VGloriana
DAVID VALLORY had not been strictly truthful in pleading the journey preparations as an excuse for leaving Oswald at the dinner-table. It still wanted three hours of train time; and, as a matter of fact, his trunk, packed in Florida for the hurried flight northward, had not since been unpacked. But on no account would he have given Oswald the real reason for his early defection.
That reason began to define itself when, at the corner beyond the St. Nicholas, he turned to the left and walked rapidly in a direction precisely opposite to that in which the home suburb lay. Down to the railroad yards and across the tracks he fared, turning presently from the main street into another which led to a region called “Judsontown,” taking its name from the Judson Foundries and housing the major portion of Judson’s workmen.
At the gate of a cottage a trifle larger andmore commodious than its neighbors on either hand, David turned in and walked up the slag-paved path to the porch. There was a light turned low in one room of the cottage, but no other signs of life. But at his approach there was a rustle of modish skirts on the porch and a vision appeared; the vision taking the form of a strikingly handsome young woman, round limbed, scarlet-lipped, with midnight eyes and hair. The light from the near-by street lamp framed her in the porch opening for David as he swung up the path, and it was a picture to stir the blood in the veins of an anchorite.
“Gloriana!” he said, taking both of her hands, and giving her the name she had given herself as soon as she was old enough to hate the one her parents had given her.
“Davie! you’ve come at last, have you?” she breathed. “’Tis long ago I’d given you up. A week you’ve been back, and but for the papers I’d never have known it!”
“Don’t scold me, Glo,” he begged. “If you could only know how busy I’ve been. This is the first spare minute I’ve had in the week, honestly. Where are your father and mother?”
“They’ve gone up-town to the movie. You’ll be coming in?”
“Just for a little while.”
She led the way into the cottage, into the room of the dimmed light. It was exactly as David remembered it from a time when he had often been made at home in it; the big-figured red carpet, the marble-topped center table with the family Bible, the family photograph album, and a crocheted mat in the middle for the foot of an ornate parlor lamp with a crimson shade. Also, there were the same stiff-backed chairs and the same sofa upholstered in green rep. In one corner was the young woman’s piano. John Fallon was a foreman in the Judson Foundries and could well afford to buy his daughter a piano, if he chose. David sat down on one of the uncomfortable chairs.
“Turn up the light and let me see you, Glo,” he said, and when she did it: “Jove! but you picked the right name for yourself years ago when we were kiddies! The movie stars have nothing on you—not one of them.”
“Flatterer!” she laughed, and if there were a faint suggestion of the “h” after the “t’s” he did not mind. Her Irish accent had always seemed to harmonize perfectly with her rich, “black-Irish” beauty. Then: “The two years have been making you into a man, Davie. ’Twas in yourletters when I’d be reading them. Don’t be propping yourself on that chair; come over here and be yourself.”
He went to sit beside her on the green sofa and was straightway conscious that he had stepped within a strange aura. Pointedly and of set purpose he began to talk of commonplace things; Middleboro things that had happened during his absence. But the subtle distraction persisted, coming like a veil between the thought and the words until he scarcely knew at times what he was saying. It was a new experience. What he had told Oswald was the simple truth; in the old days he and Judith Fallon had been more like two boys together than a boy and girl, and the frank comradeship had carried over from childhood to manhood and womanhood; or it had up to now. But now he could see and feel nothing but her superb physical beauty. Once, as a college Freshman, he had permitted himself to be ridiculed into gulping down a drink of whiskey. “It was like this,” he found himself saying aloud, and the girl beside him laughed.
“What’s come over you, Davie?” she said. “Half the time you’re talking nonsense—just nonsense. But for knowing how you hate it, I might think you’d been drinking!”
“I have,” he returned soberly, suddenly realizing. Then: “Glo, you ought to pick out some decent young fellow and get married.”
She laughed at this, but the black eyes were hard.
“Why would I want to be getting married?” she demanded.
“Don’t you?”
“I thought I did—two years ago.”
“You were too young then,” he decided gravely. “But now it is time. You—you’re a living threat, as you are. Don’t you know it?”
