THE HONOR GIRL (20 page)

Her brothers stared at her, and Jack laughed at her, a loud, nervous laugh.

“Pray!” he said. “I’d like to know what good you think that would do? He needs a good club, I think, coming home and getting you into this state.”

“Pray!” sneered Eugene. “What good would that do? Elsie, you don’t understand. He’s been at it for years, and he’ll keep at it to the end. There’s no stopping him, and you might as well understand that now as later. You better pack up your things and go back to Aunt Esther’s. This is no place for you. We ought to have known better than to let you come.”

But Elsie was calm now. Somehow the mention of prayer had strengthened her. Somehow she remembered who had promised to walk beside His children in times of trouble, and a great peace descended upon her, and helped her to see things clearly.

“No, Eugene!” she said quietly. “You needn’t talk of my going away. He’s my father as well as yours, and I came here to stay. We’ll stick together, and keep the home; and we’ll work for him with all our might.”

“But it isn’t right to you, Elsie. You are a girl. You’ve had a chance to get out of this—this—this hell of a life, for that’s what it’s been, and you ought to stay out of it. It’s no place for a girl, just as Aunt Esther said. Why, you can’t have any friends coming here. You never know when he’s going to come home like this and turn everything upside down. You ought to go, Elsie, you really ought.”

Jack stood in the middle of the kitchen, looking miserably from one to the other of them.

“Do you want me to go, Gene?” asked Elsie, her voice trembling with appeal for her brother’s love.

“No! Of course I don’t want you to go, but I think you ought,” responded Eugene gruffly.

“Do
you
want me to go, Jack?”

“Not on your life!” responded Jack savagely.

“Then I’m
not going!
” she answered decidedly. “Whatever comes, I’m not going. Do you understand? Please don’t mention it to me again. I’m going to stay right here and help, at least until you want me to go. Now come; we’re going in to eat our supper.”

Martha had been going quietly back and forth carrying in the supper, and now she signified that everything was ready. Jack, big, hungry boy that he was, put his arm around Elsie’s waist, and she drew her arm within Eugene’s; and so the three went slowly, soberly to the table, and, sitting down, tried to be cheerful for one another’s sakes. But it was hard, for upstairs an angry, muttering voice kept shouting invectives, and there was pounding on the door; and the hearts of the three children were very sore.

“Come on out and take a walk, Elsie,” said Jack after supper when they had all settled down in the living-room and Eugene was at his books. The sounds of disturbance were still heard upstairs at intervals. “This gets on my nerves.”

“But we mustn’t leave Gene here alone, and he has to study,” said Elsie, longing to go, yet held by her duty.

Eugene looked up from his books with an appreciative smile. It was so new to him to have anyone consider him that it sent a thrill through him every time.

“I don’t mind, really, kid,” he said tenderly. “I’m used to it, you know; and, besides, this book is awfully interesting. I’ll just stay here and keep at it. I’ve got to write a review of it yet tonight, you know, or I’d go too.”

So they slipped away in the moonlight, brother and sister, and walked about the streets of Morningside for an hour or more, passing houses lit up where people sat happily around tables reading and talking; looking in wistfully and wondering whether these too had hidden sorrows that might break out at any time and spoil the beauty and the comfort of the home. Jack opened his heart to his sister, revealing many of his boyish hopes and fears, how he used to dread to go into the house at night, because always his mother’s coffin seemed to be there in the parlor when he first entered, and how Elsie’s coming had dispelled the dreadful vision of that white, sad face. He told her how he used to lie and cry himself to sleep nights when his father was drunk, and wish and pray that he might die before morning; and how it used to hurt him to know that everyone knew their shame. He let her know that he had felt that God was against them all for his father’s sin, and he had often felt how useless it was to try to do anything right because there was God hating him for something he couldn’t help.

He didn’t say all these things in just this way; he merely revealed them by his words, till all the cry and longing of his heart had been spoken out. Elsie forgot her own shame and sorrow in the pitiful picture of this lonely young life, and reached her hand into Jack’s overcoat pocket after his big hand, nestling in it comfortingly.

