A laugh of triumphant defiance broke hoarsely from the young man as he turned to obey. But suddenly Chester Thornton’s senses were set free, and fury arose within him. Was this young reptile to defy him and lead his daughter away while he stood by? He had not forgotten the tricks he learned in college, and a quick well-directed blow under the chin sent young Weston sprawling on the hard bare ground to the utter astonishment of Betty, who whirled furiously on her father, a look in her eyes that was not good to see. It was a look that he was to remember long years after, a look like a blow that left a scar.
But Thornton was alert now and keyed up to the fighting point. He picked young Betty up in his arms as if she had been a feather and strode off down the hill.
Betty struggled furiously at first and then was still for an instant in sheer astonishment. When she began to struggle again, silently he held her like a vise.
“Look here, Chester, you needn’t think you can treat me like this. I won’t stand for it!” she defied him when she saw she could not get away.
But he strode on through the night without a word. “I’ll scream!” she said threateningly. “And then what will they think of you? There are plenty of people in that tavern, and they will come out and laugh at you. A silly old parent that thinks he has just come out of the ark!”
Still Thornton strode on down the hill. It was taking all his breath, between his anger and helplessness and the weight of his daughter, which he had by no means been training for during the years.
They were almost to the car, and Chester Thornton was wondering whether he could hold out, when Betty dealt her final blow.
In a cold, hard, matter-of-fact tone she said:
“Well, I hate you, and I’m off you for life!”
The impact quivered through his trembling flesh like an actual blow. He realized that here was another thing with which he would have to live out the years, and never forget!
Betty! His little Betty! His first baby girl!
There was an instant’s struggle again as they reached the car. Betty was determined not to be carried home ignominiously. But he held her fast.
“Will you get in quietly, or shall I have to tie you?” he asked in a strange panting voice that somehow startled her in spite of her hardness.
“Oh, have it your own way,” she said, relaxing suddenly into indifference. “I’m getting terribly sleepy anyway and might as well go home.” She summoned a casual yawn.
How had the universe got turned around? This was his Betty! The child for whom he had but a few short hours before been planning an expensive Christmas surprise and exulting in her probable delight in it. How had all this awful change come about?
He tried as he drove along through the night to think of a wise mode of approach, for he must have it out with her before he reached home. He would have to tell her all those awful words that that foulmouthed boy had said. There was no way to spare her from it. She ought to know the truth. Her humiliation would have to be complete before she could be brought to her senses.
Betty was leaning back, feigning sleep.
Very gently, very tenderly, with the deep, hurt love in his voice and words chosen from the depths of his suffering heart he began:
“Betty, it is because I love you—” he started in a voice she used to love.
“Rot!” said Betty sleepily. “Save your breath, Chester. That kind of mush is out of date.”
Appalled, he summoned new words, sharp with truth, and began to tell her what he had heard in the train.
She listened through to the finish, and then her scornful laugh rang out like a flashing knife:
“Oh, is that all you’ve got on your chest?” she scorned. “I thought you were off your nut. But you’ve only got a Victorian complex after all. Poor Dad, you’ll recover, but you’ve lost out as far as I’m concerned. I thought you had an open mind!”
“Betty! What do you mean? Don’t you—Aren’t you—?”
“No, I don’t think Dud is a beast! No, I’m not shocked or humiliated or any of the other things you want me to be. This is an enlightened age, and things have changed since you were young. I have my doubts whether they were so very sanctimonious as you try to make out even then, but of course you want me to think they were. But as for Dud, he’s all right. He’s no worse than all of the rest of us. We’re just frank and honest. All the boys talk like that. That’s nothing. We’re just living our lives in the new free way, that’s all. You lived your life, and it’s our turn now to live ours as we please, and there’s no use in thinking we’re going to be tied now by any antiquated whims that people tried to kid themselves into a century ago, for we won’t do it.”
“My child!” he said sadly. “Right and wrong do not change. God is always the same. There are certain laws—”
“Oh, bilge!” broke in Betty. “You don’t really believe that. That’s all baloney!”
Appalled, at last he gave it up and silently drove her to her home.
There was nothing left to tell her, nothing to say, because she did not care for any of the standards he set up. She had torn them down with a laugh and flung them to the breeze. She had declared her inalienable right to do as she pleased and flouted the idea that there was such a thing as right and wrong.
He groped for the right word and wondered what it had been in his youth that had held him back from many things. Sin—that was it, a sense of sin. Why, she seemed to have no sense of sin at all!
He spoke the word as if it were a talisman, a sword that he had mislaid and was glad to find again.
“Betty, it is sin—” he said.
She laughed.
“What is sin?” she said pertly, imitating his voice as he pronounced the word.
An old answer came from out of his past, learned back in the years of long, dear, drowsy Sabbaths, with a smell of spiced cookies and gingerbread in the air, and his mother’s sweet face as she sat in the rocking chair by her window on the old farm and read her Bible while he learned his catechism:
“Sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God,” he said.
Betty stared and laughed again.
