Читать книгу Indian Summer - Emily Grant Hutchings - Страница 22
ОглавлениеI
Lavinia was finding her tenant increasingly useful—the wicket gate an open sesame to many of the difficult problems for which she had been wont to search in vain the pages of the Self Culture Magazine. A development watched by her son with incredulous wonder. Hitherto Lavinia Trench had believed nothing that was conveyed to her by word of mouth. “She’s a pure visuel,” Dr. Schubert had sought to explain. “She gets her mental concepts through her eyes.” But Lary knew that that was not all of it. His mother held an enormous respect for the printed word. She wanted one of her sons to be a writer. That would reflect real credit on the family. Her own inability to form fluid sentences only increased her admiration for those unseen masters whose thoughts and experiences had received the accolade of printer’s ink. True, she had many times appeared over her own signature, in the clumsily edited columns of the Bromfield Sentinel—when there was a chance to weave into the story some reference to Larimore’s triumphs at Cornell, Sylvia’s social conquests or Bob’s athletic achievements. But to get things published ... and paid for.... This last comment always sent Lary flying from the room. She would probably not take any stock in the things he wrote, even if she read them in print. They were so at variance with all her established convictions.
On a certain Thursday morning she made occasion to call on Mrs. Ascott, the newly arrived copy of the Sentinel in her hand. Her dark sallow cheeks showed hectic splotches, and her eyes flared and dimmed with the emotion she was trying to conceal. She had not written the story on the front page of the Bromfield paper. Her fancy’s most ingenious flight could not have fabricated anything one half so ... gratifying. So terrible, she amended, to her own soul. But the real, the usually submerged Lavinia, knew that the former word was the right one.
“You remember the boy, Fournier Stone, that you used to play with when you were a little girl in Rochester,” she began tensely. “Read that.”
The story was told with all the crass vulgarity and offensiveness of small town journalism. The bank examiner had paid an unexpected visit to the Bromfield National bank—because of certain stories that had been circulated concerning young Stone’s extravagance in Rochester and Buffalo. It was found that a large gap between the bank’s records and the actual cash on hand had been bridged by spurious paper that implied the additional crime of forgery. This, it transpired, was not Fournier Stone’s first offence. In the past he had fled to his mother for assistance; but now Mrs. Stone was critically ill, and he had not dared to tell her of his dilemma.
“To think of a mother shielding her son in such rascality!” to which Lavinia added, with snapping satisfaction, “But what could you expect of such a mother?”
The account closed with the statement that Mrs. Stone had suffered a relapse, because of the shock of her son’s arrest, and for several hours her life was despaired of. The culprit was released, under heavy bond, and was constantly at his mother’s bedside.
II
Saturday brought a letter from Ellen Larimore, with further details. Fournier Stone had disappeared—walked out of the house, in the clothes of one of the servants, right past the secret service man who was there to trap him. It was thought that he had gone to Canada. His mother was in a desperate condition. “Of course,” Ellen added, “we don’t know a thing for certain. I talked to Calvin this morning, and the poor man is distracted. But most people here think he might have set the boy a better example. I never forgot the day you told me it was too risky to marry a man who drank and gambled. What if it was Larimore that was a fugitive from justice! Aren’t you thankful that you married David instead of Calvin? I’ve had an idea for a long time that you got wind of the affair with Lettie, and threw Calvin over, in a jealous huff. Now I see your wisdom. Oh, I almost forgot to tell you that when they came to look up Fournier’s records, in Rochester, it came out that he is six months older than we thought he was. There are a lot of things about Calvin Stone’s marriage that some of us older people would like to find out about.” Lavinia set her teeth hard, and a yellow pallor replaced the flush of indignant pleasure that had accompanied the reading of the letter ... up to this point. She had intended to show the letter to David; but when she came to the mention of her wisdom in the choice of a husband, she wavered. That last sentence brought her to an abrupt decision. She burned the letter—and repeated such parts of it as would fit in with a half formed plan in her own mind.
David was profoundly sorry for the Stones. Their misfortunes helped to ease the pain in his own heart, a pain that had never been lulled since the black day when Bob Trench’s dripping body was taken from the river. It was his mother who had urged him to compete for one more trophy at the annual college field meet. To David it seemed that his wife cared more for Bob’s ribbons and foolish little silver cups than for all Lary’s scholarships and medals. He had never connected these spectacular mementoes with the boastings in the Bromfield Sentinel, and their possible effect on certain of the old friends, whose children had not distinguished themselves. Providence, it now appeared, had been kind in the untimely taking off of his son. Such disgrace as Fournier Stone had brought upon his parents would be harder to bear. In David’s limited vocabulary respectability had no place. But principle loomed large. It was the thing Fournier Stone had done, not the newspaper account of it, that mattered.
