it was to be present excited surprise, and eventually a mysterious
uneasiness. Search was made about the house; no one was discovered up
stairs but Mrs. Lauson, brooding alone; then a neighbor or two was
visited by Bessie; still no Aunt Mercy. The solemn truth was, although
no sanguinary sign as yet revealed it, that the Lauson tragedy had an
hour since been consummated.
The search for the missing Aunt Mercy continued until it aroused the
interest and temper of Squire Lauson. Determined to find his daughter
once that he had set about it, and petulant at the failure of one line of
investigation after another, the hard old gentleman stumped noisily about
the house, his thick shoes squeaking down the passages like two bands
of music, and his peeled hickory cane punching open doors and upsetting
furniture. When he returned to the sitting-room from one of these
boisterous expeditions, he found his wife sitting in the light of the
kerosene lamp, and sewing with an impatient, an almost spiteful rapidity,
as was her custom when her nerves were unbearably irritated.
“Where’s Mercy?” he trumpeted. “Where _is_ the old gal? Has anybody
eloped with her? I saw Deacon Jones about this afternoon.”
This jest was meant to amuse and perhaps to conciliate Mrs. Lauson,
for whom he sometimes seemed to have a rough pity, as hard to bear as
downright hostility. He had now and then a way of joking with her and
forcing her to smile by looking her steadily in the eye. But this time
his moral despotism failed; she answered his gaze with a defiant glare,
and remained sullen; after another moment she rushed out of the room, as
if craving relief from his domineering presence.
Apparently the Squire would have called her back, had not his attention
been diverted by the entry of his granddaughter.
“I say, Bessie, have you looked in the garden?” he demanded. “Why the
Devil haven’t you? Don’t you know Mercy’s hole where she meditates? Go
there and hunt for her.”
As the girl disappeared he turned to the door through which his wife had
fled, as if he still had a savage mind to roar for her reappearance. But
after pondering a moment, and deciding that he was more comfortable in
solitude, he sat slowly down in his usual elbow-chair, and broke out in a
growling soliloquy:—
“There’s no comfort like making one’s self miserable. It’s a —— sight
better than making the best of it. We’re all having a devilish fine time.
We’re as happy as bugs in a rug. Hey diddle diddle, the cat’s in the
fiddle—”
The continuity of his rough-laid stone-wall sarcasm was interrupted by
Bessie, who rushed into the sitting-room with a low shriek and a pallid
face.
“What’s the matter now?” he demanded. “Has the cow jumped over the moon?”
“O grandfather!” she gasped, “I’ve found Aunt Mercy. I’m afraid she’s
dead.”
“Hey!” exclaimed the Squire, starting up eagerly as he remembered that
Aunt Mercy was his own child. “You don’t say so! Where is she?”
Bessie turned and reeled out of the house; the old man thumped after her
on his cane. At the bottom of the garden was a small, neglected arbor,
thickly overgrown with grape-vines in unpruned leaf, whither Aunt Mercy
was accustomed to repair in her seasons of unusual perplexity or gloom,
there to seek guidance or relief in meditation and prayer. In this arbor
they found her, seated crouchingly on a bench near the doorway, her
arms stretched over a little table in front of her, and her head lying
between them with the face turned from the gazers. The moon glared in
a ghastly way upon her ominously white hands, and disclosed a dark yet
gleaming stain, seemingly a drying pool, which spread out from beneath
her forehead.
“Good Lord!” groaned Squire Lauson. “Mercy! I say, Mercy!”
He seized her hand, but he had scarcely touched it ere he dropped it,
for it was the icy, repulsive, alarming hand of a corpse. We must
compress our description of this scene of horrible discovery. Miss Mercy
Lauson was dead, the victim of a brutal assassination, her right temple
opened by a gash two inches deep, her blood already clotted in pools or
dried upon her face and fingers. It must have been an hour, or perhaps
two hours, since the blow had been dealt. At her feet was the fatal
weapon,—an old hatchet which had long lain about the garden, and which
offered no suggestion as to who was the murderer.
When it first became clear to Squire Lauson that his daughter was dead,
and had been murdered, he uttered a sound between a gasp and a sob;
but almost immediately afterward he spoke in his habitually vigorous
and rasping voice, and his words showed that he had not lost his iron
self-possession.
