had happened.
“I think, mother,” said Ethel loftily, “that Grace should know. It may be possible that she can help us in our trouble. Roy has always been fonder of her than of me.”
Ethel’s tone was replete with intimations that this affection was not wholly complimentary to either her brother or sister. She entered upon a circumstantial account of Roy’s misbehavior which omitted nothing that could enhance its heinousness, Mrs. Durland interrupting occasionally to soften the harsh terms in which Ethel described Roy’s appearance on the snowy threshold at two o’clock, in the care of two young friends in little better condition than himself. It had been necessary to summon a doctor to relieve Roy’s stomach of the poison he had consumed.
“I’m sure it’s the first and last time for Roy,” said Mrs. Durland. “He’s terribly cut up over it; but of course at the holiday season, and meeting old friends and all, I suppose we must make allowances.”
“That’s the way to look at it, mother,” said Grace, sincerely grieved for her mother and anxious to restore her confidence in Roy. “I know Roy wouldn’t do anything to trouble you. We ought to be glad that stuff didn’t kill him! Roy isn’t the only boy who thinks it smart to drink now that it’s forbidden. I hear a lot about that, down town.”
“I suppose you do,” said Mrs. Durland, catching hopefully at the suggestion that her boy was not the only wanderer in the path that leads to destruction.
“Roy knows our hopes are centered in him; there’s not the slightest excuse for his conduct!” Ethel resumed, unwilling that Roy’s sin should be covered up in charitable generalizations. “Instead of running around with a lot of dissolute young men he ought to be making friends who can help him get a start in life. As for prohibition, it’s the law of the land and you’d think a young man who’s studying law would respect it. Only the other day Osgood gave me an article with statistics showing what’s being done to enforce the law and it will only be a short time until the rum power is completely vanquished.”
“It’s dying mighty hard,” remarked Grace cheerfully. “Anybody can get whiskey who has the price.”
“One would think—” began Ethel, moved at once to give battle.
“Oh, I’m not hankering for it myself,” Grace interrupted. “But they ought to enforce the law or repeal it. I’m only saying what everybody knows.”
“Well, of course, Grace, we don’t know just who your friends are,” Ethel retorted.
“Oh, they probably wouldn’t amuse you even if you knew them!” Grace flung back.
Whereupon Mrs. Durland, who was arranging a tray with coffee and toast to carry up to Roy, announced that enough had been said on the subject.
Trenton’s week in town lengthened to ten days. Minnie Lawton’s apartment proved to be a convenient meeting place, and on two evenings Grace and Trenton dined there alone, with Jerry to serve them. Trenton had persuaded Kemp to go to a hospital for rest and observation. The reports of the local physician merely confirmed what the New York specialist had told Trenton as to his friend’s condition. Trenton took Irene and Grace to the hospital to see Kemp one evening. They found him looking a little thin and white but he greeted them joyfully. He wasn’t wholly cut off from civilization in spite of their efforts to get rid of him, he said, pointing gleefully to a telephone at his bedside which he had obtained as a special concession. He boasted that he could lie in bed and direct his business affairs almost as well as at his office.
“But the nurses won’t flirt with me,” he complained, “and you girls showed up just in time to keep me from passing up your whole unaccountable sex. I’ve got to be amused even if I am locked up here with fourteen disagreeable things being done to me every day. The purpose of woman is to amuse.”
“There you go, Tommy! Women are divided into two classes,” said Irene in her spacious manner, “those who amuse their husbands and those who amuse other women’s husbands. It’s not for me to say to which variety, subdivision or group I prefer to belong.”
Trenton had visited Stephen Durland twice at his shop in the Power Building and at the hospital he mentioned the matter of Durland’s improvements on the Cummings-Durland motor. The issuance of the patents to Durland had brought inquiries from several Eastern manufacturers and the representative of one concern had opened negotiations for an option.
“Look here, Grace,” said Kemp when Trenton had explained concisely the nature of the improvements, “I’m going to be mighty sore if you let this escape before I have a look at it. Go on, Ward, and tell me more about it.”
“You father must have something good,” said Irene, who had listened attentively to the talk, “for I don’t understand a word of it. I hope there’s millions in it.”
