Munsey's Magazine/Volume 86/Issue 4/The Unwritten Story/Chapter 5
V
For a moment the woman stood silent, looking at the unwelcome visitor. She seemed to shrink, to fade. The essence of life appeared ebbing in her, as if some inescapable octopus or vampire bat had fastened upon her, against which all struggle were vain. A sigh escaped her. One hand sought the door jamb, steadying her. She rallied, however. She turned back into the hallway and called out:
“Disney!”
“Yes, mother!” sounded the girl's voice from regions unseen.
“Run up to Hetman's drug store on King Street, hon, and get that prescription.” The woman's voice held quavers that she labored to suppress. “It's filled by now.”
“All right, mother!”
Only when the girl was gone did Mrs. Forrester come into the parlor. With a very thriving panic in her eyes, she confronted the professor.
A moment's fateful silence weighed heavy between them. Outside, in Broad Street, sounded the siren of a motor car, the crack of a whiplash round a mule's ears, the crooning song of a negro wench who passed:
“Yo' kin talk 'bout de high yallers,
But gimme de brown an' de black!”
The professor coughed slightly.
“Listen, Harriet—don't be alarmed,” he began, with what was intended to be a soothing tone. “I haven't come back with any disposition to hurt you. Of course I haven't! On the contrary, my dear, I've got something advantageous to offer—something highly advantageous.”
“As if you could hurt me any more than you've already hurt me!” she retorted with quivering bitterness, “As if you could offer me anything!”
The dim light revealed her as a thin, work-worn woman of about fifty, white-haired already, and with darkly anxious eyes that held a peculiar quality of seeing through and past things, as if in search of something never to be found anywhere in this world. Now she stood, her hands gripped together at her breast, looking at the professor as one might perhaps look at a rattlesnake coiled to strike—looking with fascination and terror mingled.
“See here, Harriet,” he proffered, forcing a smile that disclosed his gold tooth, “we can't talk here. There's too much possible eavesdropping in a boarding house. Walk out with me. There's a little park down the street, diagonally across from the post office. That 'll do. We can sit on a bench there and talk this thing out without anybody butting in.”
“No, Brackett! I won't go. I won't go anywhere with you!”
“Oh, you won't, eh?” His voice grew poisonous. “I'd contaminate you, I suppose! Well, you will go, or by God you'll be out of business here in less than a week! You know me!”
Their eyes met, clashed a moment—and hers fell.
“Maybe you'd rather talk it out here,” he gibed, “with a lot of rubbernecks listening over the banisters!”
“Hush, Brackett! I—I'll go; but I tell you, right now, I'm through with you and your deals forever!”
To this he vouchsafed only a smile, and—
“Come, let's go!”
A few minutes—after a silent walk—and they were sitting in the vague seclusion of the little square flanked by St. Michael's massive white bulk and by the spacious galleries of the old Timrod Hotel. Veazie began once more:
“Now, Harriet, it's no use your being stiff-necked and rebellious. When I cleared out and let you get your divorce for desertion, I told you plainly I'd be back some time—if I ever needed you; and here I am now.”
“After money?”
“Huh! Hardly! Quite the reverse.” He laughed, with all the merriment of a creaking hinge. 'No, my dear, ]'ve got a good thing to offer you—a peach of a good thing! I don't make any bones about admitting that it's for my own interest, but”—he rubbed his hairy hands together—“you can ring in on it, too, and clean up handsomely; and so can—what's the girl's name? Dismay, or something like that? The two of you—”
“Keep my daughter's name out of this!” cried Mrs. Forrester.
“Can't be done,” he smiled. “She's bound to get involved—to get into trouble, too, if you make a row. But why should you, my dear?”
She shuddered at the mockery of the word.
“What is it this time?” she asked bitterly. “Blackmail, or extortion, or—”
“It's something you're going to help me with. It's a peach of a game, as I said before.”
“You'll get no help here!”
“Oh, yes, I shall—the best kind. What are you trying to resist for? Want me to rake up old times and—”
“That was all a lie, Brackett, what you charged me with, and you know it!”
“I can make it stick, if I try. You don't want the girl to hear about it, eh?”
