The Debtor: A Novel

by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

Charlotte had expected her father home at a little after six o'clock that night. That was the train on which he usually arrived lately. She had not the least idea what he was doing in the City. She supposed he was in the office as he had been hitherto. She never inquired. With all the girl's love for her father, she had a decided respect. She was old-fashioned in her ways of never interfering or even asking for information concerning a man's business affairs.

Charlotte went down to the station to meet her father, as she was fond of doing. She had her dinner all ready. It was pretty bad, but she was innocently unaware of it. In fact, she had much faith in it. She had a soup which resembled greatly a flour paste, and that was in its covered tureen on the range-shelf, keeping hot and growing thicker. She had cooked a cheap cut of beef from a recipe in the cook-book, and that was drying up by the side of the soup. Poor Charlotte had no procrastination, but rather the failing of “Haste makes waste” of the old proverb. She had her cheap cut of beef all cooked at three o'clock in the afternoon, and also the potatoes, and the accompanying turnips. Salad at that time of the year she could not encompass in any form, but she had a singular and shrunken pudding on the range-shelf beside the other things. She set the coffee-pot well back where it would only boil gently, and the table was really beautifully laid. The child's cheeks were feverishly flushed with the haste she had made and her pride in her achievements. She had swept and dusted a good deal that day, also, and all the books and bric-à-brac were in charming arrangement. She felt the honest delight of an artist as she looked about her house, and she said to herself that she was not at all tired. She also said that she was not at all hungry, even if she had only eaten a cracker for luncheon and little besides for breakfast. She realized a faintness at her stomach, and told herself that she must be getting indigestion. Her little stock of money was very nearly gone. She had even begun to have a very few things charged again at Anderson's. Sometimes her father brought home a little money, but she understood well enough that their financial circumstances were wellnigh desperate. However, she had an enormous faith in her father that went far to buoy her up. While she felt the most intense compassion for him that he should be so hard pressed, it never occurred to her that it could be due to any fault or lack of ability in him, and she had, in reality, no doubt whatever of his final recovery of their sinking fortunes. She wrote her mother that papa was going to the City every day, that they were getting on very well, and while they had not yet a maid, she thought it better to wait until they were perfectly satisfied before engaging one. The letters she had received at first from Mrs. Carroll had been childishly amazed and reproachful, although acquiescent. Her aunt had written her more seriously and with great affection. She told her to send for her at once if she needed her, and she would come.

Charlotte, going down the street towards the station that night, expected a letter by the five-o'clock train. She reached the post-office, which was near the station, at a quarter before six, and she found, as she anticipated, letters. There were several for her father, which she thought, accusingly towards the writers, were bills. It was odd that Charlotte, while not really morally perverted, and while she admitted the right of people to be paid, did not admit the right of any one to annoy her father by presenting his bill. She looked at the letters, and, remembering the wretched expression on her father's face on receiving some the night before, it actually entered into her mind to tear these letters up and never let him see them at all. But she put them in her little bag, and opened her own letters and stood in the office to read them. The train was not due for fifteen minutes yet, and was very likely to be late. She had letters from her mother, Ina, and aunt. They all told of the life they were leading there, and expressed hope that she and her father were well, and there was a great deal of love. It was all the usual thing, for they wrote every day. There were also letters from them all for Carroll. The Carroll family, when absent from one another, were all good correspondents, with the exception of Carroll. There was even a little letter from Eddy, which had been missent, because he had spelled Banbridge like two words—Ban Bridge.

Charlotte read her letters, smiling over them, standing aloof by the window. The post-office was fast thinning out. There had been the customary crowd there at the arrival of the mail—the pushing and shrieking children and the heavily shuffling loungers—all people who never by any possibility got any letters, but who found a certain excitement in frequenting the office at such times. Just as Charlotte finished her last letter and replaced it in the envelope, Anderson came in for his mail. He did not notice her, but went directly to his box, which had a lock, opened it, and took out a pile of letters. Charlotte stood looking at him. He looked very good and very handsome to her. She thought to herself how very much better-looking he was than Ina's husband. There was something about the manly squareness of his shoulders, as he stood with his back towards her, examining his letters, which made her tremble a little, she could not have told why. Suddenly he looked up and saw her, and she felt that the color flashed over her face, and was ashamed and angry. “Why should I do so?” she asked herself. She made a curt, stiff little bow in response to Anderson's greeting, and he passed her going out of the office with his letters. Then she felt distressed.

“I need not have been rude because I was such a little idiot as to blush when a man looked at me,” she told herself. “It was not his fault. He has always been lovely to us.” She reviewed in her mind just her appearance when she had given him that stiff little bow, and she felt almost like crying with vexation. “Of course he does not care how I bow to him,” she thought, and somehow that thought seemed to give her additional distress, “but, all the same, I should have been at least polite, for he is very much a gentleman. I think he is much better bred, and he certainly knows much more than Ina's husband, even if he does only keep a grocery store; but then army officers are not supposed to know much except how to fight.”

The heavy jar of a passing freight train made her look at the post-office clock, and with her usual promptness, although it was fully seven minutes before the train was due, even if it were on time, and she was only about one minute's walk from the station, she reflected that she must start at once if she were to meet her father. So she stowed away her letters in her little bag, and fairly ran across the icy slope between the office and the station. She saw, as she hurried along, a child tumble down, and watched him jump up and run off to make sure he was not hurt. When she reached the station she did not go in the waiting-room, which seemed close and stuffy, but remained out on the platform. The sun had set, but the western sky, which was visible from that point, was a clear expanse of rose and violet. Charlotte stood looking at it, and for a minute she was able to find that standing-point outside her own little life and affairs which exists for the soul. She did not think any more of the money troubles, of her bowing so stiffly to Mr. Anderson. She forgot not only her petty worries, but her petty triumphs and pleasures. She forgot even the exceeding becomingness of a new way in which she had dressed her hair. She forgot her coat, which she had herself trimmed with fur taken from an old one of her mother's, and in which her heart delighted. She forgot her supreme dinner warming on the range-shelf at home. She forgot the joy she would soon have in seeing her father alight from the train. The little, young, untrained creature saw and knew for the moment only the eternal that which was and is and shall be, and which the sunset symbolized. Her young face had a rapt expression looking at it.

“Dandy sunset, ain't it?” said a voice at her ear. She looked and saw Bessy Van Dorn, her large, blooming face, rosy with the cold, smiling at her from under a mass of tossing black plumes on a picture-hat. The girl was really superb in a long, fur-lined coat. She had driven in a sleigh to the station, and she expected Frank Eastman on the train, and was, with the most innocent and ignorant boldness in the world, planning to drive him home, although she was not engaged to him and he was not expecting her. Her face, turning from the wonderful after-glow of the sunset to Charlotte's, had also something of the same rapt expression in spite of her words.

“Yes, it is beautiful,” replied Charlotte, but rather coldly. She was a friendly little soul, but she did not naturally care for girls of Bessy Van Dorn's particular type. She was herself too fine and small before such a mass of inflorescence.

“It's cold,” said Bessy Van Dorn, further, “but, land, I like it! Have you been sleigh-riding?”

“No, I haven't,” replied Charlotte.