II
When the packet docked, runners from the Exchange Coffee House and from the other hotels fought over the baggage of every passenger. Ephraim left his gear aboard, to be sent for presently, and walked up Poplar Street on his way home. On Tim Hager’s house, enlarged now by the addition of a two-story wing behind, he saw Lena Tempest’s sign, ‘Laundering for Young Gentlemen’ and a pretty girl with fair hair waved to him in a friendly fashion from the doorway. The street was dry and dusty, and it was thronged with people, while through the crowds moved vehicles of a dozen kinds. Carts loaded with shingles or sawed lumber or with produce of the near-by farms picked their laborious way; and when he reached Main Street coaches, barouches, curricles and carriages of every description passed to and fro.
When he came to his father’s house on Main Street, Isaiah and Jenny were at dinner; and Isaiah in his skull cap-he wore the brown wig only when he went abroad, still clung to the skull cap at home—rose in surprise from his chair.
‘Came home, did ye?’ His tone was not cordial. ‘I thought you’d be on your way to Europe or somewhere by now.’
‘Who, me?’ Ephraim laughingly protested. ‘No, I decided to come home and go to work.’ He shook his father’s hand and went to greet Jenny, sitting at the other end of the table under Mr. Hardy’s portrait. When he took her hand, she drew him gently toward her, and with a quick pleasure he leaned down to kiss her cheek; but it was her lips, a little moist, which were lifted to meet his.
Isaiah grunted at the other end of the table, and Jenny said: ‘I was sure you’d come home, Ephraim. Isaiah told me you meant to travel for a while, but I didn’t think you would.’
‘He wanted me to travel,’ Ephraim agreed. ‘He wrote and told me to.’
Jenny looked at Isaiah with expressionless eyes, then, smiled a little. ‘But I decided to come home without any arguing.’
‘Didn’t you want him here, Isaiah?’ she asked curiously. Isaiah grunted again, and she rang a little glass hand bell with a tinkling note, and a girl with black hair and a tipped nose came in. Jenny said: ‘Put a place for young Mr. Poster, Ruth. Here, by me. Ephraim, sit down. I think you’ve grown heavier since you were last home.’
Isaiah said morosely from the end of the table: ‘You’ll find little to keep you in Bangor, Eph.’ Isaiah was nearing seventy, a spry little old man with a crackle in his voice. ‘After your fine ways in Cambridge, you’ll be hard to please in this town.’
‘Bangor’s grown, even this year,’ Ephraim commented. ‘The packet was crowded with men coming to buy timber lands. The talk aboard was of nothing else.’
‘Aye.’ Isaiah agreed, pride for the moment overcoming his jealous ill temper at his son’s return. ‘Five or six thousand people here already and more coming. The hotels are full, and houses going up everywhere. I’m about ready to start selling off my building lots.’
Jenny watched them while they talked, and Ephraim commented: ‘The talk was more of trading in timber lands than in building lots.’
Isaiah snorted. ‘Land, my foot! It’s bonds they mean. They’re not caring about the land. It’s the price, whether it goes up or down, that they’re interested in. Price is all they know! The Coffee House is packed all day with them, dickering for bonds.’
‘What’s a bond?’ Ephraim asked curiously.
Isaiah cackled: ‘You’d best go back to Cambridge and learn something. Say a man owns a township. He makes a bond to give a deed for it at a certain price a year from now, or five years, or ten. He sells that bond and pockets the money, and the man that bought the bond sells it to someone else, and that keeps on till there’s no sense to it.’
‘Who gets the land in the end?’
‘Whoever has the bond when the time comes to make a deed—if he wants a deed and can pay for it. But half the time a man will make a bond for a deed without owning the land at all, and maybe sell the bond and skip with the money.’ Isaiah added hotly: ‘They’re crazy, the lot of them, and getting crazier every day!’
