Butler Ellis Parker
In Pawn

CHAPTER XIV

The evening proved more satisfactory than Henrietta had feared. Carter Bruce did not leave Gay to Freeman, but seemed to have taken Henrietta’s warning thoroughly to heart. It is true that Freeman tried to monopolize Gay, rather driving Carter to Lorna, but Carter would not be wholly driven and managed to make it a party of four on the steps, talking across Lorna at Gay.

Neither was Johnnie Alberson as fearsome as Henrietta had feared. If he meant to press his attentions on her – and he certainly did mean to – he was too wise to begin too violently. Flirtation was a game with Johnnie and one in which he was an experienced hand. When, about eleven, he said good-night, Henrietta had spent one of the pleasantest evenings of her life. She settled herself in her chair again, listening to the four younger people on the steps, to the crickets in the grass, and to the thumping of Miss Susan’s iron in the kitchen.

Carter, when Gay finally arose, went with her, and Henrietta was pleased to see that he took her arm and that she did not object to this slight attention.

“Going up, Lorna?” Henrietta asked, meaning the question more as a hint to Freeman, for she wanted to talk with him, but he did not take the hint and sat on the step smoking when they went in.

It was an hour later – fully midnight – when Miss Susan laid aside her irons and went to her room. The house was silent, for Freeman had gone to his room half an hour before and Miss Susan climbed the stairs wearily. She was so tired that when she reached her room she sat on the edge of her bed, almost too tired to bend to undo her shoe-laces, and suddenly her eyes fell on her purse, which she had left on her dresser. It was wide open.

Miss Susan crossed the room and took the purse in her hand. It was empty. For a minute she stood looking into it and then she opened her door and went into the hall.

The purse had not contained much money – eleven or twelve dollars, if she remembered rightly – but that was gone. At Lem’s door she paused, listening, for she heard subdued noises within the room. She opened the door suddenly.

The boy stood in the full moonlight, fully dressed and his ragged straw hat on his head, just as he had come in from his visit to his father. He turned as the door opened and the next moment Miss Susan had him by the collar. He tried to pull away toward the window, but she held him fast and he fell and was on his feet again in an instant, kicking and striking. Miss Susan held tight to the collar.

The small stand holding the ewer and basin toppled and fell with a crashing of queensware, and almost before the noise ceased Lorna and Henrietta were at the door. A minute later Freeman came, and Lorna fled, being too lightly clad.

“Grab him! Grab the little rat!” Susan cried, and Freeman clasped the boy from behind, slipping his hands under his arms, and spreading his own feet wide apart to escape the kicks the sobbingly angry boy dealt with his bare heels.

“You leave me alone,” Lem sobbed, doubling his kicks and jerking to set himself free. Miss Susan, as Freeman tightened his grip, felt in the boy’s pockets, bringing forth a silver dollar, but no more.

“Lem! Lem, dear!”

The boy looked up. Henrietta was standing in the doorway, her voice commanding but soothing. In the instant before Freeman or Susan could turn their heads toward her, she closed her eyes and stiffened her body. At the moment Lem was too angry to heed her, but, in another moment, he felt that his struggles were useless, and he grasped what she meant. Suddenly he grew white and rigid and lay in Freeman’s arms, stiffly inert.

“I was afraid of that! I was afraid of that!” Henrietta said, and she went to take Lem from Freeman.

Miss Susan, one hand comforting the side of her face where one of Lem’s blows had fallen, scowled at the boy.

“The thief!” she exclaimed angrily. “The miserable, low, thieving brat! He robbed my purse. I ‘ll show him! I ‘ll see that he gets what he deserves now! Fit or no fit he does not stay in my house another hour.”

Henrietta paid no attention to her. Lorna was at the door now, a robe thrown around her.

“What was it?” she asked. “What did he do?”

“He stole from me,” said Miss Susan. “He robbed my purse. And out he goes!”

“But not to-night,” said Henrietta, braving her. “Not while he is like this.”

She tried to lift him, but he was too heavy. “Take him, Freeman,” she said.

