General Veazie told them, with a booming chuckle in his voice, about his recent break with his former associate, Mr. Wadleigh. ‘He and Purinton bought the Indian interest in Shad and Pine Islands last year,” he said.
They’ve put in six saws—and they’ve grabbed three of my mills, claim they’re on their land. But I’ll lick ’em if I have to go to the Supreme Court to do it.’
Judge Saladine said in dry amusement: ‘Colonel, I wish you liked a lawsuit as well as Sam does. He’s a lawyer’s idea of a perfect client.’
And he told General Veazie: ‘You’ll have some hard doing in that suit, with Indians for witnesses. They won’t stand without hitching.’
Rufe Dwinel suggested in a dry tone: ‘Better get Bob Wyman on your side, Sam. He’d rather testify than eat; bragged after the last term of court that he’d been a witness in fourteen cases and only lost one of them!’ They laughed together, and Judge Saladine said: ‘A good witness can win your case for you, Sam. I was charging a jury the other day and I said: “Now if the testimony of this witness was so and so, you will decide for the defendant,” and the witness jumped up and yelled: “Why, Judge, that’s just what I said, to a shaving!” After that, plaintiff didn’t have a chance!’ General Veazie chuckled with the rest. ‘But I never go to court unless I know I have the law on my side,’ he said, and Judge Saladine smiled.
‘That’s all right if your opponent knew the law,’ he suggested. ‘Bert Jewett was prosecuting a fellow the other day for an outrage on a girl up in Orono. Moody was for the defense, and he argued that because the girl made no outcry, the jury must infer consent; produced an armful of law books to show that was the common-law rule. But when Bert came to that, he shouted at the jury: “I ask you, gentlemen, what did this girl know about the law? She never read these law books. She was just a poor, ignorant country girl. But, by God, gentlemen, if she had known what the law was she’d have yelled loud enough to be heard ten miles off!” And he got his conviction, too!’
The tales after that came thick and fast, and the good wine went around till John’s eyes began to blur; but when Colonel Black called for a fourth bottle, Rufe Dwinel rose. Thank you, Colonel, no,’ he said. “I know my limitations.’
The others came to their feet to say good night; and General Veazie said frankly:
‘I sometimes have regrets in the morning myself, Rufe; but I’m never wise enough to foresee them the night before.’
John remembered a tale his father had used to tell. ‘There was an old ship’s carpenter in Freeport,’ he said, ‘used to take too much and feel bad afterward; but he couldn’t leave it alone. One morning he was feeling particularly low in his mind, after a rough night, and he said to his wife: “By the Great Jehovah, Mary, I’m never going to touch another drop of rum as long as I live!” But then before she could say how glad she was, he realized that he’d taken in a good deal of territory, and he added one word: “Probably!” ’
Everyone laughed, and John had a fine certainty that he had contributed something to the amusement of these men so much older in wisdom than himself. When the guests were gone, Colonel Black clapped him on the shoulder in full approval.
‘Well, John, you’re all right!’ he said. ‘You’ll get along. Now we’ll go to bed!’
II
They were up early for the long drive to Ellsworth. Colonel Black, as a matter of routine, went to Philadelphia on the first of January every year, to make a report to the Bingham heirs; and for that mission there was a mass of papers to be put in order, of summaries to be prepared. On John’s earlier visit, the house in Ellsworth had been full of the family and of guests; but now November was bleak across the land, and John and the Colonel had the place to themselves. They worked together all day long, but toward the middle of the month Judge Saladine came down for a day or two of business talk; and at the first opportunity John ventured to ask for his daughter.
‘Meg’s in Washington,’ the Judge told him. ‘Visiting some friends. I’m meeting her in New York after I go to Philadelphia with the Colonel.’ He added courteously: ‘If you’re in New York at that time, I’m sure she’d be pleased to have you call. She’s spoken of you often since last summer.’
John, red with pleasure at this, promised to see them in New York, as the Judge suggested.
