Annie found the living room of the Fairchild homestead unoccupied. She
could hear Alvira talking with the Lawton girl out in the kitchen, and
from the parlor on the other side there came a murmuring sound which she
did not comprehend at once. As she laid her hand upon the stair door,
with the purpose of ascending to Sabrina’s room, this sound rose to
a distinguishable pitch. It was a woman’s weeping. Annie hesitated,
listening for a moment; then she turned, rolled one of the parlor doors
back, and entered.
Isabel lay buried in the blue easy-chair, her face, encircled by one
arm, hidden against its back. The great braids of her yellow hair were
dishevelled and loosened, without being in graceful disorder. Her whole
form trembled with the force of her hysterical sobbing.
At Annie’s touch upon her shoulder she raised her face quickly. It was
tear-stained, haggard, and looked soft with that flabbiness of outline
which trouble may give to the fairest woman’s beauty when it is not
built upon youth; over this face passed a quick look of disappointment
at recognition of Annie.
“Oh, it is you!”
The almost petulant words escaped before Isabel could collect herself.
She sat up now, wiping her eyes, and striving with all her might for
control of her thoughts and tongue.
“Yes, Isabel. I _was_ going up to Sabrina’s room, but I heard you
sobbing here, and I felt that I must come to you. It is all so
terrible--and I do so feel for you!”
“Terrible--yes, it _is_ terrible! It was kind of you to come--very kind.
I--I scarcely realize it all, yet. It was such a shock!”
“I know, poor dear.” Annie laid her hand caressingly on the other’s
brow. She had not come with over-tenderness in her heart, but this
unexpected depth of suffering, so palpably real, touched her keenly. “I
know. Don’t try to talk to me--don’t feel that it is necessary. Only let
me be of use to you. It will be a dreadful time for you all--and perhaps
I can spare you some. I shan’t go to the school to-day. Oughtn’t you to
go up to your room now, Isabel, and lie down, and leave me here to--to
arrange things?”
“No, not yet! Perhaps soon I will. My impulse is to stay down, to spare
myself nothing, to force myself to suffer everything that there is to be
suffered. I’ll see; perhaps that may not be best. But not now! not now!
No--don’t go! Stay with me. I dread to be left alone; my own thoughts
murder me!” She rose to her feet, and began pacing to and from the
piano. “Let me walk--and you talk to me--anything, it doesn’t matter
what--it will help occupy my mind. Oh, yes--were you at Crump’s last
night? I heard them come by, late, singing.”
“Oh, Isabel, how _can_ we talk of such trivial things? Yes, I was there;
I was in the singing party, too. It makes me shudder to think that at
that very minute, perhaps----” The girl paused for a moment, with
parted lips and troubled face, as if pondering some sudden thought; then
exclaimed, “_Oh-h!_ the horse! Could it have been!”
“Could what have been!” Isabel stopped in her caged-panther-like pacing,
and looked deep inquiry.
“But no, of course not! What connection _could_ there have been! You
see, after I left the wagon, to cut across by the path at the end of the
poplars, a horse came galloping like the wind up the road, with some
figure lying low on its back. We were too far away to see distinctly,
though the night was so light”--she had insensibly drifted into the use
of the plural pronoun--“but the thing went by so like a flash that it
seemed an apparition. And come to think of it, there was an effort to
avoid noise. I know I wondered at there being such a muffled sound, and
Seth explained----”
She stopped short, conscious of having said more than she intended.
“Seth was with _you_, then?”
“Yes--he met me, quite unexpectedly, by the thorns. He had been out
walking, he said; the night was too fine to sleep.”
“Yes, I heard him go out, an hour and a half at least before the singers
came by. Did he say anything to you about what had happened, here in the
house, during the evening?” Isabel’s azure eyes took on their darkest
hue now, in the intentness of her gaze into her companion’s face.
“Only that he had had words with Albert--poor boy! how like a knife the
memory of them must be to him now!”
“Did he tell you what the words were about?”
“No.”
“Did he say anything else to you?”
Annie grew restive under this persistent interrogation. The habit of
deference to the older, wiser, more beautiful woman was very strong with
her, but this did seem like an undue strain upon it.
“Why yes, no doubt he did. We talked of a number of things.”
“What were they? What did he say?”
“Well, really, Isabel, I----”
The elder woman gave a little click with her teeth and, after a
searching glance into the other’s face, resumed her walk up and down,
her hands clenched rather than clasped before her, and her movement more
feline than ever. “Well, really you--what?” she said with the faintest
suggestion of a mocking snarl in the intonation.
The girl drew herself up. It was not in human nature to keep her tone
from chilling. “Really, I think I would better go up to Sabrina. I
fancied I might be of some service to you.”
“Annie! Are you going to speak like that to me?--_now_ of all times!”
The tone was outwardly appealing. Annie’s sense was not skilled enough
to detect the vibration of menace in it.
“No, Isabel, not at all. But you make it hard for me. Can you wonder? I
think to comfort a desolate, stricken woman in her hour of sorrow, and
she responds by peremptory cross-examination as to what a young man may
have said to me, in the moonlight. Is it strange that I am puzzled?”
“Strange! Is not everything strange around and about me! That I should
have married as I did; that I, loathing farm life, should have come
here to live; that I should be waiting here now for them to bring
my husband’s corpse home to me--is it not all strange, unreal? The
conversation ought to be to match, oughtn’t it?”--she spoke with an
unnatural, tremulous vivacity which pained and frightened the girl--“and
so, while we wait, I talk to you about young men, and the moonlight, and
all that. _Can’t_ you see that my mind is tearing itself to pieces,
like a machine in motion with some big rod or other loose, pounding,
crushing, right and left like a flail! We _must_ talk! Tell me what he
said, anything--everything.”