“And what would I be threatening, then?”
“The peace of mind of every man who comes near you. You may not know it, Glo, but you are the kind of woman for whom men, ever since the world began, have been throwing everything worth while into the discard; truth, honor, loyalty—anything they had to fling away.”
“Would you just be finding that out, Davie?”
“You—you’re different in some way, Glo; or else I am. What have you been doing to yourself in these two years?”
“What should I be doing? Is a girl to be waiting always for something that’s never going to happen?”
A cold horror seized him, but he tried to shakeit off; tried to recall the Gloriana he had grown up with; a frank, outspoken daughter of the people, strong to attract, but also strong to resist. The “town-side” boys had jeered him for companying with John Fallon’s daughter, a “factory-side” girl, but then, as now, he was wont to go his own way when he was convinced that the way was straight and honest. The way had been straight, he told himself, because the girl was straight. But now——
“Glo, I meant what I said a few minutes ago; you ought to get married. Some wise person has said that all men and women can be divided into two classes: those who need not marry unless they choose to, and those who must. You are one of those who must. It’s your harbor of safety.”
Her low laugh was like an invitation to a sensuous dance.
“Since when have you turned preacher, Davie?” she mocked. “What’s got into you to-night? Put your head down here and let me comb it, the way I used to when you wore knee stockings.”
“No,” he refused.
She leaned toward him and slipped a round arm across his shoulders. He reached up and disengaged it gently.
“No,” he said again. “You shouldn’t dothings like that, Glo. You used to do them once, and it didn’t matter. But now you are not the same.”
This time her laugh had an edge to it.
“The fishes have nothing on you for the cold blood, Davie. But you’re like all the men. After you’ve made what you like out of a girl, you slap her in the face.”
Vaguely he understood that she was accusing him of something.
“I’m wishing for nothing but your happiness, Glo; can’t you understand that? I’ve never wished for anything else.”
She was silent for a moment. Then she said:
“’Tis to a convent I should have gone, Davie, instead of to the public—to run with boys, and with you. ’Twas you taught me things a girl shouldn’t know.”
“I?” said David, still more horror-stricken.
“’Tis so. I was a woman grown whilst you were yet but a boy. You didn’t know. If your lady mother had lived she might have told you more about girls and women. I was loving you, Davie, long before ever you put a razor to your face.”
For the first time in his life David the man found it easeful and fitting to curse David theboy. “Warm-hearted,” he had called Judith in those other days, and thought no more of it. But now ... he had been as one who tosses a careless match aside and passes on, only to turn and find a forest ablaze.
“Tell me what you care to, Glo,” he said gravely.
“’Tis an old story, I’m thinking. Whilst I could be writing to you and knowing you’d be coming back from the college the bad heart of me kept still. But when you went to that place in Florida the bad heart was empty—empty for a man. The man came, Davie; I’m thinking he always comes.”
David had to moisten his lips before he could say: “Who was it, Glo?”
“’Twas young Tommy Judson.”
“God!” said David. The exclamation was half prayer and half execration. He knew Judson; all Middleboro knew him as the country town’s most faithful imitation of gilded youth and its degeneracy. After a time he said: “Somebody ought to kill him, Glo; I ought to kill him.”
“’Tis little good that would do now. He’s gone away, and my father would be getting a raise in his pay, little knowing why he got it.”
Though the windows were open to the summernight breeze David felt as if he were suffocating. Springing to his feet he began to pace the narrow limits of the little sitting-room.
“Glo,” he said chokingly, “this is the most awful thing I’ve ever had to face. I came here to-night just as I used to come years ago. I meant to tell you that I had found the girl that I hoped some day to marry. And now you tell me that I led you up to the edge and left you where the next man who came along could push you over.”
“No, Davie, dear; I’m not blaming you,” came from the green-covered sofa.
“But I am blaming myself.” He stopped abruptly before her. “Let me see your face, Glory: have you been trying to tell me that I ought to marry you?”
