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Mary E. Wilkins Freeman - The Debtor

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




Charlotte, going down the street towards the station that night,
expected a letter by the five-o'clock train. She reached the
post-office, which was near the station, at a quarter before six, and
she found, as she anticipated, letters. There were several for her
father, which she thought, accusingly towards the writers, were
bills. It was odd that Charlotte, while not really morally perverted,
and while she admitted the right of people to be paid, did not admit
the right of any one to annoy her father by presenting his bill. She
looked at the letters, and, remembering the wretched expression on
her father's face on receiving some the night before, it actually
entered into her mind to tear these letters up and never let him see
them at all. But she put them in her little bag, and opened her own
letters and stood in the office to read them. The train was not due
for fifteen minutes yet, and was very likely to be late. She had
letters from her mother, Ina, and aunt. They all told of the life
they were leading there, and expressed hope that she and her father
were well, and there was a great deal of love. It was all the usual
thing, for they wrote every day. There were also letters from them
all for Carroll. The Carroll family, when absent from one another,
were all good correspondents, with the exception of Carroll. There
was even a little letter from Eddy, which had been missent, because
he had spelled Banbridge like two words--Ban Bridge.

Charlotte read her letters, smiling over them, standing aloof by the
window. The post-office was fast thinning out. There had been the
customary crowd there at the arrival of the mail--the pushing and
shrieking children and the heavily shuffling loungers--all people who
never by any possibility got any letters, but who found a certain
excitement in frequenting the office at such times. Just as Charlotte
finished her last letter and replaced it in the envelope, Anderson
came in for his mail. He did not notice her, but went directly to his
box, which had a lock, opened it, and took out a pile of letters.
Charlotte stood looking at him. He looked very good and very handsome
to her. She thought to herself how very much better-looking he was
than Ina's husband. There was something about the manly squareness of
his shoulders, as he stood with his back towards her, examining his
letters, which made her tremble a little, she could not have told
why. Suddenly he looked up and saw her, and she felt that the color
flashed over her face, and was ashamed and angry. "Why should I do
so?" she asked herself. She made a curt, stiff little bow in response
to Anderson's greeting, and he passed her going out of the office
with his letters. Then she felt distressed.

"I need not have been rude because I was such a little idiot as to
blush when a man looked at me," she told herself. "It was not his
fault. He has always been lovely to us." She reviewed in her mind
just her appearance when she had given him that stiff little bow, and
she felt almost like crying with vexation. "Of course he does not
care how I bow to him," she thought, and somehow that thought seemed
to give her additional distress, "but, all the same, I should have
been at least polite, for he is very much a gentleman. I think he is
much better bred, and he certainly knows much more than Ina's
husband, even if he does only keep a grocery store; but then army
officers are not supposed to know much except how to fight."

The heavy jar of a passing freight train made her look at the
post-office clock, and with her usual promptness, although it was
fully seven minutes before the train was due, even if it were on
time, and she was only about one minute's walk from the station, she
reflected that she must start at once if she were to meet her father.
So she stowed away her letters in her little bag, and fairly ran
across the icy slope between the office and the station. She saw, as
she hurried along, a child tumble down, and watched him jump up and
run off to make sure he was not hurt. When she reached the station
she did not go in the waiting-room, which seemed close and stuffy,
but remained out on the platform. The sun had set, but the western
sky, which was visible from that point, was a clear expanse of rose
and violet. Charlotte stood looking at it, and for a minute she was
able to find that standing-point outside her own little life and
affairs which exists for the soul. She did not think any more of the
money troubles, of her bowing so stiffly to Mr. Anderson. She forgot
not only her petty worries, but her petty triumphs and pleasures. She
forgot even the exceeding becomingness of a new way in which she had
dressed her hair. She forgot her coat, which she had herself trimmed
with fur taken from an old one of her mother's, and in which her
heart delighted. She forgot her supreme dinner warming on the
range-shelf at home. She forgot the joy she would soon have in seeing
her father alight from the train. The little, young, untrained
creature saw and knew for the moment only the eternal that which was
and is and shall be, and which the sunset symbolized. Her young face
had a rapt expression looking at it.