“Bessie, run into the house,” he said. “Call the hired men, and bring a
lantern with you.”
When she returned he took the lantern, threw the gleam of it over his
dead daughter’s face, groaned, shook his head, and then, leaning on his
cane, commenced examining the earth, evidently in search of footmarks.
“There’s your print, Bessie,” he mumbled. “And there’s my print. But
whose print’s that? That’s the man. That’s a long slim foot, with nails
across the ball. That’s the man. Don’t disturb those tracks. I’ll set the
lantern down there. Don’t you disturb ’em.”
There were several of these strange tracks; the clayey soil of the walk,
slightly tempered with sand, had preserved them with fatal distinctness;
it showed them advancing to the arbor and halting close by the murdered
woman. As Bessie stared at them, it seemed to her that they were
fearfully familiar, though where she had seen them before she could not
say.
“Keep away from those tracks,” repeated Squire Lauson as the two laborers
who lived with him came down the garden. “Now, then, what are you staring
at? She’s dead. Take her up—O, for God’s sake, be gentle about it!—take
her up, I tell you. There! Now, carry her along.”
As the men moved on with the body he turned to Bessie and said: “Leave
the lantern just there. And don’t you touch those tracks. Go on into the
house.”
With his own hands he aided to lay out his daughter on a table, and
drew her cap from her temples so as to expose the bloody gash to view.
There was a little natural agony in the tremulousness of his stubbly and
grizzly chin; but in the glitter of his gray eyes there was an expression
which was not so much sorrow as revenge.
“That’s a pretty job,” he said at last, glaring at the mangled gray
head. “I should like to l’arn who did it.”
It was not known till the day following how he passed the next half-hour.
It seems that, some little time previous, this man of over ninety years
had conceived the idea of repairing with his own hands the cracked wall
of his parlor, and had for that purpose bought a quantity of plaster
of Paris and commenced a series of patient experiments in mixing and
applying it. Furnished with a basin of his prepared material, he stalked
out to the arbor and busied himself with taking a mould of the strange
footstep to which he had called Bessie’s attention, succeeding in his
labor so well as to be able to show next day an exact counterpart of the
sole which had made the track.
Shortly after he had left the house, and glancing cautiously about as
if to make sure that he had indeed left it, his wife entered the room
where lay the dead body. She came slowly up to the table, and looked at
the ghastly face for some moments in silence, with precisely that staid,
slightly shuddering air which one often sees at funerals, and without any
sign of the excitement which one naturally expects in the witnesses of
a mortal tragedy. In any ordinary person, in any one who was not, like
her, denaturalized by the egotism of shattered nerves, such mere wonder
and repugnance would have appeared incomprehensively brutal. But Mrs.
Lauson had a character of her own; she could be different from others
without exciting prolonged or specially severe comment; people said to
themselves, “Just like her,” and made no further criticism, and almost
certainly no remonstrance. Bessie herself, the moment she had exclaimed,
“O grandmother! what shall we do?” felt how absurd it was to address
such an appeal to such a person.
Mrs. Lauson replied by a glance which expressed weakness, alarm, and
aversion, and which demanded, as plainly as words could say it, “How can
you ask _me_?” Then without uttering a syllable, without attempting to
render any service or funereal courtesy, bearing herself like one who had
been mysteriously absolved from the duties of sympathy and decorum, she
turned her back on the body of her step-daughter with a start of disgust,
and walked hastily from the room.
Of course there was a gathering of the neighbors, a hasty and useless
search after the murderer, a medical examination of the victim, and a
legal inquest at the earliest practicable moment, the verdict being
“death by the hand of some person unknown.” Even the funeral passed, with
its mighty crowd and its solemn excitement; and still public suspicion
had not dared to single out any one as the criminal. It seemed for a day
or two as if the family life might shortly settle into its old tenor, the
same narrow routine of quiet discontent or irrational bickerings, with
no change but the loss of such inflammation as formerly arose from Aunt
Mercy’s well-meant, but irritating sense of duty. The Squire, however,
was permanently and greatly changed: not that he had lost the spirit of
petty dictation which led him to interfere in every household act, even
to the boiling of the pot, but he had acquired a new object in life,
and one which seemed to restore all his youthful energy; he was more
restlessly and distressingly vital than he had been for years. No Indian
was ever more intent on avenging a debt of blood than was he on hunting
down the murderer of his daughter. This terrible old man has a strong
attraction for us: we feel that we have not thus far done him justice: he
imperiously demands further description.
