Jennie Gerhardt - Драйзер Теодор. Страница 49

meditative, helpless figure.

"Gone!" she thought.

At this moment his footsteps sounded on the stairs. He came in with his

derby hat pulled low over his broad forehead, close to his sandy

eyebrows, and with his overcoat buttoned up closely about his neck. He

took off the coat without looking at Jennie and hung it on the rack. Then he deliberately took off his hat and hung that up also. When he was

through he turned to where she was watching him with wide eyes.

"I want to know about this thing now from beginning to end," he began.

"Whose child is that?"

Jennie wavered a moment, as one who might be going to take a leap in

the dark, then opened her lips mechanically and confessed:

"It's Senator Brander's."

"Senator Brander!" echoed Lester, the familiar name of the dead but still famous statesman ringing with shocking and unexpected force in his ears.

"How did you come to know him?"

"We used to do his washing for him," she rejoined simply—"my mother and I."

Lester paused, the baldness of the statements issuing from her sobering

even his rancorous mood. "Senator Brander's child," he thought to himself. So that great representative of the interests of the common

people was the undoer of her—a self-confessed washerwoman's daughter.

A fine tragedy of low life all this was.

"How long ago was this?" he demanded, his face the picture of a darkling mood.

"It's been nearly six years now," she returned.

He calculated the time that had elapsed since he had known her, and then

continued:

"How old is the child?"

"She's a little over five."

Lester moved a little. The need for serious thought made his tone more

peremptory but less bitter.

"Where have you been keeping her all this time?"

"She was at home until you went to Cincinnati last spring. I went down and brought her then."

"Was she there the times I came to Cleveland?"

"Yes," said Jennie; "but I didn't let her come out anywhere where you could see her."

"I thought you said you told your people that you were married," he exclaimed, wondering how this relationship of the child to the family

could have been adjusted.

"I did," she replied, "but I didn't want to tell you about her. They thought all the time I intended to."

"Well, why didn't you?"

"Because I was afraid."

"Afraid of what?"

"I didn't know what was going to become of me when I went with you,

Lester. I didn't want to do her any harm if I could help it. I was ashamed, afterward; when you said you didn't like children I was afraid."

"Afraid I'd leave you?"

"Yes."

He stopped, the simplicity of her answers removing a part of the

suspicion of artful duplicity which had originally weighed upon him.

After all, there was not so much of that in it as mere wretchedness of

circumstance and cowardice of morals. What a family she must have!

What queer non-moral natures they must have to have brooked any such a

combination of affairs! "Didn't you know that you'd be found out in the long run?" he at last demanded. "Surely you might have seen that you couldn't raise her that way. Why didn't you tell me in the first place? I wouldn't have thought anything of it then."

"I know," she said. "I wanted to protect her."

"Where is she now?" he asked.

Jennie explained.

She stood there, the contradictory aspect of these questions and of his

attitude puzzling even herself. She did try to explain them after a time, but all Lester could gain was that she had blundered along without any

artifice at all—a condition that was so manifest that, had he been in any other position than that he was, he might have pitied her. As it was, the revelation concerning Brander was hanging over him, and he finally

returned to that.

"You say your mother used to do washing for him. How did you come to get in with him?"

Jennie, who until now had borne his questions with unmoving pain,

winced at this. He was now encroaching upon the period that was by far

the most distressing memory of her life. What he had just asked seemed

to be a demand upon her to make everything clear.

"I was so young, Lester," she pleaded. "I was only eighteen. I didn't know.

I used to go to the hotel where he was stopping and get his laundry, and at the end of the week I'd take it to him again."

She paused, and as he took a chair, looking as if he expected to hear the whole story, she continued: "We were so poor. He used to give me money to give to my mother. I didn't know."

She paused again, totally unable to go on, and he, seeing that it would be impossible for her to explain without prompting, took up his questioning

again—eliciting by degrees the whole pitiful story. Brander had intended

to marry her. He had written to her, but before he could come to her he

died.

The confession was complete. It was followed by a period of five

minutes, in which Lester said nothing at all; he put his arm on the mantel and stared at the wall, while Jennie waited, not knowing what would

follow—not wishing to make a single plea. The clock ticked audibly.

Lester's face betrayed no sign of either thought or feeling. He was now

quite calm, quite sober, wondering what he should do. Jennie was before

him as the criminal at the bar. He, the righteous, the moral, the pure of heart, was in the judgment seat. Now to sentence her—to make up his

mind what course of action he should pursue.

It was a disagreeable tangle, to be sure, something that a man of his

position and wealth really ought not to have anything to do with. This

child, the actuality of it, put an almost unbearable face upon the whole

matter—and yet he was not quite prepared to speak. He turned after a

time, the silvery tinkle of the French clock on the mantel striking three and causing him to become aware of Jennie, pale, uncertain, still standing as she had stood all this while.

"Better go to bed," he said at last, and fell again to pondering this difficult problem.

But Jennie continued to stand there wide-eyed, expectant, ready to hear at any moment his decision as to her fate. She waited in vain, however.

After a long time of musing he turned and went to the clothes-rack near

the door.

"Better go to bed," he said, indifferently. "I'm going out."

She turned instinctively, feeling that even in this crisis there was some little service that she might render, but he did not see her. He went out, vouchsafing no further speech.

She looked after him, and as his footsteps sounded on the stair she felt as if she were doomed and hearing her own death-knell. What had she done?

What would he do now? She stood there a dissonance of despair, and

when the lower door clicked moved her hand out of the agony of her

suppressed hopelessness.

"Gone!" she thought. "Gone!"

In the light of a late dawn she was still sitting there pondering, her state far too urgent for idle tears.

CHAPTER XXX

The sullen, philosophic Lester was not so determined upon his future

course of action as he appeared to be. Stern as was his mood, he did not

see, after all, exactly what grounds he had for complaint. And yet the

child's existence complicated matters considerably. He did not like to see the evidence of Jennie's previous misdeeds walking about in the shape of