“CHARLIE, DEAR,” BEDELIA SAID. IT WAS ALMOST eleven o’clock and Charlie had not yet carried out his resolution to tell her Ben Chaney’s story. He had not forgotten it nor changed his mind. His first thought on opening his eyes that morning had been of his vow. But Bedelia had slept late. Charlie had done all the housework while he waited for her to awaken. The tasks had become irksome. He had been fidgety, aware of every passing minute, every thought that entered his mind, every movement of his muscles. Yet he wanted the house clean before he faced her with his questions. He did not wish to create a disorder of the emotions before there was order in his house. For then there would never be any tidiness to steady him.
At half-past ten she had called him to say that she was awake and ready for her breakfast. Her fever was down, but she was coughing badly and Charlie thought it better that she remain in the bedroom that day. She wore a handsome gown of green serge with bell-shaped sleeves that were embroidered in gold, black, and red.
“Charlie, dear, I think I should like an egg this morning.”
“Yes, dear.”
When he returned with the breakfast tray, she had made up the bedroom. The rose-colored moiré spread lay smooth upon the bed, and the pillows were tucked into the bolster. The room was like a stage set for the big scene. Charlie decided that he would let her eat her breakfast before he began his inquisition. He set the tray upon a small table by the window and lined the upholstered chair with cushions for her. Bedelia ate slowly, looking out of the window and dreaming between sips of coffee.
Outside the window the world shone. Clean, unbroken snow stretched to the horizon. On each side of the river the dark rocks were bearded with icicles; and icicles, catching the sunlight and sending off rainbows, hung from the roof and window-frames.
At last her coffee cup was empty. Charlie moved his chair closer so that there was only the small table, set with empty dishes, between him and his wife. Bedelia had fallen into a reverie. The bones of her face were neatly modeled and her skin shone with a fine luster. Appreciating these qualities but looking beyond them for something deeper, Charlie willed her to return his glance.
“Why were you so upset when Ben mentioned Keene Barrett?”
Suddenly the whole thing seemed absurd to Charlie. McKelvey, Jacobs, and Barrett were merely specters and could not endure in the clear daylight. The blue fishermen on the willow-ware plates were more real.
“Ben is a liar. There’s not a word of truth in anything he says.” Bedelia said this calmly as if Charlie’s sudden and irrelevant question had not disturbed her. In the same level voice she asked, “Do you love me?”
He did not answer. The specters, happily, were fading. So long as they remained ghosts, creatures of Ben Chaney’s cruelty and Charlie’s tormented imagination, they could never touch nor hurt the Horsts. But once Charlie heard his wife speak their names, McKelvey, Jacobs, and Barrett would no longer be phantoms but corpses of men who had once been happy husbands.
“You loved me yesterday. You loved me until he came and told you those lies.”
“How did you know he’d been here?”
“The doorbell woke me up. I heard him say the Keeley boys had taught him to use snowshoes.”
“Why didn’t you mention it?”
“Why didn’t you?”
“If you know what he told me, Bedelia, you know why.”
“You believed him. That’s why you were afraid to tell me.”
“I didn’t want to hurt you,” Charlie said.
“It hurts me more for you to believe lies about me. I don’t see how you could. His lies! He’s the most deceitful man I’ve ever met. He’s never told a word of truth since we’ve known him.”
“Then you know what he said?” Charlie asked hesitantly.
“Do you remember what I told you last night? If I didn’t love you so much I wouldn’t be having the baby. I needn’t have, you know.”
“Were you pregnant when you first told me about it? Or was it a trick to get me to increase my insurance?”
She went scarlet. The doll’s mouth became a thin line.
“About this man from St. Paul, Bedelia? Barrett. What about him?”
“It’s four months. Pretty soon I’ll be feeling life.”
It was an obvious appeal for sympathy and Charlie had no right to let himself be touched by it. But this was such a natural thing for a woman to say that it made everything seem right again, and he felt as a husband ought to feel when his wife talks to him of the growth of the child in her womb. The rocker groaned. Charlie caught himself thinking that he ought to speak to Bedelia about oiling the furniture.
She raised her head defiantly. “It’s just like Ben to believe the Barretts.”
Charlie gasped.
“They were always against me. You must believe me, Charlie. Do you?”
There it was, her confession, not in the words Charlie had expected but no less real. One phantom became a husband.
