The next morning, when Mrs. Balfame, running lightly down the back
stairs, entered the kitchen half an hour earlier than her usual
appearance in the dining-room, the front of her housefrock covered with
a large apron and her sleeves pinned to the elbow, she beheld Frieda
slicing potatoes.
"Why!" The exclamation was impetuous, but her quick mind adapted itself.
"I woke up early and thought I would come down and help," she continued
evenly. "You have had so much to do of late."
Frieda was regarding her with intense suspicion. "Never you have done
that before," she growled. "You will see if I have the dishes by the
dinner washed."
"Nonsense. And everything is so different these days. I am hungry, too.
I thought it would be nice to hurry breakfast."
"Breakfast always is by eight. You have told me that when I come. I get
up by half past six. First I air the house, and sweep the hall. Then I
make the fire and put the water to boil. Then I peel the potatoes. Then
I make the biscuit. Then I boil the eggs. Then I make the coffee--"
"I know. You are marvellously systematic. But I thought you might make
the coffee at once."
"Always the coffee come last." Frieda resumed her task.
"But I don't eat potatoes for breakfast."
"I eat the potatoes. When they fry in the pan, then I put the biscuit in
the oven. Then I boil the eggs and then I make the coffee. Breakfast is
by eight o'clock."
Mrs. Balfame, with a good-humoured laugh, turned to leave the kitchen.
But her mind, alert with apprehension, cast up a memory, vague but far
from soothing. "By the way, I seem to remember that I woke up suddenly
in the night and heard voices down here. Did you have visitors?"
Frieda flushed the deep and angry red of her infrequent moments of
embarrassment. "I have not visitors in the night." She turned on the
water tap, which made noise enough to discourage further attempts at
conversation; and Mrs. Balfame, to distract her mind, dusted the
parlour. She dared not go out into the yard and walk off her
restlessness, for there were now two sentinels preserving what they
believed to be a casual attitude before her gate. She would have given
much to know whether those men were watching her movements or those of
her servant.
Immediately after breakfast, the systematic Frieda was persuaded to go
to the railway station and buy the New York papers when the train came
in. Frieda might be a finished product of the greatest machine shop the
world has ever known, but she was young and she liked the bustle of life
at the station, and the long walk down Main Street, so different from
the aristocratic repose of Elsinore Avenue. Mrs. Balfame, watching
behind the curtain, saw that one of the sentinels followed her. The
other continued to lean against the lamp-post whittling a stick. Both
she and Frieda were watched!
But the disquiet induced by the not unnatural surveillance of premises
identified with a recent crime was soon forgotten in the superior powers
of the New York press to excite both disquiet and indignation.
She had missed a photograph of herself while dusting the parlour and had
forgiven the loyal thief as it was a remarkably pretty picture and
portrayed a woman sweet, fashionable, and lofty. To her horror the
picture which graced the first page of the great dailies was that of a
hard defiant female, quite certain, without a line of letter press, to
prejudice a public anxious to believe the worst.
Tears of outraged vanity blurred her vision for a few moments before the
full menace of that silent witness took possession of her. She knew that
most people deteriorated under the mysterious but always fatal encounter
of their photographs with the "staff artist," but she felt all the
sensations of the outraged novice.
A moment after she had dashed her tears away she turned pale; and when
she finished reading the interviews the beautiful whiteness of her skin
was disfigured by a greenish pallor.
The interviews were written with a devilish cunning that protected the
newspapers from danger of libel suit but subtly gave the public to
understand that its appetite for a towering figure in the Balfame case
was about to be gratified.
There was no doubt that two shots had been fired from the grove
simultaneously, and from revolvers of different calibre (picture of tree
and gate).
Was one of them--the smaller--fired by a woman? And if so, by what
woman?
Not one of the females whose names had been linked at one time or
another with the versatile Mr. Balfame but had proved her alibi, and so
far as was known--although of course some one as yet unsuspected may
have climbed the back fence and hid in the grove--the only two women on
the premises were the widow and her extraordinarily plain servant.
Balfame was shot with a .41 revolver. In one of the newspapers it was
casually and not too politely remarked that Mrs. Balfame had larger
hands and feet than one would expect from her general elegance of figure
and aristocratic features, and in the same rambling sentence (this was
written by the deeply calculating Mr. Broderick) the public was informed
that certain footprints might have been those of a large woman or of a
medium sized man. In the next paragraph but one Mrs. Balfame's stately
height was again commented upon, but as the public had already been
informed that she was an expert at target practice, reiteration of this
fact was astutely avoided.
A great deal was said here and there of her composure, her large
studiously expressionless grey eyes, her nimble mind that so often
routed her inquisitors, but was allied to a temperament of ice and a
manifest power of cool and deliberate calculation.
