Munsey's Magazine/Volume 86/Issue 4/The Unwritten Story/Chapter 11
XI
A week later they came back to Boston.
In this world of inextricable human complications, of tangled enigmas whereof only fate can give the answer, was ever a stranger anomaly than this, or a less congruous little group than the five who, that sunny and snowy afternoon of early March, drove up Beacon Hill in the soft-cushioned limousine?
Let us glimpse them. First, an aged man, brain-touched and nerve-shaken, smiling fatuously through all the exhaustions of his long journey, with the supreme beatitude of a lifelong search ended and of longed-for ones once more gathered to his arms.
Then a careworn woman of some fifty years, the opulent beauty of her new fur coat contrasting sharply with the harassed look of faded blue eyes that mirrored only fear.
Beside her, likewise in miraculous furs, and with a fetching new hat close-drawn over luxuriant black hair, a slender girl of nineteen—a girl eager-eyed at all this unaccustomed luxury, thrilled by this city of dreams and by anticipations of the wondrous home soon to be hers.
Next, seated with the chauffeur, Professor Maximilian Veazie, his thin lips hard and smiling under his red mustache; and last, a frightened negro at the wheel, held to his task only by a liberal supply of “coke” and by the professor's largesse.
“Well, children, here we are at last!” the old man quaveringly exulted, as the car swung to the curb and stopped. “A weary trip we've had of it, but now it's all over. We're home at last!”
They helped him out of the limousine, his numbed legs hardly able to support him, and got him into the house. Followed a vast confusion of baggage, of getting their things off, of meeting Miss Lavinia Grush, more glum and dour than ever. Amid all this pother Professor Veazie discreetly vanished, like one of his own wraiths.
“Oh, oh, oh!” Disney exclaimed, with the delight of a youthful and perfectly unspoiled ingenuousness.
The transition from the almost conventual austerity of a boarding house to the luxury of a mansion on Beacon Hill left her nearly breathless. The violet blackness of her eyes fairly sparkled with delight as she looked about the truly impressive drawing-room, ran a deft hand over the keyboard of the grand piano so long silent, glanced through the purple-paned windows at the unknown allurements of the motor-thronged street and the—to her—fascinating snow still patching the Common.
“Isn't this just wonderful, mother?” she frankly exulted. “Isn't it all like a dream? What a beautiful place! How I love the snow! It's all just like a dream! Is it true?”
“Come here, child, and kiss me again,” bade the trembling old aristocrat, from the wing chair into which, before the fire, he had sunk exhausted. “It's all true. There, if you're happy, what do you think of me?”
“I think you're the most wonderful grandfather in all this world, and I know I love you!”
Lockwood smiled with a happiness too deep for words, as Disney, perched on the arm of his big chair, smoothed back the scant white hair from his forehead; but her mother closed eyes of pain and turned away, and Miss Grush, watching, smiled with a grimness destined to bear bitter fruits!
That afternoon, an hour after lunch, in the huge, high-wainscoted dining room with the steel engravings and the massive brass-handled sideboard, Miss Grush had her first passage at arms with the interloping Mrs. Forrester.
Old Lockwood, completely done up, had been persuaded to go to bed. Disney, not to be denied, had gone out for some preliminary explorations of Boston, especially the Common and its scant, though to her almost miraculous, film of snow. Only once in her life, twelve years before, had the girl ever seen snow, and now she simply had to walk upon it. Though—
“Mind, now,” her mother had warned, “you're to be back before five. Things in Boston aren't like Charleston. This is a great big city, and there's no telling what might happen to a girl here.”
“As if I were a child!” Disney had laughingly retorted, already at the door. “I reckon I can look out for myself!”
Blowing her mother a kiss, she had gone out—fur-clad and glowing with young enthusiasms—into the allure of this strange, fascinating new life.
As Mrs. Forrester turned back into the hallway, Lavinia Grush spoke to her:
“If you don't mind, I'd like a few words with you!”
