Mary E. Wilkins Freeman - The Debtor

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

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"You had a whole big glass jar of them, anyhow," said he, "and I
didn't have a single one. You might have given me some, and then I
shouldn't have stolen them. It's your own fault. You ought not to
have things that anybody else wants, when they haven't got money to
pay for them. It's a good deal wickeder than stealing. It was your
own fault."

But Eddy had then to deal with his sister. She towered over him,
pinker than her pink muslin. The ruffles seemed agitated all over her
slender, girlish figure, like the plumage of an angry bird. She
caught her small brother by the shoulders, and shook him violently,
until the dark hair which he wore rather long waved and his whole
head wagged.

"Eddy Carroll," she cried, "aren't you ashamed of yourself? Oh,
aren't you ashamed of yourself? Begging, yes, _begging_ for candy! If
you want candy, you will buy it. You will not beg it nor take it
without permission. If you cannot buy it, you will go without, if you
are a brother of mine."

The boy for the first time quailed somewhat. He looked at her, and
raised a hand childishly as if to ward off something.

"I didn't ask, Charlotte," he half whimpered. "If he was to offer me
any now, I would not take it. I would just fling it in his face. I
would, Charlotte; I would, honest."

"I heard you," said Charlotte.

"I didn't ask him. I said if he had given me a little of that candy,
I wouldn't have been obliged to take any. I said--"

"I heard what you said. Now you must come at once."

Anderson said good-morning rather feebly. Charlotte made a distant
inclination of her head in response, and they were gone, but he heard
Eddy cry out, in a tone of reproachful glee:

"There! you've made me late at school, Charlotte. Look at that clock;
it's after nine. You've made me late at school with all that fussing
over a few old peppermint-drops."

Chapter XI

Anderson, after they were gone, sat staring out of the window at the
green spray of the spring boughs. His mouth was twitching, but his
forehead was contracted. This problem of feminity and childhood which
he had confronted was too much for him. The boy did not perplex him
quite so much--he did not think so much about him--but the girl, the
pure and sweet unreason of her proceedings, was beyond his mental
grasp. The attitude of reproach which this delicate and altogether
lovely young blossom of a thing had adopted towards him filled him
with dismay and a ludicrous sense of guilt. He had a keen sense of
the unreason and contrariness of her whole attitude, but he had no
contempt towards her on account of it. He felt as if he were facing
some new system of things, some higher order of creature for whom
unreason was the finest reason. He bowed before the pure, unordered,
untempered feminine, and his masculine mind reeled. And all the time,
deeper within himself than he had ever reached with the furthest
finger of his emotions, whether for pain or joy, he felt this
tenderness, which was like the quickening of another soul, so alive
was it. He felt the wonder and mystery of the awakening of love in
his heart, this reaching out with all the best of him for the
protection and happiness of another than himself. He saw before him,
with no dimming because of absence, the girl's little, innocent, fair
face, and such a tenderness for her was over him that he felt as if
he actually clasped her and enfolded her, but only for her protection
and good, never for himself.

"The little thing," he thought over and over--"the little, innocent,
beautiful thing! What kind of a place is she in, among what kind of
people? What does this all mean?"

Suspicions which had been in his mind all the time had developed. He
had had proof in divers ways. He said to himself, "That man is a
scoundrel, a common swindler, if I know one when I see him." But
suspicions as to the girl had never for one minute dwelt in his
furthest fancy. He had thought speculatively of the possible
complicity of the other women of the household, but never of hers.
They were all very constant in their church attendance; indeed,
Carroll had given quite a sum towards the Sunday-school library, and
he had even heard suggestions as to the advisability of making him
superintendent and displacing the present incumbent, who was
superannuated. Sometimes in church Anderson had glanced keenly from
under the quiet droop of languid lids at the Carrolls sitting in
their gay fluff and flutter of silks and muslins and laces, and
wondered, especially concerning Mrs. Carroll and her sister-in-law.
It seemed almost inconceivable that they were ignorant, and if not,
how entirely innocent! And then the expressions of their pretty,
childish faces disarmed him as they sat there, their dark, graceful
heads drooping before the divine teaching with gentle acquiescence
like a row of flowers. But there was something about the fearless
lift to Charlotte's head and the clear regard of her dark eyes which
separated her from the others. She bloomed by herself, individual,
marked by her own characteristics. He thought of her passionate
assertion of the principles of her home training with pity and
worshipful admiration. It was innocence incarnate pleading for guilt
which she believed like herself, because of the blinding power of her
own light. "She thinks them all like herself," he said to himself.
"She reasons from her knowledge of herself." Then reflecting how
Carroll had undoubtedly sent his son to return his pilfered sweets,
he began to wonder if he could possibly have been mistaken in his
estimate of the man's character, if he had reasoned from wrong
premises, and from that circumstantial evidence which his experience
as a lawyer should have led him to distrust.

