Part 46

“No. Somebody's he's ashamed of, probably, or he wouldn't be so clandestine about it.”

“Nina!”

“Well, it looks like it. Jim's a man, mother. He's not a little boy. He'll go through his shady period, like the rest.”

That night it was Mrs. Wheeler's turn to lie awake. Again and again she went over Nina's words, and her troubled mind found a basis in fact for them. Jim had been getting money from her, to supplement his small salary; he had been going out a great deal at night, and returning very late; once or twice, in the morning, he had looked ill and his eyes had been bloodshot, as though he had been drinking.

Anxiety gripped her. There were so many temptations for young men, so many who waited to waylay them. A girl. Not a good girl, perhaps.

She raised herself on her elbow and looked at her sleeping husband. Men were like that; they begot children and then forgot them. They never looked ahead or worried. They were taken up with business, and always they forgot that once they too had been young and liable to temptation.

She got up, some time later, and tiptoed to the door of Jim's room. Inside she could hear his heavy, regular breathing. Her boy. Her only son.

She went back and crawled carefully into the bed.

There was an acrimonious argument between Jim and his father the next morning, and Jim slammed out of the house, leaving chaos behind him. It was then that Elizabeth learned that her father was going away. He said:

“Maybe I'm wrong, mother. I don't know. Perhaps, when I come back, I'll look around for a car. I don't want him driven to doing underhand things.”

“Are you going away?” Elizabeth asked, surprised.

It appeared that he was. More than that, that he was going West with Dick. It was all arranged and nobody had told her anything about it.

She was hurt and a trifle offended, and she cried a little about it. Yet, as Dick explained to her later that day, it was simple enough. Her father needed a rest, and besides, it was right that he should know all about Dick's life before he came to Haverly.

“He's going to make me a present of something highly valuable, you know.”

“But it looks as though he didn't trust you!”

“He's being very polite about it; but, of course, in his eyes I'm a common thief, stealing--”

She would not let him go on.

A certain immaturity, the blind confidence of youth in those it loves, explains Elizabeth's docility at that time. But underneath her submission that day was a growing uneasiness, fiercely suppressed. Buried deep, the battle between absolute trust and fear was beginning, a battle which was so rapidly to mature her.

Nina, shrewd and suspicious, sensed something of nervous strain in her when she came in, later that day, to borrow a hat.

“Look here, Elizabeth,” she began, “I want to talk to you. Are you going to live in this--this hole all your life?”

“Hole nothing,” Elizabeth said, hotly. “Really, Nina, I do think you might be more careful of what you say.”

“Oh, it's a dear old hole,” Nina said negligently. “But hole it is, nevertheless. Why in the world mother don't manage her servants--but no matter about that now. Elizabeth, there's a lot of talk about you and Dick Livingstone, and it makes me furious. When I think that you can have Wallie Sayre by lifting your finger--”

“And that I don't intend to lift my finger,” Elizabeth interrupted.

“Then you're a fool. And it is Dick Livingstone!”

“It is, Nina.”

Nina's ambitious soul was harrowed.

“That stodgy old house,” she said, “and two old people! A general house-work girl, and you cooking on her Thursdays out! I wish you joy of it.”

“I wonder,” Elizabeth said calmly, “whether it ever occurs to you that I may put love above houses and servants? Or that my life is my own, to live exactly as I please? Because that is what I intend to do.”