The Prodigal Girl (12 page)

He turned to the girl at the desk who was discreetly making out index cards.

“Will you kindly let my daughter’s friends know that she was suddenly called away by her father and will not be able to be at her class meeting this afternoon, or her basketball practice?”

Betty bit her red lips hard; she was so angry with her father for mortifying her this way. She tried to think of some way out, but he stood waiting for her and she turned, slowly, reluctantly, and went across the hall to the cloakroom, looking eagerly either way in hopes of seeing some of her special friends that she might send a hasty word of explanation to one of the boys who had asked her to take a ride in his new car that afternoon. She had really been planning to slip away from basketball. But no one whom she dared trust came by, and she had lingered as long as she dared in the cloakroom with her father standing just outside the door. She finally had to come out and follow him down the steps.

Once outside the school she made another stand.

“See here, Chester, what’s all this about? I simply
can’t
go away anywhere today. I really have things that I must do. You don’t understand what a responsibility a girl in my position has. I’m class president, and we’ve just found out some of the class are trying to put something over on us. Trying to influence the faculty to say we can’t wear anything but plain white muslin dresses at commencement, and a lot of folly like that, and I’ve simply
got
to go back and put a stop to it. If the vote goes their way it will make us no end of trouble. We’ll have to get up a school strike to undo the mischief.”

Chester Thornton took his daughter’s arm, firmly, but with a friendly touch:

“You’ll find it won’t affect your future in the least, Betty,” he said in a kindly voice. “There are several things you do not yet understand, and I will have to explain, but the main one just now is that you are to come with us
at once!”

“Us?” said Betty with a sudden quick glance down the walk at the car that she had merely taken for granted before. “Us?” incredulously. “Really, is this a family picnic? It is a poor time to choose,” she remarked coldly. “Thanks, I don’t care to attend.”

And she stopped short in the walk and looked defiantly up at her father.

He looked down into her face with eyes that were sharp with the pain of disappointment. There was even a look of disgust about the glance he gave her, and his voice sounded entirely unlike the indulgent father she had always known.

“Betty,” he said, “I am quite capable of taking you up and carrying you to the car as I did last night. But, there are several young people up at the window over the front door. They have evidently recognized you. Do you wish to leave the schoolhouse in that manner, or will you walk down and get into the car in the usual way?”

Betty looked up startled, recognized the boy of whom she had been in search talking to a girl she disliked, gave a quick nod and a cheerful wave of the hand to them, and tripped down the walk to the car, vanishing into the place left for her in the backseat with much the same manner that an arrested man dives from the patrol car into the door of the courthouse when a crowd is standing around watching.

Chester was in his seat almost as soon, and the doors slammed shut. John pulled down his little middle seat, and off they went.

As soon as they had turned the corner Betty sat up, her cheeks flaming brilliantly under the generous coat of white she had applied to them a few minutes before and her eyes flashing like two naughty stars.

“Well!” said Betty with the air of a royal princess kidnapped. “I should like to know what possible explanation there can be to this extraordinary performance.”

She fixed her mother with her eyes, but her tone was loud enough to reach easily to the front seat.

Eleanor busied herself with folding back the sleeve of Doris’s sweater that had come down below her coat sleeve and did not pretend to try to answer. Chester was threading his way carefully through traffic, going in the opposite direction from home. Betty grew angrier with every second.

“Is somebody dead? And are we all going to the funeral?” she asked contemptuously. “I’m sure I don’t know who it could possibly be that would demand our instant presence before the afternoon session of school closed. Now, I shall lose my marks on my report, and every mark counts from now on whether I win the college scholarship or not.”

But no one answered. Chester was too much preoccupied in getting through a snarl of vehicles at the railroad crossing to be expected to reply, and Eleanor had stooped to recover her handbag, which had slipped to the floor of the car.

“I’m perfectly furious!” said Betty, sitting up the straighter and looking angrily at first one parent and then the other and then around the ring of brothers and sisters.

