His Family Part 38

Roger smoked for a moment, and said,

"There's Edith and her children."

"The children needn't know anything--and Edith only part of it."

"The less, the better," he grunted.

"Of course." She looked at him anxiously. This tractable mood of his might not last. "Why not go up and see her now--and get it all over--so you can sleep."

Over Roger's set heavy visage flitted a smile of grim relish at that.

Sleep! Deborah was funny. Resolutely he rose from his chair.

"You'll be careful, of course," she admonished him, and he nodded in reply.

At the door he turned back:

"Where's the other chap?"

"I don't know," she answered. "Surely you don't want to see _him_--." Her father snorted his contempt:

"See him? No. Nor she neither. _She's_ not to see him. Understand?"

"I wouldn't tell her that to-night."

"Look here." Roger eyed his daughter a moment.

"You've done well. I've no complaint. But don't try to manage everything."

He went out and slowly climbed the stairs. Outside the bedroom door he paused. When had he stood like this before? In a moment he remembered. One evening some two years ago, the night before Laura's wedding, when they had had that other talk. And so it had come to this, had it. Well, there was no use making a scene. Again, with a sigh of weariness, Laura's father knocked at her door.

"Come in, Deborah," she said.

"It isn't Deborah, it's I." There was a little silence.

"Very well, father, come in, please." Her voice sounded tired and lifeless.

He opened the door and found the room dark. "I'm over on the bed," she said. "I've had a headache this evening."

He came over to the bedside and he could just see her there, a long shadow upon the white. She had not taken off her clothes. He stood a moment helplessly.

"Please don't _you_ talk to me!" His daughter fiercely whispered. "I can't stand any more to-night!"

"I won't," he answered. "It's too late." Again there was a pause.

"What time is it?" she asked him. But he did not answer.

"Well, Laura," he said presently, "your sister has told me everything. She has seen your husband--it's all arranged--and you're to stay here till it's over ... You want to stay here, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Then it's settled," he went on. "There's only one thing--the other man. I don't know who he is and I don't want to know. And I don't want you to know him again. You're not to see him. Understand?" For a moment Laura was silent.

"I'm going to marry him, father," she said. And standing in the darkened room Roger stiffened sharply.

"Well," he answered, after a pause, "that's your affair. You're no longer a child. I wish you were," he added.

Suddenly in the darkness Laura's hand came out clutching for his. But he had already turned to the door.

"Good-night," he said, and left her.

In the hallway below he met Deborah, and to her questioning look he replied, "All right, I guess. Now I'm going to bed." He went into his room and closed the door.

As soon as Roger was alone, he knew this was the hardest part--to be here by himself in this intimate room, with this worn blue rug, these pictures and this old mahogany bed. For he had promised Judith his wife to keep close to the children. What would she think of him if she knew?

Judith had been a broad-minded woman, sensible, big-hearted. But she never would have stood for this. Once, he recollected, she had helped a girl friend to divorce her husband, a drunkard who ran after chorus girls. But that had been quite different. There the wife had been innocent and had done it for her children. Laura was guilty, she hadn't a child, she was already planning to marry again. And then what, he asked himself. "From bad to worse, very likely. A woman can't stop when she's started downhill." His eye was caught by the picture directly before him on the wall--the one his wife had given him--two herdsmen with their cattle high up on a shoulder of a sweeping mountain side, tiny blue figures against the dawn. It had been like a symbol of their lives, always beginning clean glorious days. What was Laura beginning?

"Well," he demanded angrily, as he began to jerk off his clothes, "what can I do about it? Try to keep her from re-marrying, eh? And suppose I succeeded, how long would it last? She wouldn't stay here and I couldn't keep her. She'll be independent now--her looks will be her bank account.

There'd be some other chap in no time, and he might not even marry her!" He tugged ferociously at his boots. "No, let well enough alone!"

He finished undressing, opened the window, turned out the gas and got into bed. Wearily he closed his eyes. But after a time he opened them and stared long through the window up at the beetling cliff of a building close by, with its tier upon tier of lighted apartments, a huge garish hive of homes.

Yes, the town was crowding down on him to-night, on his house and on his family. He realized it had never stopped, and that his three grown children, each one of them a part of himself, had been struggling with it all the time. Laura--wasn't she part of himself? Hadn't he, too, had his little fling, back in his early twenties? "You will live on in our children's lives." She was a part of him gone wild. She gave it free rein, took chances. G.o.d, what a chance she had taken this time! The picture of that court he had seen, with the girl in the witness chair and those many rows of eyes avidly fixed upon her, came back to his mind so vividly they seemed for a moment right here in the room, these eyes of the town boring into his house. Angrily he shut out the scene. And alone in the darkness, Roger said to his daughter all the ugly furious things he had not said to her upstairs--until at last he was weary of it.

"Why am I working myself all up? I've got to take this. It's my medicine."

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

But as he watched Laura in the house, Roger's first emotions were complicated more and more by a feeling of bewilderment. At dinner the next evening he noticed with astonishment that she appeared like her natural self. "She's acting," he decided. But this explanation he soon dismissed.

No, it was something deeper. She was actually unashamed, unafraid. That first display of feelings, the night of her arrival, had been only the scare of an hour. Within a few days she was back on her feet; and her cure for her trouble, if trouble she felt, was not less but more pleasure, as always. She went out nearly every evening now; and when she had spent what money she had, she sold a part of her jewelry to the little old Galician Jew in the shop around the corner. Yes, she was her natural self. And she was as before to her father. Her att.i.tude said plainly,

"It isn't fair to you, poor dear, to expect you to fully understand how right I am in this affair. And considering your point of view, you're acting very nicely."

Often as she talked to him a note of good-humored forgiveness crept into his daughter's voice. And looking at her grimly out of the corner of his eye, he saw that she looked down on him, far, far down from heights above.

"Yes," he thought, "this is modern." Then he grew angry all at once. "No,"

he added, "this is wrong! You can't fool me, young woman, you know it as well as I do myself! You're not going to carry this off with an air--not with your father! No, by George!"

And he would grow abrupt and stern. But days would pa.s.s and in spite of himself into their talks would creep a natural friendly tone. Again he found himself friends with her--friends as though nothing whatever had happened! Could it be that a woman who had so sinned could go right on?

Here was Laura, serenely unconscious of guilt, and smiling into her future, dreaming still of happiness, quite plainly sure of it, in fact! With a curious dismayed relief Roger would scowl at this daughter of his--a radiant enigma in his quiet sober house.

But Edith was not at all perplexed. When she learned from Deborah that there was soon to be a divorce, she came at once to her father. Her face was like a thundercloud.

"A nice example for my children!" she indignantly exclaimed.

"I'm sorry, my dear. But what can I do?"

"You can make her go back to her husband, can't you?"