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 nobody 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 God’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 nobody 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 God 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-shell glasses. But he had boyish, joking ways of speech, as you know. He came down the walk between the plats of grass 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, passions, 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 documents 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 grass—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 passed 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 grass 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 prickly 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 hearse horses was over, I was left alone with the baby Julianna and the Judge.
The child was laying on its fat little naked back, kicking its feet at me, when the father came upstairs.
“Please, sir,” said I, “what is the news?”
“The inquest says drowning or blows on the head administered by a party or parties unknown,” he answered gravely. “John Chalmers, the husband, acts like a heeled snake—violent and sinuous by turns. His lawyer has waived all preliminary proceedings and, as luck will have it, we have a clear docket to go to trial with a jury.”
By afternoon the town was filled with reporters who had come up on the midday train. From the back windows you could see them walking along the banks of the river and talking with a man in a red shirt. And later I learned he was the one who had gone out in a rowboat and found the poor woman’s silly hat, that, with its wet yellow roses and lavender veil, had floated around amongst a clump of rushes. With night the city papers came, full of accounts of the actress and how she had played in melodramas, until finally she had played her farewell in a tragedy of real life. One said her husband was going to prove an alibi; another said he had no memory whatever of where he had been or what he had done that evening; and still another paper said the woman had been seen to quarrel with him and join a mysterious stranger, who was described as being a hunchback of terrible ugliness. All three of those I saw said the mystery might never be solved, but that new developments were expected every minute by both the state police and the chief of the local department.
“Margaret,” said the Judge that evening at supper, as I was waiting on him, “you must not be talking of this murder with any one. Remember that you are employed in my home. Furthermore, I have old-fashioned notions, and so, from now on, I have stopped the ‘Morning Chronicle’ from coming to the house and I don’t want any newspapers brought in until the trial is over.”
“And when will that be?” I asked.
“Soon, I hope,” he answered. “The district attorney, I understand, has conferred with the police again this afternoon, and believes he has enough evidence to hang Chalmers and that no more can be gathered. For some reason the defense is equally satisfied. Do you understand now?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “There won’t be much delay.”
“Not much delay,” he repeated over after me, and his voice shook as I never heard it shake before that minute.
“The beast!” I said.
“Hush,” said he. “He must be found guilty first. But if he is—”
He stopped there, but I saw the light in his eyes and his long, tight-clenched fingers turning white under the pressure, and I knew, if he passed sentence on John Chalmers, what it would be.
That was the last word I ever heard from him before the trial was over, and I had to be running over to the neighbors for all the news I got. A reporter came to ask me one day if I had seen a strange man loafing in the meadows the evening the thing happened. He was a red-haired, freckled young man who kept pushing his hat, first to one side of his head and then the other, and talking first to one side and then the other of a pencil held in his teeth, so I could hardly hear a word he said. But he told me that, following the case from the beginning, he had been the one who had discovered that two weeks before the murder the man had insured his wife’s life in his own favor and that before he had met and married her he had had a different name,—Mortimer Cross,—and been a runner for a hotel in Bermuda, and lost the place because, in a fit of anger, he had tried to knife a porter.
“The police haven’t half covered this case,” he said, with his green eyes snapping. “I’ve got more evidence for my paper than they can get for the State’s case. I haven’t slept four hours in forty-eight.”
“Young man,” said I, “how much do you get a week?”
He grinned.
“Twenty dollars,” he said.
“You work like that for twenty dollars?” I asked.
“For twenty dollars!” said he. “What’s the twenty dollars?”
“Well, then—” said I.
“It’s the game!” he said. “But you don’t understand.”
“Don’t I, though!” said I. And for days the old desire for adventure, for all the crooked ways, came back to me and made me as restless as a volcanic island, as Madame Welstoke used to say.
It was then I used to begin to hate the baby at times. I could have loved one of my own, and the feeling that this one belonged to some one else, and that I probably never would have the touch of hands that belonged to me, haunted me like a gray worm crawling through my head. Many a time as I would be dipping little Julianna into her bath, these thoughts would come to my wicked mind, and, drying her, I’d dust the powder over the pink body till the room looked like a flour-mill. I wished the trial would hurry to come and go, so Mrs. Colfax, who was writing such pathetic, patient letters about her baby, could return, and I laid many a curse on the fat doctor for making so much fuss about her nervous condition and for sending her away.
I could not go to the court and I had to pick up what I could of the trial, as it went on, from gossip and reading of papers in my own room after I had gone to bed. Sometimes I’d wheel Julianna down the street to the court-house, and then I’d see men with fingers raised as if they were all barristers, or imitating barristers, standing on the court-house steps and whispering and talking and laughing, and the sheriff, with a blue coat and mixed trousers and gray side whiskers, sitting on a campstool under the big elm tree, like a man at an old soldiers’ home, and factory-girl witnesses, giggling as they went up and disappeared into the dark corridors, and the drone of voices coming out of the open windows, and perhaps the jury walking in pairs and acting very important, with a deputy sheriff taking them over to the Lenox Café for their lunch. The murder mystery had brought up a lot of curious people from the city, and I remember one—a woman with folds of skin under her chin and plenty of diamond rings—who wiped her eyes, pretending there were tears in them.
“Where is the court-house?” she said to me, just as if she could not see it. “I was the woman’s most intimate friend once.”
