The Callender Papers Page 14

  I couldn’t think of anything scathing enough, so I didn’t finish my sentence. Quite calmly, I folded my napkin and rose from the table. Quite calmly, I walked out of the dining room and then out of the house. Then I began to run wildly, before my tears could be noticed by anyone following me. I ran up into the woods toward the falls.

  Chapter 13

  By the time I had crossed at the ford, then walked down to Mr. Callender’s house, I had ceased sobbing. I imagine I looked pretty disheveled, however: I’d left shoes and stockings by the stream and run through the forested countryside, not bothering to avoid bushes. Mr. Callender took one look at me and knelt down beside me. “My dear,” he said. His eyes looked gently into mine. “What has happened?”

  I shook my head, I could not have begun to explain to him why I was there. I did not understand it myself. I had only feelings: I felt alone, afraid; I felt angry at everyone, and as if things were happening which I did not understand; I felt helpless.

  Mr. Callender stared into my face. “Has he been cruel to you? Don’t try to pretend, I know how miserable my sisters life was with him. Whatever it is, Jean, it will be set right.”

  That was what pulled me out of it, because I knew—not only felt, but knew, as a fact—that everything was not all right and never could be. He must have seen something in my face.

  “Better?” he asked.

  I had found him leaving his house, outside, alone. He was kneeling so that his face was even with mine. His voice was soothing, comforting; but his eyes bored into mine as if to read my mind. “What did happen?” He gave me his handkerchief. I blew my nose several times.

  “Nothing,” I said, remembering that I did not know who could be trusted. I thought of something to satisfy him, “I was ill, some kind of food poisoning. I wasn’t sure you all were well.”

  That did surprise him. I am sure of it, or, at least, I was sure of it then. “As you see,” he said, “I am in perfect health. So are the rest of us, I promise you. When was this?”

  “Sunday.”

  “Is everyone well at the big house? Did you have the doctor?”

  Yes, I nodded. “But I’m sorry, you were going downtown. I’ve interrupted.”

  “That isn’t important. That will wait for another day. Shall we walk? Where we won’t be disturbed? You seem to me to be a young lady in need of a friend.” He stood up and dusted the dirt from his knees. He looked back at his house, but there was nobody to be seen, and we went back, slowly, by the path upriver.

  “You really don’t want to talk to me?” he asked gently. “You can tell me anything, anything. I want to be your friend. But you don’t want to talk, and I can understand that. What you want—let me guess—is simply the comfort of a friend. Just to walk along as we are now, talking of other things, so that you can forget, however temporarily, whatever troubles you.”

  He seemed to know so much about me, I could only be grateful.

  “You’re still a child, after all.” He smiled down at me. His hair glowed golden in the sunlight, and his eyes shone a dark, kindly blue. “You’re so composed, one tends to forget that. Under your cool exterior you have plenty of feelings, haven’t you?”

  I agreed, embarrassed.

  “I’m so glad you feel you can come to me for comfort,” he said. “I think I am beginning to understand you. My sister Irene, she too had deep feelings, which she disguised. I always knew that. Other people never seemed to notice what she was really like. Your Mr. Thiel, he never even suspected it. Poor Irene.”

  “What was she like, your sister?” I asked him. I felt now that of all the Callenders, she was the one I liked most, even more (strange as it may seem) than Mr. Enoch Callender.

  “She was tall and dark, not pretty at all. But she was the most loyal person you’d ever hope to meet, and kindness itself. She never mixed well in company, always standing back—she was so awkward, it made her shy—and then when a man came courting she was too intelligent not to know he was courting her money. Sometimes she would ask me what I thought of this one or that one. I wouldn’t try to lie, I loved her too much to lie to her. And I said that and told her that I for one wouldn’t change a single thing about her, not for all the engagement rings set out in Mr. Tiffany’s counters. Many’s the time she helped me out of one scrape or another. Irene. She could talk to me, make me see reason when nobody else could. I knew I could trust her, you see, that’s the kind of person she was. If she told me not to do something, I always thought twice about it.” He smiled at the memory. “I didn’t always do what she asked, but even then she never held that against me, never carried a grudge. She didn’t want me to marry my wife.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “She thought I was too young, and she might have been right. Then she said Priscilla wasn’t strong enough, that Priscilla loved me too much—and she was correct, of course. I quickly learned what Irene had meant. But my sister never gloated. She just helped whenever she could, with money or little attentions. She listened to Priscilla’s little tales of woe. Whereas my father—” His voice became bitter. Until then, as he spoke of his sister, his voice had sounded happy.

