VIIIOut of the Past
DISMISSED from the presence of the hard-bitted maker of destinies, David Vallory—not being a devotee of bridge—spent little enough of what was left of the evening in the manner in which he most wished to spend it. But at the end of things, when hope deferred was about to fold its wings and go to bed, Miss Virginia gave her place at the second whist table to the elderly broker’s juvenile wife, and David had the reward which comes to those who only stand and wait.
“Well, have you been dishonorably discharged?” she asked, after they had passed out of earshot of the card players.
“I imagine you know a lot more than I can tell you about it,” he bubbled happily. “I’m to take an early train to-morrow morning and vanish, disappear, fade into the western horizon.”
“Are you sorry—or glad?”
“Both. I’ve had a promotion so whaling big that it makes my head swim. But the place of it is a mighty long jump from Chicago.”
“You didn’t make any use of the nearness of Chicago while you had it at Coulee du Sac,” she cavilled. Then: “Are you starting west without going to see your father and sister?”
“I was with them Christmas, as I told you. And I have a plan which has been simmering while I was waiting for you to get tired of the whist-game. If the living accommodations in the Timanyoni country are at all possible, I shall send for Dad and Lucille a little later in the season.”
“The accommodations are very good. There is a small summer-resort hotel with cottages on the ridge opposite Powder Can.”
“You have been there?” David asked.
“Once; for a few weeks last summer, or rather early in the autumn, when the work was just starting. But won’t that be a rather violent change for your father and sister?—from sleepy old Middleboro to the heart of the Rockies?”
“Possibly. But there are reasons for believing that it will be beneficial all around. Dad isn’t entirely well. His heart was never in the banking business to any great extent, but just the same, the breaking up of all the old routine is hard for him. A complete change will do him no end of good.”
“You said ‘reasons’, and that is only one.”
“There is another. How much do you remember about my sister, Lucille?”
“Only that she is blind, and perfectly angelic, and the most delicately beautiful child that ever breathed.”
“She is all those things yet—only more so. Do you remember Bert Oswald?”
“Oh, yes; quite well. He is a lawyer now, isn’t he?”
“Even so. Worse than that, he is in love with Lucille, and—er—I’m very much afraid she is with him—entirely without realizing it, you know. It’s a pitiful misfortune for both of them. Of course, Lucille can never marry.”
“Why do you say ‘of course’?”
“With her affliction? She doesn’t dream of such a thing! Herbert has been very decent about it. I put him on his guard last summer before I left Middleboro, and he hasn’t spoken—yet. But a day may come when he will speak, and then, as I have told him, there will be trouble and a lot of needless wretchedness. That’s why I want to get Dad and sister away from Middleboro. If they are not where Bert can drop in every few minutes, it will be different.”
For a time the daughter of profitable contractsdid not comment on the plan, but when she did there was a touch of her father’s shrewd directness in her manner.
“You are the most frightfully cold-blooded person I’ve ever met,” she told him. “If you had ever been in love yourself you wouldn’t talk so calmly about separating these two. What if Lucille is blind? There have been blind wives, and blind husbands, for that matter, since the beginning of time. You’re hard-hearted.”
“No,” said David; “I am only trying to be the right kind of a brother—as I have tried to be ever since that black day years ago when old Doctor Brown told us that the little sister would never see again. And your argument falls down at the other end, too. You say, if I had ever been in love myself.... That has already happened to me, Virginia.”
Her laugh was deliciously care free. “And you have never told me!” she mocked. “Does she live in Middleboro?—or maybe it’s Florida. Or have you broken all the traditions by keeping faith with a college widow?”
“No, she doesn’t live in Middleboro or in Florida, and I am very certain she has never been a college widow. It’s only a pipe-dream for me as yet, but some day——”
“Some day she will grow tired of waiting and marry somebody else,” was the brisk retort. “Is she pretty?”
“No; that isn’t the word at all.”
“Beautiful, then?”
“So beautiful that I can’t be with her without going fairly dotty.”
Again she laughed derisively.
“You seem to have all the symptoms, and really I didn’t believe it of you, David. You have always seemed so solid and sensible.”
“I am both,” he boasted gravely. Then in a quick shift to safer ground: “You told me once that you enjoyed going out on the work with your father—is there any chance that you may come to the Timanyoni this summer?”
“Maybe. I liked it when I was out there last year—for some things.”