“So we all observe!” said Jane quaintly, settling back sanctimoniously. Having suffered herself, it was good to be able to watch someone else take a grilling. Besides, the affair had begun to take on the proportions of an adventure in Jane’s eyes. She was already forgetting what she had left behind in the joys of what might possibly be ahead. Jane was still half a little girl.

But the road wound on out of Briardale, down toward the city, and finally turned into the state highway. Still nobody had answered.

When the car dashed out of Briardale and toward the city line, Betty turned to her mother.

“I insist on knowing where we are going,” she said in a tone that made Chester feel like slapping her. When did Betty develop into such a little minx? He hadn’t noticed it coming on.

“Your father will explain presently,” said Eleanor in a gentle tone. She was still engaged in settling some of the little bags and boxes that had been tossed into the car just as they started. She had avoided her daughter’s eyes, because she could not bear to see the fury in them and so had not noticed her makeup.

“Gee!” said John, turning around and suddenly getting a good look at his oldest sister. “Gee! You look like Lily Whiffletree!”

Now Lily Whiffletree was a maiden of uncertain age and an unsavory character who lived with her blind and deaf old father on the outskirts of Briardale, and her daring outfits and notorious deeds were the talk of the town.

Chester and Eleanor both turned suddenly and looked at Betty, Chester with open annoyance, and Eleanor with horror. Betty became suddenly aware of herself and sought her scrap of a handkerchief in her coat pocket. Her mother’s reproachful “Oh, Betty! How could you be so common?” only served to anger her the more.

“I’m going to get out!” she said and burst into passionate tears.

“Yes,” said Chester, “you’re going to get out, right down there by that brook on the edge of the Willowvale Golf Course, and wash your face!”

Chapter 9

H
e drew up at the side of the road and opened the door of the car.

“Get out, Jane,” he ordered.

Jane got out with a leer on her elfin face.

“Get out, Betty!”

Betty resisted, but her father reached in and drew her out.

“Now, go down there and wash your face! You can get some of the flour off at least, and if the red doesn’t come off with water we’ll stop at the drugstore and get some acid or something to take it off. I’m not going through the world with my daughter looking like a bad woman.”

“Doesn’t she look funny, Mamma?” laughed Doris. “Doesn’t Betty look funny, all red and white like a circus clown! Why, Mamma! You’re crying. What’r ya crying for, Mamma? Are you crying ‘cause Betty looks like Lily Whiffletree? Mamma,
say!”

“Aw shut up, can’t ya!” growled Chris, suddenly entering into the conversation. “Such a
life
!”

Betty returned with her father from her trip to the creek, looking several shades more lifelike, and climbed into the car indignantly.

“I never heard of a girl of my age being treated this way in my life!” she remarked as she settled back and turned her face toward the window of the car with an air of withdrawal from the world.

Chester Thornton climbed back into the car and slammed the door shut. He waited an instant with his hand on the wheel, and then he turned around and faced his little family, a yearning look on his tired, drawn face that went to his wife’s heart.

“Now,” said he, “we have quite a journey to take before night, and we haven’t any time to waste in talking. There are things that I intend to explain to you when we get to a place where we have leisure. At present, it is enough to say that it is your own doings that have brought this journey about, and that your mother and I feel that it is for the best in every way. Now you know, however much you may pretend that you are your own masters and mistresses, that that isn’t the case at all. You are all
our children
, and in the eyes of the law—you are still underage and therefore under our control. Also, you have a moral obligation, whether you own it or not, to obey me as long as I am supporting you, whether you like it or not.

“I am taking you on this journey because I feel that it is for your own good, and I shall go into no more detail at present. There will probably be some unpleasant things, and hard things in what is before us, and I expect you to be good sports and take them as all in the day’s work. If you do this you may find that the journey will be a pleasant one. It will be, of course, just what you make it. We shall also incidentally discover who of you are loyal to the family. That’s all. Now, shall we go?”

“All set!” rollicked out John joyously. It was plain that John had no objection to the family flight.

Chester stepped on the gas, and the car shot forward into the clear, cold winter afternoon.

