The Parting Glass

The Parting Glass: A Mrs. Meade Mystery

By Elisabeth Grace Foley

Cover design by Historical Editorial

Silhouette artwork by Casey Koester

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Copyright © 2013 Elisabeth Grace Foley

Table of Contents

The Parting Glass

More Mrs. Meade

About the Author

And all I’ve done for want of wit

To memory now I can’t recall…

“
The Parting Glass”
(traditional)

It was afternoon, and the upper floor of the
Colonial Hotel was still. Mrs. Meade sat in a rocking-chair in the
square of sunlight that fell through her bedroom window, reading
and rocking gently back and forth.

Mrs. Meade’s migration to the Colonial was
temporary, and had occurred on short notice. Two weeks before, her
landlady, Mrs. Henney, had received word that her sister in Boulder
was ill and required her presence. Mrs. Henney had no time to find
someone who could run her little boarding-house satisfactorily in
her absence, so she had decided to close it up, her ladies and
gentleman consenting to be thrown on the hospitality of other
establishments or friends for a week or two. Several of them had
seen Mrs. Henney off at the station, even more flustered and
near-hysterical than usual, laden with shawls, bonnet, carpetbag,
parcels, umbrella—everything, in fact, but a pair of snowshoes—and
finally, in a burst of tearful magnanimity as the train was about
to pull out, offering to refund their rent for the days they would
be in exile.

Mrs. Meade had therefore taken up residence
at the Colonial Hotel, where she found much to interest her. Being
a woman who all her life had found enjoyment in observing and
interacting with people, she made the most of her opportunities for
such in the company of the summer boarders and travelers who
gathered around the dinner-tables at the Colonial. She had made
several new friends, her room was neat, clean and convenient, and
altogether her stay was less an exile than a pleasant
interlude.

As Mrs. Meade turned over a page in her book,
the silence was broken by three light muffled taps, as though at
another door in the upstairs hallway. Mrs. Meade lifted her head
and listened for a moment, but there was no further sound, so she
dismissed it from her mind and returned her attention to her
reading. The only sound to be heard in the room was the faint hum
of insects from outdoors, and the blundering of one persistent fly
around the top of the window.

Then suddenly there was an outburst of noises
from beyond the closed door—somewhere just across the hall the bang
of a door against a wall, a woman’s shriek, and a man’s loud angry
voice mixed with a series of confused bumps and thuds. Mrs. Meade
dropped her book and rose quickly. The whole floor of the hotel had
come alive in a moment, with the sounds of doors opening and
people’s footsteps and questioning voices in the corridors.

There was already a knot of people in the
hallway when Mrs. Meade opened her door, but she was still able to
catch a distinct glimpse of what had caused the disturbance. The
door of the room immediately opposite hers was open, and in the
middle of the room a short, stocky, black-moustached man in an
overcoat had hold of the collar of a much taller young man, who
appeared somewhat dazed and confused, and was shaking and cuffing
him vigorously. Behind them on the edge of the bed, shrinking back
against the headboard as if she had been pushed or had stumbled and
fallen there, was a fair-haired young girl.

“You young scoundrel!” exclaimed the stocky
man, with another indignant jerk. “You drunken young cuss, I’ll
learn
you
to insult a lady! Get along, there! Move!”

He alternately pushed and dragged the young
man through the door into the hall, where he was immediately
assisted by the hands of several other people who had no idea what
they were helping with, but were no less eager to help than if they
had. The two of them were borne away down the hall in a crowd. In
the commotion Mrs. Meade slipped from her doorway and crossed into
the other room, where the girl leaning back limply at the head of
the bed seemed to have been almost forgotten.

“Are you all right, my dear?” she asked,
bending to lay a hand on her shoulder.

The girl looked up at her, and though her
fair face seemed blank and uncomprehending, Mrs. Meade thought she
saw a brief look of sharp distress in her dull-blue eyes, as if
they felt and expressed something independent of the rest of
her.

“Yes,” she said after a few seconds. “Yes,
I’m fine.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?” said
Mrs. Meade gently.

The girl, her eyes now fixed on the quilt,
shook her head. “No, thank you…I’d just rather—be left alone.”

She put her hand up over her mouth, but Mrs.
Meade observed that it did not shake. Adept at discerning when
another’s presence was beneficial and when it was not necessary,
she decided that in this case the girl probably
would
be
better off left alone. So she exited the room with the same
unobtrusive efficiency with which she had entered, and closed the
door behind her.

She was not too reluctant to go, either, for
her curiosity was tending in another direction. She had recognized
the young man who had been one of the other principal performers in
the chaotic scene just enacted, and she was very much interested in
finding out just what had happened.

By the time she got downstairs, she found
that the energetic black-haired man, along with a few other
public-spirited volunteers, had already hustled the young man out
of the hotel and off to the sheriff’s office. The lobby and
sitting-room were filled with buzzing little groups of people
discussing the incident. Mrs. Meade listened here and listened
there, inconspicuously, without taking part in the conversations.
She was present when one of the men returned a quarter of an hour
later and reported what had happened at the sheriff’s. Then she
went back upstairs to her own room, absently picked up the book she
had let fall to the floor and placed it on the night-table, and sat
down in her rocking-chair to think.