Although he had been steeling himself against this moment, Charlie cringed. His face was twisted and his body twitching. He closed his eyes, thinking that if he shut her out of his sight he would stand it better.
Bedelia watched intently. When at last she saw Charlie’s eyes open, she threw him an appealing glance. He would not look at her, but she hurried on with her excuses, wooing him, hoping to win his sympathy. “They were furious when Will married me. Keene’s wife wanted him to marry an heiress, some girl whose father had a seat on the Stock Exchange. When they found out he’d married a penniless girl, they were horrid. Wait till you see Keene. He’s got a mouth like a pocketbook.” Her mouth became shrewd and greedy in imitation of Keene’s. “He doesn’t talk much. You’d think words cost money. When Keene and Hazel found out about Will’s leaving me all of his insurance, they were horrid to me, just horrid.” Bedelia’s eyes narrowed. She shuddered slightly. “They’re trying to make trouble for me now because they think they can scare me into giving them some of the money back.”
The irascible old lady’s relations had been against her, too, and the family of the consumptive millionaire who had wanted her to inherit his fortune.
There was a long silence, and then Charlie said, “Ben told me the Keene Barretts were fond of you. After your husband died they tried their best to comfort you.”
“Fond of me!” Her nostrils quivered. “I wish you’d heard the insults. Hazel couldn’t stand it when Will bought me my fur coat. The best Keene would give her was plush with a tiny little Persian lamb collar. Well, she’s got my moleskin now and everything else that was mine.”
“That’s right, you left it with her, didn’t you? Why?”
“She’d have to add fifty skins to get it around her bust. This is all a plot to get my money away from me. It’s like Keene to spend on detectives.”
“If there’s no more to it than that,” Charlie said, “why did you run away?”
“I told you. The Barretts made my life miserable.”
“Why did you change your name?”
“I was frightened.” She lowered her eyelids as if her enemies were confronting her, and she wished to avoid their faces. “I knew they’d stop at nothing to find me and get my money away from me.”
“It wouldn’t have been necessary to change your name. The insurance money was legally yours and they couldn’t have got it away from you.”
“Is that so?” she asked gravely.
“Bedelia, please tell me the truth,” Charlie begged. “I’m not against you, I’m . . .” he was reluctant to pledge love, and he said instead, “and I want to help you.”
“Don’t you believe me?”
“I’m afraid not.”
She looked hurt.
“You gave me a false name when we met. And when we married, you let them put that false name on our marriage certificate. I don’t even know whether we’re legally husband and wife.”
“Oh!” she cried. “That’s terrible.”
“Not so terrible as the other things,” Charlie said.
“But I want to be married to you.”
“Didn’t you want to be married to the others?”
She rested against the back of the chair and looked down at her folded hands. Charlie had never before seen her sulky or ill-mannered.
“Didn’t you want to be married to the others?”
“There were no others,” she said to her hands. “No others except you and Will.”
“What about Raoul Cochran?”
She waited a minute and then she gave him such a heart-breaking glance that he forgot how wicked she was and regretted his harshness. Thirty seconds later he was sorry that he had offered the flash of sympathy and despised himself because he was not a strong man who could tussle with evil and conquer in fifteen minutes.
A cloud slid over the sun. The day’s purity and sparkle died. The snow was a dirty grayness. Down the road moved a dozen men bundled to the ears, shoveling snow off the road, piling it in soiled heaps. Charlie saw the question in Bedelia’s eyes and nodded. Their isolation would soon be over. The poor of the town were opening the road to their door.
AT NOON THE men stopped work, climbed into wagons and were carried off.
“They’ve gone,” Bedelia said.
Apparently Charlie had not heard. He had lost all sense of time, of the things around him, and of his peculiar situation. The clock struck, but he did not count its notes. Bedelia watched nervously as he walked up and down, his eyes on the carpet.
“Charlie, I said they’d gone away.”
“Who?”
“The men who were clearing the road. They didn’t get to the house.”
“They’ve gone to dinner. Probably down at Mitch’s saloon. The town is paying for it.”
“Will they be back?”
“At one o’clock.”
“Oh, dear,” Bedelia said unhappily.
“Perhaps we’d better have a bite, too.”
“I’m not hungry.”
Charlie was glad. He was in no mood for small tasks.
“I do wish you wouldn’t do that,” Bedelia complained.
“Do what?”
“Keep charging across the room like a caged lion. It makes me nervous.”
