"When I saw that girl crawling around," she said, "seems to me I
remembered all at once seeing Miss Emily, that day I found her, running
her finger along the baseboard. Says I to myself, there's something
more hidden, and she don't know where it is. But I do. So I lifted the
baseboard, and this was behind it."
Anne heard her from her room, and she went out soon afterward. I heard
her going down the stairs and called to her. But she did not answer. I
closed the door on Maggie and stood in my room, staring at the envelope.
I have wondered since whether Miss Emily, had she lived, would have put
the responsibility on Providence for the discovery of her pitiful story.
So many of us blame the remorseless hand of destiny for what is so
manifestly our own doing. It was her own anxiety, surely, that led to
the discovery in each instance, yet I am certain that old Emily Benton
died, convinced that a higher hand than any on earth had directed the
discovery of the confession.
Miss Emily has been dead for more than a year now. To publish the letter
can do her no harm. In a way, too, I feel, it may be the fulfilment of
that strange pact she made. For just as discovery was the thing she most
dreaded, so she felt that by paying her penalty here she would be saved
something beyond--that sort of spiritual book-keeping which most of us
call religion. Anne Sprague--she is married now to Martin has, I think,
some of Miss Emily's feeling about it, although she denies it. But I
am sure that in consenting to the recording of Miss Emily's story, she
feels that she is doing what that gentle fatalist would call following
the hand of Providence.
I read the letter that night in the library where the light was good. It
was a narrative, not a letter, strictly speaking. It began abruptly.
"I must set down this thing as it happened. I shall write it fully,
because I must get it off my mind. I find that I am always composing
it, and that my lips move when I walk along the street or even when I am
sitting in church. How terrible if I should some day speak it aloud. My
great-grandmother was a Catholic. She was a Bullard. Perhaps it is from
her that I have this overwhelming impulse to confession. And lately I
have been terrified. I must tell it, or I shall shriek it out some day,
in the church, during the Litany. 'From battle and murder, and from
sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us.'"
(There was a space here. When the writing began again, time had elapsed.
The ink was different, the writing more controlled.)
"What a terrible thing hate is. It is a poison. It penetrates the mind
and the body and changes everything. I, who once thought I could hate no
one, now find that hate is my daily life, my getting up and lying down,
my sleep, my waking.
"'From hatred, envy, and malice, and all uncharitableness, Good Lord,
deliver us.'
"Must one suffer twice for the same thing? Is it not true that we pay
but one penalty? Surely we pay either here or beyond, but not both. Oh,
not both!
"Will this ever be found? Where shall I hide it? For I have the feeling
that I must hide it, not destroy it--as the Catholic buries his sin with
the priest. My father once said that it is the healthful humiliation of
the confessional that is its reason for existing. If humiliation be a
virtue--"
I have copied the confession to this point, but I find I can not go on.
She was so merciless to herself, so hideously calm, so exact as to dates
and hours. She had laid her life on the table and dissected it--for the
Almighty!
I heard the story that night gently told, and somehow I feel that that
is the version by which Miss Emily will be judged.
"If humiliation be a virtue--" I read and was about to turn the page,
when I heard Anne in the hall. She was not alone. I recognized Doctor
Lingard's voice.
Five minutes later I was sitting opposite him, almost knee to knee,
and he was telling me how Miss Emily had come to commit her crime. Anne
Bullard was there, standing on the hearth rug. She kept her eyes on
me, and after a time I realized that these two simple people feared
me, feared for Miss Emily's gentle memory, feared that I--good
heaven!--would make the thing public.
"First of all, Miss Blakiston," said the doctor, "one must have known
the family to realize the situation--its pride in its own uprightness.
The virtue of the name, what it stood for in Bolivar County. She was
raised on that. A Benton could do no wrong, because a Benton would do no
wrong.
"But there is another side, also. I doubt if any girl was ever raised
as Miss Emily was. She--well, she knew nothing. At fifty she was as
childlike and innocent as she was at ten. She had practically never
heard of vice. The ugly things, for her, did not exist.
"And, all the time, there was a deep and strong nature underneath. She
should have married and had children, but there was no one here for
her to marry. I," he smiled faintly, "I asked for her myself, and was
forbidden the house for years as a result.
