Emily had been so insistent that I had finally doneso.
It seemed to me that she flashed a quick glance at me.
"She is quite the most loved person in the valley," she said. "And sheloves the place. It is--I cannot imagine why she rented the house. Sheis far from comfortable where she is."
After a time I gathered that she suspected financial stringency as thecause, and I tried to set her mind at rest.
"It cannot be money," I said. "The rent is absurdly low. The agentwished her to ask more, but she refused."
She sat silent for a time, pulling at the fingers of her white silkgloves. And when she spoke again it was of the garden. But before sheleft she returned to Miss Emily.
"She has had a hard life, in a way," she said. "It is only five yearssince she buried her brother, and her father not long before that. Shehas broken a great deal since then. Not that the brother--"
"I understand he was a great care."
Mrs. Graves looked about the room, its shelves piled high with theecclesiastical library of the late clergyman.
"It was not only that," she said. "When he was--all right, he was anatheist. Imagine, in this house! He had the most terrible books, MissBlakiston. And, of course, when a man believes there is no hereafter, heis apt to lead a wicked life. There is nothing to hold him back."
Her mind was on Miss Emily and her problems. She moved abstractedlytoward the door.
"In this very hall," she said, "I helped Miss Emily to pack all hisbooks into a box, and we sent for Mr. Staley--the hackman at thestation, you know--and he dumped the whole thing into the river. We wentaway with him, and how she cheered up when it was done!"
Martin Sprague's newspapers arrived the next morning. They bore a dateof two days before the date of the confession, and contained, rathertriumphantly outlined in blue pencil, full details of the murder of ayoung woman by some unknown assassin. It had been a grisly crime, andthe paper was filled with details of a most sensational sort.
Had I been asked, I would have said that Miss Emily's clear, slightlyupturned eyes had never glanced beyond the merest headlines of suchjournalistic reports. But in a letter Martin Sprague set forth aprecisely opposite view.
"You will probably find," he wrote, "that the little lady is pretty wellfed up on such stuff. The calmer and more placid the daily life, themore apt is the secret inner one, in such a circumscribed existence, tobe a thriller! You might look over the books in the house. There is ahistoric case where a young girl swore she had tossed her little brotherto a den of lions (although there were no lions near, and little brotherwas subsequently found asleep in the attic) after reading Fox's Book ofMartyrs. Probably the old gentleman has this joke book in his library."
I put down his letter and glanced around the room. Was he right, afterall? Did women, rational, truthful, devout women, ever act in thisstrange manner? And if it was true, was it not in its own way asmysterious as everything else?
I was, for a time that day, strongly influenced by Martin Sprague'sconviction. It was, for one thing, easier to believe than that EmilyBenton had committed a crime. And, as if to lend color to his assertion,the sunlight, falling onto the dreary bookshelves, picked out andilluminated dull gilt letters on the brown back of a volume. It wasFox's Book of Martyrs!
If I may analyze my sensations at that time, they divided themselvesinto three parts. The first was fear. That seems to have given away tocuriosity, and that at a later period, to an intense anxiety. Of thethree, I have no excuse for the second, save the one I gave myself atthe time--that Miss Emily could not possibly have done the thing sheclaimed to have done, and that I must prove her innocence to myself.
With regard to Martin Sprague's theory, I was divided. I wanted himto be right. I wanted him to be wrong. No picture I could visualize oflittle old Miss Emily conceivably fitted the type he had drawn. On theother hand, nothing about her could possibly confirm the confession asan actual one.
The scrap of paper became, for the time, my universe. Did I close myeyes, I saw it side by side with the inscription in "Fifty years of myBolivar County," and letter for letter, in the same hand. Did the sunshine, I had it in the light, examining it, reading it. To such a pointdid it obsess me that I refused to allow Maggie to use a tablet ofglazed paper she had found in the kitchen table drawer to tie up thejelly-glasses. It seemed, somehow, horrible to me.