The conversation suggested a small domestic quarrel. There was neither drama in it nor the hint of tragedy. Charlie found his pipe on the mantel, but did not light it. He clenched his teeth on the stem, and held an unlighted match in his hand.
“I love you dearly, Charlie. If you’d only believe that.”
He took a long time to light his pipe, pull at it, and throw away the match. “If you love me so much, why have you lied to me?”
“I’ve had an unhappy life.”
There was something ingenuous about Bedelia, and something sly. She waited for Charlie to show pity. He failed her, and she went to the mirror, smoothed her hair, and then found her lip salve and rubbed it on her mouth. Then she hurried to Charlie, confronted him, not in anger but in humility. “You don’t know how miserable I’ve been. You don’t know.”
He looked down at the parting in her hair. “I want to know the truth about your life, right from the beginning.”
Bedelia sighed.
At the parting her hair was paler in hue. Charlie did not like this and he moved away. He did not conclude as another woman would that she dyed her hair, but was faintly revolted without knowing why. Like Ellen, he detested artificiality of any sort.
“Who were your people?” he asked sharply. “Where were you born? What was you childhood like?”
“I’ve told you, dear.” Her manner had become casual. In a brisk, business-like way, she continued, “I came from one of the best families in San Francisco. Before the earthquake we were very rich. We lived . . .”
Charlie seized her shoulders. He was on the point of shaking her. “I know that story. I don’t believe it. Tell me the truth.”
“Oh, darling,” she moaned.
His hands fell away. He walked off and then turned around and looked at her from a safe distance. “Look here, Biddy, you can be honest with me. I’m not against you, I’m your husband, I’m trying to help you.” He kept his voice low, for he was trying to make her understand that he would not punish her for telling him the truth.
Tears welled up, flooding out of her eyes and rolling down her cheeks. She did not try to stem them nor to dry her face, but stood there helplessly, pressing her hands against her neck. Her wide stare was directed at nothing. For the moment her eyes had no function except to make tears. She did not sob. There was nothing Charlie could do but wait until she had finished crying.
At last she was finished. She rubbed her eyes with her fists and smiled ruefully. She took the handkerchief from Charlie and wiped her cheeks and eyes. “I’m sorry I was such a baby.”
“Would you like a drink of water?”
“No thank you.”
“Brandy?”
“Nothing, thanks.”
She looked around the room. Her glance was inquisitive and stared as if Charlie were someone she had never seen before. Her grief had been like a trance, and now as she returned to consciousness she sought reassurance in familiar things. Soon she was smiling, calm, home again. She sat down in the chair beside the window.
Charlie took the seat opposite it and stretched his hand across the table. She took it shyly.
“I’m going to ask you a few questions. You must answer them honestly, Bedelia. Nothing will make me angry nor hurt my feelings. You can be as honest with me as you’d be with yourself. Promise?”
“Yes, Charlie, I promise.”
Thus she gave herself to Charlie and trusted him to protect her. Her hand quivered as it lay in his. The sense of responsibility increased his tension. He did not know what he would do after he had learned the truth.
“What’s your name?” he said.
“Bedelia Horst.”
Charlie shook his head. “No, that’s not what I want. The truth. Were you christened?”
She nodded.
“What name did they give you?”
“Bedelia.”
“I thought you promised to tell me the truth.”
“My mother used to call me Annie.”
Charlie felt that he had made progress. “Annie what?”
“Annie Torrey.” “Annie Torrey, that was the name you were called by when you were a child, is it?”
“Torrey with a Y. T-o-double r-e-y.”
“What sort of name was it?”
“It was my mother’s name.”
“Not your father’s?”
She became pale and her cheeks seemed to sink in. Her hands clasped her throat again.
“I see,’’ Charlie said gently. “Then you didn’t know your father?”
She looked at him blankly.
“Didn’t you know anything about him? How old he was, his nationality, what sort of people he came from, what he did for a living?”
“He came from an aristocratic English family. His father was a younger son and came to this country because . . .”
“Bedelia,” Charlie interrupted, “we’re not playing a game. You’ve promised me the truth; are you going to keep you promise?”
“Yes,” she said humbly.
“What about your father?”
“I told you. When they had a dinner party, he’d carry me downstairs from the nursery. There were gold plates on the table and hired musicians. My mother had diamond earrings and . . .”
Charlie went off on a tangent. He hoped to shock her into honesty. “Do you remember McKelvey?”
“Who?”
“Wasn’t he your first husband?”
