The Silent Hour (4 page)

“I’d have married you just as quickly with
him alive if I could. And if you want the truth, I don’t feel much
respect for him just now anyway.” He pulled away from her and
walked restlessly about the room.

“Jim, you can’t mean that,” protested Frances
softly. “He was your grandfather—he raised you all those years. Can
you really say you don’t feel any kind of grief for him at
all?”

Jim was facing away from her, but she saw him
draw an unsteady breath. He moved over to the hard little sofa and
sat down on it, putting his head down in his hands and running his
fingers through his thick golden hair.

“No, I can’t say that—I didn’t say it,” he
said, his voice coming with a choked sound from behind his hands.
Frances sat down beside him and quietly laid her arm around his
bowed shoulders. “I did love him. He was all the family I had—we
were pretty much everything to each other. But I
can’t
forgive what he said about you.”

In the moment’s silence that followed,
Frances felt that he had not intended to say that much. Jim seemed
to have mastered his emotion, but he did not look up.

“What was it that he said?” she asked.

Jim shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. It’s
not even worth repeating.”

“I wish you’d tell me. I just want to
know.”

He looked away from her earnest eyes, but
knew he had gone too far to hold out much longer. He made a vague,
impatient gesture, trying to dismiss the words as nothing.
“Grandfather was set against it because of you being older than me.
He said I was only a boy, and a woman wouldn’t see anything in me.
That—that you couldn’t have accepted me for love.”

There was a short silence, and then Frances
said, “Did you believe him?”

“Frances!” Jim turned to face her with an
indignant scowl.

He took both her hands, his face softening a
little. “Whose idea was all this, anyway?
I
asked you to
marry
me
, didn’t I?”

Frances said, trying faintly to be humorous,
“Yes, but you are young—and innocent of women’s wiles—”

“Frances, don’t try to be funny about this!”
Jim got up abruptly, and crossed the room again.

He came to a stop and faced her, and tried an
entreating tone again. “Frances, just tell me once and for all:
won’t you marry me now? Mr. Hall won’t put up any objection; he’s
only my guardian in name really. I can get the license by Friday
and we’ll go to Cornet next week for our honeymoon, just quietly
for a couple of days. Will you?”

The silence lengthened out—the muffled sound
of something being dropped in the kitchen seemed to increase the
strain, and the grotesqueness of the situation.

No one who saw Frances’ quiet face as she sat
making her decision could have known the struggle inside her. How
terribly she wanted to say yes. But the spectres of the murder, the
gossip, the plausible motive attributed to Jim, all rose up against
her—and Major Cambert’s harsh words, pried up from the grave at her
own insistence, let in a chill to her heart as the autumn breeze
had done that day in the schoolhouse.

“No,” she said. “I can’t.”

* * *

It was dark and rainy outside the day Jim
Cambert came to the boarding-house. Mrs. Henney opened the door,
and greeted him with a little gasp and an application of her hand
to her plump cheek that did nothing to improve his spirits. Jim had
come with a brief question to ask, but felt now that he
could
not ask it and see the reaction from round-eyed,
uneasily fluttering Mrs. Henney. So he said, “Is Mrs. Meade at
home?”

“Why, yes,” said Mrs. Henney, torn between
the ideas of whether one should be sympathetic, or stern, or afraid
in the presence of someone suspected of murder. “She is—I shall—if
you’ll just wait—”

Mrs. Henney tore herself away and scurried
into the parlor, fortified by a double handful of apron. In a few
seconds Mrs. Meade emerged, the hum and chatter of ladies’ voices
in the snug, warmly lit room rising a little with quickened
interest in her wake. “Jim—good afternoon,” she said simply,
holding out her hand. And then, as his hand was still in hers, she
added, looking straight in his eyes, “I want you to know how very
sorry I was to hear about your grandfather.”

Jim looked down, and murmured his thanks
almost inaudibly. Then he straightened, trying to lift his chin a
little. “Mrs. Meade, is Frances here? Nan Cooper told me she was
supposed to be here with you this afternoon.”

“No, she isn’t,” said Mrs. Meade. “She and
Bessie Cooper were going to come over after school today to help
work on the decorations for the church supper, but Bessie only
stopped to say Frances had a headache and had gone home, so we put
it off to another afternoon.”

