The woman was dead. They picked her up and laid her carefully on one of the blackened marble benches of the garden, and McTavish told him what had happened. In the Town they had forbidden the strikers to hold meetings, hoping thus to break the strike, but the Shanes, Irene and Lily (for the old woman was dead), had sent word to Krylenko that they might meet in the dead park. And so the remnant of those who had held out in the face of cold and starvation had come here to listen to Krylenko harangue them from a barrel by the light of a great fire before the stables. There had been shouting and disorder, and then some one inside the Mill barrier—one of the hooligans (they hadn’t yet discovered who did it) turned a machinegun on the mob around the fire. It had only lasted an instant—the sharp, vicious, staccato sound, but it had taken its toll.
“It’s a dirty business,” concluded McTavish in disgust. He wasn’t jolly to-night. All the old, cynical good-humor had gone out of him, as if he, too, had seen what Philip saw in that sudden flash as he leaned against the decaying arbor.
They took a shutter from the windows of the stable and, placing the body of the girl upon it, set off down the hill between the dead walls of the pine-trees. For a long time Philip stood in the soiled, trampled snow, looking after them, until a turn in the drive hid the lantern from view behind the pine-trees.
17
The room above the stable was in darkness, but as he came up out of the staircase he saw that there was a woman sitting by the window, silhouetted against the moonlight beyond. He thought, “It must be Lily Shane, but why is she here at this hour of the night?” And then a low, familiar voice came out of the darkness, “It’s only me, Philip ... Mary.” She spoke as if he must have known she was there, waiting for him.
He struck a match quickly and lighted the kerosene lamp, at which she rose and came over to him. By the flickering, yellow light he saw that she had been crying.
“It’s been horrible, Philip. I saw it all from the window while I was waiting for you.”
“I know ... we just found a dead woman in the snow.”
He was possessed by a curious feeling of numbness, in which Mary seemed to share, as if the horror of what had taken place outside wiped out all the strangeness of their meeting thus. Death, it seemed, had brushed by them so closely that it had swept away all but those things which lay at the foundation of existence—the fact that they loved each other, that they were together now, and that nothing else was of any importance. They were, too, like people stunned by horror. They sat by the stove, Philip in silence, while Mary told him what she had seen. For a long time it did not even appear strange to him that she should be there in his room at two o’clock in the morning.
He heard her saying, “Who was the woman they killed?”