Chapter 18
The letter reached Eleanor Stuart’s hands on a still afternoon. She read it in the front parlor with the door shut and the blinds drawn.
It had come up from town with the rest of the post, in the hired girl’s basket.
There was a bill from the store. There was a circular from a cattle buyer in Fort Worth.
And there was a thick cream envelope with an Iowa postmark, addressed in a small, cramped hand.
Eleanor took the last one out of the girl’s fingers before it reached the hall table.
She said nothing. She only carried it into the parlor, shut the door behind her, and turned the key.
Then she sat down at the desk beneath her husband’s likeness. She slit the envelope with his paper knife, and read.
It took her some time. There were three sheets, closely written on both sides. He began with the Wests, whom he had known thirty years, and buried in the March rain. He gave their character. Hard people, but respectable, and prompt with the church subscription. Then he came to the girl.
Miss Samantha Bree, he wrote, had come to the West household as a child of eight, by way of the Children’s Aid Society.
She had come off one of the orphan trains that passed through the county in the fall of 1876.
She had been placed out to the Wests as a domestic and had remained with them until this spring.
Of her origins before that, nothing was known.
She was believed to have come from the New York streets, like the rest of such children.
The county had known her, he wrote, as the girl off the train.
Eleanor set the sheet down.
She sat very still. Outside the shut blinds, the afternoon was white and silent, with the heat lying on the valley like a hand. Somewhere in the kitchen the girl was singing to herself. From the yard came the sound of an ax, steady, a boy at the woodpile.
The girl off the train.
She had known. Of course she had known. She had known it, or something very like it, from the day the beautiful stranger stepped down from the wagon. Every entry filed. Every entry waited on. Here was the sum.
Placed out. Bad stock. Come from nowhere with nothing. Got up respectable in her fine hand and her quiet ways. Walked straight into the finest house in the county, with the Stuart name a fortnight from her finger.
Eleanor found she was not surprised. What she felt was something colder and more satisfying than surprise. It was the feeling of a woman who has said what would happen, and been doubted. Then watched it happen exactly as she said.
She picked up the second sheet.
The minister had more to say, and he said it with care.
He had thought it right, he wrote, in view of the lady’s inquiry touching character, to make some further investigation at the courthouse.
There he had learned a report which he could not vouch for.
But it was very generally spoken of in the county since the spring.
The lady might wish to know it before forming any connection.
Eleanor read on. Her face did not change. But her hand, on the desk, had gone quite still.
It was said in the county that the girl Bree had gone from the West farm in the dark.
This was on a night in May, some weeks after the Wests’ burying.
She had not been seen there since. It was said that she had not gone alone, or at least not unaided.
The Wests’ hired man, one Amos, an old servant of the place, was believed to have been concerned in it.
And it was said that the two of them had set upon the young master of the farm, Mr. Nathan West, in his own barn.
The minister repeated that he could not vouch for this.
They had struck him down and left him for dead in the straw.
Mr. West had been found in his barn with his head laid open.
He had lain some weeks in a fever. He was recovered now.
It was known in the county that he considered himself very ill used, and had spoken of the law.
Whether the girl was a fugitive from justice, the minister could not say. He could say only that she had fled the county the same night, and that no one had heard of her since. He was sorry to be the bearer of such an account. He hoped it might be of use.
The third sheet was courtesies. Eleanor did not read it.
She sat with the two sheets in her lap and looked at the shut door.
So it was worse than she had thought. Not merely bad stock.
Not merely a train-girl got up in a good dress.
A girl who had left the master of her farm for dead in his own barn, with a hired man.
Who had run in the night with his blood on her hands.
And come south. And sat at Eleanor’s table with her fine quiet ways, poured the coffee.
Let Ramsay Stuart bring a ring within a finger’s length of her hand.
She was appalled. She let herself be appalled, for a moment, alone in the shut room, because there was no one to see it.
And under the appalling of it, deeper and steadier, she was vindicated.
Blood tells. Her husband had said it across this desk for forty years. Here it was, in three sheets.
You could not get good stock out of bad.
You could feed it, clothe it, put a fine dress on it.
One dark night it would pick up whatever came to hand and lay a man’s head open, because that was what was in it.
It had been in it on a platform in Iowa, at eight years old.
