To be sure, only two months before, he had obligated himself to pay her ten dollars a week more for five weeks, and had.
But that only proved to her very likely that he had so much extra to give, even though he had tried to make it clear at the time that he was pinching himself to do it.
And yet, however much he chose to waver in her favor, he could not, with his desire for Hortense directly confronting him.
He went out into the living-room after a time, and as usual his mother at once led the way to one of the benches in the mission — a cheerless, cold room these days.
“I didn’t think I’d have to speak to you about this, Clyde, but I don’t see any other way out of it.
I haven’t anyone but you to depend upon now that you’re getting to be a man.
But you must promise not to tell any of the others — Frank or Julia or your father.
I don’t want them to know.
But Esta’s back here in Kansas City and in trouble, and I don’t know quite what to do about her.
I have so very little money to do with, and your father’s not very much of a help to me any more.”
She passed a weary, reflective hand across her forehead and Clyde knew what was coming.
His first thought was to pretend that he did not know that Esta was in the city, since he had been pretending this way for so long.
But now, suddenly, in the face of his mother’s confession, and the need of pretended surprise on his part, if he were to keep up the fiction, he said,
“Yes, I know.”
“You know?” queried his mother, surprised.
“Yes, I know,” Clyde repeated.
“I saw you going in that house in Beaudry Street one morning as I was going along there,” he announced calmly enough now.
“And I saw Esta looking out of the window afterwards, too.
So I went in after you left.”
“How long ago was that?” she asked, more to gain time than anything else.
“Oh, about five or six weeks ago, I think.
I been around to see her a coupla times since then, only Esta didn’t want me to say anything about that either.”
“Tst! Tst! Tst!” clicked Mrs. Griffiths, with her tongue.
“Then you know what the trouble is.”
“Yes,” replied Clyde.
“Well, what is to be will be,” she said resignedly.
“You haven’t mentioned it to Frank or Julia, have you?”
“No,” replied Clyde, thoughtfully, thinking of what a failure his mother had made of her attempt to be secretive.
She was no one to deceive any one, or his father, either.
He thought himself far, far shrewder.
“Well, you mustn’t,” cautioned his mother solemnly.
“It isn’t best for them to know, I think.
It’s bad enough as it is this way,” she added with a kind of wry twist to her mouth, the while Clyde thought of himself and Hortense.
“And to think,” she added, after a moment, her eyes filling with a sad, all-enveloping gray mist, “she should have brought all this on herself and on us.
And when we have so little to do with, as it is.
And after all the instruction she has had — the training.
‘The way of the transgressor —’”
She shook her head and put her two large hands together and gripped them firmly, while Clyde stared, thinking of the situation and all that it might mean to him.
She sat there, quite reduced and bewildered by her own peculiar part in all this.
She had been as deceiving as any one, really.
And here was Clyde, now, fully informed as to her falsehoods and strategy, and herself looking foolish and untrue.
But had she not been trying to save him from all this — him and the others?
And he was old enough to understand that now.
Yet she now proceeded to explain why, and to say how dreadful she felt it all to be.
At the same time, as she also explained, now she was compelled to come to him for aid in connection with it.
“Esta’s about to be very sick,” she went on suddenly and stiffly, not being able, or at least willing, apparently, to look at Clyde as she said it, and yet determined to be as frank as possible.
“She’ll need a doctor very shortly and some one to be with her all the time when I’m not there.
I must get money somewhere — at least fifty dollars.
You couldn’t get me that much in some way, from some of your young men friends, could you, just a loan for a few weeks?
You could pay it back, you know, soon, if you would.