“Herman Bender was my first husband.”
Charlie leaped. “Who was Herman Bender?”
“I told you,” she said patiently. “My first husband. We were married when I was seventeen. He kept the livery stable.”
Charlie was shaken. He had prepared himself for horror, but it was tidy horror that concerned facts he knew and had arranged in his mind.
“I promised to tell you the truth,” she said.
“Yes, yes, of course,” he sputtered. “Go ahead, tell me about Herman Bender.”
“I never talk about him because I don’t like to remember how horrid people were to me afterward. I had to leave town. They went around saying I’d known about the mushrooms. They were jealous when they found out about the thousand dollars.”
“Herman died after eating mushrooms?”
“I guess they weren’t really mushrooms. But how was I to know? He taught me to test them. He was always going to pick mushrooms. They made a good meal and didn’t cost anything.”
“You gave him mushrooms and he died, and then you got some money?”
“We always cooked them in butter.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The mushrooms. He wouldn’t eat them unless they were cooked in butter.”
“I want to hear about the thousand dollars.”
She spoke patiently. “I didn’t know about the thousand dollars, honestly. I’d heard about insurance, but I didn’t know what it meant until they sent me the money.”
“Then why did you give him the mushrooms?”
“He liked them. And we could get them for nothing, all we had to do was go out and pick them.” The flesh tightened over her cheekbones. “He was cheap. I didn’t think he had any money the way he was always going on about ending up in the poorhouse. He said the horses ate too much, ate up all the profits.”
“Where was this?”
“Just outside of San Francisco. I told you I was born in California.”
There were other things she had told him. He saw now that certain gems of truth shone among her falsehoods, and understood that when she tried to tell the truth it was tarnished by deceit. For Bedelia there was no clean line between honesty and fabrication.
“Did you love Herman Bender?”
Her laughter was harsh.
“Then why did you marry him?”
Bedelia looked out of the window. The wagons had brought the men back to work. Beside the road the mounds of snow were growing tall. And the men were working their way toward the gate.
“He had a good business and wasn’t afraid of getting married,” Bedelia said, turning toward Charlie again.
“It must be hard to marry when you’re seventeen and not in love with your husband.”
Her lips moved but no words came out. She was carrying on a debate with herself, arguing the reality of some image that had risen in her mind, pondering the wisdom of telling it.
“Speak up, Bedelia. I’ll try to understand.”
The words tumbled out in a cascade. “He was good to me sometimes and sometimes he was horrid. He’d hit me and knock me down. You don’t know, Charlie! He was mean and he’d hit me if I asked for money. Maybe you don’t believe that either.” Her hands protected her belly. “I lost my baby. It was his fault.”
“And you got a thousand dollars for giving him the mushrooms.”
“No!” she cried. “I didn’t mean to, honestly, I was only trying to give him a cheap meal. It wasn’t till afterward that I found out he’d gone and insured his life for a thousand dollars after I told him I was in the family way.”
“That’s hard to believe,” Charlie said. “His insuring his life showed consideration and tenderness, and looked as if he were glad that you were bearing him a child. It’s hard to believe he hit you and made you lose it.”
Her face had become scarlet. She beat her fists against the table. “You’ve got to believe that, Charlie. There are a lot of things you don’t know because you don’t know tough people. A husband’s always glad when you tell him you’re going to have your first; he thinks he’s a wonderful fellow, he’s going to be a father. That’s the way Herman felt when I told him, only he had a terrible temper. When he got sore he forgot I was in the family way. He was sorrier when I lost it.”
“You might have had another.”
“If he’d lived,” she said piously.
“Or perhaps you’d have prevented it, since you seem to know how.”
“I didn’t know that till later. I was green then, I didn’t know much of anything. It was later, a long time later, that I found out about those things.”
“Did you know them when you were married to McKelvey?”
Charlie was used to that look of blank inattentiveness. He spoke in a loud, authoritative voice. “Bedelia! Look at me.” She turned her head as the subject might obey a hypnotist. Her eyes were still veiled. Charlie reached across the table, took her chin in his hand, tilting it and forcing her to keep her face turned toward him. Suddenly she smiled. The frost was out of her eyes, they were bright and alive again, her smile warm and loving.
He felt a brute for going on with his interrogation. “What about McKelvey? Were you married to him or weren’t you?”
“I don’t remember.”
