Coming Through the Rye

  Presently in a blinding search for her handkerchief, a bit of paper fell from her pocket, and she remembered the note she had been trusted with. She stooped and picked it up.

  It had fallen open, and her eye caught the words:

  Go tell Krupper I’ll get him a whole truckload of the kind he wants—the real thing—if he gets me out of here. Do what I say, and I’ll see you get all the rides you want. Don’t open your lips about last Thursday, and if anybody asks you about the roadhouse, say you went with Timmy.

  The signature was a disguised L.

  Chapter 8

  Romayne dropped down upon her bed weakly with the paper in her hand. She felt as if all the strength of her body were slowly ebbing from her through hands and feet. Her fingers seemed lifeless. The effort to keep her hold upon the flimsy paper seemed almost too great to be accomplished, yet she grasped it as if by so doing she were in some way withholding the words it contained from a ruthless and unsympathetic world. Her thoughts were in a tumult. All that had happened before seemed climaxed in that note of her brother’s.

  It was not that she had not already appreciated the shame and humiliation of the discovery of the evening to the full, but somehow this note to this common little painted girl so far below her brother socially, so much beneath him in education and breeding, so low in the moral scale, seemed suddenly to reveal to her the depths to which they all had fallen, and to sweep away in one stroke any illusions she might have entertained concerning her brother’s innocence in these other matters.

  Then Lawrence did know about it all.

  Then he not only knew but was also deep into the business himself.

  Then that was where all his money had come from! It had seemed so wonderful that he should have stepped right into a great salary just because Grandfather used to know the grandfather of the man who was at the head of the business. Probably Lawrence’s salary at the office was after all but a mere pittance. Probably he kept the position to better hide his real business! These last suggestions only hovered in the back of her mind. She had not yet gotten adjusted to the idea of Lawrence as a deceiver. Never had she thought of anything like dishonor in connection with this brother who had always seemed to her just about perfect.

  It was true that Lawrence had been away at school for years, and she had seen but little of him except at vacation times. But he had written her the most charming letters, cheerful and breezy, telling her of all he did and of all his friends. Ever there had been an atmosphere of refinement and righteousness about him. How could it be possible that he could have descended to this?

  She read the note over again, trying to torture its phrases into a mere business communication, or possibly a message he was transmitting to Frances from some friend of hers, but the truth stared her in the face. Lawrence must have had some kind of friendship with this low-born little ignorant child, whose limitations would necessarily have taken him among people with whom he did not naturally belong. Dimly she understood that a relationship like that must be one of temptation, must carry him to places where his own ideals would be cheapened by the contact.

  Something rose up in righteous anger within her soul toward the pert little flapper who had presumed to be intimate with her brother. Her brother!

  And then her pride winced at the thought that she could no longer hold her head up at the thought of her family. Not that she had ever boasted or been unduly proud of herself, but always she had been glad that she had been born into a family who were Godfearing, law-abiding, educated, refined people, above doing anything low or mean or beyond the pale of culture.

  Now! Now where was she! The daughter of a bootlegger!

  Down went her head into the pillow once more, and the tears welled forth, strangling her for the moment.

  Back came the vision of her father’s white face and hunted look just before he fell.

  Like a rock upon her heart fell the conviction that her father had known what those men had come for, and that there had been guilt in his look!

  Then there surged from her heart a reaction. She would not believe that of her father! He had not knowingly sinned! It might be that he had come to suspect something. There might have been things in the business to make him uneasy. But surely, surely he had not known all! They had been using him as a blind to the world to hide their illicit operations.

  As she recalled it now, her father hardly ever went down into the cellar—not in the daytime—and he could not have gone at night without awaking her. Why, she could remember but three times when her father had gone down into the cellar. Twice to arrange about the coal and open the chute and once when those great packing cases had come from the West. He had gone down and arranged where they were to be put. There had been several of them, more it seemed to her memory than had appeared when she went through the cellar with the young officer. They had probably been split up for kindling wood long ago, or else her memory had made more of them than there were. And—oh yes—she could remember when Father went down to superintend the fixing of the wall where they said a part had fallen down. She hadn’t been down herself—but she was sure her father could not have known of those packing cases in the cellar filled with bottles. Now she remembered—the man who brought them worked a long time unpacking the boxes and bringing up those specimens, and her father had been busy in his office, arranging them as they were brought up. Very likely he hadn’t known a thing about what was going on. Whoever was employing him had just kept things camouflaged, and, of course, it was all the better screen for them to have her father unaware of what was going on down in his cellar. No one would have dared suspect a respectable man like her father! She would tell that detestable young man about it in the morning if he dared come near the house again—or, no, she preferred telling someone who would have more authority. She would go to the Judge’s secretary and explain it all out and ask them to see that the impertinent young man was told. Of course her father was all right!

  Having convinced herself bravely, she got up from the bed and washed the tears from her face. By and by, reconnoitering to see that all was quiet below, she stole down the hall to her father’s door again.

