I had made no protest when Anne Bullard presented herself at the door the morning after Miss Emily arrived, and, walking into the house, took sleepless charge of the sickroom. And I made no reference save once to the reason for the tragedy. That was the night Miss Emily died. Anne Bullard had called to me that she feared there was a change, and I went into the sickroom. There was a change, and I could only shake my head.
She burst out at me then.
"If only you had never taken this house!" she said. "You people with money, you think there is nothing you can not have. You came, and now look!"
"Anne," I said with a bitterness I could not conceal, "Miss Emily is not young, and I think she is ready to go. But she has been killed by her friends. I wanted to help, but they would not allow me to."
Toward morning there was nothing more to be done, and we sat together, listening to the stertorous breathing from the bed. Maggie, who had been up all night, had given me notice at three in the morning, and was upstairs packing her trunk.
I went into my room, and brought back Miss Emily"s confession.
"Isn"t it time," I said, "to tell me about this? I ought to know, I think, before she goes. If it is not true, you owe it to her, I think."
But she shook her head.
I looked at the confession, and from it to Miss Emily"s pinched old face.
"To whom it may concern: On the 30th day of May, 1911, I killed a woman here in this house. I hope you will not find this until I am dead.
"(Signed) EMILY BENTON."
Anne was watching me. I went to the mantel and got a match, and then, standing near the bed, I lighted it and touched it to the paper. It burned slowly, a thin blue semicircle of fire that ate its way slowly across until there was but the corner I held. I dropped it into the fireplace and watched it turn to black ash.
I may have fancied it--I am always fancying things about Miss Emily--but I will always think that she knew. She drew a longer, quieter breath, and her eyes, fixed and staring, closed. I think she died in the first sleep she had had in twenty-four hours.
I had expected Anne Bullard to show emotion, for no one could doubt her attachment to Miss Emily. But she only stood stoically by the bed for a moment and then, turning swiftly, went to the wall opposite and took down from the wall the walnut-framed photograph Mrs. Graves had commented on.
Anne Bullard stood with the picture in her hand, looking at it. And suddenly she broke into sobs. It was stormy weeping, and I got the impression that she wept, not for Miss Emily, but for many other things--as though the piled-up grief of years had broken out at last.
She took the photograph away, and I never saw it again.
Miss Emily was buried from her home. I obliterated myself, and her friends, who were, I felt, her murderers, came in and took charge. They paid me the tribute of much politeness, but no cordiality, and I think they felt toward me as I felt toward them. They blamed me with the whole affair.
She left her property all to Anne Bullard, to the astonished rage of the congregation, which had expected the return of its dimes and quarters, no doubt, in the shape of a new altar, or perhaps an organ.
"Not a cent to keep up the mausoleum or anything," Mrs. Graves confided to me. "And nothing to the church. All to that telephone-girl, who comes from no one knows where! It"s enough to make her father turn over in his grave. It has set people talking, I can tell you."
Maggie"s mental state during the days preceding the funeral was curious.
She coupled the most meticulous care as to the preparations for the ceremony, and a sort of loving gentleness when she decked Miss Emily"s small old frame for its last rites, with suspicion and hatred of Miss Emily living. And this suspicion she held also against Anne Bullard.
Yet she did not want to leave the house. I do not know just what she expected to find. We were cleaning up preparatory to going back to the city, and I felt that at least a part of Maggie"s enthusiasm for corners was due to a hope of locating more concealed papers. She was rather less than polite to the Bullard girl, who was staying on at my invitation--because the village was now flagrantly unfriendly and suspicious of her. And for some strange reason, the fact that Miss Emily"s cat followed Anne everywhere convinced Maggie that her suspicions were justified.
"It"s like this, Miss Agnes," she said one morning, leaning on the handle of a floor brush. "She had some power over the old lady, and that"s how she got the property. And I am saying nothing, but she"s no Christian, that girl. To see her and that cat going out night after night, both snooping along on their tiptoes--it ain"t normal."
I had several visits from Martin Sprague since Miss Emily"s death, and after a time I realized that he was interested in Anne. She was quite attractive in her mourning clothes, and there was something about her, not in feature, but in neatness and in the way her things had of, well, staying in place, that reminded me of Miss Emily herself. It was rather surprising, too, to see the way she fitted into her new surroundings and circ.u.mstances.
But I did not approve of Martin"s attraction to her. She had volunteered no information about herself, she apparently had no people. She was a lady, I felt, although, with the exception of her new mourning, her clothing was shabby and her linen even coa.r.s.e.
