James Oliver Curwood - "The Courage of Marge O'Doone"

Isaac Newton - "Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John"

Anonymous - "The Manual of Heraldry; Fifth Edition"

R. F. Dearborn - "Saratoga and How to See It"

Author of ‘Conversations With God’ Admits Essay Wasn’t His
Steve Knopper’s stark accounting of the mistakes major record labels have made in the digital era suggests they are largely responsible for their own demise.

Books of The Times: When Labels Fought the Digital, and the Digital Won
Oprah.com, the Web site of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” has posted a disclaimer acknowledging that Herman Rosenblat admitted he had invented portions of his Holocaust memoir.

Arts, Briefly: Winfrey Web Site Notes Fabricated Memoir
Mr. Seaver defied censorship and conventional literary standards to bring works by rabble-rousing authors like Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller and William Burroughs to American readers.

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman - The Debtor

M >> Mary E. Wilkins Freeman >> The Debtor




"What?" asked Charlotte.

"Nothing," said Eddy. His arm was paining him quite severely. It had
been quite an ordeal for him to manage his knife and fork at supper
without betrayal.

"What were you going to say?" persisted Charlotte.

"Nothing," said Eddy, doggedly--"nothing at all. Don't act so fierce,
Charlotte. It isn't lady-like. Amy never speaks so awful quick."

Charlotte began putting on her hat, which had been left on the
sitting-room table. "I am ashamed of you," she whispered again. "I
was ashamed of you all tea-time."

Eddy whistled in a mannish fashion. Charlotte continued adjusting her
hat and smoothing her fluff of dark hair. Her face, in the mirror
which hung between the two front windows, looked not so angry as
sorrowful, and with a dewy softness in the pretty eyes, and a slight
quiver about the soft mouth. Eddy glanced several times at this
reflected face; then he stole, with a sudden, swift motion, up behind
his sister, threw his arms around her neck, although it hurt him
cruelly, and laid his boyish cheek against her soft, girlish one.

"No, you need not think that will make up," whispered Charlotte. But
she herself pressed her cheek tenderly against his, and then laughed
softly. "Try not to do so again, dear," she said. "It mortified me,
and it is not being a credit to papa. Think a little and try to
remember how you have been brought up."

"Charlotte," whispered Eddy, in the softest, most furtive of
whispers, casting a glance over his shoulder.

"What is it, dear?"

"I suppose they"--he indicated by a motion of his shoulder his host
and hostess--"are just as nice people as--we are--as the Carrolls."

"Of course they are," replied Charlotte, hastily. She pushed Eddy
away softly and began to fuss again with her hat. "We must go home
right away," she said, "or they will worry."

"There is no need of his going home with you, as long as I am here,"
said Eddy.

"Of course not," replied Charlotte.

But it seemed that Anderson himself had other views, and his mother
also, for although a sudden and not altogether easy suspicion had
come to her, she whispered aside to him that he must certainly
accompany the two home.

"It is quite dark already," she said, "and it is not fit for that
child to go alone with nobody but that boy, after the fright she has
had this afternoon. She is just in the condition now when a shadow
might upset her. You really must go with her, Randolph."

"I have no intention of doing anything else, mother," Randolph
replied, laughing. He had been, indeed, taking his overcoat from the
tree in the hall when his mother had come out to speak to him.
Charlotte had said, on rising from the table, that she must go home
at once.

Mrs. Anderson enveloped the girl in her large, gentle,
lavender-scented embrace, and received with pleasant disclaimers her
assurances of obligations and thanks; then she stood in the window
and, with a little misgiving, and a ready imagination for future
trouble, watched them emerge from the little front yard and disappear
down the street under the low-growing maple branches which were
turning slowly, and flashed gold over their heads in electric lights.
She reflected judicially that while Charlotte was undoubtedly a sweet
girl, and very pretty, very pretty, indeed, and, while her own heart
was drawn to her, yet she would make no sort of wife for her son. She
remembered with a shudder Eddy's remarks at the table.

"He is a pretty little boy, too," she thought, with a maternal
thrill, remembering her own son at that age. When she returned to the
dining-room to wash the pink-and-gold cups and saucers, in her little
bowl of hot water on the end of the table, as was her custom when the
best china had been used, the maid, who was clearing the table, and
who had been encouraged to conversation from the lack of another
woman in the house, and her mistress's habit of gentle garrulity,
spoke upon the subject in her mind.

