Her similarity to Lettice grew still more apparent—she presented the same order, her white shirtwaist had been crisply ironed, her shoes were rubbed bright and neatly tied. He recalled this similitude suddenly, and it brought before him a clearly defined vision of Lettice, not as his wife, but of the girl he had driven to and from the school at Stenton. He had not thought of that Lettice for months, for three years; not since before she had died; not, he corrected himself drearily, since he had killed her. He had remembered the last phase, of the glazed and bloodless travesty of her youth. But even that lately had been lost in the fog of nothingness settling down upon him.
And now this girl, on a box back of Simmons’ store, brought the buried memories back into light. They disconcerted him, sweeping through the lassitude of his mind; they stirred shadowy specters of fear.... The voice of the sheriff carried to them, describing the excellent repair of incidental sheds.
“I nailed all the tar-paper on the—the chicken house,” she told him in a fresh accession of unhappiness, the tears spilling over her round, flushed cheeks.
It annoyed him to see her cry: it was as though Lettice was suffering again from old misery. His irritation grew at this seeming renewal of what had gone; it assumed the aspect of an intentional reproach, of Lettice returned to bother him with her pain and death. He turned sharply to continue on his way. But, almost immediately, he stopped.
“Your name?” he demanded.
“Adelaide Crandall.”
The Crandalls, he knew, were a reputable family living in the valley bottom east of Greenstream village. Matthew Crandall had died a few years before, and, as this girl had indicated, had left a substantial farm to each of his sons. Cannon would get this one, and it was more than probable, the others.
The old enmity against Valentine Simmons, directed at Cannon, flamed afresh. Simmons or the other—what did the name matter? they were the same, a figurative apple press crushing the juice out of the country, leaving but a mash of hopes and lives. He stood irresolute, while Adelaide Crandall fought to control her emotions.
The badgering voice of the sheriff sounded again on his hearing. He crossed the road, pushed open the grinding iron gate of the fence that enclosed the Courthouse lawn, and made his way through the sere, fallen leaves to the steps.