* * *

She knew Clyde Renfrew quite well; his
parents, both dead now, had been her friends. Clyde was a sober,
steady young cattleman who lived some distance out of Sour Springs,
coming into town occasionally to buy supplies or to arrange for the
sale and shipment of his livestock. His serious, somewhat
methodical manner of speaking and acting belied the fact that he
had both brains and business sense—he had never been cheated. He
was a bachelor still at twenty-five, known to be painfully shy of
women. Local wits said it would probably take him a year or two to
get up the nerve to speak to a woman, let alone propose marriage to
her, and the eligible young ladies were all snapped up by more
enterprising suitors before he could get fairly started. At any
rate, he treated all women with scrupulous deference, did not speak
to them if he could help it, and turned brick-red if cornered by
one or trapped into conversation with a particularly lively
specimen.

There had been no notable departure from this
behavior observed since his introduction to Dorene Leighton, but
then again, Dorene was not of the type of girl whom Clyde usually
found occasion to avoid.

Dorene had come to Colorado with her aunt for
her health, or for her aunt’s health; nobody quite knew which. The
aunt, Miss Asher, dominated any conversation where both were
present, and nobody had the chance to learn much about Dorene at
all. A small, timid-looking girl of about twenty, she wore pale
colors that made her appear to be continually on the point of
fading away altogether, and her fair hair was cut in a bang across
her forehead like a much younger girl’s. When one had the chance to
hear her speak, her low voice had a pleasing musical quality, but
this chance did not come often.

Dorene had come into contact with Clyde
Renfrew through mutual friends, a family in Sour Springs whose
acquaintance she and her aunt had made early in their stay. They
had been in each other’s company at a few picnics and dinners, and
Clyde had called at the Coopers’ once or twice when Dorene happened
to be spending the day with them. By all accounts he had behaved
towards her with the same studious politeness that he showed all
women, but they had seemed to appreciate each other’s company in a
reserved way.

On this particular afternoon, Clyde had
called at the Colonial Hotel at about a quarter to two, and asked
the clerk for the number of Miss Leighton’s room. He had gone
upstairs, and nothing more was seen or heard of him for the better
part of an hour.

Around ten minutes to three, the man who had
the room next to Dorene Leighton’s—a traveling patent-medicine
salesman named Hollister—had heard muffled voices through the wall,
and then a woman’s cry of alarm or distress. He had immediately
rushed out of his room, burst open the door of the next one and
found Dorene Leighton struggling in Clyde Renfrew’s embrace as he
forcibly attempted to kiss her. Hollister had “broken it up,” to
use his own expression, by which time other witnesses had arrived.
Clyde was evidently drunk; there was liquor on his breath, he was
unsteady on his feet and could not speak clearly. Hollister, as
well as one or two others who had been in the doorway, said there
had been an empty glass decanter on the bureau in the room, which
the hotel chambermaid insisted was mostly full earlier in the day
when she did the rooms.

They dragged Clyde down to the sheriff’s
office, where by a combination of bullying and black coffee he was
got into a condition for questioning. But even so they did not
glean anything of significance. Clyde said that Miss Leighton had
asked him to call on her at the hotel; he confusedly admitted to
having had a drink, but claimed he could remember nothing of what
had happened afterward. Sheriff Royal had locked him up on a charge
of assault and one of being drunk and disorderly, had pacified the
red-hot Hollister and shooed everybody out of his office, and there
the case stood.

Mrs. Meade rocked slowly back and forth in
her chair. She was profoundly puzzled. There were the facts, and
they seemed undeniable, but the story shocked her to a great
degree.
Clyde?
Clyde Renfrew, of all people, drunkenly
insulting a woman? She would have thought him the very last person
likely to do such a thing. So, apparently, would most of the other
people she had overheard discussing the matter in the lobby.
Surprise, puzzlement, incredulity had been the prevailing
sentiments among them. More than once she had heard a near-echo of
her own thought: “But
Clyde?
I’d never have expected—”

What could possibly have happened to him?

Mrs. Meade shook her head. She could not rid
herself of the idea that there must be an explanation
somewhere—that there had been some kind of misconception or
mistake.

* * *

At half-past three, Miss Asher entered the
hotel and sailed majestically up the stairs to her niece’s room,
her lips pinched firmly together in a manner that signified
disapproval, having been informed by someone in the street as to
what had occurred. Miss Asher was a tall, substantial woman, with
gray hair dressed in innumerable little tight curls, a fountain of
rather bluish-colored lace spilling over the bosom of her lavender
silk dress and a masterpiece of a large feathered hat to top it
all, and the combined effect when she turned a corner at top speed
was a
swish
that made anyone in her path fall back feeling
as if an ocean wave had gone over them. She turned the corner into
her niece’s room with just such a
swish
, the expression on
her face boding no good, and the door closed firmly behind her.

Mrs. Meade, who had learned from the
afternoon’s occurrences that one must leave one’s door ajar if one
is to remain apprised of events, had arranged herself in her
rocking-chair, decorously faced at an angle away from the door, but
one which still allowed her to see and hear quite well through the
three inches’ opening at which she had set it. She had a glimpse of
lavender silk and foreboding expression, and after Miss Asher had
shut her niece’s door was able to listen to the tenor, if not the
words, of the conversation that took place behind it. Miss Asher
was an orator among women, whose voice rung with feeling and
italics. For a space of about ten minutes Mrs. Meade listened to
her voice rising and falling, with occasionally what sounded like a
faint protest from Dorene, and then after Miss Asher had wound
down, a few minutes of unhappy silence. At some point during this
interval Miss Asher evidently rang for the chambermaid, who
presently climbed the stairs and knocked at the door. Miss Asher
appeared briefly and presented her with a severely folded little
note, with the instructions, “See that this is delivered to the
sheriff at once.”