CHAPTER II
Backin the kitchen she had left silence reigned, and all the pans and kettles and bowls which had been used in preparing the hurried evening meal seemed to fill the place with desolation. It was not a room that Nannette cared to contemplate as she came out to get the coffee-pot for Eugene’s second cup which he insisted be kept hot. She frowned at the jelly roll all powdered with sugar and lying neatly on a small platter awaiting dessert time. It was incredible that Joyce had managed to make it in so short a time with all the rest she had to do, but she needn’t think she could make up for negligence and disobedience by her smartness.
“Gene, I think you better go down to the garage and talk to her,” said Nannette coming back with coffee, “The kitchen’s in an awful mess and she ought to get at it at once. I certainly don’t feel like doing her work for her when I’ve been in the city all day, and then this shock about Junior on top of it all.”
“Let her good and alone,” said Gene sourly, “She’s nothing to kick about. If I go out there and pet her up she’ll expect it every time. That’s the way mother spoiled her, let her do every thing she took a notion to, and she has to learn at the start that things are different. What made her mad anyhow? She’s never had a habit of flying up. I didn’t think she had the nerve to walk off like that, she’s always been so meek and self-righteous.”
“Well, I suppose she didn’t like it because I wore thatprecious fox scarf of hers to the city. She’s terribly afraid her things will get hurt, and she pretends to think a lot of it because mother gave it to her last Christmas.”
“Did you wear her fur?”
“Why, certainly. Why shouldn’t I? It’s no kind of a thing for a young girl like her to have, especially in her position. She ought to be glad she has something I can use that will make up for what we do for her.”
“Better let her things alone, Nan. It might make trouble for us if she gets up the nerve to fight. You can’t tell how mother left things you know, till Judge Peterson gets well and we hear the will read.”
“What do you mean? Didn’t your mother leave everything to you, I should like to know?”
“Well, I can’t be sure about it yet. I suppose she did, but it’s just as well to know where we stand exactly before we make any offensive moves. You know mother said something that last night about Joyce always having a right to stay here, that it was her home. I didn’t think much of it at the time of course, and told her we would consider it our duty to look out for Joyce till she got married of course, but I’ve been thinking since, you can’t just tell, mother might have been trying to prepare me for some surprise the will is going to spring on us. You know mother had an overdeveloped conscience, and there was something about a trifling sum of money that Joyce’s father left that mother put into this house to make a small payment I think. I can’t just remember what it was but that would be just enough to make mother think she ought to give everything she owned to Joyce. I sha’n’t be surprised at almost anything after the wayshe made a fool of that girl. But anyhow, you let her alone till she gets good and ready to come in. She won’t dare stay out all night.”
“She might go to the neighbors and make a lot of talk about us,” suggested Nan, “She knows she’d have us in a hole if she did that.”
“She wouldn’t go to the neighbors, not if I know her at all. She wouldn’t think it was right. She has that kind of a conscience too. It’s lucky for us.”
“Well, suppose she doesn’t come in and wash the dishes tonight?”
“Let ’em go then till tomorrow. You’ve got dishes enough for breakfast haven’t you? Well, just leave everything where it is. Don’t even clear off the table. Just let her see that she’ll have it all to do when she gets over her tantrums, and you won’t find her cutting up again very soon.”
“I suppose she’ll have to come back tonight,” speculated Nan. “She has another examination tomorrow morning I think, and it would take an earthquake or something like that to keep her away from that.”
“Well, we’ll order an earthquake then. I don’t mean to have her finish that examination. If she happens to pass—and she likely would for those Radways have brains they say, that’s the trouble with them—she’ll make us all kinds of trouble wanting to teach instead of doing the work for you, and then we’d be up against it right away. It costs like the dickens to get a servant these days and there’s no sense in having an outsider around stealing your food and wearing your clothes. Don’t you worry about Joyce. Let her alone till she comes in. Lock thekitchen door so she’ll have to knock. Then I’ll let her in and give her such a dressing down as she’ll remember for a few years. Come on. Let’s turn out this diningroom light and go into the living room. Then she’ll know we’re not going to wash those dishes, and she’ll come in all the sooner.”
Nannette slapped Dorothea for breaking off another piece from the jelly roll, and turned out the light quickly. It occurred to her that there would be nobody to make another jelly roll when this one was gone unless Joyce came speedily back. She hated cooking.
But although she intentionally neglected to lock the kitchen door, hoping the girl would slip in quietly when they were gone from the diningroom and get the work done, Joyce did not return. Dorothea and Junior were allowed to sit up far beyond their usual bedtime, and after they were at last quiet upstairs, Eugene and Nannette continued to sit and read, loth to leave until their young victim should return repentant and they could tell her just what they thought of her for her base ingratitude. When you know you have done wrong yourself there is nothing so soothing as to be able to scold some one else.