“That new composition Mr. Durland’s working on for non-cracking spark-plug porcelains will be worth something handsome if it’s as good as it promises to be,” Trenton remarked. Kemp’s alert curiosity had to be satisfied as to the nature of the substance Durland was working on and Trenton went into the chemistry of the composition and said it would have to be subjected to more exacting tests.
“We’ll test that at my plant too,” said Kemp, “but the sooner we get to work on the motor the better. We’ll give Mr. Durland a corner in my shop, and all the help he needs; I’ll call up the superintendent in the morning and explain what’s wanted.”
“It’s all too good to be true!” said Grace. “Father’s such a dear, patient, gentle soul and to land something now will mean more than you can understand. Thank you so much, Tommy.”
She walked to the bed and took Kemp’s hand.
“I suppose your father would rather Cummings had the new features for the engine,” he said drily.
“Gracious heavens, no!” Grace exclaimed. “Father would cheerfully die in the poor house before he’d let Cummings have anything of his.”
“That’s the spirit! Ward, don’t be stingy with Mr. Durland. Double whatever anybody else offers for an option on the motor improvements and we’ll hope it’s only the beginning.”
Stephen Durland discussed with Grace everything pertaining to his new connection with the Kemp concern. He had made so many mistakes in his life that he didn’t want to risk making any more, he said pathetically at a noon hour which Grace spent with him after he had agreed to the terms Kemp had proposed through Trenton.
“A thousand dollars just for an option looks mighty big,” he said. “I never expected to see that much money again. And I’m to draw two hundred a month from the Kemp Company while I’m building a motor out there. It’s pretty nice, Grace.”
He wanted to give her the thousand dollars and any income he might derive from the improved motor as compensation for what he felt was the wrong she had suffered through his inability to keep her in college. He was greatly in earnest about this and showed his affection for her in a shy gentle fashion that touched her deeply. She laughed him into accepting her rejection of his offer and overruled his decision not to tell his wife and Ethel of his brightening prospects. The motor might not stand up under the tests, he said, and he wished to avoid the necessity of confessing a fresh failure.
“Don’t be afraid; I’ll see that you don’t get scolded! You just strut around the house and make the most of your success—for that’s what it is! Mr. Trenton told me he was sure your improvements were enormously important—greater efficiency, greater economy of operation and every other little old thing you’ve thought up in that dear bean of yours!”
“Trenton’s a fine man. He’s been mighty nice to me,” said Durland. “It’s a pleasure to talk to a man who catches an idea so quick. I guess Kemp does pretty much what he says. I don’t know Kemp. I never thought of it till after the break, but Cummings never wanted me to meet other manufacturers in our line. Guess he didn’t trust me,” he ended with a grim smile. “Afraid I might get away from him before he was sure I’d petered out.”
“He guessed wrong, daddy! We’ll let Cummings do the worrying now.”
On the day he closed his shop in the Power Building and moved to the experimental room that had been fitted up for him at Kemp’s big plant Durland mentioned his new prospects at the supper table. He made the disclosure so slightingly that Mrs. Durland and Ethel, who had been busily discussing the merits of a novel they had been reading and Ethel thought grossly immoral, failed to catch the point of the revelation until he had cleared his throat and announced for a second time that he was moving out to Kemp’s to do a little experimenting.
“I guess that’s yours, Allie,” he remarked, producing the check. “Got it for an option on a patent I’ve been tinkering at. Trenton, that Pittsburgh expert, recommended it to Kemp.”
“Trenton?” repeated Ethel, carefully scrutinizing the Kemp Manufacturing Company’s check before passing it on to her mother.
“Yes; Ward Trenton,” Durland replied with a note of pride that so distinguished an engineer had recognized his merits. “He keeps track of everything that goes through the patent office for clients he’s got all over the country. I’m going to build some of my motors at Kemp’s; they’ve given me a lot better place to work in than I used to have at Cummings’s, and I’m going to have all the help I want. And I’m to draw two hundred a month while I’m there. I guess that’s fair enough.”
“This is your friend, Trenton, is it, Grace?” asked Ethel, awed into respect by the size of the check.
“The same,” Grace replied, carelessly meeting Ethel’s gaze across the table. “He’s the kindest man imaginable. You can hardly complain of his treatment of father.”
“I’ve always believed in father,” said Ethel. “I hope Isaac Cummings will see in this a retribution—God’s punishment for the way he treated father.”
“Let’s not hand out the retribution to Cummings till Kemp’s satisfied about the motor,” suggested Grace.
