The blue wall

by Richard Washburn Child

“Who was it?” she asked. “Did they learn anything from the boy? How long ago?”

There was a pause.

“Can’t you see how terrible it would be if any one knew about her?” she said. “Do you believe she is being watched? You do! Detectives! I can’t talk any more—good-bye!”

That was what she said and for a week afterward she was walking through the house, up and down each room, like a creature in a cage, listening for every sound and nursing her head with her hands as if she were afraid it would burst. She would sit down in a chair and then jump up again, as if the place she had chosen to rest was red-hot. Every moment she was with her husband she seemed to be holding herself in check, as if he might read some terrible thing in her eyes. Then, all of a sudden, she would get some message from outside and she would be peaceful again and sigh and fold her beautiful hands.

You can see well enough that I was ready for something queer. But when it came, it was so unaccountable that I could scarcely believe I wasn’t living in a dream. It was late one afternoon when I came down from my room and found her talking through the crack of the front door to somebody outside in the vestibule. I could hear the whisper of voices and I thought the other person was a man. I can be sly when I want to, so I did not go forward at all, but crept back and along the upper hall to the window. After a minute or two I heard the door close and somebody going down the steps. I had raised the screen already so that I could lean out to see who it was.

For some reason I felt I should know the person. I had a horrid feeling that it was somebody I had seen before. The name of Monty Cranch was almost ready on my lips in spite of my old idea, which had never left me, that I had seen him—at least in this world—for the last time. Therefore it was almost a surprise to me to find that the man was as far different from her father as butter from barley. Whoever the man might be, he was tall and thin and had a white, disagreeable skin and a nervous way of looking to right and left, holding his chin in his hands. I never got a good look at his face. But once he turned up his head, perhaps to look at the house. He had gold teeth—a whole front row of them! This, perhaps, was the man the messenger boy had described—the man to whom Mrs. Estabrook was addressing secret communications. Certainly it was no one I had ever seen, and certainly, too, there was something in that fleeting glance at the lower part of his face which made me have no wish to see his ugly countenance again.

His visit, at any rate, set me to thinking more than ever, and that night as I walked about the dining-room, serving the courses in place of the maid who was away, I think I felt for the first time a doubt about my mistress. She had always seemed to me like a creature of heaven, and as I stood back of her chair, looking down upon those beautiful shoulders and white arms and head of soft and shining hair, it was hard to believe she was in some conspiracy of which she had kept her husband in ignorance with the slyness of a snake. I felt sorry for him. So at the moment of my first doubt of her, I found that pity—begging your pardon!—had at last made me ready to forget that I had never liked him or his cold ways, and ready to forgive the once he laid violent hands on me. My mistress had not chosen to tell me anything and had acted toward me as suspicious as if she had believed me capable of meaning evil to her. She had turned my questions aside and reminded me of my place. I suppose it was only human nature for me to lose sympathy with her and begin to have it with the man who sat across the table from her, all in the dark about the curious and perhaps terrible affairs that were hanging over his home and always kind and patient and, I may say,—begging your pardon!—innocent, too! It was during that meal that I made up my mind to tell him all I knew. It seemed to me the best and safest course; I would have taken it if he had stayed another day in the house.

His going was a mystery to me. I only knew that Mrs. Estabrook said that she had asked him to go and that he had gone. The front door had hardly closed behind him that morning before she unlocked her room and called to me to come to her. I shall never lose the picture of her face as I saw it then. She was sitting in that big wing-chair which is covered with the figured cretonne and her face was as white as a newly ironed napkin. It was so white that it did not seem real, but more like the face of some vision that comes and sits for a minute and fades away before a little draft of air. Her hands were on the chair arms just like the hands of those Egyptian kings, carved out of alabaster, that you see in museums. She might have been one of those queens of great empires in the old times. She might have heard the roar of battle and seen the retreat of her army from the windows of the palace and had plunged a thin little dagger into her breast so that she would not be captured alive. It cut me to the heart to see how beautiful she was—and how terrible!

“Margaret,” she said to me, spacing off her words. “Margaret.”

“Little girl!” I cried out, forgetting the passage of all the years. And I fell on my knees beside her.