CHAPTER VI
AN ERROR OF JUDGMENT
Nan stood at her window watching a man turn out of the walk that led from the front door to the street. Her eyes followed him until the hedge hid him from sight, and then she sat huddled in the window-seat, breathing hard from her run upstairs. She went to her desk and glanced at a page of the pass-book of a trust company that showed the withdrawal on June 29 of one thousand dollars from her savings account. There remained a balance of sixteen hundred, and she verified the subtraction before thrusting the book into the bottom of a drawer under a mass of invitations she meant at some time to file in a book she kept as a record of her social activities.
She knew that she had made a mistake, and she was considering the chances of discovery with a wildly beating heart. The man she had just closed the door upon had paid two calls on successive days. He had represented himself as the attorney for her brother, held on a charge of murder at Belleville. He had plausibly persuaded her that it was only fair for her to help her brother in his distress; that he was the victim of unfortunate circumstances, but that an investment of one thousand dollars for his defense would save her the humiliation of having one of her own flesh and blood convicted of a murder for which he was in no wise responsible. It had been intimated in discreet terms that her relationship to the prisoner could be hidden; it would even be denied if necessary.
She knew now that she should not have yielded; that in all fairness to her foster-father she should have reported this demand to him. In secretly giving money that represented Christmas and birthday gifts through half a dozen years, for the defense of a man she had not heard of since the beginning of her life with the Farleys, she justified herself with the thought that it was kinder to her foster-father, in his invalid condition, to keep the matter from him. She experienced a sudden revulsion of feeling the moment the money passed from her hands in the ten one-hundred-dollar bills the man had specified.
Farley had been seeing much of his lawyer since the row over the Kinney luncheon. While his wrath at her duplicity seemed to pass, she assumed that he had not forgotten his threat to disinherit her if she married Copeland.
She was unwontedly attentive, spending much time reading to him or playing cards. She knew that he liked having young people about, and she asked to his room some of the girls and young men who called on her. She exercised all her arts, which were many, to keep him cheerful, and if he realized that the change had been abrupt, and that it dated from his outburst against Copeland, he made no sign. She mustn’t stay in too much, he said; he didn’t want to be a burden to her.
Eaton had called shortly after his talk with her on the golf links, but on a night when Farley was receiving the attentions of his masseur. He had spent the evening and had been at pains to make himself agreeable. Now that Copeland had been thrust into the background, it occurred to her that Eaton was worth cultivating. We all maintain more or less consciously a mental list of people on whom we feel that we may rely in difficulties; it had occurred to Nan that in a pinch Eaton would be a friend worth having.
While it was wholly unlikely that Farley would ever learn of her transaction with the stranger, it was nevertheless a possibility that would hang over her as long as he lived. She sought comfort in the reflection that the amount was small, and that Farley had never stinted her; moreover, that it was her own money, subject to her personal check; but there was little consolation to be had from such reasoning. She must talk to some one, and before dinner she telephoned Eaton and asked him to come up.
Farley had spent two hours with his lawyer that day, and from the fact that two of his old friends had arrived hurriedly in answer to telephonic summons, she judged that he had been making a new will and that these men had been called to witness it.
He ate his prescribed supper, grumbling at its slightness, and watched her consume her ampler meal with his usual expressions of envy at her appetite.