CHAPTER IV

Lydia would have been displeased to know how little her curt refusal affected the emotional state of the man driving away from her door. It was the deed rather than the word that he remembered--the fact that he had held a beautiful and eventually unresisting woman in his arms that occupied his attention on his way home.

He found his mother sitting up--not for him. It was many years since Mrs. O'Bannon had gone to bed before two o'clock. She was a large woman, massive rather than fat. She was sitting by the fire in her bedroom, wrapped in a warm, loose white dressing gown, as white as her hair and smooth pale skin. Her eyes retained their deep darkness. Evidently Dan's gray eyes had come from his father's Irish ancestry.

It was only the other day--after he was grown up--that O'Bannon had ceased to be afraid of his mother. She was a woman passionately religious, mentally vigorous and singularly unjust, or at least inconsistent. It was this quality that made her so confusing and, to her subordinates, alarming. She would have gone to the stake--gone with a certain bitter amusement at the folly of her destroyers--for her belief in the right; but her affections could entirely sweep away these beliefs and leave her furiously supporting those she loved against all moral principles. Her son had first noticed that trait when she sent him away to boarding school. His mother--his father had died when he was seven--was a most relentless disciplinarian as long as a question of duty lay between him and her; but let an outsider interfere, and she was always on his side. She frequently defended him against the school authorities, and even, it seemed to him, encouraged him in rebellion. In her old age most of her strong passions had died away and left only her God and her son. Perhaps it was a trace of this persecutory religion in her that made Dan accept his present office.

She looked up like a sibyl from the great volume she was reading.

"You're late, my son."

"I've been gambling, mother."

He said it very casually, but it was the last remnant of his fear that made him mention particularly those of his actions of which he knew she would disapprove. In old times he had been a notable poker player, but had abandoned it on his election as district attorney. Her brow contracted.

"You should not do such things--in your position."

"My dear mother, haven't you yet grasped that there is a touch of the criminal in all criminal prosecutors? That's what draws us to the job."

She wouldn't listen to any such theory.

"Have you lost a great deal of money?" she asked severely.

"Not enough to turn us out of the old home," he smiled. "I won something under four hundred dollars."

Her brow cleared. She liked her son to be successful, preeminent in anything--right or wrong--which he undertook.

"You made a mistake to get mixed up with people like that," she said. She knew where he had been dining.

"I can't be said to have got mixed up with them. The only one I expressed any wish to see again slammed the door in my face."

The next instant he wished he had not spoken. He hoped his mother had not noticed what he said. She remained silent, but she had understood perfectly, and he had made for Lydia an implacable enemy. A woman who slammed the door in the face of Dan was deserving of hell-fire, in Mrs. O'Bannon's opinion. She did not ask who it was, because she knew that in the course of everyday life together secrets between two people are impossible and the name would come out.

After an almost sleepless night he woke in the morning with the zest of living extraordinarily renewed within him. Every detail in the pattern of life delighted him, from the smell of coffee floating up from the kitchen on the still cold of the November morning to the sight from his window of the village children in knit caps and sweaters hurrying to school--tall, lanky, competent girls bustling their little brothers along, and inattentive boys hoisting small sisters up the school steps by their arms. Life was certainly great fun, not because there were lovely women to be held in your arms, but because when young and vigorous you can bully life into being what you want it to be. And yet, good heavens, what a girl! At four that very afternoon he would see her again.

He was in court all the morning. The courthouse, which if it had been smaller would have looked like a mausoleum in a cemetery, and if it had been larger would have looked like the Madeleine, was set back from the main street. The case he was prosecuting--a case of criminal negligence against a young driver of a delivery wagon who had run over and injured a prominent citizen--went well; that is to say, O'Bannon obtained a conviction. It had been one of those cases clear to the layman, for the young man was notoriously careless; but difficult, as lawyers tell you criminal-negligence cases are, from the legal point of view.

O'Bannon came out of court very well satisfied both with himself and the jury and drove straight to the Thorne house. The smell of the grapes started his pulses beating. Morson came to the door. No, Miss Thorne was not at home.

"Did she leave any message for me?" said O'Bannon.

"Nothing, sir, except that she is not at home."

He eyed Morson, feeling that he would be within his masculine rights if he swept him out of the way and went on into the house; but tamely enough he turned and drove away. His feelings, however, were not tame. He was furious against her. How did she dare behave like this--driving about the country at midnight, gambling, letting him kiss her, and then ordering her door slammed in his face as if he were a book agent? Civilization gave such women too much protection. Perhaps the men she was accustomed to associating with put up with that kind of treatment, but not he. He'd see her again if he wanted to--yes, if he had to hold up her car on the highroad.

He thought with approval of Eleanor, a woman who played no tricks with you but left you cool and braced like a cold shower on a hot day. Yet he found that that afternoon he did not want to see Eleanor. He drove on and on, steeping himself in the bitterness of his resentment.

