Coming Through the Rye (18 page)

It seemed hours, while she and Lawrence held their breath, before the steps turned and went back down the hall, pausing on every door. They could see the flashlight like a moving sprite dancing through the crack under the door fitfully, growing paler as the officer receded, and finally disappearing as he went back downstairs. Then the tension relaxed. Finally, Lawrence put his lips down to her ear again.

“Listen, Romayne, don't speak nor stir! I've only a minute, and this is dangerous, but I had to have the check for my suitcase. No, wait till I finish! We mustn't make a noise! Freeman got me transferred to another jail, see? And I'm supposed to be on my way. But I've got a
double
. The judge fixed it all up, and he's sending me to South America. I make my getaway tonight. If you want to go with me, you'll have to sail on a different ship. There's directions in this letter.” He pressed a paper into her cold, trembling hand. “Will you come? I've got to know tonight, because I can't have you writing letters to me.”

“And
leave Father
?” she managed to whisper in a frightened voice. “Why Lawrence! How could I?”

“Hush! Don't call me by name! You can't tell who's listening. Father's as good as dead. Judge Freeman said the doctor said so. No one can blame you for coming. And it's no one's business anyhow.”

“Lawrence! How
horrible
!” said Romayne, unconsciously using his name once more, and raising her voice to an excited whisper. But her brother's hand was placed firmly over her mouth again till she almost smothered, and his voice in her ear whispered, “Shut up, can't you! You'll cant the whole thing! Don't be a little fool! You don't have to come if you don't like. I can get on much safer and easier without you. I'm only offering. It's likely Judge Freeman will be kind to you, and you won't suffer, but I've got to beat it right away. Now, will you be sensible and shut up and do what I tell you, or have I got to stuff something in your mouth?”

Romayne signified by a relaxed nod that she would do his will.

“All right, then. You get up as still as you can and get me that check for the suitcase and all the money you've got. I'm short. Do it quick, and don't speak! Then you open your door, rattle it good and loud, as if you'd just got up, and go out into the hall and call down to that officer to know if it was he who came upstairs. Say you heard someone come up and did he want anything? While you're talking, I'll beat it back to the bathroom and swing out the window the way I came. No, don't speak! Just do as I tell you. The mischief will be to pay in no time if you make any mistakes. Now, go!”

Cold with anxiety and trembling so that she could scarcely move, Romayne slipped out of bed to her bureau, where she had pinned the check to her pincushion. She groped for her purse. There was a five-dollar bill and some change in it. She emptied it into his hands mutely, and, with her robe wrapped around her, opened the door and went out to the hall, calling downstairs as her brother had bade her. It was all dark in the upper hall, and she scarcely knew when her brother slid by her to the bathroom door. Her heart seemed almost smothering her as she tried to conduct a reasonable conversation with the officer.

“No, ma'am,” he was saying, “there ain't no one around. I just was stepping up through the halls to make sure all was right. I do it regular every little while. Yes, I did think I heard a noise, but I reckon it was only a rat. They sound awful human, and, you know, these here old houses always has 'em. No, ma'am, don't you worry, lady. I stay awake all night, and I'll look after the house. It's my job.”

Romayne thanked him in a small, shaking voice and crept back to her room, feeling like a criminal herself. To think she had had to descend to deception to help her brother! Oh, had it come to this? And was it right, what he was doing? Wasn't it cowardly to get out of facing the law? And what was that he had said about a double? She ought to have asked him more, only he had stopped her mouth, and she had been only half-awake. Had she been a party to something dishonorable, helping him to escape? Yet how could she detain her own brother to face a possible charge of murder? Oh, how complicated and awful life was getting to be! The simple rules of right and wrong by which she had been brought up seemed not to apply at all anymore. Nothing was as it ought to be, and the people you thought you could depend upon had failed. It was as if the foundations of the earth were shaken and she was tottering with them.

She crept shivering into her bed and tried to go over the whole experience sanely, but the more she recalled everything, word by word, the more disturbed she was, and when she finally came to the end and realized that there had not been a single word of loving or kindness to her beyond that cold-blooded suggestion that she leave their dying father and escape from it all into another land, the tears smarted into her eyes, and a sharp pain darted through her heart. Lawrence was gone! Her only dependence gone far away, without leaving any address, and without even a good-bye kiss!

The tears came in a flood then and relieved the terrible pressure on her heart. She felt so alone and utterly desolate.

“Oh God!” she cried. “I've nobody but You! Won't You please help me somehow?”

Sleep was driven utterly from her. She found herself listening to every sound in the house and on the street. She wondered if Lawrence had succeeded in getting safely out of the bathroom window. There was a bay window out from the dining room, to the roof of which he might possibly manage to drop, although it would be a dangerous feat even in the daytime. How had he possibly managed it in the dark? Of course, Lawrence had always been a great climber, but as she continued to think about it, her flesh grew cold with horror. Perhaps even now he was lying unconscious on the brick-paved court below. She wanted to fly down and see, or at least to go to the bathroom window and look down to be sure he was safely out, but she dared not attract the attention of the officer again. He would surely think something unusual had happened and perhaps begin an investigation that would put Lawrence in jeopardy. Anyhow, Lawrence was her brother, and perhaps he was doing the right thing somehow. Only if it was right, why did he have to come to her so secretly?