Suddenly a shadow flung out across the office floor and a man stood
in the doorway. He was tall and elderly, with a shag of gray beard
and a shining dome of forehead over a nervous, blue-eyed face. He was
the druggist, Andrew Drew, who had his little pharmacy on the
opposite side of the street, a little below Anderson's grocery. He
united with his drug business a local and long-distance telephone and
the Western Union telegraph-office, and he rented and sold
commutation-books of railroad tickets to the City.

"Good-day," he said. Then, before Anderson could respond, he plunged
at once into the subject on his mind, a subject that was wrinkling
his forehead. However, he first closed the office door and glanced
around furtively. "See here," he whispered, mysteriously; "you know
those new folks, the Carrolls?" With a motion of his lank shoulder he
indicated the direction of the Carroll house.

Anderson's expression changed subtly. He nodded.

"Well, what I want to know is--what do you think of him?"

"I don't quite understand what you mean," Anderson replied, stiffly.

"Well, I mean-- Well, what I mean is just this"--the druggist made a
nervous, imperative gesture with a long forefinger--"this, if you
want to know--is he _good?_"

"You mean?"

"Yes, is he good?"

"He has paid his bills here," Anderson said. He offered the other man
a chair, which was declined with a shake of the head.

"No, thank you, can't stop. I've left my little boy in the store all
alone. So he has paid you?"

"Yes, he has paid his bills here," Anderson replied, with a guilty
sense of evasion, remembering the check.

"Well, maybe he is all right. I'll tell you, if you won't speak of
it. Of course he may be all right; and I don't want to quarrel with a
good customer. All there is--he came rushing in three weeks ago
to-day and said he was late for the train, and he had used up his
commutation and had come off without his pocket-book, and of course
could not get credit at the station office, and if I had a book he
would take it and write me a check. While he was talking he was
scratching a check on a New York bank like lightning. He made a
mistake and drew it for ten dollars too much; and I hadn't a full
book anyway, only one with thirty-five tickets in it, and I let him
have that and gave him the difference in cash--fifteen dollars and
forty-two cents. And--well--the long and short of it is, the check
came back from the bank, no good."

"Did you tell him?"

"Haven't seen him since. I went to his house twice, but he wasn't
home. I tried to catch him at the station, but he has been going on
different trains lately; and once when I got a glimpse of him the
train was in and he had just time to swing on and I couldn't stop him
then, of course. Then I dropped him a line, and got a mighty smooth
note back. He said there was a mistake; he was very sorry; he would
explain at once and settle; and that's over a week ago, and--"

"Probably he will settle it, if he said so," said Anderson, with the
memory of the little boy who had been sent to return the stolen candy
in his mind.

"Well, I hope he will, but--" The druggist hesitated. Then he went
on: "There is something else, to tell the truth. One of his girls
came in just now and asked me to cash a check for twenty-five
dollars--her father's check, but on another bank--and--I refused."

Anderson flushed. A great gust of wind made the window rattle, and he
pulled it down with an irritated jerk.

"Do you think I did right?" asked the druggist, who had a nervous
appeal of manner. "Maybe the check was good. I hated to refuse, of
course. I said I was short of ready money. I don't think she
suspected anything. She is a nice-spoken girl. I don't suppose she
knew if the check wasn't good."

"Any man who thinks so ought to be kicked," declared Anderson, with
sudden fury, and the other man started.

"I told you I didn't think so," he retorted, eying him with some
wonder and a little timidity. "But I declare I didn't know what to
do. There was that other check not accounted for yet; and I can't
afford to lose any more, and that's a fact. Then you think I ought to
have cashed it?"

Anderson's face twitched a little. Then he said, as if it were wrung
out of him, "On general principles, I should not call it good
business to repeat a transaction of that kind until the first was
made right."

The druggist looked relieved. "Well, I am glad to hear you say so. I
hated to--"

"But Captain Carroll may be as good pay in the end as I am,"
interrupted Anderson. "He seems to me to have good principles about
things of that kind."

