The Debtor Part 25

Chapter XV

"I think we shall have thunder-showers to-day," Mrs. Anderson remarked, as she poured the coffee at the breakfast-table. Even this old gentlewoman, carefully attired in her dainty white lawn wrapper, had that slightly dissipated, bewildered, and rancorous air that extreme heat is apt to impart to the finest-grained of us. Her fair old face had a glossy flush, her white hair, which usually puffed with a soft wave over her temples, was stringy. She allowed her wrapper to remain open at the neck, exposing her old throat, and dispensed with her usual swathing of lace. She confessed that she had not been able to sleep at all; still she kept her trust in Providence, and would scarcely admit to discomfort. "I am sure there will be showers, and cool the air," she said, with her sweet optimism. As she spoke she fanned herself with the great palm-leaf fan with a green bow on the stem, which she was never without during this weather. "It is certainly very warm so early in the season. One must feel it a little, but it is always so delightful after a shower that it compensates."

"You are showing a lovely Christian spirit, mother," Anderson returned, smiling at her with fond amus.e.m.e.nt, "but don't be hypocritical."

"My son, what do you mean?"

"Mother, dear, you don't really like this weather. You only pretend to because man did not make it."

"Randolph!"

"Only think how you would growl if the mayor and aldermen, or even the president, made this weather!"

"My son, they did not," Mrs. Anderson responded, solemnly.

"No, and that settles it, I suppose. If they did, you would say at once they ought to be forced to resign from their offices. Now, mother, be resigned all you like, but don't be pleased, for you can't cheat the Providence that made this beastly heat, and must know perfectly well how beastly it is, better than you or I do, and won't think any more of us for any pretence in the matter."

"You shock me, dear. And, besides, I did not say that I liked it. I said I liked the weather after a shower. You look pale this morning, dear, and you don't talk quite like yourself. I do wish you would take an umbrella when you go to the office to-day. It is so very warm." Mrs. Anderson had a chronic fear of sunstroke.

When Randolph went away without his umbrella, as he usually did, being, dearly as he loved his mother, impervious to some of her feminine demands, she watched him, standing in the doorway and shaking her head with a dubious air.

That noon she was quite contented, for he did actually carry his umbrella. The sky in the northwest was threatening, although the sun still shone fiercely in the south. She herself sat on the doorstep in the shade, and fairly panted like a corpulent old dog. Her mouth was open and her tongue even lolled a little. She was, in reality, suffering frightfully. She had both flesh and nerves, and, given these two adverse conditions to endurance, and the mercury ninety in the shade, there is torture although the spirit is strong.

Although the sky was threatening all the afternoon, it was not until four o'clock that the northwest sky grew distinctly ominous and the rumble of the thunder was audible. Then Mrs. Anderson called her maid, and they proceeded to close tightly all the windows against the rising wind.

"It is very dangerous indeed to have a draught in the house in a thunder-shower," Mrs. Anderson always said while closing them.

Then she hurriedly divested herself of the white lawn wrapper which she had worn all day, and put on her black summer silk gown, with a wrap and a bonnet and an umbrella at hand. Mrs. Anderson was not afraid of a thunder-shower in the ordinary sense, but her imagination never failed her. Therefore she was always dressed, in case the worst should happen and she be forced to flee from a stricken house. She also had her small and portable treasures ready at hand. Then she sat down in the middle of the sitting-room well out of range of the chimney, and prayed for her own and her son's safety, and incidentally for the safety of the maid, who was in the adjoining room with the door open, and for the house and her son's store. She always did thus in a thunder-shower, but she never told any one this innocent childish secret of an innocent old soul.

She thought with a sort of undercurrent of faithlessness of the great draught in her son's store if the large front doors and the office door were both open, as there was a strong probability of their being. She thought uneasily that her son might be that very moment in that draught, as indeed he was. He stood in the strong current of fresh storm-air, with its pungent odors, more like revelations than odors, of things which had been in abeyance for some time past in the drought. The smell of the wet green things was like a paean of joy.

It was a call of renewed life out of concealed places of fainting and hiding. There were scents of flowers and fruits, and another strange odor, like the smell of battle, from all the ferment on the earth which had precipitated the storm. It was quite a severe thunder-shower. The rain had held off for a fierce prelude, then it came in solid cataracts. Then it was that Charlotte Carroll rushed into the store. She was dripping, beaten like a flower, by the force of the liquid flail of the storm. She had pulled off the rose-wreathed hat which was dear to her heart, and she had it under her dress skirt, which she held up over her lace-trimmed petticoat modestly, with as little revelation as might be. Her dark head glistened with the rain.

Anderson stepped forward quickly. "Pray come into the office, Miss Carroll," he said.