“We’re all proud of you, Stephen,” said Mrs. Durland, smoothing the creases in the check. “I’m writing Roy tonight and I’ll tell him the good news. Of course I’ll warn him not to speak of it. Your success will be a great incentive to the dear boy. He was so contrite over his behavior while he was home that I’m glad to have this news for him. We should all feel grateful. Something told me when Isaac Cummings turned you out that it was for the best. I’ll never again question the ways of Providence. I don’t feel like taking this money, Stephen, but it will come in handy in giving Roy a start.”
In the happier spirit that now dominated the home circle Grace’s increasingly frequent absences for evenings and occasionally for a night passed with little or no remark.
“You’ve got to live your life in your own way,” Mrs. Durland would say with a sigh when she found Grace leaving the house after supper. “I hardly see you any more.”
To guard against awakening in Ethel’s mind any suspicion that her evenings away from home coincided with Trenton’s presence in town, which her father usually mentioned, Grace made a point of going out at times when Trenton was away. There were always things she could do—entertainments among the Shipley employees, dances, theatre parties of business girls with whom she had become acquainted. These engagements she refrained from describing with any particularity as this would make the more marked her silence on evenings when she went to Minnie Lawton’s to meet Trenton. She had adopted a regular formula when she left the house, saying merely, “I’m going out for a little while,” which her mother and Ethel had schooled themselves to accept as an adequate explanation of her absences.
Mrs. Bob Cummings looked in on her one day at Shipley’s with the promised invitation to dinner, and to go to a club dance afterwards, which Grace refused only because the dramatic club of Shipley employees was giving a play the same night and she had a leading part. And Miss Reynolds dropped in to the ready-to-wear department frequently when she was down town and occasionally asked Grace to dinner.
The mild winter almost imperceptibly gave way before the blithe heralds of spring and April appeared smiling at the threshold.
No cloud darkened the even course of her affair with Trenton. She was more and more convinced of the depth and sincerity of her love for him and he was the tenderest, the most considerate of lovers. When she did not see him, sometimes for a week or fortnight, his messages floated back with those constant reassurances of his loyalty and affection that are the very food of love. He rarely mentioned his wife in their talks and Grace was no longer a prey to jealousy. She wondered sometimes whether he had ever broached to Mrs. Trenton the matter of the divorce at which he had hinted, but Grace found herself caring little about this one way or another. She exulted in her independence, complacent in the thought that she was a woman of the Twentieth Century, free to use her life as she would.
John Moore had not crossed Grace’s vision since the afternoon of Christmas day, when his unexpected appearance in the highway near The Shack proved so disconcerting. She suspected that he was avoiding her, probably from a generous wish to spare her the embarrassment of explaining herself.
When she left Shipley’s at the closing hour of a day early in April she was surprised to see him waiting at the door.
“Good evening, Grace! Hope you don’t mind being held up, but I wanted to see you and this seemed the easiest way. Got time to walk home?”
Grace had meant to take the car but she decided instantly that in view of the glimpse he had got of her in Trenton’s arms on the memorable day at The Shack it would be poor diplomacy to refuse.
“Of course, I’ll walk, John,” she replied cordially. “I’ve been wanting to see you.” She waited till they were out of the crowd, then said with a preluding laugh:
“You must be thinking the awfulest things of me, and that’s why you’ve given me the go-by. That was an awful fib I told you Christmas about going to a matinee. The truth of the matter was that I had promised to go with some people into the country for the afternoon and didn’t want the family to know; and I couldn’t explain over the telephone. And out there we all got to cutting up and well—you saw me! I’m terribly ashamed of myself!”
“Oh, pshaw, you needn’t be! I didn’t think anything about it. I always know you’re all right. I’m for you, Grace—you know that. I’ve been so busy since I moved to town that I’ve kept my nose right on the grindstone.”
His words lacked the usual John Moore flavor, and in spite of his protest she guiltily attributed his unusual restraint to reservations as to the Christmas day episode. But his next speech quickly shifted the ground of her apprehensions.
“I’ve just been down to Bloomington to see Roy,” he said, doggedly blurting out the sentences. “The boy sent for me; he’d got into a bad scrape—about a girl. You can guess the rest of it.”
“Oh!” she gasped, feeling the earth whirling. “Not that!”
