Filigree Ball — Words in the Night, Part 2

There were no signs of subterfuge in him now, and we all, unless I except Durbin, began to yield him credence.

Durbin never gives credence to anybody whose name he has once heard associated with crime.

“And this Pfeiffer was contracted to her?

A man she had secretly married while a school-girl and who at this very critical instant had found his way to the house.

” “You shall read her letter.

It was meant for me, for me only—but you shall see it.

I can not talk of him or of her crime.

It is enough that I have been unable to think of anything else since first those dreadful words fell front her lips in sleep, thirty-six hours before she died.

” Then with the inconsistency of great anguish he suddenly broke forth into the details he shrank from and cried “She muttered, lying there, that she was no bigamist.

That she had killed one husband before she married the other.

Killed him in the old house and by the method her ancestors had taught her.

And I, risen on my elbow, listened, with the sweat oozing from my forehead, but not believing her, oh, not believing her, any more than any one of you would believe such words uttered in a dream by the darling of your heart.

But when, with a long-drawn sigh, she murmured, ‘Murderer!

’ and raised her fists—tiny fists, hands which I had kissed a thousand times—and shook them in the air, an awful terror seized me, and I sought to grasp them and hold them down, but was hindered by some nameless inner recoil under which I could not speak, nor gasp, nor move.

Of course, it was some dream-horror she was laboring under, a nightmare of unimaginable acts and thoughts, but it was one to hold me back; and when she lay quiet again and her face resumed its old sweetness in the moonlight, I found myself staring at her almost as if it were true—what she had said—that word—that awful word which no woman could use with regard to herself, even in dreams, unless—Something, an echo from the discordant chord in our two weeks’ married life, rose like the confirmation of a doubt in my shocked and rebellious breast.

From that hour till dawn nothing in that slowly brightening room seemed real, not her face lying buried in its youthful locks upon the pillow, not the objects well-known and well-prized by which we were surrounded—not myself—most of all, not myself, unless the icy dew oozing from the roots of my lifted hair was real, unless that shape, fearsome, vague, but persistent, which hovered in the shadows above us, drawing a line of eternal separation between me and my wife, was a thing which could be caught and strangled and— Oh!

I rave!

I

chatter like a madman; but I did not rave that night.

Nor did I rave when, in the bright, broad sunlight, her eye slowly unclosed and she started to see me bending so near her, but not with my usual kiss or glad good morning.

I could not question her then; I dared not.

The smile which slowly rose to her lips was too piteous—it showed confidence.

I waited till after breakfast.

Then, while she was seated where she could not see my face, I whispered the question: ‘Do you know that you have had a horrible dream?

’ She shrieked and turned.

_I saw her face and knew that what she had uttered in her sleep was true.

_’ “I have no remembrance of what I said to her.

She tried to tell me how she had been tempted and how she had not realized her own act, till the moment I bent down to kiss her lips as her husband.

But I did not stop to listen—I could not.

I flew immediately to Miss Tuttle with the violent demand as to whether she knew that her sister was already a wife when she married me, and when she cried out ‘No!

’ and showed great dismay, I broke forth with the dreadful tale and cowered in unmanly anguish at her feet, and went mad and lost myself for a little while.

Then I went back to my wretched wife and asked her how the awful deed had been done.

She told me, and again I did not believe her and began to look upon it all as some wild dream or the distempered fancies of a disordered brain.

This thought calmed me and I spoke gently to her and even tried to take her hand.

But she herself was raving now, and clung about my knees, murmuring words of such anguish and contrition that my worst fears returned and, only stopping to take the key of the Moore house from my bureau, I left the house and wandered madly—I know not where.

“I did not go back that day.

I could not face her again till I knew how much of her confession was fancy and how much was fact.

I roamed the streets, carrying that key from one end of the city to the other, and at night I used it to open the house which she had declared contained so dreadful a secret.

“I had bought candles on my way there but, forgetting to take them from the store, I had no light with which to penetrate the horrible place that even the moon refused to illumine.

I realized this when once in, but would not go back.

All I have told about using matches to light me to the southwest chamber is true, also my coming upon the old candelabrum there, with a candle in one of its sockets.

This candle I lit, my sole reason for seeking this room being my desire to examine the antique sketch for the words which she had said could be found there.

“I had failed to bring a magnifying-glass with me, but my eyes are phenomenally sharp.

Knowing where to look, I was able to pick out enough words here and there in the lines composing the hair, to feel quite sure that my wife had neither deceived me nor been deceived as to certain directions being embodied there in writing.

Shaken in my last lingering hope, but not yet quite convinced that these words pointed to outrageous crime, I flew next to the closet and drew out the fatal drawer.

“You have been there and know what the place is, but no one but myself can ever realize what it was for me, still loving, still clinging to a wild inconsequent belief in my wife, to grope in that mouth of hell for the spring she had chattered about in her sleep, to find it, press it, and then to hear, down in the dark of the fearsome recess, the sound of something deadly strike against what I took to be the cushions of the old settle standing at the edge of the library hearthstone.

