Coming Through the Rye (11 page)

“No, thank you,” she said in a small tired voice. “I was only going down to the cellar.”

“Certainly,” he said as if going down to the cellar in the middle of the night were quite a common occurrence. “I will go with you.”

“Oh, it isn't necessary,” said Romayne, looking as if she were going to cry again. “I'm not afraid.”

“I'd better go,” said the man.

Then she remembered that they were all under surveillance.

“Very well,” she said coldly. “I'm only going down to look at something. In the morning I'm going to see someone and explain all this. I'm sure my father knew nothing whatever about it. I'm quite sure someone else has been carrying on all this, because my father was in the
oil
business. Why, I've helped him send out his circulars! My father almost never came down to the cellar.”

“Yes?” said the officer as if he were trying to be kind to her. There was something condescending in his tone that offended her. She walked on down the stairs determinedly and began her inspection of their cellar. She went over to the big box that Evan Sherwood had shown her earlier in the evening and examined it carefully.

She saw now what she had not noticed the first time, that the box had been made in compartments, and evidently there had been a shelf or top layer separated from the rest. Perhaps this was the way they had deceived her father to get their wares into the next house. They might have packed the upper compartment with specimens of ore and then employed the man to open the box. She felt sure her father had not remained in the cellar long enough to have unpacked the whole box. He probably merely inspected the top of the box and ordered the things brought upstairs, and very likely the man reported that the rest was all alike.

She turned from the box with a sigh of real relief and with more assurance than she had felt since she had entered the house the evening before. She began to investigate the remainder of the cellar. If she could just prove that her father had known nothing about it, that he had been duped, it would make all the difference in the world. But she would have to prove it to herself. If only she might go about alone without an officer at her elbow!

The back of the cellar was dark, and she peered into the shadows furtively, wondering if there was anything more she had not seen. But the officer, noticing her glance, stepped to the wall and touched a button under the edge of the stairs that she did not know existed, flooding the back of the cellar with light, and revealing a door that she had never noticed before and that apparently led into a vegetable store closet, at least that would be the natural conclusion of a housekeeper.

In surprise she stepped to the door and tried to open it but found it locked.

The attendant, however, stepped forward and, selecting a key from a bunch he carried, opened the door quite as if it were not the first time that night that he had done it, and pressing another button, filled the room beyond with light.

Romayne stepped within and looked about. Instead of the rows of shelves for canned fruit and potato bins she had expected to find, there was a tall desk and stool, and on the desk an open ledger with a pen lying beside it as if it had been hastily dropped.

At one side of the desk stood a safe, and beyond were shelves filled with bottles labeled with the names of every known kind of gin and whiskey. On a long table and piled about on the floor against the wall were brown paper packages carefully done up and addressed, and one apparently recently broken open showed a dozen bottles packed in straw. She stepped nearer and saw the address on one, E. A. K
RUPPER
, E
ARNHEIM
B
UILDING
—but the thing that made her heart stand still was that the address was
in her father's handwriting
! Could he possibly have addressed them without knowing what they contained?

As if to answer her unspoken question, her eyes turned to the pile of labels and revenue seals lying on the table. Of course she did not know that they were counterfeits.

Sick at heart, she turned and walked over to the desk, struggling to keep back the tears, and forced herself to read several lines of the entries all in her father's clear, unmistakable handwriting:

She did not follow them out to the end of the line. She was not concerned with the price they brought nor the people who bought them. She was convinced beyond a doubt that her father knew what he was doing and that he had done it all deliberately. She was trembling and would have fallen if she had not steadied herself by the desk. The man who was awaiting her convenience stepped back in the shadow. His heart was aching for this frail bit of a girl and the burden that had been handed her to bear. His jaw set sternly over the father who had so far lost his fatherhood as to leave a sorrow like this for his girl to bear. Suppose it had been his little Nannie?

Romayne, forcing her trembling lips to steadiness, stepped to the opening in the other side of the room where the wall had evidently been pulled down hastily and the stones flung to one side, perhaps to make room for some bulky object to pass through.

She did not go over there to see anything more. She had her answer. There was no further doubt. She went there to be unobserved for a moment until she could control the overwhelming tears that threatened to engulf her.

But when she stood at the opening, she saw beyond a big room filled with packing boxes like the one that stood in the front of their cellar. It almost looked as if it reached through two or three cellars, it was so long. And there was a glimmer of light at the far end as if there were a door beyond. Why! Could it be that the business included more of the houses in the block? One, two, yes, there were three houses beyond them, two occupied and one next door vacant. The corner was occupied by a baker, and yes, there was a big door opening from the back of his house to the side street. She had seen it open once and a big truck hauled up to the sidewalk being loaded with wooden boxes of all sizes. Could it be? Oh how
horrible
! Her father had always encouraged her to go to that store, even though things were expensive there, rather than to go a little farther where they were cheaper.

Suddenly she turned and fled up the stairs, her lips quivering, her eyes streaming, her heart fairly smothered with surging emotions. Back to her room she fled and locked the door, buried her face in her pillow, and prayed. But now the prayer was not for deliverance for herself. She prayed for her father.

“Oh God, forgive him! Forgive him! He did it for me—I know he did! He always wanted me to have nice things. He used to say I ought to have the things my mother had when she was a girl! Oh God, please forgive him! Won't You please, please to forgive him, and not let him have to suffer for it? He was not well, You know, and he had tried so long to get a position! Oh dear God, help me somehow to make up for the wrong he has done, and don't punish him. My poor dear Father!”