Jenny said in her low tones: ‘I’ll take you with me this afternoon, Ephraim, to show you what a town we have.’ She explained to Isaiah: ‘Mrs. Ingraham looked for a shipment of millinery and fancy goods on the packet. I want to see them as soon as they’re unpacked.’
Isaiah protested crabbedly: ‘Eph has something better to do than help a woman buy a bonnet!’
But Jenny insisted: ‘I shall need his advice. He can tell me what Boston ladies prefer to wear.’ She added, smiling at Eph: ‘He’s young enough to pay attention to such things, I know.’
III
They drove into town that afternoon in the curricle, with the calash bonnet raised to “keep off the sun, and Pat Tierney on the box. As the demand for labor in the growing town increased, Bangor was receiving an increasing number of Irish immigrants. They were, despite a certain garrulous pugnacity, a cheerful and a hard-working lot; and men who wanted a job of work done were glad to have these new citizens. But there were others in the town who worked as little as possible, yet who now protested that the newcomers were taking jobs away from honest folk; and along the waterfront and wherever work was in progress daily brawls occurred.
Pat Tierney was somewhere in his later forties, and he had come from Ireland two years before. An old injury to his foot gave him a severe limp and incapacitated him for manual labor; but he was a master hand with horses, and he kept Isaiah’s stable, his animals and his carriages in the best of order. He was not married, living in a boarding house on the east side of the Stream; and he was devoted to Isaiah—and to Jenny too.
She thought today that Ephraim might wish to make some purchase for himself. ‘And I want you to see that Bangor is not too far behind Boston,’ she explained. So at the Phoenix Block she sent him to inspect Mr. Sargent’s broadcloths and cassimeres, and his assortment of fashionable vestings and stocks, while she herself was busy at Mrs. Ingraham’s. There presently he had to approve the bonnet she had chosen. Then they went together to Nourse and Smith’s bookstore, where she bought the latest reviews and magazines; and she stopped to consult John Stevens about a broken silver spoon which he was to repair. She bought ten pounds of sea-fowl feathers at Aaron Lowell’s establishment on Main Street; and at Jesse Wentworth’s Ephraim persuaded her to purchase a French print. After they had stopped at Wright’s to order some West India goods, she said softly:
‘And now I must show you something of the town.’
So she told Pat Tierney which way to turn, and they drove out Broadway to see the fine new houses built or building there; General Veazie’s towering mansion, and Mr. Sylvester’s, and next door to it the house he had built for his sister, Mrs. Guild. They passed one house, of brick with two chimneys, and Ephraim said:
‘That’s like ours.’
‘Mr. Hamm built them both,’ she assented, and she directed Pat to drive down Essex Street past other houses Mr. Hamm had put up. Then they crossed the Stream and went out Hammond Street past the Seminary and drove a little way into the country beyond, before turning back into the town.
She told him many things about the houses which they passed and about the people who lived in them; and he listened as he could. Sitting close beside her under the bonnet of the curricle, with the broad back of Pat Tierney and his square shoulders obscuring everything ahead, they were in a sort of solitude which Ephraim relished. She wore, he thought, some delicate scent; yet he could not be sure of this. It might be merely the distilled essence of her beauty; that beauty which was compounded of her hair, and the curve of her lips always a little moist at the corners like the lips of a greedy child, and the way when she smiled those faint indentations on her cheekbones made her seem on the point of tears till Ephraim wished to take her in his arms and comfort her. They were so near one another that her shoulder touched his, and when the carriage swayed around a corner, she leaned toward him and the pressure was increased. He thought of that moment when on his arrival he had seen that she expected him to kiss her, and ho
w when he bent to do so her lips rather than her check met his; and he wished he were still on the packet, still to come to her and receive that warming welcome.
It was not until they neared home that he remembered with a faint sense of foreboding that she was his father’s wife.
