The Shoulders of Atlas: A Novel

by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

“Come, Sylvia,” said Henry, admonishingly.

“You needn't be afraid. I ain't going to talk about them that's dead and gone, and especially when they've gone in such a dreadful way; and maybe it wasn't true,” said Sylvia. “But it's just as I say: when a woman is fixed up the way Miss Eliza Farrel was yesterday, she ain't within a week of making way with herself. Seems as if I might have had forethought enough to have got that kitten for poor Lucinda.”

Sylvia went out again. The men heard the rattle of dishes. Horace rose with a heavy sigh, which was almost a sob, and went out by the hall door, and Henry heard his retreating steps on the stair. He frowned deeply as he sat by the window. He, too, was bearing in some measure the burden of which he had spoken. It seemed to him very strange that under the circumstances Horace had not explained his mysterious meeting with the woman in the grove north of the house the night before. Henry had a certainty as to her identity—a certainty which he could not explain to himself, but which was none the less fixed.

No suspicion of Horace, as far as the murder was concerned—if murder it was—was in his mind, but he did entertain a suspicion of another sort: of some possibly guilty secret which might have led to the tragedy. “I couldn't feel worse if he was my own son,” he thought. He wished desperately that he had gone out in the grove and interrupted the interview. “I'm old enough to be his father,” he told himself, “and I know what young men are. I'm to blame myself.”

When he heard Horace's approaching footsteps on the stair he turned his face stiffly towards the window, and did not look up when the young man entered the room. But Horace sat down opposite and began speaking rapidly in a low voice.

“I don't know but I ought to go to Mr. Meeks with this instead of you,” he said; “and I don't know that I ought to go to anybody, but, hang it, I can't keep the little I know to myself any longer—that is, I can't keep the whole of it. Some I never will tell. Mr. Whitman, I don't know the exact minute Miss Hart gave her that confounded peppermint, and Miss Hart seems rather misty about it, and if the girl knows she won't tell; but I suspect I may be the last person who saw that poor woman alive. I found a note waiting for me from her when I arrived yesterday, and—well, she wanted to see me alone about something very particular, and she—” Horace paused and reddened. “Well, you know what women are, and of course there was really no place at the hotel where I could have been sure of a private interview with her. I couldn't go to her room, and one might as well talk in a trolley-car as that hotel parlor; and she didn't want to come here to the house and be closeted with me, and she didn't want to linger after school, for those school-girls are the very devil when it comes to seeing anything; and though I will admit it does sound ridiculous and romantic, I don't see myself what else she could have done. She asked me in her note to step out in the grove about ten o'clock, when the house was quiet. She wrote she had something very important to say to me. So I felt like a fool, but I didn't go to bed, and I stole down the front stairs, and she was out there in the grove waiting for me, and we sat down on the bench there and she told me some things.”

Henry nodded gravely. He now looked at Horace, and there was relief in his frowning face.

“I can tell you some of the things that she said to me,” continued Horace, “and I am going to. You are connected with it—that is, you are through your wife. Miss Farrel wasn't Miss at all. She was a married woman.” Henry nodded again. “She had not lived with her husband long, however, and she had been married some twenty years ago. She was older than she looked. For some reason she did not get on with him, and he left her. I don't myself feel that I know what the reason was, although she pretended to tell me. She seemed to have a feeling, poor soul, that, beautiful as she was, she excited repulsion rather than affection in everybody with whom she came in contact. ‘I might as well be a snake as a woman.’ Those were just her words, and, God help her, I do believe there was something true about them, although for the life of me I don't know why it was.”

Henry looked at Horace with the eyes of a philosopher. “Maybe it was because she wanted to charm,” he said.

Horace shot a surprised glance at him. He had not expected anything like that from Henry, even though he had long said to himself that there were depths below the commonplace surface.