Life kept on as it had been going, with many things sliding in and out, but they have nothing to do with what is hanging over us now. Welstoke and I finally came to America, however, and then luck began to turn.
There is a great joke behind the scenes of the little dramas of each of us, and the old lady, who had laid her hand on many a twisted wrist or swollen elbow, began with a joint in her thumb and in six months" time was a hundred shapes with the rheumatism. She was all out of scandals and blackmail then, and lay in bed with her own self coming out, in evil curses for pain and her losses on "Change, and slow horses, and she who had claptrapped thousands was caught herself by a slick brown man who called himself a Hindoo Yogi and treated her by burning cheap incense in a bra.s.s bowl, and a book of prayer that he called the "Word of Harmonious Equilibrium."
"You are all I have now," she would say to me after the cupboard was bare. "Whatever you do, don"t get married, my child. These men are all alike. Some of them begin to get knock-kneed as soon as you marry them, and others have great fat middles. You have your choice in these offenses to good taste."
The old fox was wasting breath, though, for I had less notions for men than ever before. I had only to shut my eyes to see one, and though time had slid by fast enough, I could only see him as he was, standing half frightened before me in the Trois Folies. He never seemed to change. I thought he"d always be the same.
Besides, I was loyal to old Welstoke, if I do say it. I tried hard at first to keep our patients coming, but it would not go when the Madame herself was out of the business. I never understood how to hold the confidence of people, and then the only thing left to us was a complexion mask that the old lady had invented. It was a failure, at first, but after I had walked my feet off introducing it, we got a bare living from it, and I thought it would stand between me and starvation when Welstoke had gone.
Finally that day came, too, with the undertaker creeping around in his black, sneaking way, and I found when it was all over that she had secretly incorporated a face-bleach company and sold all she owned to it, complexion mask and all, and lost the whole of what she got on that year"s Derby. I"ve understood from the boarding-house keeper that the last words she said, was, "Now I"m really plucked!" And that was the end of her.
CHAPTER II
THE HOUSE ON THE RIVER
There are times like that, when one"s spirit is sick, sore, and lame, as if it was a body, and it goes looking for a place to lie down where n.o.body will disturb it, and it can feel its dizzy self going into a long sleep. I"ll never forget how sick my soul was then--sick of all the false ways and selfishness and all the old scenes, and all big cities and the flow of faces on the streets and the memory of our elegant apartments in Paris, with their pale brocades at the windows and on the furniture, and sick of the sordid surroundings in the cheap New York boarding-house where the rheumatism had finally reached Welstoke"s heart, and the paper was peeling off the walls. I had always swallowed the airs and graces of society people very hard, and many was the time I"d wish to drop back among people like my father"s family, who didn"t mind the smell of cooking and could get a night"s sleep by laying a head on a pillow and weren"t bothered by frills. So, though it was plain enough that nothing was left for me but to come down in the world, I was not sorry, after all. I could see in the mirror that the easy life I had led at first, and the worry and labor of foot that had come suddenly on top of it, had made me fat of body and yet drawn and old of face. My youth had gone, along with Madame Welstoke, and I had little regret for it or for her.
Business was dreadfully poor then, and for the life of me I could not get a hold on anything in the way of hotel housekeeper, or millinery, or doctor"s office-maid. For every position that offered, which was few, there was a mob of women with their smirks and smiles and references in white envelopes that they were trying to keep clean as the days went by.
Of course, I had no references at all, and small good would it do for me to tell of my past experience. Besides, as I"ve often thought since, the way I wore my hair and colored my cheeks, from the habits Welstoke had taught me, was overdone, as all women get to overdoing the thing sooner or later, and more particularly when they think their good looks is threatened by the bleaching and yellowing and drying-up of the wrong side of thirty-five. It"s not a thing to help much in applying for work.
Anyway, the short of it was that after six weeks I had no job, for all my walks in the heat to save carfare.
You have never felt the panic that comes when it seems as if Fate was chewing away the strands of the rope that holds you to self-preservation; it is a terrible thing and soon takes out of you all fancy notions. It grabbed me by the neck and bent my pride and sent me off praying to find a place through an employment agency. Cooking, washing and ironing was good enough for me the minute I found my last dollar staring up at me from the palm of this right hand. The fall had begun to come on, and, believe it or not, as you like, I dreamed and dreamed and dreamed of walking the streets at night, through the driving snow of winter and down to the wharves and the river, with its cakes of ice and its welcome. And when the first day I had gone to sit in the intelligence room and a lady--she seemed like a blurred picture to me and her questions were far away like the rumble of a train at night--had hired me, I took my alligator bag that was left out of the wreck of old elegance, and I stood up and tried to follow her like a dog till she stopped me.
It was only when I"d met her later and was on the train bound for a little town up the state, that I turned my eyes, kind of cautious, to see who it was had hired me. You could not call her pretty, by any means. She was tall and thin, and there was a prominent bone sticking out at the back of her neck. Her shoulders sloped, too, and looked as if they had been bent forward on purpose to squeeze her lungs together. Her skin was a bit too yellow and her teeth too large and her lips too shapeless. But the steel of people has nothing to do with the scabbard, I"m thinking. Bodies are many a time disguises, and there was only one place where that woman"s self peeped through like a flower through the dead coals on an ashheap. It was her eyes.
