‘And my father drank too much, for many years,’ she said, ‘till when he got up in the morning his hand shook terribly; and although I know he loved me, sometimes he would beat me awfully.’ Ephraim felt a stormy rage at Tim Hager, and she explained: ‘He beat me the night he died. I got away from him and he was chasing me and just dropped down dead. I didn’t know it. I was running away from him, running to your father. I’d always called your father Uncle Isaiah. He married me so he could take care of me, you know. He married me before he knew—before anyone knew—that my father was dead.’ She added simply: ‘So I know what rum can do, even to a good man. Some day we’ll stop men selling it here in Bangor, if I have anything to do with it.’
‘I used to drink a lot in college,’ he reminded her; and—finding an almost sensuous satisfaction in the confession—he added: ‘And run after women. If John Evered hadn’t straightened me out, I’d have gone straight to the Devil.’
She nodded. ‘I know. You told me before.’ Then she said in her low tones, her hand pressing his arm: ‘It’s hard to think of you as—doing these things. You’re such a fine young man.’
‘Who, me?’
She smiled at this familiar ejaculation. ‘Yes, you,’ She added after a moment: ‘You know, Ephraim, I’m very fond of you. I think taking care of Isaiah together has brought us close. I think we will always be fond of each other.’
His throat was full, and he coughed to clear it. ‘You’re mighty good to him.’
‘He seems so much older, these last few months.’
He tried to laugh. ‘Don’t worry. He’s tough as a tamarack root! He’ll live another twenty years.’
She did not speak for a moment. Then she asked intently: ‘Do you think so, Ephraim?’
Her tone startled him. He said hurriedly: ‘Why—yes, I do. There’s nothing wrong with him.’
They walked on in silence for a while through the dark streets, the thought that Isaiah might die in both their minds; and her hand rested on his arm. When they approached the house, its windows were dark.
‘Isaiah has gone to bed,’ she said quietly.
The night was warm, with a blustery wind, the elms above them tossing; and she was so near him that her skirts brushed his legs as they walked along. He opened the door and they went in and she laid aside her hat of chip straw with a broad soft brim and a bright flower fastened to the side of the round, flat crown. She turned to him smilingly, and he caught that faint, exciting fragrance which she always seemed to wear.
‘I’ve often thought, Ephraim, since you came home,’ she said, looking up at him, ‘that if you hadn’t been away at Harvard College that night my father beat me I might have married you instead of Isaiah!’
‘Who, me?’ he gasped, staring at her, feeling his cheeks burning, trembling like a tree under the first stroke of the axe.
She waited for a moment, but when he said nothing more, and did nothing, still smiling, she spoke softly. ‘Good night.’ She turned and lifted her skirts and went away from him up the stairs.
VII
Ephraim stayed where he was for a long time before he lighted his night candle and snuffed the others and followed her. When he passed her door, his eyes turned toward its blank, white surface and it was as though he looked through its panels and saw her, slim and white and beautiful as she stepped out of the circle of her skirts and petticoats on the floor about her feet. In his own room he closed the door and set the candle down, watching its flame in a sort of fascination while he took off his coat and waistcoat and hung them on a chair.
He stood for a while in the middle of the room, carefully, like one who keeps precarious balance on a narrow foothold and as though with any movement he might fall. Jenny’s words had let loose a storm in him, a storm almost too violent to endure. There are some women whose eyes are, when they wish, nakedly eloquent, carrying a message of surrender. Ephraim had once said to John Evered: ‘I sec a wanton in every pretty woman I meet, and usually I find it, too.’ There could be no doubt what he had seen in Jenny’s eyes tonight. He knew with an intoxicating certainty that if at the stair foot just now he had taken her in his arms, she would have been all surrender. If he had kissed her then, her door would not have been closed when he came up the stairs.
Yet—she was his father’s wife. That too he knew; and one certainly battled with the other in him, rendingly. His brow was wet. He licked his lips, grinned weakly.
‘You damned fool!’ he muttered, in hoarse tones.