IV
During the weeks that followed, Ephraim tried to fit himself into the pattern of his father’s business. Isaiah had since his marriage put the management of his store into other hands, devoting all his energies to the ramifying details of his larger affairs. He had a sort of office in his home, at one side of the front door, with an iron vault built into the wall where his books and ledgers and his letter books were kept; and he spent there most of his waking hours, writing many letters in his precise hand that began to be a little tremulous, meticulously copying each one into a letter book afterward. Ephraim, the morning after his homecoming, went to him there to propose that the older man begin his training in business affairs.
Isaiah did not welcome the suggestion. ‘There’s nought for you to do,’ he said harshly. “I’ve managed by myself this long. I don’t need any young fool to help me now!’
Ephraim grinned appealingly. Tm not such a damned fool, sir,’ he said. ‘You can teach me things.’
‘Nobody taught me anything,’ Isaiah assured him. ‘I taught myself, and you can do the same.’
‘Who, me?’ Ephraim echoed. ‘Well, I’ll try. I may have to ask you to tell me about some of the books and what they mean; but I’ll study them all, learn all I can.’
‘You’ll do no such of a thing!’ Isaiah told him flatly. ‘I don’t aim to have any young jackanapes sticking his nose into my business.’
Ephraim said reasonably: ‘But after all, sir, you’re getting old. I’ll have to learn about your affairs if I’m to handle them properly when you die.’
‘Who said you were a-going to handle them, when I die or ever?’
Ephraim grinned appeasingly. ‘Why, I took that for granted. If I’m not, then certainly I don’t want to bother you—or waste my time.’
‘Waste your time? What’s your time worth to anybody? What did you ever do but waste it?’
Ephraim hesitated. ‘Possibly you’re right.’ He thought suddenly of John Evered, and said honestly: ‘It’s true I did waste a lot of time, my first two years at college. But I did some good work these last two years. And it was your doing that I went to college, sir. I’d have come home more often, too, if you had wanted me. I don’t think you wanted me to come even now. Why not? What is it I’ve done that has offended you?’
‘You think yourself too good for this town!’
Ephraim protested: ‘I don’t think I’m good enough.’
Isaiah burst out in a sudden storm of anger. ‘I know your kind, nothing in your heads but dandling and kissing! I tell you right now, young fellow me lad, I’ll have none of that in my house. You try it and I’ll bring you up with your toes a-digging! You hear me?’
He paused, as though expecting a reply; but before Ephraim could speak, someone knocked on the closed door. Isaiah barked a summons and Jenny came in, came to his side.
‘There, Isaiah,’ she said in her low tones. ‘It’s bad for you to get all excited! Shame on you, Ephraim, to torment him!’ Isaiah fumed, and she laid her hand upon his shoulder, standing at his side and a little behind him, looking at Ephraim. ‘Your father’s a fine man,’ she said. ‘And he has much business on his mind. You must never disturb him so.’
Her tones were calm and grave, yet she was smiling faintly, some message in her eyes; and Ephraim thought he understood. She meant that Isaiah was old and crotchety and must be humored. ‘Who, me?’ Ephraim protested. ‘I didn’t go to bother him.’
Isaiah grunted and mumbled, yet under her hand he was calmer too. ‘I’ll give you a chance,’ he said. ‘Can you copy a letter and make no mistakes?’
‘I think so.’
‘I’ll put you at it. We’ll soon see! But mind you, boy!’ Isaiah’s voice rose in new wrath. ‘One mistake’s the last. Mind what I say!’
V
Thereafter, Ephraim assumed the task of copying Isaiah’s correspondence. Since there was not space in the office for them both, he worked in his own room, painstakingly comparing each copy with the original after his task was done. This was laborious, and Jenny came to him there, on the fourth day, to offer her help.
‘I don’t want you to make any mistakes,’ she explained, ‘because it would upset Isaiah so. He talks angrily, but really he loves you, Ephraim.’ When she spoke his name, he thought it had a beauty he had never heard in it before. ‘So I’ll help you. I can read the letters to you while you watch the copy. Between us we can make sure there are no mistakes in any one.’