The dullest reader was quickened into the belief that he was the real
detective and that his unerring sense had carried him straight to the
woman who had hated the murdered man and had quarrelled with him in
public a few hours before his death.
The episode of Mrs. Balfame's offer to make her husband a glass of
doctored lemonade and the disappearance of both beverage and glass was
not mentioned; presumably these bright young men did not believe in
digressions or in rousing a curiosity they might not be able to appease.
The interview concluded with a maddening hint at immediate developments.
Mrs. Balfame let the papers drop to the floor one by one; when she had
finished the last she drew her breath painfully for several moments. The
room turned black, and it was cut by rows of bared and menacing teeth,
infinitely multiplied.
But she was not the woman to give way to fear for long, or even to
bewilderment. There could be no real danger, and all that should concern
her was the outrageous, the intolerably vulgar publicity. A woman whose
good taste was both natural and cultivated, she felt this ruthless
tossing of her sacred person into the public maw much as the more
refined octoroons may have felt when they stood on the auction block in
the good old days down South. She shuddered and gritted her teeth; she
wished that she were a hysterical woman that she might find relief in
shrieking at the top of her voice and smashing the furniture.
Why, oh why, could not David Balfame have been permitted by the fate
which had decreed his end on that particular night to enter the house
and drink the lemonade; to die decently, painlessly, bloodlessly (she
shrank aside when compelled to pass those blood stains on the brick
path), as any man might die when his overtaxed heart simply stopped? She
would have run down the moment she heard the fall, she would have
managed to get the glass out of the way if Frieda had condescended to
visit the scene, which was quite unlikely. She would have run over to
Doctor Lequer, who lived next door to the Gifnings, and he would have
sent for the coroner. Both inevitably would have pronounced the death
due to heart failure. It was fate that had bungled, not she.
She mused, however, that she should have had a duplicate glass of
lemonade to leave half consumed on the table, as it would be recalled
that he had expected to imbibe a soothing draught immediately upon his
return; and adjacent liquids invariably induce suspicion in cases of
sudden death. But that did not matter now.
She set her wits to work upon the identity of her companion in the
grove. Was it Frieda? Or an accomplice of the girl, who was already in
the house or on the alert to direct him out by the rear pathway? But why
Frieda? She knew the raging hate that had filled her husband since the
declaration of war, and she knew that his rivals in politics hated him
with increasing virulency; as they were beginning to hate everybody that
presumed to question the right and might of Germany.
But she was a woman just and sensible. Nor for a moment could she
visualise Old Dutch or any of his tribe shooting David Balfame because
he cursed the Kaiser and sang Tipperary. The supposition was too shallow
to be entertained.
The person in the grove had been either a bitter political rival too
intimate with the local police to be in danger of arrest, or some woman
who for a time may have believed herself to be his wife in the larger
village of New York.
She could have sworn that that stealthy figure so close to her was a
man, but women's skirts were very narrow and silent these days, and
after all she herself was as tall as the average man.
Before noon the house was filled with sympathising and indignant
friends. Cummack came up town to assure her that it was a shame; and he
would ask Rush if those New York papers couldn't be had up for libel.
He'd take the eleven-thirty for Dobton and consult with him.
The ladies were knitting, no one more impersonally than Mrs. Balfame,
although she was wondering if these kind friends expected to stay to
lunch, when an automobile drove honking up to the door, and Mrs. Battle
teetered over to the window.
"For the land's sake," she exclaimed. "If it isn't the deputy sheriff
from Dobton. Now, what do you suppose?"
Mrs. Balfame stood up suddenly, and the other women sat with their
needles suspended as if suddenly overcome by a noxious gas, with the
exception of Mrs. Cummack, who ran over to her sister-in-law and put her
plump arm about that easily compassed waist. Mrs. Balfame drew away
haughtily.
"I am not frightened," she said in her sweet cool voice. "I am prepared
for anything after those newspapers--that is all."
The bell pealed, and Mrs. Gifning, too curious to wait upon the
hand-maiden, ran out and opened the front door. She returned a moment
later with her little blue eyes snapping with excitement.
"What do you think?" she gasped. "It is Frieda they want. She is being
subpoenaed to Dobton to testify before the Grand Jury. The deputy
sheriff is going to take her with him."
Mrs. Balfame returned to her chair with such composure that no one
suspected the sudden weakening of her knees. Instantly she realised the
meaning of the voices she had heard in the night. Frieda had been
"interviewed," either by the press or the police, and induced, probably
bribed, to talk. No wonder she had not run away.
But she too resumed her knitting.