They were both keenly aware of the buzz in
the parlor; Jim glanced toward the doorway, trying not to see the
craning necks and the edge of Mrs. Henney’s gray coiffure visible
round the edge of the half-open door. Mrs. Meade, with the
perceptiveness of long-honed instinct, sensed that behind his
uneasiness was a desire to say something more, to find someone to
whom he could unfold the bafflement and trouble she saw in his
eyes.

“Would you like to come in here for a
moment?” she asked, motioning toward the empty dining-room across
the hall.

Jim nodded. Without speaking again, Mrs.
Meade turned to lead the way. Jim tried to brush some of the rain
from his coat onto the doormat, and then followed her.

The dining-room was quiet and gray, with rain
dribbling down the windowpanes, and tall shadows in the corners
beyond the sideboard and china-cupboard. Jim walked partway toward
the windows, then turned around and put his hands on the back of a
chair. “I haven’t seen Frances in days,” he said. “I’ve tried, but
it seems every time, she’s not at home or she’s lying down with a
headache.”

“Do you know the reason she is avoiding you?”
said Mrs. Meade. At such times as this—in a charged quiet, with
only melancholy raindrops for witness—any pretense at polite
reserve or lack of knowledge falls away.

Jim thudded the heel of his hand slowly on
the back of the chair. “My grandfather,” he said. He looked
straight at her. “It’s what he did, Mrs. Meade. He’s come between
us worse dead than he ever could have alive. Frances thinks I
believed him.”

There was a short pause, in which Mrs. Meade
was thinking over what to say, but Jim mistook her silence. “If
you’re thinking what he did, Mrs. Meade, you’re wrong. Frances
isn’t like that. It wasn’t until I told her what Grandfather said
that she changed—she was every bit as happy as I was before.”

Mrs. Meade smiled a little. “She is very
fortunate,” she said, “to know that you have such a warm opinion of
her, and firm belief in her.”

“But she doesn’t know it,” said Jim
despairingly. “She refuses to. And she won’t even let me explain
why. You see, Mrs. Meade, I knew my grandfather. He was cynical
right down to the roots. He was suspicious of everyone’s
motives—suspicious of everyone he met in life except me, and that’s
only because I’d been close by him so long, he knew me well enough.
Grandfather could have a splendid time visiting and laughing with
someone, and then as soon as they were gone he’d be speculating on
all the different things they could have been lying about, and what
they might want to get out of him. That’s why I didn’t give a
dime’s weight to anything he said about Frances. He’d likely have
taken a while to warm to any girl I chose, but—money was one of the
things he was sharpest about. You’ve probably heard some of the
things about him.” Jim flung a questioning glance at her.

Mrs. Meade inclined her head; she was
remembering some of them. “Grandfather would never trust any of his
money to a bank, even though Tom Hall who runs the First National
was one of his best friends. He had to have everything in writing
and double-stitched legal terms. He had it fixed in his mind that
there were certain kinds of people who were only out for money, and
he—he’d have it that Frances was one of them, just because he
couldn’t see any reason why she’d want to marry me…to marry someone
younger than her.”

“And yet Frances still doubts you.”

“I’ve tried. I’ve tried everything to make
her see. I’ve begged her to marry me right away, and she
won’t.”

“Perhaps she thinks you protest too
much.”

“Protest—! What am I supposed to do, stay
away from her and neglect her, and let her think I don’t care?”

“I don’t mean only that; I mean—in your anger
toward your grandfather.”

Jim paused, brought up short for a moment.
Then he spoke, carefully, in short-clipped phrases, as though
trying not to let the emotion roiling under the surface escape.
“When the person who’s been your whole family, father and
grandfather both, tells you you’ve got nothing to offer a woman—and
insults the one you love better than…He insulted her! Of course I
was angry! But I know better than to believe a word he said even
though I was mad enough to have mur—”

He caught Mrs. Meade’s bright eye, and broke
off in confusion.

She let him wait, for a moment, in that
mortified pause, and moved deliberately to the dining-room table
and seated herself beside it. Silences were interesting things,
made all the more rare because it was seldom you found a person who
could resist breaking them.

