"DUST TO DUST"
At the coroner's inquest Margaret was the first one questioned.
When Victor De Jarnette breathed his last, Dr. Semple had taken her by
the hand and led her, apparently almost stupefied, into Richard's room,
there to await the summons to appear before the coroner, who was
immediately notified of the death. When she came in she was entirely
collected, though very pale. Her appearance indicated more horror at
what had occurred than grief, which was but natural under the
circumstances, as more than one man thought, recalling the past year.
When questioned, she stated that her husband had been with her through
the afternoon, that he had left her home about four o'clock, and that
she had come down to the office an hour or so later. She had gone
directly to the door of the main office, and just before reaching it had
heard the pistol shot. She ran through the front office into Mr. De
Jarnette's private room, feeling sure that the sound had come from
there. She had found him on the floor, and near him a revolver which she
recognized as one that he had had in his possession for several years.
Here, suddenly recalling Mr. De Jarnette's peremptory command to her to
put the pistol down, she hesitated, and looked at him. His face was
averted.
She went on, saying nothing about having had the pistol in her hand, nor
about its being one of a pair that her husband owned, though this fact
came to her suddenly. She had not had time to question him, she said,
nor even to go to him before Mr. De Jarnette came in.
Had she heard any sound at the other door?
No, she had heard nothing, or rather she had been so horror-stricken to
come upon her husband in this condition that she had not noticed
anything.
Richard De Jarnette stated that he had heard the shot while he was in
his own room across the hall and had hurried at once to the outside door
of his brother's room. Finding it locked he had run around through the
main office and found things just as Mrs. De Jarnette had testified. The
door was locked, but it was a night latch, he got up to show. One might
have gone out that way.
"Without encountering you?" the coroner asked. And Mr. De Jarnette,
hesitating, and weighing his words, thought it hardly probable, though
possible.
Margaret interrupted timidly here to say that since he spoke of the door
she recollected hearing something just as she came in that sounded like
the closing of a door. Mr. De Jarnette turned toward her, and with his
hard eyes upon her, Margaret faltered that perhaps it was the outer door
of the lavatory. Investigation proved that that door was bolted on the
inside.
"I cannot see the pertinence of this line of inquiry," said Mr. De
Jarnette, at length, almost roughly, "in the face of his dying statement
that it was accidental." And his eyes as if by chance turned upon his
sister-in-law.
The elevator boy was questioned as to whether any suspicious person had
gone down about that time. He could not remember. It seemed to him, upon
further thought, that a fat old lady had got on going down at the time
of the pistol shot, but so many people went up and down all the time he
couldn't be sure that it was not on the floor below.
Dr. Semple was examined as to the wound.
"I have made no careful examination," he said slowly, "beyond assuring
myself that nothing could be done for him, and later that life was
extinct. I have not thought it necessary. A dozen men are here who heard
him say it was accidental, and from a weapon in his own hand." He picked
up the cloth used in cleaning the revolver. "This seems to substantiate
his statement as to how he happened to have the pistol." Several men
were examined as to the ante-mortem statement.
The coroner's report was, "Accidental killing from a weapon in the hand
of the deceased." Since it had been clearly shown to be accidental, no
jury was impaneled.
It was Margaret's wish that Victor should be buried from his own home.
When Judge Kirtley communicated this wish to Richard De Jarnette, he was
surprised to find him averse to the arrangement. He preferred that he
should be buried from _his_ home, he said briefly. They were separated,
and there was no use keeping up a pretence that they were not.
The Judge remonstrated that nobody knew what had passed between them
that afternoon, not even Mr. De Jarnette, nor how it would have gone in
the future had Victor lived. Margaret's wish to have him buried from his
own home would seem to indicate that there had been a reconciliation. At
any rate, it would put a different face on the matter to the world, and
make it easier for her afterwards.
"Yes," Richard agreed, grimly, "it might make things easier for her."
And he consented.
The burial service was brief and wholly impersonal. The burial was
private.
Margaret went to the carriage on the arm of her brother-in-law by the
arrangement of the undertaker. He had not been near her since the day
they separated at the close of the coroner's inquest. Victor De
Jarnette's body had lain in his brother's house two days and nights and
had then been taken to the house on Massachusetts Avenue the morning of
the burial. This was the most that Mr. De Jarnette would consent to.
Whatever was thought about the grief of the wife, at this untimely
death, there was no doubt as to that of the brother. Richard De Jarnette
had aged years in these few days.
As the carriage door was closed upon Margaret alone, Judge Kirtley
stepped up to the undertaker.
"Does not Mr. De Jarnette ride with Mrs. De Jarnette?" he asked in a low
tone.
"No, sir, he preferred to ride in the second carriage alone. The third
is reserved for you, sir."
"I will trouble you to open that door," said the Judge, rather stiffly,
indicating the first carriage. "You may use your third carriage for some
one else or dismiss it. I shall ride with Mrs. De Jarnette."
In a green bank at Oak Hill he was laid--Oak Hill, that beautiful silent
suburb which, for a century of the capital's life--the shifting,
heaving, kaleidoscopic life in which men come and go, and wax and wane,
and pass into obscurity in ceaseless flow--has steadily gained in
population and never lost. A passionate, turbulent soul was Victor De
Jarnette, not wholly bad certainly; capable of much that was generous;
productive of little that was worth perpetuating; not lacking in good
impulses, but casting them oftener than otherwise in a mould of wax,
which melted at the first hot blast of passion,--a mixture, like most of
us perhaps, of good and evil, black and white. But alas!
"The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones."
That night Margaret De Jarnette sat long before the grate fire of the
lonely house to which she had come a bride,--looking into the darkening
coals and seeing nothing,--looking into the embers of a dead fire
within, and finding much that had burned out. She lived relentlessly
over the past two years,--putting to herself searching questions and
exacting an answer to every one; going down into black depths of whose
existence she once had not dreamed and coming up with staring,
frightened eyes from which the scales of innocence had dropped.
Then she drew a long, shuddering breath.
"That book is closed," she whispered, "never to be opened again, _thank
God_!... My girlhood is put away with it. I am old--old!"--she threw
herself on her knees beside her sleeping child-- "But oh, my baby! my
little one! my blessed one! I have you! I have you!"
* * * * *
"Semple," Richard De Jarnette said abruptly as he and his friend sat
together that night--a long silence had fallen between them--"could a
wound like that be self-inflicted? In God's name, tell me the truth!"
It was the question Dr. Semple had been dreading for three days. He had
thought of several ways to evade it. When it came, there was something
in the haggard face of the man before him that would not be denied.
"No," he said, simply. "It would be a physical impossibility."