Charlotte had expected her father home at a little after six o'clock
that night. That was the train on which he usually arrived lately.
She had not the least idea what he was doing in the City. She
supposed he was in the office as he had been hitherto. She never
inquired. With all the girl's love for her father, she had a decided
respect. She was old-fashioned in her ways of never interfering or
even asking for information concerning a man's business affairs.
Charlotte went down to the station to meet her father, as she was
fond of doing. She had her dinner all ready. It was pretty bad, but
she was innocently unaware of it. In fact, she had much faith in it.
She had a soup which resembled greatly a flour paste, and that was in
its covered tureen on the range-shelf, keeping hot and growing
thicker. She had cooked a cheap cut of beef from a recipe in the
cook-book, and that was drying up by the side of the soup. Poor
Charlotte had no procrastination, but rather the failing of "Haste
makes waste" of the old proverb. She had her cheap cut of beef all
cooked at three o'clock in the afternoon, and also the potatoes, and
the accompanying turnips. Salad at that time of the year she could
not encompass in any form, but she had a singular and shrunken
pudding on the range-shelf beside the other things. She set the
coffee-pot well back where it would only boil gently, and the table
was really beautifully laid. The child's cheeks were feverishly
flushed with the haste she had made and her pride in her
achievements. She had swept and dusted a good deal that day, also,
and all the books and bric-a-brac were in charming arrangement. She
felt the honest delight of an artist as she looked about her house,
and she said to herself that she was not at all tired. She also said
that she was not at all hungry, even if she had only eaten a cracker
for luncheon and little besides for breakfast. She realized a
faintness at her stomach, and told herself that she must be getting
indigestion. Her little stock of money was very nearly gone. She had
even begun to have a very few things charged again at Anderson's.
Sometimes her father brought home a little money, but she understood
well enough that their financial circumstances were wellnigh
desperate. However, she had an enormous faith in her father that went
far to buoy her up. While she felt the most intense compassion for
him that he should be so hard pressed, it never occurred to her that
it could be due to any fault or lack of ability in him, and she had,
in reality, no doubt whatever of his final recovery of their sinking
fortunes. She wrote her mother that papa was going to the City every
day, that they were getting on very well, and while they had not yet
a maid, she thought it better to wait until they were perfectly
satisfied before engaging one. The letters she had received at first
from Mrs. Carroll had been childishly amazed and reproachful,
although acquiescent. Her aunt had written her more seriously and
with great affection. She told her to send for her at once if she
needed her, and she would come.
Charlotte, going down the street towards the station that night,
expected a letter by the five-o'clock train. She reached the
post-office, which was near the station, at a quarter before six, and
she found, as she anticipated, letters. There were several for her
father, which she thought, accusingly towards the writers, were
bills. It was odd that Charlotte, while not really morally perverted,
and while she admitted the right of people to be paid, did not admit
the right of any one to annoy her father by presenting his bill. She
looked at the letters, and, remembering the wretched expression on
her father's face on receiving some the night before, it actually
entered into her mind to tear these letters up and never let him see
them at all. But she put them in her little bag, and opened her own
letters and stood in the office to read them. The train was not due
for fifteen minutes yet, and was very likely to be late. She had
letters from her mother, Ina, and aunt. They all told of the life
they were leading there, and expressed hope that she and her father
were well, and there was a great deal of love. It was all the usual
thing, for they wrote every day. There were also letters from them
all for Carroll. The Carroll family, when absent from one another,
were all good correspondents, with the exception of Carroll. There
was even a little letter from Eddy, which had been missent, because
he had spelled Banbridge like two words--Ban Bridge.
Charlotte read her letters, smiling over them, standing aloof by the
window. The post-office was fast thinning out. There had been the
customary crowd there at the arrival of the mail--the pushing and
shrieking children and the heavily shuffling loungers--all people who
never by any possibility got any letters, but who found a certain
excitement in frequenting the office at such times. Just as Charlotte
finished her last letter and replaced it in the envelope, Anderson
came in for his mail. He did not notice her, but went directly to his
box, which had a lock, opened it, and took out a pile of letters.
Charlotte stood looking at him. He looked very good and very handsome
to her. She thought to herself how very much better-looking he was
than Ina's husband. There was something about the manly squareness of
his shoulders, as he stood with his back towards her, examining his
letters, which made her tremble a little, she could not have told
why. Suddenly he looked up and saw her, and she felt that the color
flashed over her face, and was ashamed and angry. "Why should I do
so?" she asked herself. She made a curt, stiff little bow in response
to Anderson's greeting, and he passed her going out of the office
with his letters. Then she felt distressed.