  Softly she turned the knob, opened the door, and stepped inside. The nurse sat silently by the window, looking out into the deep midnight sky. Long afterward Romayne remembered the impression of stars against the midnight blue of the sky as she stepped inside that room, and then went to look at the white twisted face on the pillow, her heart breaking with the agony of thinking how he lay there unable to speak for himself. But she would speak. She would clear his fair name! And she would go back now and spend the night in praying. Lawrence might have gone wrong, but Father, never! She would not believe it.

  She went back to her room after a little while. It was too terrible to stand there and watch that living death of her beloved.

  She changed into a little plain housedress that had been her work dress before the rise in their fortunes. Somehow she felt more honest and strong in that than going about in her pretty new things that might have been bought with doubtful money. Not that she was going to believe that they had yet, but she felt better and more like her old self in the old dress.

  In almost a businesslike way she knelt beside her bed when she was dressed and began to pray that God would help her to vindicate her father. But when she tried to frame the sentences, the words would not come, and it was just as if a preventing hand had been laid upon her soul forbidding her prayer. How strange! And then she set about it again, in a fury of anger that anyone should suspect her father—yes, and her brother—her dear brother! Surely there must be some mistake about him, too. That note—well—there would be some explanation. When day came, she would go again to the prison and find out from Lawrence and get the thing straight. Why had she not made Lawrence realize their father’s condition? Now she remembered she had been dazed herself.

  Again, for the third time, she tried to pray that everything would be set right in the morning.

&nb
sp; So through the night she struggled to pray, framing sentences that her inner consciousness told her did not fit the case, yet trying to reach the gate of heaven with a petition that was more a demand than a prayer that the Most High would work a miracle and undo all the sin that had been committed.

  When the first crimson streak of dawn sent a faint rosy light across the window, making half-visible the furniture in her room, Romayne suddenly rose from her knees with a set face and started downstairs. She realized that she was fighting to believe what her good judgment told her was a lie, trying to believe a thing because she wanted it to be true. She had to clear away these doubts that were in her own heart before she could pray to be heard. She had always believed in prayer from her childhood but never practiced it very continuously. Still, she had prayed in faith many times and received a comfortable feeling in return that now all would be well because she had given it into the hands of God. But this time it was different. It was as if her prayers reached no higher than the ceiling and then fell in broken fragments around her feet. It seemed that if it were possible to see the invisible, she would be able to see her vain words lying in useless unaccepted heaps around the room.

  Romayne found a light in the lower hall and went on past the arched doorway toward the back of the hall to the cellar door. She was going down to investigate for herself without any curious eyes upon her.

  She had opened the door and snapped on the cellar light when she was suddenly confronted by a blinking officer who had evidently been dozing in the front room.

  “Is there anything I can get for you, miss?” he asked courteously.

  “No, thank you,” she said in a small tired voice. “I was only going down to the cellar.”

  “Certainly,” he said as if going down to the cellar in the middle of the night were quite a common occurrence. “I will go with you.”

  “Oh, it isn’t necessary,” said Romayne, looking as if she were going to cry again. “I’m not afraid.”

  “I’d better go,” said the man.

  Then she remembered that they were all under surveillance.

  “Very well,” she said coldly. “I’m only going down to look at something. In the morning I’m going to see someone and explain all this. I’m sure my father knew nothing whatever about it. I’m quite sure someone else has been carrying on all this, because my father was in the oil business. Why, I’ve helped him send out his circulars! My father almost never came down to the cellar.”

  “Yes?” said the officer as if he were trying to be kind to her. There was something condescending in his tone that offended her. She walked on down the stairs determinedly and began her inspection of their cellar. She went over to the big box that Evan Sherwood had shown her earlier in the evening and examined it carefully.

  She saw now what she had not noticed the first time, that the box had been made in compartments, and evidently there had been a shelf or top layer separated from the rest. Perhaps this was the way they had deceived her father to get their wares into the next house. They might have packed the upper compartment with specimens of ore and then employed the man to open the box. She felt sure her father had not remained in the cellar long enough to have unpacked the whole box. He probably merely inspected the top of the box and ordered the things brought upstairs, and very likely the man reported that the rest was all alike.

  She turned from the box with a sigh of real relief and with more assurance than she had felt since she had entered the house the evening before. She began to investigate the remainder of the cellar. If she could just prove that her father had known nothing about it, that he had been duped, it would make all the difference in the world. But she would have to prove it to herself. If only she might go about alone without an officer at her elbow!

  The back of the cellar was dark, and she peered into the shadows furtively, wondering if there was anything more she had not seen. But the officer, noticing her glance, stepped to the wall and touched a button under the edge of the stairs that she did not know existed, flooding the back of the cellar with light, and revealing a door that she had never noticed before and that apparently led into a vegetable store closet, at least that would be the natural conclusion of a housekeeper.

