The Debtor: A Novel

by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

“If you had really cared so much, mother—if I had understood,” he said, gently, “you might have gone. You could have gone with the Egglestons.”

“There was no reason why we could not have gone by ourselves,” said she, “and sat with the invited guests, where we could have seen everything nicely, since we had an invitation.”

Anderson opened his mouth to tell his mother of the true source of the invitation; then he hesitated. He had a theory that it was foolish, in view of the large alloy of bitterness in the world, to destroy the slightest element of sweet by a word. It was quite evident that his mother, for some occult reason, took pleasure in the invitation. Why destroy it? So he repeated that she might have gone, had she cared so much; and feeling that he was showing a needless humility in his own scruples, he added that he would have gone with her. Then his mother declared that she did not, after all, really care, that it was a warm night and she would have been obliged to dress, and after fanning herself a little while, went in the house and to bed, leaving him marvelling at the ways of women. The problem as to whether his mother had really wished very much to go to the wedding and whether he had been selfish and foolish in opposing her wish or not, rather agitated him for some minutes. Then he gave it up, and relegated women to a place with the fourth dimension on the shelf of his understanding. The moon was now fairly aloft, sailing triumphant in a fleet of pale gold and rosy clouds. The night was very hot, the night insects were shrieking in their persistent dissonances all over the street. Shadows waved and trembled over the field of silver radiance cast by the moon. No one passed. He could not see a window-light in any of the houses. Everybody had gone to the wedding, and the place was like a deserted village. Anderson felt unutterably lonely. He felt outside of all the happy doors and windows of life. Discontent was not his failing, but all at once the evil spirit swept over him. He seemed to realize that instead of moving in the broad highway trod by humanity he was on his own little side-path to the tomb, and injury and anger seized him. He thought of the man who was being married so short a distance away, and envy in a general sense, with no reference even to Charlotte, swept over him. He had never been disturbed in very great measure with longing for the happiness that the other man was laying hold of, but even that fact served to augment his sense of injury and resentment. He felt that it was due to circumstances, in a very large degree to the inevitable decrees of his fate, that he had not had the longing, and not to any inherent lack of his own nature. He felt that he had had a double loss in both the hunger and the satisfaction of it, and now, after all, had come at last this absurd and hopeless affection which had lately possessed him. To-night the affection, instead of seeming to warm the heart of a nobly patient and reasonable man, seemed to sting it.

Suddenly out of the hot murk of the night came a little puff of cool wind, and borne on it a faint strain of music. Anderson listened. The music came again.

“It cannot be possible that the wedding is just about to begin,” he thought, “not at this hour.”

But that was quite possible with the Carrolls, who, with the exception of the head of the family, had never been on time in their lives. It was nearly nine o'clock, and the guests had been sitting in a subdued impatience amid the wilting flowers and greens in the church, and the minister had been trying to keep in a benedictory frame of mind in a stuffy little retiring-room, and now the wedding-party were just entering the church. A sudden impulse seized Anderson. He stole inside the house, and looked and listened in the hall. Everything was dark up-stairs, and silent. Mrs. Anderson always fell asleep like a baby immediately upon going to bed.

Anderson got his hat from the hall-tree, and went out, closing the door with its spring-lock very cautiously. Then he slipped around the house and listened. He could hear a soft, cooing murmur of voices from the back stoop. The servant, as usual, was keeping tryst there with her lover. He walked a little farther and came upon their consolidated shadow of love under the wild-cucumber vine which wreathed over the trellis-hood of the door. The girl gave a little shriek and a giggle, the man, partly pushed, partly of his own volition, started away from her and stood up with an incoherent growl of greeting.

“Good-evening,” said Anderson. “Jane, I am going out, and my mother has gone up-stairs. If you will be kind enough to have a little attention in case she should ring.” Anderson had fixed an electric bell in his mother's room, which communicated with the kitchen.

“Yes, sir,” said the girl, with a sound between a gasp and a giggle.

“I have locked the front-door,” said Anderson.