Chapter 20
They came at three, as Eleanor had asked, and the front parlor of the great stone house filled with the county.
Samantha watched them come from the window of the blue room.
The storekeeper’s wife, in her good visiting dress, with her husband beside her looking as if he would rather be at the store.
Next, the thin anxious woman with the mouth like a drawn purse.
The red-faced woman who had asked for the cake recipe, with her big slow husband who ran cattle up the valley.
Then the lean sour neighbor who had lost a hired hand to Missouri.
Others. A dozen of them, in wagons and on horseback, drawing up in the white heat. Their faces were set. Folk asked to bear witness, not yet knowing to what.
Then the sheriff, alone, on a gray horse. He was a heavy quiet man with a drooping mustache. He got down slowly, and looked at the house a moment before he went in.
Last came the hotel buggy, with Nathan West in it, in his good coat.
Samantha turned from the window. Her hands were cold.
She had put on the blue dress, because it was the best she had.
She had pinned her hair, folded her hands, and she was going to go down.
There had been no sleep. All night she had lain on top of the stone and looked at the ceiling too high to touch.
This was the day the platform had been coming toward her for twelve years.
Down she went.
The parlor was full. Eleanor had had the blinds raised for once. The white afternoon lay across the room, on the dark furniture, the good carpet, the faces. Over the mantel, the likeness looked down. The leather chair that nobody sat in stood empty by the hearth.
Along the walls the neighbors had been given seats, and they sat in them stiffly, with their hats in their laps.
By the door, the sheriff stood with his arms folded.
Ramsay stood by the window, alone, with his back to the light.
His face was the face he had worn on the platform the first day, giving nothing away.
Nathan West stood by Eleanor’s chair, with his hat in his hand and his head a little turned, so the scar was from the room.
And in the doorway to the hall, where nobody had told him to be, stood Harry.
Samantha saw him as she came in, and her heart went out of her.
He was pressed against the frame with his thin arms at his sides.
His face was the platform face, shut, braced, waiting for the blow.
Nobody had sent him. Nobody had sent him away.
He had simply come, and stood, because it was her. There were two of them.
She could not go to him. She stood where Eleanor’s look told her to stand. In the middle of the carpet, in the middle of the room. The county on three sides of her, the door on the fourth.
Eleanor rose.
She had the letter in her hand. She unfolded it without haste and settled her spectacles. Then she looked round the room once, cool and gray, at each face in turn.
“I have asked you here,” she said, “because a matter has come to my knowledge touching the young woman my son intends to marry. It is not a thing I can keep to myself. I will not have it said that the Stuarts hid what they knew. So I will read you what I have, and then Mr. West will speak, and then you may judge.”
She read.
It was read the way she said every word, cool and plain, without heat, in a voice that carried to every wall.
The minister’s name, and the county’s. That Miss Samantha Bree had come to the West household as a child of eight, by way of the Children’s Aid Society.
Off one of the orphan trains. Placed out.
Domestic. Believed to have come from the New York streets, like the rest of such children.
That the county had known her as the girl off the train.
Somewhere along the wall a woman drew her breath in. Samantha did not look to see who.
Eleanor lowered the letter.
“That is the young woman,” she said, “who has sat at my table these three months and let this county call her a rare find. A placed-out child. Bad stock, out of the gutters of New York, got up respectable in a good dress and a fine hand. Set to carry the Stuart name. She has told none of you. She has told none of us. All summer she has let my son court her, and never said the word train.” The gray eyes came round to Samantha. “Do you deny it, Miss Bree?”
The room waited.
Samantha stood in the middle of the carpet and looked back at Eleanor. She could not deny it. Every line of it was true. There was no answer to that except the truth, and the truth was the charge itself.
She said nothing. Her silence went round the room like a draft.
“I thought not,” Eleanor said. “Mr. West.”
Nathan stepped forward.
He did it well. Samantha had to give him that, standing there with her hands cold. He did not stare at her. Nor did he smile. He held his hat in both hands and looked at the sheriff, then at the room. His voice was low, plain, sorrowful, like a decent man telling a hard tale.
Nathan West, he said, of the West farm in Iowa.
His father and mother, God rest them, had taken this young woman off the train as a child.
They had given her a home. Twelve years they had fed her and roofed her, asking nothing in return but honest work.
In the spring they had died, both together, at a flooded ford, and the farm had come to him.
He had kept the girl on. He would not turn a poor creature out.
It was what his father would have wanted.
And then, one night in May, he had gone out to his own barn. He had found this girl there with the hired man, an old servant of the place. They had set upon him.
He touched his hat brim, lifted it, turned his head, and let the room see the scar.
Somebody along the wall said, “Lord.”
“They left me for dead, sheriff,” Nathan said quietly.
“In the straw. In my own barn. I don’t know to this day what the old man struck me with.
I lay three weeks with my head open and a fever on me.
When I could stand, she was gone. Gone in the night with all she could carry.
Nobody in the county has seen her since.
