"It cannot be money," I said. "The rent is absurdly low. The agent wished her to ask more, but she refused."
She sat silent for a time, pulling at the fingers of her white silk gloves. And when she spoke again it was of the garden. But before she left she returned to Miss Emily.
"She has had a hard life, in a way," she said. "It is only five years since she buried her brother, and her father not long before that. She has broken a great deal since then. Not that the brother--"
"I understand he was a great care."
Mrs. Graves looked about the room, its shelves piled high with the ecclesiastical library of the late clergyman.
"It was not only that," she said. "When he was--all right, he was an atheist. Imagine, in this house! He had the most terrible books, Miss Blakiston. And, of course, when a man believes there is no hereafter, he is apt to lead a wicked life. There is nothing to hold him back."
Her mind was on Miss Emily and her problems. She moved abstractedly toward the door.
"In this very hall," she said, "I helped Miss Emily to pack all his books into a box, and we sent for Mr. Staley--the hackman at the station, you know--and he dumped the whole thing into the river. We went away with him, and how she cheered up when it was done!"
Martin Sprague"s newspapers arrived the next morning. They bore a date of two days before the date of the confession, and contained, rather triumphantly outlined in blue pencil, full details of the murder of a young woman by some unknown a.s.sa.s.sin. It had been a grisly crime, and the paper was filled with details of a most sensational sort.
Had I been asked, I would have said that Miss Emily"s clear, slightly upturned eyes had never glanced beyond the merest headlines of such journalistic reports. But in a letter Martin Sprague set forth a precisely opposite view.
"You will probably find," he wrote, "that the little lady is pretty well fed up on such stuff. The calmer and more placid the daily life, the more apt is the secret inner one, in such a circ.u.mscribed existence, to be a thriller! You might look over the books in the house. There is a historic case where a young girl swore she had tossed her little brother to a den of lions (although there were no lions near, and little brother was subsequently found asleep in the attic) after reading Fox"s Book of Martyrs. Probably the old gentleman has this joke book in his library."
I put down his letter and glanced around the room. Was he right, after all? Did women, rational, truthful, devout women, ever act in this strange manner? And if it was true, was it not in its own way as mysterious as everything else?
I was, for a time that day, strongly influenced by Martin Sprague"s conviction. It was, for one thing, easier to believe than that Emily Benton had committed a crime. And, as if to lend color to his a.s.sertion, the sunlight, falling onto the dreary bookshelves, picked out and illuminated dull gilt letters on the brown back of a volume. It was Fox"s Book of Martyrs!
If I may a.n.a.lyze my sensations at that time, they divided themselves into three parts. The first was fear. That seems to have given away to curiosity, and that at a later period, to an intense anxiety. Of the three, I have no excuse for the second, save the one I gave myself at the time--that Miss Emily could not possibly have done the thing she claimed to have done, and that I must prove her innocence to myself.
With regard to Martin Sprague"s theory, I was divided. I wanted him to be right. I wanted him to be wrong. No picture I could visualize of little old Miss Emily conceivably fitted the type he had drawn. On the other hand, nothing about her could possibly confirm the confession as an actual one.
The sc.r.a.p of paper became, for the time, my universe. Did I close my eyes, I saw it side by side with the inscription in "Fifty years of my Bolivar County," and letter for letter, in the same hand. Did the sun shine, I had it in the light, examining it, reading it. To such a point did it obsess me that I refused to allow Maggie to use a tablet of glazed paper she had found in the kitchen table drawer to tie up the jelly-gla.s.ses. It seemed, somehow, horrible to me.
At that time I had no thought of going back five years and trying to trace the accuracy or falsehood of the confession. I should not have known how to go about it. Had such a crime been committed, how to discover it at this late day? Whom in all her sheltered life, could Miss Emily have murdered? In her small world, who could have fallen out and left no sign?
It was impossible, and I knew it. And yet--
Miss Emily was ill. The news came through the grocery boy, who came out every day on a bicycle, and teased the cat and carried away all the pears as fast as they ripened. Maggie brought me the information at luncheon.
"She"s sick," she said.
There was only one person in both our minds those days.
"Do you mean really ill, or only--"
"The boy says she"s breaking up. If you ask me, she caught cold the night she broke in here and took your Paisley shawl. And if you ask my advice, Miss Agnes, you"ll get it back again before the heirs step in and claim it. They don"t make them shawls nowadays, and she"s as like as not to will it to somebody if you don"t go after it."