"Them was them Carrolls that lives in the Ranger place, was they
not?" said she. The maid was a curious product of the region, having
somewhat anomalously graduated at a high-school in New Sanderson
before entering service, and gotten a strange load of unassimilated
knowledge, which was particularly exemplified in her English. She
scorned contractions, but equally scorned possessives and legitimate
tenses. She wrote a beautiful hand, using quite ambitious words, but
she totally misinterpreted the meaning of these very words in current
literature, particularly the cook-book. Her bread was as heavy with
undigested facts as is the stomach of a dyspeptic with food, but she
was, in a way, a good servant, very faithful, attached to Mrs.
Anderson, and a guileless purveyor of gossip, which rendered her
exceedingly entertaining. She sniffed meaningly now in response to
Mrs. Anderson's affirmative with regard to the identity of the recent
guests.

"They did not fail to eat enough," said she, presently, packing up
the plates and looking at her mistress, who was drying carefully a
pink-and-gold cup on a soft towel.

"Yes, they seemed to relish the food," responded Mrs. Anderson.

The maid sniffed again, and her sniff meant the gratification of the
cook who sees her work appreciated, and something else--an indulgent
scorn. "Well, I guess there is reason enough for them relishing it,"
said she.

Mrs. Anderson made a soft, interrogatory noise, all that was
consistent with her dignity and her sense of honor as a recent
hostess towards departed guests.

The maid went on. "They do say," said she, "them as knows, that them
Carrolls do not have enough to eat."

Mrs. Anderson made a little exclamation expressive of horror and pity.

"Yes, they do say so," the maid went on, solemnly. "They do say, them
that knows, that them Carrolls be owing everybody in Banbridge, and
have cheated folks that have trusted in them awful."

"Well, I am sorry if it is so," said Mrs. Anderson, with a sigh, "but
of course this young lady who was here to-night and her little
brother can't be to blame in any way, Emma."

The maid sniffed with a deprecating disagreement. "Mebbe they be
not," said she. She was rather a pretty girl, in her late girlhood,
thin and large-boned, with a bright color on her evident cheek-bones,
and with small, sparkling, blue eyes. She was extremely neat and
trim, moreover, in her personal habits, and to-night was quite
gorgeously arrayed in a light silk waist and a nice black skirt. She
was expecting her beau to take her to evening prayer-meeting. She was
a very religious girl, and had reclaimed her beau, who had had a
liking for the gin-mills previous to keeping company with her.

"Of course they are not," said Mrs. Anderson, with some warmth of
partisanship, remembering poor little Charlotte's pretty, anxious
face and her tiny, soft, clinging hands. She glanced, as she spoke,
at the maid's large, red-knuckled fingers with a mental comparison.

The maid was fixed in her own rendering of English verbs, and had
told her beau that her mistress did not speak just right, like most
old folks.

"Mebbe they be not," she said, with firm doubt. Then she added, "It
would not hurt them Carroll ladies, that young lady, nor her mother,
nor her aunt, if they was to take hold, and do the housework them own
selves, instead of keeping a girl, who they do not never pay."

"Oh, dear! Do you know that?"

"Indeed I do know that! Ed, he told me. He had it straight from them
Hungarians who live in the house back of his married sister's. The
Carroll girl, she goes there, and she told them, and them told Ed's
sister."

"Perhaps she has had some of her wages. You don't mean she has not
been paid at all?" Mrs. Anderson said.

"I mean not at all," the maid said, firmly. "That girl that works for
them Carrolls has not been paid, not at all."

"Why does she remain there, then?"

"She would have went a long time ago if she not been afraid, lest, if
she had went, it would have come about that she would have lost all
she was going to lose as well as that which she had lost before,"
replied the girl, and Mrs. Anderson, being accustomed to her method
of expression, understood.

"It is dreadful," she said.

"They say he has about ruined a great many of the people in Banbridge
who have trusted them," said the maid, with a sly, keen glance at her
mistress. She had heard that Mr. Anderson was one of the losers, and
she wondered.

"They have paid my son promptly, I believe," said Mrs. Anderson,
although a little reluctantly. She always disliked alluding to the
store to her maid, much more so than towards her equals. But that the
maid misunderstood. She often told her beau that Mrs. Anderson was
not a bit set up nor proud-feeling, if her son _did_ have a store.
Therefore, to-night she understood humility instead of pride from her
mistress's tone, and looked at her admiringly as she daintily
polished the delicate pink-and-gold cups.

"I am very glad, indeed, that Mr. Randolph has not lost nothing
through them," she replied.

"No, he has not," Mrs. Anderson repeated. "I dare say it is all
exaggerated. The young lady who was here to-night seems like a very
sweet girl."