He looked toward the bed, moving that way, intending to finish undressing and try to sleep. He always slept with two pillows under his head, and Ruth when she came to put his room in order in the morning always found them one atop the other. Thinking to please him, when at night she removed the spread and turned back the covers she now usually put his pillows as he liked them; but tonight they lay end to end, and he lifted the nearest to rearrange them.
When he did so, he saw a slip of paper that had been hidden under the pillow. He lifted it and carried it across to the candle on the dresser to read it. It was unsigned, but he knew Ruth must have written it. Six words:
‘What makes you mad at me?’
He stared at the paper, slowly understanding. Since that day when for the first time she responded to his kiss, he had avoided being alone with her, and he had seen the hurt bewilderment in her eyes. He crumpled the bit of paper, held it in the candle flame, dropped it, watched it burn black and die. The big house was silent, but outside, branches thrashed in the wind.
Ruth’s room was just above his own. The stairs to that third floor were opposite his door. He thought suddenly, and the thought was like a flame running through his veins, how much Ruth was like Jenny. Jenny! He heard her intoxicating words again: ‘If you hadn’t been away at Harvard College, I might have married you.’ For a moment his suffused eyes were almost blind. The candle seemed to bum red. He sat down, and his throat was so congested that when he leaned over to remove his shoes, his breath stopped stranglingly.
After his shoes were off, he sat a moment longer. When he acted, it was not by decision but as though compelled against his will. He blew out his candle, crossed and softly raised the latch and opened the door. In the dark hall he paused a moment, closing the door behind him without a sound, then went silent-footed up the attic stair to Ruth’s small room.
4
THERE was in Isaiah a strong
frugality which revolted at such ostentatious display as formal entertaining. To Jenny herself he denied nothing, meeting her every wish, lavishing upon her all and more than she desired; but when she now and then proposed a dinner to which they might invite their friends, he shouted at such foolery.
‘Why, that means a lot of cackling womenfolks, jabber, jabber, jabbering like so many hens!’ he said. ‘No, ma’am, not in my house!’
Jenny asked mildly: ‘Do I jabber, jabber, jabber, Isaiah?’
‘Course you don’t. But there ain’t many women as sensible as you, Jenny. I won’t have it, I say.’
So for the most part Isaiah and Ephraim and Jenny were alone in the big house; but in the fall of this year, as with the approach of cold weather the season of active business neared its close, Isaiah spoke to Jenny one day, bidding her arrange a dinner to which he proposed to invite a group of his friends.
‘I’ll ask ’em myself,’ he said. ‘Don’t know yet who all there’ll be; but maybe ten or a dozen.’
‘Their wives too?’
‘No, no women. Only you, Jenny. I wouldn’t feel right sitting at my own table unless you was at the other end of it with your picture over your head.’ He added: ‘Have some good candles in the stands on the mantel, Jenny, so your picture’ll be lighted up. I want ’em to see what a handsome woman my wife is.’
Jenny smiled. ‘I seem so to you, Isaiah; but others may not think so.’
‘Then they’d be a pack of fools,’ he told her stoutly. ‘But there won’t be any fools here that evening. Amos Patten will be here, for
one.’
Amos was by this time a leading citizen of the town, President of the newly organized Savings Bank, merchant, and a leader in town government. ‘And Ben Wingate,’ Isaiah added, ‘and Captain Bryant, and General Veazie if he’ll come, and Judge Williamson and some more of them. Sensible men, Jenny. It’s time sensible men got together and made something of this town.’
‘I’ll feel strange and queer, the only lady at table.’
Td feel a sight stranger if you weren’t there. No, Jenny, you do as I say.’
II
Jenny obediently made her plans; and she and Mrs. Hollis discussed for days the food that should be served, while Jenny consulted with Ephraim as to wines. There were when the company sat down sixteen guests at the extended table with Isaiah at one end and Jenny at the other. Mr. Hardy the painter sat beside her, and Captain Bryant who had organized the force which put down the riots was on her other hand, while General Veazie and Judge Williamson, whose history of Maine had been published the year before, flanked Isaiah. Ephraim was halfway down one side between Amos Patten and William Abbott. Mr. Abbott was now the First Selectman; and George Brown and Royal Clark, the other Selectmen, were side by side across from Ephraim; and there were others. Jenny and Mrs. Hollis had planned a surfeit of good victuals, with two saddles of venison and a tremendous partridge pic as the backbone of the meal. To help Ruth serve, Mrs. Hollis had enlisted three other girls as pretty as she.
