Coming Through the Rye (17 page)

“I mean the people who have been crushed under this juggernaut of drink.”

“The families of those who drink, you mean?”

“Yes, and the families of those who make them drink. I was thinking just when I spoke of the daughter of a bootlegger.”

“Oh!” said Aunt Patty with a little gasp of surprise. “I scarcely see how anyone could help them. I should think they would probably be benefiting so much by the business that they would be in thorough sympathy with it.”

“This one isn't,” said Evan sadly. “She is simply stricken! She wouldn't believe it when she first found it out, was very angry and indignant that any one would charge her gentleman father with any such deed. But when I took her into the cellar and showed her the stuff stored there, and the secret entrance into a private cabaret where drinking parties were carried on, she was simply crushed.”

“Poor child! What a heritage!” said the kind-hearted woman. “But surely, the daughter of a man who would go into a business like that would not have as fine feelings about things of this sort as you would.”

“There's where you are mistaken, Aunt Patty,” said the young man earnestly. “Her father is a southern gentleman of the old type and has always lived on pride and family. But pride and family don't keep a man and his family from starvation quite as well in these days as they used to in the old time, and it came to a question of letting his pretty sheltered daughter go out with the common throng to work, or accepting the proposition of an unprincipled politician who was an old friend of the family and saw a chance in the weakness of this old patrician bigwig to screen his own interests and get an abject slave to do his dirty work. It was put up to him in such a way that the old Southerner accepted the proposition, and such immediate prosperity followed that his conscience and his pride were lulled to sleep. If it hadn't been for his rascal of a son, perhaps he wouldn't have been found out yet. The son was utterly unlike the father. The old man really was getting along famously from the standpoint of his employers. He and his lovely daughter made a perfect camouflage for the business, and the daughter was absolutely unaware of the whole thing. You could see he just adored the girl and wouldn't have dared lift his head before her if she knew what he was doing. She seems to be quite an unusual girl, is a Sunday school teacher, interested in church work and that sort of thing.”

“You know a good deal about her?”

“No, Aunt Patty. Don't look at me like that. I'm not in love with her nor even interested in her beyond the fact that I've been the means of bringing great sorrow upon her, and I hate myself for having to do it.”

“But you didn't do it alone—”

“No, of course not, but I was in charge when the raid was made on the house, and we were waiting inside the house for the man to come home. Everything was all set. The girl was supposedly off in New Jersey at a house party, and the time had been carefully calculated to catch both father and son and hold them until we had evidence for the real owners behind them. Everything went off well till suddenly the girl walked in on us and wanted to know what we were doing in her father's house. Of course I had to answer her, and when I found I couldn't put her off, I had to tell her the truth. She was simply furious at first, and then when I showed her the evidence, which she couldn't doubt, she was stricken. It was terrible, Aunt Patty! I felt like a murderer! And right in the midst of it in walked her father with the brother behind, and when he saw her, and saw us there in his house, he just crumpled up and dropped as if he had been shot, a stroke of apoplexy, and he hasn't roused at all, probably never will.”

“How terrible! Poor child!” Aunt Patty was beginning to take the right point of view now. Evan went on.

“The brother disappeared, but our men outside got him, and he's lodged in jail now. The girl, meanwhile, has all that to bear, and not a soul apparently of friend or family to help her bear it. She looks like a wraith.”

“The poor little girl!” said Aunt Patty. “And what have you done about it? I know you haven't been idle.”

“Done! I haven't done a thing. She won't let me! She asked me if I wished to do her any favor would I please get out of her sight and never let her have to see me again. I don't blame her, of course, but it's tough luck, for there are a lot of little things I could have done—”

“And you've done them anyway without letting her know who did it. I know you, Evan Sherwood. You're your father all over again. But go on. What can I do?”

“I don't know, Aunt Patty,” said the young man, letting the real misery for the situation show in his eyes now. “I've thought and thought. I can't bear to have her going it alone through all this. It's horrible! And she's such a little flower of a girl!”

“I'll go and see her!” said Aunt Patty briskly. “I may get in, and I may not, but I'll try.”

“You won't get in, I'm afraid,” he said. “She's as proud as Lucifer, and she hates the very name of Sherwood. I represent humiliation, you see.”

“I see. Well, I'll try what I can do. Give me the street number, and I'll find my way. Now, Evan, you mustn't bother about me. You've got important things to do, and I'll take care of myself till evening. I'm going to see those lawyers this morning and get that off my mind.”

“I'll take you there,” he said. “I have to go right by the door. How soon will you be ready?”

“In half a minute!” said the spry little woman, springing up. “Oughtn't I wash up these dishes first?”

“No, the maid looks after those when she comes to clean. I often have meals sent in this way, and they just stack the dishes back in the container, and the caterer's man calls for them. Just leave them as they are.”

Aunt Patty disappeared into the bedroom and came back in a very brief space attired in a small gray hat and wrap and looking like a little gray dove with her silver hair and delicate bearing, and they went off together in Evan's shiny little car that was waiting down in front of the apartment.

Aunt Patty had much and trying business to look after that day, and it took hours longer than she expected, but she did not forget her nephew's commission, and before she went back to the apartment in the afternoon, she rang the bell of the brownstone house where Romayne lived and was admitted to an interview with the nurse, which was later detailed to Romayne.

The good lady went away from the brownstone house baffled but not conquered. She was greatly troubled in her soul that she had had to reveal her name. She knew that was a bad move, but her New England conscience had not been able to elude the direct question of the nurse, and now she felt she had lost ground rather than gained it. Nevertheless, she meant to try again. She meditated whether it would be wise to send some flowers without any card but decided against it. It might look as if Evan had sent them and be an offense to the girl. She must walk wisely and ask counsel of heaven in this matter if she could hope to be of service.