At that time I had no thought of going back five years and trying totrace the accuracy or falsehood of the confession. I should not haveknown how to go about it. Had such a crime been committed, how todiscover it at this late day? Whom in all her sheltered life, could MissEmily have murdered? In her small world, who could have fallen out andleft no sign?
It was impossible, and I knew it. And yet--
Miss Emily was ill. The news came through the grocery boy, who cameout every day on a bicycle, and teased the cat and carried away allthe pears as fast as they ripened. Maggie brought me the information atluncheon.
"She's sick," she said.
There was only one person in both our minds those days.
"Do you mean really ill, or only--"
"The boy says she's breaking up. If you ask me, she caught cold thenight she broke in here and took your Paisley shawl. And if you ask myadvice, Miss Agnes, you'll get it back again before the heirs step inand claim it. They don't make them shawls nowadays, and she's as like asnot to will it to somebody if you don't go after it."
"Maggie," I said quietly, "how do you know she has that shawl?"
"How did I know that paper was in the telephone-box?" she countered.
And, indeed, by that time Maggie had convinced herself that she hadknown all along there was something in the telephone battery-box.
"I've a sort of second sight, Miss Agnes," she added. And, with ashrewdness I found later was partially correct: "She was snooping aroundto see if you'd found that paper, and it came on to rain; so she tookthe shawl. I should say," said Maggie, lowering her voice, "that as likeas not she's been in this house every night since we came."
Late that afternoon I cut some of the roses from the arch for MissEmily, and wrapping them against the sun, carried them to the village.At the last I hesitated. It was so much like prying. I turned aside atthe church intending to leave them there for the altar. But I could findno one in the parish house, and no vessel to hold them.
It was late afternoon. I opened a door and stepped into the old church.I knelt for a moment, and then sat back and surveyed the quiet building.It occurred to me that here one could obtain a real conception of theBenton family, and of Miss Emily. The church had been the realest thingin their lives. It had dominated them, obsessed them. When the ReverendSamuel Thaddeus died, they had built him, not a monument, but a parishhouse. When Carlo Benton died (however did such an ungodly name come tobelong to a Benton?) Miss Emily according to the story, had done withoutfresh mourning and built him a window.
I looked at the window. It was extremely ugly, and very devout. Andunder it was the dead man's name and two dates, 1860 and 1911.
So Carlo Benton had died the year Miss Emily claimed to have done amurder! Another proof, I reflected that Martin Sprague would say. He hadbeen on her hands for a long time, both well and ill. Small wonder iflittle Miss Emily had fallen to imagining things, or to confessing them.
I looked at the memorial window once more, and I could almost visualizeher gathering up the dead man's hateful books, and getting themas quickly as possible out of the house. Quite possibly there wereunmentionable volumes among them--de Maupassant, perhaps Boccaccio. Ihad a distinct picture, too, of Mrs. Graves, lips primly set, assistingher with hands that fairly itched with the righteousness of her actions.
I still held the roses, and as I left the church I decided to lay themon some grave in the churchyard. I thought it quite likely that rosesfrom the same arch had been frequently used for that purpose. Some veryyoung grave, I said to myself, and found one soon enough, a bit of arectangle of fresh earth, and a jarful of pansies on it. It lay in the
shadow of the Benton mausoleum.
That was how I found that Carlo Benton had died on the 27th of May,1911.
I cannot claim that the fact at the time had any significance for me,or that I saw in it anything more than another verification of MartinSprague's solution. But it enabled me to reconstruct the Bentonhousehold at the date that had grown so significant. The 30th would haveprobably been the day after the funeral. Perhaps the nurse was stillthere. He had had a nurse for months, according to Mrs. Graves. Andthere would have been the airing that follows long illness and death,the opened windows, the packing up or giving away of clothing, thepauses and silences, the sense of strangeness and quiet, the loweredvoices. And there would have been, too, that remorseless packing fordestruction of the dead atheist's books.
And some time, during that