At dinner his mother noticed his abstraction and feared an important case was going wrong. Afterwards, supposing he wanted to think out some tangle of the law, she left him alone--not meditating, but seething.

The next morning at half past eight he was in his office. The district attorney's office was in an old brick block opposite the courthouse. It occupied the second story over Mr. Wooley's hardware shop. As he went in he saw Alma Wooley, the fragile blond daughter of his landlord, slipping in a little late for her duties as assistant in the shop. She was wrapped in a light-blue cloak the color of her transparent turquoise-blue eyes. She gave O'Bannon a pretty little sketch of a smile. She thought his position a great one, and his age extreme--anyone over thirty was ancient in her eyes. She was profoundly grateful to him, for he had given her fiance a position on the police force and made their marriage a possibility at least.

"How are things, Alma?" he said.

"Simply wonderful, thanks to you, Mr. O'Bannon," she answered.

He went upstairs thinking kindly of all gentle blond women. In the office he found his assistant, Foster, the son of the local high-school teacher, a keen-minded ambitious boy of twenty-two.

"Oh," said Foster, "the sheriff's been telephoning for you. He's at the Thornes'."

O'Bannon felt as if his ears had deceived him.

"Where?" he asked sternly.

"At the Thornes' house--you know, there's a Miss Thorne who lives there--the daughter of old Joe S. Thorne." Then, seeing the blank look on his chief's face, Foster explained further. "It seems there was a jewel robbery there last night--a million dollars' worth, the sheriff says." He smiled, for the sheriff was a well-known exaggerator, but he met no answering smile. "They've been telephoning for you to come over."

"Who has?" said O'Bannon.

Foster thought him unusually slow of understanding this morning, and answered patiently, "Miss Thorne has. There's been a robbery there."

The district attorney was not slow in action.

"I'll go right over," he said, and left the office.

There were some advantages in holding public office. You could be sent for in your official capacity--and stick to it, by heaven!

This time he asked no questions at the door, but entered.

Morson said timidly, "Who shall I say, sir?"

"Say the district attorney."

Morson led the way to the drawing-room and threw open the door.

"The district attorney," he announced, making it sound like a title of nobility, and O'Bannon and Lydia stood face to face again--or rather he stood. She, leaning back in her chair, nodded an adequate enough greeting to a public servant in the performance of his duty. They were not alone--a slim gray-haired lady, Miss Bennett, was named.

"I understood at my office you had sent for me," said he.

"I?" There was something wondering in her tone. "Oh, yes, the sheriff, I believe, wanted you to come. All my jewels were stolen last night. He seemed to think you might be able to do something about it." Her tone indicated that she did not share the sheriff's optimism. Miss Bennett, with a long habit of counteracting Lydia's manners, broke in.

"So kind of you to come yourself, Mr. O'Bannon."

"It's my job to come."

"Yes, of course. I think I know your mother." She was very cordial, partly because she felt something hostile in the air, partly because she thought him an attractive-looking young man. "She's so helpful in the village improvement, only we're all just a little afraid of her. Aren't you just a little afraid of her yourself?"

"Very much," he answered gravely.

Miss Bennett wished he wouldn't just stare at her with those queer eyes of his--a little crazy, she thought. She liked people to smile at her when they spoke. She went on, "Not but what we work all the better for her because we are a little afraid----"

Lydia interrupted.

"Mr. O'Bannon hasn't come to pay us a social visit, Benny," she said, and this time there was something unmistakably insolent in her tone.

O'Bannon decided to settle this whole question on the instant. He turned to Miss Bennett and said firmly, "I should like to speak to Miss Thorne alone."

"Of course," said Miss Bennett, already on her way to the door, which O'Bannon opened for her.

"No, Benny, Benny!" called Lydia, but O'Bannon had shut the door and leaned his shoulders against it.

"Listen to me!" he said. "You must be civil to me--that is, if you want me to stay here and try to get your jewels back."

Lydia wouldn't look at him.

"And what guaranty have I that if you do stay you can do anything about it?"

"I think I can get them, and I can assure you the sheriff can't." There was a long pause. "Well?" he said.

"Well what?" said Lydia, who hadn't been able to think what she was going to do.

"Will you be civil, or shall I go?"

"I thought you just said it was your duty to stay."

"Make up your mind, please, which shall it be?"

Lydia longed to tell him to go, but she did want to get her jewels back, particularly as she was setting out for the Emmonses' in a few minutes, and it would save a lot of trouble to have everything arranged before she left. She thought it over deliberately, and looking up saw that he was amused at her cold-blooded hesitation. Seeing him smile, she found to her surprise that suddenly she smiled back at him. It was not what she had intended.

"Well," she thought, "let him think he's getting the best of me. As a matter of fact, I'm using him."

She hoped he would be content with the smile, but, no, he insisted on the spoken word. She was forced to say definitely that she would be