Chapter Thirty-Four

I SUPPOSE THAT FALL and winter in Beverly had been much as usual. Debutantes came out, looking young and innocent, and slipping outside now and then for a cigarette. There were the usual benefits for charity, the usual bridge parties and dinners, and naturally more than the usual gossip. I was asked out a good bit, but I did not care to go. Sooner or later the talk would turn to the Hill, and I could not face it.

Nor could I face much more of the Cloisters. When I had time I read the Help Wanted ads in the papers. Nobody seemed to require anyone of my peculiar qualifications: “Fair French, poor golf, good tennis, excellent on a horse, and no strawberry marks.” But in one business office at that time there was a small scene which—when I heard of it from Margery later—caused me acute unhappiness. Following Julian’s arrest the newspapers had published both his picture and Margery’s. Miss Connor was in the office at the time, and somebody showed it to her.

She took one look at the one of Margery, then sat down at her desk and began to cry, long dreadful sobbing that brought the entire force around her, helpless. “That girl!” she said slowly. “That snake in the grass! And I gave her tea!”

I can write that now, but among the by-products of our crimes last year I must count Eliza Connor and the wreckage of her last faith in her fellow man. As I have said, I have tried to pay for that treachery of mine. I managed indirectly to get her a better position, and now and then I have sent her things, anonymously; once a small portable radio for that lonely room of hers, and again a small tea set and tray. That last probably betrayed me, but at my request Margery never told her who I was, so she could not send them back.

I didn’t know that then. My own life had become a dreary round of going up the Hill, working, avoiding Bessie, and going down to Miss Mattie’s at night. Then one day I saw that the Beverly shops had burst into a scarlet, green, and white rash which could only mean Christmas. The florist’s window was decked out with small white-feathered trees, and at St. Mark’s the waits were rehearsing carols, ready to stop on Christmas Eve wherever a lighted candle in a window beckoned to them.

I felt sick and lonely. Mother had always lit bayberry candles for them, and I could see them standing, men and women, outside in the snow, singing, their earnest faces lifted in the night. We always had cocoa and cake for them. Mother did not believe in liquor on such occasions.

There was no Christmas spirit at the Cloisters. One day Mrs. Partridge asked me if she might order a small tree for the servants’ hall—she never asked Bessie for anything—and I told her to go ahead. “It won’t be like the old days,” she said mournfully. “With the ballroom all lit up, and the tree and presents. I expect the children will miss it.”