The Prodigal Girl

by Grace Livingston Hill

  Chapter 22

  Farther and farther from the city they drove, out into the empty country, with snow on the ground and snow beginning to come down from the sky now in earnest, in lazy whirls and fantastic drifts that gave a sense of power, terrible power, power to come down in flocks and droves pretty soon if it chose.

  They were out in the country now with no moon, no stars, black leaden sky overhead, and only the light of the snow to guide them. There were occasional woods, dark as velvet, and only the streak of their own lamps to break it, and in one of these Dudley suddenly brought the car to a dead stop, so suddenly that it almost threw her off the seat.

  “Now,” said the gallant young bridegroom, “if you wantta jump out here’s a good place to try it. You get out and walk back, and I’ll go on to Gwen’s house party. I’m sick of a grouch! You’ve lost your nerve! Get out!”

  For one angry instant Betty was on the point of obeying. She put out her hand to open the door and looked out to the blackness of the woods, with the one gash of white where the lamps shone ahead, and she thought of the lamps going on without her. Only the little red taillight at the back, winking, winking, in the distance and vanishing, and she shuddered. Her voice broke, and tears came into her throat and eyes, angry tears that those gallant young eyes tried to conquer, and failed.

  “I’m hungry!” wailed Betty like a frightened little child. “I’m not grouchy. I’m just—just—tired and hungry! I haven’t had any—any—l–l–lunch, nor d–d–dinner!” Her voice was coming through real sobs now. “And you—you—you—b–b–b–rought that g–g–gr–rlll!”

  “Oh, gosh! Yes, I thought that was it! Jealous little cat you are! Anything I hate is a sniveling woman! Anything I hate is a jealous little cat! I never thought you were like that! I wouldn’ta come if I had! I’d a sight rather stayed at Gwen’s, only I had given my word of honor—” he swaggered.

  “I’m not jealous!” said Betty, suddenly straightening up and dashing the tears away from her face, her bold look coming back into her eyes. “You think I’d be jealous of a thing like that? Fat and dowdy! She hadn’t a bit of style! She was common! Very common! How could I think of being jealous of a thing like that? Why, she had dirty fingernails and looked as though she’d never had a shampoo or her hair waved. Her hair hung round her face like a row of pins in a paper. No, I’m not jealous! I’m just disappointed in you, Dudley

  Weston.”

  “I’ll say you are! I’ll say you’re a peach! I’ll say you’re a beaut! You’re the bee’s knees and then some. I drive thousands of miles after you just to rescue you from a cruel family, and give up all my fun, and my midyear exams, and all my chance of graduating and feeling I have an education, and what for? I ask you. Just to get my eyes scratched out by a jealous little cat!”

  Betty withdrew into her corner and closed her lips in a hard little line. This was a new Dudley! How she hated him! Was this what she was marrying?

  “Well, are you going to get out?” asked Dudley loftily, after a long minute’s silence.

  “No,” said Betty composedly in her very best princess style, “not in a place like this, of course.”

  “All righty!” said Dudley, preparing to start the car. “Last chance now ur never!” And they shot out into the road again and dashed through the night, but neither spoke for a long time.

  At last after what seemed to Betty like an eternity where she had been regretting everything she had ever done since she was born, Dudley stopped the car and handed her a flask.

  “Here!” he said, though still gruffly. “Put yerself around some of this. It’s a wow! I got it on the way up. It oughtta bring ya outta yer grouch ef anything will. If it don’t I’m done!”

  She perceived that Dudley was making a drunken attempt to make up with her, and she took the flask eagerly and tipped it up to her lips.

  The flask had apparently been recently replenished for it was nearly filled, with some hot stinging liquor that was new to Betty and burned her throat as she swallowed it. Immediately a sense of comfort pervaded her, and the clamor in her stomach was warmed and soothed.

  “Hot stuff!” said Dudley, leaning over and taking the flask as she handed it back, a little frightened at the new feeling of exhilaration that began to tingle all over her tired body. Dudley took great swallows of the liquor, and the smell of it filled the car with a strange, sickening odor.