Morning brought relief of one kind in that she could go openly to the window and look down. And glad she was that she had gone before anyone was astir, for there she saw a heavy rope fastened firmly to the leg of the radiator and going out the open window. Lawrence had not hesitated to leave behind embarrassing evidence for her to erase. With a quick gasp she locked the bathroom door and looked out the window, half expecting to see a huddled form lying below. But to her relief there was nothing but the rope dangling ten or twelve feet from the ground. Lawrence had managed the difficult ascent by way of the dining room bay window, likely, but he had come prepared with a rope for descent. Well, she must get rid of that rope at once. It was in full sight of the upper part of the dining room window. If the officer should chance that way, he could not fail to see it.

She pulled it in quickly, hand over hand, and soon had it coiled on the bathroom floor. The difficult task was to untie the complex knot that fastened the other end to the radiator.

She worked and tugged with her frail fingers. The rope was heavy, and the time was short, for at any moment now the nurse would be coming down the hall to get water for her father. She must have the rope hidden before she came. She dared not go back to her room for scissors or knife lest the nurse come in while she was gone.

Frantically she looked for some implement to help her and at last discovered a nail file on the shelf of the medicine closet. It was not large nor strong, but it had a stout little handle, and she managed at last to insert it into the knot and so loosen it up. Little by little, such a very little that it scarcely seemed any at all, the stubborn rope yielded. Her fingers smarted and burned and rubbed into blisters, but she finally got the knot untied. It seemed to her when it finally yielded the last inch and she pulled it free from the radiator that she must sink down and cry for relief, but she did not. Instead she gathered it quickly into the smallest coil she could manage and, enveloping it under her robe, hurried with it to her room, hiding it far back in the depths of her closet behind some big hatboxes, and dropping a big cloak carelessly over the whole as if it had fallen from the hook. Nobody would probably go to her closet in search of a rope, of course, but it made her feel easier to hide it utterly.

Her next act was to dress hurriedly and rush downstairs to examine the ground under the window to make sure there were no footprints nor anything else dropped that might look suspicious. She also went out to the ash barrel with some papers and gave a careful furtive look in the yard and the alley where Lawrence must have climbed the fence. Then she came back to her room and sat down to think. She felt like breaking down utterly and weeping, but she knew she must be strong and brave, not a crybaby. Whether or not Lawrence had done right, even whether or not
she
had done right in helping him, was not any longer the question. Lawrence was gone! She had herself and her father to look out for, and she must not go to pieces.

The nurse was sorry for her that morning as she went about her little daily household duties and came and went in the sickroom, with great dark circles under her eyes and a deep look of sadness around her firm-set mouth.

A special delivery letter reached her midway of the morning. She set her teeth in her trembling underlip and took it up to her own room. Always now when anything new happened, even the most commonplace things, there was that clutch of terror at her heart. She knew this letter was from Lawrence even though the handwriting was disguised. What could he have to say now? How her heart hungered for just one loving word from him.

She tore it open hurriedly and read:

There was no name signed, and when she had read it slowly through twice, she dropped upon her knees beside the bed and hid her face in the pillow.

She did not cry. She just lay there trying to get strength to face the hard facts. Lawrence was engaged in trying to save himself at the expense of their father. Yes, and at her expense, too. He did not seem to care what became of her nor how hard things were for her. No endearing epithets, no tenderness, no thoughtfulness. Just that hard, cold expression, “tough luck,” which might have been the solace of the slums. How could he be her brother and write like that? Not a word about their father, not an expression of anxiety about either of them!

Of course he was in a terrible situation himself, and for the time that might have effaced all other emotions. She had never been in prison or in danger of her life. She could not tell how she might act under similar circumstances; and, of course, perhaps he was taking all these gentler things for granted. Yet she could not hide the fact from her inmost soul that Lawrence was thinking of no one but himself, and that he had laid upon her a command that she could not fulfill.

Never could she go into the sickroom and bombard her father's stricken consciousness with matters of business. Not even if she could call him back would she use such things to do it. If he were getting well again and strong enough to bear references to matters that obviously had been the cause of his trouble, there might come a time when she could tell him about it all, but not in his present condition; no, not even to save Lawrence! There was something innately basic about her decision that made it seem final. She knew that this was right.

But Lawrence's letter had given her another idea.

When she stayed in the room alone with her father again, she would read aloud to him those words from the Bible. She would give him a hope out of his living death. If her words could reach his dull ears and his submerged consciousness at all, they should be words of forgiveness and life. She reasoned that her father, if he were conscious at all of his situation, must be troubled that he had done wrong. His whole life had been spent in an atmosphere where wrongdoing meant a cutting off from eternal happiness. She could not think of her father as being content to be a wrongdoer, a law-breaker. If he really had done the thing that they were charging him with, then he must feel condemned in his soul. That, and that alone, must be the important thing now for her to do, to let him know that she believed he could be forgiven for what he had done, and to remind him that God had promised to forgive if one would ask.

With such a purpose in her heart, she took her little Bible that afternoon and went to sit with her father while the nurse slept. As soon as the nurse was gone to her room and all was quiet, she began in a gentle voice, very low but clear: “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.”