saw her eyes seek the Bible beside her. But sheonly said gently: "Then sit down, dear. You can work at my knitting ifyou like. My hands get very tired."
She asked me questions about the house and the garden. The raspberrieswere usually quite good, and she was rather celebrated for her lettuces.If I had more than I needed, would I mind if Mr. Staley took a few in tothe doctor, who was fond of them.
The mention of Doctor Lingard took me back to the night of the burglary.I wondered if to tell Miss Emily would unduly agitate her. I think Iwould not have told her, but I caught the girl's eye, across the bed,raised from her knitting and fixed on me with a peculiar intensity.Suddenly it seemed to me that Miss Emily was surrounded by a conspiracyof silence, and it roused my antagonism.
"There are plenty of lettuces," I said, "although a few were trampled bya runaway horse the other night. It is rather a curious story."
So I told her of our night visitor. I told it humorously, lightly,touching on my own horror at finding I had been standing with my hand onthe burglar's shoulder. But I was sorry for my impulse immediately, forI saw Miss Emily's body grow rigid, and her hands twist together. Shedid not look at me. She stared fixedly at the girl. Their eyes met.
It was as if Miss Emily asked a question which the girl refused toanswer. It was as certain as though it had been a matter of wordsinstead of glances. It was over in a moment. Miss Bullard went back toher knitting, but Miss Emily lay still.
"I think I should not have told you," I apologized. "I thought itmight interest you. Of course nothing whatever was taken, and no damagedone--except to the lettuces."
"Anne," said Miss Emily, "will you bring me some fresh water?"
The girl rose reluctantly, but she did not go farther than the top ofthe staircase, just beyond the door. We heard her calling to some onebelow, in her clear young voice, to bring the water, and the next momentshe was back in the room. But Miss Emily had had the opportunity for onesentence.
"I know now," she said quietly, "that you have found it."
Anne Bullard was watching from the doorway, and it seemed to me, havinggot so far, I could not retreat. I must go on.
"Miss Bullard," I said. "I would like to have just a short conversationwith Miss Emily. It is about a private matter. I am sure you will notmind if I ask you--"
"I shall not go out."
"Anne!" said Miss Emily sharply.
The girl was dogged enough by that time. Both dogged and frightened, Ifelt. But she stood her ground.
"She is not to be worried about anything," she insisted. "And she's notsupposed to have visitors. That's the doctor's orders."
I felt outraged and indignant, but against the stone wall of the girl'spresence and her distrust I was helpless. I got up, with as much dignityas I could muster.
"I should have been told that downstairs."
"The woman's a fool," said Anne Bullard, with a sort of suppressedfierceness. She stood aside as, having said good-by to Miss Emily, Iwent out, and I felt that she hardly breathed until I had got safely tothe street.
Looking back, I feel that Emily Benton died at the hands of her friends.For she died, indeed, died in the act of trying to tell me what they haddetermined she should never tell. Died of kindness and misunderstanding.Died repressed, as she had lived repressed. Yet, I think, died calmlyand bravely.
I had made no further attempt to see her, and Maggie and I had takenup again the quiet course of our lives. The telephone did not ring ofnights. The cat came and went, spending as I had learned, its days withMiss Emily and its nights with us. I have wondered since how many nightsMiss Emily had spent in the low chair in that back hall, where theconfession lay hidden, that the cat should feel it could sleep nowhereelse.
The days went by, warm days and cooler ones, but rarely rainy ones.The dust from the road settled thick over flowers and shrubbery. Thelettuces wilted, and those that stood up in the sun were strong andbitter. By the end of August we were gasping in a hot dryness thatcracked the skin and made any but cold food impossible.
Miss Emily lay through it all in her hot upper room in the village, andmy attempt, through Doctor Lingard, to coax her back to the house byoffering to leave it brought only a negative. "It would be better forher, you understand," the doctor said, over the telephone. "But she isvery determined, and she insists on remaining where she is."
And I believe this was the truth. They would surely have been glad toget rid of me, these friends of Miss Emily's.