Freeman lifted the boy and turned toward the bed.

“Not there,” said Henrietta. “In my room. He is not wanted here, but my room is my own. To-morrow, if Miss Redding wishes, Lem and I will go. Come, Freeman.”

CHAPTER XV

Before Freeman had placed Lem on Henrietta’s bed, Henrietta had her door closed and locked. She stood with her back to the door, facing Freeman when he turned. She had several things she wanted to say to him. She had not the slightest doubt that he had taken Miss Susan’s money and there were other things she wished to talk over with him. Her position was becoming more and more difficult each hour.

What she meant to say she did not know, and neither did she know what she meant to do when all was said. One thing seemed to her particularly monstrous – that Lem should be held guilty for a theft he had not committed – and in her present state of mind she was ready to sacrifice both Freeman and herself to save Lem. Her own life, and Freeman’s, seemed already ruined, and as she stood there she was resolved that before Freeman left the room everything must be decided.

Freeman, as he turned, looked at her. He knew by the look on her face and the light in her eyes that she had been driven beyond all patience by this last act of his.

“What do you want?” he asked, moving away from the bed.

“To talk with you,” Henrietta said. “I am through. This is the end, of course.”

“A nice little family chat, I suppose,” he sneered. “Door locked, hubby captured, wifey angry. Act 3, Scene 2. Villain husband lights cigarette.”

He took his pack of cigarettes from his pocket and shook one out, knocking it on the back of his hand before he lighted it.

“Wife glares at husband,” he continued, in the same tone. “Husband nonchalantly crosses stage to chair.”

He walked toward the chair that stood by Henrietta’s window.

“And exit husband,” he said, raising the wire screen of the window and stepping out upon the tin roof of the porch. Henrietta leaped forward, but only in time to hear the crackling of the tin as Freeman crossed to his own window. She heard his screen clatter down, and the creak of his window as he lowered it, and even the grating of the safety lock as he quite satisfactorily locked himself in.

For a moment Henrietta looked at her window; then she turned to Lem.

“Lem!” she commanded. “Lem, wake up!” The boy did not stir.

“Lem!” she said. “Wake up. I know you are only pretending. Stop this fooling; I want to talk to you.”

But Lem would not waken. She tried other ways, talking to him all the while, tickling the tough soles of his bare feet and opening his eyelids, but he was not to be coaxed or driven out of the pretended fit.

“Very well, then,” Henrietta said, seating herself on the bedside. “I’ll talk to you, anyway, for I know you hear me. I know you did not steal Miss Susan’s money, but she will never believe that. I know Freeman stole it.”

Lem lay as inert as a corpse. If he heard he gave no sign.

“Listen, Lem,” Henrietta continued. “What I want to tell you is that you must not run away, if you were thinking of running away. That was why I had you brought here, so I could tell you that. You understand, don’t you? You must not run away; not to-night, anyway.”

There was still no sign from the boy on the bed. “I ‘ll tell you why,” Henrietta went on. “If you do, every one will always think you are a thief, and all your life you will have trouble and misery and unhappiness. All your whole life, even if you live to be a hundred. So I want you to promise not to run away to-night. Will you promise that?”

Lem did not answer.

“I wish you would,” pleaded Henrietta. “I’m tired, Lem, and my heart is tired to-night. I want to sleep and see if sleep will bring me any answer to the troubles I can’t see my way out of to-night. There may be some way, but I do not see it now, and if you will not promise not to run away I ‘ll have to go to Miss Susan now and tell her that Freeman stole her money. I want to save you, Lem, but I want to save myself and Freeman, too, if I can, and if I tell Miss Susan the truth it means ruin for me. I will have to go away forever. Will you promise now not to run away?”

She looked at him, but not a muscle of his face quivered. She arose, and drew her robe more closely around her neck, and went to the door. There she gave a last look toward the bed. Lem was sitting straight.

“Aw, gee!” he said. “Don’t go an’ tell her nothin’ like that. Don’t you go an’ tell her Freeman took her money. Because he didn’t take it. I took it.”

