“Nothing. And even then, when Mrs. Fenn called up and told me, I didn’t think of Alda. I supposed it was heart failure or apoplexy. But when I learned of the nail I suspected the truth, and later, Alda told me all. She has no regret—I mean, her sense of right and wrong is so clouded now that she cannot think clearly. Her mentality has dwindled rapidly of late, and even now—she is sleeping after a sedative—I think she will not recover her mind to the extent of sanity she has shown of late. I’m not sure I am telling you this so you can understand it, but I am so stunned, so dazed to think the time has come to tell it, that I want only to tell it truthfully and all at once, I don’t want to have to go over it again——”
Merivale appeared in the doorway.
“Miss Alma,” she said, gravely, and in solemn tone, “Miss Alda is going.”
Alma rose, not hastily, but with a sweet dignity, and turning to me, said: “Come with me, Gray.”
It was like a chrism; I felt sanctified to be chosen to stand at her side in this supreme moment.
The others followed us, but I did not know it then.
Alma and I went up the stairs together and she turned toward the guest room.
There on the bed lay the counterpart of my own darling. I knew now that it was Alda whom I had seen that night in the canoe; it was Alda whom Posy May and her friends had seen in tantrums with the nurse, it was Alda who—poor demented, irresponsible child—had killed Sampson Tracy, in blind imitation of the story she had read about the nail.
She was beautiful, even as Alma was beautiful, but the light in her eyes was not the light of reason, rather the weird light of visions seen by a deficient mentality. But even as we looked, the restless eyes closed, the restless body subsided into stillness, and a coma set in, from which Alda Remsen never awakened.
We sent for a doctor, but there was nothing to be done, and though she lingered for two days, the spirit was at last set free, Alda was released, and Alma’s long and ghastly term of servitude was over.