to whom confession at first seemed impossible, under the sympathetic persistence of her mother broke down at last and made the fatal confession, whereupon Mrs. Gerhardt only stood there, too dumb with misery for a time to give vent to a word.
“Oh!” she said at last, a great wave of self-accusation sweeping over her. “It is all my fault. I might have known.”
The crowding details of this miserable discovery were too numerous and too pathetic to record. Concealment was one thing the mother troubled over. Her husband’s actions, another. Brander, the world, her beautiful, good Jennie—all returned to her mind in rapid succession. That Brander should have betrayed her daughter seemed horrible.
She went back after a time to the washing she had to do, and stood over her tub, rubbing and crying. The tears ran down her cheeks and dropped into the suds. Once in awhile she would stop and lift the comer of her apron in an effort to dry her eyes, but emotion soon filled them again.
When the first shock had passed, there came a vivid consciousness of approaching danger with always the need of thinking about it. Mrs. Gerhardt was no fine reasoner for such a situation. She thought and thought, but always the necessity of telling her husband haunted her. He had often said that if ever one of his daughters should act like some of those he knew, he would turn her out of doors. “She should not stay under my roof!” he had exclaimed.
Now that this evil was truly upon him, he would be as good as his word. Had he not driven Brander away? Would he have any use for her, or Jennie, once he knew that they had countenanced the senator after his warning, and with such terrible results? Jennie herself had no idea of trying to escape.
“I’m so afraid of your father,” Mrs. Gerhardt often said to Jennie in this intermediate period. “I don’t know what he’ll say.”
“Perhaps I’d better go away,” suggested her daughter.
“No,” she said, “he needn’t know just yet. Wait awhile.”
The difficulty of this is neither easily understood by, nor indicated to, those who do not know. In all Columbus Mrs. Gerhardt knew no one to whom she could send Jennie, if her father refused to endure her. It was not a village, but, even so, wherever she went, a wave of gossip was likely to spread and reach all about. Brander’s money would keep her, but where? Thinking it over, she decided to tell her husband, and hope for the best.
One day then, when her own suspense had reached the place where it could no longer be endured, she sent Jennie away with the children, hoping to be able to tell her husband before they returned. All the morning she fidgeted about, dreading the opportune moment and letting him retire to his slumber without speaking. When afternoon came she did not go out to work, because she could not leave and see her duty unfulfilled. Gerhardt arose at four and still she hesitated, knowing full well that Jennie would soon return, and the specially prepared occasion be lost. It is almost certain that she would not have had the heart to say anything if he himself had not brought up the subject of Jennie’s appearance.
“She doesn’t look well,” he said. “There seems to be something the matter with her.”
“Oh,” began Mrs. Gerhardt, visibly struggling under her fears, and moved to make an end of it at any cost, “Jennie is in trouble. I don’t know what to do. She—”
Gerhardt, who had unscrewed a door-lock and was trying to mend it, brought the hand which held the screwdriver lightly to the table and stopped.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
Mrs. Gerhardt had her apron up in her hands at the time, her nervous tendency to roll it coming upon her. She tried to summon sufficient courage to explain, but fear and misery dominating, she lifted the apron to her eyes and began to cry.
Gerhardt looked at her and got up. He was a man with the Calvin type of face, rather spare, and sallow as to skin, a result of age and work in the wind and rain. When he was surprised or angry, a spark of light would come in his eye. He frequently pushed his hair back when he was troubled, and almost invariably walked the floor. Just now he looked alert and dangerous.
“What is that you say?” he inquired in German, his voice straining to a hard note. “In trouble—has someone—” he paused and flung his hand upward. “Why don’t you speak?” he demanded.
“I never thought,” went on Mrs. Gerhardt, frightened, and yet following her own train of thought, “that anything like that would happen to her. She was such a good girl. Oh!” she concluded, “to think he should ruin Jennie.”
“By thunder!” shouted Gerhardt, giving way to a fury of feeling, “I thought so! Brander! Ha! Your fine man! That comes of letting her go running around at nights, buggy-riding, walking the streets. I thought so. God in heaven—!”
He broke from his dramatic attitude and struck out in a fierce stride across the narrow chamber, turning like a caged animal.
“Ruined!” he exclaimed. “Ruined! Ha! So he has ruined her, has he!”
Suddenly he stopped like an image jerked by a string. He was directly in front of Mrs. Gerhardt, who had retired to the table at the side of the wall and was standing there pale with fear.
“He is dead now!” he shouted, as if this fact had now first occurred to him. “He is dead!”
He put both hands to his temples as if he feared his brain would give way, and stood looking at her, the mocking irony of the situation seeming to bum in his brain like fire.
“Dead!” he repeated, and Mrs. Gerhardt, fearing for the reason of the man, shrank still farther away, her wits taken up more with the tragedy of the figure he presented than with the actual substance of his woe.
“He intended to marry her,” she pleaded nervously. “He would have married her, if he had not died.”
“Would have!” shouted Gerhardt, coming out of his trance at the sound of her voice. “Would have! That’s a fine thing to talk about now. Would have! The hound! May his soul bum in hell—the dog! Ah, God! I hope—I hope—If I was not a Christian—” He clenched his hands, the awfulness of the thought of what he could wish for Brander’s soul shaking him like a leaf.
Too strained by the fury of this mental tempest, Mrs. Gerhardt now burst into tears, and the old German turned away from her, his own feelings far too intense for him to have any sympathy with her. He walked to and fro, his heavy step shaking the kitchen floor. After a time he came back, a new phase of the dread calamity having offered itself to his mind.
“When did this happen?” he demanded.
“I don’t know,” returned Mrs. Gerhardt, too terror-stricken to tell the truth. “I only found it out the other day.”
“You lie!” he exclaimed in his excitement, the painful accusation escaping him almost without consciousness on his part. “You were always shielding her. It is your fault that she is where she is. If you had let me have my way there would have been no cause for our trouble tonight.”
He turned away from her, a vague sense of the dreadful assault he had made breaking into his mind, but his feeling was still too high to allow him to reason.
“A fine ending,” he went on to himself. “A fine ending. My boy gets into jail; my daughter walks the streets and gets herself talked about; the neighbors come to me with open remarks
