Shattuck shook off the hand which his friend placed upon his shoulder; but Rhodes turned with unimpaired cheerfulness to the others.
"Now look-a-here, Mrs. Yates, this must stop, short off, right here. I'd like to think I'd leave as good a friend behind me as the pygmies have in you; but you can't befriend with impunity people who have been dead so long that they are too funny to keep their coffins to themselves. You look out! You don't want an action for assault with intent to kill brought against you, I reckon. I think I may promise that Mr. Shattuck will do nothing about this offence—if it is not repeated. At least, I would go that far myself," he concluded, with an air of prompting his friend's generosity.
But Shattuck said nothing. His whole interest in the present moment had given way to that suggestion of a strange sound in the midnight and what it might signify. He still hung on the back of the chair, his hat in his listless hands, but his face was turned toward the purplish black square of the window, and his meditative eyes dwelt upon the inscrutable darkness that encompassed the pygmy burying-ground.
Adelaide had seen, in a sort of numb despair, her denial of the deed swallowed up in her admission of the threat. In her confused sense of the fact, and her loss of courage before the inexorability of the conviction, as it were, out of her own mouth, she could only reiterate: "I didn't do it! I didn't do it!" And her stunned immobility of aspect seemed sullen, and her tone was interpreted as dogged.
"Oh, well, all right," said Rhodes, lightly. He could be casual enough now, since it could be made plain to all the country-side that it was no affair of his, but a quarrel between Shattuck and the fugitive Yates and the deserted wife. "Come, come, Shattuck," again clapping his heavy hand on his friend's shoulder, "we must be a-jogging."
Ephraim, too, had the voice of accusation in his farewell. "I ain't s'prised none," he said, looking over his shoulder, with a lowering melancholy gleam in his eyes under the broad brim of his hat, as he turned toward the door—"I ain't s'prised none ef Fee makes ye pay fur that thar leetle colt, an' takes it 'fore the court." He paused upon the threshold after a heavy lumbering step or two. "I reckon he won't make ye pay much, though; an' Fee ain't one nohow ter set store on courts," he added, relenting.
She stood there, arraigned on her own hearth-stone, silent, pale, her face seeming as rigid as if it were some changeless symmetry of marble, in the interval while they mounted their horses and rode way. The sound of the hoofs came, then ceased as a marshy dip intervened, and rose on the air once more from the farther side, and dulled in the distance to silence. The throbbing of the cataract asserted itself anew. From every weed growing rank about the fence corners, from amongst the vines over the porch, vibrated the voice of the myriad nocturnal insects, chiming and chiming interminably. Only the irresponsive darkness without met her eye as she still mechanically gazed through the doorway where the visitors had disappeared.
Letitia had sunk down in the great spacious high-backed chair on which Shattuck had leaned. It was a half-reclining posture, to whose languors her slenderness and drooping grace lent a sort of individuality, and she looked like a child half recumbent in the corner, both hands clasping one of its arms. Her curling hair, a tress or two falling on her forehead, the rest drawn back and tied at the nape of the neck, whence the ends all escaped, seemed longer as her head drooped. Her eyes for the moment were upon the fire. When she suddenly lifted them, they shone like sapphires, with crystalline splendor, and Adelaide, in amazement, saw that they were full of tears—saw them thus that night for the first and last time in all her life.
"How could ye have done it?" she exclaimed. "Ye wicked heart! Ye cruel, evil soul!"
"Litt," cried Adelaide, aghast, "ye ain't believin' what them men said ter me? Ye 'ain't turned agin me too?"