  In surprise she stepped to the door and tried to open it but found it locked.

  The attendant, however, stepped forward and, selecting a key from a bunch he carried, opened the door quite as if it were not the first time that night that he had done it, and pressing another button, filled the room beyond with light.

  Romayne stepped within and looked about. Instead of the rows of shelves for canned fruit and potato bins she had expected to find, there was a tall desk and stool, and on the desk an open ledger with a pen lying beside it as if it had been hastily dropped.

  At one side of the desk stood a safe, and beyond were shelves filled with bottles labeled with the names of every known kind of gin and whiskey. On a long table and piled about on the floor against the wall were brown paper packages carefully done up and addressed, and one apparently recently broken open showed a dozen bottles packed in straw. She stepped nearer and saw the address on one, E. A. KRUPPER, EARNHEIM BUILDING—but the thing that made her heart stand still was that the address was in her father’s handwriting! Could he possibly have addressed them without knowing what they contained?

  As if to answer her unspoken question, her eyes turned to the pile of labels and revenue seals lying on the table. Of course she did not know that they were counterfeits.

  Sick at heart, she turned and walked over to the desk, struggling to keep back the tears, and forced herself to read several lines of the entries all in her father’s clear, unmistakable handwriting:

  7 Quarts Gin……………

  12 Quarts Rye Whiskey.……

  5 Quarts—

  She did not follow them out to the end of the line. She was not concerned with the price they brought nor the people who bought them. She was convinced beyond a doubt that her father knew what he was doing and that he had done it all deliberately. She was trembling and would have fallen if she had not steadied herself by the desk. The man who was awaiting her convenience stepped back in the shadow. His heart was aching for this frail bit of a girl and the burden that had been handed her to bear. His jaw set sternly over the father who had so far lost his fatherhood as to leave a sorrow like this for his girl to bear. Suppose it had been his little Nannie?

  Romayne, forcing her trembling lips to steadiness, stepped to the opening in the other side of the room where the wall had evidently been pulled down hastily and the stones flung to one side, perhaps to make room for some bulky object to pass through.

  She did not go over there to see anything more. She had her answer. There was no further doubt. She went there to be unobserved for a moment until she could control the overwhelming tears that threatened to engulf her.

  But when she stood at the opening, she saw beyond a big room filled with packing boxes like the one that stood in the front of their cellar. It almost looked as if it reached through two or three cellars, it was so long. And there was a glimmer of light at the far end as if there were a door beyond. Why! Could it be that the business included more of the houses in the block? One, two, yes, there were three houses beyond them, two occupied and one next door vacant. The corner was occupied by a baker, and yes, there was a big door opening from the back of his house to the side street. She had seen it open once and a big truck hauled up to the sidewalk being loaded with wooden boxes of all sizes. Could it be? Oh how horrible! Her father had always encouraged her to go to that store, even though things were expensive there, rather than to go a little farther where they were cheaper.

  Suddenly she turned and fled up the stairs, her lips quivering, her eyes streaming, her heart fairly smothered with surging emotions. Back to her room she fled and locked the door, buried her face in her pillow, and prayed. But now the prayer was not for deliverance for herself. She prayed for her father.

  “Oh God, forgive
him! Forgive him! He did it for me—I know he did! He always wanted me to have nice things. He used to say I ought to have the things my mother had when she was a girl! Oh God, please forgive him! Won’t You please, please to forgive him, and not let him have to suffer for it? He was not well, You know, and he had tried so long to get a position! Oh dear God, help me somehow to make up for the wrong he has done, and don’t punish him. My poor dear Father!”

  Wildly she whispered the petition into her pillow, sobbing her heart out between gasps.

  “Please forgive my father, and make him get better somehow so he will know You love him yet. Mother loved him, and Mother loved You. Won’t You forgive him for Mother’s sake? I know Mother is in heaven with You. Won’t You forgive him? Oh, forgive him, for Jesus’ sake—”

  There seemed to come a calm into her heart after that, and she crept upon her bed and slept from pure exhaustion.

  The sun was shining brightly across her bed when the nurse tapped at the door with a tray.

  There was toast and poached eggs and a cup of tea set forth appetizingly. The nurse had a kind voice. She told her she must eat or she would be sick.

  Romayne did not feel hungry. The thought of food was revolting. She felt as if she had been dead and buried a long time, and she wished this strange nurse would go away, this woman who kept on saying things that she had not listened to.

  “You will have to eat something,” she was saying, “because they have sent for you to come down and see your brother again. And before you go, you must come and sit with your father while I straighten up. The day nurse will be here presently.”

  “Oh,” said Romayne with sudden responsibility, “but I do not need to eat. I will come at once. I am not hungry.”

  “You must eat!” said the nurse with an air of finality. “See, I have made breakfast for you!”

  It seemed a matter of courtesy, so she ate what was on the tray, wishing the woman would go away.