The Strange Woman

by Ben Ames Williams

  She said eagerly: ‘I know a law you ought to have; to stop men from riding horses at a gallop through the streets, or from driving full tilt, scattering people everywhere. A sleigh last winter drove directly in front of Mrs. Wingate as she crossed Main Street on the way to church, and so close to her that it tore her broadcloth cape to tatters and her cloak and silk under-cape, and then raced away without ever stopping at all.’

  ‘Certainly,’ he assented, ‘we must put an end to that.’ He laughed, said in an amusing imitation of Ben Wingate himself: ‘We can’t have ruffians tearing Mrs. Wingate’s capes!’

  She smiled with him. ‘There were no bells on the sleigh,’ she explained, ‘so she had no warning.’

  ‘Come!’ he said, his voice rising. ‘Soon you and I will have planned the whole body of our laws! We must have bells on sleighs, to be sure!’

  ‘And we mustn’t let men stop their teams and carts on walks and crossings to unload, so that ladies have to walk around them.’

  ‘Certainly not!’ They were both laughing together now. ‘And we won’t let small boys coast down hills and knock their elders off their feet.’

  ‘I’m not so sure of that,’ she protested. ‘I used to like to go sliding when I was a child.’

  ‘There!’ he exclaimed. ‘I will see to it, this winter, that you try it again. Suppose—now that we have organized our future city, we organize a sledding party for the first snow!’

  They began at once to do so, deciding where to go, and who should be of the party. They were so animated and so merry together that they drew the attention at first of those nearest them and then of others; and one by one conversation ceased, everyone looking toward these two, until like a rising tide silence crept up the table to where Isaiah sat and he became conscious of it and without being able to hear what these two said, watched them with peering, angry eyes.

  Captain Bryant, turned toward Jenny, seeing only her, was unconscious of this hush along the table; but Ephraim saw Jenny suddenly realize that only they two were talking. She ceased to smile and her countenance became composed, and Captain Bryant looked around in surprise and then in confusion and was silent too.

  Ruth and the others were clearing the dessert dishes away. Isaiah spoke to Jenny.

  ‘Now, Mrs. Poster, our dinner’s done and we must get to business. Thank you for your company, my dear.’

  His dry tone was so manifestly a rebuke that Jenny caught her lower lip between her teeth, and Ephraim saw her color change to red and then to white. She rose at once, spoke evenly.

  ‘Then it appears that I must bid you good evening, gentlemen.’

  They stood as she moved toward the door; but after she was gone Jeremiah Hardy watched for a while the door where she had disappeared, with grave, dispassionate eyes.

  III

  The matter which the men discussed that evening came to fruition presently. The Selectmen had been among the company at Isaiah’s table, and in November they called a special town meeting to see if the town would apply to the next Legislature for a charter. The vote was carried. The only other business was to change the name of Poplar Street. It became Exchange Street, in recognition of the fact that the Exchange Coffee House was the centre of that lively speculation which had already so powerfully stimulated the growth of the town.

  In mid-December the form of the proposed act of incorporation was settled at another meeting of the town; and in February the Legislature prepared to consider the measure which would make Bangor a city. Isaiah had from the first taken an active part in these procedures; and he and Jenny went to Augusta to watch the Legislature pass the act. The trip was a hard one for the old man, since the stage left Bangor at seven o’clock in the morning and was all day upon the road, arriving in Augusta long after the early winter dusk. Ephraim did not go with them on this trip, and while they were gone he was alone in the house, Mrs. Hollis pointing out that for Ruth to stay there while Isaiah and Jenny were away was bound to start talk.

  ‘Not but what Ruth’s a good girl,’ she assured him, ‘and I don’t mean to say I wouldn’t trust you, Ephraim. But you know the way people are.’

  Her word left Ephraim with a sorry taste in his mouth. There had been more than one occasion when after an evening with Jenny he crept secretly up the attic stair. At first, once his ardor had overcome her doubts and fears, Ruth’s rapturous and trusting happiness had made her seem to glow, so that he thought Jenny or Mrs. Hollis must notice the change in her; and he cautioned Ruth not to look at him at all when others could see her. It seemed to him everyone must mark the glad surrender in her eyes.