Mrs. Anderson said that from a beautiful sense of loyalty and
justice, while in her mind's eye she saw her beloved son walking
along through the early night with the young lady on his arm, and
perhaps falling desperately in love, even at this date, and beginning
to think of matrimony with a member of a family about which such
tales were told in Banbridge.

But the harm had been done long before she had dreamed of it, and her
son had been very much in love with the girl on his arm before he had
scarcely known her by sight. Anderson that night felt in a sort of
dream. He was for the first time practically alone with Charlotte,
for Eddy accompanied them very much after the fashion of an extremely
lively little dog. He ran ahead, he lagged behind, and made dashes
ahead with wild whoops. He hid behind trees, and sprang out at them
when they passed. He was frequently startlingly obvious, but could
not be said to actually be with them. He had wondered frankly, before
they started, as to why Anderson wished to accompany them at all.

"I don't see why you want to go 'way up to our house when Charlotte
has got me," he said. "Ain't you tired?"

Something in Anderson's persistency seemed to strike him as
significant, for he walked behind them quite soberly, with his eye
upon their backs in a speculative fashion at first; then he seemed to
be seized with wild excitement, and began frantic demonstrations to
attract Anderson's attention. In reality the boy was jealous,
although nobody dreamed of such a thing.

"A man will never notice a feller when a pretty girl's around; and
she ain't so very pretty, either," he said to himself. He regarded
Anderson as his find, and was naturally indignant with Charlotte. So
all the way home he darted and veered about them, in order to divert
the man's mind from the girl to the faithful little boy, but with no
avail. Once or twice Charlotte spoke reproachfully to him, and that
was all. Anderson never spoke a word to him, and his grief and
jealousy grew.

Anderson, walking along the shadowy street with Charlotte's little
hand in his arm, would have been oblivious to much more startling
demonstrations than poor Eddy's. He was profoundly agitated, stirred
to the depths, and for that very reason he acquitted himself with
more dignity and quiet calm than usual. He held himself with such a
tight rein that his soul ached, but he never relaxed his hold. He
told himself that it would be monstrous if by a word or gesture, by a
tone of the voice, he betrayed anything to this little, innocent,
timid, frightened girl on his arm. He never dreamed of the remotest
possibility of dreams on her part. The soul beside him, seemingly
separated only by thin walls of flesh, was in reality separated by an
abyss of the imagination. But every minute his heart seemed to
encompass her more and more tenderly, seemed to enfold her, shielding
her from itself with its own love. Now and then he looked down at
her, and the sight of the little, pale, flower-like face turned
towards his with a serious, guileless scrutiny, like a baby's, caused
him to fairly tremble with his passion of protection and adoration.
They talked very little. Charlotte, if the truth were told, in spite
of the tender nursing she had received, was still feeling rather
shaken, and she had also a curious sense of timid and excited
happiness, which tied her tongue and wove her thoughts even into an
incoherent dazzle. When Anderson spoke, it was very coolly, on quite
indifferent topics, and Charlotte answered him in her soft, rather
unsteady little voice, and then conversation lagged again. It was on
Anderson's tongue to question her closely as to her entire recovery
from her fright of the afternoon, but he did not even do that, being
afraid to trust his voice.

As they drew near the Carroll house, a doubt and perplexity which had
been haunting Charlotte, assumed larger proportions, and Anderson
himself had a thought also of the complication. Charlotte was
wondering if she should ask him in. She was wondering what her mother
and aunt would think. She knew what they would do, of course--that
is, so far as their reception of the man who had befriended her, and
whose mother had befriended her was concerned. They were gentlewomen.
And she knew quite certainly about her father. But she wondered as to
their real attitude, their mental attitude, and she wondered still
more with regard to Anderson. Would he expect to be invited in? In
what fashion did he read his own social status in the village.
Anderson also was considering, during the last of the way, if he
should enter the Carroll house and present his apologies and his
mother's for having urged the fugitive members of the family to
remain, and he wondered a good deal as to the desirable course for
him to adopt, even supposing he were invited. While he had no
consciousness whatever of any loss of prestige among people whom he
had always known in the village, while, in fact, he never gave it a
thought--yet he knew reasonably that outsiders might possibly look at
matters differently, that his own unshaken estimate of himself, the
estimate which was the same in a grocery-store as in a lawyer's
office, might not be accepted. He recognized the fact with amusement
rather than indignation, but he recognized it. He wondered how the
girl would look at it all, whether she would ask him in to make the
acquaintance of her family, and whether, if she did so he should
accept.

But Charlotte came to have no doubt whatever that she should ask him.
Suddenly a great wave of loyalty towards this new friend came over
her, loyalty and great courage.

