ELIMINATION
At about three o'clock in the afternoon Mr. Ransom left his room. He had
been careful almost from his first arrival to sit with his door ajar. He
had, therefore, only to give it a slight push and walk out when he heard
the bustle of preparation going on in the two rooms in whose future
occupancy he was so vitally interested. A maid stood in the hall. A man
within was pushing about furniture. The landlady was giving orders. His
course down-stairs did not lead him so far as those rooms, so he called
out pleasantly:
"I have written till my head aches, Mrs. Deo. I must venture out
notwithstanding the rain. In which direction shall I find the best
walking?"
She came to him all eagerness and smiles. "It's all bad, such a day,"
said she, "but it's muddiest down by the factories. You had better climb
the hill."
"Where the cemetery is?" he asked.
"Yes; do you object to cemeteries? Ours is thought to be very
interesting. We have stones there whose inscriptions are a hundred and
fifty years old. But it's a bad day to walk amongst graves. Perhaps you
had better go east. I'm sorry we should have such a storm on your first
day. Must you go out?"
He forced a suffering look into his eyes, and insisting that nothing but
outdoor air would help him when he had a headache, hastened down-stairs
and so out. A blinding gust seized him as he faced the hill, but he drew
down his umbrella and hurried on. He had a purpose in following her
suggestion as to a walk in this direction. Dark as the grasses were, he
meant to search the cemetery for the graves of the Hazens and see what he
could learn from them.
He met three persons on his way, all of whom turned to look at him.
This was in the village. On the hillside he met nobody. Wind and rain
and mud were all; desolation in the prospect and all but desolation in
his heart. At the brow he first caught sight of the broken stone wall
which separated the old burying place from the road. There lay his path.
Happily he could tread it unnoticed and unwatched. There was no one
within sight, high or low.
He spent a half hour among the tombs before
he struck the name he was looking for.
Another ten minutes before he found those
of his wife's family. Then he had his reward.
On a low brown shaft he read the names of
father and mother, and beneath them the following
lines:
Sacred to the memory of
Anitra
Died June 7, 1885
Aged 6 years and one day.
_Of such is the Kingdom of heaven._
The twin! Georgian was mad. This record showed that her little sister lay
here. Anitra,--yes, that was the name of her other half. He remembered it
well. Georgian had mentioned it to him more than once. And this child,
this Anitra, had been buried here for fifteen years.
Deeply indignant at his wife's duplicity, he took a look at the opposite
side of the shaft where still another surprise awaited him. Here was the
record of the brother; the brother he had so lately talked to and who had
seemingly proven his claim to the name he now read:
Alfred Francesco
only son of
Georgian Toritti afterwards Georgian Hazen.
Lost at sea February, 1895.
Aged twenty-five years.
An odd inscription opening up conjectures of the most curious and
interesting nature. But it was not this fact which struck him at the
time, it was the possibility underlying the simple statement, Lost
at sea. This, as the wry-necked man had said, admitted of a possible
resurrection. Here was no body. A mound showed where Anitra had been laid
away; a little mound surmounted by a headstone carved with her name. But
only these few words gave evidence of the young man's death, and
inscriptions of this nature are sometimes false.
The conclusion was obvious. It was the brother and not the sister who had
reappeared. Georgian was not only playing him false but deceiving the
general public. In fact, knowingly or unknowingly, she was perpetrating
a great fraud. He was inclined to think unknowingly. He began to regard
with less incredulity Hazen's declaration that the shock of her brother's
return had unsettled her mind.
Distressed, but no longer the prey of distracting doubt, he again
examined the inscription before him and this time noticed its
peculiarities. _Alfred Francesco, only son of Georgian Toritti afterwards
Georgian Hazen._ Afterwards! What was meant by that _afterwards_? That
the woman had been married twice, and that this Alfred Francesco was the
son of her first husband rather than of the one whose name he bore? It
looked that way. There was a suggestion of Italian parentage in the
Francesco which corresponded well with the decidedly Italian Toritti.
Perplexed and not altogether satisfied with his discoveries, he turned to
leave the place when he found himself in the presence of a man carrying a
kit of tools and wearing on his face a harsh and discontented expression.
As this man was middle-aged and had no other protection from the rain
than a rubber cape for his shoulders, the cause of his discontent was
easy enough to imagine; though why he should come into this place with
tools was more than Mr. Ransom could understand.
[Illustration: "I cut them letters there fifteen years ago. Now I'm to
cut 'em out."]