Not until I heard, by chance, that a lady in Texas was asking after her. ”
He looked at Samantha for the first time. It was a sorrowful look, and under it his eyes were exactly what they had always been.
“I never wished her harm. Not then. Not now. But I have a right to see justice done. A man was near murdered on his own place. The woman who did it is standing in this room, about to marry into a decent family under a false face. I could not let that pass. No man could.”
He stopped. He put his hat back on, turned the scar from the room again, and stood with his head a little bowed.
It was very well done.
And for a terrible moment, it hung.
Samantha felt it hang. She felt the whole room tip toward it, the way a wagon tips on a bad ford before it goes over.
The neighbors along the wall were looking at her, and their faces had changed.
Not at once. Slowly. What they had believed for three months was being turned over and shown to have a different underside.
The storekeeper’s wife had her hand at her throat. Down the wall, the red-faced woman was looking at her lap. The thin woman with the drawn-purse mouth was nodding, very slightly, as if a suspicion she had always held had at last been confirmed.
The sheriff’s face had hardened. He had unfolded his arms. He was looking at Samantha as a sheriff looks at a person he has been asked to arrest, without yet being sure he may. There was no unkindness in it, only a weighing.
And Ramsay.
She made herself look at him. She had known she would have to.
He stood by the window with the white light behind him.
His face had gone the color of the limestone in the creek.
He was not looking at Nathan, nor at his mother.
He was looking at her. His whole certain world was tipping under him, and she watched it tip.
The train she could not deny. Now he was seeing it, and she watched him see it.
And behind that, in a barn, a man left for dead in the straw.
She saw him put the two together. How could he not?
For thirty years his father had told him what came of bad stock.
Here it was in his own parlor with the county looking on.
He did not speak. White and stunned, he did not speak. That was worse than any word he could have said.
Eleanor pressed her advantage. She had waited a summer for this moment, and she did not waste it.
“You have heard it,” she said. “From a letter. From the man’s own mouth. You have seen the mark on him. I do not ask you to take my word. I ask you to use your eyes.”
She turned to her son.
“The match is at an end. It must be. No Stuart can wed a woman who came off a train and left a man for dead.”
She looked to the door.
“Sheriff, I look to you to do what the law requires with a fugitive.”
The sheriff did not move from the door. He looked at the letter in her hand, then at Nathan West, then last at Samantha.
“Ma’am,” he said, slow, “I’ll say how it stands, so nobody mistakes me.
What I have here is a letter from a preacher and the word of a gentleman from Iowa.
That’s not a warrant. Nobody in Iowa has sworn a complaint before a magistrate that I know of.
No requisition has come down from their governor to ours.
Until one does, I’ve no lawful ground to take this woman anywhere.
If Mr. West wants her, he can swear his complaint before the justice in town and go the long road through Austin. That’s the law, and I’ll keep to it.”
“Then she stays in this house a fugitive,” Eleanor said.
“She stays a woman with an accusation against her, ma’am. That’s a different creature.” He folded his arms again. “I’ll hear what she has to say before I do anything at all.”
Eleanor’s mouth pressed thin. She did not look at him again. She looked at the room.
“Very well. The law may be slow. This county need not be. And the boy,” her look went to the doorway, and stayed there, “goes back where such stock belongs, on the next train through the depot. I took him for the yard. I will not keep him in this house. Not when it has just been shown, in front of all of you, what a Society child grows up to be.”
The parlor murmured.
It was a low sound. It went round the walls, and Samantha heard in it exactly what she had heard at eight years old in an Iowa church. Poor Stuart. You never know what you’ll get with that sort. She felt the room close on her. The noose drew tight.
Not only around her. Around the boy in the doorway, too.
She saw his face. He was standing there with his back against the frame and his eyes on her.
Every word had reached him. He was not braced any longer.
He was past bracing. Small, terrified, ten years old, and about to be put on a train because of what she was.
Something in her went very still.
She knew this stillness. It was the oldest thing she owned. She had learned it in a loft with a roof an arm’s length from her face. She had used it on a platform, in a church, at the corner of a table. In a barn with a lantern shaking in her hand.
Shrink. Deny. Say nothing. Keep your face still and your head down. Let the words go over you, and wait for it to pass. Twelve years it had kept her alive, and it was in her now like breath.
She felt it rise. Her shoulders began to come in. Her eyes began to go to the carpet. The old words began to form. I don’t know what he means. I never. It wasn’t like that.
And then she looked at Harry.
Small, and terrified, in the doorway. Looking at her. Waiting to see what she would do. Because there were two of them, and she was the other one. He had never before had anyone to watch.
The stillness went out of her in a breath, the way a held breath goes out.
From a platform in Iowa she had run. From a loft, a barn, a county, a name. A thousand miles she had run, and hidden in a house of stone. For three months she had told herself she could stand on thin ground forever if she only stood still.
The running was done. It stopped there, on the carpet, in the white afternoon, with the county looking on. Something in her that had been running since she was eight years old sat down and would not get up again.
Samantha lifted her head.