Part 16

“Oh, she is young, and he will live on, and the whole thing will be forgotten in time. It is not the only case we have had in St. Ann; and, as far as I have been able to see, the actors in these tragedies appear to be very little influenced or altered. Greyhurst is the sole instance I recall in which the man who killed seemed to be personally changed by what he had done. He certainly is changed—Dudley says very much changed.”

“But how?”

“Oh, he is moody and silent; he is less gay; he is more deferential. Suppose we drop him, Eleanor.”

“It is all very sad,” she said; and gathering up her knitting, she went out into the garden, where now in the late spring the flowers were welcoming the sun.

PART II

I

A year had gone by since Trescot’s death. St. Ann was prospering and on the way to become a great city. The shops were larger, the cotton-presses more busy, a new railroad was approaching the town. Already the divided water-front at the bend was being needed for cotton-storage and to supply landings for freight-boats.

Greyhurst profited by the general rise in real estate, and was able to sell two or three lots at good prices. His political prospects were also promising, and with increased means and lessening causes of irritability, he began to feel some return of self-confidence and the amiability of a man reassured as to his future. A fortunate decision in a case against the United States government added local popularity, and it may be said that, except in the opinion of a small class, he had suffered little in the eyes of a community largely made up of not altogether the best elements of the West and South. As he became busier, chiefly with small suits, occupation served to assist the blurring influence of time.

And yet he had his hours, or at least his minutes, of regret. He was sensitive, as the irritable often are, not merely to slights, but also to memorial reminders. He never willingly walked over the ground where he had seen Trescot fall. He had that day put a rose in his buttonhole. He never did so again. He still excused his act as justified by what Trescot had said, and by the self-belief encouraged in his trial by those who swore they thought Trescot was about to draw and defend himself. He was measurably successful, but never could deal as readily with his remembrance of the agonized face of Constance Trescot. That she had gone, never to be seen by him again, was a vast relief.

There is, however, a little space of time when the specters of thought or memory possess the scene. In the brief interval between the waking state and sleep, when the will is becoming dormant, and imagination plays us sad tricks, he saw her as she stood before him pronouncing the sentence which he never could forget. Of late this visualized memory was becoming less vivid. He felt that also to be a relief.

On the ninth of October, the anniversary of Trescot’s death, Greyhurst walked up the hill slope from his own house, and past the long-closed home of the man he had killed. He had a startling revival of memory as he saw that the windows were open, but he reflected with satisfaction that it had some new owner. Very naturally he had never spoken of it or its former tenant, and knew nothing in regard to it. He went on, setting his mind upon the business of the day, nor did he venture to ask any one who had taken the house.

At dusk the day before Constance Trescot and a maid arrived at St. Ann. Unrecognized in her black veil, she had driven to her old home. A letter from her and a despairing note from Susan Hood had prepared the Averills for her coming, so that she found the house in order and her old servants ready.

For two days she was, by her own wish, alone, having begged her sister, who utterly disapproved of her return to St. Ann, not to join her for a fortnight.

She found the house, as she had desired to find it, unaltered. She went up-stairs and changed her dress, asking to have tea sent up to her. Later in the evening, when the house had been closed, and the servants had gone to bed, she took a candle and went down to the study. The room, by her wish, had never been opened, and the dust lay thick on everything. For a minute she stood with the candlestick in her hand and looked about her. There were the table and books—the Bible with one of her own gloves left in it as a marker at the story of Ruth, which Trescot had meant next to read to her. The dead rose-stem was in the tall glass, the dried petals on the table. The piano was there, and her music; on a chair lay Trescot’s spurs and his riding-whip. She sat down, and for the first time in months broke into a passion of tears. That yearning for the dead which few escape came upon her. She threw up her hands with a wild gesture of utter despair. “How am I to bear it?” she cried. “How am I to bear it?”

At last she lay down on the lounge, and, wiping her eyes, resolutely controlled herself. Once repossessed of power to think, she lay quiet, reflecting. All summer, at times, she had set herself to plan some scheme of punishment for the man who had wrecked her life. She had schemed in vain. She was a woman, and powerless. What could she do?

The air was warm, the room close. She opened a door and went out and stood in the garden. The damp night air brought to her the fragrance of lingering autumn roses, with the keen memories perfumes so surely recall, and the darkness intensified her abiding sense of loneliness.

