The Tracy diamonds

by Mary Jane Holmes

In an agony of remorse Tom kissed the face where the moisture of death was gathering fast. Then he left her, and when he saw her again she was like a beautiful piece of marble, with a smile on her lips which told of perfect peace. Mark and Fanny watched by her until the great change came, and the hand which had beaten the air constantly was stilled forever, its last stroke falling on the head of her father who knelt beside her. In his heart was anguish such as few men have ever known. Not once had she reproached him. If she had he could have borne better than he could the look in her eyes and the way she shrank from him at times. Once when Fanny was absent from the room for a moment she said to him, “Poor father, I know you are sorry, and I have loved you through it all, but I can’t bear it. I must die. It is better so, for things could never be again as they have been. I couldn’t be happy here, nor anywhere. I want to go to mother and to God. Stay with Tom; he will be kind to you. Don’t go with Fanny, if she urges it,—with her and Roy, I mean. You could not go to her mother.”

She had done what she could for all of them, and felt that her work was finished. For an hour or more she lay with her eyes closed and with no perceptible motion in her body except the slow beating of her fingers, and when they stopped she was dead. When sure she was gone Mark broke down entirely, while Fanny and Tom tried in vain to quiet him.

“Let me alone,” he said. “I must have it out by myself. Nothing can help me but time.”

Leaving the house he spent hours among the hills, walking up and down while the rain, which had begun to fall, beat upon him unnoticed. He did not think of the storm, or the darkness, and stumbled over rocks and bushes until benumbed with cold and wet with the rain he returned to the house, an old man, so broken that he would never be himself again. He let Tom and Roy and Fanny make the arrangements for the funeral, while he sat in the room with Inez, sometimes talking to her, sometimes to himself, and sometimes to Anita, by whom Inez was buried on one of the loveliest mornings of the late summer. There were few visitors in the valley, but all the people in the sparsely settled neighborhood turned out to the funeral, as they had done to her mother’s. The house was filled with the flowers they brought, some from the woods and some from the gardens which were stripped to honor the dead. Early in the morning on the day of the funeral there came from Stockton a box of exquisite roses and a pillow of flowers, with Inez’s name in the centre. The moment she heard of Inez’s death Mrs. Prescott had telegraphed for the flowers, urging haste and fearing lest her gift should not be in time. As the funeral did not take place until the third day after Inez’s death, they were in time, and neither Fanny nor Mark would have had any doubt as to the sender, if her card, “Mrs. Helen Tracy Prescott,” had not accompanied them.

“Look, father,” Fanny said. “See what mother has sent.”

She put the roses upon the table and left the room for vases in which to arrange them. When she returned one was gone, but there were so many she did not miss it, or suspect that it was between the lids of the family Bible which Mark had not opened before since he recorded Anita’s death. Helen’s thoughtfulness had touched him closely and the rose he took was for her sake and the old time when he had nearly ruined himself with the roses bought for her in Ridgefield. When the short service was over Roy, who longed to get away, suggested to Fanny that they should leave that afternoon, as her mother was anxious for her return. There was no good reason for her staying longer, except to be with her father, who, putting his own grief aside, said to her, “Much as I want you to stay I think you should go to your mother. It was kind in her to let me have you so long. Tell her so, and thank her for the flowers she sent to Inez.”

Fanny would like to have asked him to come to New York, but she knew this could not be. Her father and mother had separated themselves from each other, and the gulf between them could never be recrossed. But she could have him in her own home, when she had one, and she urged his coming to Boston and felt piqued that Roy did not second her invitation. He was busy strapping his satchel and pretended not to hear. Mark understood perfectly, and while thanking Fanny for her kindness, knew he should never trouble Roy, and knew, too, when he said good bye to Fanny that in all human probability he should never see her again. For hours after Tom, who took Roy and Fanny to Clark’s, was gone, he lay on Inez’s bed, wishing he, too, were dead and lying by the new-made grave from which a faint odor of roses occasionally reached him. It was like a breath of Helen,—a perfume from the years of long ago, and he could have shrieked as he recalled those days, remembering what he was then and what he was now. It was dark when Tom returned, and not finding Mark in the house he went to the grave where he was standing with folded arms and his frame convulsed with sobs.

“Mark,” Tom said, stretching his hand across Inez’s grave, “Mark, it is we two alone forever.”

“Yes, we two alone forever,” Mark answered, grasping Tom’s hand, and holding fast to it as a drowning man holds to a spar. “Alone forever, with our secret to keep, and here by Anita’s grave and Inez’s, both of whom I killed, let us swear that henceforth we will be honest men and try in some small measure to redeem the past.”

“I swear it! I promised Inez that whatever restitution could be made we would make,” Tom said, and for a few moments the clasped hands were held above the grave, while the heads of the two men were bowed low as if each were ratifying the solemn vow.