"Of course I shall ask him, when he has done all he has for me, he
and his mother," she decided. "I shall, and I don't care what they
think. I don't care. He is a gentleman, as much a gentleman as papa."
Charlotte walked more erect, the pressure of her hand on Anderson's
arm tightened a little unconsciously. When they reached the Carroll
grounds she spoke very sweetly, and not at all hesitatingly.

"You will come in and let my family thank you for your kindness to
me, Mr. Anderson," she said.

Anderson smiled down at her, and hesitated. "I do not require any
thanks. What I have done was only a pleasure," he said. In his
anxiety to control his voice, he overdid the matter, and made it
exceedingly cool.

"He means he would have done just the same for any other girl, and it
is silly for me to think he needs to be thanked so much for it,"
thought Charlotte, like a flash. She was full of the hair-splitting
fancies of young girlhood in their estimate of a man. Her heart sank,
but she repeated, still sweetly, though now a little more formally:
"Then please come in and meet my father and mother and aunt. I should
like to have you know them, and I am sure it would be a great
pleasure to them."

"Thank you, Miss Carroll," Anderson said, slowly. Then, while he
hesitated, came suddenly the sound of a shrill, vituperating voice
from the house, a voice raised in a solo-like effect, the burden of
which seemed both grief and rage, and contumely.

Eddy, who had given one of his dashes ahead, when they reached the
grounds, came flying back. "Say," he said, "there's an awful shindy
in the house. The dressmaker is pitching into papa for all she is
worth, and there are some other folks, but she's goin' it loudest;
but they are all going it! Cracky! Hear 'em!"

Indeed, at that second the solo became a chorus. The house seemed all
clamorous with scolding voices. The door stood open, and the
hall-light streamed out in the hall.

"Marie, she's in there, too," said Eddy, in an odd sort of glee, "and
Martin. They are all pitching into papa for their money, but he's
enough for them." It became evident why the boy's voice was gleeful.
He was pitting his father, with the most filial pride and confidence,
against his creditors.

Anderson held out his hand to Charlotte. "Good-night," he said,
hastily, "and I hope you will feel no ill effects to-morrow from your
fright." Then he was gone before Charlotte could say anything more.

"It's an awful shindy," Eddy said, still in that tone of strange
glee, to his sister. To his great amazement, she caught him suddenly
by his arm, the hurt one, but he did not flinch.

The girl began to cry. "Oh, Eddy!" she sobbed, pitifully. "Oh, Eddy
dear!"

"What are you crying for, Charlotte?" asked Eddy, giving his head a
rough caressing duck against hers. "Papa's enough for them; you know
that. He ain't a mite scared."



Chapter XXIX


Anderson, as he went away that night, had before his eyes Charlotte's
little face, the intensity of which had seemed to make it fairly
luminous in the dim light, as she had turned it towards him. There
was in that face at once unreasoning and childish anger that he was
there at all, and in a measure a witness of the distress and disgrace
of herself and her family, and a piteous appeal for help--at once a
forbidding and a beseeching. For Anderson, naturally, the forbidding
seemed most in evidence as an impulse to action. He felt that he must
withdraw immediately and save them all the additional mortification
that he could. So he hurried away down the road, with the girl's face
before his eyes, and the sound of the scolding voice in the house in
his ears. The voice carried far. In spite of the wrath in it, it was
a sweet, almost a singing, voice, high-pitched but sonorous. It was
the voice of little Willy Eddy's German wife, and it came from a pair
of strong lungs in a well-developed chest, and was actuated by a
strong and indignant spirit. Arthur Carroll, listening to her, was
conscious of an absurdly impersonal sentiment of something like
admiration. The young woman was really in a manner superb. The
occasion was trivial, even ignoble. Carroll felt contemptuous both
for her and for himself, and yet she dignified it to a degree. Minna
Eddy was built on a large scale; she was both muscular and stout. Her
short, blue-woollen skirt, increasing with its fulness her firm hips,
disclosed generously her sturdy feet and ankles, which had a certain
beauty of fitness as pedestals of support for her great bulk of
femininity. She had come out just as she had been about her household
tasks, and her cotton blouse, of an incongruous green-figured
pattern, was open at the neck, disclosing a meeting of curves in a
roseate crease, and one sleeve, being badly worn, revealed a pink
boss of elbow. Minna Eddy had a distinctly handsome face, so far as
feature and color went. It was a harmonious combination of curves and
dimples, all overspread with a deep bloom, as of milk and roses, and
her fair hair was magnificent. She had a marvellous growth both for
thickness and length, and it was plaited smoothly, covering the back
of the head as with a mat. She had come out with a blue handkerchief
tied over her head, but she had torn it off, and waved it like a flag
of battle in one fat, muscular hand as she lifted on high her voice
of musical wrath. She spoke good English, although naturally
tinctured by the abuses of the country-side. She had come to America
before she could talk at all, and all her training had been in the
country. The only trace of her German descent was in the sounds of
certain letters, especially _d_ and _v_. She said _t_ for _d_, and
_f_ for _v_. Carroll noticed that as he noticed every detail. His
senses seemed unnaturally acute, as possibly any animal's may be when
at bay, and when the baiting has fairly begun.