“Roy was in a blue funk and threatened to run away but I talked him out of that. The girl’s name is Sadie Denton; she’s not really a bad girl. I had a talk with her and went down to Louisville with them yesterday and saw them married. Her folks live there and they’ll look out for her till Roy finishes at the law school. I guess that’s about all. He didn’t want any of you to know about it just yet; but I sat down on that and he agreed I should tell you. I was sure you’d handle it right at home.”
“Oh, it will break mother’s heart! She’s counted everything on Roy.”
“Well, everything isn’t lost yet,” he replied. “I hope you think I did right.”
“It was the only thing, of course, John. It was just like you to see it straight and do the right thing.”
She wormed from him the fact that he had given Roy a hundred dollars, and that certain payments for the support of Roy’s wife had been agreed on.
“You’re certainly a friend, John. We’ll return the money at once; that’s the least we can do.”
When he protested that he did not need the money immediately she explained that her father’s affairs were looking brighter and that the return of the sum advanced would work no hardship.
The bad news having been delivered, Moore exerted himself to cheer her, but a vast gloom had settled upon her. As he shook hands at the gate her sense of his tolerance, kindness and wisdom brought tears to her eyes but, left alone, her only emotion was one of fury against Roy. She stood on the doorstep pondering. Again, as after Roy’s appeal for money to cover his share of the expense of his automobile escapade, she thought of her own weakness in yielding to temptation. But for John’s advice that it would be better for the rest of the family to know at once of Roy’s tragedy—this being the only word that fitly described this new and discouraging blight upon her brother’s future—she would have lacked the courage to communicate the evil tidings to the household.
It was not until they had all settled in the living room after supper that she broke the news. Her father sat at the table, reading a technical journal, with Ethel near by preparing her Sunday-school lesson. Mrs. Durland had established herself by the grate with the family darning in her lap. Since Durland’s removal to Kemp’s establishment a new cheer and hope had lightened the atmosphere of the home, and Grace, moving restlessly about the room, dreaded to launch her thunderbolt upon the tranquil scene.
“I have something to tell you; please listen,—you too, father,” she began quietly.
She used much the same blunt phrases in which Moore had condensed the story, watching with a kind of fascination a long black stocking slip from her mother’s hand, pause at her knee and then crawl in a slow serpentine fashion down her apron to her feet.
“Oh, Roy!” Mrs. Durland moaned, her face white.
Mr. Durland coughed, took off his glasses, breathed on the lenses and began slowly rubbing them with the corner of the linen table cover. He desisted suddenly, remembering that Ethel had once rebuked him for mussing the cover.
“I guess that’s all there is to say about it,” Grace concluded when she had told everything, not omitting their financial obligation to Moore. “We’ve all got to make the best of it.”
Grace picked up the fallen stocking and handed it to her mother, who made a pretense of carefully inspecting a hole in the heel.
“What time’s the first train down in the morning?” she asked. “I must see Roy—and——”
Ethel, who had sunk back helplessly in her chair, jumped to her feet, her eyes blazing.
“You shan’t go one step mother! It’s enough that Roy’s brought this disgrace on the family without you going down there to pet him. It’s your spoiling him that’s made him what he is. John Moore had no business meddling in our affairs. What Roy should have done was to go away and never show his face to any of us again. Father, you tell mother to keep away from Roy!”
The appeal to Durland, who had so rarely found himself a court of last resort in the whole course of his life, was not without its humor and Grace smiled bitterly as she watched her sister, who stood before her, white, her lips set in hard lines, her hands clenched at her sides. Durland cleared his throat and recrossed his legs.
“I guess your mother’ll do the right thing, Ethel,” he said.
“I think you’re all crazy!” Ethel flared. “What will Osgood think of me, with my brother forced to marry a girl off the street.”
“I didn’t say she was off the street,” Grace corrected her. “I’d show the girl a little mercy if I were you, and I wouldn’t make it any harder than necessary for father and mother. You’re not the only one of us who has feelings.”
“I’ll leave! The rest of you may do as you please, but I’ll not let Osgood think I don’t feel the shame of my brother’s sin.”
“If Osgood reads his Testament he may not see it in quite that light.”
Ethel breathed hard in the effort to think of some withering retort. The best she could do, however, was not especially brilliant.
“Osgood,” she announced grandly, “is a gentleman!”