Squire Lauson was at this time ninety-three years of age. The fact
appeared incredible, because he had preserved, almost unimpaired, not
only his moral energy and intellectual faculties, but also his physical
senses, and even to an extraordinary degree his muscular strength. His
long and carelessly worn hair was not white, but merely gray; and his
only baldness was a shining hand’s-breadth, prolonging the height of
his forehead. His face was deeply wrinkled, but more apparently with
thought and passion than from decay, for the flesh was still well under
control of the muscles, and the expression was so vigorous that one was
tempted to call it robust. There was nothing of that insipid and almost
babyish tranquillity which is commonly observable in the countenances
of the extremely aged. The cheekbones were heavy, though the healthy
fulness of the cheeks prevented them from being pointed; the jaws, not
yet attenuated by the loss of many teeth, were unusually prominent and
muscular; the heavy Roman nose still stood high above the projecting
chin. In general, it was a long, large face, grimly and ruggedly massive,
of a uniform grayish color, and reminding you of a visage carved in
granite.
In figure the Squire was of medium height, with a deep chest and heavy
limbs. He did not stand quite upright, but the stoop was in his shoulders
and not in his loins, and arose from a slouching habit of carrying
himself much more than from weakness. He walked with a cane, but his
step, though rather short, was strong and rapid, and he could get over
the ground at the rate of three miles an hour. At times he seemed a
little deaf, but it was mainly from absorption of mind and inattention,
and he could hear perfectly when he was interested. The great gray eyes
under his bushy, pepper-and-salt eyebrows were still so sound that he
only used spectacles in reading. As for voice, there was hardly such
another in the neighborhood; it was a strong, rasping, dictatorial _caw_,
like the utterance of a gigantic crow; it might have served the needs of
a sea-captain in a tempest. A jocose neighbor related that he had in a
dream descended into hell, and that in trying to find his way out he had
lost his reckoning, until, hearing a tremendous volley of oaths on the
surface of the earth over his head, he knew that he was under the hills
of Barham, and that Squire Lauson was swearing at his oxen.
Squire Lauson was immense; you might travel over him for a week without
discovering half his wonders; he was a continent, and he must remain for
the most part an unknown continent. Bringing to a close our explorations
into his character and past life, we will follow him up simply as one of
the personages of this tragedy. He was at the present time very active,
but also to a certain extent inexplicable. It was known that he had
interviews with various officials of justice, that he furnished them
with his plaster cast of the strange footprint which had been found in
the garden, and that he earnestly impressed upon them the value of this
object for the purpose of tracking out the murderer. But he had other
lines of investigation in his steady old hands, as was discoverable later.
His manner towards his granddaughter and his wife changed noticeably.
Instead of treating the first with neglect, and the second with
persistent hostility or derision, he became assiduously attentive to
them, addressed them frequently in conversation, and sought to win their
confidence. With Bessie this task was easy, for she was one of those
natural, unspoiled women, who long for sympathy, and she inclined toward
her grandfather the moment she saw any kindness in his eyes. They had
long talks about the murdered relative, about every event or suspicion
which seemed to relate to her death, about the property which she had
left to Bessie, and about the girl’s prospects in life.
Not so with Mrs. Lauson. Even the horror which had entered the family
life could not open the hard crust which disease and disappointment had
formed over her nature, and she met the old man’s attempts to make her
communicative with her usual sulky or pettish reticence. There never
was such an unreasonable creature as this wretched wife, who, while she
remained unmarried, had striven so hard to be agreeable to the other
sex. It was not with her husband alone that she fought, but with every
one, whether man or woman, who came near her. Whoever entered the house,
whether it were some gossiping neighbor or the clergyman or the doctor,
she flew out of it on discovering their approach, and wandered alone
about the fields until they departed. This absence she would perhaps
employ in eating green fruit, hoping, as she said, to make herself
sick and die, or, at least, to make herself sick enough to plague her
husband. At meals she generally sat in glum silence, although once
or twice she burst out in violent tirades, scoffing at the Squire’s
management of the place, defying him to strike her, etc.