"Dandy sunset, ain't it?" said a voice at her ear. She looked and saw
Bessy Van Dorn, her large, blooming face, rosy with the cold, smiling
at her from under a mass of tossing black plumes on a picture-hat.
The girl was really superb in a long, fur-lined coat. She had driven
in a sleigh to the station, and she expected Frank Eastman on the
train, and was, with the most innocent and ignorant boldness in the
world, planning to drive him home, although she was not engaged to
him and he was not expecting her. Her face, turning from the
wonderful after-glow of the sunset to Charlotte's, had also something
of the same rapt expression in spite of her words.

"Yes, it is beautiful," replied Charlotte, but rather coldly. She was
a friendly little soul, but she did not naturally care for girls of
Bessy Van Dorn's particular type. She was herself too fine and small
before such a mass of inflorescence.

"It's cold," said Bessy Van Dorn, further, "but, land, I like it!
Have you been sleigh-riding?"

"No, I haven't," replied Charlotte.

"Oh, I forgot," said Bessy.

Charlotte knew what she had forgot--that the horses had gone for
debt--and she reddened, but the other girl's voice was honest.

"I'd like to take you sometime," said Bessy.

"Thank you," said Charlotte.

"I'd offer to take you home to-night," said Bessy, "but I've arranged
to take somebody else."

"Thank you. I could not go, anyway," said Charlotte. "I am down to
meet my father."

"Oh!" said Bessy. "Well, then you couldn't. A sleigh ain't quite wide
enough for three, unless one of 'em is your best young man," she
giggled. Charlotte felt ashamed.

"My father is," she said, sternly. She fairly turned her back on
Bessy Van Dorn, but she did not notice it, for the train was audible
in the distance, and Bessy began calculating her distance from the
car in which Frank Eastman usually rode, that she might be sure not
to miss him.

Charlotte stood on the platform, and also ran along by the side of
the train scanning anxiously the men who alighted. To her great
astonishment, her father was not among them. She could scarcely
believe it when the train went slowly past the station and her father
had not got off.

Bessy Van Dorn, driving Frank Eastman in her sleigh, with the fringe
of fur tails dangling over the back, looked around at Charlotte
slowly retreating from the station. "Why, her father didn't come!"
said she.

"Whose father?" asked young Eastman. He looked admiringly and even
lovingly at the girl, and yet in a slightly scornful and shamed
fashion. He hated to think of what some of the men he knew would say
about her meeting him at the station.

"Why, that poor little Charlotte Carroll's!" said Bessy. "Say," she
added, after a second's hesitation.

"What?" asked young Eastman.

"I've a good mind to ask her to ride. We're goin' her way. You don't
mind?"

"Not a bit," said young Eastman, but he did think uncomfortably of
Ina's sister seeing him with Bessy Van Dorn.

Bessie promptly stopped. They had not yet made the turn from the
station to the main road, and Charlotte was just behind them.

"Say," she called out, "get in here. I'll take you home--just as soon
as not."

"Thank you," replied Charlotte. "I have an errand. I am not going
home just yet."

"All right," replied Bessy, touching her horse. "I'd just as soon
have taken you as not, if you'd been going home."

"Thank you," Charlotte said, again.

"I declare, she looked as if she was just ready to cry," said Bessy
to Eastman, as they drove up the street.

