Mary E. Wilkins Freeman - The Debtor

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"They are late," Ina said, after the caller's light coat had
disappeared behind the shrubbery.

"I suppose they waited for the moon to rise," Charlotte replied. "You
know Amy dearly loves to drive by moonlight."

"Well, let's go to bed, and not wait," Ina said, with a yawn. "I'm so
sleepy." She had sat with her letter unopened in her lap all evening.

"All right," assented Charlotte.

"I'm going to sit here till they come," said Eddy.

"Very well," said Charlotte, "but mind you don't stir off the porch."

The two girls went up to their own rooms. They occupied adjoining
ones. Charlotte slept in a small room out of the larger one which was
Ina's.

Charlotte came in from her room brushing out her hair, and Ina was
reading her letter. She looked up with a blushing confusion and
crumpled the paper involuntarily.

"Oh, you needn't start so," said Charlotte. "I know whom the letter
is from. It's that old Major Arms."

"He is not old. He is no older than papa, and you don't call him
old," Ina retorted, resentfully.

"I don't call him old for a father, but I would for--"

"Well, he isn't a--yet."

"Ina, you ought to tell me."

"Well, I'm going to marry Major Arms, so there!"

"Oh, Ina!"

The two girls stood staring at each other for a moment, then they ran
to each other. "Oh, Charlotte! oh, Charlotte!" sobbed Ina,
convulsively.

"Oh, Ina! oh, honey!"

"I'm going to, Charlotte. Oh, I am going to!"

"Ina, do you, do you--"

"What?"

"Love that old Major Arms?" Charlotte spoke out, in a tone of almost
horror.

"I don't know. Oh, I don't know," sobbed Ina.

"Ina, you don't love--Mr. Eastman better?"

"No, I don't," replied Ina, in a tone of utter conviction.
"Charlotte, do you know what would happen if I married Mr. Eastman?
Do you?"

"No, I don't."

"All my life long I would be at war with the butcher and baker, just
as--just as we always are."

"Ina Carroll, you aren't getting married just for that? Oh, that is
dreadful!"

"No, I am not," said Ina. "You call Major Arms old, and you don't
see--you don't see how a girl can ever fall in love with him, but--I
think he's splendid. Yes, I do. You can laugh, Charlotte, but I do.
And it is a good deal to marry a man you can honestly say you think
is splendid! But you can do a thing, for a very good, even a noble
reason, and all the time know there is another reason not quite so
noble, that you can't help but take some comfort in. And that is the
way I do with this. Charlotte, poor papa does just the best he can,
and there never was a man like him; Major Arms isn't anything in
comparison with papa. I never thought he was, but there is one thing
I am very tired of in this world, and I can't help thinking with a
good deal of pleasure that when I am married I will be free from it."

"What is that, honey?" The two girls had sat down on Ina's
window-seat, and were nestling close together, with their arms around
each other's waist, and the two streams of dark hair intermingling.

"I am heartily tired," said Ina, in a tone of impatient scorn, "of
this everlasting annoyance to which we are subjected from the people
who want us to pay them money for the necessaries of life. We must
have a certain amount of things in order to live at all, and if
people must have the money for them, I want them to have it, and not
have to endure such continual persecution."

"Ina," said Charlotte, in a piteous, low voice, "do you think papa is
very poor?"

"Yes, honey, I am afraid he is very poor."

Charlotte began to weep softly against her sister's shoulder.

"Don't cry, honey," soothed Ina. "You can come and stay with me a
great deal, you know."

"Ina Carroll, do you think I would leave papa?" demanded Charlotte,
suddenly erect. "Do you think--I would? You can, if you want to, but
I will not."

"It costs something to support us, dear," said Ina. "Don't be angry,
precious."

"I will never have another new dress in all my life," said Charlotte.
"I won't eat anything. I tell you I never will leave papa, Ina
Carroll."

