第40章

Perhaps the most amazing, the most stunning, of all the blows fate had thus suddenly showered upon her was this transformation of her uncle from gentleness to ferocity.But many a far older and far wiser woman than seventeen-year-old Susan has failed to understand how it is with the man who does not regard woman as a fellow human being.To such she is either an object of adoration, a quintessence of purity and innocence, or less than the dust, sheer filth.Warham's anger was no gust.He was simply the average man of small intelligence, great vanity, and abject snobbishness or terror of public opinion.There could be but one reason for the flight of Lorella's daughter--rottenness.The only point to consider now was how to save the imperiled family standing, how to protect his own daughter, whom his good nature and his wife's weakness had thus endangered.The one thing that could have appeased his hatred of Susan would have been her marriage to Sam Wright.Then he would have--not, indeed, forgiven or reinstated her--but tolerated her.It is the dominance of such ideas as his that makes for woman the slavery she discovers beneath her queenly sway if she happens to do something deeply displeasing to her masculine subject and adorer.

They went to the Central Station.The O.and M.express which connected with the train on the branch line to Sutherland would not leave until a quarter past two.It was only a few minutes past one.Warham led the way into the station restaurant; with a curt nod he indicated a seat at one of the small tables, and dropped into the opposite seat.He ordered beefsteak and fried potatoes, coffee and apple pie.

"Sit still!" he said to her roughly and rose to go out to buy a paper.

The girl sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes upon them.

She looked utterly, pitifully tired.A moment and he came back to resume his seat and read the paper.When the waiter flopped down the steak and the dish of greasily fried potatoes before his plate, he stuffed the paper in his pocket, cut a slice of the steak and put it on the plate.The waiter noisily exchanged it for the empty plate before Susan.Warham cut two slices of the steak for himself, took a liberal helping of the potatoes, pushed the dish toward her.

"Do you want the coffee now, or with the pie?" asked the waiter.

"Now," said Warham.

"Coffee for the young lady, too?"

Warham scowled at her."Coffee?" he demanded.

She did not answer; she did not hear.

"Yes, she wants coffee," said Warham."Hustle it!""Yes, sir." And the waiter bustled away with a great deal of motion that created a deceptive impression of speed.Warham was helping himself to steak again when the coffee came a suspicious-looking liquid diffusing an odor of staleness reheated again and again, an under odor of metal pot not too frequently scoured.

Warham glanced at Susan's plate.She had not disturbed the knife and fork on either side of it."Eat!" he commanded.And when she gave no sign of having heard, he repeatedly sharply, "Eat, Itell you."

She started, nervously took up the knife and fork, cut a morsel off the slice of steak.When she lifted it to her lips, she suddenly put it back in the plate."I can't," she said.

"You've got to," ordered he."I won't have you acting this way.""I can't," she repeated monotonously."I feel sick." Nature had luckily so made her that it was impossible for her to swallow when her nerves were upset or when she was tired; thus, she would not have the physical woes that aggravate and prolong mental disturbance if food is taken at times when it instantly turns to poison.

He repeated his order in a still more savage tone.She put her elbows on the table, rested her head wearily upon her hands, shook her head.He desisted.

When he had eaten all of the steak, except the fat and the gristly tail, and nearly all the potatoes, the waiter took the used dishes away and brought two generous slices of apple pie and set down one before each.With the pie went a cube of American cream or "rat-trap" cheese.Warham ate his own pie and cheese; then, as she had not touched hers, he reached for it and ate it also.Now he was watching the clock and, between liftings of laden fork to his mouth, verifying the clock's opinion of the hour by his own watch.He called for the bill, paid it, gave the waiter five cents--a concession to the tipping custom of the effete city which, judging by the waiter's expression, might as well not have been made.Still, Warham had not made it with an idea of promoting good feeling between himself and the waiter, but simply to show that he knew the city and its ways.He took up the shawl strap, said, "Come on" in the voice which he deemed worthy of the fallen creature he must, through Christian duty and worldly prudence, for the time associate with.She rose and followed him to the ticket office.He had the return half of his own ticket.When she heard him ask for a ticket to North Sutherland she shivered.She knew that her destination was his brother Zeke's farm.

From Cincinnati to North Vernon, where they were to change cars, he sat beside her without speech.At North Vernon, where they had to occupy a bench outside the squat and squalid station for nearly two hours, he sat beside her without speech.And without a single word on either side they journeyed in the poking, no-sooner-well-started-than-stopping accommodation train southbound.Several Sutherland people were aboard.He nodded surlily to those who spoke to him.He read an Indianapolis paper which he had bought at North Vernon.All the way she gazed unseeingly out over the fair June landscape of rolling or hilly fields ripening in the sun.