She sat down on the steps of the porch, and fed her grief with remembered joy. An immense longing came over her to see her dead as he was in life, and it seemed to her as though she must have some power to compel this vision. She had greatly desired to dream of him, and had never done so. At times, as now, she failed to be able to call his face into mental view. The longing seemed to affect her whole strong young body, so that she felt her heart beat in her neck and down to her finger-ends.

Suddenly she swayed to one side. She sat up, alarmed. A slight, abrupt sense of weakness, of want of control over her muscles, announced that to indulge in the remembrance of hours of passionate love, or of joyous comradeship, was perilous to such absolute self-command as she well knew she should need. She recalled the old doctor’s warning. He had said that to give way to emotion would for a long time to come be likely to bring about a fresh attack of loss of self-command. She set herself sternly to recover calmness of mind, and with it the power to reason. As she rose she felt amazed at this sudden feebleness. Resolving not again to give way to the sweetness and pain of trying to live back into the too real recollection of the days of a supreme passion, she went in, and, to her surprise, slept a deep and, as she knew next morning, an unrefreshing slumber. “This shall not happen again,” she said, as she turned over her letters at breakfast; and, in fact, unsatisfied desire to make her husband’s murderer atone in suffering took the place of a more perilous form of mental activity.

After breakfast she quietly arranged her household affairs for the day, and then busied herself in setting the study in order, dusting it, with care to leave all things as they had been.

At last she sat down at Trescot’s table, and, preoccupied, dipped a pen into the dry inkstand. She laid down the pen and went to get her traveling-inkstand. Returning, she stood still a moment, and then turned to her own table, and again sat down. She had the feeling that not where he sat could she plan a course of life so opposed to all he held dear. He would have said, “Forgive; forget.” For a minute, and for the first time, the woman hesitated. She was at the parting of the ways. She looked around her at the memorials of a true and noble life, and forward at the lonely desert of days and years without hope and void of all the joys that belong to youth and love. She did not reason—she simply felt. “No,” she said aloud; “I must go my way.” From that sad hour she held to one unchanging resolve.

First she must see Coffin, and must know all that was possible of her enemy’s life. How could she, a young woman, enter into it with power to ruin and make him suffer? She resolved to be patient. Had it been some lesser injury, she could have made the man love her and then cast him aside to realize the pain of loss. She knew, as by instinct, her power over men. She dismissed the thought in disgust and horror, and, rising, walked about, and at last went into the front parlor, and, to air the long-closed room, threw up a sash. As she moved to the other window she saw herself in a mirror, a tall form in deep mourning-dress, with a face the whiter from contrast with her black gown and mass of dark hair. She threw up the sash and stood still, held motionless as if by some fascination; for, on the farther side of the street, in the brilliant sunshine, she saw John Greyhurst walking slowly toward the town. He glanced over at the house and saw and knew her. Instantly quickening his pace, he looked away and moved on.

Noting the suddenly averted head, the abrupt hastening of his steps, she looked after him, and said aloud: “He feels; he is sensitive.” A stern joy possessed her, and she turned away satisfied. “Now I know,” she said.

When she went back to the study she saw Tom Coffin on the back porch. She called him: “Tom, Tom!”

“I heard you was here. I was that sure you would come back. Are you going to stay, ma’am?”

“Yes; I do not know how long. I told you I meant to come. Did you keep my secret?”

“I did.”

“Are you doing well on the bluff?”

“Why, Mrs. Trescot, I’m saving money. Never did that before in all my life, and it’s all along of you. Oh, we’re right well pleased, all of us.”

It was a long speech for Tom.

“I am very glad. And now I want something. I want to know all about that man, Tom. How he spends his time. He goes to his office, I suppose, and to that club, and to—to the court-house. Does he go to any houses? Does he visit any one—any woman?”

“You want me to find out? That’s easy enough.”

“But he must not know he is watched.”

Tom smiled. “All right.” He looked at her and wondered what she could mean to do. It seemed simple to him—a rifle-shot, and that would end the matter. She had said no. Her desire for some continuity of punishment would have been foreign to his mountain code of vengeance. For men of his kind there was some recognized joy in the crude pleasure of pipe and glass, of the visible results of the hunt, and of the use of ax and plow. The men he knew had no other joys, and to take life was to take away all that was valuable, and competently to deal with a wrong. He left her, puzzled as to what she meant to do, but, as always, her willing instrument, in small things or in large.

