I HAVE THOUGHT A great deal about Laura Dalton since that day. In the Crescent her position was somewhat isolated; not because she did not belong, for she had been born there. But as Herbert says, she was suspended like Mahomet’s coffin, between heaven and earth. She was too young for that close triumvirate which had consisted of Mother, Mrs. Lancaster and Hester Talbot, and her marriage had placed an unbridgeable gulf between the local spinsters and herself.
Doctor Armstrong, calling that morning to look me over, had expressed some anxiety about her.
“It’s the wrong time of life for her to go through all this,” he said. “Head looks all right to me, Lou; you can go down to dinner if you feel up to it. But I’d be glad if you could talk to her a little. She’s got something on her mind. She’s still pretty much in love with Bryan, you know, and I imagine she’s got some sort of bee in her bonnet about him.” He went into the bathroom, washed his hands carefully and came back still holding the towel.
“I suppose people make their own hell in this world,” he went on. “They’re fond of each other, you know; probably a good bit more than that. But they’re both stubborn. It’s twenty years since she locked her door against him for some peccadillo or other, and I haven’t a doubt myself that there have been a good many times since when she’s unlocked it; and others when he had brought himself to try it, and had to go away. Pitiful, isn’t it, with life so short!”
All that was in my mind that afternoon when Laura Dalton walked into my room and locked the door behind her. I can see her now, in her pale lavender summer silk, her too-youthful hat sitting high on her head, and under it a pair of devastated eyes and a mouth that twitched with nerves.
She did not even explain that locking of the door. She moved directly across the room and stood over me, and for a moment I was startled. She did not look quite sane. She wasted no time in preliminaries.
“Is it true,” she demanded, “that they have arrested George Talbot?”
“I don’t know about an arrest. They have taken him to Headquarters.”
“The fools. The fools!” she broke out. “Listen, Louisa, George never killed Emily Lancaster, or her mother either. I know that. But I can’t tell the police. I can’t. I can’t.”
It was some time before I could quiet her, and at first I did not realize what she was trying to tell me. It was only after a full half hour, while I listened to the bottled-up miseries of a jealous and suspicious woman, still passionately in love with her husband and now terrified beyond all control, that I knew that Mrs. Dalton believed that her husband, with the assistance of Margaret Lancaster, had killed both Margaret’s mother and her sister!
Stripped of inessentials, her narrative ran something like this:
Years ago, Margaret Lancaster had been engaged to Bryan Dalton. He did not live on the Crescent then; but he used to come in his high trap and take Margaret for drives. Mrs. Lancaster had opposed the match, however.
“She didn’t like Bryan,” was what she said. “And when Margaret insisted on marrying him anyhow she simply went to bed for six months. I was very young then,” she added quickly, “but my father had built here where we are now, and I can remember my own mother saying that Mrs. Lancaster had gone to bed because it was the one way she could keep Margaret at home.”
Then one day Bryan asked her to drive with him, and after that they became engaged and were married. “And I had the house by that time,” she said, “so he came to live on the Crescent, although it wasn’t the Crescent then. It was just country, and he never really liked it.”
It was to that, his boredom and his revolt against the Crescent, that she laid his unfaithfulness. There had been somebody else, as she put it, every now and then since. And for the past few months it had been Margaret Lancaster again.
She was, I thought, trying to explain something to herself rather than to me, for all this came out only by degrees. She would stop, stretch the fingers of the gloves on her lap and start again, as though by going over the whole business and trying to coordinate it for me, she was trying to follow the steps by which she had come to her tragic conviction.
“I thought it was all over,” she said. “I still can’t see—I think she led him on, Louisa; for her own purposes. He hadn’t been faithful. We separated years ago over a maid in my own house. But after all a man of fifty—well, I thought all that was over. I suppose,” she added doubtfully, “that I shouldn’t be telling you all this, Louisa. You’re still a young woman.”
“I’m twenty-eight,” I said briefly. “I don’t think you’re telling me much I don’t know. I can’t believe what you are telling me about Margaret Lancaster. That’s all.”
I was, however, uneasily remembering that anonymous letter sent to the police, and I felt that my voice lacked conviction. If it did she did not notice.