I never have seen the beat of her eyes for loveliness. No, I never have seen two of them--gray they were--that could toss a G.o.d"s blessing to you so easy. They gave the lie to her cold lips and made you forget the looks of her, because you knew she"d been made to wear ugliness to test the sweetness of her soul.
I saw "em when, from all the falseness and worry, all the paint and powder and the mockery of big cities and the jest of money and all the worry and bitterness of the end of my adventures, I felt the relief of being n.o.body again and going in a home, whose ever it might be, and being where there was trees and hard work and fewer human faces streaming along and looking into yours, only to forget you forever. For the first time since the day I believed I"d never meet Monty Cranch again, my sight was all fogged with tears.
Probably she saw me. And if you"d know the kind of woman she was, I"ll tell you that the first I knew, her thin fingers was on my big hands, and I looked up and there were those two eyes. The train was thumping along through the meadows, but I heard her say, "There, there," very soft and she never asked me one word about my past either then or ever after. That was her kind of charity, and may G.o.d rest her soul!
Oh, when I look back on that day, I wonder how evil thoughts ever came into my mind and how I could ever wish harm to the white house under the big elms in the centre of the town, where among the business blocks it stood very stubborn, and I wonder how I ever plotted wrong for her or him that was her husband and met us that day at the iron gate.
We saw him reading a paper on the wide porch--a young man then, with a big frame and a habit of looking out very solemn from under his eyebrows and over big tortoise-sh.e.l.l gla.s.ses. But he had boyish, joking ways of speech, as you know. He came down the walk between the plats of gra.s.s that looked like two peaceful, green rugs spread in the midst of all the noise and bustle of the town, and his long hands pulled up the latch and he smiled at the woman as if he loved her. And she said to me in a very proud and dignified way, "Judge Colfax, my husband."
That was the first time I ever set eyes on him, and in a quarter of a century, beginning as he was then, a judge of county court, and ending, as well you know, I never could see a change in his way of looking at life. Civilization moves here and there and along with it ways and means and customs and fashions and the looks of the buildings and the furniture, but there is a saying of the Judge that comes back to me now.
"The way of vice, virtue, pa.s.sions, and instincts of men is universal and everlasting," he"d say, and as for himself, his eyes were watching it all from too high a place for him to be jumping this way and that, like one of the sheep running with the flock.
It showed on the inside of the house then, as it did the day he died in this city. The look of it was the same then, with most everything that was in it used for comfort and not for show, though in those first days there was no end of ornaments, that was kept for memory"s sake--a piece of coral as big as your head brought back by Mrs. Colfax"s father, who had been a minister or something to Brazil, and spears from the South Sea Islands, and two big blue biscuitware jars from China that had been a wedding present to the Judge"s mother from an importer of tea, who had courted her and been rejected, and doc.u.ments in frames which I can"t remember, except a commission in the army signed by a man named James Madison, and a college degree, and a letter written by Jonathan Edwards to a man dying of consumption. They were hard to keep clean, but I liked those things because they reminded a body of the fact that days had gone by when other people was living with their ambitions and loves, and snoring at night, and pain in their wisdom teeth, and all forgotten now!
Anyway, you"d never know they had wealth, they lived so simply, and Mrs.
Colfax had even done much of her own housework. I was hired because a baby was coming, and you can believe it was a happy house in those days, with its peace and the sprinklers spraying water on the lawn in the last hot days of the autumn, and the leaves rustling outside the kitchen window, and the wife singing in her room upstairs, and the Judge looking at her as she sat across the table at breakfast, with his eyes wide open, because, whatever anybody else might think, he believed her the most beautiful looking woman in the world.
I was happy, too, speaking generally. The only trouble was the training that Madame Welstoke had given me. After a body has learned a little of being shrewd like a snake, a cat, or a weasel, and looking on anybody as fair game for blackmail or threats or health cures, it is very hard to shut the cover down on them and never employ those methods any more. I liked the Judge and I might say I loved his wife, but there was still something in me that kept me watching for secrets or skeletons in the closet, and little did I know then how my chance would come.
The baby was born in January,--a daughter--and as beautiful a little creature as you would want to see, with red-brown hair and a pink mouth hard to beat. Of course I"ve seen parents fond enough of children, but never any so fond of one that their mouths were hushed as they looked at her. The truth was that, as for Mrs. Colfax, she was so bound up in the child that she suffered.
"Margaret," she said to me many a time, "a mother"s heart has strange instincts and, I fear, true ones. There is something that tells me that little Julianna will never live."
"Hush, the nonsense!" I answered her, laughing at her white, frightened face. "Trouble enough you"ll have with her teething without borrowing more from such things as Death! Look out the window, ma"am, at the snow that covers everything, and be thankful that we are not having a green winter."