Chapter XIV

It was about a week later when Anderson, going into the drug store
one evening, found young Eastman in the line in front of the
soda-fountain. A girl in white was with him, and Anderson thought at
first glance that she was Charlotte Carroll, as a matter of
course--he had so accustomed himself to think of the two in union by
this time. Then he looked again and saw that the girl was much larger
and fair-haired, and recognized her as Bessy Van Dorn, William Van
Dorn's daughter. The girl's semi-German parentage showed in her
complexion and high-bosomed, matronly figure, although she was so
young. She had a large but charming face, full of the sweetest
placidity; her eyes, as blue as the sky, looked out upon the world
with amiable assent to all its conditions. It required no acuteness
to predict this as an ideal spouse for a man of a nervous and
irritable temperament; that there was in her nature that which could
supply cushioned fulnesses to all the exactions of his. She sat on a
high stool and sipped her ice-cream soda with simple absorption in
the pleasant sensation. She paid no attention whatever to her escort
beside her, who took his soda with his eyes fixed on her. Her chin
overlapping in pink curves like a rose, was sunken in the lace at her
neck as she sipped. She did not sit straight, but rested in her
corsets with an awkward lassitude of enjoyment. It was a very warm
night, but she paid no attention to that. She was without a hat, and
the beads of perspiration stood all over her pink forehead, and her
thin white muslin clung to her plump neck and arms. There was
something almost indecent about the girl's enjoyment of her soda.
Hardly a man in the shop but was watching her. Anderson gazed at her
also, but with covert disgust and a resentment which was absurd. He
scowled at the young fellow with her. He felt like a father whose
daughter has been flouted by the man of her choice. "What the devil
does the boy mean, taking soda here with that Van Dorn girl?" he
asked himself. He felt like a reckoning with him, and chafed at the
impossibility of it. When the couple rose to go Anderson met the
young man's salutation with such a surly response and such a stern
glance that he fairly started. The men stared as the two went out,
their shoulders touching as they passed through the door. The girl
was round-shouldered from careless standing, but she moved with a
palpitating grace of yielding, and the smooth, fair braids which
bound her head shone like silver.

"Guess that's a go," a man said, with a chuckle; "a narrower door
would have suited them just as well."

"Mighty good-looking girl," said Amidon.

"Healthy girl," said another. "If more young fellows had the
horse-sense to marry girls like that, I'd give up medicine and go on
a ranch." The Banbridge doctor said that. He was rather young, and
had been in the village about five years. He had taken the practice
of an old physician, a distant relative who had died six months
before. Dr. Wilson was called a remarkably able man in his
profession. He had been having several prescriptions filled, and kept
several waiting. He was a large man with a coarsely handsome physique
and a brutal humor with women. He was not liked personally, but the
people rather bragged about their great physician and were proud when
he was called to the towns round about.

"There's no getting Dr. Wilson, for a certainty, he has such an
enormous practice!" they said, with pride.

"That girl is as handsome and healthy as an Alderney cow," he added,
now, and the men laughed.

"She's a stunner," said Amidon.

Anderson went out abruptly without waiting to make his purchase. He
felt as repelled as only a man of his temperament can feel. No woman
could equal his sense of utter disgust, first with the quite innocent
girl herself, next with the young physician for his insistence upon
the subject. His wrath against young Eastman, his unreasoning and
ridiculous wrath, swelled high as he dwelt upon the outrage of his
desertion of a girl like his little Charlotte, that little creature
of fire and dew, for this full-blown rose of a woman--the outrage to
her and to himself. When he got home, his mother inquired anxiously
what the matter was.

"Nothing, dear," he replied, brusquely.

"You look as if something worried you," said she. She had been taking
a little evening toddle on her tiny, slippered feet out in the
old-fashioned flower-garden beside the house, and she had a little
bunch of sweet herbs, which she dearly loved, in her hand. She
fastened a sprig of thyme in his coat as she stood talking to him,
and the insistent odor seemed as real as a presence when he breathed.
"nothing has gone wrong with your business, has there?" she inquired,
lovingly.

"No, mother," he replied, and moved away from her gently, with the
fragrance of the thyme strong in his consciousness.

His mother put her sweet nosegay in water. Then she went to bed, and
Anderson sat on the stoop. Young Eastman and the Van Dorn girl passed
after he sat there, and he thought with a loving passion of
protection of poor little Charlotte alone at home. "I'll warrant the
poor child is watching for that good-for-nothing scoundrel this
minute," he told himself. He would have liked to knock young Eastman
down; it would have delighted his soul to kick him; he would have
given a good deal to have had him at the top of the steps.

The weather was intensely warm. He heard his mother fling her bedroom
blinds wide open to catch all the air. The sky was clear, but all
along the northwest horizon was a play of lightning from a
far-distant storm.

Anderson lit another cigar. The night seemed to grow more and more
oppressive. When a breath of wind came, it was like a hot breath of
some fierce sentiency. A disagreeable odor from something was also
borne upon it. The odors of the flowers seemed in abeyance. The play
of blue-and-rosy light along the northwest horizon continued.
Anderson got a certain pleasure from watching it. Nature's
spectacularity diverted him, as if he had been a child, from his own
affairs, which seemed to give him a dull pain. Between the flashes he
asked himself why.