  Dudley took a long drink and then lurched over with his arm around Betty and kissed her. The smell of his breath was hot and heavy. Betty felt a dizzy disgust at his touch.

  “Hurry up, Dud,” she said, trying to get her old imperious tone back again. “Let’s go! I want some dinner, and then I’ll feel all right!” What was the use in quarreling with Dudley? It was too late. She must make the best of things and get her old control over him.

  “Awwright ole girl! Jus’ you shay!” said Dudley, starting the car again with one arm still around her, crushing her to him.

  Dudley drove wildly as usual, and before long they came to a town and a gas station.

  “Gotta get gas, ole girl!” he said affably. “Shay, you got any dough? I haven’t got mush more’n ‘nough to pay fer gas. That darned kid pinched it off me. She gave me a lotta sob stuff about her folks turning her out, an’ her not having any place ta go, till I shelled out all I had.”

  “Dudley! Do you mean we haven’t any money? Why, what are we going to do? Do you mean you gave that girl all the money you had when you were coming to marry me?”

  She was both frightened and angry again, and her voice had a helpless note in it.

  “Oh, tha’s all right, kid,” he said comfortingly. “Got ‘nough to get gas, and I’ll telephone to the ole man and get him to wire me some money awwright! Donchoo worry, kid!”

  “But I’m hungry!” said Betty, beginning to cry now without realizing it.

  “That’s tough luck, kid, but it won’t take so long now ta get ta N’York. Are you broke, too?”

  “I’ve only got twenty-seven cents!” said Betty with a quiver.

  “That’s awwright!” soothed Dudley. “Getta good meal fer that!”

  So while Dudley bought gas and a package of cigarettes Betty climbed out and spent twenty-five of her twenty-seven cents on a cup of bitter coffee, a box of stale crackers, and an overripe banana.

  “Have a cigarette!” said Dudley graciously as she got back into the car.

  Betty took it eagerly and tried to get the usual thrill out of smoking, but somehow everything seemed to have gone stale like the crackers. All she wanted in the world was to lie down and go to sleep.

  They drove on through the night, passing villages and larger towns more often now and shooting through their quiet streets or noisy thoroughfares alike regardless of life or limb.

  “Oh, Dud, I wish you wouldn’t drive so fast through these towns! We might get pinched!” said Betty after a particularly narrow hairbreadth escape.

  “‘Smatter of you, Thorny?” inquired the gallant youth. “Getting soft? Losing yer nerve? Thought you liked a kick. This is nothing. Only fifty-five. Let’s make it sixty.” He stepped on the gas, and the car lurched out around a curve and almost into a staid old Ford driven by an elderly man.

  Betty caught her breath and looked back expecting to see the Ford on its side, but her escort gave her far too much to think about, and she had to turn back and forget the old man and the Ford.

  “Goin’ to take a shortcut,” said Dudley, swerving into a rough asphalt road that looked as if it were utterly out of repair.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t, Dud, not tonight!” cried Betty. “What if you should get a flat tire! What if we should have a blowout! Let’s take the regular road!”

  “Oh, I know you wouldn’t. You’d wantta be all night and all next day on the road. You’re yella, that’s what’s the matter with you. A fella I met tol’ me this was a good road. I’m tryin’ it, see? Take another drink! Brace ya up. Look at me! I’m not afraid to take a chance. You gotta keep up
your end ur we can’t make a go of it. Why, Thorny, you useta be a tough little egg. Wha’s eatin’ ya?”

  “I think we’d get there quicker if we kept to the good road,” answered Betty sulkily. “You make me tired the way you act.”

  “Oh, I do, do I? I make you tired, do I? Well, just for that we’re goin’ this road, see? An’ we’ll take it at seventy-five if I like. Or ninety, maybe. Wantta see me take this road at ninety an hour?”

  That was a night to be remembered.

  The rough road proved to be anything but a shortcut. Mile after mile they careened along, over breaks that seemed like ditches, through snow that had blown in the way and never been cleared. Traffic had gone around the drifts, but Dudley went straight through and nearly stalled his engine. Twice he had to get out and work at the machinery with cursing lips and uncertain fingers. Then Betty discovered that though the flask had been emptied much to her relief several miles back, Dudley had more of the strange tangy, sickly smelling liquor in the back of his car, and each time he got out he replenished the flask.