"You have heard of the brother? But of course you have. I know you have
found the books. Such an existence as the family life here was bound to
have its reactions. Carlo was a reaction. Twenty-five years ago he ran
away with a girl from the village. He did not marry her. I believe he
was willing at one time, but his father opposed it violently. It would
have been to recognize a thing he refused to recognize." He turned
suddenly to Anne. "Don't you think this is going to be painful?" he
asked.
"Why? I know it all."
"Very well. This girl--the one Carlo ran away with--determined to make
the family pay for that refusal. She made them actually pay, year by
year. Emily knew about it. She had to pinch to make the payments. The
father sat in a sort of detached position, in the center of Bolivar
County, and let her bear the brunt of it. I shall never forget the day
she learned there was a child. It--well, it sickened her. She had not
known about those things. And I imagine, if we could know, that that was
the beginning of things.
"And all the time there was the necessity for secrecy. She had never
known deceit, and now she was obliged to practice it constantly. She had
no one to talk to. Her father, beyond making entries of the amounts paid
to the woman in the case, had nothing to do with it. She bore it all,
year after year. And it ate, like a cancer.
"Remember, I never knew. I, who would have done anything for her--she
never told me. Carlo lived hard and came back to die. The father went.
She nursed them both. I came every day, and I never suspected. Only,
now and then, I wondered about her. She looked burned. I don't know any
other word.
"Then, the night after Carlo had been buried, she telephoned for me.
It was eleven o'clock, She met me, out there in the hall, and she said,
'John, I have killed somebody.'
"I thought she was out of her mind. But she opened the door, and--"
He turned and glanced at Anne.
"Please!" she said.
"It was Anne's mother. You have guessed it about Anne by now, of course.
It seems that the funeral had taken the money for the payment that was
due, and there had been a threat of exposure. And Emily had reached the
breaking-point. I believe what she said--that she had no intention
even of striking her. You can't take the act itself. You have to take
twenty-five years into account. Anyhow, she picked up a chair and
knocked the woman down. And it killed her." He ran his fingers through
his heavy hair. "It should not have killed her," he reflected. "There
must have been some other weakness, heart or something. I don't know.
But it was a heavy chair. I don't see how Emily--"
His voice trailed off.
"There we were," he said, with a long breath. "Poor Emily, and the other
poor soul, neither of them fundamentally at fault, both victims."
"I know about the books," I put in hastily. I could not have him going
over that again.
"You knew that, too!" He gazed at me.
"Poor Emily," he said. "She tried to atone. She brought Anne here, and
told her the whole story. It was a bad time--all round. But at last Anne
saw the light. The only one who would not see the light was Emily. And
at last she hit on this confession idea. I suspected it when she rented
the house. When I accused her of it, she said: 'I have given it to
Providence to decide. If the confession is found, I shall know I am to
suffer. And I shall not lift a hand to save myself.'"
So it went through the hours. Her fear, which I still think was the
terror that communicated itself to me; the various clues, which she,
poor victim, had overlooked; the articles laid carelessly in the
book she had been reading and accidentally hidden with her brother's
forbidden literature; the books themselves, with all of five years to
destroy them, and left untouched; her own anxiety about the confession
in the telephone-box, which led to our finding it; her espionage of the
house by means of the telephone; the doctor's night visit in search of
the confession; the daily penance for five years of the dead woman's
photograph in her room--all of these--and her occasional weakenings,
poor soul, when she tried to change her handwriting against discovery,
and refused to allow the second telephone to be installed.
How clear it was! How, in a way, inevitable! And, too, how really
best for her it had turned out. For she had made a pact, and she died
believing that discovery here had come, and would take the place of
punishment beyond.
Martin Sprague came the next day. I was in the library alone, and he was
with Anne in the garden, when Maggie came into the room with a saucer of
crab-apple jelly.
"I wish you'd look at this," she said. "If it's cooked too much, it gets
tough and--" She straightened suddenly and stood staring out through a
window.
"I'd thank you to look out and see the goings-on in our garden," she
said sharply. "In broad daylight, too. I--"
But I did not hear what else Maggie had to say. I glanced out, and
Martin had raised the girl's face to his and was kissing her, gently and
very tenderly.
And then--and again, as with fear, it is hard to put into words--I felt
come over me such a wave of contentment and happiness as made me close
my eyes with the sheer relief and joy of it. All was well. The past was
past, and out of its mistakes had come a beautiful thing. And, like the
fear, this joy was not mine. It came to me. I picked it up--a thought
without words.
Sometimes I think about it, and I wonder--did little Miss Emily know?