Wildly she whispered the petition into her pillow, sobbing her heart out between gasps.

“Please forgive my father, and make him get better somehow so he will know You love him yet. Mother loved him, and Mother loved You. Won't You forgive him for Mother's sake? I know Mother is in heaven with You. Won't You forgive him? Oh, forgive him, for Jesus' sake—”

There seemed to come a calm into her heart after that, and she crept upon her bed and slept from pure exhaustion.

The sun was shining brightly across her bed when the nurse tapped at the door with a tray.

There was toast and poached eggs and a cup of tea set forth appetizingly. The nurse had a kind voice. She told her she must eat or she would be sick.

Romayne did not feel hungry. The thought of food was revolting. She felt as if she had been dead and buried a long time, and she wished this strange nurse would go away, this woman who kept on saying things that she had not listened to.

“You will have to eat something,” she was saying, “because they have sent for you to come down and see your brother again. And before you go, you must come and sit with your father while I straighten up. The day nurse will be here presently.”

“Oh,” said Romayne with sudden responsibility, “but I do not need to eat. I will come at once. I am not hungry.”

“You
must eat!
” said the nurse with an air of finality. “See, I have made breakfast for you!”

It seemed a matter of courtesy, so she ate what was on the tray, wishing the woman would go away.

“Did you say the doctor had gotten another nurse?” she asked, trying to make talk because it seemed she just could not endure having the woman stand there watching her silently.

“Not the doctor,” answered the nurse, “the young gentleman. He arranged it when they sent me. He said there was to be two nurses, a day and a night, as long as we was needed. And he said you was to eat and rest—”

“The young gentleman!” repeated Romayne with dignity. “Whom do you mean? Was my brother able to send word about our comfort?”

“Oh, no, him that was here—Mr. Sherwood. He gave me my orders. They do say he has done more for the cleaning up of this town—”

But Romayne was on her feet with the tray in her hand, her eyes full of protest.

“What in the world does he have to do with it? It is not his business!” she flashed indignantly.

“He has all to do,” said the nurse a bit importantly. “He's in charge here, and you're lucky he is. They say he is wonderful. He called up himself and insisted I should come for the night. He said it was an important case and he wanted me because he knew me. I've nursed in his family, took care of his father when he died and took his mother through double pneumonia last winter, and he knows me. You don't need to worry about anything earthly because he just thinks of everything. He was the kindest son—”

“That may be all very true,” said Romayne coldly, “and I'm sure I'm obliged to whoever sent for the doctor and the nurse, but this young man is an entire stranger to me, and of course I do not care to be under obligation to him. If you see him again, please tell him that it is not necessary for him to do anything further. I will look after everything from now on. I couldn't possibly let a stranger—”

“Don't be a fool!” said the nurse bluntly. “Don't you know this house is under control of the police and they're guarding it? Nobody can't come in or out without he says so, and you better be thankful you've got such a jailer. Now, drink the rest of that tea, and then I'll let you go and sit with your father while I slick up the room. I'm old-fashioned, and I like things in their places before the day nurse gets here.”

Romayne had sunk back upon the bed again with a helpless despair in her face at the announcement of the police control, but now she realized that she must obey this kindly dictatorial woman or be further tried by her, so she hastily swallowed the hot tea and went to her father's room.

It was all very quiet except for that strange breathing of the patient. Daylight gave even more of an ashen look to his face than the evening had done. Romayne dropped awesomely into the chair that the nurse had placed for her beside the bed and watched him, terror like a steel hand gripping her heart.

What, oh what, was to be the outcome of this terrible situation? And yesterday had been so sweet and fair in its beginning! Oh, if they all could have died before any of this happened! And in a few minutes she was to go to jail again to see her brother! To
jail
!

T
here was no one else but Lawrence in the room that morning when she went for her appointment. She overheard the warden say to an attendant: “It's all right. Sherwood ordered it,” and again she felt the steel of obligation enter her soul. Somehow it seemed so terrible to have this young man mixed up in her affairs. His gray eyes seemed to have seen clear through her life and stripped it of all its sweet reserve. She felt she could never forgive him for continuing to take care of her in this way. He had promised to get out of her life, and he had not done it! Surely he might have turned the whole affair over to some other official. She would rather suffer a few hardships and go less well-cared-for than to all the time feel his protection and know that he had thought out every inch of the way through which she was to pass and anticipated it for her. She resented his right to care for her. He had hurt her father and brother! Much as he was in the right and they were in the wrong, it yet seemed disloyal to them to accept any favors from one who had been the cause of the family disaster.

Yet she was glad to have this brief freedom from watchful eyes and listening ears, as the guard withdrew and left them alone. She wanted to throw herself into her brother's arms and weep out all her sorrow on his loving breast, but somehow he seemed strangely separated from her since the occurrences of the day before. As she looked at him now, haggard and white from his night's vigil, somehow she saw only the desperate face that had gleamed for a moment behind her father yesterday and then disappeared. There had been and was still a strange lack in his face of something that, had she been a little older, she might have called “principle.” She felt the lack as she studied his face now while he seated himself across the little white pine table from her. It seemed like something that had suddenly disappeared out of him, something familiar that had always been there, and had dropped out, leaving a blank, as if it had been a color or a shading in the flesh.

Lawrence's manner was bright. He was making a good bluff, he considered. He felt it was only a matter of time before the gang would help him out. His sister was not the only one who had carried notes for him. He had been busy all night. He had been able to fix up one or two little shaky matters, and to get several pieces of evidence destroyed or hushed up, and he was feeling happier.