"Hello, stranger." It was this man who spoke. "Interested in the Hazen
monument, eh? Well, I'll soon give you reason to be more interested yet.
Do you see this inscription--On June 7, 1885; Anitra, aged six, and the
rest of it? Well, I cut them letters there fifteen years ago. Now I'm to
cut 'em out. The orders has just come. The youngster didn't die it seems,
and I'm commanded to chip the fifteen-year-old lie out. What do you think
of that? A sweet job for a day like this. Mor'n likely it'll put me under
a stone myself. But folks won't listen to reason. It's been here fifteen
years and seventeen days and now it must come out, rain or shine, before
night-fall. 'Before the sun sets,' so the telegram ran. I'll be blessed
but I'll ask a handsome penny for this job."
Mr. Ransom, controlling himself with difficulty, pointed to the little
mound. "But the child seems to have been buried here," he said.
"Lord bless you, yes, a child was buried here, but we all knew years ago
that it mightn't be Hazen's. The schoolhouse burned and a dozen children
with it. One of the little bodies was given to Mr. Hazen for burial. He
believed it was his Anitra, but a good while after, a bit of the dress
she wore that day was found hanging to a bush where some gipsies had
been. There were lots of folks who remembered that them gipsies had
passed the schoolhouse a half hour before the fire, and they now say
found the little girl hiding behind the wood-pile, and carried her off.
No one ever knew; but her death was always thought doubtful by every one
but Mr. and Mrs. Hazen. They stuck to the old idee and believed her to be
buried under this mound where her name is."
"But one of the children was buried here," persisted Ransom. "You must
have known the number of those lost and would surely be able to tell if
one were missing, as must have been the case if the gipsies had carried
off Anitra before the fire."
"I don't know about that," objected the stone-cutter. "There was, in
those days, a little orphan girl, almost an idiot, who wandered about
this town, staying now in one house and now in another as folks took
compassion on her. She was never seen agin after that fire. If she was in
the schoolhouse that day, as she sometimes was, the number would be made
up. No one was left to tell us. It was an awful time, sir. The village
hasn't got over it yet."
Mr. Ransom made some sympathetic rejoinder and withdrew towards the
gateway, but soon came strolling back. The man had arranged his tools and
was preparing to go to work.
"It seems as if the family was pretty well represented here," remarked
Ransom. "Is it the girl herself,--Anitra, I believe you called her,--who
has ordered this record of her death removed?"
"Oh, no, you don't know them Hazens. There's one of 'em who has quite a
story; the twin of this Anitra. She lived to grow up and have a lot of
money left her. If you lived in Sitford, or lived in New York, you'd know
all about her; for her name's been in the papers a lot this week. She's
the great lady who married and left her husband all in one day; and for
what reason do you think? We know, because she don't keep no secrets from
her old friends. _She's found this sister_, and it's her as has ordered
me to chip away this name. She wants it done to-day, because she's coming
here with this gal she's found. Folks say she ran across her in the
street and knew her at once. Can you guess how?"
"From her name?"
"Lord, no; from what I hear, she hadn't any name. _From her looks!_ She
saw her own self when she looked at her."
"How interesting, how very interesting," stammered Mr. Ransom, feeling
his newly won convictions shaken again. "Quite remarkable the whole
story. And so is this inscription," he added, pointing to the words
_Georgian Toritti_, etc. "Did the woman have two husbands, and was the
Alfred Hazen, whose death at sea is commemorated here, the son of Toritti
or of Hazen?"
"Of Toritti," grumbled the man, evidently displeased at the question. "A
black-browed devil who it won't do to talk about here. Mrs. Hazen was
only a slip of a gal when she married him, and as he didn't live but a
couple o' months folks have sort o' forgiven her and forgotten him. To us
Mrs. Hazen was always Mrs. Hazen; and Alf--well, he was just Alf Hazen
too; a lad with too much good in him to perish in them murderous waters a
thousand miles from home."
So they still believed Hazen dead! No intimation of his return had as yet
reached Sitford. This was what Ransom wanted to know. But there was still
much to learn. Should he venture an additional question? No, that would
show more than a stranger's interest in a topic so purely local. Better
leave well enough alone and quit the spot before he committed himself.
Uttering some commonplace observation about the fatality attending
certain families, he nodded a friendly good-by and made for the entrance.
As he stepped below the brow of the hill he heard the first click of the
workman's hammer on the chisel with which he proposed to eliminate the
word _Anitra_ from the list of the Hazen dead.