“Lem!” Henrietta cried, with a deep breath, while her eyes showed her distress. “Not truly? You don’t mean that, Lem?”

“Yes, I did!” he insisted. “I took it. I took it, but I did n’t steal it. I took it to get even with her, callin’ me a thief an’ everything.” Henrietta returned to sit on the edge of the bed.

“Oh, Lem!” she said. “How could you!”

“Well, she was mean to me, so I was mean to her,” he said. “I got a right to get even with her, have n’t I? I don’t have to let her be mean to me an’ not be mean to her, do I?”

“But to steal!” cried Henrietta.

“I didn’t either steal!” declared Lem stubbornly. “I just took. I just took her old money an’ put it where she would n’t get it again, so she’d wish she had n’t ever wanted to be mean to me.”

“Where did you put it?” asked Henrietta.

“I won’t tell you!”

“You will tell me! You ‘ll tell me this instant!”

Henrietta had not been a school teacher fot years for nothing. Now, by an instantaneous change, she was all a school teacher – a school teacher able to command rebellious boys for their own good.

“I won’t either tell you!” declared Lem.

“Very well!” said Henrietta, and she arose and began to draw on her stockings.

“What you goin’ to do?” Lem asked.

“No matter,” she said. “You are going to tell me what you did with that money.”

Lem watched her uneasily. She drew on her shoes with the brisk movements of one who knows exactly what she has planned to do and how she has planned to do it. She drew the shoe-laces taut with little jerks that made the metal tips snap against the shoes.

“Are you going to wale me?” asked Lem.

“No matter. You’ll know soon enough.”

“I ain’t afraid of being waled,” said Lem. Henrietta was snapping the hooks of her corset now, not looking at Lem. There was a businesslike briskness in the way she snapped hook after hook and reached for her skirt that frightened Lem.

“Well, anyway, you might tell a feller what you’re goin’ to do to him,” he said uneasily.

“Never mind,” Henrietta said, and jerked the band of the skirt two inches to the left around her waist. She reached for her jacket and thrust her arms into the sleeves, reaching for her hat almost the same instant.

“Well, what do I care who knows where I put the money?” said Lem. “I made her mad, all right. I wa’n’t afraid to say where I put it. You don’t need to think I’m afraid to.” Henrietta jabbed a pin into her hat and put her hand on the doorknob.

“Where did you put it?” she demanded.

“I put it in her shoe.”

“What shoe?”

“Her shoe in her closet.”

“Her Sunday shoes? The shoes with the cloth tops?”

“Yes, mam.”

“All of it?”

Lem nodded an affirmative.

“Very well,” said Henrietta. “You’ll stay here; understand?”

“Yes, mam,” said Lem meekly. “I’ll stay.”

“See that you do, if you know what is good for you,” said Henrietta, and she went into the hall, closing the door behind her, but leaving it unlocked. She knew Lem would not try to run away that night.

CHAPTER XVI

It may be doubted if Henrietta would ever have worked as hard to save herself as she worked that night with Miss Susan to save Lem. At the end of the long plea for the boy, the best Miss Susan would say was that if he was not a thief he was an imp of Satan and she wished she had never set eyes on him. She supposed, however, she would have to keep him for, goodness knew! it was the only way she would ever get her money out of that no-account brother of hers.

Henrietta went back to her room utterly weary and disheartened with the world in general. Lem she sent back to his own room with a warning that he was to try no escape business. The boy was, indeed, too sleepy now to want anything but sleep. He went staggering to his room, and it would be hard to tell whether he or Henrietta was asleep the sooner, for she threw herself on her bed as she was, only removing her hat and jacket, and she did not awaken until the sun on her face and the discomfort of her shoes brought her to herself again. She opened her eyes with a sense that everything was going wrong in her world.