At dinner that day, Judge Saladine spoke of Isaiah Poster’s death, said his body had never been found; and John saw that he and the Colonel had known Isaiah. ‘I knew his son at Harvard.’ he remarked. ‘But I never met him—or Mrs. Poster.’
‘She’s a fine young woman,’ Judge Saladine assured him. She made Isaiah a good wife.’ He added gravely: ‘Your friend, Isaiah’s son, turned out rather badly, but she stands up for him. He was cut off, you know—I drew Isaiah’s will—but she insists on providing for him.’
‘I’ve heard Ephraim speak of her,’ John assented, and said no more, trying to reconcile what Ephraim had told him with Judge Saladine’s opinion.
He had another report of her—and he had news of Ephraim—a few weeks later. Early in December Colonel Black departed, with instructions to John to join him in New York as near the first of the year as possible. Left alone in the big house except for the servants, Evered was busy with his ledgers till a day or two before Christmas. The river closed on December 9, so he made arrangements to go to Thomaston overland and sail from there on the schooner Mary Ann, which would carry a load of lime to New York and which he was promised would wait for him.
He came to Bangor Christmas Day, stopping overnight for the formal opening banquet of the Bangor House. The banquet was an impressive affair, with Mr. Wood playing host to a brilliant company of ladies and gentlemen. John had thought it possible Mrs. Poster might be among them; and he had a lively curiosity to see her, but she was not at the banquet. He met, however, Mr. Richardson, cashier of the Commercial Bank; and he remembered that Ephraim was authorized to draw on that institution.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I’ve lost contact with my old friend Ephraim Poster. I believe he banks with you. Can you tell me where he is?’
Mr. Richardson, he thought, hesitated for a moment; but he said then: ‘In New York, I should say. He drew on us for funds a week ago.’
‘I’d be obliged for his address,’ John explained. ‘I shall be in New York a week hence, and I can look him up.’
Mr. Richardson promised to send the address by messenger in the morning, and Evered asked one more question. ‘Is Mrs. Poster among the ladies present this evening?’
The other shook his head. ‘No, she goes nowhere—to no social gatherings—since her husband died.’ He added, smiling slightly, for wines had flowed freely at the banquet: ‘And her views on temperance are so strong she would hardly appear here in any case!’
‘I haven’t met her,’ Evered explained. ‘But of course I’ve heard much of her from Ephraim.’
‘She’s an admirable young lady,’ the other told him with obvious sincerity. ‘She’s had more than her share of troubles and has borne them well.’
Evered hesitated, thinking of a hundred questions he wished to ask; but clearly Mr. Richardson had no slightest suspicion of that side of Jenny which Ephraim had described. So John said no more.
III
When Evered reached Thomaston, he went by prearrangement to the Georges Hotel. Captain Obed Manter of the Mary Ann had appointed to meet him there. Cap’n Manter was a little old man with a bald head which he kept covered with a tremendous coonskin hat, indoors and out; and when Evered first saw him he was in the midst of a violent argument with another man as old or older than he.
‘Dad rot it, Willie!’ he cried in a shrill rage. ‘I told you to stay aboard her and get the hatches on! You know, well as I do, I plain had to come back here to pick up my passengers, and to see that man about going mate. Doggone George Hedge anyway, getting sick and us all ready to sail!’
‘George ain’t no sicker’n I be,’ Willie retorted. They scolded each other in high, cracked voices.
‘But he always did say he wouldn’t ship on a hen frigate. Sence when did the Mary Ann turn into a passenger packet? A man’s bad enough, but why in tarnation did you have to take a woman too?’
‘That’s my business,’ Cap’n Obed told him, louder than ever. ‘If I want to carry a woman, I guess’t I can, and take no sarse from George Hedge, or any damned cook either!’
John Evered, smiling at their heat, approached them. ‘You must be Cap’n Manter of the Mary Ann schooner,’ he said. ‘I’m Mr. Evered, your passenger.’
