He Pretended To Be A Penniless Farmhand To Test Her HeartThen He Arrived In A Carriage To Propose

Chapter 9

The Marlowe house swallowed Gideon Marlowe whole.

He had forgotten, in a month of small rooms and lamplight, how vast his own house was. He stood in the front hall with its two-story ceiling and its cold marble floor, and the silence rang in his ears like a struck bell. Mrs. Pratt appeared, thin-lipped and furious, and fussed over him and fed him and wanted to know where in heaven’s name he had been, and Gideon answered her in monosyllables and went to his room and shut the door.

That night he ate at the long table alone.

He sat at his usual end, and the candles threw long shadows down the empty length of the mahogany, and he looked at the twenty-one empty chairs and heard Cora Vane’s voice as plainly as if she stood behind him: I’ve got a table and a roof and food enough for two. On my place, a body doesn’t eat alone like a stray dog.

He pushed the plate away. He had not been hungry for days.

The valley, meanwhile, had discovered the story, and the story was better than anything the town had gossiped about in a decade. The richest man in Oregon had spent a month playing hired hand on the widow Vane’s failing farm. He had slept in her barn. He had worn patched trousers. He had been caught at it by his own foreman, and the widow had sent him packing like a stray dog.

By the third day, the story had grown a tail — he had been run off at gunpoint; he had been blackmailing her; she had a shotgun and had used it. Doyle Emery came to the house red-faced with the latest versions and demanded to know what he ought to tell people.

“Tell them the truth,” Gideon said.

“The truth, sir?”

“That I made a fool of myself over a decent woman, and she was right to throw me out.” Gideon looked at his foreman with eyes that Doyle had never seen in twelve years. “That’s the whole of it, Doyle. That’s the whole of the story.”

Doyle stared at him. “Mr. Marlowe — you could have any woman in the valley. Any woman in the state.”

“I know,” Gideon said. “That’s rather the point. I’ve had any woman in the valley. I’ve never once had a woman who wanted me when I had nothing to offer. And I found one — and she was the one person I couldn’t keep by offering anything at all.”

He sent Doyle away and went back to the long table, and he sat there until the candles burned down to stubs, and he wrote letters. He wrote a dozen letters to Cora Vane, and he read them, and he burned every one of them in the fireplace.

I am sorry was too small. I was afraid was too true to be an excuse. Let me save your farm was the one thing she had forbidden. I love you — he wrote those words and stared at them for an hour, and he had never written them to anyone in his life, and he could not send them because he had no right to ask anything of her until she had room to breathe.

On the fourth day, he almost went to her. He had the bay saddled and his hand on the rein when he stopped at the head of his own lane, looking down the valley road toward her small farm. It would take him an hour to ride there. She would open the door and see him and — what? He had promised her room. He had promised her he would learn to do what she asked.

He turned the horse around and went back to the house, and Mrs. Pratt found him that evening in the study, staring at the fire, and for the first time in twenty years of service she saw her employer look like a man who had lost something that money could not replace.

On the sixth day, a different kind of news reached him.

It came through Doyle, who had heard it in town: the bank had advertised the Vane place for auction. The note had come due, and the widow had not paid, and the sale was set for the first Monday of the month. Eleven days away. Doyle delivered the news with the careful neutrality of a man who was not sure which way his employer would break.

Gideon sat very still. The fire crackled. Somewhere in the house, a clock struck the hour.

He could end it in an afternoon. He could ride to town as himself, walk into the bank, and clear Cora Vane’s note before the banker could finish his coffee. The money was nothing. It was less than nothing — it was the price of a horse he would not miss. One signature, and the farm that Cora Vane would rather lose standing up than save on her knees would be hers forever.

And she had told him, with her whole stubborn heart, that it was the one thing she could not bear.

He sat in his study until the fire died, and he wrestled with it the way he had wrestled with it in her barn for a month — the same war between what he could do and what he had promised. And in the end, it was not his promise that stopped him. It was Cora’s voice, and the exact shape of her pride, and the knowledge that if he saved that farm with his money before she had chosen him — if he made her a rescue, a project, a charity — he would lose her forever, and he would deserve to.

He had spent ten years being a prize. He would not turn her into one.

On the ninth day, Gideon Marlowe went to his closet and took down the worn brown coat — the frayed one he had arrived in, the one that had started all of it. He stood looking at it for a long moment. Then he put it on.

He went down to the stables and ordered the carriage brought round.

Mrs. Pratt appeared in the stable yard, alarmed. “Sir — are you going out? In that?”

“I’m going to ask a question I should have asked a month ago,” Gideon said. “And I’m going to ask it in the coat of the man who earned the right to ask it.”

The sale was in two days. He had learned to do what she asked.

He had also learned when to stop asking.