He welcomed her help, and her company; and thereafter they were thus together and alone for at least some time every day. Isaiah, busy in his office downstairs, never knew this. As he grew older, his world was constricting, his horizons narrowing. He regularly complained, for instance, that his spectacles were always so dirty that nobody could see through them; and although he heard Jenny well enough, as though there were a vibration in her tones to which his ears were attuned, he was apt to insist that everyone else talked so low that a man couldn’t hear what they said.
So he was unconscious of any sounds in the big house, of anything that went on outside the office where he sat all day behind a closed door.
Also, another result of Isaiah’s increasing deafness was that he slept easily and long. In the short evenings he was apt to drop off in his chair, till Jenny roused him to say that it was time he went to bed. He always grumbled at doing so, maintaining the fiction that he went upstairs only to please her; but he never delayed long. Once abed, he seldom waked till Jenny roused him in the morning; so sometimes after he was asleep she would come downstairs again, and she and Ephraim might read over the letters he had copied that day; or they might talk awhile, Jenny asking many questions about the young man’s travels, or about his life in Cambridge and his friends there.
Once he told her about John Evered. ‘I’d have gone to the Devil properly, if it hadn’t been for him,’ he said. ‘I was chasing after women, and drinking a lot, and on the downhill road.’
She asked about John, and he answered her; and she asked too about those sins of his. He took a certain pride in confessing his iniquities, as men will always boast—under a mask of penitence—of their ill deeds, even while they conceal their good ones.
‘I’m glad you don’t drink now,’ she said. ‘We’re trying to drive rum out of Bangor. There’s a county temperance society; but I want them to change the name. Temperance is just the first step toward excess. It’s only in abstinence that men can find any safety, Ephraim.’ Her tone was one of friendly counsel and warning. ‘Men who boast that they take only one glass may believe they tell the truth, but they are deceived. John Evered did well to draw you back in time. Moderate drinking is the seed of drunkenness.’
He grinned in that attractive way which always marked him. ‘I never was a moderate drinker,’ he said. ‘I could drink twice as much as would make most men drunk, and never know it.’
She asked curiously: ‘Did you really like that kind of woman, Ephraim? I know some base men do, but—did you?’
‘Who, me?’ He hesitated, coloring a little; then he said audaciously: ‘Why, Jenny, all women are like that, only some of them never find it out. I liked them, yes, till John Evered talked some sense into me.’
She said slowly: ‘I used to see such women with men near our house when I was little; but the men were always drunk, and usually the women too.’ She relaxed in her chair, her head far back, her eyes upturned. ‘I used to watch them and wonder about them,’ she said in low tones, and suddenly, without moving her head, her eyes looked down over her cheekbones and met his. He was jarred as though by a physical blow, and for a long moment their eyes held.
Then quietly she rose. ‘Good night, Ephraim,’ she said, and went from the room.
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VI
One evening when he had been a month or so at home, Jenny and Ephraim were reading together the letters he had copied, and Isaiah was asleep upstairs when they became conscious of a distant sound, hoarse and turbulent and curiously frightening. Jenny heard it first, looking up from the letter she was reading aloud while he followed his copy; and then he too heard that sound. It seemed to be compounded of many voices, swelling at times into a single roar. Ephraim after a moment rose and went to the door and stepped outside; and she followed him, standing on the stoop, and then, as he moved across to the corner of the house to hear the better, coming by his side.
The uproar came from the direction of the Point, half a mile away. The night was dark, the general blackness broken only by a lighted window here and there; but over the intervening roofs and trees they could see a faint glare as though from some illumination in that direction; and they heard an occasional far shout, or a splintering crash, and now and then a woman’s distant scream; and they were conscious of nearer sounds, the sounds of voices and of running feet as others drawn by this disturbance hastened toward the scene.
Jenny touched Ephraim’s arm. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘We’ll go down there.’
‘What is it?’ he asked uneasily.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But once when I was a girl there was a fight down there in the night, a crowd of men fighting; and next morning I saw a man all beaten and bloody, still lying in the alders. Come.’
The Strange Woman Page 15
