I
It is improbable that Bromfield’s weekly paper would have yielded its
meagre space for the chronicling of Eileen Trench’s engagement, had
that important fact been divulged at home. There were other, more
momentous things going on. The entire front page of each issue was
plastered with the Stone sensation, which grew by melodramatic leaps
to something like an international affair. Fournier Stone had been
captured in Montreal, had broken from his captor and leaped into the
river. At first it was thought that he had been drowned; but he was an
agile swimmer, and it was reported that a man answering his description
had been seen near Longueuil, an hour or two after his escape.
From Mrs. Stone’s darkened bedroom came bulletins of one collapse after
another. The news that her darling had perished in the treacherous
waters beneath the Victoria bridge affected her so profoundly that
the physician resorted to nitroglycerine injections to restore her.
Lavinia read the accounts with emotions that surged from exultation to
a species of envy. The part she had been called upon to play was such
a drab one, that Lettie Stone’s colourful rôle stung her. To ease her
mind, she fell back on one passage of Scripture after another. She
might have known all along that the marriage would end in something
like this. It was right that it should end this way ... right that an
immoral, unprincipled woman should suffer. And Calvin? No doubt he was
suffering, too. But what was the good of going over that ground--ground
that she had long since stripped bare of every sprig of comfort or
misery?
At last came the startling denouement. Mrs. Calvin Stone was dead.
There had been a simple private funeral--attended by everybody in
Bromfield. That night Fournier had slipped stealthily into town, and
out to the cemetery, where he had ended his life on his mother’s grave.
The account of the double tragedy was not news to Lavinia. Ellen
Larimore had sent a telegram ... just why, it was difficult to explain.
The message came Sunday morning, while David and the girls were at
church and Lary was at the office getting out some rush specifications.
It conveyed only the bare information that Fournier Stone had shot
himself, the night after his mother’s funeral.
“Dead ... Calvin free!” the woman muttered, staring in a daze at the
words. And, after a moment of strangling emotion: “But what difference
does it make--now? I can’t be there to see it. I wouldn’t go, _if_ I
_could_.”
At this juncture Lavinia’s thoughts took an unexpected turn. She was
always thinking things she had no intention of harbouring within her
consciousness--as if she had a whole cellar full of ideas she did not
know she possessed. The one that came up to her now nauseated her. To
see Calvin weeping over the body of his dead wife! Oh, the insolent
superiority of the dead! You have no words with which to confront them.
All their failings, all their sins are lifted above your most virtuous
attack. It would be like this if David should die, and she could no
longer upbraid him. No, it was better for people to go on living. You
could at least speak your mind, without galling self-reproach.