Charlie was not sure he blamed Herman Bender for his fits of temper. With the sense of impotence Charlie’s fury swelled. “It’s impossible to forget a person you’ve been married to. Don’t think I’m gullible enough to believe that sort of excuse.”
“Please don’t shout at me, Charlie. I can’t help it if I forget, can I?”
“Your memory serves you conveniently. This morning you told me there’d never been any other husbands but Will Barrett and me, and then suddenly you pull out this Bender.”
“Herman was so mean to me that I forget him a lot of the time.”
Charlie shook his head.
“I don’t always remember unpleasant things,” Bedelia said plaintively, and when Charlie looked at her face he knew that this at least was the truth.
Still he tried patiently to get some order and logic into her story. “What did you do after Bender died?”
“I went away.”
“Where?”
“Different places. I was companion to a rich old lady and we traveled a lot. We went to fashionable resorts, Nantucket, Bar Harbor, and Asbury Park.”
Charlie remembered that Ben had spoken of Asbury Park as the scene of her meeting with McKelvey. “Did you meet anyone there?”
“That’s where I met Harold De Graf. I’ve told you about him. He was a Southerner, awfully good-looking and immensely wealthy, but he had consumption. He fell in love with me . . .”
“Bedelia,” Charlie said wearily, “I’ve heard that story. I want the truth. You promised to tell me the truth, you know.”
“Yes, dear.”
“Was there actually a rich old lady and a consumptive millionaire?”
“Of course, dear. I’ve told you about her. She wanted to leave me a lot of money, but her relations were against me, particularly her nephew; he was a terrible scoundrel and when I wouldn’t let him make love to me . . .”
“What about Jacobs?” snapped Charlie.
Bedelia did not answer, but her left hand covered the right on which she wore the ring of gold and garnets that Charlie had given to her to replace the black pearl.
“Then you do remember Jacobs?”
A vein bisected her forehead. It stood out prominently, slanting from her hairline to the left eye. Charlie noticed that it was throbbing. Her teeth cut into her lower lip.
“You must remember Jacobs. You kept the black pearl.”
When she spoke, Charlie saw the mark of her teeth on the lower lip. “It was mine. I had the right to keep it.”
“It must have been hard to leave everything else,” Charlie said coldly. “All your clothes and the kitchen things and fur coats. But you kept the ring and it was the ring that trapped you.”
“You sound like you don’t love me.”
The men with snowshovels had reached the strip of road in front of their house. The vast silence which had surrounded the house was broken by the clatter of shovels and the men’s coarse, good-natured laughs.
CHARLIE’S LEGS WERE stiff. The back of his neck ached. Beyond the terrace the river rushed along as cheerfully as ever and in the western sky the clouds had become luminous islands on a pearly sea. The wagon had called for the snow-shovelers, who had been driven back to City Hall for their pay. It was five o’clock, and Charlie had been standing at the window for almost an hour.
He remembered with astonishment that he had not telephoned the office. Although his phone had been connected all day, he had not once thought to call the office. On the day of his mother’s death he had telephoned his foreman three times.
Bedelia was sleeping. The quarrel had worn her out and she had been able to cast aside her worries and curl up on the bed like a kitten. For Charlie there was not such easy refuge.
When he made up his mind to ask his wife about Ben’s accusations, Charlie had expected denial or confession. He had got neither, only evasions which fell between the two. She had owned neither to marriage nor acquaintance with Jacobs and McKelvey, but had given signs that dwelt somewhere in the twisted avenues of her memory. He had mentioned Jacobs and she had made an involuntary gesture toward the hand on which she had worn the black pearl. And Asbury Park, which had been the meeting-place between romance with the tubercular millionaire. The fabric of her story was woven with threads of truth as well as with the colors of deceit. She had a strong enough memory for all her fancies; it was her sins that she forgot.
And there had been Herman Bender, the livery-stable proprietor, the husband she had forgotten in the morning and remembered in the afternoon. If his death had been, as she said, an accident, it had been a piece of remarkably good fortune for her. She had been freed of a disagreeable mate and endowed with one thousand dollars, which had seemed at that time a fortune. Her husband’s death had come as a rare piece of luck and the tawdry accident became a pattern for crime. In one form or other she had repeated it remorselessly, always with greater cunning and new refinements. Charlie’s flesh shrank as he recalled the emotions which had churned in him when she had first confided that she was pregnant.
