Long Shadows

Chapter 7

Spring came early in 1874. By late March the blossom on the trees was out in Pennsylvania and folk were saying that it was more like May than it was March. Colonel Farrance had not been living in Whyteleafe in those days, nor was he as wealthy as he was later to become. He and Anne had a modest house in Harrisburg, not far from the State Capitol building. He was working his money hard, laying the foundations for his future prosperity. He was well respected in Harrisburg; both as a war hero and a shrewd, but fair, businessman. Life was good. He and Anne had been married for a shade more than two years and were hoping to have a child soon, although there was no real hurry.

Colonel Farrance had married late in life; he was forty four years of age when he and Anne became husband and wife after a whirlwind courtship. He sometimes wondered if his age had anything to do with the fact that Anne had not yet fallen pregnant, even though they had enjoyed an active and full married life. He supposed that it was just one of those things and there was no hurry. Anne was considerably younger than he was himself. She was not yet twenty five that March.

He came home from his office that day with no intimation of disaster. A most advantageous deal had been concluded, the one that laid the foundation for his acquisition of the estate in Whyteleafe. There was not a cloud in the sky, not even that little one, no bigger than a man’s hand, that scripture warns us to keep a lookout for. The colonel had marched through the front door, called out a cheery greeting to his wife and then walked into the large front room, which overlooked the street. Seated at his ease in that room was Andrew Crawley.

The colonel had not seen Crawley since before the war. When he had abandoned his gang and enlisted, he naturally hoped never again to set eyes upon any of those who had once looked up to him as their leader. Nobody in Harrisburg knew aught of him, other than that he had been an honourable and gallant officer during the War between the States and that he was now a leading figure in the commerce of the town. There was certainly no apprehension that one of their most notable citizens might once had robbed banks and derailed trains for a living. For this reason alone, he was far from overjoyed to come home that day and find Andrew Crawley sitting in his house, being entertained by his pretty young wife.

There was more to the case than this though. Although Crawley had more or less been his second in command during the outlaw days, he had never cared much for the man. There was something loathsome about him that one was hard pressed to identify. It was just that his presence affected many folk the way that having a venomous snake or poisonous insect near at hand might do. There was an instinctive feeling that here was a man you could never wholly trust. Of course, those qualities were not altogether bad in a ruthless outlaw, but Farrance was strongly repulsed by the sight of this man in his respectable home now. Crawley looked to him, grotesquely out of place in a domestic setting.

Anne knew little of his early life, beyond the bald fact that he had been a little disreputable. She certainly could not guess that he had been a murderer several times over when young, nor that he had come within a whisker of having a rope placed about his neck. For this reason, his first thought upon seeing Crawley talking to his wife was how far the man might have opened his mouth.

“Andrew,” he said, with a wide and insincere smile upon his face, “It surely is good to see you. It must be, how many years now? More than ten, I should say.”

“It was eighteen sixty one, when last we saw each other, Bob. I mark the day well.”

“Oh,” broke in Anne delightedly, “Do you call him Bob? I have never known anybody to address him as anything other than Robert or Colonel Farrance. How strange it is to hear him being called Bob!”

“’Long Bob‘, we used to call him back in those days, ma’am. On account of his height, you understand.”

This was dangerous territory indeed. Although his activities had chiefly been confined to Kansas, Colorado and Texas; the name of “Long Bob” and his gang was pretty widely known at one time. Farrance thought it might be a good thing to find out what Crawley was about and what he was doing here. He said to his wife, “Darling, I am going to take Mr Crawley into the garden and show him our roses. Not that there are many at this time of year. He used to be a rare one for flowers at one time. Is it not so Andrew?”

Crawley turned to Anne and said, “Indeed so ma’am. And sweet roses ever were my favourites.” He caught her eyes when he said this and stared at her for a second or so, which to his satisfaction caused her to blush slightly. This did not escape Colonel Farrance’s remark. He led his erstwhile friend into the garden and then asked as they walked along the path, “Tell me Andrew, is my wife observing us from the window?”

Crawley turned to look and then said, “No, I don’t believe that she is.”

Hardly were the words out of his mouth when Farrance had grabbed him around the throat with both hands and dragged him so into a little arbour of rose bushes where they could not be seen from either the house or street. Having got him into this convenient location, Farrance increased his pressure on the man’s throat, saying, “Well Andrew, you best tell me what your game is, before I choke the life out of you.”

