The Silent Hour (2 page)

“Well, that’s not what I want. Frances is
worth ten girls like that, and she’s the one I love.”

Major Cambert’s voice was hard. “You’re
fooling yourself if you think she’s marrying you for love, my boy.
You’re infatuated with her, that’s plain, and you don’t see you’re
being taken for everything you’ve got by a very practical,
fortune-hunting—”

“Don’t say it!” Jim took a step forward,
towering over his grandfather with eyes blazing.

There was a second’s silence, with the fire
crackling innocuously in the background, their eyes locked angrily
on each other. Then Jim turned away and walked the length of the
long hearth and back, abruptly, trying to control himself. He spoke
again. “Well, now I know what you think. But it doesn’t make any
difference. I intend to marry Frances whether you like it or
not!”

Major Cambert leaned forward, pushing himself
up with the arm of the easy-chair till it creaked. “Not with my
consent you won’t. You can’t marry as you please till you’re
twenty-one, and I don’t need to remind you that you’re a ways off
from that.”

“Your consent! You wouldn’t dare do
that!”

“I would indeed. You might as well resign
yourself, my boy.”

Jim ground the words out through his teeth.
“After all your fine talk about relying on me and being proud of my
judgement, you won’t let me choose for myself in the only thing
I’ve ever wanted!”

“I don’t intend to see you ruin your life
with a poor choice in marriage, and it matters little to me what
means I have to use to keep you from it.”

Again Jim took an enraged step toward him,
the shadows thrown in the dark room blackening all but his angry
face. “Well,
you won’t do it!
I don’t care if I have to
wait, or if I have to do something else, but you’re not going to
stop me. You’re going to regret you ever tried.”

He was halfway across the room as he flung
these last words over his shoulder, and turned and jerked the door
open so sharply that the man standing outside had no time to draw
back, though he made a half-motion as if to do so. He wore cowboy’s
garb, and had coarse, unkempt black hair and a swarthy brown tint
to his face, and he lifted his head and surveyed Jim with a
curiously speculative look. He had clearly been standing there
wanting to come in for reasons of his own, but unwilling to
interrupt the argument he heard inside. “What are you doing here?”
demanded Jim.

The cowboy opened his mouth, and then closed
it again. Perhaps he saw the answer made no difference. Jim pushed
roughly past him and disappeared.

* * *

Frances sat at her desk, a pencil still in
her hand, and stared at the whitewashed wall opposite. She heard
her own voice say, sounding as if it came from someone else, “Then
he refused his consent—completely?”

Jim nodded, restlessly. “And he can do it,
too,” he said, turning a jar of ink on the desk with one hand.
“He’s my legal guardian. If he won’t give me his consent I can’t
take out a marriage-license.”

Frances managed a small, wistful smile. “I
don’t mind waiting, Jim,” she said, although something sharp and
gripping inside her was crying out the opposite.

“But I do,” said Jim, swinging away from the
desk and walking about the platform on which it sat. “I won’t be
twenty-one for fourteen months. It’s ridiculous that we should have
to wait more than a year. I’ll find some way out…I won’t stand for
it.”

“But why did he object? Did he give you any
reason?”

Jim’s face darkened as he looked down at the
scuffed plank floor of the schoolhouse, and for a second he seemed
about to say something that would give her the answer; but he
thrust his hands deep into his coat pockets and shook his head a
little. “He just didn’t behave at all the way I expected,” he said.
“Nothing like I expected.”

It was the first time Frances had known that
Jim was not telling her the whole truth, and what that meant about
his quarrel with his grandfather she did not dare to consider. She
had never seen Jim like this before. He looked pale, restless,
aggravated, as if he had not slept well; his movements were abrupt
and uneasy, and there was still some kind of anger lurking behind
his eyes when they met hers for a second. He stood still a moment,
and kicked at the corner of the desk.

She said, “Jim, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” said Jim. He turned to face her
and put both hands flat on the desk. “Nothing. I—I’d just rather
not talk about it any more. But I promise you, Frances,
everything’s going to work out all right.” He leaned forward and
kissed her rather quickly on the cheek, and straightened up.

“I’m riding over to Morris’s,” he said. “I
want to take another look at that horse I’m trying to get Randall
to sell me. I’ll see you again tomorrow, all right?”