The woman made a helpless gesture.
“You scoundrel!”
“Easy, easy!” he warned. “That's no way to talk to your first husband, the man you once swore to love, honor, and obey! Just because I accommodated you to the extent of letting you get rid of me, and because you married again and now have a very charming, talented daughter by your late lamented second husband—excellent musician, no doubt, though shiftless, and leaving you to run a boarding house—just because you're now a perfectly respectable widow, that don't give you any license to throw mud at me. Even if it did—”
A booming bell stroke from St. Michael's steeple interrupted him. Eight more followed. As the last echoes died on the vibrant night air, Mrs. Forrester desperately demanded:
“Well, what do you want?”
“Ah, that is the main question! I've been to all the trouble of looking you up, and traveling some eight hundred miles, in my busy season as a high-grade trance medium and séance expert, just to interview you, my dear Harriet; so you see it must be pretty important.”
“So that's your line now, is it?” she bitterly exclaimed. “Spiritualism!”
“Yes, my dear—with materializations, slate writings, levitation, trumpets, and all the fixings—even ectoplasm, for highbrows who demand it. Strictly a high-grade line. As a go-getter, it can't be beat.”
She laughed with a maladroit directness of scorn that creased his brows to anger.
“I'll break you, and your girl into the bargain!” he was thinking. “Break you both, if you resist!”
But he forced himself to go on smoothly:
“If you had only seen fit to stick with me, and get into this lay, we could have made a clean-up long ago. You could be living in a swell Boston apartment and riding in a limousine, instead of running a hash house. Never mind—let bygones be bygones, and no hard feelings, my dear. The important thing now is that I've got a big deal on. There's unlimited cash in it, if I work it right. There's a good rake-off in it for you, too—a corking good rake-off. That's why I'm here.”
Mrs. Forrester shook her head in refusal.
“No, sir!” she rebuffed the professor. “I know altogether too much about you and your deals! Every dollar you've ever made in all your life has been tainted, some way or another, and I don't want any money like that. This is hard work, here, Lord knows, but it's decent. It's clean! All I want of you is for you to get out and leave me—leave Disney—alone!”
He laughed mockingly.
“Noble virtue in poverty, on an honest crust! All very fine, Harriet, but it don't go this time; because, you see, I need you in my business. What's more”—suddenly he gripped her arm—“I'm going to have you!”
“No, no! Go away! Leave me alone!”
“Fat chance!” he sneered, sensing how she was weakening. “Look here, now, no more nonsense! You either come through with me, or—well, I'll spill a hatful of information about you!”
“Lies, all lies!”
“All right, yes; but that don't matter. Throw enough mud, and some's bound to stick. I'll find ways and means to give your darling daughter quite another slant on her dear, devoted mother!”
“She'll never listen!”
“Want to buck me, do you? In your experience of me, have you ever known me to say I'd do a thing and not do it?”
Her head sank. She sat there on the park bench in the faint tremble of street lights through the new green mist of spring foliage on the trees, terrified, shaking, beaten.
“Come, come!” adjured the professor. His hirsute grip on her arm relaxed. Reassuringly he patted her hand, which lay upon her knee. “Listen, Harriet—it's not so bad as you're trying to make out. What is there to be scared of? Nothing! You work this right, with me, and there's a world of money in it for you and the girl. Think what a girl of her talent could do with money—the right kind of musical training! It 'll be the making of her, and—”
“Don't, don't!”
“Oughtn't a mother to make some effort, some sacrifice, for her daughter, even if not for herself? Of course she had! There's not a ghost of a risk anywhere. I'm an expert on ghosts, and I know! I'll train you and coach you, put you wise to everything, keep you posted from Boston, make you letter perfect in every detail, before anything stirs; and then, with me to give you the right steer—”
“Brackett! I beg you, if you ever loved me—even a little bit, as you once said you did—let me be!”
The professor only stroked his red mustache and laughed with easy and domineering patronage.
“Listen, now!” he commanded. “I'm going to spill the scheme; and if it's not a bird, I'm no judge of birds—or of long lost daughters, either. Listen, now!”