She had never once admitted to murder. Nor had Charlie asked the direct question. Delicacy forbade it. He could no more speak to Bedelia of murder than he could mention deformity in the presence of the deformed. There had been pathos in her confession that she had married Herman Bender because the man was willing and he made a good living. No other answer could so clearly have shown that her early life had been sordid. Like the mansion in San Francisco, the aristocratic forebears, the gold plates, hired musicians, the diamonds in her mother’s ears, it pointed to youthful poverty and shame.
Charlie pitied her because she had not been able to grow beyond these humiliations, but he was too honest to accept these as excuse for her crime. If everyone whose childhood has been sordid were to become a murderer, at least eighty per cent of the population would be homicidal. Early deprivations, unhappiness, hunger, may lead to a grudge against society, bitterness, protest, or the healthy attempt to make a better world for the new generation, but no sane judge would accept such excuse for deliberate, cruel, plotted murder.
There was no mystery about her motives. She had killed for money, planning her life like a business man who hopes to lay aside a tidy fortune for his old age. She had arranged her business affairs with acumen, had invested a part of her capital in each new venture. There was no mystery about it, no grandeur, but here was enigma, the enigma of the soul of a human being who is able to commit crime as normally and efficiently as the business man plans a deal. Why is one person incapable of crime, another able to kill in cold blood? Why, where, what is the cause of that delicate balance between good and evil? This is the mystery beyond all mysteries, the problem that neither detective, physician, nor psychologist has yet solved. Charlie remembered the newspaper story about the New Hampshire elder who had smothered his sister with a sofa pillow because, after seventeen years, he had believed she was interfering in his love affair. Why after seventeen years on that particular day?
Coral and lavender faded in the western sky. Twilight hung in the air like mist.
“Charlie!”
Charlie shuddered.
“I’ve come downstairs.”
His mother’s white shawl over her shoulders, the green dress fading into the shadows, the white doorway framing the picture, she was like one of those dim portraits that hang in the old twilight galleries of Europe. As Charlie’s eyes became used to the dusk, he saw the oval of her face pierced by dark eyes, and her hands holding the shawl.
“You shouldn’t have come downstairs.”
“Charlie, I want to talk to you.”
“All right.” He led the way toward the living-room, which seemed safer than the den because it was larger. Bedelia chose the wing chair. Charlie turned on all of the lights and touched a match to the crumpled paper under the logs in the fireplace.
“The road’s clear, Charlie, we could get to town.”
“Our drive hasn’t been cleared yet.”
“You could clear it, couldn’t you?”
“I intend to, first thing tomorrow morning.”
“How long will it take?”
“Two to three hours, I imagine.”
“Oh,” said Bedelia; and after a pause, “then we could catch the ten-ten.”
“What for?”
“New York.”
Charlie did not answer. Bedelia looked at the what-not. There was a bare space which had once belonged to the Dresden marquis and his love. So much had happened since she had dropped the ornament that Bedelia had not had a chance to rearrange her shelves. She went to the what-not, tried a Sèvres vase in the bare space, but shook her head at it because the vase definitely belonged on the upper shelf.
“What do you want to go to New York for?” Charlie said at last.
Bedelia replaced the vase and stepped back to study the shelves. “A holiday, dear. We could go to some Southern place in Europe. Italy, I’d like. The English always go to Italy for the winter.”
“I don’t understand you.” That was a lie. Charlie knew precisely what she had chosen not to say.
“We’ve both been ill, Charlie. You’ve had a bad attack of indigestion and my cold may hang on for months. A vacation would do us good.”
She tried to make it sound as commonplace as it would sound to their friends if Charlie Horst and his wife should take a winter holiday.
Charlie cleared his throat. “Is it because you want to avoid Barrett?”
Bedelia turned to the what-not again. She tried a set of silver furniture, minute and exquisitely wrought, in the place of the Dresden group.
“Have they any evidence against you?”
Her voice came to Charlie as from a great distance. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“If Barrett should identify you, would it prove anything? Could they tell now, after all this time, whether Will Barrett was drugged before he fell into the water? And even if they should prove it, would they have any real evidence? Of course, your running off and changing your name doesn’t help.”
Bedelia changed the positions of a carved ivory stork, a china dog, a carnelian elephant, and a pair of white jade cats. The motley menagerie pleased her. She stepped back and scrutinized it from a distance. “They’ve got nothing against me, except the suspicion in their dirty rotten minds.” Her voice was not defiant, but merely contemptuous as if she were talking reluctantly about something unpleasant that had nothing to do with herself.