But she remained standing in front of the door, having removed her hat furtively from its shelter. "No, thank you," said she, "I would rather stay here. I like to watch it."

Anderson fetched a chair from his office, but she thanked him and said that she preferred standing.

"I thought I had time to get to Madame Griggs's on the other side of the street," said she, "but all at once it came down."

Anderson felt her ungraciousness, but she herself did not seem to realize it at all. Presently she gave a little sidewise smile at him, and comprehended in the smile the old clerk and the boy who hovered near.

"It is a fine shower," said she, with a kind of confidential glee. As she spoke she looked out at the snarl of rain shot with lances of electric fire, and there was a curious elation, almost like intoxication, in her expression. She was in a fine spiritual excitement.

"Yes," said Anderson. "We needed rain."

Just then the world seemed swimming in blue light and there was a terrific crash. Anderson, who never thought of any personal fear in a tempest, looked rather apprehensively at the girl. He recalled his mother's fear of draughts.

"Perhaps you had better move back a little; that was quite near," he said. Somehow the little fears and precautions which he scorned for himself seemed to apply quite reasonably to this little, tender, pretty creature with the lightning playing around her and the thunder breaking over her defenceless head.

Charlotte laughed. "Oh, I am not afraid," said she. Then she added, quite innocently, with more of personal appeal than she had ever used towards him, "Are you?"

"No," said Anderson.

"I like it," said she, staring out at the swaying, brandishing maples, and the street which ran like a river, with now and then a boiling pool.

"I am afraid you are wet," said Anderson.

"Yes," said she, "but that is nothing. My dress won't hurt. It is just white lawn, you know. All that would be hurt is my hat, and that is hardly damp. I took it off." She held it up carefully on one hand, and gazed solicitously at it. "It is my best hat," said she, simply.

"No, I don't think it is hurt at all." She looked sharply towards the counter. "The counter is clean, isn't it?" said she. "I might lay my hat there. I don't want to put it on until my hair gets dry."

The old clerk smiled covertly, the boy grinned at her in a fascinated way. Anderson regarded her with worshipful amazement. This little, artless revelation of the innermost vanity of a woman's heart touched him. It was to him inconceivable that she should so care for the welfare of that flower-bedecked oval of straw, and yet he thought it adorable of her to care. He stared at the hat as if it had been a halo, then he turned and looked anxiously at the counter.

"Get a sheet of clean paper," he ordered the boy, and frowned at him for his grin.

The boy obeyed solemnly.

"I think that will not soil your hat," Anderson said, when the preparations were complete.

"Oh, thank you," she said, and handed him the hat.

Anderson touched it gingerly as if it were alive, and placed it upside down on the clean sheet of paper.

"The other way up, please," said she, and Anderson changed it in alarm.

"I hope I have not injured it," he said.

She was laughing openly at him. "No," she replied, "but you put it right on the roses. Men don't know how to handle girls' hats, do they?"

"No; I fear they don't," replied Anderson.

He remained leaning against the counter near the door; the old clerk lounged against the next one, on the end of which Sam Riggs was perched. Charlotte remained standing in the doorway, leaning slightly against the post, and they all watched the storm, which was fast reaching its height. The flashes of lightning were more frequent, the crashes of thunder followed fast, sound overlapping sight. The rain became a flood. The girl watched, with the intense, self-forgetful delight of a child, the plash of the great blobs of rain on the macadamized road outside. They came to look to her exactly like little figures chasing one another in an unintermittent race of annihilation. She smiled, watching them. Anderson, looking from the rain to her, saw the smile, and thought with a little pang that she was probably thinking of her own happiness when she smiled to herself like that. He kept his eyes fixed upon her for a moment, her glistening dark head, her smooth cheek, her smiling mouth, her shoulders faintly pink through her thin white gown, which, being wet, clung to them. Charlotte's shoulders were thin, but the hollowing curve from the throat to the arm was ravishing. Anderson's face hardened a little. He looked away again at the rain.

All at once Charlotte glanced up from the dancing flight of the rain-drops on the road, and laughed. "Why," she cried, "there is Ina!

There is my sister!"

Anderson looked, and in a second-story window opposite was a girl's head in a violet-trimmed hat. She was smiling and nodding. Charlotte waved her hand to her.

"I'll be over as soon as it holds up a little," she cried out. "Did you get wet?"

The girl in the window hollowed a slim hand over an ear.

"Did you get caught in the shower? Did you get wet?" called Charlotte.

The girl in the window shook her head gayly.

"She didn't," Charlotte said, with an absurd but charming confidence to Anderson; "but, anyway, she didn't have on her very best hat."