"I need not have been rude because I was such a little idiot as to
blush when a man looked at me," she told herself. "It was not his
fault. He has always been lovely to us." She reviewed in her mind
just her appearance when she had given him that stiff little bow, and
she felt almost like crying with vexation. "Of course he does not
care how I bow to him," she thought, and somehow that thought seemed
to give her additional distress, "but, all the same, I should have
been at least polite, for he is very much a gentleman. I think he is
much better bred, and he certainly knows much more than Ina's
husband, even if he does only keep a grocery store; but then army
officers are not supposed to know much except how to fight."
The heavy jar of a passing freight train made her look at the
post-office clock, and with her usual promptness, although it was
fully seven minutes before the train was due, even if it were on
time, and she was only about one minute's walk from the station, she
reflected that she must start at once if she were to meet her father.
So she stowed away her letters in her little bag, and fairly ran
across the icy slope between the office and the station. She saw, as
she hurried along, a child tumble down, and watched him jump up and
run off to make sure he was not hurt. When she reached the station
she did not go in the waiting-room, which seemed close and stuffy,
but remained out on the platform. The sun had set, but the western
sky, which was visible from that point, was a clear expanse of rose
and violet. Charlotte stood looking at it, and for a minute she was
able to find that standing-point outside her own little life and
affairs which exists for the soul. She did not think any more of the
money troubles, of her bowing so stiffly to Mr. Anderson. She forgot
not only her petty worries, but her petty triumphs and pleasures. She
forgot even the exceeding becomingness of a new way in which she had
dressed her hair. She forgot her coat, which she had herself trimmed
with fur taken from an old one of her mother's, and in which her
heart delighted. She forgot her supreme dinner warming on the
range-shelf at home. She forgot the joy she would soon have in seeing
her father alight from the train. The little, young, untrained
creature saw and knew for the moment only the eternal that which was
and is and shall be, and which the sunset symbolized. Her young face
had a rapt expression looking at it.
"Dandy sunset, ain't it?" said a voice at her ear. She looked and saw
Bessy Van Dorn, her large, blooming face, rosy with the cold, smiling
at her from under a mass of tossing black plumes on a picture-hat.
The girl was really superb in a long, fur-lined coat. She had driven
in a sleigh to the station, and she expected Frank Eastman on the
train, and was, with the most innocent and ignorant boldness in the
world, planning to drive him home, although she was not engaged to
him and he was not expecting her. Her face, turning from the
wonderful after-glow of the sunset to Charlotte's, had also something
of the same rapt expression in spite of her words.
"Yes, it is beautiful," replied Charlotte, but rather coldly. She was
a friendly little soul, but she did not naturally care for girls of
Bessy Van Dorn's particular type. She was herself too fine and small
before such a mass of inflorescence.
"It's cold," said Bessy Van Dorn, further, "but, land, I like it!
Have you been sleigh-riding?"
"No, I haven't," replied Charlotte.
"Oh, I forgot," said Bessy.
Charlotte knew what she had forgot--that the horses had gone for
debt--and she reddened, but the other girl's voice was honest.
"I'd like to take you sometime," said Bessy.
"Thank you," said Charlotte.
"I'd offer to take you home to-night," said Bessy, "but I've arranged
to take somebody else."
"Thank you. I could not go, anyway," said Charlotte. "I am down to
meet my father."
"Oh!" said Bessy. "Well, then you couldn't. A sleigh ain't quite wide
enough for three, unless one of 'em is your best young man," she
giggled. Charlotte felt ashamed.
"My father is," she said, sternly. She fairly turned her back on
Bessy Van Dorn, but she did not notice it, for the train was audible
in the distance, and Bessy began calculating her distance from the
car in which Frank Eastman usually rode, that she might be sure not
to miss him.
Charlotte stood on the platform, and also ran along by the side of
the train scanning anxiously the men who alighted. To her great
astonishment, her father was not among them. She could scarcely
believe it when the train went slowly past the station and her father
had not got off.
Bessy Van Dorn, driving Frank Eastman in her sleigh, with the fringe
of fur tails dangling over the back, looked around at Charlotte
slowly retreating from the station. "Why, her father didn't come!"
said she.
"Whose father?" asked young Eastman. He looked admiringly and even
lovingly at the girl, and yet in a slightly scornful and shamed
fashion. He hated to think of what some of the men he knew would say
about her meeting him at the station.
"Why, that poor little Charlotte Carroll's!" said Bessy. "Say," she
added, after a second's hesitation.
"What?" asked young Eastman.
"I've a good mind to ask her to ride. We're goin' her way. You don't
mind?"
"Not a bit," said young Eastman, but he did think uncomfortably of
Ina's sister seeing him with Bessy Van Dorn.
Bessie promptly stopped. They had not yet made the turn from the
station to the main road, and Charlotte was just behind them.
"Say," she called out, "get in here. I'll take you home--just as soon
as not."