I have wondered since what they thought of me, Anne Bullard and thedoctor, to have feared me as they did. I look in the mirror, and I seea middle-aged woman, with a determined nose, slightly inquisitive, andwhat I trust is a humorous mouth, for it has no other virtues. But theyfeared me. Perhaps long looking for a danger affects the mental vision.Anyhow, by the doctor's order, I was not allowed to call and see MissEmily again.
Then, one night, the heat suddenly lifted. One moment I was sitting onthe veranda, lifeless and inert, and the next a cool wind, with a hintof rain, had set the shutters to banging and the curtains to flowing,like flags of truce, from the windows. The air was life, energy. I feltrevivified.
And something of the same sort must have happened to Miss Emily. Shemust have sat up among her pillows, her face fanned with the electricbreeze, and made her determination to see me. Anne Bullard was at work,and she was free from observation.
It must have been nine o'clock when she left the house, a shaken littlefigure in black, not as neat as usual, but hooked and buttoned, for allthat, with no one will ever know what agony of old hands.
She was two hours and a half getting to the house, and the rain cameat ten o'clock. By half after eleven, when the doorbell rang, she wasa sodden mass of wet garments, and her teeth were chattering when I ledher into the library.
She could not talk. The thing she had come to say was totally beyondher. I put her to bed in her own room. And two days later she died.
I had made no protest when Anne Bullard presented herself at the doorthe morning after Miss Emily arrived, and, walking into the house, tooksleepless charge of the sickroom. And I made no reference save once tothe reason for the tragedy. That was the night Miss Emily died. AnneBullard had called to me that she feared there was a change, and I wentinto the sickroom. There was a change, and I could only shake my head.She burst out at me then.
"If only you had never taken this house!" she said. "You people withmoney, you think there is nothing you can not have. You came, and nowlook!"
"Anne," I said with a bitterness I could not conceal, "Miss Emily is notyoung, and I think she is ready to go. But she has been killed by herfriends. I wanted to help, but they would not allow me to."
Toward morning there was nothing more to be done, and we sat together,listening to the stertorous breathing from the bed. Maggie, who hadbeen up all night, had given me notice at three in the morning, and wasupstairs packing her trunk.
I went into my room, and brought back Miss Emily's confession.
"Isn't it time," I said, "to tell me about this? I ought to know, Ithink, before she goes. If it is not true, you owe it to her, I think."But she shook her head.
I looked at the confession, and from it to Miss Emily's pinched oldface.
"To whom it may concern: On the 30th day of May, 1911, I killed a womanhere in this house. I hope you will not find this until I am dead.
"(Signed) EMILY BENTON."
Anne was watching me. I went to the mantel and got a match, and then,standing near the bed, I lighted it and touched it to the paper. Itburned slowly, a thin blue semicircle of fire that ate its way slowlyacross until there was but the corner I held. I dropped it into thefireplace and watched it turn to black ash.
I may have fancied it--I am always fancying things about Miss Emily--butI will always think that she knew. She drew a longer, quieter breath,and her eyes, fixed and staring, closed. I think she died in the firstsleep she had had in twenty-four hours.
I had expected Anne Bullard to show emotion, for no one coul
d doubt herattachment to Miss Emily. But she only stood stoically by the bed fora moment and then, turning swiftly, went to the wall opposite andtook down from the wall the walnut-framed photograph Mrs. Graves hadcommented on.
Anne Bullard stood with the picture in her hand, looking at it. Andsuddenly she broke into sobs. It was stormy weeping, and I got theimpression that she wept, not for Miss Emily, but for many otherthings--as though the piled-up grief of years had broken out at last.
She took the photograph away, and I never saw it again.
Miss Emily was buried from her home. I obliterated myself, and herfriends, who were, I felt, her murderers, came in and took charge. Theypaid me the tribute of much politeness, but no cordiality, and I thinkthey felt toward me as I felt toward them. They blamed me with the wholeaffair.
She left her