Byfleet people knew each other well, and when this mysteriously absent
person did not return to the town-farm at the end of a week, public
interest became much excited; and presently it was ascertained that
Betsey Lane was neither making a visit to her friends the Deckers on
Birch Hill, nor to any nearer acquaintances; in fact, she had
disappeared altogether from her wonted haunts. Nobody remembered to have
seen her pass, hers had been such an early flitting; and when somebody
thought of her having gone away by train, he was laughed at for
forgetting that the earliest morning train from South Byfleet, the
nearest station, did not start until long after eight o’clock; and if
Betsey had designed to be one of the passengers, she would have started
along the road at seven, and been seen and known of all women. There was
not a kitchen in that part of Byfleet that did not have windows toward
the road. Conversation rarely left the level of the neighborhood gossip:
to see Betsey Lane, in her best clothes, at that hour in the morning,
would have been the signal for much exercise of imagination; but as day
after day went by without news, the curiosity of those who knew her best
turned slowly into fear, and at last Peggy Bond again gave utterance to
the belief that Betsey had either gone out in the early morning and put
an end to her life, or that she had gone to the Centennial. Some of the
people at table were moved to loud laughter,—it was at supper-time on a
Sunday night,—but others listened with great interest.
“She never’d put on her good clothes to drownd herself,” said the widow.
“She might have thought ’twas good as takin’ ’em with her, though. Old
folks has wandered off an’ got lost in the woods afore now.”
Mrs. Dow and Peggy resented this impertinent remark, but deigned to take
no notice of the speaker. “She wouldn’t have wore her best clothes to
the Centennial, would she?” mildly inquired Peggy, bobbing her head
toward the ceiling. “’Twould be a shame to spoil your best things in
such a place. An’ I don’t know of her havin’ any money; there’s the end
o’ that.”
“You’re bad as old Mis’ Bland, that used to live neighbor to our folks,”
said one of the old men. “She was dreadful precise; an’ she so
begretched to wear a good alapaca dress that was left to her, that it
hung in a press forty year, an’ baited the moths at last.”
“I often seen Mis’ Bland a-goin’ in to meetin’ when I was a young girl,”
said Peggy Bond approvingly. “She was a good-appearin’ woman, an’ she
left property.”
“Wish she’d left it to me, then,” said the poor soul opposite, glancing
at her pathetic row of children: but it was not good manners at the farm
to deplore one’s situation, and Mrs. Dow and Peggy only frowned. “Where
do you suppose Betsey can be?” said Mrs. Dow, for the twentieth time.
“She didn’t have no money. I know she ain’t gone far, if it’s so that
she’s yet alive. She’s b’en real pinched all the spring.”
“Perhaps that lady that come one day give her some,” the keeper’s wife
suggested mildly.
“Then Betsey would have told me,” said Mrs. Dow, with injured dignity.