Her appearance at this time was miserable and little less than
disgusting. Her skin was thick and yellow; her eyes were bloodshot
and watery; her nose was reddened with frequent crying; her form was
of an almost skeleton thinness; her manner was full of strange starts
and gaspings. It was curious to note the contrast between her perfect
wretchedness of aspect and the unfeeling coolness with which the Squire
watched and studied her.
In this woful way was the Lauson family getting on when the country
around was electrified by an event which almost threw the murder itself
into the shade. Henry Foster, the accepted lover of Bessie Barron, a
professor in the Scientific College of Hampstead, was suddenly arrested
as the assassin of Miss Mercy Lauson.
“What does this mean!” was his perfectly natural exclamation, when seized
by the officers of justice; but it was uttered with a sudden pallor which
awakened in the bystanders a strong suspicion of his guilt. No definite
answer was made to his question until he was closeted with the lawyer
whom he immediately retained in his defence.
“I should like to get at the whole of your case, Mr. Foster,” said the
legal gentleman. “I must beg you, for your own sake, to be entirely frank
with me.”
“I assure you that I know nothing about the murder,” was the firm reply.
“I don’t so much as understand why I should be suspected of the horrible
business.”
The lawyer, Mr. Adams Patterson, after studying Foster in a furtive way,
as if doubtful whether there had been perfect honesty in his assertion
of innocence, went on to state what he supposed would be the case of the
prosecution.
“The evidence against you,” he said, “so far at least as I can now
discover, will all be circumstantial. They will endeavor to prove your
presence at the scene of the tragedy by your tracks. Footmarks, said to
correspond to yours, were found passing the door of the arbor, returning
to it and going away from it.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Foster. “I remember,—I did pass there. I will tell you
how. It was in the afternoon. I was in the house during a thunder-storm
which happened that day, and left it shortly after the shower ended.
I went out through the garden because that was the nearest way to the
rivulet at the bottom of the hill, and I wished to make some examinations
into the structure of the water-bed. A part of the garden walk is
gravelled, and on that I suppose my tracks did not show. But near the
arbor the gravel ceases, and there I remember stepping into the damp
mould. I did pass the arbor, and I did return to it. I returned to it
because it had been a heavenly place to me. It was there that I proposed
to Miss Barron, and that she accepted me. The moment that I had passed it
I reproached myself for doing so. I went back, looked at the little spot
for a moment, and left a kiss on the table. It was on that table that her
hand had rested when I first dared to take it in mine.”
His voice broke for an instant with an emotion which every one who has
ever loved can at least partially understand.
“Good Heavens! to think that such an impulse should entangle me in such a
charge!” he added, when he could speak again.
“Well,” he resumed, after a long sigh, “I left the arbor,—my heart as
innocent and happy as any heart in the world,—I climbed over the fence
and went down the hill. That is the last time that I was in those grounds
that day. That is the whole truth, so help me God!”
The lawyer seemed touched. Even then, however, he was saying to himself,
“They always keep back something, if not everything.” After meditating
for a few seconds, he resumed his interrogatory.
“Did any one see you? did Miss Barron see you, as you passed through the
garden?”
“I think not. Some one called her just as I left her, and she went, I
believe, up stairs.”
“Did you see the person who called? Did you see any one?”
“No one. But the voice was a woman’s voice. I took it to be that of a
servant.”
Mr. Patterson fell into a thoughtful silence, his arms resting on the
elbows of his chair, and his anxious eyes wandering over the floor.
“But what motive?” broke out Foster, addressing the lawyer as if he were
an accuser and an enemy,—“what sufficient motive had I for such a hideous
crime?”
“Ah! that is just it. The motive! They will make a great deal of that.
Why, you must be able to guess what is alleged. Miss Lauson had made a
will in her niece’s favor, but had threatened to disinherit her if she
married you. This fact,—as has been made known by an incautious admission
of Miss Bessie Barron,—this fact you were aware of. The death came just
in time to prevent a change in the will. Don’t you see the obvious
inference of the prosecution?”