When Nannette finally went upstairs to bed she took the borrowed fox fur and flung it across Joyce’s bed, with its tail dragging on the floor.
“I’m sure I don’t know why we can’t have that will read without waiting for that old mummy to get well,” she said discontentedly. “It’s awfully awkward waiting this way and not knowing what is ours. Why can’t some one else read it if Judge Peterson isn’t able to?”
“Why, no one knows just where it is. His valuablepapers are all locked in his safe, and the doctor won’t let him be asked a thing about business till he gets able to be around. He says it might throw him all back to have to think about anything now. Of course it’s all nonsense, but I don’t see what we can do.”
“Suppose he should die?”
“Why, then of course, they would open his safe and examine all his papers, but his wife won’t hear to anything being touched till he gets out of danger, so we just have to wait.”
“Well, I’m not going to worry about it,” said Nannette with a toss of her head. “If the will isn’t right we’ll just break it, that’s all. I’m not going to let that girl get in the way of my happiness. There’s more than one way of going about things, and, as you say, she has that kind of a conscience. If that’s her weak point we’ll work her through that. If she thinks her beloved Aunt Mary is going to be proved in court as not of sound mind, she’ll give up the hair on her head. I know her. Smug-faced little fanatic! How on earth did she ever get wished on your mother for life anyway? You’ve never told me.”
“Oh, her mother was mother’s youngest sister, and idol. Mother was perfectly insane about her. Then she married this Radway, and everybody said it was a great match, brilliant young doctor and all that. But the brilliant young doctor showed he hadn’t a grain of sense in his head. He discovered some new germ or other and then he went to work experimenting on it, and two or three times was saved from death just by the skin of his teeth. Finally he let them inoculate him with the thing, just to observe its workings. He knew he was runninga great risk when he did it, and yet he was ass enough to go ahead. When he died they sold the house and a good deal of the furnishings. Mother had some of the things up in the attic a long time. I don’t know what became of them. Sold I suppose, perhaps to get that fox fur. Mother was just daffy on that girl. She always wanted a daughter you know. And after Aunt Helen died,—she didn’t live many months after her husband, just faded away you know—why mother did everything for Joyce.”
“Well, I think she did more than she had any right to do for just a niece,” said Nannette scornfully. “It’s time you had your innings. I think your mother should have thought of her own son and her grandchildren, and not lavished fox furs on a mere relation. She just spoiled Joyce. She thinks she has to live in luxury, and it’s going to be very hard to break her in to working for her living.”
The clock was striking twelve before Nannette began to undress, and now and then she would cast an anxious eye out of the window and wonder how long the erring girl’s nerve would hold out, or whether she had really dared go to some neighbor’s and stay all night. If she had what could they do?
Finally Gene got up from his reading chair and went downstairs to see if all the doors were locked, he said; but in reality he went softly out the kitchen door and walked down to the garage with slow, careful tread, stopping to listen, every minute or two. But no sound reached his ear save the dreamy notes of a tree toad. The little gray clouds drifting through the sky were hiding the moon and making the back yard quite dark. Somehow a vision of his mother’s face came to him, that last day when she had called him to the bed side and reminded him that sheleft Joyce as a sacred trust to his care. She told him that of course he would understand the home was always hers and something like reproach came and stood before his self-centred, satisfied soul and gave him strange uneasiness.
He stepped quietly into the garage and looked around in the darkness. There was no car as yet, but he meant to purchase one the minute the estate was settled up. He felt sure there would be plenty of money to do a number of the things to the house that he had already planned. It was not really a garage, though he had called it that ever since he came home to live with his mother, it was only the old barn with a new door.
But there was no sign of any Joyce inside the old barn, though he searched every corner and even opened the door of what used to be the harness closet.
He closed the door and went outside, puzzled, a trifle anxious, not for the safety of the girl whom he had driven from the only home she had by his unsympathetic words, but for the possibility of what she might have said to some neighbor with whom she might have taken refuge for the night. And yet he could not bring himself to believe, that Joyce would be so disloyal to his mother’s family as to let others know of a rupture between them.
He went outside and walked around, but there was no sign of any one, and the dew glistened evenly on the new grass in the sudden light as the moon swept out from behind a cloud and poured down a moment’s radiance. There were no marks of footprints on the tender grass anywhere near the building.