In this feeling she was not far wrong. The amount of her debt – in money – to Lorna, Gay, and Johnnie Alberson, to say nothing of the board money she owed Miss Susan, was enough to worry any school teacher. In Freeman she had a constant source of worriment, not knowing what folly or crime he might undertake next; the lies she had told so freely threatened to make trouble any moment, and she had Gay on her conscience, too.

The next few days held nothing to make Henrietta happier. Johnnie Alberson took up his residence at the boarding-house, and the way in which he flirted with Henrietta did not please Miss Susan.

From the day of his installation at Miss Redding’s, Johnnie Alberson made open and almost outspoken love to Henrietta, and Miss Redding looked upon it sourly. She would have sent Henrietta away instantly but for the equally open and almost outspoken attitude of disapproval shown Johnnie by Henrietta. Henrietta could not, Susan knew, say outright that she was a married woman, but Susan was none the less displeased. She made up her mind that as soon as possible after Johnnie Alberson left, she would send Henrietta away. To interfere while Johnnie remained seemed to her to invite scandalous gossip, and she did not think of sending Johnnie packing. He was an Alberson, and every one knows what that means in Riverbank. Temporarily, therefore, Miss Redding vented her irritation on Lem. He was, a good part of the time, a sulky boy in tears, for he had a new grievance. Miss Susan had taken his dollar and had not returned it.

It has been remarked before, by other observers, how some good women, otherwise admirable, can take a bitter dislike to certain children, and Miss Susan – overworked, harassed by the thought of the scandal-pregnant presence of Henrietta, and “pulled down” by a spell of unusually hot weather – made Lem’s days miserable. She even heaped upon him a crowning indignity and made him wash the dinner dishes. He might almost have washed them in the tears he shed over them.

“I’ve got you, and I suppose I ‘ve got to keep you,” she told him, “but, if so, you’ve got to be of use. I can’t afford to feed useless boys, and it’s no use to bawl about it. You’re better off washing dishes than skirmishing around stealing from folks, anyway.”

If idle hands are the only hands for which the devil finds work, Lem was in little danger of doing the devil’s work during those days. He was too busy doing Miss Susan’s. The great stove in the kitchen seemed to swallow wood by the cord during those hot days, and Miss Susan, for economy’s sake, was burning pine slabs from the sawmill, and they had to be chopped. The big, drab-painted wood box always needed filling. It was always empty to the last handful of pine bark, Lem thought.

The boarding-house dishes, too, seemed to breed in great masses, like sturgeon eggs. He had never imagined there were so many dishes in the world. He had to carry the dishwater to the alley, to empty it, because the grease would kill the grass. He had to pump water for the washlady, who came twice a week. He had to carry water to fill the ewers in all the rooms, and he even suffered the indignity of having to carry down slops. He felt he was a slave and he was more bitterly and miserably resentful than any slave had ever been.

In addition to all the other work there was the yard to cut. This Lem knew to be sheer thought-up, intentional cruelty to youth, for the yard had never been cut before. In places the matted, dried grass was the accumulation of years, tough and stringy. It was a huge yard; to Lem it seemed like square miles.

To cut the grass he had a sickle that had seen better days, but not recently. It was like cutting grass with a spoon. When he came to the places where the old grass was matted under the new, he had to comb it out with his fingers and hold it up, like a Bluebeard holding the hair of an inquisitive wife’s head, and hack at it. His knuckles wore raw, stained with earth and grass, from rubbing as he slashed at the grass.

The result of his sickle work gave Miss Susan little satisfaction. The yard looked worse where Lem had cut it than it had looked originally. It had a jagged, uncouth appearance, like some yellow furred animal that had shed in rough, irregular patches. Miss Susan told him he would have to go over it again as soon as he had finished.

To his misery was added the knowledge that it was a shocking-looking job. His acquaintance with sickles was so slight that he did not know the instrument of his torture was outrageously dull. He foresaw a life of unending grass chopping, with a complaining Aunt Susan always at hand to give him another job as soon as she had scolded him for doing the last in a sloppy manner.