Some sensible woman had felt the child’s arms and not thought to look deeper.
Eleanor had looked deeper. That was all. She had looked, when nobody else would, and she had been right.
She was not glad. Nor would she have said she was glad.
She was an old woman who had spent a summer watching her only son turn, before her eyes, into a man who laughed at supper.
Who idled by the barn. Who set a Society brat on a pony of his own.
One by one, she had watched him lose his father’s certainties, like buttons off a coat, and not notice them going.
And she had watched the girl who did it, quiet, handsome, capable. She had known in her bones what the girl was, and had been unable to prove it.
Now she could prove it.
She sat on, with the heat pressing on the blinds and the ax going in the yard. She thought about how.
There was one matter Eleanor did not know, sitting there with the letter in her lap. It was this: her careful inquiries had done more than she had bargained for.
A letter to a county clerk does not stay in a county clerk’s hands.
A letter to a postmaster, to be handed to whatever minister had buried the Wests, passes through a post office where people talk.
It was a small county in Iowa. The whole neighborhood had known for twelve years that a beautiful train-girl worked for nothing at the West farm.
The whole neighborhood had talked of little else since a night in May.
A lady in Texas asking questions about that girl was news.
At the store it was news. At the church door it was news.
By the time the minister’s answer went south, it was news at the head of a certain supper table on the West farm.
A broad, hard-handed man with a healed scar in his hair sat alone there, at the place his father had sat. He heard it, and put down his fork.
Nathan West had not forgotten. Forgetting was not in him.
Three weeks he had lain in a fever with his skull cracked, dreaming of the girl every night, and got up harder for it.
He had ridden the county over. At every depot for a hundred miles he had asked.
He had put it about that she was a thief and worse.
The county nodded along. Not so much as a direction had come of it.
She had gone into the dark like water into sand.
And now a lady in Texas was writing letters to the clerk of the court, asking after the character of a Miss Samantha Bree.
Texas.
He had the name of the county inside two days.
He had the name of the lady inside three.
A postmaster who is asked plainly by the master of the West farm will generally answer.
Stuart. A ranch in the Hill Country. A widow with a son of marriageable age, inquiring after a young woman lately of the West household, in a matter of family concern.
Nathan West sat at his father’s table and looked at that for some minutes, with his hard hand flat on the wood. He understood exactly what it meant.
She had gone south to marry money. Walked off his farm with the old man’s help and a stranger’s ticket. Got herself into a rich widow’s house, and was about to be a rancher’s wife. His girl. She had left him for dead in the straw to go and be a lady in Texas.
He had said it in the barn. I keep what’s mine.
He got up from the table. In the morning he went to the depot and bought a ticket south. He did not tell the county where he was going.
Eleanor did not know that. Not yet.
In the shut parlor she sat with the letter until the ax stopped in the yard. The light behind the blinds went from white to gold. Then she folded the three sheets along their creases. She put them in the drawer of her husband’s desk, locked it, and put the key in her pocket.
By then her plans were laid. She had laid them as she laid all else, without haste, looking at each piece.
It would not do to speak to Ramsay alone.
She saw that clearly. He was besotted. A man besotted would find some way to forgive a train, if the girl wept and the boy looked hopeful.
He might even find a way to forgive a barn, if it came to that.
Eleanor knew her son. Once he had set his feet he did not easily move them.
So it must not be his mother’s word. It must be the county’s.
It must be laid before him and before everyone.
In one place, on one afternoon, plainly, so that there was no room in it for weeping.
The letter read out. A sheriff present. The neighbors who had called the girl a rare find sitting in Eleanor’s parlor and hearing exactly what they had found.
And when it was done, no man in that room, least of all her son, would be able to pretend he had not heard.
Then the girl would go. The county would see to that if Ramsay would not.
And the boy would go with her, back to whatever Society house had sent him.
He was the same stock. One clean stroke.
The train-girl and the train-boy, out of the great stone house together.
The Stuart name scoured of both of them in a single afternoon.
Exactly as her husband would have done.
She rose, unlocked the parlor door, and went out into the gold evening to see about supper. Her face was composed as ever. In the kitchen she said good evening to Miss Bree. Miss Bree said good evening back. Neither of them let anything show.