A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 3/Chapter 8
He went that night to sleep in the room above the stable, and on the following Tuesday Naomi and the twins moved into the three rooms above the drugstore in Front Street. Emma stayed home from the restaurant all day, going and coming to and from the newly established household. She did and thought of everything, so that Naomi in the end gave up, and, sitting on the imitation-tapestry davenport, simply watched her mother-in-law arrange the new household. Mabelle was there, too, with little Jimmy, in the way most of the time, or making suggestions which Emma ignored. She was a creature whose feelings were not easily hurt and all Emma's bitter remarks seemed to have left no trace. When they had left Naomi with the three rooms in order, she even walked home with Emma, dragging the tired and whining Jimmy behind her.
As she hurried through the darkness after Emma's tall, robust form, she panted, "Well, things might go better now. I always think young people ought to start out in a house of their own."
"Yes," said Emma, certain from the remark that Naomi hadn't told Mabelle the whole truth.
"It's funny what a change has come over Philip. He's much nicer than he used to be."
"What on earth do you mean by that, Mabelle?"
Here Jimmy set up a yell—"I don't wanna walk! I wanna be carried!"
"All right, dear, only you mustn't cry. Little men don't cry."
"Well, I do. I'm tired. I don't wanna walk!"
"All right, dear." She bent down and picked up the child. He continued to whine, but at least their progress was not retarded.
"If he were my child, Mabelle," said Emma, "I'd into Egypt just leave him sitting on the curb till he got good and ready to walk. I never had any trouble with Philip. . . . He's always been obedient and respectful."
"But Jimmy's delicate, and I'd rather carry him than have him whine."
"He's whining in any case," said Emma, acidly.
Mabelle was puffing now beneath her burden and the long steps of Emma. But she managed to say, "What I mean about Philip is . . . that he's more masterful now. He's a man. He's the kind of a man that women have a right to be afraid of."
Emma snorted. "Don't talk such rot, Mabelle. If you'd read less trash."
"It's funny about him taking up with the Shane."
Naomi had told her, then, about the stable. And Mabelle was a sieve: whatever you told her poured right on through. "He hasn't taken up with the Shanes. He's simply using their stable to work in. That's not the same thing. Why, he barely knows them—except that half-crazy old maid, Irene. And he doesn't know the others at all."
"Then it must be that Mary Conyngham. She's friends with them."
"Mary Conyngham!" repeated Emma. "Mary Conyngham! Why, he hasn't seen her in years!" But the shock of the name turned her suddenly thoughtful, so that she walked at a slower pace, mercifully for Mabelle.
"Well, he might have seen her," persisted Mabelle. "She's mixed up with Irene Shane's school for the Dagoes and Hunkies. They all belong to the same crowd . . . all thinking they can make something out of a lot of bums." For a moment she was so completely here winded that she could not speak. When she recovered her breath, she said, "I remembered the other night that they'd been sweet on each other once."
Still Emma walked furiously in silence, and presently Mabelle said, "Of course, I didn't say anything about her to Naomi. She might be upset just now."
"No," said Emma, "and don't say anything to her about it or to any one else. It's nonsense."
"Well, I didn't know. I was just interested in Philip, and Naomi, and in his queer behavior, and I always find that when a man goes off his head like that, there's a woman about somewhere."
"I forbid you, Mabelle, to speak of it to any one." She halted and took Mabelle by the shoulder. "You understand? That's the way silly talk gets started."
Mabelle was silent as they resumed their way, but presently she said, "That Lily Shane . . . she's come home to see the old woman die."
"They're a bad lot, all of 'em," said Emma, "and I guess she's the Jezebel of the lot."
"I hate to see a good boy like Philip getting mixed up with people like that."
"He's not getting mixed up, I tell you."
"What am I to tell people about him, Em, if they ask me?"
"Tell them that he's going to be an artist. You might say, too, that he has a fine talent, and later he's going to New York to study."