"It is just right," he told himself; "just what I desired. Why do I
feel this way?"

Presently he decided with self-deception that it was because of the
recent scene in the drug store. He remembered quite distinctly the
young man's gaze at the stout, blue-eyed girl. "What right had the
fellow to look at another girl after that fashion?" he said to
himself. Then it struck him suddenly as being perhaps impossible for
him ever to look at Charlotte in just that fashion. He thought with a
thrill of indignant pride that there was a maiden who would have the
best of love as her right. Then sitting there he heard a quick tread
and a trill of whistle as meaningless as that of a robin, and young
Eastman himself came alongside. He stopped before the gate.

"Hullo!" he said, suddenly.

"Hullo!" responded Anderson.

"Got a match?" said Eastman.

"Sure."

Eastman sprang up the steps until he came in reach of Anderson's
proffered handful of matches. "Hotter 'n blazes," he remarked, as he
scratched a match on his trousers leg.

"Hottest night of the season so far, I think," responded Anderson.

"I'm about beat out with it," said Eastman, lighting his cigar with
no difficulty in the dead atmosphere. He threw himself sprawling on
the step at Anderson's feet, without any invitation. "Whew!" he
sighed.

"It 'll be hotter than hades in the City to-morrow," he remarked,
after a moment's silence.

Anderson muttered an assent. He was considering as nervously as a
woman whether he should say anything to this boy. While he was
hesitating, young Eastman himself led up to it.

"Saw you in the drug store just now," he remarked.

"Yes; you were with--"

"Bessy Van Dorn--yes. Pretty girl?" Eastman spoke with the
insufferable air of patronizing criticism of extreme masculine youth
towards the opposite sex.

"Very," replied Anderson, dryly.

The young fellow gave a furious puff at his cigar. The smoke came
full in Anderson's face. "Passed here the other evening with two
other young ladies while you were sitting here," young Eastman
remarked, in a curious tone. It was full of pain, but it had a
reckless, devil-may-care defiance in it also.

"Yes," said Anderson, "I think you did. About a week ago, wasn't it?"

"Week ago yesterday. Well, I suppose you've heard the news. It's all
over town."

"You mean--"

"She's engaged."

Anderson felt bewildered. "Yes?" he replied, questioningly.

"She's engaged," the young fellow repeated, with a sobbing sigh,
which he ended in a laugh. "They all do it, sir."

Anderson was too puzzled to say anything.

"Suppose you've heard about the man?" said Eastman, in a nonchalant
voice. He inhaled the smoke from his cigar with an air of abstract
enjoyment.

Anderson unassumedly stared at him. "Why, I thought it was--"

"Who?" asked the young fellow, eagerly.

Anderson hesitated.

"Who did you think it was?" Eastman persisted. He had a pitiful
wistfulness in his face upturned to the older man. It became quite
evident that he had a desire to hear himself named as the accepted
suitor.

"Why, I thought that you were the man!" Anderson answered.

"Everybody thought so, I guess," the young fellow said, with an
absurd and childlike pride in the semblance in the midst of his grief
over the reality. "But--" He hesitated, and Anderson waited, looking
above at the play of lightning in the sky and smoking. "She's gone
and got engaged to a man old enough to be her father. Lord! I guess
he's older than her father--old enough to be her grandfather!" cried
the young fellow, with a burst of grief and rage and shame. "Yes,
sir, old enough to be her grandfather," he repeated. His voice shook.
His cigar had gone out. He struck a match and the head flew off. He
swore softly and struck another. Sometimes a match refusing to ignite
changes mourning to wrath and rebellion. The third match broke short
in two and the burning head flew down on the sidewalk. "Wish I had
hold of the man that made 'em," young Eastman said, viciously; and in
the same breath: "What can the girl be thinking of, that she flings
herself away like that? Hang it all, is a woman a devil or a fool?"

Anderson removed his cigar long enough to ask a question, then
replaced it. "Who is the man?" he inquired, in a slow, odd voice.

"Oh, he is an old army officer, a major--Major Arms, I believe his
name is. He's somebody they've known a long time. He lives in
Kentucky, I believe, in the same place where the Carrolls used to
live and where she went to school. Oh, it's a good match. They're
just tickled to death over it. Her sister feels rather bad, I guess,
but, Lord! she'd do the same thing herself, if she got the chance.
They're all alike." The boy said the last with a cynical bitterness
beyond his years. He sneered effectively. He crossed one leg over the
other and puffed his relighted cigar. The last match had ignited.
Anderson said nothing. He was accommodating his ideas to the change
of situation. Presently young Eastman spoke again. "Well," he said,
in a tone of wretched conceit, "girls are as thick as flowers, after
all, and a lot alike. Bessy Van Dorn is a beauty, isn't she?"