When the glasses were filled, General Veazie rose in his place, harumphing for attention, his glass in his hand. He was a newcomer to Bangor from Old Town, but he was already a figure of importance in the local world of business. He had begun life as a sailor in the West India trade, with certain stowage rights so that he was able to make small private ventures. With the proceeds he set himself up as a manufacturer of cigars, opened a store in Topsham, and used his profits to buy shares in trading vessels. During the War of 1812 he achieved the rank of General in the militia. In 1826, attracted by the growing lumber business, he moved to Old Town and bought the Jackson Davis mills and privileges. Mills would always be his passion, and whenever he heard of one for sale he bought it, so that he would come at last to be by all odds the largest mill-owner in Maine. After six years in Old Town, as his interests widened, he had moved to Bangor, bought a house on Harlow Street, presently built a bigger house at the comer of York Street and Stetson Square, and as of right took a place among the leading citizens.
He was at this time in his middle forties. He had a huge, blocky head, and his jutting, clean-shaven jaw and his clamped lips testified to the driving force in him, while his eyes, the right narrowed and piercing, the left wide open and with a questioning and half quizzical lift to the lid, showed the shrewd ability which marked his career. When he had the attention of them all now, he lifted his glass to Jenny. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, T beg you to rise and toast with me our hostess, the loveliest flower in Maine I’
They were on their feet with a shout, their glasses high; and Jenny smiled and color flooded her cheeks. Ephraim caught her eyes, and hers for a moment held his before passing to one man and another till every man thought she had smiled for him alone. Mr. Hardy beside her watched her thoughtfully; and once he looked up at the portrait above her head and back at her again. He had seen her glance meet Ephraim’s, and thereafter he studied the young man for a while, looking from him to Jenny.
General Veazie at Isaiah’s right began to talk on his favorite subject. ‘Land’s all right, and pine’s all right,’ he said loudly. ‘But the mills will make the money. Since I bought out Jack Davis I’ve built two or three mills, and I’m putting up a couple more next year.’
Isaiah suggested: ‘You and Wadleigh?’
General Veazie made a careless gesture. ‘Why, we’ve pulled together some; but Wadleigh’s got a bee in his bonnet. He figures to branch out for himself any time, I judge. I’ll get along with him as long as I can, but we’ll come to a bust-up soon. Trouble with Wadleigh, he’s always wanting to go to court!’
Everyone laughed, for the General’s own reputation as a hard fighter and a confirmed litigant was already established, and young Rufus Dwinel said in a dry tone: ‘You’re as hungry for a lawsuit as a bear for honey, yourself, General. The lawyers will take your hide, some day.’
The General’s great laugh boomed again. ‘You’re a fine one to talk, my gentle sucking dove!’ Dwinel, not yet thirty years old and already a successful man of business, had a reputation for a temper as violent as his business judgment was shrewd. He, with Isaiah as a silent partner, had bought the franchise of the Penobscot Boom Corporation soon after it was granted, and they secured a new charter for a boom at Pea Cove, but Dwinel presently bought Isaiah’s interest and soon after sold out at a substantial profit to General Veazie. His irascible disposition was well known; so at the General’s word now there were smiles but no open mirth; and Jenny, quick to prevent the threatened explosion, spoke the length of the table to Judge Williamson, referring to his history.
‘I have read it every word,’ she said. ‘Certainly every Maine man must do so, too.’
The Judge smiled with pleasure. ‘I’d be well pleased to think even every man in Bangor would read it—if each one of them would buy the copy he read!’ he declared.
George Thatcher said he had bought not one copy but two. T presented one to my relative, Mr. Thoreau of Concord,’ he explained, and he added smilingly: ‘I doubt Mr. Thoreau has read it, but his son Henry—he’s no more than a boy, studying in the Academy there—wrote to thank me for sending it to them.’