  He offered it to her every time he drank, but she refused. She had heard about drugged liquor that made people very sick, killed them sometimes, and tonight she somehow felt a strange reluctance to take a chance.

  “Where did you get it, Dud?” she asked after the fifth refusal and his accompanying jeer at her new principles. “It tastes funny. Maybe it’s poisoned.”

  “Great cats!” said Dudley. “I musta made a mistake an’ brought along yer grandmother! Letcha off at the next town an’ ya can walk back. Didn’t know ya’d gone on the water wagon.”

  “Oh, cut it out, Dud!” said Betty, trying to assume her old superiority. “You’re not pleasant!”

  “Pleasant! Pleasant! I like that! When I came all the way—”

  And so it went on, hour after hour, as the night waned, and morning began to dawn. Betty thought it never would end.

  “Where are we going, Dud?” she asked at last, wearily. “I’m just ready to pass out. Aren’t we ever going to get there? This road is so bumpy my back aches.”

  “Get there! Get there!” repeated Dudley drunkenly. “All you care is get there! Whaddaya think of me? I drove all last night—”

  Betty looked at him in the early dawn of the cold, cheerless morning. His face was flushed in blotches, his eyes were bloodshot, his collar awry, his hair disheveled, his lips swollen. He had a wild look about him. She wondered why she had ever called him good looking. She shuddered and drew herself away, a feeling of utter disgust coming over her. She used to think it was manly to get a little drunk. But Dudley was more than a little drunk. He was beside himself, and he was driving like a madman. He was talking like a madman, swearing at her in the intervals.

  “Tied to a skirt! That’s what it is to be tied to a skirt!” he said. “Get me away up here, outta my way! Make me shpend all my dough gettin’ gas. Then make a fuss about a little bitta road. Awright! We’ll try another road!”

  Suddenly, without any warning, he deliberately turned the car to the left. The road sloped down abruptly to another highway several roads below the one they were on.

  Dudley had been drinking at intervals all night, but the last drink had been deeper and longer than all the rest, inasmuch as he had recently refilled his flask from the mysterious supply in the back of his car, and now he seemed to be utterly beyond reason. Betty had never seen him like this. She had never seen anyone quite so drunk and wild and angry as Dudley was now. Probably it was a combination of exhaustion from long driving and overstimulation from the bad liquor. He seemed quite like an insane person.

  Betty, forgetting all her pride in being hard boiled and daring anything, was frightened beyond anything she had ever felt before. She cried out and sprang forward at the same time, trying to lay hands on the wheel and turn the car back into the road before it should be too late, but Dudley was only infuriated by this. He turned like a wild beast and glared at her, striking her hands from the wheel with a paralyzing blow and then dealing a stinging slap across her mouth and another over her eyes, till she huddled speechless with fear in her corner of the car too frightened to think. The last vision her eyes had caught as they received the blinding blow was a rim of crimson disk like a great fire opal, coming up above the distant mountain.

  Dudley had begun to brake and had caught the wheel once more, but the car was beyond his control. Betty in her blindness and horror and pain could feel it hurtling down the sudden grade, could realize what it meant, had time to wonder what the swift end would be, and then to suddenly feel the eye of God upon her—God, standing down there in the valley, watching them come, knowing what was happening to them, knowing she had brought this all on herself, and yet looking at her in that same yearning way, as if He would have saved her from it if she had but let Him! God! Why, God could save her even yet, couldn’t He, if He was a God?

  “Oh, God!” she cried. But the awful curses of Dudley as he tried to direct his car into the road drowned out her voice. Had He heard? Had God heard?

  And then the car turned over and all was blotted out.

  Chapter 23

  Back in Vermont there was consternation when the word came that the young woman who had answered the description of Miss Thornton, and who had been seen by several employees of the railroad in the station during the day, was not to be found. She had been paged for half an hour and had not been found.