“Then why shouldn’t we stay and fight it out? Why run away?”
“I’d rather go abroad.”
“Suppose he should identify you as his sister-in-law; he still has nothing definite against you. And besides, it happened in another state. All these cases were in different states, weren’t they? Minnesota, Michigan, and Tennessee. There’d be the devil of a legal mess. And what proof have they of anything?” As he said this, Charlie saw triumph in the law courts, the judge leaning over to shake hands with the released prisoner while her loyal husband stood beside her, holding her other arm. “First of all, they’d have to identify you as the Barrett Woman, as Annabel McKelvey and Zoe Jacobs.”
“Chloe,” she said.
Charlie stepped back so suddenly that he narrowly missed the fire.
Bedelia began to talk vivaciously of the trip to Europe. Winter seas might be rough, but the trip across would not take more than a week. Paris first, she thought, because she had longed all her life to see Paris and she’d like some new clothes. Afterward Italy, or, if Charlie preferred, the Riviera. She had read a lot about the Riviera, knew about the grand hotels, seaside promenades, gambling casinos.
“We might even go to Monte Carlo,” Bedelia said. She was still unsatisfied with the arrangement of her shelves. On the palm of her right hand rested the three monkeys the Johnsons had given the Horsts for Christmas. To follow their advice, Charlie thought, to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, was as weak as deliberately cultivating evil. The careful avoidance of all that was unpleasant and unsavory was not only Charlie’s greatest fault, but the fault of his people and his class. By turning their eyes and ears from evil, they nourished evil, gave it sunlight, fresh air, and the space in which to flourish. The civilized man was not the man who shut himself away from evil, but who saw it clearly, heard its faintest rustlings, exposed it, shouted about it from the housetops.
A pinprick had destroyed his triumph. The trial that he had seen as an easy victory became a nightmare. He saw his wife on the witness stand, being interrogated, cross-examined, bullied; he saw the flashlights exploding, the newspaper headlines, the lurid photographs and stories in the Sunday supplements. Reporters would pry into the secrets of the murderess’s life with her last husband and nothing of their marriage would be too intimate for the sob sisters to search out and serve to the public in syrupy prose. They would pity her husband for having been taken in by this female Bluebeard and consider him lucky because he had escaped death at her hands.
Bedelia turned from the what-not and came toward him. The green gown was loose, but it clung to her body and he saw that he need not have asked Doctor Meyers about her pregnancy. It was all too apparent. Charlie counted the months on his fingers. A chill crept along his spine. Telegraph wires would flash the news from coast to coast when Charlie Horst’s child was born; in the remotest villages the newspapers would print his name. And even if the courts should free Bedelia, the stigma would endure; she would be a marked woman, stared at and whispered about wherever she went, and her child would be marked, too, with the brand.
She chattered on about Europe. One would think Venice and Rome were no farther off than Georgetown and Redding. She had read all that romantic fiction and to her mind there was no place like Lake Como for fugitive lovers. They might find a house on a hill . . . “a villa, you call it. They have terraced gardens with trellises and statues and olive trees and oranges and lemons. Lemon blossoms are sweeter than orange,” she told him gravely. “We’d have four or five in help, you always do in foreign countries; they don’t cost any more than one good servant here, especially with the wages they expect nowadays; they’re really happy to go to work for you cheaply, and you always have your morning coffee in bed.”
“What do you mean?” Charlie asked, irritated by the completeness of her plans. “We can’t live abroad.”
“Why not?”
“My home’s here, my business.”
“We could close the house. Bachman would run the business for you, or you could sell it. Judge Bennett would look after your affairs.”
“So you’ve settled my life for me?”
“Don’t be angry, dear. It would be so pleasant, living in a warm climate, basking in the sun, swimming in the middle of winter. Wouldn’t you like to swim in February, Charlie?” Deliberately avoiding the real motive for the journey, she made it sound as if she sought nothing but sunshine and lemon blossoms. Charlie looked at her face and saw that she was engrossed in this new reverie. He wondered if she had hypnotized herself into believing this lie, too.
“I intend to stay right here.”
She pouted prettily, still the saucy darling mildly irritated because her obstinate husband would not indulge her whim.
“My dear.” Charlie’s voice sounded like his mother’s in her most righteous moments. “We can’t afford to live anywhere but here. When I asked you to marry me, I told you frankly that I wasn’t a rich man. I’ve got no income except what I earn, and even my business means nothing without me. So it’s no use arguing, we can’t leave.”