She held the key to the confession. I knew that. And I had no more hope of getting it from her than I had from the cat. So I prepared to go back to the city, with the mystery unsolved. It seemed a pity, when I had got so far with it. I had reconstructed a situation out of such bricks as I had, the books in the cellar, Mrs. Graves"s story of the river, the confession, possibly the note-book and the handkerchief. I had even some material left over in the form of the night intruder, who may or may not have been the doctor. And then, having got so far, I had had to stop for lack of other bricks.
A day or two before I went back to the city, Maggie came to me with a folded handkerchief in her hand.
"Is that yours?" she asked.
I disclaimed it. It was not very fine, and looked rather yellow.
"S"got a name on it," Maggie volunteered. "Wright, I think it is.
"Tain"t hers, unless she"s picked it up somewhere. It"s just come out of the wash."
Maggie"s eyes were snapping with suspicion. "There ain"t any Wrights around here, Miss Agnes," she said. "I sh"d say she"s here under a false name. Wright"s likely hers."
In tracing the mystery of the confession, I find that three apparently disconnected discoveries paved the way to its solution. Of these the handkerchief came first.
I was inclined to think that in some manner the handkerchief I had found in the book in the cellar had got into the wash. But it was where I had placed it for safety, in the wall-closet in the library. I brought it out and compared the two. They were unlike, save in the one regard. The name "Wright" was clear enough on the one Maggie had found. With it as a guide, the other name was easily seen to be the same. Moreover, both had been marked by the same hand.
Yet, on Anne Bullard being shown the one Maggie had found, she disclaimed it. "Don"t you think some one dropped it at the funeral?" she asked.
But I thought, as I turned away, that she took a step toward me. When I stopped, however, and faced about, she was intent on something outside the window.
And so it went. I got nowhere. And now, by way of complication, I felt my sympathy for Anne"s loneliness turning to genuine interest. She was so stoical, so repressed, and so lonely. And she was tremendously proud. Her pride was vaguely reminiscent of Miss Emily"s. She bore her ostracism almost fiercely, yet there were times when I felt her eyes on me, singularly gentle and appealing. Yet she volunteered nothing about herself.
I intended to finish the history of Bolivar County before I left. I dislike not finishing a book. Besides, this one fascinated me--the smug complacence and almost loud virtue of the author, his satisfaction in Bolivar County, and his small hits at the world outside, his patronage to those not of it. And always, when I began to read, I turned to the inscription in Miss Emily"s hand, the hand of the confession--and I wondered if she had really believed it all.
So on this day I found the name Bullard in the book. It had belonged to the Reverend Samuel Thaddeus"s grandmother, and he distinctly stated that she was the last of her line. He inferred, indeed, that since the line was to end, it had chosen a fitting finish in his immediate progenitor.
That night, at dinner, I said, "Anne, are there any Bullards in this neighborhood now?"
"I have never heard of any. But I have not been here long."
"It is not a common name," I persisted.
But she received my statement in silence. She had, as I have said, rather a gift for silence.
That afternoon I was wandering about the garden snipping faded roses with Miss Emily"s garden shears, when I saw Maggie coming swiftly toward me. When she caught my eye, she beckoned to me. "Walk quiet, Miss Agnes," she said, "and don"t say I didn"t warn you. She"s in the library."
So, feeling hatefully like a spy, I went quietly over the lawn toward the library windows. They were long ones, to the floor, and at first I made out nothing. Then I saw Anne. She was on her knees, following the border of the carpet with fingers that examined it, inch by inch.
She turned, as if she felt our eyes on her, and saw us. I shall never forget her face. She looked stricken. I turned away. There was something in her eyes that made me think of Miss Emily, lying among her pillows and waiting for me to say the thing she was dreading to hear.
I sent Maggie away with a gesture. There was something in her pursed lips that threatened danger. For I felt then as if I had always known it and only just realized I knew it, that somewhere in that room lay the answer to all questions; lay Miss Emily"s secret. And I did not wish to learn it. It was better to go on wondering, to question and doubt and decide and decide again. I was, I think, in a state of nervous terror by that time, terror and apprehension.
While Miss Emily lived, I had hoped to help. But now it seemed too hatefully like accusing when she could not defend herself. And there is another element that I am bound to acknowledge. There was an element of jealousy of Anne Bullard. Both of us had tried to help Miss Emily. She had foiled my attempt in her own endeavor, a mistaken endeavor, I felt.
But there was now to be no blemish on my efforts. I would no longer pry or question or watch. It was too late.
In a curious fashion, each of us wished, I think, to prove the quality of her tenderness for the little old lady who was gone beyond all human tenderness.
So that evening, after dinner, I faced Anne in the library.
"Why not let things be as they are, Anne?" I asked. "It can do no good.
Whatever it is, and I do not know, why not let things rest?"