"I don't think she's much like the other," said Anderson, shortly.

"She's full as pretty."

Anderson made no reply.

"I don't believe Bessy would go and marry a man old enough to be her
grandfather," said the boy, with a burst of piteous challenge. Then
suddenly he tossed his cigar into the street and flung up his hands
to his head with a despairing gesture. "Oh, my God!" he groaned.

"Be a man," Anderson said, in a kind voice.

"I am a man, ain't I? What do you suppose I care about it? I don't
want to marry and settle down yet, anyway. I like to fool with the
girls, but as for anything else-- I am a--man. If you think I am
broken up over this, if anybody thinks I am-- Lord--" The young
fellow rose and squared his shoulders. He looked down at Anderson.
"There's one thing I want to say," he added. "I don't want you to
think--I don't want to give the impression that she--that she has
been flirting, or anything like that. She hasn't. Of course she might
have been a little franker, I will admit that, for I have been there
a good deal, but I don't suppose she thought it was anything serious,
and it wasn't. She was right. But she did not flirt. Those girls are
not that sort. Great Scott! I should like to see a man venture on any
little familiarities with them--holding hands, or a kiss, or
anything. They respect themselves, those girls do. They have been
brought up better than the Banbridge girls. Oh no, she hasn't treated
me badly or anything, and of course I don't care a damn about her
getting married, only I'll be hanged if I like, on general
principles, to see a pretty young girl throwing herself away on a man
old enough to be her father. It's wrong--it's indecent, you know."
Again the boy's voice seemed bursting with wrath and grief and shame.

Anderson rose, went into the house, and was out again in a few
seconds. He had a cigar-box in his hand. "Try one of these," he said.
"It's a brand new to me, and I think it fine. I think you'll agree
with me."

"Thanks," said Eastman, with a sound in his voice like a heart-broken
child's. He almost sobbed, but he took the cigar gratefully. "Well, I
must be going," he said. "Mother 'll wonder where I am. It was too
deuced hot to go to bed, so I've been strolling around. But I've got
to turn in sometime. These nights are too hot to sleep, anyhow."

"Yes, they are pretty tough," said Anderson. "Wish we could have a
shower."

"So do I. Say, this cigar is a dandy."

"I thought you'd like it. Of course it isn't a cigar that everybody
would like. It requires some taste, perhaps a cultivated taste."

"Yes, that's so," replied the boy, with a pleased air. "I guess it
does. I shouldn't say every man would appreciate this."

"Have another," said Anderson, and he pressed a couple into the hot
young hand, which was greedily reached out for a little solace for
its owner's wounded heart and self-love.

"Thanks. I suppose I have quite a good taste for a good cigar. I
don't believe it would be very easy to palm off a cheap grade on me.
Good-night, Mr. Anderson."

"Good-night," said Anderson, and was conscious of pity and amusement
as the boy went away and his footsteps died out of hearing. As for
himself, he was in much the same case as before, only the time had
evidently arrived for him to dismiss his dreams and the lady of them.
He did not think so hardly of her for being willing to marry the
older man as the disappointed young man did. He considered himself as
comparatively old, and he had a feeling of sympathy for the other old
fellow who doubtless loved her. He was prepared to think that she had
done a wiser thing than to engage herself to young Eastman,
especially if the man was rich enough to take care of her. The
position would be good, too. He thought generously of that
consideration, although it touched him in his tenderest spot of
vanity. "She will do well to marry an ex-army officer," he thought.
"She will have the entree to any society." Presently he arose and
went up-stairs to bed. He passed roughly by the nook where he had so
often fancied her sitting, and closed, as it were, the door of his
fancy against her with a bang. He set a lamp on a table at the head
of his bed and read his political economy until dawn. It was, in
fact, too hot for any nervous person to sleep. Now and then his
thoughts wandered, the incessant drone of the night insects outside
seemed to distract his attention from his book like some persistent
clamor of nature recalling him to his leading-strings in which she
had held him from the first. But resolutely he turned again to his
book. At dawn he fell asleep, and woke an hour later to another
steaming day.