"Well, I'll cash the next check," said Drew, with a laugh. "I must go
back, for I left my little boy alone in the store."

The druggist had scarcely gone before the old clerk came to the
office door. "That young lady who was here a little while ago wants
to speak to you, Mr. Anderson," he said, with an odd look.

"I will come out directly," replied Anderson, and passed out into the
store, where Charlotte Carroll stood waiting with a heightened color
on her cheeks and a look of mingled appeal and annoyance in her eyes.

"I beg your pardon," she said, "but can you cash a check for me for
twenty-five dollars? It will be a great favor."

"Certainly," replied Anderson, without the slightest hesitation. He
was conscious that both clerks, the man and the boy, were watching
him with furtive curiosity, and he was aware that Carroll's
unreliability in the matter of his drafts had become widely known. He
passed around the counter to the money-drawer.

"Money seems to be very scarce in Banbridge this morning," remarked
Charlotte, in a sweet, slightly petulant voice. She was both angry
and ashamed that she had been forced to apply to Anderson to cash the
check. "I have been everywhere, and nobody had as much as twenty-five
dollars," she added.

Anderson heard a very faint chuckle, immediately covered by a cough,
from Sam Riggs. He began counting out the notes, being conscious that
the man and the boy were regarding each other with meaning, that the
boy's elbow dug the man's ribs. He handed the money to Charlotte with
a courteous bow, and she gave him in return the check, which was
payable to her mother, and which had been indorsed by her.

"Thank you very much indeed," she said, but still in a piqued rather
than very grateful voice. She really had no suspicion that any
particular gratitude was called for towards any one who cashed one of
her father's checks.

"You are quite welcome," Anderson replied.

"It is a great inconvenience not having a bank in Banbridge," she
remarked, accusingly, as she went out of the door with a slight nod
of her pretty head. Then suddenly she turned and looked back. "I am
very much obliged," she said, in an entirely different voice. Her
natural gentleness and courtesy had all at once reasserted
themselves. "I trust I have not inconvenienced you," she added, very
sweetly. "I would have waited until papa came home to-night and got
him to cash the check. He was a little short this morning, and had to
use some money before he could go to the bank, but my sister and I
are very anxious to take the eleven-thirty train to New York, and we
had only a dollar and six cents between us." She laughed as she said
the last, and Anderson echoed her.

"That is not a very large amount, certainly, to equip two ladies to
visit the shopping district," he said.

"I am very glad to accommodate you, and it is not the slightest
inconvenience, I assure you."

"Well, I am very much obliged, very much," she repeated, with a
pretty smile and nod, and she was gone with a little fluttering hop
like a bird down the steps.

"He's got stuck," the boy motioned with his lips to the old clerk as
Anderson re-entered the office, and the man nodded in assent. Neither
of them ventured to express the opinion to Anderson. Both stood in a
certain awe of him. The former lawyer still held familiarity somewhat
at bay.

However, there followed a whispered consultation between the two
clerks, and both chuckled, and finally Sam Riggs advanced with
bravado to the office door.

"Mr. Anderson," he said, with mischief in his tone, and Anderson
turned and looked at him inquiringly. "Oh, it is nothing, not worth
speaking of, I suppose," said Sammy Riggs, "but that kid, the Carroll
boy, swiped an apple off that basket beside the door when he went out
with his sister. I saw him."