“But God does care, dear. I know He does. Haven’t things been a little better lately?” she asked wistfully.

He grasped the little hand strongly in his own.

“You mean since you came? You bet they have! It hasn’t been the same house. It’s like heaven. It’s something like living now. It’s been wonderful. I don’t see why you did it, such a mess as things were here, and you had everything fine at Aunt Esther’s.”

“I think God sent me,” she said thoughtfully. “I didn’t really want to come at all at first. I was interested in things in the city, and I had got weaned away from here. It was all wrong. I ought never to have gone away at all, I guess, or at least only for a little while till I got old enough to help make a home and know how to do things right. But I ought never to have been satisfied to stay there and live my life out without you. And yet I was. But, when I came out here that first day that I straightened things up a little, I felt something drawing me that I could not understand. And now I know that it must have been God telling me I was living where I did not belong, and I ought to get back to my place, and love it, and make it beautiful. It was because God loved you, Jack, that He made things different for us all.”

“It doesn’t look much as if He loved you, bringing you into this,” murmured the brother with drawn brows. “I thought for a while that maybe Father was going to be different, now that you had come; but it didn’t last; you oughtn’t to have to bear it.”

“Why not? Hard things make one grow strong. It isn’t a sign that God doesn’t love you just because He lets you get some hard knocks. You wouldn’t think a boy would be much account, would you, if he was brought up without hard knocks, just everything made easy for him?”

So they walked about the town and talked until both felt strengthened for the fight they saw before them.

It was all quiet at the house when they returned, and Eugene was just finishing his book-review. When it was done and the paper folded, Elsie shyly took a hand of each brother, and drew them over toward the couch.

Wonderingly they followed her, and then she paused beside the couch and looked up at them bravely.

“Will you kneel down with me?” she whispered wistfully.

Embarrassed, yet not liking to refuse, the two big fellows knelt one on each side of her, their arms protectingly thrown about her; and kneeling so, with the flicker of the firelight upon them and the silent tragedy in the room above them, Elsie breathed her first audible prayer. It was a stumbling, halting, childlike petition; but it came from a heart full of longing and sorrow. It was very brief, only two or three sentences; but, simple as it was, it must have reached the Throne. The two big fellows found tears upon their cheeks, and they bowed their heads the lower, and had to struggle to keep back their own strong feelings. After the “Amen” they continued to kneel in silence for a minute or two; and, when they rose, they each in turn bent over their sister and kissed her good-night; but they had no language but their tears to show her how they appreciated her presence and her fine, sweet personality.

S
everal times that evening and far into the night Cameron Stewart walked by the house in the stillness of the shadows, and kept watch with aching heart. He watched the lights go out one by one and quiet settle on the house; and again and yet again he walked by, that he might make sure that all was well. As he walked, he fought out something in his own heart, and tried to understand himself.

Was it just sympathy that made him feel so keenly for this lovely girl? She was almost a stranger to him; yet he felt so strangely drawn to her. Something recoiled within him at the thought of her belonging to the man who had reeled off the trolley crying out invectives to the world. It seemed a hard thing that a man had a right to shame his own child in this way. When he thought of the lovely face of that girl as it must have looked when she saw her father, his very soul boiled within him with rage; and yet there was with it mingled a kind of pity for the poor creature who had allowed himself to become a slave to a habit that crazed him and unmanned him. It was of no use to wonder where the poor fellow got the liquor, of course as long as respectable people insisted upon having it, there would always be a way for tempted men to get it. The pity of it was that a girl like Elsie Hathaway had to be hurt by it. Such a bud of a girl, scarcely more than a child, and such a fine, sweet, brilliant girl too! If only he could do something to lift this sorrow from her life!

The next afternoon as he drove his car down one of the principal city streets, he saw Mr. Hathaway ambling slowly, aimlessly toward him with uncertain gait. A glance made it plain that he was still under the influence of liquor, though by no means in the critical condition in which he had been the evening before.

The truth was he had cunningly evaded Jack’s vigilance and made his way to the river, always his ultimate destination when despair overtook him and his own selfishness was revealed to him.