Chapter XV

"I think we shall have thunder-showers to-day," Mrs. Anderson
remarked, as she poured the coffee at the breakfast-table. Even this
old gentlewoman, carefully attired in her dainty white lawn wrapper,
had that slightly dissipated, bewildered, and rancorous air that
extreme heat is apt to impart to the finest-grained of us. Her fair
old face had a glossy flush, her white hair, which usually puffed
with a soft wave over her temples, was stringy. She allowed her
wrapper to remain open at the neck, exposing her old throat, and
dispensed with her usual swathing of lace. She confessed that she had
not been able to sleep at all; still she kept her trust in
Providence, and would scarcely admit to discomfort. "I am sure there
will be showers, and cool the air," she said, with her sweet
optimism. As she spoke she fanned herself with the great palm-leaf
fan with a green bow on the stem, which she was never without during
this weather. "It is certainly very warm so early in the season. One
must feel it a little, but it is always so delightful after a shower
that it compensates."

"You are showing a lovely Christian spirit, mother," Anderson
returned, smiling at her with fond amusement, "but don't be
hypocritical."

"My son, what do you mean?"

"Mother, dear, you don't really like this weather. You only pretend
to because man did not make it."

"Randolph!"

"Only think how you would growl if the mayor and aldermen, or even
the president, made this weather!"

"My son, they did not," Mrs. Anderson responded, solemnly.

"No, and that settles it, I suppose. If they did, you would say at
once they ought to be forced to resign from their offices. Now,
mother, be resigned all you like, but don't be pleased, for you can't
cheat the Providence that made this beastly heat, and must know
perfectly well how beastly it is, better than you or I do, and won't
think any more of us for any pretence in the matter."

"You shock me, dear. And, besides, I did not say that I liked it. I
said I liked the weather after a shower. You look pale this morning,
dear, and you don't talk quite like yourself. I do wish you would
take an umbrella when you go to the office to-day. It is so very
warm." Mrs. Anderson had a chronic fear of sunstroke.

When Randolph went away without his umbrella, as he usually did,
being, dearly as he loved his mother, impervious to some of her
feminine demands, she watched him, standing in the doorway and
shaking her head with a dubious air.

That noon she was quite contented, for he did actually carry his
umbrella. The sky in the northwest was threatening, although the sun
still shone fiercely in the south. She herself sat on the doorstep in
the shade, and fairly panted like a corpulent old dog. Her mouth was
open and her tongue even lolled a little. She was, in reality,
suffering frightfully. She had both flesh and nerves, and, given
these two adverse conditions to endurance, and the mercury ninety in
the shade, there is torture although the spirit is strong.

Although the sky was threatening all the afternoon, it was not until
four o'clock that the northwest sky grew distinctly ominous and the
rumble of the thunder was audible. Then Mrs. Anderson called her
maid, and they proceeded to close tightly all the windows against the
rising wind.

"It is very dangerous indeed to have a draught in the house in a
thunder-shower," Mrs. Anderson always said while closing them.

Then she hurriedly divested herself of the white lawn wrapper which
she had worn all day, and put on her black summer silk gown, with a
wrap and a bonnet and an umbrella at hand. Mrs. Anderson was not
afraid of a thunder-shower in the ordinary sense, but her imagination
never failed her. Therefore she was always dressed, in case the worst
should happen and she be forced to flee from a stricken house. She
also had her small and portable treasures ready at hand. Then she sat
down in the middle of the sitting-room well out of range of the
chimney, and prayed for her own and her son's safety, and
incidentally for the safety of the maid, who was in the adjoining
room with the door open, and for the house and her son's store. She
always did thus in a thunder-shower, but she never told any one this
innocent childish secret of an innocent old soul.

She thought with a sort of undercurrent of faithlessness of the great
draught in her son's store if the large front doors and the office
door were both open, as there was a strong probability of their
being. She thought uneasily that her son might be that very moment in
that draught, as indeed he was. He stood in the strong current of
fresh storm-air, with its pungent odors, more like revelations than
odors, of things which had been in abeyance for some time past in the
drought. The smell of the wet green things was like a paean of joy.
It was a call of renewed life out of concealed places of fainting and
hiding. There were scents of flowers and fruits, and another strange
odor, like the smell of battle, from all the ferment on the earth
which had precipitated the storm. It was quite a severe
thunder-shower. The rain had held off for a fierce prelude, then it
came in solid cataracts. Then it was that Charlotte Carroll rushed
into the store. She was dripping, beaten like a flower, by the force
of the liquid flail of the storm. She had pulled off the
rose-wreathed hat which was dear to her heart, and she had it under
her dress skirt, which she held up over her lace-trimmed petticoat
modestly, with as little revelation as might be. Her dark head
glistened with the rain.

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