I
STATEMENT OF JOEL HETMAN, JR.
I AM the most unfortunate of men. Rich, respected, fairly well educated
and of sound health—with many other advantages usually valued by those
having them and coveted by those who have them not—I sometimes think that
I should be less unhappy if they had been denied me, for then the
contrast between my outer and my inner life would not be continually
demanding a painful attention. In the stress of privation and the need
of effort I might sometimes forget the somber secret ever baffling the
conjecture that it compels.
I am the only child of Joel and Julia Hetman. The one was a well-to-do
country gentleman, the other a beautiful and accomplished woman to whom
he was passionately attached with what I now know to have been a jealous
and exacting devotion. The family home was a few miles from Nashville,
Tennessee, a large, irregularly built dwelling of no particular order of
architecture, a little way off the road, in a park of trees and
shrubbery.
At the time of which I write I was nineteen years old, a student at Yale.
One day I received a telegram from my father of such urgency that in
compliance with its unexplained demand I left at once for home. At the
railway station in Nashville a distant relative awaited me to apprise me
of the reason for my recall: my mother had been barbarously murdered—why
and by whom none could conjecture, but the circumstances were these: My
father had gone to Nashville, intending to return the next afternoon.
Something prevented his accomplishing the business in hand, so he
returned on the same night, arriving just before the dawn. In his
testimony before the coroner he explained that having no latchkey and not
caring to disturb the sleeping servants, he had, with no clearly defined
intention, gone round to the rear of the house. As he turned an angle of
the building, he heard a sound as of a door gently closed, and saw in the
darkness, indistinctly, the figure of a man, which instantly disappeared
among the trees of the lawn. A hasty pursuit and brief search of the
grounds in the belief that the trespasser was some one secretly visiting
a servant proving fruitless, he entered at the unlocked door and mounted
the stairs to my mother’s chamber. Its door was open, and stepping into
black darkness he fell headlong over some heavy object on the floor. I
may spare myself the details; it was my poor mother, dead of
strangulation by human hands!
Nothing had been taken from the house, the servants had heard no sound,
and excepting those terrible finger-marks upon the dead woman’s
throat—dear God! that I might forget them!—no trace of the assassin was
ever found.
I gave up my studies and remained with my father, who, naturally, was
greatly changed. Always of a sedate, taciturn disposition, he now fell
into so deep a dejection that nothing could hold his attention, yet
anything—a footfall, the sudden closing of a door—aroused in him a fitful
interest; one might have called it an apprehension. At any small
surprise of the senses he would start visibly and sometimes turn pale,
then relapse into a melancholy apathy deeper than before. I suppose he
was what is called a “nervous wreck.” As to me, I was younger then than
now—there is much in that. Youth is Gilead, in which is balm for every
wound. Ah, that I might again dwell in that enchanted land!
Unacquainted with grief, I knew not how to appraise my bereavement; I
could not rightly estimate the strength of the stroke.
One night, a few months after the dreadful event, my father and I walked
home from the city. The full moon was about three hours above the
eastern horizon; the entire countryside had the solemn stillness of a
summer night; our footfalls and the ceaseless song of the katydids were
the only sound aloof. Black shadows of bordering trees lay athwart the
road, which, in the short reaches between, gleamed a ghostly white. As
we approached the gate to our dwelling, whose front was in shadow, and in
which no light shone, my father suddenly stopped and clutched my arm,
saying, hardly above his breath:
“God! God! what is that?”
“I hear nothing,” I replied.
“But see—see!” he said, pointing along the road, directly ahead.