“Good Heavens!” exclaimed Foster, springing up and pacing his cell. “I
murder a woman,—murder my wife’s aunt,—for money,—for twenty thousand
dollars! Am I held so low as that? Why, it is a sum that any clever man
can earn in this country in a few years. We could have done without it.
I would not have asked for it, much less murdered for it. Tell me, Mr.
Patterson, do you suppose me capable of such degrading as well as such
horrible guilt?”
“Mr. Foster,” replied the lawyer, with impressive deliberation, “I shall
go into this case with a confidence that you are absolutely innocent.”
“Thank you,” murmured the young man, grasping Patterson’s hand violently,
and then turning away to wipe a tear, which had been too quick for him.
“Excuse my weakness,” he said, presently. “But I don’t believe any worthy
man is strong enough to bear the insult that the world has put upon me,
without showing his suffering.”
Certainly, Foster’s bearing and the sentiments which he expressed had the
nobility and pathos of injured innocence. Were it not that innocence _can
be_ counterfeited, as also that a fine demeanor and touching utterance
are not points in law, no alarming doubt would seem to overshadow the
result of the trial. And yet, strange as it must seem to those whom my
narrative may have impressed in favor of Foster, the sedate, Puritanic
population of Barham and its vicinity inclined more and more toward the
presumption of his guilt.
For this there were two reasons. In the first place, who but he had any
cause of spite against Mercy Lauson, or could hope to draw any profit
from her death? There had been no robbery; there was not a sign that the
victim’s clothing had been searched; the murder had clearly not been the
work of a burglar or a thief. But Foster, if he indeed assassinated this
woman, had thereby removed an obstacle to his marriage, and had secured
to his future wife a considerable fortune.
In the second place, Foster was such a man as the narrowly scrupulous
and orthodox world of Barham would naturally regard with suspicion.
Graduate of a German university, he had brought back to America, not
only a superb scientific education, but also what passed, in the region
where he had settled, for a laxity of morals. Professor as he was in
the austere college of Hampstead, and expected, therefore, to set a
luminously correct example in both theoretical and practical ethics, he
held theological opinions which were too modern to be considered sound,
and he even neglected church to an extent which his position rendered
scandalous. In spite of the strict prohibitory law of Massachusetts, he
made use of lager-beer and other still stronger fluids; and, although he
was never known to drink to excess, the mere fact of breaking the statute
was a sufficient offence to rouse prejudice. It was also reported of him,
to the honest horror of many serious minds, that he had been detected in
geologizing on Sunday, and that he was fond of whist.
How apt we are to infer that a man who violates _our_ code of morals will
also violate his own code! Of course this Germanized American could not
believe that murder was right; but then he played cards and drank beer,
which we of Barham knew to be wrong; and if he would do one wrong thing,
why not another?
Meantime how was it with Bessie? How is it always with women when
those whom they love are charged with unworthiness? Do they exhibit
the “judicial mind”? Do they cautiously weigh the evidence and decide
according to it? The girl did not entertain the faintest supposition that
her lover could be guilty; she was no more capable of blackening his
character than she was capable of taking his life. She would not speak to
people who showed by word or look that they doubted his innocence. She
raged at a world which could be so stupid, so unjust, and so wicked as
to slander the good fame and threaten the life of one whom her heart had
crowned with more than human perfections.
But what availed all her confidence in his purity? There was the finger
of public suspicion pointed at him, and there was the hangman lying in
wait for his precious life. She was almost mad with shame, indignation,
grief, and terror. She rose as pale as a ghost from sleepless nights,
during which she had striven in vain to unravel this terrible mystery,
and prayed in vain that Heaven would revoke this unbearable calamity.
Day by day she visited her betrothed in his cell, and cheered him with
the sympathy of her trusting and loving soul. The conversations which
took place on these occasions were so naïve and childlike in their
honest utterance of emotion that I almost dread to record them, lest
the deliberate, unpalpitating sense of criticism should pronounce them
sickening, and mark them for ridicule.
“Darling,” she once said to him, “we must be married. Whether you are to
live or to die, I must be your wife.”
He knelt down and kissed the hem of her dress in adoration of such
self-sacrifice.