“I think I must have fainted.

For when I found myself possessed of sufficient consciousness to withdraw from that hole of death, the candle in the candelabrum was shorter by an inch than when I first thrust my head into the gap made by the removed drawers.

In putting back the drawers I hit the candelabrum with my foot, upsetting it and throwing out the burning candle.

As the flames began to lick the worm-eaten boarding of the floor a momentary impulse seized me to rush away and leave the whole place to burn.

But I did not.

With a sudden frenzy, I stamped out the flame, and then finding myself in darkness, groped my way downstairs and out.

If I entered the library I do not remember it.

Some lapses must be pardoned a man involved as I was.

” “But the fact which you dismiss so lightly is an important one,” insisted the major.

“We must know positively whether you entered this room or not.

” “I have no recollection of doing so” “Then you can not tell us whether the little table was standing there, with the candelabrum upon it or—” “I can tell you nothing about it.

” The major, after a long look at this suffering man, turned toward Miss Tuttle.

“You must have loved your sister very much,” he sententiously remarked.

She flushed and for the first time her eyes fell from their resting-place on Mr. Jeffrey’s face.

“I loved her reputation,” was her quiet answer, “and—” The rest died in her throat.

But we all—such of us, I mean, who were possessed of the least sensibility or insight, knew how that sentence sounded as finished in her heart “and I loved _him_ who asked this sacrifice of me.

” Yet was her conduct not quite clear.

“And to save that reputation you tied the pistol to her wrist?

” insinuated the major.

“No,” was her vehement reply.

“I never knew what I was tying to her.

My testimony in that regard was absolutely true.

She held the pistol concealed in the folds of her dress.

I did not dream—I could not—that she was contemplating any such end to the atrocious crime—to which she had confessed.

Her manner was too light, too airy and too frivolous—a manner adopted, as I now see, to forestall all questions and hold back all expressions of feeling on my part.

‘Tie these hanging ends of ribbon to my wrist,’ were her words.

‘Tie them tight; a knot under and a bow on top.

I am going out— There, don’t say anything— What you want to talk about will keep till tomorrow.

For one night more I am going to make merry—to—to enjoy myself.

’ She was laughing.

I thought her horribly callous and trembled with such an unspeakable repulsion that I had difficulty in making the knot.

To speak at all would have been impossible.

Neither did I dare to look in her face.

I was touching the hand and _she_ kept on laughing—such a hollow laugh covering up such an awful resolve!

When she turned to give me that last injunction about the note, this resolve glared still in her eyes.

” “And you never suspected?

” “Not for an instant.

I did not do justice either to her misery or to her conscience.

I fear that I have never done her justice in anyway.

I

thought her light, pleasure-loving.

I did not know that it was assumed to hide a terrible secret.

” “Then you had no knowledge of the contract she had entered into while a school-girl?

” “Not in the least.

Another woman, and not myself, had been her confidante; a woman who has since died.

No intimation of her first unfortunate marriage had ever reached me till Mr. Jeffrey rushed in upon me that Tuesday morning with her dreadful confession on his lips.

” The district attorney, who did not seem quite satisfied on a certain point passed over by the major, now took the opportunity of saying: “You assure us that you had no idea that this once lighthearted sister of yours meditated suicide when she left you?

” “And I repeat it, sir.

” “Then why did you immediately go to Mr. Jeffrey’s drawer, where you could have no business, unless it was to see if she had taken his pistol with her?

” Miss Tuttle’s head fell and a soft flush broke through the pallor of her cheek.

“Because I was thinking of _him_.

Because I was terrified for _him_.

He had left the house the morning before in a half-maddened condition and had not come back to sleep or eat since.

I did not know what a man so outraged in every sacred feeling of love and honor might be tempted to do.

I thought of suicide.

I remembered the old house and how he had said, ‘I don’t believe her.

I don’t believe she ever did so cold-blooded an act, or that any such dreadful machinery is in that house.

I never shall believe it till I have seen and handled it myself.

It is a nightmare, Cora.

We are insane.

’ I thought of this, sirs, and when I went into her room, to change the place of the little note in the book, I went to his bureau drawer, not to look for the pistol—I did not think of that then,—but to see if the keys of the Moore house were still there.

I knew that they were kept in this drawer, for I had been present in the room when they were brought in after the wedding.

I had also been short-sighted enough to conclude that if they were gone it was he who had taken them.

They were gone, and that was why I flew immediately from the house to the old place in Waverley Avenue.

I was concerned for Mr. Jeffrey!

I feared to find him there, demented or dead.

” “But you had no key.

” “No. Mr. Jeffrey had taken one of them and my sister the other.

But the lack of a key or even of a light—for the missing candles were not taken by me[1]—could not keep me at home after I was once convinced that he had gone to this dreadful house.

