Alf was right; I had enough to worry about with what was in the house.
CHAPTER IX
THE SECOND NIGHT
SO Mattie had committed suicide.
The knowledge changed the day for me, altered the whole circumstance of our moving in, made a mist of what had before been as clear as sunlight, forced me from the relationship of a buyer into the moral position of a murderer. It seemed hardly possible that one could, with no intent of evil, be the sole cause of such a tragedy! And we had been frankly glad, had almost laughed, when we had found that she was dead! Never was I further from hilarity than that second evening in our new home, when I stood at the great window looking at the bit of sea through the pine-trees, the note from Mattie crumpled in my hand.
The sun had set behind the sand-dunes and the bay was liquid red with the reflection. It had lost the quality of water and had become blood. So must it have looked to Mattie, not once but many times during the years that she had tended the terrible “Mis’ Hawes,” after she had grown out of being the barefoot girl whom the boy had chased through the drying-frames. There was no cod spread out to the salt winds now. The whole industry had vanished as completely as the owners of it, and, to take the place of these persons indigenous to the sea, was only myself, a stranger sleeping in their beds, one who could only guess out their histories and who knew nothing of their thwarted ambitions and their dreams.
Tell me your dreams!... But your dream is you.
We are our dreams—and the dream is all!
What had Mattie’s reveries been during all those twilights when she must have stood at this same window with the New Captain and, after him, alone? However dreary, they could not have included the possibility of being driven forth. It had been left for me, in my presumptuous selfishness, to add that cataclysm. Now I was the one to be alone here. Was it to be the lot of some woman always to be left at this window at sunset, to face the growing shadows in solitude? Would it be that way with me, too?
Some Puritanical instinct in me, deeper-rooted than the casual conscience of the Middle West where I had been born, tracing back to forefathers whose stern necessities of doctrine were related to this atmosphere, made me wonder if the justice which ought to be meted out to me, the murderer of Mattie, would be that, for some reason still obscure, my husband would never return and fate would force me to change places with the woman whose house I had usurped and leave me stranded there.
I checked myself. This was no mood with which to meet the night. That life had stripped Mattie at last even of her dwelling, leaving her body as bereft as her soul, was no precedent for me to follow, or I would end, as she had, in the bottom of the bay. I was grateful to her that she had not chosen the house for her act of renunciation. If her revenge upon me had taken the form of hanging herself, so that I would have unexpectedly come upon her body, swinging from the kitchen-rafters, in the dark—I put that thought away, too, and tried to occupy myself.