“I don’t think any woman ought to say this to any man,” I began from very far down in my throat, “but you are a preacher, and that makes a difference, and you won’t mind. I am disrespectful and ungrateful to Aunt Grace about it when she is trying her level best to do it to me, but—but I ought to get married. There are lots of wonderful women all over the world who are doing gloriously without husbands, and living happily forever after; but I’m not one. Some women have such frivolous spirits that nothing but a good, firm husband and an enormous family of children can ever chasten them. I’m one. I’ve always thought that he’d find me some day long before I was ready for him—or them; but now I’m afraid he’ll never come. I know he won’t.” I clung to his strong fingers desperately.
“I think he will,” he answered as he kindly, but firmly, possessed himself of his own hand and coat-sleeve, but in such a way as not to hurt my feelings. “I seem to feel that he is well on the road, though fighting hard,” he added in what sounded like mild exasperation or desperation, I couldn’t tell which.
“No,” I answered, with pitiful sadness and real conviction—“no; I am not worthy of him, and he won’t come. It is too late. God and you have just taught me this dreadful night what a good woman really is, and now I will have to be so busy trying all the rest of my life to be one that I won’t have time to look for—that is, he won’t find me. I don’t want anything but a good one, and if I’m being so good as all that, how’ll I let him know I want him?”
“Maybe he’ll get a revelation,” answered Gabriel in a low and controlled voice that seemed to come from the very fastnesses of something within him.
And as he spoke I felt something warm and sweet and terrible stealing over me; but I plunged forward in my confession, past the episode of the duke, my traitorous flight from home, and up to the arrival at Stivers’s, and the cowardly taking of refuge under the patchwork quilt.
“I misunderstood, and thought from the way the men talked that you were going to kill Bill, and I was too much of a coward to run out and find him in the dark and warn him. You see, I lay still and let Bill be killed, whether you did it or not; and so I murdered him, even if he is alive,” I deduced miserably.
“Dudley was wise to fear the precipitation of the logical part of the solution,” Gabriel remarked so quietly that it seemed as if he preferred that I shouldn’t hear him.
“Yes; and, you see, I am a common murderer as well as all the other dreadful things. And I let that baby die, too, rather than go and help the woman wash it outside and in, as you made me do. That is two murders; and I’m another one for not knowing how to fill it up with hot water and poke my finger down its throat and press the potatoes and water up at the same time. I’m a woman, or I ought to be. It’s my life business to know and perform ably such terrible and simple operations on babies. That makes me three murderers. And how did I know that Bill wouldn’t kill you at the same time you killed him, and Mr. Stivers and—”
“Stop!” Gabriel exclaimed suddenly, and he was shaking so hard with unseemly mirth that he shook me, too; for without being able to help myself, I had been crowding closer and closer to him, until I was burrowing right under his arm in the agonies of confession. “The damages will be endless if you go on at this rate. How many of these murders did you realize you were doing at the time you did ’em?”
“Only Bill,” I answered, after a few minutes of intense mental suffering. “I knew I ought to go and sympathize with the mother of the baby, but I didn’t know about that squeezing a baby’s stomach in the right place; but, as I say, I ought to have known, and—I did throw the quilt back to start to Mrs. Stivers when you came in. Please don’t laugh!”