I had the very slightest acquaintance with the basement of the Benton
house. I knew it was dry and orderly, and with that my interest in it
ceased. It was not cemented, but its hard clay floor was almost as solid
as macadam. In one end was built a high potato-bin. In another corner
two or three old pews from the church, evidently long discarded and
showing weather-stains, as though they had once served as garden
benches, were up-ended against the whitewashed wall. The fruit-closet,
built in of lumber, occupied one entire end, and was virtually a room,
with a door and no windows.
Maggie had, she said, found it locked and had had an itinerant locksmith
fit a key to it.
"It's all scrubbed and ready," she said. "I found that preserved
melon-rind you had for lunch in a corner. 'Twouldn't of kept much
longer, so I took it up and opened it. She's probably got all sorts of
stuff spoiling in the locked part. Some folks're like that."
Most of the shelves were open, but now, holding the lamp high, I saw
that a closet with a door occupied one end. The door was padlocked. At
the time I was interested, but I was, as I remember, much more occupied
with Maggie's sense of meum and tuum, which I considered deficient, and
of a small lecture on other people's melon rinds, which I delivered as
she sullenly put away the jelly.
But that night, after I had gone to bed, the memory of that padlock
became strangely insistent. There was nothing psychic about the feeling
I had. It was perfectly obvious and simple. The house held, or had held,
a secret. Yet it was, above stairs, as open as the day. There was no
corner into which I might not peer, except--Why was that portion of the
fruit-closet locked?
At two o'clock, finding myself unable to sleep, I got up and put on my
dressing-gown and slippers. I had refused to repeat the experiment
of being locked in. Then, with a candle and a box of matches, I went
downstairs. I had, as I have said, no longer any terror of the lower
floor. The cat lay as usual on the table in the back hall. I saw his
eyes watching me with their curious unblinking stare, as intelligent as
two brass buttons. He rose as my light approached, and I made a bed for
him of a cushion from a chair, failing my Paisley shawl.
It was after that that I had the curious sense of being led. It was
as though I knew that something awaited my discovery, and that my sole
volition was whether I should make that discovery or not. It was there,
waiting.
I have no explanation for this. And it is quite possible that I might
have had it, to find at the end nothing more significant than root-beer,
for instance, or bulbs for the winter garden.
And indeed, at first sight, what awaited me in the locked closet
amounted to anti-climax. For when I had broken the rusty padlock open
with a hatchet, and had opened doors with nervous fingers, nothing more
startling appeared than a number of books. The shelves were piled high
with them, a motley crew of all colors, but dark shades predominating.
I went back to bed, sheepishly enough, and wrapped my chilled feet in an
extra blanket. Maggie came to the door about the time I was dozing off
and said she had heard hammering downstairs in the cellar some time ago,
but she had refused to waken me until the burglars had gone.
"If it was burglars," she added, "you're that up-and-ready, Miss Agnes,
that I knew if I waked you you'd be downstairs after them. What's a bit
of silver to a human life?"
I got her away at last, and she went, muttering something about digging
up the cellar floor and finding an uneasy spirit. Then I fell asleep.
I had taken cold that night, and the following morning I spent in bed.
At noon Maggie came upstairs, holding at arm's length a book. She kept
her face averted, and gave me a slanting and outraged glance.
"This is a nice place we've come to," she said, acidly. "Murder in the
telephone and anti-Christ in the fruit cellar!"
"Why, Maggie," I expostulated.
"If these books stay, I go, and that's flat, Miss Agnes," was her ipse
dixit. She dropped the book on the bed and stalked out, pausing at the
door only to throw back, "If this is a clergyman's house, I guess I'd be
better out of the church."
I took up the book. It was well-worn, and in the front, in a heavy
masculine hand, the owner had written his name--written it large, a bit
defiantly, perhaps. It had taken both courage and conviction to bring
such a book into that devout household.
I am not quick, mentally, especially when it comes to logical thought. I
daresay I am intuitive rather than logical. It was not by any process
of reasoning at all, I fancy, that it suddenly seemed strange that there
should be books locked away in the cellar. Yet it was strange. For that
had been a bookish household. Books were its stock in trade, one may
say. Such as I had borrowed from the library had been carefully
tended. Torn leaves were neatly repaired. The reference books were
alphabetically arranged. And, looking back on my visit to the cellar, I
recalled now as inconsistent the disorder of those basement shelves.
I did not reach the truth until, that afternoon, I made a second visit
to the cellar. Mrs. Graves had been mistaken. If not all Carlo Benton's
proscribed books were hidden there, at least a large portion of his
library was piled, in something like confusion, on the shelves. Yet she
maintained that they had searched the house, and she herself had been
present when the books were packed and taken away to the river.
That afternoon I returned Mrs. Graves's visit. She was at home, and in a
sort of flurried neatness that convinced me she had seen me from far up
the road. That conviction was increased by the amazing promptness with
which a tea-tray followed my entrance. I had given her tea the day she
came to see me, and she was not to be outdone. Indeed, I somehow gained
the impression that tray and teapot, and even little cakes, had been
waiting, day by day, for my anticipated visit.
It was not hard to set her talking of Carlo Benton and his wickedness.
She rose to the bait like a hungry fish. Yet I gathered that, beyond his
religious views or lack of them, she knew nothing. But on the matter of
the books she was firm.
"After the box was ready," she said, "we went to every room and searched
it. Miss Emily was set on clearing out every trace. At the last minute
I found one called 'The Fallacy of Christianity' slipped down behind the
dresser in his room, and we put that in."
It was "The Fallacy of Christianity" that Maggie had brought me that
morning.
"It is a most interesting story," I observed. "What delicious tea, Mrs.
Graves! And then you fastened up the box and saw it thrown into the
river. It was quite a ceremony."
"My dear," Mrs. Graves said solemnly, "it was not a ceremony. It was a
rite--a significant rite."
How can I reconcile the thoughts I had that afternoon with my later
visit to Miss Emily? The little upper room in the village, dominated
and almost filled by an old-fashioned bed, and Miss Emily, frail and
delicate and beautifully neat, propped with pillows and holding a fine
handkerchief, as fresh as the flutings of her small cap, in her hand.
On a small stand beside the bed were her Bible, her spectacles, and her
quaint old-fashioned gold watch.
And Miss Emily herself? She was altered, shockingly altered. A certain
tenseness had gone, a tenseness that had seemed to uphold her frail body
and carry her about. Only her eyes seemed greatly alive, and before I
left they, too, had ceased their searching of mine and looked weary and
old.
And, at the end of my short visit, I had reluctantly reached this
conclusion: either Miss Emily had done the thing she confessed to doing,
incredible as it might appear, or she thought she had done it; and the
thing was killing her.
She knew I had found the confession. I knew that. It was written large
over her. What she had expected me to do God only knows. To stand up and
denounce her? To summon the law? I do not know.
She said an extraordinary thing, when at last I rose to go. I believe
now that it was to give me my chance to speak. Probably she found the
suspense intolerable. But I could not do it. I was too surprised, too
perplexed, too--well, afraid of hurting her. I had the feeling, I know,
that I must protect her. And that feeling never left me until the end.
"I think you must know, my dear," she said, from her pillows, "that I
have your Paisley shawl."