by Van Reid
“Durwood,” said Brink. “Drunk as a lord, he was!”
Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump were stunned by this indictment. None of them but Mr. Burnbrake could have been alive before the Dow Law, unlawful behavior as well as intoxication. The two trios of men gaped at which prohibited liquor in the state of Maine, and so Brink was suggesting one another for some moments, and even Roger Noble turned from his contemplation of the whitened atmosphere to see what the silence meant.
Then a strange noise emanated from Thump; he appeared to be laughing, though it was hard to be sure since his facial growth so concealed his expression. Thump’s friends knew him well, however, and they too began to chortle. “Good heavens!” said Eagleton again. “Good heavens!”
Ephram put his head back and laughed as he had seldom done before.
“You quite had me believing you,” said Thump to Brink.
“Did I?” said Brink.
Eagleton was slapping his thigh. “Drunk as a lord!” he declared. “I must write that down. Oh, good heavens!” He found his notebook and was jotting this exchange into it when it occurred to him that he had something to tell his friends. “It occurs to me,” he said, “that I had something to tell you.”
“Oh?” said Ephram. Thump too leaned forward.
Eagleton was fingering something beneath his shirt, and they watched him do this with interest and curiosity. “I can’t recall,” he said.
“How unfortunate,” said Durwood, and his fellow Dashians appeared disappointed as well.
“It will come to me,” assured Eagleton. Ephram patted Eagleton’s shoulder.
There was yet another thread of conversation among these fellows that would prove consequential to the Moosepathians in a later season (not to mention extraordinary interest, even debate, among historians of the society): While describing certain adventures they had experienced since forming their club, Eagleton happened to mention the remarkable Mrs. Roberto. It was on the previous Fourth of July that this lovely woman, in the performance of her celebrated parachute drop from an ascended balloon, accidentally landed upon Thump, who was attempting to regulate a boxing match between two politicians!
The tale, when it was told, fascinated the Dash-It-All Boys on several levels. “It is a new electoral process then?” wondered Brink.
“The lady actually settled upon you?” said Waverley. Thump, who had taken very little part in the telling of it, looked red beneath his beard; he had never gotten over his brief encounter with Mrs. Roberto (he had actually danced with her the following evening at the Freeport Fourth of July Ball), and he was quick to come to her defense if anyone was rash enough to disparage her parachuting abilities.
“I met the lady once,” said Durwood.
“Did you?” said his friends, as well as Ephram and Eagleton. Thump’s eyes widened with sudden interest.
Durwood was perhaps remembering the famous shape of that woman, which was not small but was entirely proportionate; he had, by the mild look upon his countenance, admired her.
“I know the woman,” said Roger Noble, and as this was the first instance of his joining their conversation since the train pulled from the Portland station, all eyes turned to him.
“Do you?” said Thump.
Noble smiled unpleasantly. “She is a woman of many talents,” he said, with an insinuation that touched the Dashians, if not the Moosepathians. “She used to live down by the waterfront in Portland.”
“I think you mean a different person,” suggested Durwood.
“I don’t think I do,” said Noble.
“The waterfront?” said Thump. He didn’t know that there were any very nice places in that section of the city.
“I think Mr. Noble is referring to a different person,” said Durwood.
Noble seemed to think better of pursuing this line of thought and ted with a sneer to the window.
But Thump fell into a deep study after this portion of their discourse, which musings did not go unnoticed by the Dash-It-All Boys, who nonetheless succumbed to several nights of carousing and, one by one, put up a remarkable chorus of snores. The members of the Moosepath League continued to think upon the lovely Mrs. Roberto, but soon they too were lulled by the cadence of the rails and the continuous veil of snow outside their windows.
It was not till they changed trains in Brunswick and both clubs roused themselves (and Mr. Burnbrake) that they realized Roger Noble was gone.
Ezra Burnbrake, chiding himself for his carelessness, sent a telegram of warning to his niece, which she received too late.
