A Good Man (15 page)

Ada admits that the sherry sometimes got the better of her mother, who found their reduced circumstances difficult and wearying. But then she would brighten, pull herself together, and say to her children, “Poverty cannot affect the treasure we store up in our minds. That is incorruptible. We Jessups may be forced to live low, but let us always strive to think high.”

This was training ill suited for life with the Hardings, who thought the worth of anyone was best measured by the balance in their bank book. Day by day, friction between Ada and the Harding females grew, and she found herself subject to obloquy, contempt, and petty harassment. For a year she had lived a dreadful life in that dreary, cold house, and her pride – fierce since childhood – had taken a pummelling. It had taken all her will to maintain her dignity, to carry herself as if she could withstand every slight, but in the privacy of her room, her courage ebbed away and left her sobbing in a pillow.

When Dolly Harding demanded his husband discharge the governess, he flatly refused, but it wasn’t because he admired her teaching and her spirit. Whenever she crossed a room, Ada could feel his eyes flicking at her haunches. One afternoon, after his wife had made a particularly noisy complaint about Little Miss Grace and Diginity, he had summoned her to “sort things out.” While he admitted his wife could be difficult, he urged Ada to be a little more “accommodating to Mrs. Harding’s ways.” During the entire speech his eyes never strayed from her breasts.

Three days later she made up her mind to go to Mr. Harding and negotiate her freedom from this insufferable bondage. The terms of her contract stated Miss Ada Jessup was to receive her salary yearly, on the anniversary of her first of employment. She said to Mr. Harding that clearly the present situation was unsatisfactory to all concerned. She proposed that if he were good enough to release her, she would accept a trifling sum, much less than the wages she had already earned. She would settle for travel expenses to get her back to Chicago.

“A bargain is a bargain, my girl. If you have it in mind to leave, you will go with nothing” was Mr. Harding’s stark reply.

Shortly after this, handsome, courtly, attentive Randolph Tarr had come to provide Mr. Harding with legal advice. And one thing had led to another.

No more crying over spilled milk, Ada warns herself. Randolph’s razor lies in her lap. The house is quiet as a tomb, except for the feeble buzzing of an exhausted fly on the windowpane behind her.

But Ada’s restless mind will not settle and wanders to Mr. Dunne. Why did he not object to Celeste’s leaving the house with Peregrine Hathaway today? After all, he was most insistent last night about not letting her out of his sight. Is she herself more delicate, more in need of guarding than flighty Celeste? Of course, the circumstances are different; Celeste is in the company of a young police constable. Or maybe Mr. Dunne was hesitant to provoke her because she flaunts her detestation of him to his face. Celeste cannot be prevailed upon to lift a finger for him; she will not even consent to carry a glass of water out to the porch for the poor fellow.

It all falls on Ada’s shoulders to make him comfortable. Any small kindness she shows him is greeted with excessive gratefulness. If the guard dog had a tail, it would thump at the sight of her. If she happens to make a comment on the weather, he nods his head with excessive enthusiasm. A drink of water on a sweltering afternoon, a piece of bread and butter sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, a ham sandwich, a bowl of stew prompts him to rhapsodize about her goodness and thoughtfulness. When she invited him to take supper with them in the house the other evening rather than eat out on the porch, which he insists on doing, he refused the offer, but she is sure she saw his eyes moisten with appreciation. Ada finds these displays of emotion more than odd; she finds them embarrassingly disconcerting.

And although Celeste’s aversion to Mr. Dunne cannot be justified, Ada has to admit it is difficult to
like
the man. It isn’t that his compliments and effusions are insincere – they’re too sincere, too
extreme
. His deference verges on the pathetic.

Yet last night he had shoved his usual deference aside just as he had when he had forced that shooting lesson on her. Of course, by trying to set off from the saloon on her own she had broken one of Randolph’s cardinal rules.
Go nowhere alone
. Mr. Dunne was not going to permit that. And from his point of view, he was correct. After all, he had sworn to Randolph to protect her. With little mincing, shuffling steps he had backed her into the wall of Mr. Wetzel’s store. She had felt cornered in every conceivable way, pinned by those pale, unblinking eyes, half suffocated by the heat of the heavy body that stood mere inches away from her own. And the way his insistent murmuring had surrounded her, rustling like musty curtains in a draft, “Missus, I got to watch over you. Missus, you got to let me do my job. Missus, you got to listen to me. Missus, please.” In the end, what choice did she have but to succumb to his pleading? All those sibilts hissing in her ears, the stove-like warmth of his body had dizzyingly overcome her. And when Mr. Dunne had offered his arm, how could she refuse his awkward gallantry? Yet she had been reluctant to touch him, to touch even the cloth of his sleeve.

Slowly, Ada turns her head to look out the window. There is Mr. Dunne. How can he bear to sit out there, hour after hour, staring at empty prairie and the ugly backside of an ugly town? Is it monumental patience or is his mind as empty as the howling wilderness that confronts him?

Ada picks up her husband’s razor and resumes slitting the pages of her book, releasing George Eliot’s characters to keep her company, relieve this sense of smothering loneliness.

Peregrine Hathaway has gone missing. When the boy didn’t show up for either breakfast or dinner, Case said to McMullen that maybe they should try to find him; perhaps it had slipped his mind that he and McMullen were to leave for Fort Walsh today.

“I already told him four o’clock sharp. Let him mind to his own business. You worry about that boy too much” was all that Joe had to say.

