While she stared at him with frightened, puzzled gaze he put her into Sylvena Willard’s arms.
“Do your best with her, Sylvie, until I come back,” he whispered. “I am going to get Kleber. The awful load that has come upon this household is one that husband and wife should bear together. Do your best with her, little woman! For I shall be gone a bit of a while. I am going to tell your brother a story that he needs to hear.”
He hurried away.
During the long hour that elapsed the stricken woman sat in the kitchen close by the outer door, motionless and speechless, her eyes fixed on the latch. All of Sylvena’s coaxings could not draw her back to the inner room.
The Squire came first into the room. Behind him was Captain Kleber Willard, and jostling at his back were Deputy Sheriff Purday and his helper, alert and officious. They wore the air of officers who knew that this method of handling a prisoner was not regular, but who had been overmastered by the Squire’s authority. With the group was another man, the venerable pastor of the village church, whom they had overtaken making his way with a lantern along the tempest-strewn street toward the house of mourning.
Willard stepped inside the door, his knees bending lifelessly at each step, his head wagging low between his shoulders.
His bloodshot eyes rolled shamefacedly from countenance to countenance. The solemn regard of his neighbours shifted to the worn floor. They had no consolation for him. His face began to pucker with the grimace of the strong man who is trying to hold back the tears.
“Where are our little ones, Kleber?” His wife had thrown herself upon him. She screamed the question over and over.
“Squire Look—Parson Emmons—some one—oh, for God’s sake—tell her!”
His sobs choked him. With his arm about his wife he stumbled away to a corner of the room, dragging her with him, and while the neighbours sat silent and sympathetic, the women sobbing softly, the men grinding their rough knuckles into their palms, the husband and the wife, their foreheads against the wall, washed away in the first tears they had ever shed in a common woe all the wrack of the petty quarrels, the little heart-burnings, the frettings and the misunderstandings—all so mean and small in this shadow of the mightiest tragedy in their lives.