  He never went to her without hating himself for doing so; and it was never Ruth he sought, but those things in her which were like Jenny. Coming to her in the darkness it was often true that he did not speak at all, since her voice might have shattered the illusion he cherished. Usually he slipped presently downstairs to his own room again; but if, as sometimes happened, he slept, she was careful to rouse him at first dawn so that he could leave her before anyone in the big house was astir.

  He would not let himself think of what the outcome might be. Ruth herself asked of him nothing except present happiness; but he never completely overbore her rueful certainty that they did wrong. She had the stem conscience bred and disciplined by generations of God-fearing folk; and though she yielded to him because she loved him too much to deny him anything, yet sometimes she wept with shame and sorrow even in his arms. He had taught her to accept him silently—he said this was so none could hear their whispering voices in the silence of night—so she stifled her sobs, but her eyes filled and overflowed.

  She was glad that while Isaiah and Jenny were away she would not be alone in the big house with him. ‘It would be fun,’ she told him, ‘pretending we were already married and that this was our house and that we were living here. But I’m always afraid, Ephraim. I’m afraid all the time.’ She and Mrs. Hollis had come to get his breakfast—Mrs. McGaw, the cook, was taking these days of Isaiah’s absence as vacation—and Ephraim was at the desk in Isaiah’s office where she had come with her dustcloth and mop. ‘I hate having to be ashamed and afraid.’

  ‘It won’t always be so,’ he told her. ‘Father likes me better all the time. Some day soon I can tell him. And Ruth, we needn’t be ashamed, loving each other.’

  ‘Will we have a house of our own when we’re married, Ephraim?’

  ‘You’ll have everything you want,’ he assured her. He drew her near and kissed her lips, as cool as a child’s; and after she was gone he thought he might be wise to marry her. Perhaps to do so would ease and end the anguish which every moment with Jenny evoked in him. If he married Ruth he could at least recapture the self-respect of which his desperate hunger for his father’s wife began to rob him.

  He arrived at a fixed decision that this thing should be done. Isaiah would not object. Ephraim was sure that his father would be glad to see him married and settled down. He decided to discuss it with Isaiah as soon as the older man returned.

  IV

  The day Isaiah and Jenny were expected, the stage was late. It was due at six o’clock in the evening; but deep snow delayed it, and that afternoon and early evening a cold northeaster drifted the roads, and locked an icy grip upon the land. The passengers were all shivering when they belatedly arrived, and Isaiah was fairly paralyzed with cold, his old blood, already chilled by encroaching age, failing in the fight to keep him warm. He was so nearly helpless that he could not stand, and Ephraim persuaded the stage driver to go on to the house. There Ephraim brought out a chair and they put Isaiah into it, and he and the stage driver carried the old man indoors and up the stairs.

  Mrs. Hollis had a great fire going in Jenny’s bedroom there, and they laid Isaiah on her bed, and Jenny and Mrs. Hollis undressed him and wrapped him in blankets wanned before the fire. Mrs. Hollis, saying there was a time for everything, brought a great pitcher of hot lemonade well shot with rum; but even after drinking a glass of it he was still col
d, and he petulantly insisted that Jenny must sleep with him to keep him warm. In the end she did so.

  Ephraim, after he helped carry his father upstairs, had gone down again, leaving to the womenfolks the task of tending the old man. Alone there, he tried in some astonishment to measure the effect upon himself of seeing Jenny now after her absence. A hot wind blew through him, tearing every thought except of her away. He waited, pacing up and down, unable to keep still, for her to come downstairs again; but she did not, and Mrs. Hollis appeared at last to say:

  ‘Well, there, we’ve got the poor man warm at last; but I’m afraid to think what will come of it. Cold as ice he was, all over. You put your hand on him anywhere and it was like sticking it into snow. I don’t know how he’ll be tomorrow.’

  ‘Is—she with him?’ Ephraim asked.

  ‘Abed with him, to be sure, holding him like a baby in her arms, keeping him warm. Eh, but it’s a good thing for an old man to have a fine young wife to warm him when he’s cold.’