She was quite right. Charlotte was horribly frightened by her
father's non-arrival on the train. He had never come on a later train
than that since the others had gone. The thought of returning alone
to her solitary home was more than she could bear. She remembered
that there was another train a half-hour later, and she resolved to
remain down for that. She thought that she would go to Mr. Anderson's
store and purchase some cereal for breakfast, that she might have
that charged. She was conscious, but she tried to stifle the
consciousness, of a hope that Mr. Anderson would be there, and she
might tell him that her father had not arrived on that train, and he
would reassure her. But Mr. Anderson had naturally gone straight home
from the post-office to supper. Charlotte ordered her cereal, and
also a few eggs. Then she went back to the station. It was nearly
twenty minutes before the train was due. She walked up and down the
platform, which extended east and west. The new moon was just rising,
a slender crescent of light, and off one upper horn burned a great
star. It was a wonderful night, cold, with a calmness and hush of all
the winds of heaven which was like the hush of peace itself.
Charlotte noticed everything, the calm night and the crescent moon,
but she came between herself and her own knowledge of it. Her mind
was fixed upon the train and the terrible possibility that her father
might not arrive on that. It seemed to her that if he did not arrive
on that it was simply beyond bearing. The possibility was too
terrible to be contemplated with reason, and yet she could not have
told just why she was in such a panic of fear. A thousand things
might happen to keep any business-man in the City later than he had
expected. He had often been so kept while the others were home; but
now she was alone, and she felt that he would certainly come unless
something most serious had detained him. Charlotte had naturally a
somewhat pessimistic turn of mind, and her imagination was active.
She imagined many things; she even imagined the actual cause of
Carroll's detention, among others, that he had slipped on the ice and
injured himself. The falling of the boy on her way to the six-o'clock
train had directly swerved her fancy in that direction. But she
imagined everything. That was only one of many casualties. The train
was a little late. She stood staring down the track at the unswerving
signal-lights, watching for the head-light of the locomotive, and it
seemed to her quite certain that there had been an accident on that
train. A thought struck her, and she went into the waiting-room and
asked the ticket-agent if the train was very late. The agent was
quite a young man, and he looked at her with a covert masculine
coquettishness as he replied, but she was oblivious of that. All she
thought of was that, if there had been an accident on the line and
the train was late on that account, he would surely be apt to know.
Her heart was beating so fast that she trembled; but he said ten
minutes, and said nothing about an accident, and she was reassured.
She turned to go, after thanking him, and he volunteered further
information.

"There is a freight ahead delaying the train," he said.

"Oh, thank you," replied Charlotte. Then she went out on the platform
again and watched for the head-light of the locomotive, staring down
the track past the twinkle of the signal-lights. Suddenly it flashed
into sight far off, but she saw it. She waited. Soon she heard the
train. A gateman crossed the tracks from the in-station, padlocking
the gates carefully after him. A baggage-master drew a trunk to the
edge of the platform. A few passengers came out of the waiting-room.

Charlotte waited, and the train came majestically around the curve
below the station. She moved along as it came up, keeping her eyes on
the cars. She seemed to have eyes with facets like a cut diamond. It
was really as if she saw all the car doors at once. But she moved
with a strange stiffness, and could not feel her hands nor feet; her
heart beat so fast and thick that it shook her like the pulse of an
engine. She moved along, and she saw every passenger who alighted.
Then the train steamed out of the station with slowly gathering
speed, and her father had not come on it.

Charlotte, when she actually realized the fact, the possibility of
which had seemed incredible, gained a little strength. It was like
the endurance of disaster which is sometimes more feasible than the
contemplation of it. She thought at once what to do. In the event of
her father having been delayed by some unforeseen business he would
surely telegraph. She at once crossed the slope from the station and
went to Andrew Drake's drug-store, where the telegraph-office was.
She asked if a telegram had come for her, if one had been sent to the
house. When the boy in charge answered no, she felt as if she had
received a stunning blow. She had then no doubt whatever that
something had happened to her father, some accident. The boy, who was
young and pleasant-faced, watched her with a vague sympathy. In a
moment she recovered herself. He might have sent a telegram which had
not arrived. It might come any moment. The boy directly had the same
thought. "The minute the telegram comes I'll get it up to you," he
said, earnestly. "I expect Mr. Drake back every minute, and I can
leave."

"Thank you," said Charlotte.

It was an hour and a half before the next train. She went out of the
store and walked miserably along the street to her deserted home.



Chapter XXXVIII


There is, to a human being of Charlotte Carroll's type, something
unutterably terrifying about entering, especially at nightfall, an
entirely empty house. The worst of it is it does not seem to be
empty. In reality, the emptiness of it is the last thing which is
comprehended. It is full to overflowing with terrors, with spiritual
entities which are much more palpable, when one is in a certain mood,
than actual physical presences. Charlotte approaching the house, saw,
first, glimmers of light on the windows, which were merely
reflections ostensibly from the electric light in the street, not so
ostensibly from other lights.