“He might be that and still be a Christian,” Grace replied tartly.
“What did you say about trains, Grace,” asked Mrs. Durland, who, deep in thought, had scarcely heard the colloquy between her daughters.
“I’ll call the station and find out. And I’ll get Irene on the ’phone and tell her I won’t be at the store tomorrow. I’m going with you, mother.”
“Irene!”
Ethel caught up and flung back the name as though it were some hateful and obscene thing.
“Ethel,” said Mrs. Durland serenely, “If you’ve got nothing better to do you might help me with the darning. I don’t like to go away without clearing it up.”
The visit to Bloomington was not particularly heartening. Roy was in a sullen humor when they talked to him in the hotel parlor. He wanted to drop the law course and go West, and they argued the matter most of the day, Grace alternating between despair at Roy’s stubborn indifference to every attempt to arouse his pride and ambition and admiration for her mother’s courage and forbearance in the most poignant sorrow of her life.
Grace finally left them together and took a walk that led her far from the campus. She had no heart for looking upon the familiar scenes or meeting the friends she had left there only a few months earlier. When she returned to the hotel Roy had been won to a more tractable humor; and when he left them it was in a spirit of submission, at least, to what he considered an ungenerous ordering of fate. Mrs. Durland insisted on carrying out the plan, with which she had left Indianapolis, of visiting the young woman who was now her daughter-in-law.
“She’s Roy’s wife,” she said when Grace tried to dissuade her. “I’ll feel better to see her. And it’s only right I should.”
She took the train for Louisville and Grace went home.
Grace’s thoughts were given a new direction early the next morning when Miss Beulah Reynolds appeared at Shipley’s shortly after the doors were opened.
“My dear child, the most astounding thing has happened!” the little woman declared immediately.
“Your house hasn’t burned down!” exclaimed Grace, amused by the little woman’s agitation.
“Worse! I’m to have a visitor,—that Mary Graham Trenton whose book we once talked about. I’ve just had a letter from an old friend in Boston warning me of the lady’s approach, and asking me to see the Indians don’t get her. I’ve wired her at Cleveland asking her to stay at my house—I could hardly do less.”
“I suppose not,” said Grace faintly, wondering why Miss Reynolds had come to her with the news.
“I’m asking some people to dinner the night the lady lectures—Tuesday—and I want you to come. Don’t look so scared! She may not be as terrible as she writes but I’m going to invite Dr. Ridgely, and my doctor and my lawyer with the hope that they’ll all get a shock. And I want you to come; you’ve read her stuff, and I’ll count on you to help keep the talk going.”
“Why, I don’t know—” Grace began, her mind in a whirl of conjecture.
“Come! That’s a dear child. Don’t go back on me; I need your moral support. At six thirty, then? We have to dine early on account of the lecture.”
“Why, yes; Miss Reynolds,” Grace answered faintly.
“By the little pink ear of Venus!” exclaimed Irene, coming upon Grace just as Miss Reynolds left. “What’s Little Old Ready-Money done to you?”
“Nothing,” Grace replied, her mind still in confusion. “She was just asking me to dinner.”
“From your looks I’d have guessed it was a funeral,” Irene replied, and Grace, pulling herself together, hurried away to meet an approaching customer.
Of late she had given little thought to Mrs. Trenton, and it had never occurred to her in her wildest dreams that she might meet Ward’s wife in the intimate contact of a dinner table. The prospect kept her in a state of excitement all day and at times she was strongly impelled to trump up some excuse for refusing to go to Miss Reynolds’s. But her earlier curiosity as to what manner of woman it was who bore Ward Trenton’s name was rekindled by the thought of meeting her. Trenton was in Syracuse and might not reach Indianapolis for a week or more. He had said that he had not, in the letter he had written to Mrs. Trenton from St. Louis, revealed the identity of the woman who had so strongly appealed to him. Mrs. Trenton would hardly suspect that a girl she met at a dinner party was the person her husband had described only vaguely and without indicating her habitat.
Grace decided against writing Trenton of the impending meeting till it was over. Having quieted her apprehensions she began dramatizing the scene at Miss Reynolds’s table and she reread “Clues to a New Social Order” against the possibility that Mrs. Trenton’s book might become a subject of discussion at the dinner. The thought of seeing her lover’s wife in this fashion while she herself remained unknown and unsuspected laid powerful hold upon her imagination.