Nat Harlow told Judge Williamson amiably: ‘You’d have more subscribers if you had written only the second volume. No one in Bangor today has time to read about anything that happened before the price of timber land began to climb!’
That turned the talk to speculation, and Jenny said in an undertone to Mr. Hardy at her side: ‘I declare, I hope Mr. Dwinel and General Veazie won’t come to blows!’ Then, to hold the artist in conversation, she asked: ‘Did I ever tell you, or did Mr. Poster, that your likeness of me was not the first that was made? Mr. Audubon made one of me in Houlton.’ She added: ‘But I was angry when I saw it. I tore it into bits.’
‘Why?’ Mr. Hardy inquired.
‘I did not like the person he drew.’
‘Mr. Audubon is a great artist,’ he commented. ‘I saw his portfolio, his drawings of birds and animals, when he passed through here. He had the gift of putting down exactly and faithfully whatever he saw.’
She smiled. ‘Perhaps. But I did not like what he saw in me. I forgave him—after I had destroyed his likeness—but if there is in me what he drew, then I want no one to know it.’
He bowed faintly. ‘I am sure no one could see in you anything but beauty and virtue,’ he assured her; but then, as though in dismissal, he turned and spoke to George Thatcher on his other side.
She watched him for a moment with still eyes, and then Captain Bryant spoke to her. He was a young man more bold than discreet, with something in him of the demagogue. It was only because of his energy in handling the mob after the riots around Ma Hogan’s establishment that Isaiah had invited him here tonight. He would not stay long in Bangor. A few years later he organized a movement to demand that surplus public revenues be turned back to the people, and earned from his followers the sobriquet, ‘Grand Eagle,’ but when the project collapsed he went West where some marauding Comanches took his scalp.
Tonight he was a little intoxicated—by the wine he had drunk, by Jenny’s beauty, and by that feeling of importance which his inclusion in this company gave him. He asked her now in a low tone: ‘Has your husband told you why he brought us together?’
She countered, without directly replying: ‘Has he told anyone?’
‘It is, I think, an open secret,’ he assured her. ‘Since the riot at Carr’s Wharf, and the violence which followed it, many of us think we must make a city here. It’s to discuss that that we are met tonight.’
; ‘Would a city be so different?’
He explained: ‘To be sure. If we were a city, we could elect delegates who could work more readily than our crowded town meetings. Then we need to take measures for the public safety; a police force, and an organized fire brigade; and we need a body of ordinances, and someone to see that they are obeyed.’ Isaiah had suggested that Captain Bryant himself would make a first-rate Chief of Police, and the idea pleased the young man.
She smiled. ‘We need so many things,’ she agreed. ‘Sidewalks, and lamps to light the streets, and paved streets, too, to be rid of the mud in spring and after every rain, and the dust all summer. Do you know that I must keep my door and my windows closed even on the hottest days, to shut out the dust that every passing carriage raises?’
He nodded. Mr. Hardy saw the hot admiration for her in his eyes. ‘And we need a market house,’ he said, ‘and public squares, and a proper cemetery. But most of all we need to lay down rules of conduct and to enforce them.’
‘To shut up the rum shops!’ she suggested.
‘That may come in time,’ he agreed, as judicially as possible, sipping his Madeira. ‘But not at once. We must make a start with little laws, till good people have the habit of obeying them. To be law-abiding is a habit, you know; yet it is a habit that must be taught.’ And he said: ‘We will begin with laws easy to obey, laws to provide for weighing hay brought in to be sold, and for measuring cart loads of wood so that the buyer knows what he gets, and to punish those who mix wood and bark with their hay to make the load seem bigger.’
‘The farmers won’t like that.’
He chuckled, made a defiant gesture. ‘Then let them keep their wood and hay at home!’ And he added: ‘Another thing, we must stop the ringing of bells for sport, let them be rung only to summon folk to church, or to give an alarm of fire.’
The Strange Woman Page 18