“Where did you get that, Chet? Sounds like some highbrow lawyer. Whatever it is, it’s moth eaten. What right would God have to make laws for us? If He put us here on the earth and made us live whether we wanted to or not, it’s up to us to have as good a time as we can, isn’t it? If there is a God,” she added mockingly.
He was silent with the shock of it, the humiliation.
He had never taken time to live by them himself, but he had all the doctrines thoroughly defined, laid carefully away in a neat napkin in his mind ready for any time of need. He was an elder in the church! A warm advocate of all things orthodox and biblical! And his child was talking like this! This was rank atheism!
He was silent as he drove up to the door, on his face such a look of haggard despair that Betty turned, in a kind of hard pity, as she got out of the car:
“Listen, Chester,” she said with a bit of fine condescension in her voice. “You needn’t worry about me, really! Dud isn’t as bad as he seems to you, and anyway, I know how to take care of myself. All girls do nowadays!”
With that she was off into the house, and the door closed lightly behind her.
He sat in the car for a minute more staring at the house, staring through the dark at the door where she had passed, hearing over again the awful things she had said to him—actually said to her father!
He moaned and leaned his weary head down against the wheel for a moment. Then laboriously he started his car again and drove slowly into the garage.
His wife was waiting for him when he came in. She had hot coffee and a nice little tray with delicate chicken sandwiches and a cup of custard in a china cup. She had stirred the fire when she heard him come, and his chair was waiting, drawn up before it with the tray on a little table at the side and only a dim shaded light at the far end of the room. She knew how to do all those exquisite
little comforting things so perfectly. Just her presence was a rest.
But tonight, he waved her aside. How could he tell her? Betty’s mother, pure as the snow! How could he tell her that Betty’s lovely lips had uttered words of perdition, and that the very breath on which they were brought to his ear was rank with stale tobacco smoke, and a tang of something stronger! Betty’s little rosebud lips! Betty’s baby lips that had been so pure and sweet and wonderful!
He sank into the chair by the fire with a groan and covered his face with his hands. He shook his head when she tried to press the coffee upon him, and groaned again. How could he tell Eleanor? And yet he must. This was something they must bear together, work out together. Could he make Eleanor understand the horror of it all? And if she did understand, would it perhaps kill her?
Into the midst of the turmoil of his mind and the distress of his wife, there came the sound of a key turning cautiously in the lock, a key that was unsteadily fitted into place and turned reluctantly. At last the door opened, and Chris lurched into the hall. In his clumsy attempt to be quiet about it he knocked over a vase of flowers that stood on the hall console and then tried to mop it up with his hat, muttering that it was all right. No place for weeds anyway!
Something thick and unnatural in his voice caused both father and mother to look at him with startled eyes, and his father drew himself sharply out of the comfortable chair and went toward him:
“Chris!” he said, and his voice was like an electric current. “What is the matter with you? Where have you been?”
“Tha’s none o’ your business!” replied the boy, trying to straighten up and look steadily at his father, his dripping hat back again on his head. “You refushed to gimme the dough I needed, an’ I went where I knew I could get it! Tha’s all! Wha’s that t’you? Got m’debts all paid an’ three dollars lef’ over. Pretty good, what? You ain’t got a single kick comin’—”
Chris’s voice trailed off suddenly in a kind of choking sound as a strong hand seized his collar.
“That’s enough!” said Chester Thornton authoritatively. “Don’t say another word in your mother’s hearing!”
He threw the boy’s hat off, pulled off his overcoat, and taking him firmly by the arm propelled him up the stairs to the bathroom, his face sternly white, the boy dragging back and protesting.
“Wha’s yer hurry, old soak?” Chris asked his father blearily. “Got all night, ain’t we? I know I’m half-stewed, but wha’s that? It’s happened once or twice before—”
The bathroom door slammed over the last words, and Eleanor Thornton, listening in horror at the foot of the stairs, heard the water turned on furiously in the bathtub.
As if he were assisting at some horrid rite, Chester Thornton helped his son to remove his clothing, and then against his most earnest protests plunged him into a tub of cold water.
Minutes later, sobered, ashamed, well rubbed down and arrayed in dry, warm pajamas, Chris crept to his bed, and Chester Thornton came slowly, heavily down the stairs like an old, old man.
“Eleanor!” he said gropingly, as she came toward him from the darkened parlor and stood beneath the hall light, “Eleanor, I—”
It was then that everything went black before his eyes, and clutching for the stair railing and missing it, he fell and struck his head against the newel post. Then all the world fled away from his consciousness.
Chapter 5
Her mother’s scream brought Betty to the head of the stairs calm, superior, in a hastily assumed robe. But when she saw her father lying at the foot of the stairs with blood on his forehead and her mother kneeling beside him wiping his face with her handkerchief and endeavoring ineffectually to lift him to a sitting posture, her assurance fled, and a white, scared look took its place. For angry as she was with him, she adored her father.
She flew down the stairs taking command as she came.
“Now Mums, you keep cool,” she said. “I’ll call the doctor. How did it happen?”
“He fell,” said her mother reproachfully. “I think he was dizzy—He—Your brother—You—He’s been—”
But Betty was already giving the doctor’s number at the telephone and waiting, for no orders proceeded efficiently to the kitchen for water and ice and pieces of old linen.