On the following day the general found her in the parlor.

“Well, my dear,” he said, “we are glad and sorry to see you here again. You are still too pale. Are you well?”

“Yes; I think I may say that I am as strong as I ever was. Sit down; I want to talk to you.”

“Certainly, my dear child. There is a good deal of business. The water-front at the bend ought to be improved, and—”

“Excuse me, general, but those matters may wait. I have other things to speak of, and, to me, far more important things.”

He was surprised and curious. “Now, as always, I am at your disposal.”

“I asked you some time ago to do for me what I was sure you would disapprove of.”

“Yes, on the whole I did disapprove; and when the warden said he would never consent I felt relieved. Mrs. Averill and I considered it unwise, and only to be explained by the condition in which your illness left you. It would have been an impropriety, to say no more.”

“I do not feel as you do,” she returned. “A useful, noble life is ended by a brute’s anger. He lives on unpunished. A jury justifies his act; no one remembers. Is there to be no record? Must this man live and go his way just as before? As I live, I do not mean that he shall. If to kill him would satisfy me, and I had been a man, I would have shot him as I should any other wild beast, and not have had a pang of remorse. But something I must do—oh, something!”

She rose and walked up and down the room, the figure of an avenging fate, splendid in her wrath.

“My dear Constance! let me beg of you—”

“Pardon me, let me finish. I mean to make this man suffer—oh, as I have suffered; oh, more, if that be possible! I have now but one purpose in life, and to it I mean to give my strength, my thought, and, at need, every dollar I have in the world.”

He lifted a hand in appeal: “God knows, dear, that I feel for you; but what can you do?”

He felt in a larger way much as Coffin felt; but this woman’s talk of some more refined vengeance struck him as pitiable in its incapacities.

“What I can do, general, I do not know as yet. I have felt, however, that I wished you beforehand to understand that if I seem strange in what I do, or, as men see things, eccentric, you will not consider me insane. I am fully aware that you will disapprove. I cannot help that. A man dies, and a woman must sit down and cry. I am not so made; I cannot, and I would not if I could.”

This stormy passion troubled him. It was not like any woman he had ever known. There was something in it of the deadly instinct of attack of a wounded animal—something not modern. Revenge had been in his experience the prerogative of man. He did not know how to answer her, and fell upon petty futilities. People would talk—she would surely be thought to be crazy. He hesitated to say that this vain dream of a woman ruining a strong man outside of the possibility of contact or influence was absurd, and might come to seem ridiculous, even with the tragedy behind it.

He moved her no whit. As he talked she continued to walk about uneasily, and at last pausing before him, said: “I know how you, how any man, must feel about what I have said. If there are men fools enough to think lightly of it, I swear to you there will be one man who will not laugh when I am done with him.”

The general began to think that it might very well be. He said: “I should be a poor friend, Constance, if I did not try to stop you. Think it over. Let Mrs. Averill talk to you, and wait, my dear. Do nothing rash.”

“Certainly, general, I shall do as you say. I am in no hurry, but nothing on earth will move me.”

“I am very, very sorry.”

“I could hardly have imagined that you would agree with me. May I ask you if that man is prosperous, if people have condoned his act?”

He hesitated. It was unnatural, disagreeable, this curiosity about a man who ought to have passed unmentioned out of her life.

“You do not want to answer me.”

“Frankly, I do not. He and I do not speak. If ever he did, I should call him out and kill him.”

“Thank you. I shall not urge you further. I can easily learn all I need to learn. Ask my dear Mrs. Averill to come here at four to-day. I have the miniatures for her. I have made myself unpleasant. You will forgive me, I am sure.”

He took her hand as he rose, kissed it in the old-fashioned way, and left her, feeling that he had entirely failed to bring her to reason.

When he related to Mrs. Averill this amazing interview, she said: “It is very sad, but it is also absurd. I will make her understand that, as a woman, I feel with and for her. It will then be easy to make clear how utterly impossible it is for her to do anything. It is really childish.”

The general smiled. “Wait a little,” he said—“wait until you hear her talk.”

