“To turn─”
“He was here to dinner just two weeks ago and perfectly all right. We had a nice, long chat together on the sofa. But he didn’t make his party-call quite as soon as he usually does, so when I saw him at Brenda’s wedding I thought of course he’d come up and tell me how busy he’d been or some other taradiddle. But he didn’t come near me. I was sort of surprised,–still, there were so many people there that he knew, and we didn’t stay quite to the end, you remember. I didn’t even think enough about it 368to mention it to Estelle. Well, this forenoon I went to the bank, and when I’d got my money, I happened to catch sight of Charlie, in the side-room, you know, where his desk is. I thought I’d like to speak to him. He’s always wanted me to ask for him when I went to the bank, and I’ve done it more than once, and we’ve had five minutes’ chat. I was just going to tease him a little bit about coming to see me so seldom nowadays, when he used to come so often, and ask about the lady in the case. There really is one, I guess. Italo told me. So I asked the old boy–you know the one I mean, the old servant of the bank, who’s always there, to tell Mr. Hunt that Mrs. Hawthorne would like to speak with him, and then I took a seat, and in a minute in came Charlie, with just his usual look.
“Now, I want to tell you that I’ve never had one unpleasant word with Charlie Hunt; I’ve always liked him real well. I put down my foot against letting him run me and my house, but there never was a word said about it. I balked, but I didn’t kick. All along I’ve been just as nice to him as I know how, except just one moment, when I stuck a little pin into him the night of the veglione, not supposing that he’d ever know who did it.
“Well, I was sitting there at the table with the newspapers, and he came and stood near, without taking a chair, as if he hadn’t much time to spare. I began to talk and joke about his cutting me dead at the wedding, and he listened and talked back in a common-enough way, only I noticed that he once or twice called me Mrs. Barton instead of Mrs. Hawthorne. Now I must go back and tell you that some time ago when I was at the bank he casually asked me if I knew of any Mrs. Helen Barton in Florence, and he showed me two letters in the same handwriting, one addressed 369to the English bank, and the other to the American bank, Florence, that had been there at Hunt & Landini’s for some time, and no one had called for and they didn’t know what to do with. Now, the instant my eye lit on those letters I knew who’d written them, what was in them, and who they were meant for. All letters for Estelle and me, you know, are first sent to Estelle’s house in East Boston, to be forwarded to us wherever we might be in Europe; but that letter had escaped. That letter was from a queer kind of sour, unsuccessful woman called Iona Allen, who boarded once at the same house with me on Springfield Street,–the languishing kind of critter that I never could stand, who hadn’t the gumption of a half-drowned chicken, who’d never stuck to anything or put any elbow-grease into the work on hand, and whined all the time, and was looking out for some one to support her. I guessed she’d heard of my money and was writing me a sweet letter of congratulations, along with a hard-luck story. I’d have liked to get hold of her letter, but didn’t exactly see how I could. I said to Charlie, ‘Let me take it; perhaps I can find the one it’s meant for among my acquaintances.’ But he didn’t seem to think that could be done; so there the matter dropped. I didn’t care much. Iona Allen can look for some one nearer home to support her.
“Well, to go back. When Charlie Hunt had called me Mrs. Barton for the third time I realized from his way of doing it that it wasn’t a slip of the tongue, and I stopped him short and said:
“‘What makes you call me Mrs. Barton all of a sudden?’”
“‘It’s your name, isn’t it?’ he said, with a queer look.
“‘No,’ I came right out strong and bold. And I wasn’t 370lying either. It isn’t my name. I don’t really know what my name is. It’s Hawthorne as much as it’s anything. Jim changed his name half a dozen times, and the name he married me under I found out wasn’t his real name.
“Charlie Hunt stood there a moment as if thinking it over, looking at me with the meanest grin; then he said with that hateful, sarcastic look of a person who thinks he’s being smart in getting back at you:
“‘Is that as true,’ he said, ‘as that you never indulged in carnival humor masked as a crow?’ Then I knew he’d somehow got on to the truth about that night at the veglione. But I wasn’t going to give it away.