20. Frantic Whispers and Pointed Dispatch
Roger Noble left the train at Yarmouth; it was a simple thing, a sudden inspiration touched with alarm. He waited more than an hour for a Portland-bound train, and all the while his heart thumped to think that he had defied his uncle (for whom he still held an unaccountable fear) but, more important, that he would soon be face-to-face with his cousin Charlotte Bum brake.
He had not seen Charlotte for three years now, and three years ago, when he did see her, it was considered (by Charlotte and Uncle Ezra) an accident. He had not been allowed to speak with her alone. Before that he had spoken to her alone many times and-since they were very young always to the same frustrating, maddening end.
It was worse than thirst to Noble; enough money and enough industry can find a bottle anywhere, but there was only the single face with which he was obsessed, and that was denied him.
Once they had been companions, and he had held Charlotte’s hand and even kissed her; they had walked in his parents’ garden on summer nights. She was older than he by three years, and he had watched with admiration and growing passion as she trembled from child to womanlike adolescent to woman. Since that final transformation, his life had tumbled by in an agony of waiting, which was relieved only by an absolute torment of disappointment whenever he chanced to see her again.
I his waiting and in his obsession, he managed to make good every prediction of his prodigality and profligacy. He had burned through his legacy within a year of his father’s death and been forced to beg of his uncle an annual stipend, which passed through his hands like water. He was continually in debt, fearful of meeting his creditors, and more often than not behaved as if he were owed money. a is so common with those who lack true self-possession, he carried with him a monumental conceit for his own worth and abilities, an egotism all the more dangerous for being fragile.
His hands shook as he bought a ticket in the Yarmouth station for the trip back to Portland, and he felt a weight in his chest that labored his heart and hindered his breathing.
Believing her cousin to be out of town, Charlotte Bumbrake thought that Portland in the snow was something like paradise. Though the weather already blinded the harbor, accumulating quickly upon the sidewalks, the populace was not to be daunted; the streets were swift with carriages, and the stores lively with business. Charlotte and Pacif a Means delighted to see boxes and packages done up in Christmas wrap, and they stood to listen as a man sang carols at a street corner.
Pacif a was a small woman with a large, sometimes comical manner; her eyes were almost black and flashed alike with amusement or temper; her eyebrows were perfect arches, deft at communicating her frame of mind. Beneath her hood she wore her dark hair in a pile upon her head, lending her small features a patrician quality that she used to benign, if sly, advantage. She and Charlotte walked arm in arm, bundled to the chin in fur collars, their hands muffed, the hems of their long coats dressed with snow.
At a shop window they stopped to look at great ranks of toys, and a man standing beside them asked their opinion regarding the probable Christmas wish of an eight-year-old girl. Pacif a pointed out the doll with eyes that closed when it was laid down. Charlotte favored the miniature tea set. They left the fellow peering from one to the other of these items, and he was such a picture of indecision that Pacif a made Charlotte stop some distance down the walk to watch him.
“Just see if he doesn’t
scratch his head,” said Pacifa, and when the man took off his hat to do so, she made Charlotte laugh, she was so gleeful.
“Pacifa!” said Charlotte, fearing they were drawing attention to themselves. “You always make me unruly!” she said, laughing. Pacif a thought the idea of an unruly Charlotte Bumbrake was itself very funny and was therefore subject to further imprecations from her friend.
Charlotte’s and Pacifa’s fathers had been business associates, as well as owning large shares in the same two brigs, the Hallowel and the Estimate. Charlotte, her brothers, and her sister had been raised in nearby Westbrook, but the friendship with Pacifa’s family occasioned many a fondly remembered outing to Portland, and the concerns in the two brigs drew them to the excitement of the waterfront whenever one or the other arrived at her home port.