Crawley was no weakling, but he had never been able to stand against Long Bob, especially when one of that fellow’s killing rages were upon him. He scrabbled ineffectually, trying to pluck the hands from where they were cutting off the flow of air to his lungs. A second before he began to lose consciousness, Farrance released his grip and gave Crawley an almighty shove, which sent him sprawling to the ground. Then he said, “Tell me now, what brings you here?”

Crawley could not speak for a time and sat on the earth coughing and spluttering. At length, he said, “I thought you was going to kill me!”

“Why,” said the colonel, “That is a mighty strange coincidence, for I thought the self-same thing myself. I mean it, tell me what you are doing here.”

“I need somewhere to stay for seven nights. Some men are looking for me. They have tracked me this far and I am dead if they catch up with me.”

“What is that to me?”

“You know what it is as well as I do. They catch up with me, then they catch up with you too.”

“So that’s the way of it,” said Farrance grimly, “You would threaten me? I would think you had more sense than that. You know how I have served men before for these tricks.”

“You can’t kill me, Bob. Your wife knows we are out here. What will you do, bury my body under your rose trees?”

“Why shouldn’t I just pitch you out onto the sidewalk?”

“For one thing, your wife would ask why. For another, I tell you now before God, that if I am taken here, then I will drag you down as well.”

Colonel Farrance came to a sudden decision. “If you need stay only seven days, then I might see my way to offering you hospitality for that period. But I tell you, try and harm me or my family, then it will go hard with you. You know me, Andrew. I am a man who does not bluster or bluff. Harm me or mine and there will be a reckoning for it and you had better be ready to pay the price.”

They went back into the house and Farrance said to his wife, “Poor Andrew here slipped on the path and took a tumble. He is not as surefooted as he thought himself to be. Have we a cloth or something to wipe the mud from his britches?”

Farrance was not easy about having a cunning reptile like Andrew Crawley in his home, but did not see that he had a deal of choice in the matter. It was, after all, for only for a week.

Until the day that Crawley showed up at his house, Farrance and his wife had lived a life of absolute trust and simple enjoyment of each other’s company. There had never been any shadow between them. That changed when Andrew Crawley arrived.

Anne appeared to be pleased and excited at the prospect of having a guest to stay for a week. Ever since he had observed that blush on her cheek when Crawley talked of roses as being his favourite flowers, a slight mistrust had arisen in Colonel Farrance’s mind concerning his wife. Andrew Crawley was an insinuating creature and Farrance could not help but wonder if she was charmed by his easy ways. There could be not the least doubt that Crawley went out of his way to pay attention to Anne, not in an obviously seductive way; more as any grateful guest would behaved towards a gracious hostess. Still and all, after three days had passed, Farrance could not rid himself of the terrible fear that his wife would play him false. It might not be a rational anxiety, but it was none the less powerful and disturbing for that.

Farrance could not keep away from the office at this time, much as he would have liked to. Several big deals were reaching fruition and he was negotiating for the estate at Whyteleafe as well. When they were alone after Crawley had taken his leave and gone to bed, all Anne’s conversation seemed to be about him. Practically every sentence she spoke, began, “Mr Crawley says…” And then, midway through the week, it was “Andrew says…”

Was his wife besotted with the rascal? Or did she perhaps have some schoolgirl crush on him? Or was he imagining the whole thing? Before the week had ended, Colonel Farrance was tormenting himself with the idea that his beautiful young wife was embarking upon an affair with the plausible rogue whom he had himself allowed into the house.

Anne knew that there was something the matter, but Farrance would not let her know the nature of it. He told her merely that his business deals were proving exceedingly vexatious and troublesome and that this was making him a little short with her. And so she spoke more and more with Crawley, who seemed to have nothing better to do with his time than flatter her and, God alone knew if this was true, perhaps flirt also.

Crawley was due to leave the house on the Wednesday. Anne had said openly what a pity it was that he had to go and asked Farrance whether he could not prevail upon his friend to stay any longer; all of which served only to fuel his worst suspicions.

On Tuesday, the day before Crawley was due to go, Farrance was hard at work in his office when it came into his mind that he could go home that very moment and see what was happening in his home. It was reckless of him to take his attention from the business affairs in which he was currently embroiled, but he could not keep his mind on things anyway, even though he had his head buried in ledgers and account books. So it was that at a little before midday on March 31^st, 1874, that Colonel Robert Farrance’s life changed forever and his whole world came tumbling down about his ears.