But Case does feel responsible for Hathaway. He got Walsh to agree to let the boy accompany him to Fort Benton, and he feels obliged to see that what he’s borrowed gets returned. He makes a quick tour of the town just on the off chance his young friend has decided to make a few purchases before he heads back to Fort Walsh. Finding no trace of him, Case returns to the Overland to get directions to the Tarr residence. The desk clerk tells him it can be found a half mile behind the town and adds, “A big white house. And not whitewashed, mind you, but
oil-painted.”

Case can see that oil-painted wonder now, a few hundred yards off at the end of the dusty buggy track down which he is tramping, a two-storey frame house with a long gallery porch running along its entire front. It is a little past one o’clock; the sun is directly overhead, doing its best to shrivel him and the stringy, yellowing weeds that line the trail. Everything is still except for a brace of hawks wheeling about in the pale sky, riding the scorching updrafts rising from the skillet-flat prairie.

He feels irked by Hathaway’s irresponsibility, resentful that it will no doubt bring him into proximity with Dunne. He is resolved to make no mention of the time years ago when he first saw the scoundrel backing a man into the corner of a hotel lobby, hissing his contempt in his face. The memory of this, and hearing Walsh’s report of his meeting with the man, has told him all he needs to know about what he is. Surely a paid informer then, the lowest of parasites, and most likely a petty criminal to boot, as such types often are. A man beneath notice, and that’s how he intends to behave towards him, as if he were no more significant than a flyspeck.

And then there is the awkwardness of seeing Mrs. Tarr. Meeting that eccentric woman is not a cheering prospect. He best not make any mention of being present at the concert. What could one say about that? Compliment her or commiserate with her?

As Case trudges on, drawing nearer to the house, he spots Dunne, a black heap on the porch. Trying to assume a confident air, he even attempts a nonchalant whistle, but the walk has parched his mouth so badly he gives it up as futile. When he comes within hailing distance, he tenses himself, expecting some dismissive salute, but Dunne doesn’t blink an eye or utter a sound. He simply fills a chair, legs spread wide, a shotgun resting across his bulging thighs. Only when Case’s boot strikes the bottom step does Dunne grind out three words.

“He ain’t here.”

Case refuses to respond, strides up the stairs, crosses the porch, and gives a crisp knock to the door.

Dunne says, “You deaf? I just told you that young fellow you’re looking for ain’t here.”

“Don’t presume to know my business, Mr. Dunne.”

Ada is in the kitchen preparing a jug of iced tea, rinsing sawdust off one of the last shards of ice that have survived the summer in the icehouse, when she hears a rap on the front door. Thinking that Mr. Dunne must have finally found the courage to ask for something, she goes to the door, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. But what greets her is a stranger on her doorstep, a tall, lanky fellow in an oatmeal tweed suit, sombre eyes shadowed by a broad-brimmed straw hat.

“Beg pardon for this intrusion,” the man says, looking nonplussed because she has caught him trying to rub the dust off one of his shoes on the back of a trouser leg. “If I may introduce myself – the name is Wesley Case, and I’ve come looking for Peregrine Hathaway. By any chance is he here?”

Ada recognizes the visitor’s name because it frequently appears in Hathaway’s chatty letters to her stepdaughter. The young Englishman is always singing Case’s praises to Celeste, lauding him as the epitome of a scholar and gentleman, a mentor and dear friend. “Mr. Hathaway was here, but he and my stepdaughter have gone on a picnic,” she says.

“That’s what I tried to tell him, ma’am,” Dunne calls out triumphantly. “But he didn’t listen to me. Preferred to disturb you.”

“Thank you, Mr. Dunne. It is quite all right. I am not inconvenienced at all.”

“It’s a matter of some urgency, I’m afraid,” Case says. “Do you know where I might find them?”

“I should think some spot along the river, but where exactly it is impossible for me to say. They could be anywhere.”

“Did they set an hour for their return? I apologize for pressing you, but I need to speak to Hathaway.”

Ada gives a small smile. “I would not expect them to be too very long. Celeste does not care for hot weather very much. Not even in the company of an admirer. She sunburns dreadfully. But if you would care to come in and wait for Mr. Hathaway to return, you are very welcome to do so.”

Case tucks her a little bow. “If it would not be too great an imposon, Mrs. Tarr, that might be the answer to my predicament.”

Ada ushers him down a short hallway and into the parlour. It is a cozy, cluttered room that drives a spike of homesickness into him – not for the cavernous place in which he and his parents had rattled around like three dried peas in a barrel, but for the rather ordinary houses in Ottawa’s Sandy Hill where he had gone to play with his schoolmates, to eat bread and jam, to take shelter from the cold winds that blew down the long corridors of his own home.

The wallpaper is patterned with blowsy pink roses; there is a horsehair sofa, a loveseat, several leather armchairs, a spinet, an oak sideboard, a scattering of mismatched occasional tables, and, wonder of wonders, a tall, glass-fronted bookcase, its shelves crammed with reading matter.

“I was making myself a pitcher of iced tea. Perhaps you would care for a glass?” asks Ada.

His tongue is threatening to stick to the roof of his mouth. “That would be very kind. Thank you.”

“Make yourself comfortable,” Ada says, motioning him towards the sofa before she heads for the kitchen. But Case doesn’t sit. He roams about the room, picks up a book lying on the sofa, glances at the spine.
Daniel Deronda
. He doesn’t recognize the title; it must be Eliot’s most recent. He replaces the novel and shifts to the bookcase, which holds a surprising amount of philosophy: Bentham, Mills, Burke, Locke, Hobbes. There are numerous abolitionist pamphlets and bound numbers of a journal called
The Lily
. Several shelves contain the usual English poets, the plays of Shakespeare, novels by Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Thackeray, Trollope, and Defoe. There is much more George Eliot, including the essays.