The doctor arrived almost at once. Betty had caught him just as he came in from a late call before he had retired.
They laid Thornton on the couch in the living room, and Betty stirred the fire and put on fresh wood. She brought glasses and spoons and blankets and hovered silently in the shadows of the room until the quivering eyelids opened at last, and she saw her father’s searching glance go hurriedly around the room, heard his deep, profound sigh as returning consciousness brought back his problems. Then she stole silently up to her room and lay down in the dark with her door open, listening. She was frightened at the white look of her father’s face, but angry, too. It didn’t seem quite decent of Chester to collapse this way just because he had discovered a few trifles about his children that he hadn’t known before. He had no right to be so far behind the times that he would expect them always to be infants! When he got better she would have to take him in hand, bring him up to date and open his eyes to a few facts. Times were changed of course, and Chester hadn’t realized it, but she had never expected him to show weakness, physical weakness, just because his whims were crossed. Whims! They were worse than that. They were antiques, wished on him by a former generation. How could he have been so blind as not to have seen before this that the world had outgrown them?
Yet she lay and quivered at the thought of her father ill. Her dad had always been so strong, so ready to give her anything she wanted.
She stole out to the hall and listened when the doctor talked in a low tone to her mother, straining her ears and trying to hear what they were saying. She could not sleep until she knew he was out of danger.
Then she heard her father call to the doctor. His voice sounded weak, strained, yet insistent.
The doctor went into the living room again, and Mrs. Thornton came slowly upstairs. Betty could see that she was weeping even before she lifted her tear-stained face.
“He’s all right now, I hope, dear!” said the mother. “The doctor wants him to get to sleep. I’m going to put a hot water bag in the bed and get his things out. The doctor doesn’t think the bruise was serious.”
There was a quiver in the end of her voice that gave Betty a strange uneasiness.
“It’s not like Chester to pass out!” said Betty with a half return of her habitual flippancy.
The mother shrank visibly from the words.
“I wouldn’t, Betty dear,” she said in a half-apologetic tone. “Your father doesn’t like you to call him that. It doesn’t sound respectful—”
“Rats!” said Betty inelegantly. “Are you trying to be an old stiff, too?”
“Betty! Really! Your father is very sensitive just now, and the doctor says we must be very careful. He says he is in a very dangerous state. He says this has been coming on for a long time—”
Betty gave her a startled look.
“For what reason?” she said and pinioned her mother with her glance.
“I’m afraid it’s business,” she said with a catch in her breath. “He’s been lying awake at nights, oh, for weeks and perhaps longer. I don’t know. He didn’t tell me till recently. And then this tonight—”
“Business? What’s the matter with business?” asked Betty sharply.
“I’m afraid things are in a very bad way.”
“Whaddaya mean, bad way?”
“Well, I’m not sure, but I’m afraid your father has failed. I’m afraid it’s just as bad as it can be. I know he was expecting something to happen yesterday that would turn the tide either way. And just now when the doctor asked him if he couldn’t get away from business and take a real rest he said, ‘Oh, the business doesn’t matter anymore!’ just like that, as if everything was all over. And I think that he is kin
d of desperate about it. I feel that we shall have to do everything we can to make him happy and make him understand that it doesn’t matter whether we have any money or not if he only gets well. The doctor said that this was a warning. He didn’t say just what, but from the questions he asked I’m sure he was afraid of stroke, or paralysis, or some of those terrible diseases. Betty, we must be awfully careful not to worry your father. But there! I believe the doctor is persuading him to come up. Get that other pair of pink striped blankets and lay them on the radiator. We might need them. He said he was so cold—”
Betty eyed her mother keenly. Evidently Dad had not told her yet. That was decent of him. No need in stirring Mother up.
Betty flew around efficiently, helping her mother, thinking her keen, stubborn young thoughts, trying to look a new situation in the face, and rebelling furiously at having her young life disrupted by any financial catastrophe. It wasn’t like her dad to go flooey and leave them all in the mud. He must have done something awfully foolish to get things all in a muddle. She couldn’t keep a kind of resentment out of her thoughts as she worked.
Yet when she caught sight of her father’s white face again as the doctor helped him up the stairs, while she stood in the darkened back hall and watched, her heart failed her. Poor Dad! Poor Chester! He had always been such a good sport! Perhaps he would pull out of it! He had to. He would have to borrow money or something till times got all right again. Of course, that was it. He would borrow money. Everybody did nowadays anyway. It was old-fashioned to worry because you couldn’t pay your bills right on the dot. Oh, Chester would pull out, of course. She couldn’t think of them as settling down to be poor. Of course not. It wasn’t to be tolerated!
And so, comforting herself, she crept back to her bed, and having heard the doctor go down stairs and out the front door, she composed herself to sleep.
Mrs. Thornton tiptoed around her room putting things in order for rest, laying her slippers and warm robe on a chair by the bed for possible sudden need in the night, switching on a night-light in the hall just outside her bedroom door, switching off the brighter light. She slipped softly into bed, making the least movement possible that she might not disturb her husband.
The Prodigal Girl Page 5