“Heat—not well physically. That’s what goes to the papers. Better spread that. If the girl is involved, we’ll keep her name clear.”
“Oh, yes.”
“For Walter’s sake,” Gage went on. And then very slowly, he added, “I wouldn’t like people to know that she got him.”
“Yet if it comes out that he left her everything, won’t people guess?”
“They won’t know. Nor do we know. Nobody knows except Walter and he’s dead.”
They sent a second wire to Margaret requesting her presence for urgent reasons and by night they had heard that she would come. The funeral was to be on Friday.
It was Thursday evening when the “Town Reporter” bristled with ugly headlines on the streets of St. Pierre. Walter’s body lay in the undertaking “parlors” those ineffective substitutes for homes for those who die homeless, in the brief period between their last hours among human kind and the grave. No place except a home can indeed truly shelter the dead. Walter lay inscrutably lonely, in the public parlor, mysterious in the death which was a refusal to go on with life, a relinquishment so brave and so cowardly that it always shocks observers into awe. As he lay there, a raucous voiced newsboy outside the window ran down toward the main throughfare, a bunch of “Town Reporters” under his arm, shouting, “All the noos about the sooicide”—and in half an hour his papers were gone, some bought openly, some bought hurriedly and shamefacedly. Hundreds of people now knew the reason Elihu Robinson gave for the death of Walter Carpenter, his version of the struggle in the stilled brain of the man he had not known except by sight and hundreds of people as intimate with the tragedy as he, wagged their heads and said wisely that this “was about the truth of it,” with other and sundry comments on the corruption of the age and particularly of the rich.
The Flandons read it with mixed disgust and anger. They knew it was the kind of stain that only time could scrub away. It did not matter much to Walter now that he was slandered. His suicide was a defiance of slander. They were sorry for Margaret but not too much bothered by her reception of such scandal if it came to her. It was only local scandal.
“The worst of it,” said Helen to Gage, “is tying Gregory Macmillan up that way just as they were about to announce his marriage. I telephoned Freda’s father this afternoon for I was going to tell him you had had a business letter from her and knew where she was. It seemed wise. But anyway he had just heard from her too. He was so happy, poor fellow. Now to have this nasty scandal about his son-in-law will be another blow. I shall go to see him and tell him that it’s an utter lie. I know from what Margaret told me that there never was a thing between her and Macmillan.”
Mr. Thorstad had already taken the matter up with Elihu Robinson. He had called him what he was and his white faced indignation was something the editor preferred to submit to without resistance. But he was not without trumps as usual.