A Woman Named Smith

by Marie Conway Oemler

"Hard upon the heels of these two disasters came a third, the case of Jessamine Hynds. This Jessamine—a highly gifted, imperious creature, proud as Lucifer, after the manner of the Hyndses—was an orphan, reared in Hynds House. She was some several years older than her cousins, to whom she was greatly attached. The trouble so preyed upon her that she became melancholy, and one fine day disappeared and was never afterward found. There was great hue and cry made for her, and men riding hither and yon, for this was a Hynds woman, and her story touched popular imagination, so that she is supposed," said the lawyer dryly, "to wander around Hynds House o' nights, crying for Richard and searching for the lost jewels.

"After the death of James Hampden Hynds, it was discovered that he had added a singular enough codicil to his will. This codicil provided that in the event the jewels were found intact, and Richard Hynds's innocence thereby incontrovertibly established, Hynds House as it stood should revert to him as eldest son, after the custom of the family. But until the jewels were recovered, Richard and his heirs were to have exactly—nothing. And nothing is what Richard and his heirs got."

"And was he really guilty?" breathed Alicia. Her sympathy was instantly with Richard. That is exactly like Alicia, who is sorry for the fatted calf, and the Egyptians drowned in the Red Sea, and Esau swindled out of his birthright; had she been one of the wise virgins she would have trimmed the lamps of all the foolish ones and waked them up in time.

"In theory," said the judge, "a man is innocent until he is proved guilty. In practice, he is guilty until he can prove his innocence."

"And was nothing, absolutely nothing, ever heard or known further?—nothing that would justify his mother's faith, or comfort his poor young wife's heart?"

"There was but one incident to which even the most credulous could attach the slightest importance. You shall judge for yourself whether it deserved any. Freeman Hynds, riding about the plantation after his habit, was thrown from his horse and died from the injuries sustained. He recovered consciousness for a few minutes before he died; some said he never really regained it. Be that as it may, the dying man cried out, in a voice of great anguish and affliction: 'Richard! Brother Richard! The jewels—the jewels!' He struggled to say more, and failed; looked into the concerned faces around him, with the awful look of the soul about to depart; struggled to raise himself; and fell back upon his pillow a corpse.

"Some—they were in the majority—said, sensibly enough, that the pain and disgrace of his brother's downfall had haunted the poor gentleman's death-bed, and occasioned that last sad cry. Some few said he had wished to confess a thing heavy upon his conscience, who had taken his brother's place as Jacob took Esau's. Richard's wife, of course, was of these latter. She went to her grave a passionate believer in the innocence of her husband, whom she averred to have been a deeply wronged and cruelly used man; and, for heaven's sake, who do you suppose she claimed had wronged him? Freeman! She couldn't prove anything; she hadn't the ghost of a clue to hang the ghost of an accusation upon; yet, womanlike, she clung to her notion, and she taught it to her son as one teaches a holy creed.

"The Hyndses were excellent haters. Freeman's daughter, born into an atmosphere of family disruption, abhorred the very memory of her uncle, and hated her uncle's wife, the woman who doubted and led others to doubt her father's honesty. This hatred she discovered for Richard's son, who, as he grew older, referred to Freeman as 'my Uncle Judas.'

"This second Richard became in time a highly successful physician, a man honored and beloved by this community. There was no wildness in him, nor in his son, the third Richard. His granddaughter Sarah Hynds married Professor Doctor Max Jelnik, the celebrated Viennese alienist, whom she met abroad. Your next-door neighbor is Sarah's son, born somewhere in Hungary, I believe. Both the young man's parents are dead, and I understand he has led a vagrant and irresponsible life, preferring to rove about rather than follow his father's profession, to which he was educated.

"My late client, indeed, held that he had inherited the deplorable characteristics of the first Richard. She asserted—she allowed herself great freedom of speech—that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. It displeased her that he should come to Hyndsville. She thought it showed a malignant nature and a peculiar shamelessness that he chose to reside next door to Hynds House, from which his great-great-grandfather had been so ignominously driven. Her first meeting with the young man bred in her an ineradicable dislike."