For an hour or more no one spoke save John and Doris who eagerly watched every car they met, counting how many of the different makes they passed and discussing their various qualities. Their chatter reminded Chester of his happy errand about this time yesterday hunting a Mermaid Eight for Betty and planning his Christmas presents. Now, what would Christmas be? Had he done right to bring them all off into a desolate place just as the holiday season was arriving?

But a glance in the mirror showed him Betty’s hard, angry face, fierce in its concentrated fury. Betty was by no means subdued.

He recalled her struggles the night before and her resistance at the schoolhouse. Betty was a problem indeed.

Chester was very tired. He had had scarcely any sleep for twenty-four hours, had eaten almost nothing since noon of the day before, and suddenly he felt the strain. His weary eyes longed to close and his body to relax. His heart seemed to go slower and slower and the tenseness of the atmosphere among his family was almost more than he could bear. Yet he knew he had been right to come. It seemed as if there had been someone leading, choosing this way for him, almost as if he had no choice in the matter.

Eleanor was terribly weary. She longed to put her head back on the cushion and cry, yet she knew she must keep a steady front. It would not do to break down. She felt Betty’s presence like a stranger, as if she had suddenly become an enemy. Her own little girl! It wrung her heart.

And Chris sat slumped beside his father, his eyes down, or out of the window, with a strange embarrassment upon him. What could have happened to subdue him so? He did not even make any display of more than a passing interest when they came upon the wreck of two cars at the turn of a hill. There was a little group of people standing about it, and a state policeman taking names and asking questions. There was no need to stop, and Chester drove straight ahead. Betty seemed frozen to ice. She never moved a muscle and kept her unseeing eyes fixed out the window, as if she had withdrawn to another universe and had nothing in common with any of them. Jane too was sullen and unhappy as if she would like to cry but wasn’t sure it would do any good. She had a kind of frightened look about her self-willed little mouth that reminded her mother of the time five years before when she had run away from her call straight into a mortar bed in front of a new house and got into liquid lime to her waist. It was a frightened, defiant look.

To judge by their looks there did not seem to be an over amount of loyalty in any member of the party.

It was Doris who finally voiced the question that was trembling on all their lips and brought their thoughts to a climax:

“Well, anyway,” she said after a long silence in which not even John had spoken. “Anyway, I gotta go back by next Friday. We have our party then, and Miss White wants me to give a speech. I know it all now, and I’ve got to have a new dress to wear. They are all gonta have new dresses. Mine has gotta be red. I’m a holly berry! Say, Daddy, when are we goin’ back? I gotta get ready for the party.”

“I can’t answer that now, Doris. I’m not sure that we shall ever go back,” he said gravely, sadly.

A new consternation settled down upon the group. Betty’s face grew even harder to read, as her mother glanced furtively toward her. Chris seemed to slump farther down in the seat. After that not even Doris spoke anymore, and before long Eleanor found that the tears were rolling down her cheeks silently. She drew the little girl into her arms and patted her.

“Don’t cry, darling,” she whispered. “I think we’ll have a nice time where we’re going.”

“But—I—wanta—be—a—holly berry,” sobbed the little girl.

“Well, perhaps we’ll find some real holly berries where we’re going,” whispered her mother, summoning a smile and wiping Doris’s tears away.

Jane still sat sullen and thoughtful, as the car rushed on through little towns and big ones, out on the great highway, detouring into byways now and then to avoid traffic near a town, and back again to the highway.

Suddenly Chester broke the tension by turning to Chris:

“Want to drive awhile now, Son?” he asked in a kindly tone as if nothing had happened to precipitate a cataclysm in the family.

Chris accepted with alacrity, almost embarrassed, eager to be of service. Chris liked to drive beyond everything, but his father seldom allowed him to do so. They stopped and made the change, and something tense in the atmosphere seemed to break away. Chester gave a few suggestions about keeping to a certain spot in the road and avoiding the rough edge. The boy warmed under the kindly tone and seemed to feel his self-respect returning. It relieved Eleanor to see them more like companions again. Chris was only a boy yet!