Lem, handed into pawn like a chattel by his father, was miserable and he did not think of letting his countenance hide his misery. He was so thoroughly boy that when he felt miserable he showed it, and Miss Susan believed that Lem disliked her, and Lem had no reason to doubt that she disliked him or that she was intentionally “being as mean as an old cat” to him.

In addition to the worry caused Henrietta by the dangerous and annoying attentions of Johnnie Alberson, who believed in making hay while the sun shone, both Carter Bruce and Freeman were giving Lem’s only able friend so much trouble that she had little time to help Lem with sympathy or otherwise.

Johnnie seemed inclined to take advantage of his knowledge of Henrietta’s supposed maternal relation to Freeman, as well as of his power over her because of Freeman’s peculations. Henrietta was thoroughly frightened. That Miss Susan objected was enough in itself to worry her, but she was actually afraid of Johnnie’s love-making because she was to some extent really in his power. She did not know how far he might choose to press his attentions and she did not have a free cent with which to lessen the amount for which he was holding her responsible.

Johnnie himself was probably having one of the gladdest times of his life. Being a Riverbank Alberson he had his full share of conceit, and thought well of himself at all times except when his withered, dictatorial, and aged mother was treating him as if he were a five-year-old boy. She treated him thus whenever she saw him, no matter where, and she was such a thorough tyrant and so hearty in her tyranny that Johnnie was meek and lowly before her. It was said she swore at him like a pirate when he asserted himself in any way whatever.

When he was away from his mother, the plump, immaculately dressed pharmacist rebounded to the extremes of self-adoration. He thought he was the finest flower of Riverbank’s gallantry and that the only reason all females did not fall in worshipful attitudes at his feet was because an Alberson was so awesome that their very worship would not permit them to take even that liberty.

During the days when he was thus annoying Henrietta, he believed himself to be the admiration of every one at Miss Susan’s, instead of which he came near being, in nearly all eyes, a most ridiculous figure. To Miss Susan, who knew the truth about Henrietta and her husband, he was a matter of sorrow; it was painful for her to see an Alberson preening his feathers and strutting peacock-like around Henrietta while Freeman Todder, her husband, observed it all, and laughed up his sleeve at an Alberson.

Gay and Lorna alone were pleased. As they had no reason to know that Henrietta was married, and as they believed – and rightly – that her Billy Vane was a myth, they hoped Johnnie was in love with their friend and might marry her.

To Henrietta he was nothing but a danger and a menace, doubly annoying because of her other annoyance. Carter Bruce was pressing her for more information regarding the wife of Freeman Todder.

“I ‘ve got to have it,” he told her.

“You shouldn’t have said anything to him about it,” she told him. “It was a secret. I told you in confidence.”

Carter did not see it in that light. He was inclined to argue.

“I kept your secret,” he said. “How could he know how I learned? I don’t mean to let him know, either, but you must give me some hint how I can get the information in some other way. Give me the name of the town where his wife is.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t.”

“You mean you won’t?”

“Very well, Carter, I won’t. It is absolutely impossible. I told you to look out for Gay – to make strong love to her – not to go blundering like a bull in a china shop.”

Henrietta had this every day. Freeman was even worse. He accused her of having told Bruce some lie, of course, but the worst was his insistent demand for money. He must have money. There must be some way in which she could get it, he said.

“There’s not,” she told him. “How can I get it?”

Freeman did not know, but he knew he had to have money. He was as ugly about it as possible, worse than he had ever been.

“You get me some money,” he said brutally. “That’s all I want from you – some money.”

“Freeman, I can’t get any. If I could get it I would not give it to you. Presently we will have to leave this house, and wherever we go next we have to pay in advance. And I must give something to Johnnie Alberson. I’m afraid of him. I must pay him something. I don’t like the way he acts.”

“Let him act,” said Freeman scornfully.

All in all Henrietta was in no state of mind to think of any troubles except her own, and poor Lem was left to his own resources. Or to his one resource. That one resource was his father, and his father, unfortunately, was having his own troubles. He was having difficulty in preserving that calmness of mind and subjugation of appetite necessary to carry on the business of a successful saint.