She smiled graciously. “I’ve got plenty of money.”
“You?”
Simultaneously he remembered that she had told him about an inheritance from Raoul Cochran’s grandmother and that there had never been any such person as Raoul Cochran.
“I’ve got almost two hundred thousand dollars.”
“You!”
“Almost. Of course I’ve had to spend some of it.”
“Where did . . .” he began, but became silent in the middle of the question because he knew well enough where she had got the money.
“So it would be quite easy for us to live abroad. On the income, not the capital.”
“You don’t think I’d live on that money!”
“The interest at four per cent is eight thousand a year. If we were very careful and invested only in three per cent securities, we’d have six thousand. You can live like a prince on that in Europe.”
“My God!” cried Charlie. “Oh, my God!”
“Very well, if that’s the way you feel.” The painted lips drooped cruelly. She turned abruptly and her taffeta petticoats echoed the movement. Charlie heard the silk rustle as she mounted the stairs and the sound which always seemed so feminine and fair to him was the whisper of evil.
The Danbury train whistled as it rounded the curve. Charlie took out his watch to see if it was on time. His habits had not been changed by shock and mental torment. He was still Charlie Horst, born and brought up in this fine house, a good architect and estimable citizen. His watch was always on time, his shoes were shined, his bills paid the first of the month. He looked around him at the pleasant room, at flames leaping in the fireplace, the love-seat in the bow window.
“Dearest,” Bedelia called.
“Where are you?”
“In the kitchen.”
“I thought you’d gone upstairs.”
“I came down the back way.”
She had taken off the white shawl and tied an apron over the green dress. Red-and-white checked gingham and her pose at the stove, with her head bent over the pot and a big spoon in her hand, comforted her husband.
The illusion of peace did not last. A spring snapped, metal screeched, a mouse squeaked thin shrill notes of pain. Bedelia clasped her throat with both hands and cast an anguished glance in Charlie’s direction. He opened one of the lower cupboards and took out the trap that had been set there.
Bedelia turned away.
“Don’t let it bother you,” Charlie said. As he carried the trap to the shed, he passed Bedelia. He held the trap behind him, his body concealing it from her. In the shed he finished the job, using a small hammer and killing the mouse with a single blow.
When he came back to the kitchen, he found Bedelia perched on the stool, her feet tucked under her, her arms wrapped around her body.
“Don’t be frightened. It’s dead.”
“I shouldn’t have minded if she had died right away, but I suffer when creatures struggle for life. She was such a tiny mouse.”
“It might have been a male.”
“All helpless things seem female to me.”
She turned to her work. Charlie washed his hands and dried them on the roller towel. He was unsteady; his nerves twitched, his body was strung with live wires. For years he had been catching rats and mice in the house, had thought of them as pests and never been affected by their death. Bedelia’s distress had been communicated to him.
The kitchen was silent except for the occasional tap of her high heels on the linoleum. Charlie could not endure the silence and he said, “My mother was the same. She could never bear to see anything die.”
Bedelia turned from the stove to fetch some condiment from the spice shelf. He saw that her face was like the face of a deaf mute. Her eyes had a slight glaze and her mouth was a hard knot.
Charlie saw that the trance-like state was deliberate, Bedelia’s method of wiping out an unpleasant scene. He became wildly angry. Cords thickened in his neck and his voice was harsh. “No use working yourself up over the death of a pest. A mouse seems an inoffensive little thing, really quite touching, but it’s destructive and dangerous, a menace. We’ve got to get rid of them for our own safety.”
Bedelia carried the spice shaker back to the stove, sprinkled the spice from it into the pot. “I bet you can’t guess what we’re having for supper.”
Her voice was even, the look on her face bland. She smiled, her dimples deepened, and she gave a deep sigh of contentment as she stirred the soup in the pot. She looked so small and sweet, so feminine, so delightfully absorbed in her domestic task. “There was practically nothing in the pantry, but I’ve managed to make a very good supper. You’ve no idea how ingenious I am.”
She poured the soup into bowls and put them on a tray, which Charlie carried into the dining-room. She followed with another tray on which there was a covered dish.
“Guess what’s in here,” she commanded as she set it on the table.
“What?”
“A surprise for you, dear. One of your very favorite dishes,” Bedelia said, and lifted the cover.
The French toast was done to perfection, its golden surface liberally sprinkled with powdered sugar.