Maggie served me my luncheon in a sort of strained silence. She observed
once, as she brought me my tea, that she was giving me notice and
intended leaving on the afternoon train. She had, she stated, holding
out the sugar-bowl to me at arm's length, stood a great deal in the way
of irregular hours from me, seeing as I would read myself to sleep, and
let the light burn all night, although very fussy about the gas-bills.
But she had reached the end of her tether, and you could grate a lemon
on her most anywhere, she was that covered with goose-flesh.
"Goose-flesh about what?" I demanded. "And either throw the sugar to me
or come closer."
"I don't know about what," she said sullenly. "I'm just scared."
And for once Maggie and I were in complete harmony. I, too, was "just
scared."
We were, however, both of us much nearer a solution of our troubles
than we had any idea of. I say solution, although it but substituted one
mystery for another. It gave tangibility to the intangible, indeed,
but I can not see that our situation was any better. I, for one, found
myself in the position of having a problem to solve, and no formula to
solve it with.
The afternoon was quiet. Maggie and the cook were in the throes of
jelly-making, and I had picked up a narrative history of the county,
written most pedantically, although with here and there a touch of heavy
lightness, by Miss Emily's father, the Reverend Samuel Thaddeus Benton.
On the fly-leaf she had inscribed, "Written by my dear father during the
last year of his life, and published after his death by the parish to
which he had given so much of his noble life."
The book left me cold, but the inscription warmed me. Whatever feeling I
might have had about Miss Emily died of that inscription. A devoted and
self-sacrificing daughter, a woman both loving and beloved, that was the
Miss Emily of the dedication to "Fifty years in Bolivar County."
In the middle of the afternoon Maggie appeared, with a saucer and a
teaspoon. In the saucer she had poured a little of the jelly to test it,
and she was blowing on it when she entered. I put down my book.
"Well!" I said. "Don't tell me you're not dressed yet. You've just got
about time for the afternoon train."
She gave me an imploring glance over the saucer.
"You might just take a look at this, Miss Agnes," she said. "It jells
around the edges, but in the middle--"
"I'll send your trunk tomorrow," I said, "and you'd better let Delia
make the jelly alone. You haven't much time, and she says she makes good
jelly."
She raised anguished eyes to mine.
"Miss Agnes," she said, "that woman's never made a glass of jelly in her
life before. She didn't even know about putting a silver spoon in the
tumblers to keep 'em from breaking."
I picked up "Bolivar County" and opened it, but I could see that the
hands holding the saucer were shaking.
"I'm not going, Miss Agnes," said Maggie. (I had, of course, known she
would not. The surprising thing to me is that she never learns this
fact, although she gives me notice quite regularly. She always thinks
that she is really going, until the last.) "Of course you can let that
woman make the jelly, if you want. It's your fruit and sugar. But I'm
not going to desert you in your hour of need."
"What do I need?" I demanded. "Jelly?"
But she was past sarcasm. She placed the saucer on a table and rolled
her stained hands in her apron.
"That woman," she said, "what was she doing under the telephone stand?"
She almost immediately burst into tears, and it was some time before I
caught what she feared. For she was more concrete than I. And she knew
now what she was afraid of. It was either a bomb or fire.
"Mark my words, Miss Agnes," she said, "she's going to destroy the
place. What made her set out and rent it for almost nothing if she
isn't? And I know who rings the telephone at night. It's her."
"What on earth for?" I demanded as ungrammatical and hardly less uneasy
than Maggie.
"She wakes us up, so we can get out in time. She's a preacher's
daughter. More than likely she draws the line at bloodshed. That's one
reason. Maybe there's another. What if by pressing a button somewhere
and ringing that bell, it sets off a bomb somewhere?"
"It never has," I observed dryly.
But however absurd Maggie's logic might be, she was firm in her
major premise. Miss Emily had been on her hands and knees by the
telephone-stand, and had, on seeing Maggie, observed that she had
dropped the money for the hackman out of her glove.
"Which I don't believe. Her gloves were on the stand. If you'll come
back, Miss Agnes, I'll show you how she was."
We made rather an absurd procession, Maggie leading with the saucer, I
following, and the cat, appearing from nowhere as usual, bringing up the
rear. Maggie placed the jelly on the stand, and dropped on her hands
and knees, crawling under the stand, a confused huddle of gingham apron,
jelly-stains, and suspicion.
"She had her head down like this," she said, in rather a smothered
voice. "I'm her, and you're me. And I says: 'If it's rolled off
somewhere I'll find it next time I sweep, and give it back to you.'
Well, what d'you think of that! Here it is!"
My attention had by this time been caught by the jelly, now unmistakably
solidifying in the center. I moved to the kitchen door to tell Delia
to take it off the fire. When I returned, Maggie was digging under the
telephone battery-box with a hair-pin and muttering to herself.
"Darnation!" she said, "it's gone under!"
"If you do get it," I reminded her, "it belongs to Miss Emily."
There is a curious strain of cupidity in Maggie. I have never been able
to understand it. With her own money she is as free as air. But let her
see a chance for illegitimate gain, of finding a penny on the street,
of not paying her fare on the cars, of passing a bad quarter, and she is
filled with an unholy joy. And so today. The jelly was forgotten. Terror
was gone. All that existed for Maggie was a twenty-five cent piece under
a battery-box.