Chapter XII

Anderson was in the state of mind of a man who dreams and is quite
aware all the time that he is dreaming. He deliberately indulged
himself in this habit of mind. "When I am ready, I shall put all this
away," he continually assured his inner consciousness. Then into the
delicious charm of his air-castle he leaped again, mind and body. In
those days he grew perceptibly younger. The fire of youth lit his
eyes. He fed on the stimulants of sweet dreams, and for the time they
nourished as well as exhilarated. Everybody whom he met told him how
well he looked and that he was growing younger every day. He was
shrewd enough to understand fully the fact that they considered him
far from youth, or they would not have thus expressed themselves, but
the triumph which he felt when he saw himself in his looking-glass,
and in his own realization of himself, caused him to laugh at the
innuendo. He felt that he _was_ young, as young as man could wish to
be. He, as before said, had never been vain, but mortal man could not
have helped exultation at the sight of that victorious visage of
himself looking back at him. He did not admit it to himself, but he
took more pains with his dress, although he had always been rather
punctilious in that direction. All unknown to himself, and, had he
known it, the knowledge would have aroused in him rebellion and
shame, he was carrying out the instinct of the love-smitten male of
all species. In lieu of the gorgeous feathers he put on a new coat
and tie, he trimmed his mustache carefully. He smoothed and lighted
his face with the beauty of joy and hope and of pleasant dreams. But
there was, since he was a man at the head of creation, something more
subtle and noble in his preening. In those days he became curiously
careful--although, being naturally clean-hearted, he had little need
for care--of his very thoughts. Naturally fastidious in his soul
habits, he became even more so. The very books he read were, although
he was unconscious of it, such as contributed to his spiritual
adornment, to fit himself for his constant dwelling in his country of
dreams. Certain people he avoided, certain he courted. One woman, who
was innately coarse, although her life had hedged her in safely from
impropriety, was calling upon his mother one afternoon about this
time. She was the wife of the old Presbyterian clergyman, Dr. Gregg.
She was a small, solidly built woman, in late middle life, tightly
hooked up in black silk as to her body, and as to her soul by the
prescribed boundaries of her position in life. Anderson, returning
rather earlier than usual, found her with his mother, and retreated
with actual rudeness, the woman became all at once so repellent to
him.

"My son gets very tired," Mrs. Anderson said, softly, as she passed
the pound-cake again to her caller. "Quite often, when he comes in,
he goes by himself and has a quiet smoke before he says much even to
me."

Mrs. Gregg was eating the pound-cake with such extreme relish that
Mrs. Anderson, who was herself fastidious, looked away, and as she
did so heard distinctly a smack of the other woman's lips.

"He grows handsomer and younger every time I see him," remarked Mrs.
Gregg when she had swallowed her mouthful of cake and before she took
another.

Mrs. Anderson repeated the caller's compliment to her son later on
when the two were at the supper-table. "Yes, she paid you a great
compliment," said she; "but, dear, why did you run out in that way?
It was almost rude, and she the minister's wife, too."

"I don't see how Dr. Gregg keeps up his necessary quota of saving
grace, living with her," said Anderson.

"Why, my dear, I think she is a good woman."

"She is a bottled-up vessel of wrath," said Anderson.

"My son, I never heard you speak so before, and about a lady, too."

Anderson fairly blushed before his mother's mild eyes of surprise.
"Mother, you are right," he said, penitently. "I ought to be ashamed
of myself, and I am. I know I was rude, but I did not feel like
seeing her to-day. Of course she is a good woman."

Mrs. Anderson looked a little reflective. Now that her son had taken
a proper attitude with regard to her sister-woman, she began to feel
a little critical license herself. "I will admit that she has little
mannerisms which are not exactly agreeable and must grate on Dr.
Gregg," said she. As she spoke she seemed to hear again the smacking
of the lips over the pound-cake. Then she looked scrutinizingly at
her son. "But," she said, "I do believe she was right, Randolph,
about your looks."

"Nonsense," said Randolph, laughing.

It was a warm night. After supper they both went out on the front
porch. Mrs. Anderson sat gazing at her son from between the folds of
a little, white lace kerchief which she wore over her head, to guard
against possible dampness.

"Randolph," said she, after a while.

"What is it, mother, dear?"

"Do you feel well?"

"Of course I feel well. Why?"

"You look too well to be natural," said she, slowly.

"Mother, what an absurdity!"

"It is so," said she. "I had not noticed it until Mrs. Gregg spoke,
but I see it now. I don't know where my eyes have been. You look too
well."

Randolph laughed. "Now, mother, don't you think that sounds foolish?"

Mrs. Anderson continued to regard him with an expression of maternal
love and severity, which pierced externals more keenly than an X-ray.
"No," said she, "I do not think it is foolish. You look too well to
be natural. You look this minute as young in your face as you did
when I had you in petticoats."

Randolph laughed loudly at that, but his mother was quite earnest.

She was not satisfied, and continued arguing the matter until she
became afraid of the increasing dampness and went into the house, and
the son drew a breath of relief. The mother little dreamed, with all
her astuteness, of what was really transpiring. She did not know that
when she had seated herself beside her son on the porch she had
displaced with her gentle, elderly materiality the sweetest phantom
of a beloved young girl. She did not know that when she entered the
house the delicate, evanescent thing returned swifter than thought
itself, and filled with the sweet presence that vacuum in her son's
heart which she herself had never filled, and nestled there through a
delicious hour of the summer night. She did not dream, as she sat by
the window, staring out drowsily into the soft shadows and heard no
murmur from her son on the porch, that in reality the silence of his
soul was broken by words and tones which she had never heard from his
lips, although she had brought him into the world.

