From the Housetops Part 36

"I am the person you have always spoken of as Miss Carnahan," said Lutie calmly. Throughout the brief period in which she had been legally the wife of George Tresslyn, Lutie was never anything but Miss Carnahan to her mother-in-law. Mrs. Tresslyn very carefully forbore giving her daughter- in-law a respectable name. "I was afraid you might have forgotten me."

"You will forgive me if I confess that I have tried very hard to forget you, Miss Carnahan," said the older woman.

"It isn't my fault that you haven't been able to do so," said Lutie.

"Please! you are not to go in." Mrs. Tresslyn's hand was turning the door- k.n.o.b.

"I fear you are forgetting who I am," said she coldly.

"Oh, I know you're his mother, and all that," said Lutie, breathlessly. "I do not question your right to be with your son. That isn't the point. The nurse has ordered your daughter and me out of the room for awhile. It is the first wink of sleep he has had in heaven knows how long. So you cannot go in and disturb him, Mrs. Tresslyn."

Mrs. Tresslyn's hand fell away from the k.n.o.b. For a moment she regarded the tense, agitated girl in silence.

"Has it occurred to you to feel-if you can feel at all-that you may not be wanted here, Miss Carnahan?" she said, deliberately cruel. She towered above her adversary.

"Will you be kind enough to come away from the door?" said Lutie, wholly unimpressed. "It isn't very thick, and the sound of voices may penetrate-"

"Upon my soul!" exclaimed Mrs. Tresslyn, staring. "Do you presume to-"

"Not quite so loud, if you please. Come over here if you want to talk to me, Mrs. Tresslyn. Nurse's orders, not mine. I don't in the least mind what you say to me, or what you call me, or anything, but I do entreat you to think of George."

Greatly to her own surprise, Mrs. Tresslyn moved away from the door, and, blaming herself inwardly for the physical treachery that impelled her to do so, sat down abruptly in a chair on the opposite side of the room, quite as far removed from the door as even Lutie could have desired.

Lutie did not sit down. She came over and stood before the woman who had once driven her out. Her face was white and her eyes were heavy from loss of sleep, but her voice was as clear and sharp as a bell.

"We may as well understand each other, Mrs. Tresslyn," she said quietly.

"Or, perhaps I'd better say that you may as well understand me. I still believe myself to be George's wife. A South Dakota divorce may be all right so far as the law is concerned, but it will not amount to _that_"-she snapped her fingers-"when George and I conclude to set it aside. I went out to that G.o.d-forsaken little town and stayed there for nearly a year, eating my heart out until I realised that it wasn't at all appetising. I lived up to my bargain, however. I made it my place of residence and I got my decree. I tore that hateful piece of paper up last night before I came here. You paid me thirty thousand dollars to give George up, and he allowed you to do it. Now I have just this to say, Mrs.

Tresslyn: if George gets well, and I pray to G.o.d that he may, I am going back to him, and I don't care whether we go through the form of marrying all over again or not. He is my husband. I am his wife. There never was an honest cause for divorce in our case. He wasn't as brave as I'd have liked him to be in those days, but neither was I. If I had been as brave as I am now, George wouldn't be lying in there a wreck and a failure. You may take it into your head to ask why I am here. Well, now you know. I'm here to take care of my husband."

Mrs. Tresslyn's steady, uncompromising gaze never left the face of the speaker. When Lutie paused after that final declaration, she waited a moment for her to resume.

"There is, of course," said she levelly, "the possibility that my son may not get well."

Lutie's eyes narrowed. "You mean that you'd rather see him die than-"

"Miss Carnahan, I am compelled to speak brutally to you. I paid you to give up my son. You took the money I proffered and the divorce I arranged for. You agreed to-"

"Just a moment, please. I took the money and-and _got out_ in order to give George a chance to marry some one else and be happy. That was what you wanted, and what _you_ promised me. You promised me that if I gave him up he would find some one else more worthy, that he would forget me and be happy, and that I would be forgotten inside of six months. Well, none of these things has happened. He hasn't found any one else, he still loves me, and he isn't happy. I am going back on my bargain, Mrs. Tresslyn, because you haven't carried out your part of it. If you think it was easy for me to give him up when I did, you are very much mistaken. But that wouldn't interest you, so I'll say no more about it. We'll come down to the present, if you don't mind, and see where we stand; George needs me now, but no more than he has needed me all along. I intend to stick to him like a leech from this time on, Mrs. Tresslyn. You had your chance to make _your_ kind of a man out of him, and I guess you'll admit that you failed.

Well, I'm going to begin where you were content to leave off. You treated me like a dog, and G.o.d knows you've treated George but little better, although perhaps you didn't know what you were doing to him. He is down and out. You didn't expect things to turn out as they have. You thought I'd be the one to go to the devil. Now I'll put it up to you squarely. I still have the thirty thousand you gave me. It is nicely invested. I have lived comfortably on the income. A few years ago I sold George to you for that amount. Well, I'll buy him back from you to-morrow."

