The Prodigal Girl (7 page)

Something thick and unnatural in his voice caused both father and mother to look at him with startled eyes, and his father drew himself sharply out of the comfortable chair and went toward him:

“Chris!” he said, and his voice was like an electric current. “What is the matter with you? Where have you been?”

“Tha’s none o’ your business!” replied the boy, trying to straighten up and look steadily at his father, his dripping hat back again on his head. “You refushed to gimme the dough I needed, an’ I went where I knew I could get it! Tha’s all! Wha’s that t’you? Got m’debts all paid an’ three dollars lef’ over. Pretty good, what? You ain’t got a single kick comin’—”

Chris’s voice trailed off suddenly in a kind of choking sound as a strong hand seized his collar.

“That’s enough!” said Chester Thornton authoritatively. “Don’t say another word in your mother’s hearing!”

He threw the boy’s hat off, pulled off his overcoat, and taking him firmly by the arm propelled him up the stairs to the bathroom, his face sternly white, the boy dragging back and protesting.

“Wha’s yer hurry, old soak?” Chris asked his father blearily. “Got all night, ain’t we? I know I’m half-stewed, but wha’s that? It’s happened once or twice before—”

The bathroom door slammed over the last words, and Eleanor Thornton, listening in horror at the foot of the stairs, heard the water turned on furiously in the bathtub.

As if he were assisting at some horrid rite, Chester Thornton helped his son to remove his clothing, and then against his most earnest protests plunged him into a tub of cold water.

Minutes later, sobered, ashamed, well rubbed down and arrayed in dry, warm pajamas, Chris crept to his bed, and Chester Thornton came slowly, heavily down the stairs like an old, old man.

“Eleanor!” he said gropingly, as she came toward him from the darkened parlor and stood beneath the hall light, “Eleanor, I—”

It was then that everything went black before his eyes, and clutching for the stair railing and missing it, he fell and struck his head against the newel post. Then all the world fled away from his consciousness.

Chapter 5

H
er mother’s scream brought Betty to the head of the stairs calm, superior, in a hastily assumed robe. But when she saw her father lying at the foot of the stairs with blood on his forehead and her mother kneeling beside him wiping his face with her handkerchief and endeavoring ineffectually to lift him to a sitting posture, her assurance fled, and a white, scared look took its place. For angry as she was with him, she adored her father.

She flew down the stairs taking command as she came.

“Now Mums, you keep cool,” she said. “I’ll call the doctor. How did it happen?”

“He fell,” said her mother reproachfully. “I think he was dizzy—He—Your brother—
You
—He’s been—”

But Betty was already giving the doctor’s number at the telephone and waiting, for no orders proceeded efficiently to the kitchen for water and ice and pieces of old linen.

The doctor arrived almost at once. Betty had caught him just as he came in from a late call before he had retired.

They laid Thornton on the couch in the living room, and Betty stirred the fire and put on fresh wood. She brought glasses and spoons and blankets and hovered silently in the shadows of the room until the quivering eyelids opened at last, and she saw her father’s searching glance go hurriedly around the room, heard his deep, profound sigh as returning consciousness brought back his problems. Then she stole silently up to her room and lay down in the dark with her door open, listening. She was frightened at the white look of her father’s face, but angry, too. It didn’t seem quite decent of Chester to collapse this way just because he had discovered a few trifles about his children that he hadn’t known before. He had no right to be so far behind the times that he would expect them always to be infants! When he got better she would have to take him in hand, bring him up to date and open his eyes to a few facts. Times were changed of course, and Chester hadn’t realized it, but she had never expected him to show weakness, physical weakness, just because his whims were crossed. Whims! They were worse than that. They were antiques, wished on him by a former generation. How could he have been so blind as not to have seen before this that the world had outgrown them?

Yet she lay and quivered at the thought of her father ill. Her dad had always been so strong, so ready to give her anything she wanted.

She stole out to the hall and listened when the doctor talked in a low tone to her mother, straining her ears and trying to hear what they were saying. She could not sleep until she knew he was out of danger.

Then she heard her father call to the doctor. His voice sounded weak, strained, yet insistent.

The doctor went into the living room again, and Mrs. Thornton came slowly upstairs. Betty could see that she was weeping even before she lifted her tear-stained face.

“He’s all right now, I hope, dear!” said the mother. “The doctor wants him to get to sleep. I’m going to put a hot water bag in the bed and get his things out. The doctor doesn’t think the bruise was serious.”

There was a quiver in the end of her voice that gave Betty a strange uneasiness.

“It’s not like Chester to pass out!” said Betty with a half return of her habitual flippancy.

The mother shrank visibly from the words.

“I wouldn’t, Betty dear,” she said in a half-apologetic tone. “Your father doesn’t like you to call him that. It doesn’t sound respectful—”

“Rats!” said Betty inelegantly. “Are
you
trying to be an old stiff, too?”

“Betty! Really! Your father is very sensitive just now, and the doctor says we must be very careful. He says he is in a very dangerous state. He says this has been coming on for a long time—”

Betty gave her a startled look.

“For what reason?” she said and pinioned her mother with her glance.

“I’m afraid it’s business,” she said with a catch in her breath. “He’s been lying awake at nights, oh, for weeks and perhaps longer. I don’t know. He didn’t tell me till recently. And then this tonight—”

“Business? What’s the matter with business?” asked Betty sharply.

“I’m afraid things are in a very bad way.”

“Whaddaya mean, bad way?”