Anderson never admitted to himself the possibility of his dreams
coming true. While his self-respect never wavered, while he viewed
himself with no unworthy disparagement, he still saw himself as he
was: verging towards middle age, unsuccessful according to the
standard of the world. He was one of those inglorious failures, a man
who has failed to follow out his chosen course of life. He was one
who had turned back, overcome confessedly by odds. He told himself
proudly and simply that his earning of money was, to one simple and
honest end--the prolonging of existence on the earth for the good of
one's fellow-beings, and one's own growth; that he was attaining that
end more completely in his little grocery store than he had ever done
in his law-office. Yet always he saw himself, in a measure, as others
saw him, and the humility of his position in the eyes of the world
asserted itself. While he felt not the slightest bend in the
erectness of his own soul because of it, while it even amused him, he
never forgot the supercilious courtesy of the girls' father towards
him. He recognized, even while feeling himself on superior heights,
the downward vision of the man who robbed him. It was true that he
paid scorn for scorn, but he was forced to take as well as give.

He also was not in the slightest doubt as to Charlotte's own attitude
towards him. He understood to the full the signification of the word
grocer for her. He was, to her mind, hardly a man at all, rather a
mechanical dispenser of butter and eggs for the needs of a superior
race. But he understood also the childish innocence and
involuntariness of this view of hers. He recognized even the
ludicrousness of the situation which perverted tragedy to comedy,
almost Cyrano fashion. He compared himself to Cyrano.

"As well consider the possibility of marriage with a girl of her
training, even although it is on a false basis, with a monstrosity of
nose on my face, as with the legend of retail grocery across my
scutcheon," he told himself. He even laughed over it.

Therefore, being of a turn of mind which can rear for itself airy
towers of delight over the values of insufficiency of life, and
having an access of spirituality which enabled him to get a certain
reality from them, he dreamed on, and let his new love irradiate his
own life, like a man carrying a lantern on a dark path. There are
those that are born to sunlit paths, and there are those whom a
beneficient Providence has supplied with lanterns of compensation,
and the latter are not always the unhappier nor the less progressive.
Never admitting to himself the possibility of the actual presence of
the girl in the house as his wife, he yet peopled the rooms with her.
He rose up in spirit before her entering a door. There were especial
nooks wherein his fancy could project her with such illusion that his
heart would leap as if at the actual sight of her. In particular was
there one window in the sitting-room which, being in a little
projection of the house, overlooked a special little view of its own.
From this window between the folds of the muslin curtains could be
seen a file of blooming hollyhocks. Behind them a grassy expanse
arose with a long ascent, and the rosette--like blossoms of pink and
pale-gold, with gray-green bosses of leaves, lay against the green
field like the design on a shield.

In this window was an old-fashioned rocking-chair cushioned softly
with faded, rose-patterned chintz, and before it stood always a small
footstool covered with dim-brown canvas on which was a wreath of
roses done in cross-stitch by his mother in her girlhood. Anderson
loved to see Charlotte sitting in this chair with her feet on the
footstool, her pretty head leaning back against the faded roses of
the chintz, the delicate curve of her cheek towards him, as she
swayed gently back and forth and seemed to gaze peacefully out of the
window at the hollyhocks blooming against the green hill. It was
characteristic of the man's dreams that the girl's face in them was
turned a little from him. She never saw him when he entered, she
never broke the sweet silence of her own dreams within dreams, for
him, and he never, even in dreams, touched the soft curve of that
averted cheek, or even one of the little hands lying as lightly as
flowers in her muslin lap. Anderson, the commonplace man in the
grocery business, in the commonplace present, dreamed as reverently
and spiritually of the lady of his love as Dante of his Beatrice, or
Petrarch of his Laura. He would go down to the grave with his songs
all unsung; but the man was a poet, as are all who worship the god,
and not the likeness of themselves in him. As Anderson sat on the
porch that summer night, to his fancy Charlotte Carroll sat on the
step above him. Without fairly looking he could see the sweep of her
white draperies and the mild fairness, producing the effect of
luminosity, of her face in the dusk.

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