HE'D GO OVER TO THE HOUSE ON THE DRIVE AND GET THE THING OVER WITH.
Thus Judd, fuming, and already more than half drunk.
"Get me a taxicab," he ordered a club servant, and, with a final libation for the tightening of his resolution, he lumbered unsteadily into the taxicab and was catapulted to the house on Riverside Drive.
The butler admitted him and smirked behind his back with the derisiveness of English servants in American households when he saw Judd hold out a miscalculating hand for the banister post and miss it by a foot, thereby almost going to his knees on the stairs. But he recovered his equilibrium, growling, and made his way into Mrs. Treharne's sitting room. Heloise was there alone, reading a French comic weekly of extraordinary pictorial frankness with such gusto that she did not even rise when Judd partly fell into the room.
Judd glared at her out of red eyes.
"Why the devil don't you get to your feet when I come in here, you jabbering chimpanzee?" he inquired of the by no means flabbergasted Heloise. She had often seen Judd thus and she was used to his expletives and his fondness for comparing her to the simian species on account of her French tongue. "Where's your mistress?"
"Madame has gone to the theatre," said Heloise, giving Judd a view of a wide, unscreened French yawn.
"Oh, Madame has, has she?" said Judd, apeing the maid's tone with a drunken disregard for even the most ordinary dignity. "What theatre?"
Heloise shrugged.
"What theatre?" Judd bawled at her.
"How should one know?" inquired Heloise, disdainfully enough. "Madame did not say."
Judd plumped himself into a deep chair, cocked his evening hat at a little more acute angle over his left ear, fumblingly loosened the buttons of his overcoat, crossed his legs with grunting difficulty, removed his gloves, revealing the enormous diamond rings which he wore on the third finger of each freckled, pudgy hand; then glared at the unruffled Heloise again.
"Is anybody at home?" he asked her.
"Mademoiselle is here," replied Heloise. "But she is retiring and is not to be seen."
"Oh, she's not to be seen, hey?" snarled Judd. "Who says she isn't to be seen? You?"
Heloise shrugged again. She knew that her shrugs enraged him, but she was a dauntless maid of France.
"You tell her that I want to see her, understand?" ordered Judd, thickly. "Want to see her right here and right now."
"Mademoiselle sent her maid out for the evening and left word that she was not to be disturbed," protested Heloise.
"I don't care a continental hang what word she left!" raged Judd. "You tell her that I want to see her, here and now. You take that message to her or out you go, bag and baggage. I'm paying your wages."
Heloise, bestowing upon him a parting shrug which was artistically designed to inform him as to just how little she cared for him or his "wages," left the room and knocked upon Louise's sleeping-room door.
Louise, in a negligée and with her hair rippling silkily over her shoulders, was preparing for sleep. The afternoon's reverie still possessed her. Musing dreams lingered in her eyes.
She looked up, not surprised to see Heloise enter. The French maid, devoted to Louise from the beginning, often came in for a chat when her mistress was out, to the jealous concern of Louise's own maid. Now, however, Louise was struck with the light of wrath and disgust in Heloise's fire-darting, eloquent eyes.
"What is it, Heloise?" she asked.
Heloise broke into objurgation as to "zat Jood beast"—cochon rouge, she called him, explosively.
"He demands that you come," she said to Louise. "He is not himself; that is, he is himself; he is drunk."
"But what does he want with me?" asked Louise, apprehensively. Heloise could furnish her with no reply to that. "Of course I shall not see him."
Heloise, finger on lip, considered. She knew Judd exceedingly well, and she was acquainted with his violence when in his cups. She knew that he was quite capable of breaking in upon Louise's privacy if she did not respond to his summons—even if he had to put his shoulder to her door. After a moment's reflection, Heloise advised Louise to go to him. He could not harm her, except perhaps with his tongue, and he would do that anyhow if she refused to answer his summons; Heloise would be hovering near to see that he offered her no other harm. Louise, who had the gift of becoming deliberate and cool in emergent moments, decided to take the maid's advice. She dressed hastily and Heloise quickly tucked her hair up. She was very regal, very much in control of herself, when she swept swiftly into her mother's sitting room and confronted Judd.
Judd did not rise. Neither did he remove his rakishly-tilted hat. He still sat with crossed legs, and he was muttering hoarsely to himself when Louise entered. When he heard her rustled entrance he dovetailed his fingers on the lower portion of his evening shirt, twiddled his thumbs, and gazed at her through his red, drink-diminished eyes.
"Oh, so you came, eh?" he wheezed, drily, continuing to regard her with his bleary stare.
"What is it you wish of me?" Louise asked him, meeting his gaze, but continuing to stand.
"Oh, nothing in particular—nothing in particular," said Judd with the incoherency of intoxication. Quickly, though, he took a tone of brazenness. "You're going to sit down, ain't you? It doesn't cost any more to sit down."
"I shall stand," said Louise, immovable before him.
"Oh, you'll stand, hey?" sneered Judd. "All right, stand. I sent for you because, in the first place, I wanted to see if you'd come or not. And you're here, ain't you?" this with an air of drunken triumph. Louise made no reply.
"Secondly," went on Judd, scowling over the drink-magnified memory of his wrongs, "I sent for you to ask you what in blazes you mean by continually stirring up rows and rough-houses between your mother and me? Hey? What's the answer?"
