Isabel did not respond to this tender proffer of solace. She still stood eying her companion reflectively. “You are very certain of being happy, then?” she mused.
A sense of discordance touched the girl’s heart again—a something in the restrained, calm tone which seemed to sting. She looked more searchingly into the speaker’s eyes, and read in their blue depths a mystery of meaning which froze and silenced her. While Annie looked, in growing paralysis of thought, Isabel spoke again, slowly:
“Your married life at least won’t be deadly dull, as mine was. There must be great possibilities of excitement in living with a man who can propose marriage to a girl—in the moonlight—on his way home from having murdered his brother!”
Young Samantha Lawton, the member of the tribe who served as maid-of-all-work at the Warren homestead, had a mind at once imaginative and curious. From an upper window she had caught sight of the mournful procession from Tallman’s ravine, winding its way down the hill, in the distance. She stole out from the house, whose bedridden occupant could at best only yell herself hoarse in calling if she chanced to need anything during her absence, and walked up the path by the thorns to the main road, over which the cortege would presently pass. Inside the sharp angle of shade made at this corner, where the thorns aspiringly joined the poplars, there was an old board seat between two trees, the relic of some past and forgotten habit of rendezvous, perhaps whole generations old. Samantha knew of this seat, and stood on it now; from it, she had a clear view of the road in front and, through the tangled thorns, of the meadow-path to the left, while there were branches enough about her to render her practically invisible. From this coign of vantage Samantha saw some things which she had not expected to witness.
Annie Fairchild came suddenly across the line of vision, from the direction of the dead man’s house, and walked straight to the stile at the edge of the thorn row. There was something so curious in the expression of her face, as she advanced, that Samantha scented discovery, and prepared on the instant an exculpatory lie. But Annie passed the one place where discovery was probable, and the hidden girl saw now that the strange look had some other explanation. She crossed the stile, and clung to the fence post, as if for support; glanced up the road, where now the black front of the nearing procession could be discerned; then with a shudder turned her face in profile toward her unsuspected observer, and looked vacantly, piteously up into the afternoon sky.
Annie’s face, with its straight, firm outlines, was not one which lent itself to the small facial play of evanescent emotions. Its regular features habitually expressed an intelligent, self-reliant composure, not easily responsive to shades of feeling. To see this calm countenance transfixed now with a helpless stare of anguish was to comprehend that something terrible had happened.
She stood at the stile, desperately clinging to the rail at first, then edging into the thorns to be more out of sight, as the ambulance and the little file of friends moved slowly by. She noted nothing of the peculiarities of the procession—that most of the silent followers were strange men, in city dress—but only gazed at Seth, walking along gravely behind the vehicle, beside his brother John. She saw him with eyes distended, fixed—as of one following the unfolding of a hideous nightmare. So long as the party remained in sight, these set, affrighted eyes followed him. Then they closed, and the sufferer reeled as if in a swoon.
Samantha’s first and best impulse was to get down and go to the agonized woman’s aid; her second, and controlling, thought, was to stop where she was, and see and hear all that was going.
Annie seemed to recover her strength, if not her composure. She wrung her hands wildly and talked with strange incoherence aloud to herself. Once she started, as if to cross the stile again and return to the house of mourning, but drew back. At last, walking straight ahead, like one in a dream, she moved toward her home.