  “Your father?” I asked him.

  “My dear father said that Priscilla wasn’t rich enough to keep me. I pointed out to him that he could do something about that, but he wouldn’t. I was young and in love; I didn’t obey him. Then, afterwards, he said we’d made our bed and now we had to lie on it. Irene used to come over and help Priscilla with the household accounts, advise her how to handle the cook and maids, even the children. Priscilla has never been able to manage. Irene took care of the children, she was wonderful with them. Of course, all that changed when she married.”

  “Why did it change? You lived here, nearby, didn’t you?”

  Mr. Callender looked down at me with a twinkle in his blue eyes. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. I don’t try to disguise it, you don’t have to pretend with me. There is no love lost between your employer and myself. Come now, Jean, you can speak the truth with me.”

  “Oh that,” I said. “Yes, I knew that.”

  “My sister changed,” Mr. Callender said. “My poor, gentle sister, married to a man who had been a Hider, who cared for nothing but his paintings. In her unhappiness, she grew distant. The man has never thought of anyone but himself, you must have remarked that in him—” He did not wait for me to answer. “And that little child—perhaps it is just as well—imagine being left alone with him in that house. Imagine the long hours of each long day, or having to turn to him in need. I could have done little good for the child: he won’t have me in the house. Not that I want to go. But even so, when I think—I even tried to trace her, which is more than the father did.”

  “You tried?”

  “Under the terms of my father’s will, my wife received an inheritance. I hired detectives. It wasn’t very much money, it didn’t last long. They had simply disappeared, the child and that unknown nurse, both of them. I insisted that the detectives keep on looking—I was quite frantic—following up any clue, until the money ran out. He wouldn’t give me any more.”

  “You hate Mr. Thiel,” I said. I had not understood that before.

  “What do you expect, when he ruined my life for me. You may not know that I have an allowance, under my rich father’s generous will”—the bitterness was in his voice again—“which Mr. Thiel doles out to me in bits and pieces. Twice a week I present myself to a teller at the bank, with my hand out. We are trapped here. I am trapped. And there is all that money. . . .”

  His eyes glittered icy blue when he spoke of the money. We had arrived at the ford and sat down side by side on a wide boulder. He continued talking, almost as if he were talking to someone who knew him better than I did, to someone who had known him all his life and was familiar with the intricacies of his character.

  “After all, there’s more than one way to live. For people with imagination and bold spirits, life offers so much. Irene understood that, and s
he understood me. And she died.” He hit at his knees with a fist. “And here I am.

  “The son should inherit. I would have let them live with us, I would have taken care of her, of them. Even him, since she would have wanted that. And I had plans, good ones; they couldn’t have failed. I wanted to buy back the munitions factory. There are always places in the world where guns and powder are needed, because men will always behave, alas, like murderers and warmongers. You just have to see that, and your fortune is made. Granted, some of my associates were of the wrong sort—I knew that. But I never tried to introduce them into my home. I was always discreet. These men had ideas, ideas that only needed a capital investment. It would never have touched my family, not the precious Callenders. I would have seen to that.”

  He stopped talking abruptly, as if he had noticed that it was I who sat listening. “Whatever do you make of all that, Miss Jean Wainwright? What would you do with a brother like me?” He smiled, but his eyes stayed icy.