"Maggie," I said quietly, "how do you know she has that shawl?"
"How did I know that paper was in the telephone-box?" she countered.
And, indeed, by that time Maggie had convinced herself that she had known all along there was something in the telephone battery-box.
"I"ve a sort of second sight, Miss Agnes," she added. And, with a shrewdness I found later was partially correct: "She was snooping around to see if you"d found that paper, and it came on to rain; so she took the shawl. I should say," said Maggie, lowering her voice, "that as like as not she"s been in this house every night since we came."
Late that afternoon I cut some of the roses from the arch for Miss Emily, and wrapping them against the sun, carried them to the village.
At the last I hesitated. It was so much like prying. I turned aside at the church intending to leave them there for the altar. But I could find no one in the parish house, and no vessel to hold them.
It was late afternoon. I opened a door and stepped into the old church.
I knelt for a moment, and then sat back and surveyed the quiet building.
It occurred to me that here one could obtain a real conception of the Benton family, and of Miss Emily. The church had been the realest thing in their lives. It had dominated them, obsessed them. When the Reverend Samuel Thaddeus died, they had built him, not a monument, but a parish house. When Carlo Benton died (however did such an unG.o.dly name come to belong to a Benton?) Miss Emily according to the story, had done without fresh mourning and built him a window.
I looked at the window. It was extremely ugly, and very devout. And under it was the dead man"s name and two dates, 1860 and 1911.
So Carlo Benton had died the year Miss Emily claimed to have done a murder! Another proof, I reflected that Martin Sprague would say. He had been on her hands for a long time, both well and ill. Small wonder if little Miss Emily had fallen to imagining things, or to confessing them.
I looked at the memorial window once more, and I could almost visualize her gathering up the dead man"s hateful books, and getting them as quickly as possible out of the house. Quite possibly there were unmentionable volumes among them--de Maupa.s.sant, perhaps Boccaccio. I had a distinct picture, too, of Mrs. Graves, lips primly set, a.s.sisting her with hands that fairly itched with the righteousness of her actions.
I still held the roses, and as I left the church I decided to lay them on some grave in the churchyard. I thought it quite likely that roses from the same arch had been frequently used for that purpose. Some very young grave, I said to myself, and found one soon enough, a bit of a rectangle of fresh earth, and a jarful of pansies on it. It lay in the shadow of the Benton mausoleum.
That was how I found that Carlo Benton had died on the 27th of May, 1911.
I cannot claim that the fact at the time had any significance for me, or that I saw in it anything more than another verification of Martin Sprague"s solution. But it enabled me to reconstruct the Benton household at the date that had grown so significant. The 30th would have probably been the day after the funeral. Perhaps the nurse was still there. He had had a nurse for months, according to Mrs. Graves. And there would have been the airing that follows long illness and death, the opened windows, the packing up or giving away of clothing, the pauses and silences, the sense of strangeness and quiet, the lowered voices. And there would have been, too, that remorseless packing for destruction of the dead atheist"s books.
And some time, during that day or the night that followed, little Miss Emily claimed to have committed her crime.
I went home thoughtfully. At the gate I turned and looked back. The Benton Mausoleum was warm in the sunset, and the rose sprays lay, like outstretched arms, across the tiny grave.
Maggie is amazingly efficient. I am efficient myself, I trust, but I modify it with intelligence. It is not to me a vital matter, for instance, if three dozen gla.s.ses of jelly sit on a kitchen table a day or two after they are prepared for retirement to the fruit cellar.
I rather like to see them, marshaled in their neat rows, capped with sealing wax and paper, and armed with labels. But Maggie has neither sentiment nor imagination. Jelly to her is an inst.i.tution, not an inspiration. It is subject to certain rules and rites, of which not the least is the formal interment in the fruit closet.
Therefore, after much protesting that night, I agreed to visit the fruit cellar, and select a spot for the temporary entombing of thirty-six jelly tumblers, which would have been thirty-seven had Delia known the efficacy of a silver spoon. I can recall vividly the mental shift from the confession to that domestic excursion, my own impatience, Maggie"s grim determination, and the curious denouement of that visit.
III
I had the very slightest acquaintance with the bas.e.m.e.nt 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 bra.s.s b.u.t.tons. He rose as my light approached, and I made a bed for him of a cushion from a chair, failing my Paisley shawl.