  At her words, a sort of madness seized Ephraim. That Isaiah, an emaciated, bald, toothless, half-deaf, half-blind old man should lie in the circle of Jenny’s young arms, his lips mumbling against hers or mouthing her smooth shoulder, seemed to Ephraim a hideous profanation. He forgot that Isaiah was his father, forgot everything except a pounding hatred of the old man. Mrs. Hollis babbled on, but he answered with muttered, meaningless words, till she thought his confusion was concern for Isaiah, and comforted him.

  ‘There, don’t you worry! She’ll take care of him. You’ll see, he’ll be all right again in the morning.’

  She said she would stay the night in the spare bedroom, in case Jenny needed her. It was long before he followed her upstairs. When he passed Jenny’s door, he heard Isaiah cough a little, heard Jenny’s murmuring voice as she comforted him.

  V

  Despite Mrs. Hollis’ prophecy, Isaiah was not all right in the morning. Nevertheless he insisted on getting up and dressing; and Ephraim met them at the breakfast table. Jenny seemed tired, and her eyes showed traces of a weary night. Ephraim suggested that Isaiah should summon a doctor, but the old man snarled scornfully at such nonsense; and after breakfast he took Ephraim into the office to give an account of what had happened during his absence. They were closeted there all morning, and Isaiah’s temper was at its worst. He found every possible fault with his son, shouting at him again and again in a shrill and querulous fury. Yet there was more petulance than strength now in the irascible old man; and at intervals he was interrupted by uncontrollable fits of coughing which left him gasping and breathless, pressing his hands to his chest as though to crush the deep pain there.

  That afternoon he was flushed, and Mrs. Hollis decided he was feverish and told him so; but not till dusk did he surrender and, with Jenny and Mrs. Hollis helping him on either side, crawl feebly upstairs to bed.

  Even then he would not have a doctor, but next morning he accepted the inevitable and told them to call Doctor Mason. John Mason was both doctor and apothecary, living with his father, the Reverend William Mason, on High Street. During the cholera scare a year or two before, when the disease appeared in Lower Canada, he had been sent to New York by the town to get all possible information as to how cholera could be prevented and treated. He came now and examined the old man and looked grave, and prescribed repeated doses of New England Pectoral Syrup and Cough Pills to relieve Isaiah’s cough, and Hall and Holdens’ Improved Compound Syrup of Sarsaparilla as a tonic to build up his strength. When Isaiah objected to the taste of that, the doctor shifted to Swaim’s Panacea. He was regular in attendance, coming twice and thrice a day to dose the old man, keeping him swathed in heavy masses of blankets and quilts, with mustard plasters on his chest, and warming his bed at intervals all day.

  But despite all his attention, Isaiah’s fever raged. Even in delirium he would not let Jenny from his side; and Mrs. Hollis was by day as constant in attendance as Jenny herself. When solicitous inquirers came to the door, Mrs. Hollis or Ephraim met them, Jenny staying always, night and day, with the sick man; and Mrs. Hollis told these callers proudly how devoted Jenny was.

  “I’m scared she’ll get sick too,’ she declared. ‘She’s with him all the time, and not getting enough sleep to amount to anything, nor eating enough to keep a bird alive.’

  It was true that Jenny suffered under this ordeal—which she nevertheless insisted upon enduring. She grew thin, so that her cheekbones and the firm lines of her jaw became prominent; and there were dark shadows under her sunken eyes. Ephraim, watching her day by day, was devoured at once by his anxieties for her and by his angry resentment because Isaiah, even though unknowingly, subjected her to such torments.