When Mrs. Averill had kissed the pale cheek and expressed pleasure at seeing her again, Constance gave her the two miniatures. They were admirably done, and the mother’s eyes filled as she looked up and thanked the kind thought which had made them hers.

“And now, dear,” she said, “the general has told me of your talk. I am a woman and can enter into your feelings; but, dear, I am a Christian, and must plead with you, by all that George Trescot held dear and true, to put aside these thoughts of revenge. They are wicked; and even if they were not, it is practically useless for you or me, or any woman, to think of affecting the life of such a man.”

“But I am not a Christian, Mrs. Averill.”

“No; Susan told me that long ago, to my regret, dear. But still you must at least feel—”

“Pardon me, my dear Mrs. Averill,” she broke in. “I must go my way, and I mean to do so. I may fail; I think I shall not fail. But let me say, dear friend, once for all, just this,” and she laid a hand on the knee of the elder woman. “I am here for a purpose, but I shall live my life—the usual life. I shall see you often, I hope; and while here I shall try to do what good I can to those who are in need or suffering. All pain and all human distress appeal to me as they never did before. We will never recur to this subject, and yet, last of all, let me say just only this: if a man killed me, do you think George Trescot, no matter what his creed, would have left him unpunished?”

“But that is different,” said the old lady, feebly.

“I do not so see it,” said Constance. “We won’t talk about it any more. Here are some new flower-seeds and a meerschaum pipe for our dear general.”

Mrs. Averill thanked her, and they spoke of other matters—Susan, dress, foreign travel, and, at last, of the home for the orphans of Confederate soldiers. She—Constance—desired to help it.

After a long chat, the pretty old lady put on her gloves and rose, quite conscious that she had fared no better than her husband. She had been accustomed to act in her quiet, sweet-tempered way as a peace-making influence. Her gray, wrinkled, patient face preached silent sermons of gentleness and endurance. She had lost children, fortune, and all that helps us to bear the inevitable addition of such physical disabilities as the years bring to the old. She still retained a certain pleasure in her power to affect for good the lives of the younger people, whom, now that the general was once more prosperous, she liked to see about her—the young and the happy. What she had heard from Constance was both a novel revelation and a shock to her womanly sense of what was proper and reasonable. With larger knowledge and increased opportunities she might be able to turn this young friend aside from a course which seemed to her both wrong and foolish. She, too, had suffered, and had won at last the sad serenity of a sorrow for which this earth has no competent relief, and which looks for answer to another world than ours. She had nothing in her own nature or experience to explain either the strength or the defects of a woman like Constance Trescot. That she should want to avenge an injury, and yet earnestly desire to help the poor and the suffering, seemed to Eleanor Averill an incredible attitude of mind. As she walked homeward she consoled herself with the belief that perhaps, after all, Constance would soon come to realize her own incapacity and abandon her purpose. She had learned, as the old learn, to have great faith in time.

II

Greyhurst, who had reflected not a little on the return of Mrs. Trescot, concluded that her large business interests alone could have brought her to St. Ann. She was unlikely to remain; and even if her stay should be long, what did it matter? On the third day after her return he went to his office and began to read his letters. One in a firm, large-charactered woman’s hand interested him. He broke the black seal of the mourning-paper. A yellow slip fell out. He read:

“SIR:

“The inclosed telegram was in the hand of the man you murdered at the moment he was going toward you to offer, as before he had no power to do, a friendly, and even generous, division of the lands at the bend. His blood is on it, as I trust it may rest on your own soul.

“CONSTANCE TRESCOT.”

His first feeling was simply astonishment. For a moment he held the letter in act to tear it up. Then, as if that were impossible, he laid it down and mechanically unfolded the telegram and read it over and over. It was terribly new to him. The general had never spoken to him since the day of his fatal anger. He knew, of course, of the more recent and accepted proffer to Mrs. Baptiste to divide the frontage. He sat stupefied. He saw the brown blood-stains on the paper, and let it fall. The scene came back to him. Yes, the man _was_ smiling—he had thought it the smile of triumph. There he was, dead—dead! He tore the papers to pieces and cast them into the waste-basket at his side. A brief fury of anger came over him. He rose and walked to and fro. “By heavens, if she were a man!” Then he controlled himself, saying: “After all, what does it matter—a woman’s revenge!”