There was no answer. Louise, literally numb from the vulgar violence of the man, was bereft of speech. She faced him with her fingers tightly laced behind her back, and her face had grown very pale.
"That's what I want to find out from you," went on Judd, uncrossing his legs so that he could lean forward in his chair and wag an emphasizing finger at her. "And there are some other things I want to find out from you. One of 'em is why the devil you think you're licensed to treat me—me!—as if I were a flunkey?"
Louise retained her frozen attitude. She had the feeling of one being blown upon by icy blasts. Even had there seemed to be any need for her to make reply, she could not have done so.
"You've got a tongue, haven't you?" demanded Judd, her silence adding to the rage into which he was deliberately lashing himself. "Don't you try your infernal haughty airs on me any more, young woman. I won't tolerate it. I don't have to tolerate it. Didn't they teach you manners at school? If they didn't, by God, I'll know the reason why! I paid 'em to teach you manners!"
Involuntarily Louise pressed her hands to her temples, for she felt suddenly faint. But she conquered the faintness. The utter incredibleness of his words seemed to nerve her.
"What do you mean by that?" she asked him, her voice sounding in her ears like that of someone else.
"Mean?" raged Judd, gripping the arms of his chair and half rising. "What do I mean? I mean what I say. I paid the people who educated you, or pretended to educate you, to drill some manners into you. And now I'm going to take a whole lot of pains to find out why they took my money under false pretenses!"
"Are you not beside yourself?" asked Louise quietly enough, though her thoughts were in a vortex. "Am I to understand that you really expect me to believe that you paid for my education?"
Judd flopped back into his chair and stared hard at her. Then he broke into a short, jarring laugh.
"Will you listen to that?" he croaked, looking around the room as if addressing an invisible jury. Then, lowering his head and glowering upon Louise, he went on: "Am I to understand that you are pretending that you don't know that I paid for your education?"
"I did not know it," said Louise in so low a tone that she could hardly hear herself.
"Am I to understand," brutally went on Judd, now entirely out of himself, "that you are pretending not to know that I've been shovelling out money for you for nearly five years—ever since you were in pigtails? D'ye mean to stand there, with your damned outlandish haughtiness, and tell me that you don't know that every hairpin, every pair of shoes, every frippery or furbelow that you've owned in that time, hasn't been settled for by me? That you don't know that the roof over your head and the bed you've slept in has been paid for by me? That you don't know that the clothes that you've got on your back right this minute were bought for you by me?"
It was the cruelest moment in the girl's life. Her senses were reeling. But, by an effort of pure will, of supreme concentration, she mustered her strength to withstand the shock.
"I did not know these things," she replied in a voice that sounded in her own ears like a mere distant echo. "They are true? I was not told. Until this moment I had always supposed that my education and maintenance were paid for out of funds from—" She could not mention the name of her father in the presence of this drink-inflamed brute;—"from other sources."
"Not by a damned sight," roared Judd, relentless, paying no attention to the girl's drawn features and trembling lips. "I know what you're getting at. But you're wrong. There haven't been any 'funds from other sources,' as you call it, disbursed for you for nearly five years. And that's easy to explain, too. I wouldn't have any 'funds from other sources' dribbling along to an establishment I was maintaining. That's why I chucked what you call the 'funds from other sources' back into the sender's teeth."
Louise, under the impact of that final cowardly blow, might have fallen prone had not her mother, eyes alight with mingled rage and compassion, swept into the room at that instant and gently pushed her daughter into a chair just as Louise felt that her knees were giving way beneath her. Mrs. Treharne, standing stunned in the hall upon coming in, had heard Judd's last few sentences; and she judged from them what he had been saying before her return.
Judd's jaw fell when he saw Mrs. Treharne, for the moment imperious in her anger and her solicitude for her daughter, sweep into the room in her trailing furs. But, after an instant, he brought his twisted teeth together with a snap and gazed at her with drunken dauntlessness. It was one of Judd's hours when he was too far gone to think of surrendering even to her.
"What have you done, you unspeakable brute?" Mrs. Treharne asked him, her voice trembling, as she stood facing him, one hand on Louise's shoulder.
Louise looked up at her mother.
"He has been telling me, mother, what I now believe to be the truth," she said; "that I am indebted to him for my schooling, my maintenance, my—" She could not go on.
Mrs. Treharne's eyes blazed.
"You low cad—you vulgar coward!" she fairly hissed at Judd.
But Judd, for once, would have none of that. He rose unsteadily to his feet and stood swaying before her.
"No more of that from you!" he thundered, the veins of his forehead standing out purplishly. "I know what I've said, and I stand for it! Don't you try to come that bullyragging business over me—I'm all through standing for that! You can do as you please, go as far as you like. But this is my house—don't you ever forget that! See that you remember it every minute from this time on, will you?" and with a parting glare he strode to the door, tramped down the stairs, and went out, pulling the door after him with a crash.
Mrs. Treharne, herself used to such scenes with Judd, but hideously conscious of what a horror this one must have been to an inexperienced girl less than three months away from the serene atmosphere of school, sat upon an arm of Louise's chair and began to stroke her daughter's hair.
"But why did you never tell me, mother?" asked Louise after a long silence.
