592“Kenyon, oh, my son, my beautiful son–you know I’d give my life for you–”
The son looked into the dead, brassy eyes of his mother, saw her drooping mouth, with the brown lips that had not been stained that day; observed the slumping muscles of her over-massaged face, and felt with a shudder the caress of her fingers–and he knew in his heart that she was deceiving him. A moment after she had spoken the automobile going to the station for the Judge backed out of the garage and turned into the street.
“You must go now,” she cried, clinging to him. “Oh, son–son–my only son–come to me, come to your mother sometimes for her love. He is coming now in a few minutes on the eight o’clock train. You must not let him see you here.”
She helped Kenyon to rise. He stumbled across the floor to the steps and she helped him gently down to the lawn. She stood play-acting for him a moment in whisper and pantomime, then she turned and hurried indoors and met the inquisitive maid servant with:
“Just that Kenyon Adams–the musician–awfully dear boy, but he wanted me to interfere with the Judge for that worthless brother, Grant. The Nesbits sent him. You know the Nesbit woman is crazy about that anarchist. Oh, Nadine, did Chalmers see Kenyon? You know Chalmers just blabs everything to the Judge.”
Nadine indicated that Chalmers had recognized Kenyon as he crawled up the veranda steps and Mrs. Van Dorn replied: “Very well, I’ll be ready for him.” And half an hour later, when the Judge drove up, his wife met him as he was putting his valise in his room:
“Dahling,” she said as she closed the door, “that Kenyon Adams was over here, appealing to me for his brother, Grant.”
“Well?” asked the Judge contemptuously.
“You have him where we want him now, dahling,” she answered. “If you refuse him his freedom, the mob will get him. And oh, oh, oh,” she cried passionately, “I hope they’ll hang him, hang him, higher’n Haman. That will take the tuck out of the old Nesbit cat and that other, his–his 593sweetheart, to have her daughter marrying the brother of a man who was hanged! That’ll bring them down.”
A flash across the Judge’s face told the woman where her emotion was leading her. It angered her.