Chapter 19
Nathan West stepped down from the southbound train into the white heat of the Hill Country town. He stood a moment on the platform and looked about him as he looked at every place he came to.
He was pricing it. The yellow stone courthouse.
A single street with its live oaks. The false-fronted store, the church at the far end, the horses standing hipshot at the rails.
It was a poor enough place, to his eye. Smaller than the county seat at home, hotter, duller.
But there was money in it somewhere. He could always tell.
A town did not build a courthouse of stone unless there was cattle land behind it.
Cattle land meant men with names. Men with names meant a widow called Stuart with a son and a bride on approval.
The bag he picked up was a small one. He had not come to stay.
He was a harder man than the one who had gone down in the straw.
Anyone who had known him in Iowa would have seen it at once.
The scar was hidden under his hat. A white seam ran through the hair above the left ear, where an oak bar had opened him to the bone.
But the hardness was in his face, and it did not hide.
Three weeks he had lain in a fever. Every night of it, he had seen a lantern swinging wild and a girl’s face in the light of it.
He had come up out of that fever with one purpose fixed in him where the fear had been.
He would have her back. Not for the farm now, or not only.
Because she had run. Because a thing he owned had struck him down and walked off in the night. No man could stand that and stay a man.
Hungrier, too. Under his father’s roof he had been hungry for her, with his father between them. In the barn he had been hungry. Now, with a thousand miles behind him, he was hungrier still. The thought of her had ridden the whole trip south with him like a taste in his mouth.
At the depot, he asked for the Stuart place and was told.
At the store, he asked for Mrs. Stuart, and was told a good deal more.
A stranger in good clothes with a pleasant manner can hear all he likes at a country store.
Mrs. Stuart was a lady of standing. The Stuart place was the finest in the county.
The son was to be married in a fortnight to a young woman from the north, a Miss Bree, who was very much admired.
“Is she,” Nathan said. He smiled, and bought a cigar.
He did not go to the ranch. A fool would have. He took a room at the hotel, had the boy carry up water, and washed the train off him. Then he wrote a note in his square hand. He paid the boy to carry it out to the Stuart place, to be put into Mrs. Stuart’s own hands and no one else’s.
It said that a gentleman from Iowa, lately of the West farm, was in town on a matter touching Miss Samantha Bree. He would be glad to wait upon Mrs. Stuart at her convenience.
Then he lit the cigar, sat by the window, and waited.
Eleanor came to him that same afternoon.
She did not send for him to the ranch. Instead, she drove in herself, in the spring wagon, with the hired girl beside her for the sake of appearances.
She had herself put down at the hotel. To the household she had said she was going to the store about the wedding gown.
Nobody questioned it. Nobody ever questioned Eleanor.
They met in the hotel parlor with the door open, because she was a woman who thought of such matters. She wore her black silk and the jet brooch. He wore his good town coat. He stood when she came in, and bowed. She took his measure across the room in a single look, as she took everyone’s.
Broad. Hard-handed. Coldly handsome, with an entitled stare that did not lower itself an inch for a lady of standing. There was a scar under the hat brim, she thought. He looked like a man who kept a ledger of his own.
She found she did not mind him.
It took them a quarter of an hour. No more than that. Two cold souls with a common object do not need long. She had the letter in her reticule, taken from the locked drawer that morning, and did not show it. He had the barn in his memory and did not need to.
She told him, plainly, that she had made inquiry after a young woman lately of his household.
He told her, plainly, that the young woman had gone from that household in the night.
The circumstances he would be glad to lay before her son and before the law.
Neither of them said the word train. Neither of them said the word bad blood.
They did not need to. Each heard it in the other, and each was satisfied.
“You will understand, Mr. West,” Eleanor said at the end, drawing on her gloves, “that I have no wish to see my son’s name dragged through any unpleasantness.”
“Nor I, ma’am. I have no quarrel with your son. He was deceived, the same as I was.” Nathan turned his hat over. “I want only what was taken from me. And I want it done properly. In front of witnesses. So there’s no doubt after.”
“Just so,” said Eleanor. “I have been thinking the same.”
Within the hour, the mother and the predator had their alliance.
Samantha did not hear of it until the next morning. When she heard, the ground went from under her.
It was the hired girl who told her over the bread.
Meaning no harm by it. Only that the missus had driven in yesterday and gone to the hotel.
There was a gentleman there, a stranger, very handsome, from up north somewhere.