Standing in the shadow of the big maple half way to the house he called: “Joyce!” once, sharply, curtly, in a tone that startled himself and shocked the tree toads intosudden brief silence, but the echo of the meadow came in sweet drifts of violet breath as his only answer. His voice sounded gruff even to himself and he realized that she would not come to a call like that. If she had strength of purpose enough to go at his harsh words she would not come at such a call. He tried again:
“Joyce!” and Joyce would have been astonished could she have heard his voice. He had never spoken to her with as much kindliness of tone in all his life, not even when he wanted to borrow money of her. Yes, he had really descended to asking her who had but a small allowance from the bounty of his mother, to loan it to him. And she had always been ready to lend graciously if it was not already promised for some necessity. He would soon have kept her in bankruptcy had not his mother discovered it and forbidden Joyce to lend any more, telling her son to come to her in any need.
He stood there sometime calling into the darkness trying various tones and wondering at himself, growing more indignant with the girl for not answering, calling her stubborn, and finally growing alarmed, although he would not own it really to himself.
But at last he gave it up and went in, putting it aside carelessly as if it were but a trifle after all. The girl was stubborn but she would have to come back pretty soon, and the lesson would only do her good. As for the neighbors, they must prepare a story that would offset anything she might tell them. And what did the neighbors matter anyway? This wasn’t the only place in the world. They could sell the house and move where Joyce had no friends, then there would be no trouble. Joyce would have tostick to them, for she had no way of earning money anywhere else. The idea of teaching school was fool nonsense. He wouldn’t think of allowing it. She would always be taking on airs even if she paid board, and then they would get no work out of her, and she would not be pleasant to have around.
With this reflection he fell asleep, convinced that Joyce would be found safe and sound and sane on the doorstep in the morning.
About this time the new young superintendent of the high school who was taking the place of the regular superintendent while he was abroad for six months studying, settled down in his one comfortable chair in his boarding house room with a bundle of examination papers to look over. This was not his work, but the two teachers who would ordinarily have done it were both temporarily disabled, one down with the grip and the other away at a funeral, and since the averages must be ready before commencement he had volunteered to mark these papers.
It was late and he was tired, for there had been a special meeting of the school board to deal with a matter connected with the new addition to the school building, and also to arrange to supply the place of a teacher who had suddenly decided to get married instead of continuing to teach. There had been much discussion about both matters and he had been greatly annoyed at the prospect of one young woman who had been suggested to fill the vacancy. She was of the so-called flapper variety and seemed to him to have no idea of serious work. She had been in his classes for the last six weeks, and he became more disgusted with her every time he saw her. The idea of her asa colleague was not pleasant. He settled to his papers with a frown that portended no good to the poor victims whose fate he was settling by the marks of his blue pencil.
He marched through the papers, paragraph after paragraph, question after question, marking them ruthlessly. Misspelled words, how they got on his nerves! He drew sharp blue lines like little swords through them, and wrote caustic foot-notes on the corners of the pages. The young aspirants for graduation who received them in the morning would quiver when they read them and gather in groups to cast anathemas at him.
But suddenly he came to a paper written in a clear, firm hand as if the owner knew what she was talking about and thought it really worth writing down. The first sentence caught his interest because of the original way in which the statement was made. Here was a young philosopher who had really thought about life, and was taking the examination as something of interest in itself, rather than a terrible ordeal that must be gone through with for future advantage. As he read a vision of a clear smooth brow, calm eyes lifted now and then to the blackboard, gradually came back to his memory. He was sure this was the quiet young woman with the beautiful, sincere, unselfish face that he had noticed as he passed through the study hall that morning. There had been half a dozen strangers in from neighboring towns for examination. Only this one had attracted him. He had paused in the doorway watching her a moment while he waited for a book which the attending teacher was finding for him, and had marked the quiet grace of her demeanor, the earnest expression of her face, the pure regular features, thesoft outline of the brown waves of hair, the sweet, old-fashionedness of her, and wondered who she was. He had not been long in the town and did not know all the village maidens, yet it seemed as if she must be from another place, for certainly he could not have been in the same town with this girl and not have marked her sooner somewhere in either church or shop or street? The busy day had surged in and he had forgotten the face and thought no more of the girl. But now it all came back with conviction as he read on. He turned to the end of the paper for the name “Joyce Radway.” Somehow it seemed to fit her, and he read on with new interest, noting how she gave interest to the hackneyed themes that had become monotonous through reading over and over the crude, young answers to the same questions. How was it that this young girl was able to give a turn to her sentences that seemed to make any subject a thrilling, throbbing, vital thing? And she did not skim over the answers with the least possible information. She wrote as if she liked to tell what she knew, as if her soul wereen rapportwith her work, and as if she were writing it for the mere joy of imparting the fact and its thrill to another.
“Now, there’s a girl that would make a teacher all right,” he said aloud to himself as he finished the paper writing a clear blue “Excellent” upon it with his finest flourish, “I wonder who she is? If she’s the one I saw I’ll vote for her. I must inquire the first thing in the morning. Joyce Radway. What a good name. It fits. She’s the assistant I’d like if I have my way, unless I’m very much mistaken in a human face.”