This done, she laid the revolver close to the outstretched hand of the dead man.
“God forgive me,” she said in a low tone, “for making my brother a suicide, but it is to save my husband’s life.”
This was said with the same unnatural calm, and then the speaker knelt beside the dead man and kissed him on the lips which were still unchilled by death. Once, twice, three times, her lips, colder than those of the dead, sought his face, then she took out her handkerchief to wipe the blood which was penetrating the poor, unseeing, wide-open eyes. Then, remembering the part which she had to play, she refrained.
“God help me, my deceit has killed my brother; I must try to save my husband.” Murmuring this she turned from the dreadful spectacle on the road and passed into the wood with a strange mechanical woodenness of step, as if the shock which had spared her brain and hands had benumbed or paralyzed her lower limbs.
As she neared the house her grandfather rose from his seat on the piazza, and advanced to meet her.
“What is the matter, child?” he cried, alarmed beyond measure at the ghastly face on which the seal of a great horror had been stamped, and alarmed no less at the unnatural calm of his grand-daughter’s manner, as she stood before him with staring eyes, whose dilated pupils suggested insanity.
“Grandpapa, go down to the road,” she murmured pantingly, and with a strange catch in her voice, “down by the white elm tree; something terrible has happened to Tom.” And, her gruesome work being ended, poor over-spent nature gave way, and she fell unconscious to the ground.
When she had been restored to sensibility and carried to her room, her grandfather, calling the colored butler to follow him, went to investigate the cause of her emotion. The gardener, who was found watering the plants in the front, was also summoned to accompany his master.
What the three found the reader already knows. The old white-haired grandfather uttered no sound, and only the exclamations of the horrified servants broke the weird silence.
“A lamp and a stretcher, Julius, quick!” exclaimed the old man, silencing with a wave of his hand the lamentations of the others. Then he stooped and put his ear to the chest of the silent figure; long and patiently he listened, and then, as if reluctant to believe the worst, or still uncertain, he undid the coat and vest and re-applied his ear to catch the faintest flicker of life, if it be that any such were left in the prostrate body.