The Sherrods

by George Barr McCutcheon

Sherrod's body lay stretched across the rug in front of the grate in his studio. His coat and vest had been hastily thrown aside and his white shirt, covering the deep chest, was saturated with blood. The carved hilt of a Malay dagger stood defiantly above the cleft heart. The steel was deep in his body.

He had dealt one blow, but he had sent the blade of the kris straight home; so true was its course that death must have been instantaneous. He lay flat on his broad back, his neck twisted as if checked in the supreme moment of agony; death had left its stamp of pain on his ghastly face.

On the floor near the body a piece of white paper was found, across which was scrawled:

"Forgive me."

The hand that penciled these words was the same that drove home the blade, but it had trembled only in the writing, not in the blow. The hasty scrawl revealed his eagerness to have over with life while there was yet a chance to escape facing the ruined women below. The last plea of the suicide was not directed to either of the loved ones; it was left for each to take it to her heart and in secrecy hold it as hers alone—cherishing it, if she could.

His had been a crime that the law could not sufficiently punish. He had indicted the penalty himself and he had asked forgiveness of those he had wronged in his weakness. They had loved him to the hour of his death; they had trusted him. Neither had known him in his baseness or his cowardice—they knew him only as loving, devoted and true. Death came just as the joys of being his were shattered; the pains he had given them in life were known only after he had gone from them. They were asked to forgive a dead man who had been everything to them in life, and whom they had loved until his last breath was drawn; he did not wait to receive their reproaches; he had gone away as they had known him and they had not looked upon the face of guilt.

*****

Celeste was the calmer of the two and yet she was the more deeply wronged. After the first grief she arose, bleeding and broken from the wreck of every joy, and she was strong. Justine, stunned by grief and horror, lay for hours in the bed to which she had been carried by the maids after the terrible scene in the studio. With the slow return of composure, Celeste saw dimly the situation as it existed for her. She was not a widow. The widow was the other woman who had crouched on the opposite side of the corpse, pleading with him to come back to her and the boy. While she could not as yet grasp the full reality of her position, she felt that Justine's claim was best.

It was she who had Justine taken to a room by the maids. There was no rage in her heart; she took that other one into her grief and shared it with her. There was no other way; they had suffered together. There still lingered a faint hope—cruel though it was—that she might be the real wife, and Justine the false one. Hours after the calamity, far in the night, while her mother bathed her head and sought to soothe her, Celeste planned and planned.

She knew that if Justine's claim were true, Jud had deliberately made a wanton of her, even though he loved her. The world would soon know that she was not a wife, and the newspapers would be nauseous with the sensation. She was confident, however, that she was the only one in the house who knew Justine's story, and as she lay waiting for the dawn there grew in her mind a steady purpose. The world must never know!