It was during these years that Charlotte came to know her cousin Roger Noble and in those days to welcome his company. When Charlotte was nineteen, her parents and her sister died during a snowless winter of deadly influenza, and with her brothers at sea or out west, she was sent to Cambridge and Uncle Ezra, with whom she had lived ever since. Ezra doted upon his niece, but now, in his aged years, the relationship between them had reversed somewhat.
While Charlotte was in Cambridge, Pacif a had been married for several years, but her husband died under circumstances that were not talked about. The two friends never had so much as a cross word between them. Neither of their lives was filled with incidents now, but they found much to say as they strolled the business district and shopped from the uncostly side of the store windows, all the while reveling in the snowy crowds.
Along the streets the eye might comprehend each individual flake as it tumbled between the dark buildings; as the eye gazed over the harbor, through a vast field of snowfall against the overcast sea, all the senses were hushed by that silent and endless multitude. Ship’s spars, themselves repeated into the waterfront distance, had collected a mantle of white. More than one crew had, for St. Nicholas’s Day (which was tomorrow), tied boughs and mistletoe onto the highest cross member of their vessel’s mainmast, unintentionally adorning the Christian symbol with the pagan but lending a Yuletide charm to even this rugged neighborhood.
The women were well exercised when they returned to the City Hotel, their cheeks red with exertion and the weather, and they brushed themselves and each other off as best they could before entering the foyer. There they found a young man who promised to have lunch sent to their rooms.
“And coffee please,” said Pacif a with a shiver.
“I sent one of the boys up with a telegram about half an hour ago,” said the manager, who stepped from his office.
“Oh?” Charlotte thought that her uncle might have wired her of his safe arrival at Hallowell.
“He slipped it beneath your door, ma’am.”
It seems early, she thought when she passed the tall clock in the lobby.
They hurried up the stairs, hoping the fire in the apartments was not out.
They were hungry from their exercises and they strode the upstairs hall with as brisk a pace as might be considered ladylike.
The first surprise, and the first inkling that all was not as it should be, came when the door to Charlotte’s apartments opened before she turned the key. a terrible suspicion seemed to emanate from the knob in her hand, till it touched her heart with apprehension and near panic.
The parlor was small but elaborate in its furnishings. Three large chairs cornered the room; ornate electric lamps hung from the ceiling and stood against the walls. The fire in the grate burned merrily. Charlotte had the door more than half opened before a tall man was revealed in the near right corner of the room, and she wondered if he were hiding from all but the last possible moment of discovery.
It’s just Roger she said to herself, and then, It is never just Roger She stepped on something and without thinking bent down to pick the telegram from the floor.
Roger Noble was smiling, not simply to indicate the pleasure of seeing her but to suggest that their meeting was mutually happy. Then that smile evaporated into something almost childlike in its need. She saw that he had been reading the letter from Adam Tempest, and he laid it down upon the table where he found it. He was the first to speak, pronouncing her name as if he had just come up for air.
“Roger,” she said, unable to wash affection entirely from the address.
“Mr. Noble,” said Pacif a as she appeared at her friend’s shoulder.
Irritation flashed in Noble’s eyes. “Mrs. Means,” he said, attempting to recover his passive veneer.
“I am surprised to see you, Roger,” said Charlotte quietly.
He looked like a boy expecting reprimand, and this suggestion of his youth, this flash of the child in the man, made the moments that followed the more painful for Charlotte. She realized that she was standing in the door, blocking Pacifa’s entrance and dripping with melted snow. The women brought their coats to the opposite corner, so that Noble was left standing like the member of a separate party on the other side of the small room.
“You are supposed to be with Uncle,” she said as both reason and anger returned to her.
“He has escort enough, it seems,” said Roger. There was impatience in his eyes, and every fear that Charlotte had concerning him was very simply resubstantiated.
“And yet no family while we speak,” she said.
Pacif a took a poker and made a great deal of noise shaking up the coals in the grate. Roger watched her as she made herself conspicuous; under other circumstances, it might have been comic, how severely she peered at the painting above the fireplace.