If I could not get in I could at least hammer at the door or rouse the neighbors.

Something must be done.

I

did not think what; I merely flew.

” [1] We afterwards found that these candles were never delivered at the house at all; that they had been placed in the wrong basket and left in a neighboring kitchen.

“Did you know that the house had two keys?

” “Not then.

” “But your sister did?

” “Probably.

” “And finding the only key, as you supposed, gone, you flew to the Moore house?

” “Immediately.

” “And now what else?

” “I found the door unlocked.

” “That was done by Mrs. Jeffrey?

” “Yes, but I did not think of her then.

” “And you went in?

” “Yes; it was all dark, but I felt my way till I came to the gilded pillars.

” “Why did you go there?

” “Because I felt—I knew—if he were anywhere in that house he would be _there!

_” “And why did you stop?

” Her voice rose above its usual quiet pitch in shrill protest: “You know!

you know!

I heard a pistol-shot from within, then a fall.

I

don’t remember anything else.

They say I went wandering about town.

Perhaps I did; it is all a blank to me—everything is a blank till the policeman said that my sister was dead and I learned for the first time that the shot I had heard in the Moore house was not the signal of his death, but hers.

Had I been myself when at that library door,” she added, after a moment of silence, “I would have rushed in at the sound of that shot and have received my sister’s dying breath.

” “Cora!

” The cry was from Mr. Jeffrey, and seemed to be quite involuntary.

“In the weeks during which we have been kept from speaking together I have turned all these events over in my mind till I longed for any respite, even that of the grave.

But in all my thinking I never attributed this motive to your visit here.

Will you forgive me?

” There was a new tone in his voice, a tone which no woman could hear without emotion.

“You had other things to think of,” she said, and her lips trembled.

Never have I seen on the human face a more beautiful expression than I saw on hers at that moment; nor do I think Mr. Jeffrey had either, for as he marked it his own regard softened almost to tenderness.

The major had no time for sentimentalities.

Turning to Mr. Jeffrey, he said: “One more question before we send for the letter which you say will give us full insight into your wife’s crime.

Do you remember what occurred on the bridge at Georgetown just before you came into town that night?

” He shook his head.

“Did you meet any one there?

” “I do not know.

” “Can you remember your state of mind?

” “I was facing the future.

” “And what did you see in the future?

” “Death.

Death for her and death for me!

A crime was on her soul and she must die, and if she, then myself.

I knew no other course.

I could not summon the police, point out my bride of a fortnight and, with the declaration that she had been betrayed into killing a man, coldly deliver her up to justice.

Neither could I live at her side knowing the guilty secret which parted us; or live anywhere in the world under this same consciousness.

Therefore, I meant to kill myself before another sun rose.

But she was more deeply stricken with a sense of her own guilt than I realized.

When I returned home for the pistol which was to end our common misery I found that she had taken her punishment into her own hands.

This strangely affected me, but when I found that, in doing this, she had remembered that I should have to face the world after she was gone, and so left a few lines for me to show in explanation of her act, my revolt against her received a check which the reading of her letter only increased.

But the lines she thus wrote and left were not true lines.

All her heart was mine, and if it was a wicked heart she has atoned—” He paused, quite overcome.

Others amongst us were overcome, too, but only for a moment.

The following remark from the district attorney soon recalled us to the practical aspects of the case.

“You have accounted for many facts not hitherto understood.

But there is still a very important one which neither yourself nor Miss Tuttle has yet made plain.

There was a candle on the scene of crime; it was out when this officer arrived here.

There was also one found burning in the upstairs room, aside from the one you professedly used in your tour of inspection there.

Whence came those candles?

And did your wife blow out the one in the library herself, previous to the shooting, or was it blown out afterward and by other lips?

” “These are questions which, as I have already said, I have no means of answering,” repeated Mr. Jeffrey.

“The courage which brought her here may have led her to supply herself with light; and, hard as it is to conceive, she may even have found nerve to blow out the light before she lifted the pistol to her breast:” The district attorney and the major looked unconvinced, and the latter, turning toward Miss Tuttle, asked if she had any remark to make on the subject.

But she could only repeat Mr. Jeffrey’s statement.

“These are questions _I_ can not answer either.

I have said that I stopped at the library door, which means that I saw nothing of what passed within.

” Here the major asked where Mrs. Jeffrey’s letter was to be found.

It was Mr. Jeffrey who replied: “Search in my room for a book with an outside cover of paper still on it.

You will probably find it on my table.

The inner cover is red.

Bring that book here.

Our secret is hidden in it.

” Durbin disappeared on this errand.

I followed him as far as the door, but I did not think it necessary to state that I had seen this book lying on the table when I paid my second visit to Mr. Jeffrey’s room in company with the coroner.

The thought that my hand had been within reach of this man’s secret so many weeks before was sufficiently humiliating without being shared.