The two old men instantly were silenced. Cap’n Obed extended a limp, horny hand, and Evered grasped it, and the Captain said: ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance. This is Willie Small, be’n going cook for me for thirty years.’ Evered took Willie’s gnarled, heavy hand, lifeless and un- responding, and Cap’n Manter explained: ‘We worked the Mary Ann around to the shore village to load her, to keep clear of the ice that makes in the river here. We’ll drive over first thing in the morning, before day.’ He added: ‘You make yourself t’home here. I’ll see to’t you’re rousted out. I won’t go off without you.’
Evered nodded and turned away. He saw Cap’n Obed dismiss old Willie Small with a restrained violence, and later, after he had gone up to his room and come down again, he saw the Captain in talk with another man, taller than Evered himself, big enough to make two of Cap’n Manter; and this man’s voice was so loud that everyone in the common room heard what he said. He told Cap’n Manter his name was Brock. He was a New Londoner who had quit his berth on the Eliza schooner when she docked at Searsport, and now looked for a chance to work his passage home. Cap’n Obed asked him cautiously:
‘What was the matter with the berth you had?’
‘Couldn’t hit it off with Cap’n Home,” Brock told him in a cheerful tone. ‘He was too careful to suit me.’
‘Well, I aim t’be keerful myself, as keerful as there’s any need,’ Cap’n Obed admitted. ‘Know the courses around the Cape and Nantucket, do ye?’
‘Like that!’ Brock assured him, pointing to the palm of his hand. ‘Well, I guess’t you’ll do, then,’ Cap’n Obed decided. ‘I ain’t be’n beyond Boston in ten years, but I’m going to N’York this v’y’ge.’
His word made Evered remember with a quick pleasure that he too was going to New York, and that Margaret Saladine would be there. He had not forgotten her, nor any moment of their hours together; and he looked forward to seeing her again.
He found that he had an hour to spare before supper would be ready and went out to stroll around the town. The state prison had been built ten years before, had been enlarged since then; and John looked curiously at its massive granite buildings. He saw a woman coming toward him in the dusk, and she stopped to stare at the prison. She wore over her small bonnet a heavy black veil, so nearly opaque that in the failing light he could see nothing of her countenance; but he was struck by the rigidity of her posture. She looked at the grim stone structure without a movement, as though her glance could pierce its walls. He was so impressed by this that after he had passed he looked back at her again, wondering why the prison should fascinate her so. Perhaps someone she knew was there immured.
When he returned to the tavern, Captain Copeland greeted him. John Copeland had built the Georges Hotel, on Prison Corner, at the time the prison was building, and of brick which he himself manufactured. He was a vigorous and enterprising man, combining a stage business and the responsibility of carrying the mail with his activities as tavern-keeper. To Evered as a representative of Colonel Black he was anxious to pay every courtesy and attention; and John had to assure him that his quarters were comfortable, his accommodations satisfactory.
‘I walked past the prison,’ he said. ‘It’s a gloomy-looking place.’
‘And well it might be,’ Cap’n Copeland agreed. ‘And a miserable place for them in it. There’s talk of making it over so it won’t be so bitter hard on them. Now the prisoners every night have to be lowered down through a hole in the floor to cells no better than receiving tombs; no air, and damp, and cold. I don’t hold with law-breaking myself, but a man had better be hung right off than treated so.’
John agreed that a more humane lodging for the guilty should be found. When he went in to supper, the veiled woman was seated near him. She raised her veil to eat and he saw a pale, still countenance of an extraordinary purity, like that of a girl in her teens, and of a beauty which—if it were more animated—would be striking. She did not raise her eyes during the meal, and when she was done she lowered her veil and left the room; but he found himself thinking about her after she was gone.
Cap’n Copeland knocked on his door at an unearthly hour to say it was time to be stirring; and the proprietor himself served the hot and hearty breakfast. Cap’n Manter and Mr. Brock appeared to join Evered at table; and later John and Mr. Brock were waiting by the capacious coach set on runners which the innkeeper had brought around from the stables, and which he himself would drive, when Cap’n Manter appeared. He was escorting a lady, the veiled lady whom Evered had seen by the prison the night before; and the old man said awkwardly:
‘Mis’ Poster, this is our passenger, Mr. Evered. And this is Mr. Brock, my mate.’ He may have been conscious of the sudden alertness in Evered and in her at his word of introduction, for he looked from one to the other doubtfully. They bowed without speaking, and Mr. Brock said: ‘Pleased, ma’am!’