“I am like no family at all to that old man,” he said, turning back to Charlotte.
“And if that were so, who is at fault, pray tell?”
“Charlotte, I must talk with you!”
“Nothing has changed, Roger.”
He sent Pacif a another uncertain look, then pleaded with Charlotte. “You can’t know that,” he said, though he might have been saying, How far must I humiliate myself Standing alone, he looked dangerously impotent. He had aged since she saw him last; his clothes and his hair were in the fashion of youth-too youthful really-but the pockets beneath his eyes, the pallor of his cheek declared his unhealthy existence.
There was an impasse; Charlotte was herself mortified by this scene and could say no more, and there was yet enough social restraint in Roger Noble that he would say no more in anything but the most private surroundings.
Pacifa’s restraint at present was a manifestation of her love for Charlotte, and nothing more. She stood with her back to the fire, her exquisite eyebrows raised and her chin in the air.
But Roger Noble had not braved the wrath of his uncle, returned to Portland, and stolen into Charlotte’s room by way of his talent for jimmying locks, only to turn away at the first rebuff, and Charlotte could see this. In his petulant expression there was again the young man she had known and cared for, and not for the first time did she wonder how something so short as childhood could command such respect and duty over the remainder of a person’s life. There were tears in her eyes: tears of apprehension, tears from the shock of seeing him (and seeing him look so old), and tears for the beautiful little boy still discernible in his face. “Let us go into the next room,” she said, and touching Pacifa’s hand to stem any dispute from that quarter, she led the way to the little alcove that gave access to the bed chambers.
Charlotte nodded when Noble reached for the door. He closed it softly behind them, and she saw Pacif a step briefly into her line of sight before they were shut from each other. It was curious to her that he stood with his hand upon the door as if he might have reason to flee at any moment.
He looked at her, hardly able to believe that here was not simply a manifestation (a hallucination even) of his desire but the woman herself. She could not at first meet his eyes but looked down at her hands. She stood with her back to the door of her room, but the alcove felt like a pla
ce of no escape, too small for her emotions, hardly offering enough air to breathe.
After the briefest sort of eternity she asked how he had been since she last saw him, the question sounding dull and stupid.
“My God, Charlotte!” he said. “You are more beautiful than ever!”
She did look into his eyes then, and sharply; his declaration somehow left her with more self-assurance and less guilt. She still saw in him the little boy, but not for the first time she thought she could recall the deceit and dissipation of the adult in generative form within the face of the child. It gave her room to breathe, not to feel such sadness for that young man.
“Charlotte,” he said, “I do have something to say to you.”
“What is it, Roger?”
“I know, of course,” he began, “that your father left you with a handsome legacy.” The look on her face indicated renewed suspicion, and he raised a hand to stop her from speaking, his words coming faster. “I also know that the swift loss of my own inheritance is no secret, to my family or my friends, not to say my enemies.” Charlotte looked ready to stop him at any moment, but he rushed onward, saying, “My dear, it has dawned on me and I understand how completely you must fear that any attachment with me would endanger your security. It is with that in mind that it occurs to me that I should, should have long ago, offered to suffer any legality, sign any paper to assure you that your bequest remains your own, with no danger from my imprudence, along with those assurances I repeatedly give you that such a marriage would be all I need to throw off the bad habits and low companionship that have heretofore characterized your opinion of me.”
Charlotte was appalled yet knew he was grasping at straws, that his understanding of her was lost beneath a distressing tangle of emotions. “Roger, I do not love you! Or if any love remains, it is the love of one cousin for another, the love that blood demands!”
No sooner were these words spoken than he launched himself at her and pinned her against the door to her room. He did not mean to shake her, but he was vibrating with such fear and anger that it translated itself to her like a current of electricity. Her first impulse was to cry out, though she thought it weak to do so, even as she realized that it was foolish not to.