“Well, I’m not sure, but I’m afraid your father has failed. I’m afraid it’s just as bad as it can be. I know he was expecting something to happen yesterday that would turn the tide either way. And just now when the doctor asked him if he couldn’t get away from business and take a real rest he said, ‘Oh, the business doesn’t matter anymore!’ just like that, as if everything was all over. And I think that he is kind of desperate about it. I feel that we shall have to do everything we can to make him happy and make him understand that it doesn’t matter whether we have any money or not if he only gets well. The doctor said that this was a warning. He didn’t say just what, but from the questions he asked I’m sure he was afraid of stroke, or paralysis, or some of those terrible diseases. Betty, we must be
awfully
careful not to worry your father. But there! I believe the doctor is persuading him to come up. Get that other pair of pink striped blankets and lay them on the radiator. We might need them. He said he was so cold—”

Betty eyed her mother keenly. Evidently Dad had not told her yet. That was decent of him. No need in stirring Mother up.

Betty flew around efficiently, helping her mother, thinking her keen, stubborn young thoughts, trying to look a new situation in the face, and rebelling furiously at having her young life disrupted by any financial catastrophe. It wasn’t like her dad to go flooey and leave them all in the mud. He must have done something awfully foolish to get things all in a muddle. She couldn’t keep a kind of resentment out of her thoughts as she worked.

Yet when she caught sight of her father’s white face again as the doctor helped him up the stairs, while she stood in the darkened back hall and watched, her heart failed her. Poor Dad! Poor Chester! He had always been such a good sport! Perhaps he would pull out of it! He had to. He would have to
borrow
money or something till times got all right again. Of course, that was it. He would borrow money. Everybody did nowadays anyway. It was old-fashioned to worry because you couldn’t pay your bills right on the dot. Oh, Chester would pull out, of course. She couldn’t think of them as settling down to be
poor
. Of course not. It wasn’t to be tolerated!

And so, comforting herself, she crept back to her bed, and having heard the doctor go down stairs and out the front door, she composed herself to sleep.

Mrs. Thornton tiptoed around her room putting things in order for rest, laying her slippers and warm robe on a chair by the bed for possible sudden need in the night, switching on a night-light in the hall just outside her bedroom door, switching off the brighter light. She slipped softly into bed, making the least movement possible that she might not disturb her husband.

She curled down gratefully under the blankets, let her tired head sink into the pillow and closed her eyes, for the evening had been a long, hard one and the culmination had been appalling. She had done a good deal of weeping, which was always exhausting, and her senses were almost benumbed with the various shocks they had received. But the things that had happened during the last hour had left the earlier events somewhat in the background. The unpleasant scene at the dinner table, and the incidents of Jane and Betty seemed comparatively unimportant in the light of later developments.

What, for example, had been the meaning of Chris’s strange actions and his father’s unprecedented treatment? Could it be possible that Chris was growing wild? She could not get away from the memory of the smell of liquor about him when he came into the house. She shuddered involuntarily as she thought of his unsteady step and incoherent speech! Chris! Her first little son, Chris, scarcely grown out of childhood, just coming into strength and beauty. Chris of whom she had always been so proud! Her first son! Chris gone wrong so early! And gambling! Could it be true? Surely it was someone else’s fault, not Chris’s. Why, Chris had been brought up to respect himself and his family! And that family had always stood for temperance and right living! His father an elder in the Presbyterian church, too! Surely Chris would not have knowingly disgraced his family!

She tried to think who Chris could have been going with that she might have someone else beside her son to shoulder the blame. That Harold Griswold, very likely. He had an expensive sports car and all the pocket money he wanted, and Chris had been determined to be in that car every waking minute out of school. They tore by the house forty times a day like a mad torpedo bound for destruction, and Eleanor had formed the habit of catching her breath and closing her eyes in a quick prayer whenever she heard the screech of the junior Griswold’s car, for she was always certain that her own son was clinging somewhere about its rigging, if he was not actually driving it. She fully expected to see him flung white and lifeless across the pavement sometime, from mere momentum, as the reckless bunch of wild youths hurled by. Several times she had been on the point of appealing to Chris’s father about it, only she knew that her husband was already overburdened with anxiety, and she kept hoping that Chris would find some new attraction, and it would not be necessary to worry his father with it. She did so hate to have Chester blame Chris for anything. He seemed at times so hard on the boy. As if he did not remember being a boy himself.

But now, surely, this Griswold boy was the one who had led Chris astray.

Having settled this matter and made up her mind to suggest this to Chester the first thing in the morning so that he would not blame Chris so severely, she turned to other troubles.

Chester. The doctor had said he was nervously run down and needed a change. The nerves around her heart gave sick, sore thrills of anxiety as she recalled the doctor’s warning. Assuredly it must be managed and at once. If only Chester would be reasonable and see the thing as it was.

It would be fine if he could take an ocean voyage. The Batemans were going on the Mediterranean trip. It would be great if Chester could go with them! Of course he would object to going without her, yet he would not want to leave the children alone, especially after what had happened tonight. And of course it would be cheaper for Chester to go alone. He might even balk at any expense on his own account, but expense was not to be considered where his health was at stake.

Poor Chester, he must have had an awful day at the office, worn to a thread! And he had been so hopeful in the morning! Probably that was the explanation of his being so excited over Betty and her affairs, and even the children at the table, and poor little Jane. Jane was only a child. She had sobbed herself to sleep. She hadn’t an idea she was doing anything wrong to show the boys her little school dance when they asked her, just a few of the college boys who had been friendly. But of course she must be made to understand that it wasn’t nice to have done what she did. She must give Jane more attention, let her invite her little friends home, and have parties, so that she wouldn’t be continually asking to go with the Carter child. Probably it was all the fault of the Carter girl. She was ill bred. She ought not to have allowed Jane to become so close till she had had time to get to know her mother. But she had been so busy! Those club meetings, and the child rearing class had been one straw too much. Yet it had seemed important to know the latest discoveries in child psychology.