And the two of them had sat a quarter hour in the parlor with the door open.
And the missus had come out looking, the girl said, like a woman who had bought a horse cheap.
Samantha stood at the table with her hands in the dough.
“From up north,” she said. Her voice was even. “Did she say where?”
“Iowa, the boy at the hotel told the storekeeper. Iowa, wherever that is.” The girl went on kneading. “That’s where you’re from, ain’t it, miss? Maybe you’d know him.”
She might. She might indeed.
The bread got finished. She did not know how. Her hands went on with it while the rest of her stood somewhere a long way off, listening to a lantern swing in a barn.
Then she went into town.
She had no reason to. She made one. Thread for the wedding gown, she said to Eleanor.
Eleanor looked at her over the coffee and said the store had thread enough.
Then she said, cool and easy, that Miss Bree might go if she liked.
Ramsay had the wagon. She walked. Seven miles in the white heat, in the blue dress, with her hat down over her face, and she did not feel one of them.
Across the square she saw him.
He was standing on the hotel steps with a cigar, in his good coat.
He was looking at the town the way he had looked at the West yard on the day he came home.
Pricing it. He had put on flesh since the barn.
He held himself a little differently, with his head turned so the left side was away from the sun.
But it was Nathan West. There was not a hair of doubt in it.
Nathan West, in the flesh, in the Hill Country of Texas, standing on the hotel steps of her new life.
He had not seen her. Not yet.
The ground dropped from under her. It was as plain and physical as a step missing in the dark. She stood in the shade of a live oak with one hand flat against the trunk and could not feel her feet. The whole square went far off and small, the courthouse, the store, the church.
Samantha understood, standing there under the oak, that the safe world was already ending.
Not going to end. Ending. It was ending now, this minute, with a cigar on the hotel steps.
All she had built in the great stone house had been built on top of a stone.
The stone had just stood up and put on a coat.
She turned and walked back the seven miles. She did not buy any thread.
Eleanor moved that evening.
She did it at supper, with the lamp lit and the three of them at the long table. Harry was eating in the kitchen, where he could hear every word through the open door. She waited until Ramsay had finished his meat. Then she set down her fork.
“There is a matter touching your bride,” she said, “that I think the county must hear.”
Ramsay looked up.
“I do not intend to discuss it here. It is not a thing for a supper table. But it is a serious matter. It concerns Miss Bree’s history, and there is a gentleman in town who can speak to it. I have asked him to the house tomorrow at three.”
She folded her hands.
“I have asked the sheriff also. And I have sent word to such of the neighbors as have known this family longest. It is right that they should hear it too. I will not have it said afterward that the Stuarts settled such a thing behind a shut door.”
Ramsay had gone very still. He looked at his mother. Then, slowly, he looked at Samantha.
“What matter?”
“Tomorrow, at three.” Eleanor rose. “Miss Bree knows, I think, what gentleman I mean. She saw him today. Did you not, Miss Bree?”
Samantha said nothing. She could not have spoken if the house had been on fire.
“I thought so.”
Eleanor moved toward the door. Then she stopped, with her hand on the frame, and turned back. Her face had not changed. Cool. Correct. Missing nothing.
“I will say one thing more, and then I have done. Whatever comes of tomorrow, I do not intend that this house should keep either of them. Not the girl. Not the boy. They are the same stock. I said so on the platform, and I have been proved right in my own yard. I will have the pair of them out of this house together, and the name clean, in a single afternoon. That is what my husband would have done. It is what I mean to do.”
She went out. Her steps went up the stairs, unhurried, and a door closed.
In the kitchen, through the open door, something dropped on the floor and did not get picked up.
Ramsay sat at the head of the table with his hands flat on the cloth and looked at Samantha. She looked back at him. The lamp burned between them.
“Samantha,” he said. “What gentleman?”
She opened her mouth. Nothing came out of it.
A whole summer she had had to tell him. The porch step, the dark, the whippoorwill, his forehead against hers. A hundred golden days, and every one of them had talked her out of it. Now she had one night. A man in the hotel with a cigar. An old woman upstairs who had bought a horse cheap.
And she could not find the first word.
“Tomorrow,” she said at last. It was all she had. “You will hear it tomorrow. All of it. I am sorry.”
She got up from the table, went up the stairs to the blue room, and shut the door. Below her the house was silent. Below that, in the tack room off the barn, lay a boy she had promised there were two of them. He was awake in the dark. He heard the house be silent, and knew.