She had thought it all out. There was only one method—"to take the bull by the horns." If Philip wasn't one day to be a bishop, he might be a great artist and paint great religious pictures like the man who did the Sistine Madonna or the Flight into Egypt.
The voice of Jimmy interrupted her thoughts. "Aren't we nearly home? I'm hungry!"
"Yes, dearie. That's your house right there. . . . See the one with the red light in the window?"
"I don't like Aunt Em. I wish she'd go away."
"Shh! Jimmy! Shh! He's tired, Em, that's all—the poor little thing."
They reached the house with the red light in the window, and bade each other good-night.
"Remember what I said," was Emma's final word.
After she left the gate, only one thought occupied the mind of Emma, the thought that it was Mary Conyngham who had stolen Philip from them both—from herself and Naomi. "Mary Conyngham, of course," she told herself. "What a fool I've been not to think of her before! It would be like her and her superior ways. The Watts always thought nobody good enough for 'em but the Shanes—that bawdy old woman and her two daughters—one a lunatic and the other a harlot. Yes, Mary Conyngham could carry on to her heart's content there in the Flats, and no one would know of it. The Shanes would only help her. Shane's Castle had been like a bawdy-house in the days when old John Shane was still living."
She was in a savage humor, born partly of her irritation at Naomi's helplessness, and partly of disgust at Mabelle's feeble-minded chatter; and now she had found an object on which to pin it. It was Mary Conyngham who lay at the root of everything: it explained why Mary had stopped her that day to ask about Philip.
"Mabelle," she thought, "is a dangerous woman, going about and saying things like that when she knows nothing."
Mabelle was a constructive gossip. Having nothing to keep her occupied, she sat about all day thinking up things, putting two and two together, pinning odd pieces of stories together to construct a whole, but she did have (thought Emma) an uncanny way of scenting out scandal; her only fault was that she sometimes told the story before in fact it had happened. She came upon a scrap, the merest suspicion of some dubious story, and presently after days of morbid brooding it reappeared, trimmed and garnished to perfection, with such an air of reality about it that if it wasn't true, it might easily have been.
It was the uncanny faculty of Mabelle's that really troubled Emma. Her suspicion of Mary Conyngham frightened her even while it gave her satisfaction. It occurred to her that Philip was now quite beyond control, as his father had sometimes been. Anything might happen. She dared not think of it. For a moment she felt the quick shadow of foreboding, of some tragedy that lay ahead, beyond the power of anything to prevent.
She shook it off quickly, thinking, "That is nonsense. I can still bring Philip to his senses."
Inside the house, she prepared her own supper, and spent an hour in clearing up her own house, putting from sight every trace of Naomi.
At nine o'clock Moses Slade came to call. He was in a furious temper. He brought with him a labor periodical, called The Beacon.
"It was marked," he said, "and sent to me through the mail."
Opening it, he showed her the desecration of his most admired editorial. It was a fragment of the local newspaper, stained and torn, which read, ". . . sacred rights of property must be protected against the attacks of men little better than brutes, etc., etc.," and signed in large black letters Moses Slade. On the face of the printing some irreverent hand had made a series of drawings in pencil—a Croat woman feeding her three small children with coffee out of a clumsy tin cup, a gigantic, bearded Slovak and his wizened, tubercular wife, a baby wrapped in the remains of a ragged pair of overalls, a thin, shivering girl with the face of a Madonna. The whole had been photographed and reproduced.
Underneath them was a line which read, "These are the brutes of the Honorable Moses Slade who have endangered our most sacred institutions and destroyed our God-given prosperity." And beside it was a caricature of Slade himself, gross, overdressed, with flowing locks and a leering expression, beneath which was written: "Puzzle—find the beast on these two pages."
He banged the table with his hamlike fist. "By God, I'll find out who did it, and make him pay for his impudence! I'm not a force in this Town for nothing!"
Emma turned faintly pale, but she only said, "It's shameful, I think, Moses, but what can you expect from such people? They have no respect for our institutions . . . our excellent Congressmen."
But she knew well enough who had made the drawing.