“Yes,” said Frances. Jim managed a brief,
almost painful smile, then turned quickly and strode out.

A year…more than a year…the months which
yesterday had looked so golden were suddenly bleak to Frances. She
could wait…she knew how to wait. But did Jim? He was wildly
impatient now, whipped up in a turmoil of affection for her and
anger at his grandfather; but could he stand up to tedious months
of waiting? Or would a lapse of calmer time make him see things
differently…realize he had been rash. Would he, weeks or months
from now, come to her and say in his friendly, honest way,
“Frances, maybe we made a mistake after all…we’ve always been the
best of friends, but I don’t know what I was thinking when I asked
you to marry me…it must have been just an impulse…”

Jim had left the door open. The crisp breeze
drifted in, making the bright sunlight that fell through the
doorway seem false and hollow. The four cold whitewashed walls of
the schoolhouse seemed to Frances to be shutting her in—into the
rote, quiet life of loneliness that for three brilliant weeks she
thought she had escaped forever. The shadow of a leaf blown past
the door flicked across her desk like a presentiment, and the
autumn air enveloped her with a subtle, dreading chill.

* * *

The milkman usually tapped at Mrs. Henney’s
kitchen window and left his wares on the doorstep. He only rapped
at the door and waited for her to answer it when he had some
remarkable piece of news to share. So when they heard his knock,
all of the ladies (and sometimes even the gentleman) who boarded
upstairs opened their doors a few inches and put their heads out,
and a few bolder or more hard of hearing even ventured out into the
hall and listened over the banisters of the back stairs.
Boarding-house etiquette dictated that when the milkman had
finished his recital and departed, they all retired to their
respective rooms and gave a very good imitation of having heard
nothing at all, until they gathered to discuss it at the breakfast
table later. But today, as soon as the first brief fragments of
conversation drifted up the staircase, Mrs. Meade opened her door
wide and went directly down the stairs and into the kitchen. The
word that had caught her attention was “murder.”

“Found him dead right on his own hearth,” the
milkman was saying as she entered, with the particular relish of
the news-bringer. “That’s where he liked to sit at night, they
said. He’d fell out of his chair and was lying there, shot right
through the heart.”

“Dreadful! How dreadful!” shuddered Mrs.
Henney, clasping her hands with a handful of apron in them.

“Who?” asked Mrs. Meade.

“Major Cambert. One of the punchers from his
ranch come tearing into town round one o’clock this morning and
said the old man had been shot. Sheriff went out to take a
look.”

“And have they no idea who shot him?” said
Mrs. Meade.

The glibness of the milkman’s recital hinted
at how many times he had already retailed the information at houses
on his rounds. “Guess there was nobody around when it happened. The
puncher who rode in for the sheriff, fellow named Gennaro, he was
the one that found him. He’s been talking some in town—he didn’t
ride back with the sheriff—and they say things don’t look too good
for the old man’s grandson.”

Mrs. Henney’s eyes widened as she let her
hands and the apron drop. “My heavens, not young Jim Cambert?”

“Only grandson he’s got,” said the milkman,
permitting himself a ponderous joke. “Had, more like. Anyway, the
punchers say he and Major Cambert had a most awful quarrel the
other night—something about a young lady. It was that fellow
Gennaro overheard some of it.”

“Mr. Gennaro seems quite a busy man,”
observed Mrs. Meade.

“It was
terribly
impolite of him to
have listened,” said Mrs. Henney, shaking her head solemnly.
“Didn’t he say if he heard anything more?”

“Dunno. Whatever it was about, seeing the way
things have turned out, it’s got to make the sheriff give young Jim
a look.”

“I daresay it will,” said Mrs. Meade slowly.
She was mentally running over a list of the young ladies of Sour
Springs, seeing if there were any bits and ends of gossip she had
heard that might fit together—Jim Cambert—had his name been linked
with any particular girl? It might not make any difference, of
course, if he wasn’t the one who had shot Major Cambert after all,
but such things were always interesting.

Mrs. Henney was still shaking her head. “I
declare, Sour Springs’ crime is getting to be something dreadful! A
kidnapping not a year and a half ago, and now a
murder
. Why,
it’s becoming just like living in the great cities.”