Everything looked as normal as could be when he approached the house and Farrance began to think that he was behaving like a damned fool. He opened the front door quietly, not closing it, lest the sound of the catch should signal his presence, and walked noiselessly into the front room. Andrew Crawley and his wife were both there. Crawley had his pants round his ankles and was more or less on top of his wife on the settee. Anne’s skirts were all thrown up and she was writhing in what Farrance took to be an agony of pleasure. The second he entered the room, Crawley hitched up his britches and rushed past the colonel and ran straight out of the front door.

He stood there rigid with shock and slowly became aware that Anne was sobbing pitifully. Farrance turned and left the house without a word.

For a week, Farrance stayed in an hotel, sending no word to Anne where he was or what was going on. Then he returned home, to find his wife in a precarious mental state. He moved into the room lately vacated by Andrew Crawley and refused point blank to discuss anything to do with what had taken place. Anne begged and pleaded, but he was utterly immovable. If she started to talk of the matter, he just stood up and left the room. If she pursued him further, he walked out of the house. Despite these strategies, he could not help hearing her say that Crawley had forced himself upon her. He did not know what she meant by this, nor did he care. As far as he was concerned, the marriage was over.

It took a few weeks, but Anne’s protestations gradually subsided and she just wandered around the house looking pale and listless. Then one day, a month after Crawley had left, he heard his wife throwing up in the next room. The same thing happened the following day and it dawned on him that she was pregnant.

The fact that he and his wife had not succeeded in having a baby for over two years and then, shortly after he caught her in what he took to be a compromising position, she became pregnant, did not escape the colonel’s attention. He could not put the matter into words, not even in his innermost thoughts, but the conviction seized ahold of him that his wife was carrying Andrew Crawley’s baby.

Somehow, the next eight months passed. What should have been a joyous time that the couple had eagerly looked forward to for years had become a shameful secret. Fortunately, good manners forbade anybody from noticing Anne’s condition unless she or her husband acknowledged it; which neither of them did. Farrance drank heavily and stayed late at the office in order to avoid seeing as much as he could, what he took to be the irrefutable evidence of his having been cuckolded.

One evening, he received word that he should return home at once. He did so, to find that his wife had both given birth to a daughter and died; all in the space of an hour. He was thus left with a child whom he took to be not his own. It was when he was handed this little fragment of mortality that he experienced the closest thing to a religious sensation that he had ever had in his life. He knew that whatever the circumstances which had led up to this helpless child’s birth, he alone now was responsible for the welfare and future happiness of this child.

On the midwife’s advice, he engaged a wetnurse for the baby; a woman who lived in the poorer part of town. This woman moved in for a time. Not long afterwards, Farrance and the baby moved to Whyteleaf.

At times, the colonel was absolutely sure that the baby was his. There were other occasions when he had no doubt at all that it was not and that he was raising another man’s child. It made not the least difference, because as she grew, he came to love the little girl and even when assailed by misgivings, did not think to lay them at the girl’s door as some fathers did when there was uncertainty about the parentage of a child.

Farrance loved his daughter Charlotte as though he had no doubts as to who her father truly was. It cannot be denied though that from time to time he looked at the child and wondered if he was looking at the natural daughter of the man who had destroyed his peace of mind and wrecked his marriage. He hoped that this never showed by any word or outward sign, but the niggling doubt never left him from the day that the girl was born; was she his child or the product of his cuckoldry?

It might be said that Andrew Crawley had been in some way Colonel Farrance’s constant companion over the last sixteen or seventeen years; or at least that his ghost had taken up residence in Farrance’s home. He had often wondered what he would do if he set eyes again on the man in the flesh. Had he caught hold of Crawley when he came across that shocking and distressing scene, then murder would probably have been done there and then. However, with the passing years, his passions had faded and died. It was enough for Robert Farrance to know that he and his daughter lived a contented and fulfilled life.

Ikey Wilson’s arrival was therefore not in the nature of a wholly unespected interuption to the peaceful life that Colonel farrance had been living. He had known all along that there would be a sequel or finishing scene to round off the matter of Charlotte’s dubious paternity. He was not best pleased to see Wilson again after all those years, but he would be a liar were he to assert that it was unexpected. He knew that he had unfinished business with Andrew Crawley.