"Oh, there is some one in there," Charlotte thought to herself, and
again that horrible, pulsing, vibrating motion of her heart overcame
her. "Who is there?" she asked herself. She remembered that terrible
tramp whom she had seen asleep in the woods that day. He might have
been riding on some freight-train which had stopped at Banbridge, and
stolen across and entered the vacant house. She stood still, staring
at the cold glimmers on the windows. Then gradually she became
convinced that they were merely reflections which she saw. Aside from
her imagination, Charlotte was not entirely devoid of a certain
bravery, or, rather, of a certain reason which came to her rescue.
"What a little goose I am!" she told herself. "Those are only
reflections. They are the reflections of the light in the street." As
she studied it more closely she saw that the light, being intercepted
by the branches of the trees on the lawn, swaying in a light wind,
produced some of the strange effects at the windows which had seemed
like people moving back and forth in the rooms. Then all at once she
saw another glimmer of light on the front window of her father's room
which she could not account for at all. She moved in front of a long,
fan-shaped ray cast by the electric light in the street, and, looking
at the window, the reflection was still there. She could not account
for that at all, unless it was produced by a light from a house
window--which was probably the case. At all events, it disquieted
her. Still, she overcame her disinclination to enter the house
because of that. She reasoned from analogy. "All the other lights are
reflections," she told herself, "and of course that must be."
However, the main cause of her terror remained: the unfounded,
world-old conviction of presences behind closed doors, the almost
impossibility for a very imaginative person to conceive of an
entirely empty room or house--that is, empty of sentient life. She
had hidden the front-door key under the mat before the front door;
she had lived long enough in the country to acquire that absurdly
innocent habit. She groped for it, thought for a second, with a gasp
of horror, that it was not there. Then she felt it with her gloved
hand, fitted it in the lock, opened the door, and went in, and the
inner darkness smote her like a hostile crowd.

It was actually to the child as if she were passing through a thick
group of mysterious, inimical things concealed by the darkness. It
was as if she heard whispers of conspiracy; it was even as if she
smelled odors of strange garments and bodies. Every sense in her was
on the alert. She even tasted something bitter in her mouth. It was
all absurd. She reiterated in her ears that it was all absurd, but
she had now passed the point wherein reason can support. She had come
through an unusually active imagination into the unknown quantities
and sequences of life. She put out her hands and groped her way
through the darkness of the hall, and the fear lest she should touch
some one, some terrible thing, was as bad as the reality could have
been. She knew best where to find matches in the dining-room, so she
went through the hall, with a sort of mad rush in spite of her
blindness, and she gained the dining-room and felt along the shelf
for a little hammered-brass bowl where matches were usually kept. In
it she felt only two. The mantel-shelf was the old-fashioned marble
monstrosity, the perpetuation of a false taste in domestic
architecture, but it was excellent as to its facilities for
scratching matches. She rubbed one of the two matches under the shelf
on the rough surface, but it did not ignite. It evidently was a
half-burned match. She took the other. It seemed to her that if that
failed her, if she had to grope about the kitchen for more in this
thick blackness--for even the street-light did not reach this
room--she should die. She rubbed the last match against the marble,
and it blazed directly. She shielded it carefully with her hand from
the door draught, and succeeded in lighting a candle in one of a pair
of brass candlesticks which stood on the shelf. She then held the
flaring light aloft and looked fearfully around the room. Everything
was as usual, but, strangely enough, it did not reassure her. The
solitariness continued to hold terrible possibilities for her as well
as the darkness, and with the light also returned what had been for a
few minutes in abeyance before her purely selfish fear, the anxiety
over her father. She moved about the house with the candle, going
from room to room. It seemed to her that she could not remain one
minute if she did not do so. Every time before entering a room she
felt sure that it was occupied. Every time after leaving it she felt
sure that something unknown was left there. She went into the
kitchen, and saw her miserable little dinner drying up in the shelf
of the range, and then for the first time self-pity asserted itself.
She sat down and sobbed and sobbed.

"There, I got that nice dinner, that beautiful dinner," she said to
herself, quite aloud in a pitiful wail like a baby's, "and perhaps
poor papa will never even taste it. Oh dear! Oh dear!"

She rocked herself back and forth in the kitchen-chair, weeping. She
had set the candle on the table, and a draught of wind from some
unknown quarter struck it and the strangest lights and shadows flared
and flickered over the room and ceiling. Presently, Charlotte,
looking at them, became diverted again from her grief. She looked
about fearfully. Then she made a tremendous effort, rose, and lighted
a lamp. With that the room was not so frightful, yet it was still not
normal. The familiar homely articles of furniture assumed strange
appearances. She saw something on the range, a little object which
filled her with such unreasoning horror that it was almost sheer
insanity. It was simply because she could not for the moment imagine
what the little object, which had nothing in the least frightful
about it, could be. Finally she rose and looked, and it was only a
little iron spoon which she must have dropped there. She removed it,
but still the horror was over her. She lifted the cover from the dish
of meat, and again the tears came.