  “I knew I ought to have telegraphed your father the first moment we found she was gone!” cried Eleanor with a gasp of fear. “He will never forgive me! Our little girl gone and I didn’t let him know! And now it is getting dark, and where can she be?”

  She dropped down on the hard old sofa in the library and buried her face in her hands.

  “Oh, good night, Muth! We’re doing the best we can! If Betts was really in Springfield she can’t be so far away from here yet! Likely she’s gone to a hotel. I’ll phone all the hotels and find out! You know we can get a detective in Springfield and get right on the job, if you’re willing!”

  “No,” said Eleanor, springing to her feet. “I must tell your father before we do another thing. He will likely be in the office by this time. If he caught that train this morning he would have gone right on through. Call up the office—”

  “But it’s Saturday. The office is closed.”

  “Somebody might be there. Try it. Your father would be there, I’m sure, if he has reached the city.” So Chris tried the office.

  But only the janitor answered. Yes, the office was closed. No, there wasn’t anybody there! No, Mr. Thornton hadn’t been in that day. Mr. Thornton was out of town for an extended stay.

  “I toldya, Muth,” said Chris, turning to his mother triumphantly. “Now you lemme handle this—”

  “No, Chris. You must get the telegraph office and send a telegram to the train. If your father had to stay over in New York—I’ve been thinking it over and I believe he said he might have to stop there to see a man—but if he did stay over he would have taken the four o’clock from the Pennsylvania station. That’s the train he always takes when he goes to New York. You must send a telegram to him on that train. That will get to him before he reaches home, and he will have time to think up what to do.”

  “Great cats, Muth, what can we say in a telegram that won’t publish the whole thing to the world? He won’t understand without a whole letter. Now I ask you, what can he do away off there?”

  “Your father always knows what to do,” said Eleanor firmly. “This is no time to worry about the world, but anyway nobody on the train will know anything about us. Here’s a telegram I’ve written out. Send it quick, and then get Mr. Chalmers’s number and ask for him. I want to talk to him. We can confide in him. If he isn’t home get some other member of the firm. I’ve got to have help at once!”

  But Chester did not get Eleanor’s telegram. He was not on the four o’clock train from New York. He was speeding across his home city in search of a man who was about to leave for
a Christmas vacation and was a very important factor in the contract that was to be signed. He had no time to send telegrams, nor receive them, and when later he remembered to send a message it merely read: “Business well in hand. Probably shall reach farm Monday night. Will keep you informed.” But the message gave no clue to his whereabouts at the time.

  The messages to the members of the firm brought equally poor returns, for everyone seemed to be off somewhere on this last Saturday before Christmas, and the message Eleanor left at each point—“Please have Mr. Thornton call up his wife as soon as he comes in”—lay scattered about Briardale and the city like so many useless fragments. Chester took no time to go anywhere except where he was obliged to go, and the small amount of sleep he snatched was taken at a little inconspicuous hotel where he happened to be when he got done Saturday night, and where he had never stayed before.

  So the night came down, the awful first night of Betty’s absence, and still they had managed to get no clue.

  Eleanor walked up and down her room, or stared out of the window at the slow-moving flakes that wavered past the window, and thought and shuddered and blamed herself. And then she walked again and thought of the child psychology class and the things the teacher had warned them against. What utter folly they all seemed now, and how well she had followed their lead! “Let a child express itself.”

  Well, Betty was expressing herself!

  Not once had they told the eager mothers what to do if a child went wrong and brought lifelong sorrow upon herself and her family! They had said if a child used bad words, you must not notice it. It was a phase. It would pass. They had said if a child rebelled against you, you must turn his attention to something else, soothe and engage him elsewhere, lead him to view the question from a pleasanter standpoint. But not once had they said anything about teaching your children right and wrong, teaching them to obey, to respect law and order. No, they had rather decried that attitude. No parent had a right to put limits upon his children. Who was to say what was right or wrong? The child’s own inner sense would ultimately determine those things and so allow the young nature to develop without being warped or hindered or misshapen or biased according to ancient inherited dogmas and superstitions. Oh, she knew the phrases by heart! But they had never told her what to do when a child had gone wrong.