  It was a test. I could feel that. He seemed to care intensely for what I would answer. The broad stream ran in front of us, and overhead the branches of the trees whispered. I thought how solitary Mr. Callender’s life must be, for him to be at all concerned about my opinion. He was a man removed from his natural habitat, trying to live in an uncongenial environment. I thought carefully as he waited for my response—but I was not thinking about what I would say. I thought instead of how Aunt Constance had spoken of the beauty of these mountains, and how Mr. Thiel had painted all the strength of the landscape without losing its loveliness. I thought about Mr. Callender, beside me, sitting within a ring of hills whose rise and fall was both symmetrical and irregular, sitting upon a boulder so large and hard it looked as if it had thrust its own way up out of the very earth. Mr. Callender wore a fresh linen suit, his boots were polished to a high gleam, his golden head bent down to study the toes.

  There were facts he had told me that did not match facts I had learned from the Callender papers. Was his sister unhappy? Was Mr. Thiel such a man as he had claimed? Was Mr. Callender’s allowance ungenerous? Was his face, as I had seen its change of expression when he spoke of the fortune, was that the face of greed? At last I answered him. “I don’t know.”

  That was as much of a lie as I could manage. Of course, I did know. I would do just as Irene Thiel had done: I would be troubled and uneasy, I would be as generous as I thought sensible, but I would be unable to trust him. I would have to love him, but I would not trust him. It was a terrible thought.

  But Mr. Callender insisted that I answer fully. “You’re not being truthful with me.”

  I looked at him and felt tears fill my eyes. He was, possibly, a wonderful man, a man with many gifts, with grace and wit, an informed mind, a man who might make joyful any place where he lived. What did he lack that made me know he was not to be trusted?

  “I would take care of such a brother,” I said. “I would do everything I could to help him be the best sort of man he could be.”

  He laughed then. “Do you know? Good people are all alike, their minds cast from a single mold.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “You don’t need to, and I don’t think you ever can,” he told me.

  “I’ve made you angry,” I said. “I don’t want to make you angry.”

  “How could you make me angry by telling me the truth?” he asked me. “I was thinking of other things, I’m afraid, taking advantage of your company. You know, you must learn to put yourself forward more, or nobody will ever notice you, quiet in your corner. You’ll never make heads turn, but you do have a great deal of character. You could use that to advantage, to make up—Now I’ve hurt your feelings, and I didn’t mean to. But you’ll need a thicker skin for life, my dear. But I’m forgetting—sometimes I’m so selfish I appall even myself,” and he smiled at me affectionately. “You’ve been ill, didn’t you say? And you were troubled. Have I diverted you from your troubles, at least a little bit?”

  I turned back from where I stood at the streams edge. “Yes,” I said, hearing the surprise in my own voice. He sat watching me, amusement on his face.

  “Then I’ve succeeded, haven’t I? It’s exactly what I hoped. I’ve been a comfort, which is just what you needed.”

  By the time I crossed the stream he had risen and gone.

  Chapter 14

  I lingered over my stockings and shoes so that I would be sure to be alone as I made my way back down by the brook. Mr. Callender had succeeded in diverting me and perhaps it was for that reason that he told me his long story. The story saddened me, not because I felt sorry for him but because of the man he revealed himself to be. That a man could speak so fair and be so fair, yet not be honest, nor even kind, I now suspected; that I found distressing. Also distressing was the question he raised in my mind: if a man lied, then owned that he lied, was he still lying in quite the same way? If a man said frankly that he did not care to be good, was he deceptive? Poor Irene Thiel, I thought, who had spent all her life caring for her brother. No wonder she had been attracted to Mr. Thiel, who, for all his drawbacks, was at least completely honest. Or had she been deceived in Mr. Thiel too, I wondered, had she been as cruelly disappointed in her husband as she must have been in her brother?

  I thought then of Aunt Constance, of her cool and thoughtful presence. Irene Thiel should never have married. She should have lived with Aunt Constance and worked with her, as I had; then at least she might have had some peace.