“And for some other things you didn’t? What were they?”
“I’d rather not talk about them. But there was one thing.... Do you know anything about Powder Can?”
“Less than nothing beyond what your father has just told me. He says it’s a mining-camp.”
“It is worse than the usual mining-camp, or it was when I saw it. It is the only place where theworkmen can go to spend their pay, and you know what that would mean.”
“I can visualize it pretty well; whiskey, dance-halls and gambling dens, and all that.”
“Yes. We saw little of it at the hotel; the Inn is quite a distance from the town and on the other side of the river. But once I went there with—with a man. I didn’t know where he was taking me—or us; there was a party of us from the hotel, you know; slummers, you’d call us.”
“I don’t know the man, but he ought to have been murdered,” said David.
“Something like that, yes,” she said. “But that wasn’t what I meant to speak about particularly. One of the places where he tried to take us—only we wouldn’t go in—was a dance-hall. There was a girl at the piano; I could see her from where I was standing on the sidewalk. She was beautiful, David, and it made my heart ache to see her in such a place.”
“You should never have seen her,” said David hotly. “I’ve been trying to imagine the kind of man who would take you to such a place as that!”
“He isn’t worth imagining,” she asserted quietly. “But I was speaking of the girl. She was playing for the dancers, you know, and just in the little minute that we were standing there, abig quarryman broke out of the circle and—and put his arm around her neck. It was horrible. She fought like a tiger, but the man was too strong for her. He struck her ... with his fist.”
David shook his head. “Why are you making yourself remember all this? It’s just painful, and it can’t do any good. It was a shame that you had to see it.”
“That is foolish,” she reproved gravely. “We are not living in the Victorian age, David, and the shame wasn’t in my seeing it. The dancing stopped, of course, and the men in our party, or some of them, rushed in and interfered. The girl was carried out; the brute’s blow had knocked her senseless. She was taken home and we did what we could for her. The next day I went to see her.”
“That was like you, Virginia, only——”
“Only what?”
“I won’t say that you ought not to have done it; you know best about that; but——”
“I had to go, David. There was a—a sort of obligation, you know. She was one of our Middleboro girls. I didn’t know her, but I remembered seeing her as a little thing. Perhaps you knew her; her name is Judith Fallon.”
If a bomb had been suddenly exploded underDavid Vallory he could scarcely have been more completely unnerved and shaken. They were sitting in a window alcove a little apart from the bridge players, and the looped-back curtains dimmed the lights in some measure—for which he was thankful. But Virginia Grillage seemed not to have noticed his gasping start at the mention of Judith’s name, and she went on soberly.
“As I say, I had to go, and I found that things were not quite as bad as they seemed—though they were bad enough. The girl had lately lost her mother, and she was keeping house in a little three-room shack for her father, a mechanic in the Murtrie Mine. I didn’t see him, of course, but from what Judith said I gathered that he had taken to drinking after the mother’s death. You’d say he must have gotten pretty low, to let his daughter earn money by playing the piano in a dance-hall.”
David recalled the John Fallon he had known; a rough-cast, unlettered man, but a skilled mechanic and thrifty.
“I knew him well,” he said; adding: “There was some trouble—family trouble, I think—before the Fallons moved away from Middleboro. I heard something about it when I was home for Christmas.”
“It’s the conditions in Powder Can,” she averred; “and for those the new work on the railroad is responsible—an army of workmen with money to throw away. Judith, and probably her father, are neither better nor worse than other people with their point of view. It isn’t fair to such people to permit the conditions.”
“I quite agree with you,” he rejoined hastily. “I don’t know how much I shall be able to do, as chief of construction, but from what you have been telling me it is evident that this plague spot right at our doors ought to be cleaned up with a strong hand.”
“Does that mean that you are going to reform things out there, David?”
“Whatever needs reforming, yes; if I can.”
“I wish you might say that and mean it, knowing all that it implies,” she returned, half musingly.
“What does it imply?”
The card players were rising, and there was a sputtering rapid-fire of motors in the driveway.
“That,” she said slowly, “is something you must find out for yourself, if you can—and will. Now I must go. People will want to be telling me what an exquisite time they’ve had. You say you are leaving early in the morning? Then I will saygood-night and good-by. The hall man will show you your room. Give my love to your father and sister when you write, and don’t, for pity’s sake, drag them away out yonder to the ragged edge of nowhere!”