Cap’n Obed said briskly: ‘Well, we might as well get started.’ He handed Jenny into the coach and the others followed. He and the mate faced backward. Evered and Jenny sat facing forward, side by side; and Evered’s every muscle was tensely conscious that this woman whose sleeve touched his shoulder was the monster Ephraim had described.
4
IT WAS already dark when
they set out to drive to East Thomaston. For the first mile Cap’n Obed was talkative, and Mr. Brock now and then addressed a tentative remark to Jenny; but she answered him only by nods, spoke not at all. Evered, beside her, said nothing except when the Captain or Mr. Brock seemed to demand an answer; and presently they all became silent, the Captain and Mr. Brock surrendering to the oppressive silence of the others.
Evered during that drive was acutely aware of the woman by his side. He had thought her at supper last night comely enough, but he forgot that now, seeing her through Ephraim’s eyes as of a deadly loveliness and wearing a beauty behind which lurked evil in its most treacherous and dreadful forms. Remembering Ephraim, he abhorred her, and his own present nearness to her, as a man abhors the snake which he sees writhing on the ground. He hated her with a sick loathing, so that it was hard for him to sit quietly.
In the seat facing them, Cap’n Obed and the mate huddled in a silent fortitude, enduring the bitter cold which stiffened their muscles and slowed the blood in their veins. Darkness bestowed upon each one of them a protecting solitude. To Evered’s eyes his companions in the coach were indistinct and stiffly lurching shadows, while outside in the still starlight the snow-mottled spruce forests and the open farm lands glided slowly by.
When they arrived at the wharf, the Mary Ann was tied up to receive them, and once on her decks Cap’n Manter said briskly: ‘Lively, now! Looks like snow to me. We’ll get the hatch covers on and battened down.’ Mr. Brock protested that daylight would be time enough for that, but Cap’n Obed said: ‘No, I won’t rest easy till she’s snug. Carrying lime the way we are, you can’t resk letting it get wet or it’ll set us afire.’
Jenny had gone at once below, but Evered, to avoid her near proximity, stayed on deck awhile. The Mary Ann was a decrepit old craft, all cargo space amidships, with a narrow forecastle where two men slept, and a deck house aft from which a companion ladder descended into the cabin. This cabin was no more than a wide corridor running crosswise of the vessel, with a galley on the port side forward where Willie not only performed his functions as a cook but slept, and a small cabin beside it which Cap’n Obed and Mr. Brock would share. Aft were two other
cabins; and the larger, to starboard, would be Mrs. Poster’s while Evered took the other.
‘We’re kind of cramped,’ Cap’n Obed confessed when Evered at last came below—relieved to find that Jenny was not visible. ‘I don’t most gen’ally figger to carry any passengers—nor to go all the way to N’York either—but Mis’ Poster was dead set I sh’d carry her to N’York, and she’s paying me so much I couldn’t afford not to take it.’
Evered said quietly: ‘I hope she doesn’t object to my presence aboard.’
‘No, she don’t,’ Cap’n Obed assured him. ‘I ast her, writ her a letter when I got yours—she’d already made her dicker with me—and she said I could take you well as not, if there was room; said she’d be glad to have any friend of Colonel Black’s for a shipmate.’
So she had known his name beforehand; but he reminded himself that Ephraim might never have mentioned him to her. He went on deck again as they got under way, dawn just breaking. The Mary Ann carried two stumpy masts, with no topmasts; so they had only to handle main and foresail and the jibs. Mr. Brock and Willie gave a hand when the work required it. The crew consisted of the three men aft, and a thin, gangling boy and half-witted man who wore a meaningless yet curiously appealing smile and who slept in the forecastle. Evered never heard the boy called anything but Squid. The halfwit’s name was Arthur.
The Strange Woman Page 28