"Buy my son from me?" gasped Mrs. Tresslyn.

"You made it a business proposition three years ago, so I'll do the same now. I want to be fair and square with you. I'm going to take him back in any event, but I shall be a great deal better satisfied if you will let me pay for him."

Mrs. Tresslyn had recovered herself by this time. She gave the younger woman a frosty smile.

"And I suppose you will expect to get him at a considerably reduced price," she said sarcastically, "in view of the fact that he is damaged goods."

"You shall have back every penny, Mrs. Tresslyn," said Lutie, with dignity.

"How ingenuous you are. Do you really believe that I will _sell_ my son to you?"

"I sold him to you," said the other, stubbornly.

Mrs. Tresslyn arose. "I think we would better bring this interview to an end, Miss Carnahan. I shall spare you the opinion I have formed of you in-"

"Just as you please, Mrs. Tresslyn," said Lutie calmly. "We'll consider the matter closed. George comes back to me at my own price. I-"

"My son shall never marry you!" burst out Mrs. Tresslyn, furiously.

Lutie smiled. "It's good to see you mad, Mrs. Tresslyn. It proves that you are like other people, after all. Give yourself a chance, and you'll find it just as easy to be glad as it is to be mad, now that you've let go of yourself a little bit."

"You are insufferable! Be good enough to stand aside. I am going in to my son. He-"

"If you are so vitally interested in him, how does it happen that you wait until four o'clock in the afternoon to come around to inquire about him?

I've been here on the job since last night-and so has your daughter. But you? Where have you been all this time, Mrs. Tresslyn?"

"G.o.d in heaven!" gasped Mrs. Tresslyn, otherwise speechless.

"If I had a son I'd be with him day and night at-"

"The telephone was out of order," began Mrs. Tresslyn before she could produce the power to check the impulse to justify herself in the eyes of this brazen tormentor.

"Indeed?" said Lutie politely.

"My son shall never marry you," repeated the other, helplessly.

"Well," began Lutie slowly, a bright spot in each cheek, "all I have to say is that he will be extremely unfair to your grandchildren, Mrs.

Tresslyn, if he doesn't."

CHAPTER XXI

A ground-floor window in an apartment building in Madison Avenue, north of Fifty-ninth street, displayed in calm black lettering the name "Dr. Braden L. Thorpe, M.D." On the panel of a door just inside the main entrance there was a bit of gold-leaf information to the effect that office hours were from 9 to 10 A.M. and from 2 to 4 P.M. There was a reception room and a consultation room in the suite. The one was quite as cheerless and uninviting as any other reception room of its kind, and the other possessed as many of the strange, terrifying and more or less misunderstood devices for the prolongation of uncertainty in the minds of the uneasy. During office-hours there was also a doctor there. Nothing was missing from this properly placarded and admirably equipped office,-nothing at all except the patients!

About the time that George Tresslyn fared forth into the world again, Thorpe hung out his s.h.i.+ngle and sat himself down under his own gates to wait for the unwary. But no one came. The lame, the halt and even the blind had visions that were not to be dissipated by anything so trivial as a neat little sign in an office window. The name of Braden Thorpe was on the lips of every one. It was mentioned, not with horror or disgust, but as one speaks of the exalted genius whose cure for tuberculosis has failed, or of the man who found the North Pole by advertising in the newspapers, or of the books of Henry James. He was a person to steer clear of, that was all.

Every newspaper in the country discussed him editorially, paragraphically, and as an article of news. For weeks after the death of Templeton Thorpe and the publication of his will, not a day pa.s.sed in which Braden Thorpe's outlandish a.s.sault upon civilisation failed to receive its country-wide attention in the press. And when editorial writers, medical sharps, legal experts and grateful reporters failed to avail themselves of the full measure of s.p.a.ce set apart for their gluttony, ubiquitous "Constant Reader" rushed into print under many aliases and enjoyed himself as never before.

In the face of all this uproar, brought about by the posthumous utterance of old Templeton Thorpe, Braden had the courage,-or the temerity, if that is a truer word,-to put his name in a window and invite further attention to himself.

The world, without going into the matter any deeper than it usually does, a.s.sumed that he who entered the office of Dr. Thorpe would never come out of it alive!

The fact that Thorpe advocated something that could not conceivably become a reality short of two centuries made no impression on the world and his family. Dr. Thorpe believed that it was best to put sufferers out of their misery, and that was all there was to be said about the matter so far as Mr. Citizen was concerned.

It would appear, therefore, that all of Templeton Thorpe's ideas, hopes and plans concerning the future of his grandson were to be shattered by his own lack of judgment and foresight. Without intending to do so he had deprived the young man of all that had been given him in the way of education, training and character. Young Thorpe might have lived down or surmounted the prejudice that his own revolutionary utterances created, but he could never overcome the stupendous obstacle that now lay in his path.