A little behind Minna Eddy, and at her right, stood her husband, with
a face of utter discomfiture and terror. Now and then he reached out
a small, twitching hand and made an ineffectual clutch at her elbow
as she talked on. At times he rolled terrified and appealing eyes at
Carroll. He seemed even to be begging for his partisanship, although
the absurdity of that was obvious.

"Oh, you other man," his eyes seemed to say, "see how terrible a
woman can be! What can we do against such might as this?" The room
was quite full of people, but Minna Eddy had the platform.

"You, you, you!" she repeated before every paragraph of invective,
like a prelude and refrain. "You, you, you!" and she fairly hurled
the words at Carroll--"you, you, you! gettin' my man"--with a fierce
backward lunge of her bare right elbow towards her husband, who
shrank away, and a fierce backward roll of a blue eye--"gettin' my
man to take all his money and spend it for no goot. You, you, you!
When I haf need of it for shoes and stockings for the children, when
I go with my dress in rags. You, you, you!" She went on and on, with
a curious variety in the midst of monotony. The stream of her
invective flowed on like a river with ever-new ripples. There was a
species of fascination in it for the man who was the object of it,
and there seemed to be also a compelling quality for the others in
the room. There had been no preconcerted movement among Carroll's
creditors, but a number of them had that evening descended upon him
in a body. In the parlor were the little dressmaker; the druggist;
the butcher; Tappan, the milkman; the two stenographers, and Harrison
Day, the clerk, who had come on the seven-o'clock train from New
York; two men with whom he had dealings in a horse-trade; an old man
who had made the garden the previous spring; and another butcher who
had driven over from New Sanderson. In the dining-room door stood
Marie, the Hungarian maid, and behind her was the coachman. Carroll
stood leaning against the corner of the mantel-piece; some of the
others were defiantly yet deprecatingly seated, some were standing.
Anna Carroll, quite pale, with an odd, fixed expression, stood near
her brother. When Charlotte entered the house, she took up a position
in the hall, leaning against the wall, near the door. She could hear
every word, but she was quite out of sight. She leaned heavily
against the wall, for her limbs trembled under her, and she could
scarcely stand. Her aunt had looked around as she entered, and a
question as to where she had been had shaped itself on her lips: then
her look of inquiry and relief had died away in her expression of
bitter concentration upon the matter in hand. She had been alarmed
about Charlotte, as they had all been. Mrs. Carroll had called softly
down the stairs to know if Charlotte had come, and the girl had
answered, "Yes, Amy dear."

"Where have you been, dear?" asked the soft voice, from an indistinct
mass of floating white at the head of the stairs.

"I'll tell you by-and-by, Amy dear."

"I was alarmed about you," said the voice, "it was so late; about you
and Eddy."

"He has come, too."

"Yes, I heard him." Then the voice added, quite distinctly petulant,
"I have a headache, but it is so noisy I cannot get to sleep." Then
there was a rustle of retreat, and Charlotte leaned against the wall,
listening to the hushed turmoil surmounted by that voice of
accusation in the parlor. Eddy stood full in the doorway, in a
boyish, swaggering attitude, his hands on his hips, and bent
slightly, with sharp eyes of intense enjoyment on Minna Eddy.
Suddenly, Carroll turned and caught sight of him, and as if perforce
the boy's eyes turned to meet his father's. Carroll did not speak,
but he raised his hand and pointed to the hall with an upward motion
for the stairs, and Eddy went, with a faint whimper of remonstrance.
The scolding woman saw the little, retreating figure, and directly
the torrent of her vituperation was turned into a new course.

"You, you, you!" she proclaimed; "dressin' your boy up in fine
clothes, while mine children have went in rags since you have came to
Banbridge! You, you, you! gettin' all my man's money, and dressin' up
your boy in clothes that I haf paid for! You, you, you!"

But Minna Eddy had unwittingly furnished the right key-note for a
whole chorus. Madame Griggs, who had been rocking jerkily in a small,
red-plush chair which squeaked faintly, sprang up, and left it still
rocking and squeaking.

Copyright (c) 2007. topmasterworks.com. All rights reserved.