She would not look up. “And you with another girl in your heart? I’m not that wicked, Davie.”
“Then at least you must let me talk to you as we used to talk in the other days; straight from the shoulder. I was wiser than I knew, a little while ago, Glory, when I said that your safety was in marriage. Can’t you forget and start afresh? There are plenty of young fellows here in your part of town who would never ask you to turn back a single leaf of your life book forthem; can’t you marry one of them and make him a good wife, Glory?”
She shook her head. “I can not,” she said shortly.
He drew out his watch and held its dial to the lamp light. It was time to be gone.
“I must go; I am leaving town to-night, and the kindest thing I can hope for you is that you’ll never see my face again. It doesn’t help matters any, but if you have suffered, I shall suffer, too. You have put a mark on me that I shall carry to my grave.”
She got up without a word and walked with him to the door and down the slag-paved path to the gate. But at the moment of parting, when he was again seeking vainly for some word of heartening, she flung her arms around his neck and kissed him twice, thrice.
“That’swhy I can’t marry another man!” she panted; and before he could reply she had darted up the path and into the cottage and had slammed the door.
It was an older and soberer David who tramped slowly back through the factory district and across the railroad tracks to the better lighted main street of the town. Conscience is definable only in terms, not of the common, but of the individualhuman factor. For the David Vallorys there are no compromises. He either was, or was not, Judith Fallon’s keeper. Had he been responsible for her development up to a certain point, the danger point, and had then been blind enough or thoughtless enough to cast her adrift? One responsibility he could not shirk: from a time reaching deeply into their childish years his influence over her had been stronger than that of any one else, her parents not excepted. How was he to know that her yielding to him had been chiefly sexual, and that unconsciously he had walked in her path instead of leading her to walk in his? But even so, was he wholly blameless?
These soul-searching questions kept even step with him on the way to the hill suburb, and they made the home leave-taking, a little later, thoughtfully abstracted. It was his promise to his sister to come home for Christmas, if he could leave his work, that reminded him of another responsibility; and all the way down to the railroad station he was hoping that Herbert Oswald would not forget his agreement to be at the train.
Oswald had not forgotten. He was waiting at the station entrance, and together they walked out upon the platform. The Chicago express was bulletined fifteen minutes late, and David wasthankful for the brief extension of time. There was a thing to be said to Oswald, and, finding no way in which to lead up to it, he plunged bluntly.
“Bert, there is something that I want to say—that I’ve got to say—before I leave. You’ve been a mighty good friend to us in this shake-up, and we shall always owe you a lot more than we can pay. But I’m obliged to be a sort of dog in the manger, right here at the last. I have a sister, and she is blind.”
“Well?” said Oswald, and his voice was a bit thick.
“You know what I ought to say; what I want to say, and can’t. Lucille isn’t like other girls; she can’t be. And yet she is just as human as other girls. You mustn’t go to the house so often, Bert. If you do, there’ll be an explosion some day, and you’ll never get over being sorry.”
“I don’t know exactly what you mean,” was the low-spoken reply.
“Then I shall have to tell you in so many words, brutal as it may sound. With her affliction, Lucille can’t marry, and she—oh, dammit all—you know what I mean!”
“Do I?” queried the young lawyer, in the same thick voice. “Perhaps I do, and perhaps I don’t. You might make it a little plainer, if you care to.”
The belated train had evidently made up some of its lost time; it was whistling for Middleboro and the roar of its coming was already filling the air of the calm summer night with thunderous murmurings.
“I will make it plainer. The little sister has taken you on as a friend. But at the same time you are the only man outside of the family who has ever taken the trouble to make her life more bearable. Let it stop at that, Bert; for God’s sake, let it stop at that if you don’t want to break her heart!”
The train was in; the conductor was calling “All aboard!” and the Pullman porter had opened his vestibule. Oswald crossed the platform with David Vallory in sober silence, but at the hand-gripping instant he found his tongue.
“You may go to your job and rest easy, David. I’m the last man on God’s green earth who will ever do anything to break your sister’s heart. Good-by—and let me hear from you.”