"Something will happen," she said. And I believe it was her worry and nervousness that kept her from getting her strength back and wore her thinner and thinner. She would sit in her window that looked down the slope to the river, with Julianna in her lap, and gaze out at the melting snow, or, later, at the first peep of green in the meadows between the two factories up and down the valley, and at those times I would notice how tired and patient her face looked, though it would all spring up into smiles when she heard the voice of the Judge, who had come in the front door.
Then finally there came a night I remember well. It was about the full moon in the early days of April, but a wind had come up with a lot of clouds blowing across the sky. Maybe it was at ten o"clock--just after I had gone to bed, anyway, and had got to sleep--when I heard the screams--terrible, terrible screams. And I thought they were the screams of a woman.
I jumped up, threw open my window, and tried to look through the night toward the river. I could hear something splash once or twice in the water, and then all was still--still as the grave.
You know how a body feels waked out of a sleep like that. Though it was a warm breeze that blew and though I"ve never been timid, I was shaking like a sheet of paper. It was a minute or two before I could get it out of my mind that some one had been cut from ear to ear. Then I remembered that they had told me that rowdy parties were often boating on the water above the first dam, as the weather grew warmer, and when I listened and heard no sound of any one else in the house stirring, I began to think that my half-sleepy ears had exaggerated the sounds. And then, just as I was about to close the window, a cloud rolled off the moon, and for a second or two there was a great bath of light on the slope, and back of the stable, among the old gnarled apple trees. There were a lot of queer looking shadows among these trees, too, but none so queer as one.
This one shadow was different, for it was not still like the others, but went stopping and starting and scuttling like a crab over the gra.s.s--sometimes upright like a man and sometimes on all fours like a beast. At last it stood up and ran from tree to tree in a swaying, moving zigzag. I could see then that it was a man, but for the life of me I could not remember where I"d seen his like. Then another cloud slid over the moon and the night was as dark as velvet again.
You may be sure I pa.s.sed a restless night. Perhaps the Judge saw it, for when he came in from his regular early morning walk the next day, looking very grave and solemn and troubled, he stared at me a minute before he spoke.
"Margaret," said he, "you look overworked."
"Oh, no, sir," I said, half ashamed to tell of my fright.
"I"m glad to hear you say so," he answered. "I was about to ask you whether you could add to your duties by taking full charge of Julianna."
"The baby!" said I. "Has anything happened to Mrs. Colfax?"
"No," he said, a bit excited, "but I"m going to send her away to-day. I trust it will be soon enough. The doctor has been advising it this long time. Mrs. Colfax is on the edge of nervous prostration, and the baby should be taken from her now and put in your care while she is gone."
I think I must have shrunk back from him. I remembered the screams. I could hear them again in my ears--terrible, terrible screams--at the river.
"While she is gone!" I whispered.
"Yes," said he. "What ails you? You have heard the plan before."
"But the haste, sir," I said. "What is this dreadful hurry about?"
"Not so loud," said he. "You will hear the news soon enough. I may as well tell you. But it must be kept from her at any cost until she is away. A dreadful thing has happened--happened in the night,--not two hundred yards from this house. A woman has been murdered."
"A woman!" I said. "Who?"
"Her name was Mary Chalmers," he said. "She was an actress. She and her husband and their baby had come up from New York. She was found this daybreak at the dam by one of the factory watchmen. There was an overturned boat. The baby had been left asleep in the boarding-house where they were staying, and the husband had been heard to say that he would take her rowing on the river. He had been drinking. He was caught trying to catch the early morning train, and was still so befuddled that he could only say over and over again that he had no memory of where he had been. He says he is not guilty and has sent for a lawyer. The coroner has gone to the dam. That is the story and my wife must be prevented from suspecting any of it. The man will probably be held. It looks badly for him, and the case, if tried, will come before me. My wife must be kept away until it is all over; she must not suffer the morbid worry."
"Did any one hear screams on the river last night?" I asked, biting my finger.
"Several heard them," he said, nodding.
I felt a great relief from that answer, for I had a dread of being called as a witness and then and there I made up my mind that, come what might, I would tell nothing. "What one sees to-morrow, and what one didn"t see yesterday, makes the road easy," Madame Welstoke had been used to say, and I recalled her words and thought highly of their wisdom. And yet I have many the time, wondered whether, if I had told of the creature I had seen, scuttling like a crab over the gra.s.s in the orchard, I might not have prevented the grisly prank that Fate has played.
That afternoon my mistress, in spite of her gentle protests, was taken to the train by the Judge and Doctor Turpin, who I"ve always remembered as an old fool, trying to wipe the p.r.i.c.kly heat off his forehead with a red-bordered silk handkerchief. One of the neighbors, clinking with jet beads till she sounded like a pitcher of ice water coming down the hall, went on the journey to the mountain sanitarium with Mrs. Colfax, as a sort of companion, and when all the fuss of the departure and the slam of the old cab doors and the neighing of the livery-stable hea.r.s.e horses was over, I was left alone with the baby Julianna and the Judge.