How long he had stood shivering beside the murky water, looking down and thinking how it would be to lie beneath it with the boats stealing over his up turned face, and his eyes open always to the accusing heavens, he did not know. The usual climax was reached in the course of time, and an inextinguishable thirst clamored to be satisfied.

He turned his footsteps away from the dramatic death he had never really meant to attempt, and hurried down into the city. He threaded his way this way and that through the streets, and suddenly there was a great car stopping beside the curb and a man leaning out to speak to him. He stopped, and tried to understand with his poor, bewildered brain.

“Won’t you get in and ride with me, Mr. Hathaway?”

Was it possible the man was asking him,
him?

He climbed unsteadily into the back seat, and allowed the stranger to wrap him up warmly. Then they whirled off through the streets, threading their way through the traffic, and finally getting out into the wide open thoroughfare. He soon fell into a profound sleep.

For hours they flew over the road. Just as the dusk was dropping down about them they halted at a little inn in a quiet country town.

Mr. Hathaway opened his eyes, and looked about in a dazed way. He wondered who the man was who was talking to him; but he got out and followed in where the lights shone and where little round tables were covered with white cloths.

Food was being brought. There was hot oyster broth! It made him giddy to smell it. It tasted good, and he ate it greedily. It seemed to steady his nerves and send a tingle of life to his trembling fingers again. It gave him courage. There was a smell of coffee in the air. Yes, they were bringing coffee, smoking hot, and beefsteak, and other things. He ate and drank, and grew saner with every mouthful. About eight o’clock the telephone bell rang in Morningside and Elsie answered it.

“That you, Elsie? Well, this is Dad. Yes, I’m all right. Yes, I’m taking a little automobile trip with a friend, and I’ll be home before midnight. Don’t sit up, and don’t you worry. Understand? I’m
all right!
”

Shortly before midnight as softly as a car can go they slid up to the curb in front of the house, and Mr. Hathaway got out.

But, quiet as they had been, Elsie was on the alert, and in her pink and silver robings was standing behind her rose curtains, peering out.

The car stopped just behind the big lilac bush, so that she could not see who was driving it; but she heard a low voice say:

“You usually go in town on the trolley, don’t you? Well, how about going with me tomorrow morning? I shall be going quite early. You have to be at your office at eight o’clock? Well, I’ll be at this corner at half past seven. That will give us plenty of time. Good-night.”

The car slid away into the shadows again, and Mr. Hathaway came steadily up the front walk with a self-respecting gait. Elsie slipped into bed with relief, and wondered what there was about the voice of the man that sounded so familiar.

For three days Cameron Stewart had been taking Mr. Hathaway into town in the morning and bringing him out at night in his car, always managing to do it so unobservedly that as yet none of the family had found out. The third day, however, Jack happened to be home a little earlier than usual, and was standing at the front window when the car drew up to the curb behind the lilac bush and then whizzed silently away in the dusk. When his father came in, he asked: “Who’s your friend, Dad? Some class to you arriving in a big six car like that.”

“It’s not the first time,” his father said, grinning proudly. “Been going and coming for several days like that. Some car, isn’t it? Why, my friend’s name is Stewart. He picked me up on Chestnut Street a few days ago, and since then we’ve been real chummy. He’s a nice, likely fellow. You ought to hear him talk.”

“Stewart! You don’t mean it! Well, he’s some peach, he is! I wonder what he does it for.”

“Oh, just to be sociable, I guess. Says he’s lonesome going and coming alone all the time.”

Elsie, hovering in the hall fearfully, as she always did now when her father came home, heard the whole conversation, and stood looking out of the window thinking. It had been his voice, then, she had heard in the moonlight that night! She echoed Jack’s question in her heart, while her eyes grew strangely soft as she stared into the dusk.

The days that followed were happy ones, although they were fraught with a certain degree of nervous anxiety. Each night the three children watched their father’s homecoming with tense, strained nerves, and relaxed into comforted sighs of relief when they saw him come steadily up the walk. Each morning his daughter’s heart was filled with prayer as she saw him go forth, always sending up a thankful song when she saw him climb into an automobile instead of a car in the dim morning light; and this happened as often as two or three times a week.