“You’re dead beat aren’t you?” he heard one of the girls say, and felt a soft hand push back his hair. He opened his eyes and ’Smeralda’s were burning into his.
“Come right upstairs, and you can lay down on Mother’s bed,” she continued persuasively.
He remembered saying: “Where’s Upton?” with a last clutch at his vanishing sense of responsibility, and she answered: “Oh, he’s down in the woods with Cuty and the others,” and pulled Vance to his feet. He followed her upstairs through the darkening house, and at the top of the landing she slid a burning palm in his. …
As his vision readjusted itself and he found that he was in a narrow iron bedstead, instead of a wide one of black walnut, with a portrait of Mr. Cran facing him, he began to wonder how he had got from the one couch to the other, and how much time had elapsed in the transit. … But the effort of wondering was too much for him; his aching head dropped back. …
The recollection of Upton shot through him rebukingly; but he said to himself that Upton hadn’t needed any advice, and would probably have rejected it if offered. “He ran the show—it was all fixed up beforehand between him and the Hayes fellow. … I wonder if his mother knows?” The thought of Mrs. Tracy was less easy to appease. He remembered her warning against Hayes, her adjuration that they should avoid bad company and come home before night; and he would have given the world to be in his own bed at Euphoria, with no difficulties to deal with but such as could be settled between himself and his family. “If I only knew the day of the week it is!” he thought, feeling more and more ashamed of the part he had played, and more and more scared of its probable consequences. “She’ll cry—and I shall hate that,” he reflected squeamishly.
At last he tumbled out of bed, soused his head in cold water, got into his clothes, and shuffled downstairs. The house was quiet, the hour evidently going toward sunset. In the back porch Mrs. Tracy sat shelling peas. There was no sign of emotion on her face, which was sallow and stony. She simply remarked, without meeting his eyes: “You’ll find some fried liver left out on the table,” and bent again to her task.
“Oh, I don’t want anything—I’m not hungry,” he stammered, longing to question her, to find out from her all that remained obscure in his own history, to apologize and to explain—if any explanation should occur to him! But she would not look up, and he found it impossible to pour out his excuses to her bent head, with the tired-looking hair drawn thinly over the skin, like the last strands of cotton round one of his mother’s spools. “Funny women should get to look like that,” he thought with a shiver of repulsion. To cut the situation short, he wandered into the dining room, looked at the fried liver and sodden potatoes, tried in vain to guess of what meal they were the survival, and turned away with the same sense of disgust with which the top of Mrs. Tracy’s head had inspired him.
In the passage he wavered, wondering if he should go up again to his room or wander out in the heat. If Mrs. Tracy had not been in the porch his preference would have been to return there and go to sleep again in the hammock. Then he determined to go back and have it out with her.
“Can’t I help with those peas?” he asked, sitting down beside her. She lifted her head and looked at him with eyes of condemnation. “No, I don’t want any help with the peas. Or any help from you, anyhow. You’d better go upstairs and sleep off your drunk before Miss Spear and Mr. Lorburn come round again—”
“My drunk?” Vance flushed crimson. “I don’t know what you mean—”
“The words are English, I guess. And you’ll want all your wits about you when you see Mr. Lorburn.”
“Who’s Mr. Lorburn? Why should he want to see me?”
“He’s the owner of the Willows. He’ll tell you soon enough why he wants to see you.”
Vance felt a sinking of the heart. “I don’t know what Mr. Lorburn’s got to say to me,” he muttered, but he did.
“Well, I presume he does.” Mrs. Tracy pushed aside the basket of peas and stood up. Her face was a leaden white and her lower lip twitched. “Not as I care,” she continued, in a level voice as blank as her eyes, “what he says to you, or what you feel about it. What’s a few old books, one way or another? I don’t care if you did take his books—”
“Take his books?” Vance gasped; but she paid no heed.
“—When what you took from me was my son. I trusted him with you, Vance; I thought you’d had enough kindness in this house to feel some obligation. I said to you: ‘Well, go to that game if you’re a mind to. But swear to me you’ll be back the same night, both of you; and keep away from that Hayes and his rough crowd.’ And you swore to me you would. And here I sat and waited and waited—the first time Upton was ever away from me for a night, and not so much as knowing where he was. And then a second night, and no sign of you. I thought I’d go mad then. I began life grand enough, as your folks’ll tell you; and now everything’s gone from me except my children. And when you crawled in yesterday evening, the two of you, I knew right away where you’d been, and what you’d been doing—and leading Upton into. It’s not the first time you’ve been out all night since you
