The Silent Hour Read Online Free PDF Page A

grandfather so I could marry
you? They already think that.”
    He stood up and crossed the room. The tinge
of sharp almost-sarcasm in his voice roused an unreasonable feeling
of antipathy in Frances. “It would be almost proof of it.”
    Jim stood opposite and looked down at her for
a minute. He said quietly, “Are you backing out now because you
believe I did?”
    “Oh, no!” Frances rose and took hold of his
arm, looking up into his half-averted face. “Never. I just don’t
think it’s wise—and I don’t think it would show much respect for
your grandfather, either, if we were to marry in such a hurry
after—well, afterwards.”
    “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