  By the time I reached the glade by the falls, I was properly angry at both of those men. I stumped along the path, my eyes on the ground. That she had been devoted to her husband I felt sure. But whether he had loved her in return, I doubted. I doubted whether he could even feel affection. My footsteps thumped in my ears.

  Mac waited for me just down the path. “He told me to fetch you back. Where’d you go?”

  “To see Mr. Callender.”

  “Why?”

  I didn’t know the answer to that so I did not reply.

  “You better hurry,” Mac warned me.

  I did not increase my speed.

  Mr. Thiel waited for us in the library. He stood before the fireplace. His dark face was made darker by anger. He didn’t give either Mac or me a chance to speak. He addressed himself only to me.

  “You will of course return to Cambridge,” he said. The words were cold, but his anger was hot. I could feel the force of it. “Until you are out of my care, you are to stay in this house. Is that understood? You will return to Miss Wainwright on the Friday train. I will telegraph your aunt tomorrow.”

  I just stared at him. He had no right to talk to me like that. His employee I might be, but I was not his creature. I would not obey him unless I chose to; but I would not stoop to a lie. I kept my mouth firmly shut. He could not force me to answer. Also, I’ll admit it, I didn’t have the courage to argue with him.

  “But sir—” Mac said.

  Mr. Thiel turned on him. “And you, young man, will keep yourself off this property until Jean has left. I don’t blame you. However, I can’t feel that at this time you are a good influence on her. She will get into less mischief alone. Do you give me your word?”

  “Yes sir,” Mac said. His voice sounded shaky, but he held himself straight enough.

  I walked Mac to the front door. “He sure gets angry,” Mac said, letting his breath out as soon as we were in the hallway, out of Mr. Thiel’s sight. “I thought my dad’s lecturing was bad, but this . . .” He shook his head and then grinned at me. “He sure gets angry,” he said again.

  “I don’t care,” I said. “So do I.”

  “What a pair you two are,” Mac remarked. “I don’t see how you lasted in the same house this long.” His grin had not faded, and I began to see the humor of it myself. The two of us, dark and stubborn, both furiously angry. I knew the complex reasons for my own anger, my distress at the hopelessness of Mr. Callender’s character, my sense of the way the two men had taken advanta
ge of Irene Thiel’s nature, my anger that Mr. Thiel should speak to me so, and beneath it all the fear that blew about me like a dark wind, fear for myself. But what right had Mr. Thiel to be so angry. All he had to do was dismiss me as an unsatisfactory employee.

  Dinner that night started off in uncomfortable silence. We ate trout, with potatoes and green beans from Mrs. Bywall’s garden. The only sound was the clatter of knives and forks on china. I barely glanced at my employer. Had I been older I would have asked for dinner on a tray in my room.

  At last Mr. Thiel broke the silence. “I did not think your aunt would have raised a sullen child.”

  I could not judge his tone, so I looked at his face. I could not judge his face. I went back to my food.

  “I am sorry you have not been happy here,” he said, the anger back in his voice.

  “It matters little. I’ve done the work asked of me.”

  “Yes, you have,” he said, as if the admission pained him.

  “Perhaps you would prefer me to spend my remaining time in Marlborough elsewhere,” I suggested. “I might go over to the Callenders’ until it is time for me to leave.”

  “You’ll do no such thing—I forbid it,” he said.

  I lay down my utensils silently. I looked silently at him.

  “Haven’t you thought that it was probably there that you ate poison?” he demanded. “Can you be so careless and unthinking, child?”

  That he should accuse me of being unthinking was the final straw. But I sounded calm enough, I heard with pleasure how cool my voice was. “No, sir, it seemed just as likely that I might have been given poison here. I have, as you might guess, thought rather carefully on the question—if I had been given poison at all, of course, which is only a conjecture. No, sir, I am not unthinking, if you will forgive me the self-praise. Since you see fit to accuse me of that, I will tell you what I am thinking right now. I think you are jealous of Mr. Callender.”