The housekeeper beckoned the woman from Charleston into the drawing-room. She left the door open. Open doors are safer, when servants may listen at key-holes; and as for Lockwood, he lay dead to the world, two stories above.
“Well,” asked Mrs. Forrester, with sinking heart, “what do you want of me?”
Miss Grush's eyes glowed almost like the coals in the grate.
“Now we can have this thing out!” she announced in a low voice, tremulous with outraged jealousy and hate.
“Have what out?”
“Listen to me! I'm nobody's fool, even if Mr. Lockwood is, and—”
“What do you mean by that? I don't intend to—”
“Oh, yes, you will! You'll hear what I've got to say! There's not a dite of use for you to be spity, or you'll get your come-uppance all the quicker!” The old woman's tones were vitriol. “You'd better listen, for your own good and your gal's, I hope to tell you! I won't beat round any bushes, either. I'll call a spade a spade, I will! I've totted up the whole story, and I know Professor Veazie's a thunderation fraud, and you're another. A pretty pair of tuffies, you are! Why, my soul an' deliverance, you're no more the old man's daughter than I am myself!”
“Oh!” Mrs. Forrester's hand went to her heart. “Why—what—how do you dare—”
The housekeeper laughed bitterly.
“As if anybody'd believe such an outrageous story—anybody, that is, but Mr. Lockwood! He'd believe the moon's made of green cheese, he would, if that would help him find the daughter that's been dead and gone these forty or fifty years! No, no—don't you put your paddle in yet! Let me tell you what's what, first. Veazie's a crook, Lockwood's a broken down old idiot, and you—well, you won't tear under the wing!”
“I—I refuse to listen to—”
“You'd better listen, if you don't want Something bad to happen to you and that gal of yours, that little hoity-toity that's not dry behind the ears yet!” Miss Grush's eyes fixed and held her adversary with an ophidian glitter. “I know!”
Pale to the lips, shivering and faint, Mrs. Forrester turned toward the door; but Miss Grush barred the way.
“You come in here, lollygaggin' over that crack-brained old man! Your gal comes in here, hinkerin' and hankerin', with her little dimmy-simmy-quivers on the piano! And you turn me out cold! You—”
“Why, be reasonable! We're not turning you out!”
“Oh, yes, you are! It comes to the same thing. You think I'm goin' to work and slave for that pernickety old fool twenty-seven years, and then have a couple of impostures come in here and jew me out of everythin' he's promised me—everythin' he's made writin's to leave me?” Fury lay in those lens-magnified eyes, in the thin, rouged lips, in the set jaw that bristled with white hairs. “You think I'm goin' to give up, go scratch my foot and be disinherited by the likes o' you? I wish he'd died, I do, before he ever lived to disinherit me!”
“How terrible!”
“Yes, it is terrible—terrible for me! I don't live here now. I just stay. I've got no namable part or parcel of his property now—all on account o' you, you wicked, lyin', deceitful creature!”
“Hush! For Heaven's sake, hush!” exclaimed the distracted Mrs. Forrester, with a gesture of desperation. “Somebody might overhear you!”
“Good thing if they did! The whole world will overhear me, if this goes much further. I'll tell everybody, I will. I'll go to the police. I—I'll tell the papers!” Miss Grush's gnarled and knobby hand was raised in menace. “Oh, I ain't so helpless, even if I am old, and not a cent in the world but what he was goin' to give me! You can blow your bags about bein' his daughter, all you're a mind to! I can blow a few bags, myself. I've got friends, I have!”
“Friends?”
“Yes, sir—friends on the papers. I've got a friend on one big paper here. What a write-up he'd make, if I only took and told him!”
“You—great Heavens, you wouldn't do that?”
“I wouldn't, eh? Is there anything a hard-workin' woman like me wouldn't do, to protect herself? I tell you I'm not goin' to be cheated like this—not by a barefaced fraud! You dare stand there and tell me you're really that old man's daughter, do you?”
“Why—why—what else—who else could I be?”
Miss Grush snapped bony fingers of derision.
