Chapter 8
AS they stepped quickly along in the dark, they tried to piece together the chronology of the late afternoon for Knapp and decided that this tragic ending to his feeble life must have come even before he could have seen his wife to tell her of his dismissal from the store. “I’m so glad of that!” said Nell Willing, softly. “Now she need never know.”
Her husband gave a hearty inward assent. It was the devil anyhow to be so intimately concerned in other people’s lives as an employer was.
They found the little house alight from top to bottom, and full of people, whispering, moving about restlessly and foolishly, starting and turning their heads at any noise from upstairs. An old woman, who said she was the Knapps’ next-door neighbor and most intimate friend, stopped crying long enough to tell them in a loud whisper that the doctor said Mr. Knapp was still alive, but unconscious, and dying from an injury to the spine. The children, she said, had been taken away by a sort of relative, Mrs. Mattie Farnham, who would keep them till the funeral. Asked about Mrs. Knapp, she replied that Mrs. Knapp was with the doctor and her dying husband and was, as always, a marvel of self-possession and calm. “As long as there’s anything to do, Mrs. Knapp will be right there to do it,” she said. “She’s a wonderful woman, Mrs. Knapp is.”
The Willings sat for a time, awkwardly waiting, with the other people awkwardly waiting, and then went away, leaving behind them a card on which Jerome had penciled the request to be allowed to be useful in any way possible “to the family of a highly respected member of the Emporium staff.”
As they walked home through the darkness, they exchanged impressions. “That old neighbor’s head is just like a snake’s, didn’t you think?” said Jerome.
“She seemed very sympathetic, I thought,” said Nell extenuatingly.
“She did seem to think a lot of Mrs. Knapp,” admitted Jerome.
“All the women in St. Peter’s do,” said Nell. “Mrs. Prouty says she doesn’t know what they would do in parish work if it weren’t for Mrs. Knapp. She’s one of the workers, you know. And a good headpiece too.”
“I imagine she’s had to develop those qualities or starve to death,” conjectured Jerome, forgetting for an instant that the man he was criticizing lay at the point of death.