  Rarely he went into the room—Jenny’s room, with her intimate possessions all about—where the sick man lay. Isaiah after the first days did not know him, knew no one at all. Yet his hand clung tight to Jenny’s, and if she had to leave him for a moment he fretted restlessly, his old fingers, all bone and gray dry skin, clutching feverishly at nothing till she returned to put her hand in his again. No one shaved him; and a thin, gray beard sprouted on his cheeks and chin above the semicircle of chin whisker extending from ear to ear which he always wore. His bald poll was covered by a wool nightcap which Mrs. Hollis had knitted for him. His eyes seldom opened, but his mouth worked constantly, the dry lips opening and shutting, revealing the toothless gums. His nostrils, as the flesh on his face shrank away, seemed to dilate and become unnaturally large, with long white hairs in them. His head on the pillow was hideous, a mask like the skull of a body already partially decomposed, so that Ephraim was sick to look at it. This was no longer his father. This was a corpse which refused to die, and he hated it and wished to put it away underground where its corruption would be hidden, would no longer offend the eye of living man. Standing beside the bed, looking down at the dreadful thing which lay there, he whispered in his thoughts like a soundless prayer:

  ‘God damn your soul, why don’t you die!’

  Yet that thin frame still prisoned the life which had animated it so long, refusing to let it go; while these others in the house, and Jenny most of all, lost strength and vigor day by day, as though Isaiah were replenishing the vital essences which ebbed out of him by sucking, like a hideous vampire, the life out of them all.

  VI

  On the twenty-fifth of February, the day after the town voted to accept the act which would make Bangor a city, Doctor Mason came in the late afternoon. Ephraim took him upstairs and left him with Jenny and the sick man. Mrs. Hollis was in her own room, catching a scrap of sleep. When Doctor Mason came down again, dusk had fallen. Ephraim met him in the hall and asked:

  ‘Well, can you tell how he is?’

  The other said soberly: ‘I’ve tried all I know. There seems to be no good in anything. Your father’s a sick man, Mr. Poster. I doubt he’ll last the night.’

  Ephraim felt a leaping surge of relief at the prospect that this long ordeal might be nearly ended; but he shook his head in a suitable despair.

  ‘Is there no more to be done?’

  ‘Deacon Adams told me today the whole town’s praying for him night and morning. There will be gatherings in many homes tonight for a prayer. Man can do no more for him, but God can.’

  When the Doctor was gone, Ephraim went slowly up the stairs. The door of Jenny’s room, where the old man lay, was closed; but he opened it quietly. He stood there in the doorway and in the candlelight met Jenny’s eyes. Isaiah mumbled meaningless words, and Ephraim said in a low tone:

  ‘The Doctor thinks he’ll die tonight.’

  Jenny looked at the sick man; and then, still watching him, she rose, freeing her hand from his. His fingers clutched at nothing, and she rubbed the hand he had held with the other, as though it were unclean. She stared down at Isaiah, and Ephraim came nearer, watching her, seeing her sway weakly.

  ‘He’s—he looks awful!’ she said huskily. She turned toward Ephraim, reaching out to him as though fo
r help; but then before he could catch her she bent like a reed and bowed and fell forward on the floor at his feet.

  He uttered a low cry, kneeling by her, picking her up in his arms. He stood up, lifting her easily, as strong as four men in this hour. The door into Isaiah’s small room, adjoining, was open. During the old man’s illness she had slept there, on Isaiah’s bed, when she slept at all. Ephraim carried her through the door and laid her down along the bed.

  But as he did so, and before he could release her and withdraw his arms which had supported her, her arms came around his neck and held him; and her eyes opened, looking up into his. She did not at once draw him to her, but she held him so that he could not escape. There was no candle burning in this room, but enough light came through the door so that he could see her eyes, dark shadows in her white face.

  She held him near, in the circle of her arms. One of his arms was under her shoulders, one still under her knees as he bent over her. He did not try to free himself. He saw her lips move, and then she whispered tensely:

  ‘I hate him, Ephraim. I hate the sight of him and the touch of him. He’s so ugly and old!’

  He could not speak, leaning above her awkwardly, his weight precariously balanced. He felt her body lift a little toward him, yearningly; and suddenly her arms around his neck tugged his head down. She pulled him off balance so that it was as though he fell, his legs no longer supporting his weight, his lips crushing hers like a blow. Her lips were dry and cracked and a little parted, and her teeth bruised his lips in that long kiss, and her arms were steel bands around his neck, half-strangling him. He got his feet under him again, pressed down with his hands on the bed in a smothered panic, unable to breathe, trying to escape her. Then her lips moved under his, and she whispered softly:

  ‘If he dies, Ephraim, I can marry you.’