“Do you think Frances suspects you of having
killed your grandfather?” she asked at last, looking up at Jim.

“She said ‘Never’—and I believed her, Mrs.
Meade,” said Jim, with a little break in his voice. “At least I’ve
got that.”

“As to the rest,” said Mrs. Meade, spreading
out her fingers slowly to smooth the tablecloth, “all I can advise
you is—be patient, Jim. It’s a horrible sort of a thing that has
happened, to disturb any courtship, and with all the talk and
sensation going about, Frances no doubt feels in a dreadful
turmoil, not in any condition to know what she thinks or feels. But
if, when all this has died down, you are still waiting faithfully
for her—surely she must listen to you then.”

Jim took a deep breath. He walked over to the
window, and stood for a moment staring out at the rain. “If I’m
still here,” he said, “when all this is over, Mrs. Meade.”

* * *

Sour Springs was beginning to wonder when the
blow would fall. It had been seven days since the murder of Major
Cambert, and no arrest had been made. But it was clearly only a
matter of time. All Sheriff Royal would say in public, usually
frowning as he said it, was that things were coming along; and only
the few people who knew him best knew how profoundly he disliked
what evidence he had gathered in.

Old Ted, cornered in the livery stable the
day after the murder, with squinted, bloodshot eyes and enough of
an air of sickliness to support the sheriff’s theory of drunkenness
at least, nevertheless angrily disclaimed the murder. The
interrogation resembled a belligerent hound-dog drawing screeches
of protest from a very moth-eaten cat at bay. Old Ted had been
drunk the previous night; enough witnesses were unearthed from one
of Sour Springs’ more disreputable saloons to substantiate that—but
he claimed he had reeled back to the livery stable before ten
o’clock and gone to sleep in the hayloft, and remained there till
morning. He had been seen to leave the saloon before ten, but no
one had seen him enter the darkened stable or come out of it at any
time that night, and therefore no one could say whether he had
really been in the loft as he declared.

Off the record, after the sheriff had
departed, Old Ted told a group of listeners (who must have had
nothing better to do) that he’d always thought, back in his Army
days, that that high-and-mighty Major Cambert would get himself
shot one day, and not by Indians neither. But of course he, Old
Ted, hadn’t done it.

When these remarks were duly relayed to
Andrew Royal, the sheriff tore his hair, figuratively. Far from
simplifying his case, Old Ted had saddled him with yet another
suspect who possessed a grudge against Major Cambert and no
alibi.

The streets were muddy on the afternoon
following Jim Cambert’s visit to the boarding-house, and Mrs.
Meade, seeking the narrowest distance between boardwalks, crossed
gingerly with the skirt of her walking-dress held up out of the
mud. The day was overcast, the sky walled with clouds of anxious
medium gray. Mrs. Meade, having ascended the wooden steps to the
boardwalk, looked to see what damage her shoes had sustained,
philosophically accepted it and walked on.

A tall man standing with his back to her a
little ways ahead on the boardwalk arrested her attention, and her
steps slowed for a moment. Then she advanced briskly. Truth be
told, the Cambert case had been on her mind almost as much as it
had been on Sheriff Royal’s, and Mrs. Meade was never one to refuse
an opportunity put in her way.

The man heard her approaching footsteps and
turned to make way for her to pass, but Mrs. Meade instead stopped
at his elbow, smiling pleasantly up at him. “Good afternoon, Mr.
Hall. I hope you are well?”

“Mrs. Meade, good afternoon,” said Tom Hall,
doffing his hat with a smile. “Very well, thanks. And you?”

“Oh, yes, never better. And how is Mrs. Hall?
I don’t believe I’ve seen either of you very much lately.”

“No, matter of fact she’s been in Denver the
past couple weeks, visiting a friend there. I had a letter from her
just this morning.” Hall touched the breast of his coat, indicating
a letter in his pocket. There was an aspect of the range and the
outdoors in his appearance, even after a decade of settled town and
business life; his marked and tanned face made him look older than
his fifty years, though there was no gray in his brown hair; and
his well-made suits always seemed a little wrong on him in spite of
their tailoring.