"Poor papa! poor papa!" she said.

Then she carried the lamp into the dining-room, and went into the
parlor. She had made herself quite satisfied that there was in
reality nothing menacing in the house except her own fears. She would
sit beside one of the front windows in the parlor, in the dark, in
order that she might not be seen, and she would watch for her father,
and she would also watch for any one who might approach the house
with any harmful intent.

Charlotte curled herself up in a large chair beside the window which
commanded the best view of the grounds and the drive. With the light
of the young moon there was really no possibility that anything could
approach unseen by her, unless by way of the fields from the back.
But that she did not think of. Her mind became again concentrated
upon her father and the possibility of either his return on the next
train or a telegram explaining his absence. She knew that the next
train from New York was due in Banbridge at a few minutes after
eight. She had no time-table, but she remembered Major Arms arriving
once, and she was quite certain that the train was due at
eight-seventeen. It might, of course, be late. She reflected, with a
sense of solid comfort, that the trains were rather more apt to be
late than not. She need not give up hope of her father's arriving on
this train until even nine o'clock, for besides the possibility of
the lateness there was also that of his walking rather than taking a
carriage from the station. In fact, he would probably walk, since he
was still in Samson Rawdy's debt. She might allow at least twenty
minutes for the walk from the station. She might allow more even than
that. She sat at the window, and waited, peering out. There was a
singular half-dusk rather than half-light from the new moon. The moon
itself was not visible from where she sat, for the window faced
north, but she could see over everything the sweet influence of it.
There was no snow on the lawn, which was a dry crisp of frost-killed
grass, as flat as if swept by a broom, and here and there were the
faintest patches and mottles of silver from this moon, aside from a
broad gleam of the garish light from the street-lamp. The bushes and
trees showed lines of silver. The moon was so young that the stars
were quite brilliant. Taking all the lights together--the electric
light in the street, the new moon, and the stars--the lawn was quite
visible, and even, because the leaves were now all gone from the
trees, the road for quite a distance beyond. Charlotte had a
considerable vista in which to watch for her father. The time passed
incredibly in this watching. She had upon her such a fear and even
premonition that he might not come, that the minutes passed with the
horrible swiftness that they pass for a criminal awaiting execution.
The first time she slipped out in the dining-room--with a last look
at the lawn and road, to be sure that he would not be there in the
mean time--to see what time it was by the clock on the shelf, she was
amazed. It was already eight o'clock. She had not dreamed it was more
than half-past seven. She crept back to her place by the parlor
window, with the feeling that much of her time of reprieve had
passed, and that she was so much the nearer the certainty of
tribulation. Instead of impatience she had rather the desire to defer
approaching disaster. While she watched, she had less and less hope
that her father would come on that train, and yet she kept her heart
alive by picturing her rapture when she should see his tall, dark
figure enter the lawn path, when she should run and unlock and unbar
the door and throw her arms around his neck. She made up her mind
that she should not confess to him what a panic she had been in
because of his non-arrival. She planned how she would run and set the
dinner, in which she still believed, on the table, and how hungry he
would be for it. She was quite sure that her poor father did not in
these days provide himself with sumptuous lunches in the city. But
all the time she reared these air-castles, she saw for a certainty
the dark sky of her trouble through them. For some premonition, or a
much modified form of prophecy, the rudimentary expression of a
divine sense in reality exists. It existed in Charlotte watching for
her father at the window, and yet so bound up was she in the
probabilities and present sequences of things that she still watched.
Now and then she made sure that she saw her father turn from the road
into the lawn, but the figure, to her horror, would remain standing
still in one place. It was simply a slender spruce which had seemed
to start out of a corner of the night with a semblance of life. Now
and then she actually did see a figure coming up the road,
approaching the entrance to the lawn, and her heart leaped up with
joy. She watched for it to enter, but that was the end. Whoever it
was, it had passed the house and gone farther up the road. Those were
the cruellest moments of any--the momentary revival of hope and then
the dashing it to the ground. By-and-by her eyes, strained with such
watching, began to actually deceive her. She saw, as she thought,
shadows, approach and enter the house. Several times she ran to the
door and opened it, and no one was there.

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