“Why, that isn’t so easy,” Annie replied dubiously, much mistrusting the
sanity of all this conversation, but pushed along with it in spite
of herself. “He said something about a misunderstanding with his poor
brother, and then--then something that I didn’t at all understand about
a temptation, a great temptation leading him to the gates of hell he
called it--but you know how Seth is given to exaggerate everything--and
then----”
“He told you all this, did he. How confiding! How sweet! Go on--what
_else_ did he say to you--in the moonlight.”
Annie felt vaguely that the tone was cruel and hostile. As she paused in
bewildered self-inquiry, Isabel glided forward and confronted her, with
gleaming eyes and a white, drawn face.
“Why do you stop there?” she demanded in a swift, bitter whisper.
“There _are_ things which--a girl doesn’t like to--have dragged from her
in this----”
Even as Annie was forming this halting halfsentence, a change came over
the elder woman. She dropped the hand which had been raised as if to
clutch Annie’s shoulder. The flashing light passed from her eyes, and
something of color, or at least of calm, came back into her face.
“I understand!” she said, simply.
“You can see, Isabel, that this is not a time I should have chosen to
speak of such things to you, if you had not insisted. It seems almost
barbarous to bring my joy forward, at such a time, and appear to
contrast it with your affliction. You _won’t_ think I wanted to do it,
will you?”
The widow of a day was looking contemplatively at her companion; she
had effaced from both expression and voice every trace of her recent
agitation. “Are you sure it is all joy?” she asked calmly.
“I wouldn’t admit it to him. And at first I was not altogether clear
about it in my own mind. Indeed, with this other and terrible thing, I
can scarcely think soberly about it, as it ought to be thought of. But
still--you know, Isabel, we were little children together--and I have
never so much as thought of anybody else.” Annie spoke more confidently,
as she went on; the notion that there had been malevolence in Isabel’s
tone had faded into a foolish fancy: there seemed almost encouragement,
sympathy, in her present expression. “I should have lived and died an
old maid if he had not come to me. And it comforts me, dear, too, to
think that in your great trouble I shall have almost a sister’s right to
be with you, and help you bear it.”
Isabel did not respond to this tender proffer of solace. She still stood
eying her companion reflectively. “You are very certain of being happy,
then?” she mused.
A sense of discordance touched the girl’s heart again--a something
in the restrained, calm tone which seemed to sting. She looked more
searchingly into the speaker’s eyes, and read in their blue depths a
mystery of meaning which froze and silenced her. While Annie looked, in
growing paralysis of thought, Isabel spoke again, slowly:
“Your married life at least won’t be deadly dull, as mine was. There
must be great possibilities of excitement in living with a man who can
propose marriage to a girl--in the moonlight--_on his way home from
having murdered his brother!_”
*****
Young Samantha Lawton, the member of the tribe who served as
maid-of-all-work at the Warren homestead, had a mind at once imaginative
and curious. From an upper window she had caught sight of the mournful
procession from Tallman’s ravine, winding its way down the hill, in the
distance. She stole out from the house, whose bedridden occupant could
at best only yell herself hoarse in calling if she chanced to need
anything during her absence, and walked up the path by the thorns to the
main road, over which the cortege would presently pass. Inside the sharp
angle of shade made at this corner, where the thorns aspiringly joined
the poplars, there was an old board seat between two trees, the relic of
some past and forgotten habit of rendezvous, perhaps whole generations
old. Samantha knew of this seat, and stood on it now; from it, she had a
clear view of the road in front and, through the tangled thorns, of the
meadow-path to the left, while there were branches enough about her to
render her practically invisible. From this coign of vantage Samantha
saw some things which she had not expected to witness.
Annie Fairchild came suddenly across the line of vision, from the
direction of the dead man’s house, and walked straight to the stile
at the edge of the thorn row. There was something so curious in
the expression of her face, as she advanced, that Samantha scented
discovery, and prepared on the instant an exculpatory lie. But Annie
passed the one place where discovery was probable, and the hidden girl
saw now that the strange look had some other explanation. She crossed
the stile, and clung to the fence post, as if for support; glanced up
the road, where now the black front of the nearing procession could be
discerned; then with a shudder turned her face in profile toward
her unsuspected observer, and looked vacantly, piteously up into the
afternoon sky.
Annie’s face, with its straight, firm outlines, was not one which lent
itself to the small facial play of evanescent emotions. Its regular
features habitually expressed an intelligent, self-reliant composure,
not easily responsive to shades of feeling. To see this calm countenance
transfixed now with a helpless stare of anguish was to comprehend that
something terrible had happened.
She stood at the stile, desperately clinging to the rail at first, then
edging into the thorns to be more out of sight, as the ambulance and
the little file of friends moved slowly by. She noted nothing of the
peculiarities of the procession--that most of the silent followers
were strange men, in city dress--but only gazed at Seth, walking along
gravely behind the vehicle, beside his brother John. She saw him with
eyes distended, fixed--as of one following the unfolding of a hideous
nightmare. So long as the party remained in sight, these set, affrighted
eyes followed him. Then they closed, and the sufferer reeled as if in a
swoon.
Samantha’s first and best impulse was to get down and go to the agonized
woman’s aid; her second, and controlling, thought, was to stop where she
was, and see and hear all that was going.
Annie seemed to recover her strength, if not her composure. She wrung
her hands wildly and talked with strange incoherence aloud to herself.
Once she started, as if to cross the stile again and return to the house
of mourning, but drew back. At last, walking straight ahead, like one in
a dream, she moved toward her home.
Samantha followed at a safe distance, marvelling deeply.