About that same hour or a little later, Romayne received a mysterious note from her brother that greatly disturbed her.

It was not written on prison paper nor sent by the same messenger who had brought his other communications. It arrived by the hand of a grubby little boy, who demanded a receipt for it written by Romayne herself.

After he was gone, she took the letter up to her own room and locked the door before she read it.

It was a request that she would pack certain of her brother's clothes and personal property in a suitcase and take it herself to the downtown station and check it, keeping the check carefully until he should tell her what to do with it. He explained that there was going to be a way for him to have some of this things, and that she must be ready to hand out the check quickly at any time if he should send someone to her for it. She was troubled that he had no message for her in her sorrowful situation, and no word about their dying father. Lawrence seemed to be entirely engaged with his own perplexities. It was so unlike the character that she had, through the years, built up around the thought of her adored brother. She sat a long time on the bed staring at the hasty note and trying to excuse Lawrence for his seeming selfishness. Of course he was in a terrible strait himself, yet they were all in it together, and it would have seemed natural that he should have had some little word of comfort for her somewhere.

By and by she arose and washed the tears away from her troubled face. She remembered that the nurse was busy with her father at this hour and that the guard, who usually stayed somewhere downstairs all day, would be gone to his supper, leaving only a young substitute down in the office. She could more easily now than at any other hour during the day or night go into Lawrence's room and get his things without exciting suspicion or question.

She put on her soft slippers and went directly down the hall, opening the door of his room and leaving it ajar that she might hear if anyone came up the stairs or the nurse came out of her father's room. She hated such underhanded ways, but there seemed nothing else to be done, and she dreaded any interference by the officers, who had since the first entrance been most considerate for her feelings.

She hastily gathered an armful of clothing from bureau drawers and closet and went back to her own room again to go over Lawrence's list once more and see what she had missed.

She made three silent trips to his room before she had everything, and she carefully arranged what was left in his closet so that it was not noticeable that anything had been taken out. While she was doing this, her cheeks burned with shame. She felt as if by this act somehow she were being implicated in the illicit business that had brought disgrace upon her clean, proud family.

The suitcase was in a hall closet under the third-story stairs, and she had no difficulty in getting it into her room without noise. When she finally locked her door and turned her attention to the packing of it, she drew a deep breath of relief. It only remained to get the suitcase to the station now and checked, and then her part would be over. The anxiety of it all wore upon her as if she had done a hard day's work. She found herself working with nervous haste.

When it was all packed and fastened, she threw her robe and bath towel over it, lest the nurse should suddenly come out of the door as she passed, and carried it down the hall to the bathroom.

She had provided herself with a ball of stout cord, and, locking herself in the bathroom, she carefully let the suitcase out of the window and lowered it to the ground. It was quite dark outside, and there was no light in the bathroom, so she felt reasonably safe about this, but her heart was beating so wildly when the suitcase finally settled into the grass below the window and she could shut the window and draw back that she could scarcely get her breath. She resolved then and there that when this business was finished, and the suitcase checked, she would never again resort to stealthy means. It was terrible. She felt like a thief.

By this time the regular night officer was on guard in the office downstairs, and it was quite dark outside.

Romayne went downstairs to the kitchen, where she fussed around washing the few dishes that had come down from the sickroom on a tray, washing out a dish towel and hanging it on the line on the little back porch, and then slipped quickly down the wooden steps and around to the area at the side of the house that was under the bathroom window. The only way to get that suitcase out without the officer noticing it, and Lawrence had been quite insistent about that, was for it to go over the back fence into the alley.

Romayne recovered the suitcase from the ground, made sure the cord was still fastened to it securely, and, carrying it to the back fence, arranged it carefully, with the cord thrown over the fence into the alley, so that she could easily pull it up from the outside. Then she made her way back to the kitchen, closed and locked the door for the night, and hurried up to her room for her hat and handbag.

She stopped in the front hall to say to the officer, “I am going out on an errand. If anyone calls me on the phone, please tell them I will be in by ten o'clock,” and then hurried out. So far there had been no embargo placed upon her movements, and she might come and go as she would.

She hurried around to the alley, had little difficulty in finding the cord and pulling the suitcase over the fence, and was at last on her way to the station.

She felt it was safer to walk than to attract any attention by getting into a lighted car.

The suitcase was heavy, and the way was long. She was almost worn out when she reached the station. With the check finally in her purse, she hailed the first car for home. She was tired to exhaustion and was glad to go straight to bed.

Hours later she was awakened by a firm hand on her shoulder, someone stooping over her, a whisper in her ear: “Hush! Don't say anything! Somebody is coming up the stairs!”

I
t seemed to Romayne that she could hear her own heart beating as she lay still and listened to the steps coming up the stairs. Awaking out of her exhausted sleep, she scarcely knew where she was, for she had been in the midst of a dream whose scene was laid in the cellar of her own house with rows and rows of whiskey bottles waltzing all around her and encompassing her to the voice of the drunken man of the police station singing raucously:

And now she had a curious feeling that the bottles were marshaled in orderly ranks, all marching up the stairs, or was it the drunken man coming step by step toward her door? She had an impulse to scream, but a hand came over her mouth, and the whisper was in her ear again:

“Hush, Romayne, don't stir! They mustn't find me here!”

Suddenly she knew that it was Lawrence, and a cold fear possessed her. What had Lawrence done now? Had he escaped from jail? What would they do to him for that? Imprison him for life? Or perhaps shoot him if they gave chase! She lay like marble, feeling as if she had utterly lost the power of speech and of movement, and heard those steps come on to her door and stand and listen.