"Thank you," replied Charlotte. "I have an errand. I am not going
home just yet."
"All right," replied Bessy, touching her horse. "I'd just as soon
have taken you as not, if you'd been going home."
"Thank you," Charlotte said, again.
"I declare, she looked as if she was just ready to cry," said Bessy
to Eastman, as they drove up the street.
She was quite right. Charlotte was horribly frightened by her
father's non-arrival on the train. He had never come on a later train
than that since the others had gone. The thought of returning alone
to her solitary home was more than she could bear. She remembered
that there was another train a half-hour later, and she resolved to
remain down for that. She thought that she would go to Mr. Anderson's
store and purchase some cereal for breakfast, that she might have
that charged. She was conscious, but she tried to stifle the
consciousness, of a hope that Mr. Anderson would be there, and she
might tell him that her father had not arrived on that train, and he
would reassure her. But Mr. Anderson had naturally gone straight home
from the post-office to supper. Charlotte ordered her cereal, and
also a few eggs. Then she went back to the station. It was nearly
twenty minutes before the train was due. She walked up and down the
platform, which extended east and west. The new moon was just rising,
a slender crescent of light, and off one upper horn burned a great
star. It was a wonderful night, cold, with a calmness and hush of all
the winds of heaven which was like the hush of peace itself.
Charlotte noticed everything, the calm night and the crescent moon,
but she came between herself and her own knowledge of it. Her mind
was fixed upon the train and the terrible possibility that her father
might not arrive on that. It seemed to her that if he did not arrive
on that it was simply beyond bearing. The possibility was too
terrible to be contemplated with reason, and yet she could not have
told just why she was in such a panic of fear. A thousand things
might happen to keep any business-man in the City later than he had
expected. He had often been so kept while the others were home; but
now she was alone, and she felt that he would certainly come unless
something most serious had detained him. Charlotte had naturally a
somewhat pessimistic turn of mind, and her imagination was active.
She imagined many things; she even imagined the actual cause of
Carroll's detention, among others, that he had slipped on the ice and
injured himself. The falling of the boy on her way to the six-o'clock
train had directly swerved her fancy in that direction. But she
imagined everything. That was only one of many casualties. The train
was a little late. She stood staring down the track at the unswerving
signal-lights, watching for the head-light of the locomotive, and it
seemed to her quite certain that there had been an accident on that
train. A thought struck her, and she went into the waiting-room and
asked the ticket-agent if the train was very late. The agent was
quite a young man, and he looked at her with a covert masculine
coquettishness as he replied, but she was oblivious of that. All she
thought of was that, if there had been an accident on the line and
the train was late on that account, he would surely be apt to know.
Her heart was beating so fast that she trembled; but he said ten
minutes, and said nothing about an accident, and she was reassured.
She turned to go, after thanking him, and he volunteered further
information.
"There is a freight ahead delaying the train," he said.
"Oh, thank you," replied Charlotte. Then she went out on the platform
again and watched for the head-light of the locomotive, staring down
the track past the twinkle of the signal-lights. Suddenly it flashed
into sight far off, but she saw it. She waited. Soon she heard the
train. A gateman crossed the tracks from the in-station, padlocking
the gates carefully after him. A baggage-master drew a trunk to the
edge of the platform. A few passengers came out of the waiting-room.
Charlotte waited, and the train came majestically around the curve
below the station. She moved along as it came up, keeping her eyes on
the cars. She seemed to have eyes with facets like a cut diamond. It
was really as if she saw all the car doors at once. But she moved
with a strange stiffness, and could not feel her hands nor feet; her
heart beat so fast and thick that it shook her like the pulse of an
engine. She moved along, and she saw every passenger who alighted.
Then the train steamed out of the station with slowly gathering
speed, and her father had not come on it.
Charlotte, when she actually realized the fact, the possibility of
which had seemed incredible, gained a little strength. It was like
the endurance of disaster which is sometimes more feasible than the
contemplation of it. She thought at once what to do. In the event of
her father having been delayed by some unforeseen business he would
surely telegraph. She at once crossed the slope from the station and
went to Andrew Drake's drug-store, where the telegraph-office was.
She asked if a telegram had come for her, if one had been sent to the
house. When the boy in charge answered no, she felt as if she had
received a stunning blow. She had then no doubt whatever that
something had happened to her father, some accident. The boy, who was
young and pleasant-faced, watched her with a vague sympathy. In a
moment she recovered herself. He might have sent a telegram which had
not arrived. It might come any moment. The boy directly had the same
thought. "The minute the telegram comes I'll get it up to you," he
said, earnestly. "I expect Mr. Drake back every minute, and I can
leave."
"Thank you," said Charlotte.
It was an hour and a half before the next train. She went out of the
store and walked miserably along the street to her deserted home.