“I hate a liar worse 'n I do the devil!” she sneered. “A woman liar, specially. We'll soon have this out! No later 'n to-morrow I'm goin' to Mr. Lockwood with the whole kit and caboodle of the story!”
“For God's sake, don't!” Mrs. Forrester was pleading now, her hand outstretched and shaking. “For my daughter's sake, if not mine, don't do that!”
“You admit it, then? You admit you're a fraud?”
The woman's head drooped. She leaned against a chair, and then sank into it, nerveless, spent.
“You don't have to!” exulted the housekeeper. “I haven't lived all this time in this world of sin, not to know all the symptoms of lyin'. Who you are, I don't know, but I know you're no more his daughter than a cat's hind fiddle is straight!”
“No—I'm not,” answered the unfortunate woman, her voice thin and taut as a drawn wire. “I hate all this! I hate a lie as much as you, or anybody! I've been forced into this by that beast of a Veazie!”
White-faced and trembling she peered at her accuser.
“Ah, ha! I thought so!” exulted Miss Grush. “Nobody can fool me, I hope to tell you!”
“Veazie was—yes, I might as well tell you, for you're a woman, in spite of everything, and maybe there's a spark of mercy somewhere in you—Veazie was my first husband.”
“He was? My soul and senses!”
“Yes. I divorced him for—well, never mind. If my daughter knew this, it would—but you won't tell her? You'll spare me that?”
“I'll spare you if I can do it and protect myself. I've got nothin' against you two, except your takin' the very bread and butter out o' my mouth.” A certain mollification was growing apparent in the old housekeeper. “I'm reasonable, I am.”
“Yes, yes, I know you are! It's terrible for you, this is. I had no idea—but listen. I married again, had this daughter, and hoped Veazie would only leave me alone. My husband died. I had to keep boarders. You know what that means,”
“This is a mortal hard world for lone females—that's right!”
“When Veazie hatched this terrible scheme of his, he picked on me to help him carry it out. He forced me into it. I couldn't stand his threats to spread slanders about me and ruin me. God knows I'd a thousand times rather have been left alone to run a boarding house in Charleston! I wouldn't want to get into this awful trouble for all of Lockwood's money—for all the money in the world!”
“I bet that's true, too,” the housekeeper agreed, nodding her head, on which the henna wig had twisted somewhat awry, letting sparse gray hairs protrude. “What a wrong that villain done you! Oh, these men, these men! A man done me an awful wrong, too, long ago, and I've never got over it. Veazie ought to be hung for this, what's he done to you and me!”
“That wouldn't do any good, if he was. My daughter's here, and I'm here—and what are we going to do?”
“Do? You're goin' to fix things, some way, so's I won't get cheated out of my very eyeteeth—that's what!”
“Oh, I will, I will; but tell me how! Help me, Miss Grush! You've got to. You're a woman, too!”
“Great night, what a touse we're in, the whole of us! Must be some way out of it. Let's see, now—let's see!”
The old housekeeper drew up a chair close beside Mrs. Forrester, sat down, and blinked through her thick glasses.
For a long time, while the late afternoon sunshine crept up the wall and tinged with crimson the ancestral portraits there, the two women sat and talked. They talked, while above stairs the spent and tired Lockwood slept, unconscious of the webs of destiny enweaving him. They talked, while the great clock on the stairway told its beads upon the chaplet of eternity. They talked till at last Disney came in, clear-eyed, buoyant, her cream-hued cheeks dashed with color from the keen March wind.
A very spirit of life and youth and joy, she entered that somber old house; and it was as if springtime entered with her.
“Oh, mother, what a wonderful city she exclaimed, throwing off her furs. “What streets, what stores—and this glorious Northern air! And the sunset and the snow—and now this lovely old house! It's all, all a dream. I haven't waked up yet!”
“God grant you never will, dear,” said Mrs. Forrester, with a rather wan smile.
The housekeeper, silent, but shaking her head with an air as if to say “Heaven help us all!” got up and with slow tread withdrew to her own room.