“Hardly as bad as that yet, ma’am,” said the
milkman. “My horse ain’t got nearly so far to walk yet. Well, good
morning.”

“Yes—yes indeed,” said Mrs. Henney faintly,
as if there was little hope of that.

The door closed upon the milkman and Mrs.
Henney turned to Mrs. Meade. “Mercy, Mrs. Meade, what
next
?”

“Breakfast, I think,” said Mrs. Meade, whose
interest in the more dramatic workings of human nature never made
her lose sight of the practical. “And after that—no, perhaps I had
better not go out this morning after all.”

She mounted the stairs, her approach heralded
by a muted closing of doors all along the upstairs hall. Mrs.
Meade’s curiosity never led her into excesses of rushing about
trying to discover things faster than everyone else. She knew that
if an occurrence was really interesting, the details would come—or
else they would remain strangely absent, which usually signified
something even more interesting. She knew now, for instance, that
there were three possible ways things would fall out with Major
Cambert’s death: either it was suicide, and the presence of a
revolver beside (or perhaps beneath) the body on the hearth was the
one detail the milkman had not been made master of; or he had been
shot by someone whose guilt was obvious and the sheriff would have
them arrested by midday; or—he had been shot by a person and for a
reason not immediately apparent. In which case—

Mrs. Meade went back into her room and
resumed the morning tidying-up which had been interrupted by the
milkman’s arrival. She folded her nightdress and put it away,
straightened the pillows on the bed, and returned to the bureau
looking-glass to put the last touches on her neat coiffure of soft
brown hair shaded over with gray—overtones of gray that had not
been so prominent in that prior year when Mrs. Henney’s
boarding-house had been shaken to its foundations by the
disappearance of one of its tenants. Mrs. Meade smiled at her
reflection, as one smiles at a friend whose foibles one knows well
and is patient with. She knew better than to attribute the gray
hairs to the upheaval of the kidnapping case, in the solution of
which she had played an unexpected role.

She had been acquainted with Major Cambert,
to a degree, though she had seen less of him since his rheumatism
had kept him at the ranch. Perhaps it had been better for their
acquaintance that way. The Major was an interesting man, with a
good deal of stimulating conversation, but there was a slight harsh
edge even to his humor that left one feeling rather raw after hours
in his company. A cynical man, Mrs. Meade thought as she did her
hair—she wondered why. The early deaths of his wife, son and
daughter-in-law, perhaps; years of military life with rank enough
to be involved in Army politics (politics, Mrs. Meade maintained,
would make a cynic out of anyone). Yet how could he have kept up
this attitude into old age, with a splendid boy like Jim at his
side to demonstrate all the best of what might be found in
life?

Mrs. Meade went to breakfast, and said
comparatively little while her fellow-boarders examined the
milkman’s story from every which way without forming a single
original conclusion. Afterwards, she did not sally forth upon
errands as she had intended to do that morning, but went to the
parlor and wrote some letters she had meant for her afternoon’s
employment, and then occupied herself with her knitting. If you had
asked her what she was doing, she might have replied that she was
waiting for the details to arrive.

She was rewarded in the early afternoon,
about an hour after dinner, when Sheriff Andrew Royal pushed open
the creaking little picket gate and came up the walk through the
late asters and trimmed-down autumn-dried stalks of Mrs. Henney’s
garden. In spite of his gray hair and stooped shoulders, Sheriff
Royal was an energetic man who never let the grass grow under his
feet. He would have accomplished a great deal already this morning,
Mrs. Meade reflected as she laid aside her knitting and rose to
meet him; and his appearance here, which she had only gambled upon
as a slight chance, confirmed her suspicion that this was no
ordinary case.

It was not; for instead of crafting some
elaborate throat-clearing excuse for having come to see her,
Sheriff Royal merely replied to her good-afternoon and sat down on
the sofa, which was a good deal too low for him, and sat there a
minute dangling his hat from his hands. He looked down at it, and
let it fall experimentally on the carpet, as if curious to see
which way it would land, and then picked it up and looked over at
Mrs. Meade, who had seated herself in an adjacent chair. “I suppose
you’ve heard about this Cambert thing,” he said.