That was the way with most everybody. They did not like the thought of the poor dead woman or the horror of it, but only the thought of being important and knowing something about it that the next one did not know. One girl in the town—a daughter of the biggest grocer and quite a belle—could imitate the screams she had heard and did it over and over, because she was begged by her girl friends, and so she was something of a heroine and thought for still another reason to be a good person to know.
The Judge was made of different stuff, I can tell you. We did not have many criminal trials in our family, so to speak, and I think it must have eaten well into his heart, for he was very silent and grave at meals and never laughed, except when he came up to play with the baby and ride the little thing, with its lolling head and big eyes, on his knee.
It took over a week to finish the trial after they had begun it. They had wanted to trace John Chalmers’s history, but he would tell nothing of it himself, and his past was a mystery, and there was a feeling among those who discussed the case that this would be against him. In fact, every one said he was surely guilty. He had misused his wife’s life; he was a drunkard and subject to fits of violence; he had asked his wife to go rowing on the river at a season when it was still cold; she had screamed; he was a good swimmer; there were signs of blows on her head; he had rescued himself, but not her, and he had tried to run away from the town without reporting her death. To be sure, he had been able to show that he had been drinking, and evidence was brought to prove that he had lost consciousness after getting out of the water, and that when he had awakened he had asked a sleepy milkman where the police station was and had been directed to the depot by mistake. According to his own story, the boat had tipped over when the moon was behind a cloud and he had lost all trace of his wife after her first struggle in the water. But people laughed at this story, and as for myself, I wondered who was the creature I had seen in the orchard, mixed up with the queer shadows and running from tree to tree like a frightened ape. Little knowing what was to happen, I wondered whether I should ever see John Chalmers, the accused man, before the law had made way with him.
I never doubted that the law would hesitate, till the day the Judge came home to dinner at six in the evening and told me that the case had been in the jury’s hands for three hours already. How well I remember the long rays of the sun slanting over the slope, the songs of the wild birds that had sneaked into the trees along the green back yards of our dusty street, and how it came to me then that the world was too beautiful to be befouled by the hates of little men, whose appetites were no more important than the appetites of the caterpillars eating the green foliage. But I could see the hates of men reflected in the Judge’s face.
“Surely they would not let him go, sir?” said I.
He only shook his head, and later he went out without once asking for the baby, and I knew when I heard the gate slam that things had not gone well at the court-house.
At eight o’clock that night I was on the porch when a man came tearing up to the fence, almost fell off a bicycle, vaulted the rail, and came running over the grass.
“Got a telephone?” he said.
“Yes,” said I, with the answer frightened out of me.
“Gimme a match,” said he. “I’ve gotter have a cigarette. Hold on, I got one.”
He lit it. In the flare I saw it was the red-haired, freckled reporter and his green eyes was all alive again.
Before I could stop him, he had pushed his way ahead of me into the Judge’s study and was at the instrument.
“A line!” he gasped. “I want New York.”
He was snapping at his cigarette like a wild thing, and, along with his perspiration, ashes and sparks were dropping on the rug.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I lost my prey!”
“What!” said I.
“Acquittal,” said he. “The Judge was too damned conscientious in his charge to the jury.—Come on, there, New York! Confound you, come on! I’ve got to relay a message through to my paper.”
“Acquittal?” I asked, trembling like a horse.
“Acquittal,” he roared into the instrument. “This is Roddy. Five hours out. Interview with Dugan, juryman, local plumber. Says strict charge of judge did it. Prisoner gone down to River Flats with counsel. Drinking with Fred Magurk in kitchen barroom. Refuses to talk. Rest of story already gone by telegraph.”
He turned around then and grinned as if it hurt him—as if he was trying to hide some pain. I had lit the lamp and you cannot begin to know how funny his white face looked under his bright red hair.
“Can I get a drink of water?” he said, choking, and then over he went face foremost into the morris chair.
I ran into the kitchen and what with the water splashing in the sink, I did not hear the Judge come in, and the first I knew about his being there was when I went back into the library. There he stood, with his tortoise-shell glasses in his long fingers, looking down at Mr. Roddy, sitting weak and blinking in his chair.
“Sorry, Judge, to faint away like a queen dowager in your library,” said the reporter, with his everlasting American good nature. “But I came in to use the first telephone I could find. I was a little tired. My name’s Roddy.”
“Mr. Roddy,” said Judge Colfax, holding out his hand, “I know of you very well and of your work on this case.”
“Too bad!” said Roddy,—“the outcome?”
“I express no opinion,” the Judge answered in a weary voice.
“The prisoner lost no time in finding liquor again,” said the other. “He went to a bar before he went to his baby.”
This reached the Judge. His eyes snapped. There was a low growling in his throat.
“Margaret,” said he to me, “bring this gentleman some brandy. You will rest here a while, Mr. Roddy. I suppose you will not leave until the eleven-thirty train.”
“Thank you. I’m played out,” said the reporter. “I thank you.”
And so it was that, with many a queer thought in my head, I sat in the kitchen rocker, listening to the mumble of their voices and waiting up to see if they should want me for anything. And so it was, too, that at last I found myself nodding with sleep, and started to go upstairs to bed.
Call me superstitious if you like, but I know well enough that some of us humans can feel the whisper of evil and terror before it reaches us. It spoke to me on those dark back stairs with the moonlight shining on the wall at the top, and I was brought up sharp and wide awake, when the air rang with it as if it was a bell.
“You’re half asleep, you old fool,” I said, feeling the sweat start out on my forehead, and I repeated it to myself when I was in my room and turning down the bedclothes.