“It’s true,” she asserted. “I don’t know how far it’s gone, but she’s smart and not bad-looking; and after all the time comes when any man has to learn that young women aren’t interested in him.”
There was apparently no mistake about the situation. He had even taken Margaret out driving, meeting her some place downtown; that was early in August, and once she had found Margaret’s bag in the car. It had slipped down beside a seat cushion, and she had given it to her husband without speaking. He had simply shrugged his shoulders and taken it. But she had no other proof. She had set herself to watch, but so far as she could tell no letters passed between them. She believed now that they had; that they had used the woodshed on the Lancaster place as a sort of post office.
The affair, so far as she knew, had commenced late in June or early in July.
Then abruptly she went on to the day of Mrs. Lancaster’s murder.
“Bryan was in the garage,” she said. “He had put on a pair of old overalls, and I was at a window at the back of the house upstairs. I wasn’t watching him,” she added. “I was measuring a window for new curtains. And at half past three I saw him, in his overalls, go toward the Lancaster woodshed. I could not see him all the way, of course. The path curves, and you know how the shrubbery has grown. But I was curious and I waited. And he didn’t come back until a quarter after four.”
She began to cry again, and I saw that she was trembling violently.
“Look here,” I said, “haven’t you just worked yourself into a state of nerves over all this? Suppose he was near the Lancaster house at that time? How could he get in? And why in heaven’s name would he want to get in? It all sounds rather silly to me.”
“It won’t sound so silly when I’ve finished, Louisa,” she said with a return of her dignity. “I’m not an utter fool. Perhaps I would be a happier woman if I were!”
I was inclined to agree with her as she went on; for she did go on. What she believed was that for a long time Margaret had been taking gold from the chest under the bed, either with a duplicate key or by securing at night the one from her mother’s neck. That she had carried it out of the house, a little at a time, and hidden it; and that all of this was known to Bryan Dalton. That it was in effect a part of their plan to run away and live together somewhere, probably in Europe or South America.
“You see,” she said, as though the entire Crescent did not know it, “I have the money. Bryan has very little of his own.”
Then, on the day Margaret had telephoned Jim Wellington that her father wanted an audit and to examine the chest, they had both known the game was up.
“He might have found a note in the woodshed, telling him,” she said. “And of course there was the axe, right there in plain sight. I know it sounds crazy, but wait, Louisa. How do we know he didn’t slip around the house, and Margaret admit him by the front door?”
I am afraid I shivered, for she said then that she should not have come to me after my own dreadful adventure; but that she was simply desperate.
“I can’t let them hold George Talbot,” she wailed.
“Listen, Mrs. Dalton. Do you think Bryan Dalton shot Emily Lancaster, or did this to me last night? Because I don’t.”
“God forgive me, Lou! I don’t know.”
“Well, I do know,” I told her. “He never left the house last night. They had two men watching it.”
I remember that she got up then, her face colorless and still twitching.
“Then they suspect him! What am I to do, Lou? What am I to do? For he’s guilty, Lou. He must be, or why did she give him that note last night to burn his overalls? He did burn them, last Thursday night. There was a fire still going out there and they disappeared. What else could he have done with them?”
I was too stunned to speak.
“And why, when he heard Emily run out screaming, didn’t he go to her? He must have been near enough to hear her. Who could help it? And why did he come into the house from the garage after he took off his overalls and tell Joseph to get him some whisky? In thirty years I’ve never known him to take a drink before dinner. I tell you, Louisa, Bryan Dalton knew that afternoon that Mrs. Lancaster had been murdered; for all his asking Joseph to tell me that night, as though he had just read it in the newspaper.”
When he came back into the house that afternoon she had been quietly drinking her iced tea, and he never knew she had seen him. But of course she still knew nothing of the murder. She was still without suspicion that evening, in the library after dinner. He had looked very strange when he called Joseph, however. She remembered that later on when they had reached the Lancaster house. They did not enter it together. Bryan rang the front doorbell. She herself had gone around and in by the kitchen, fully aware that the servants would be more talkative than the family. It was still only a crime to her, bad as it was.
But on emerging from the service wing into the side hall, she had seen her husband and Margaret together for a second near the foot of the front stairs. The Talbots were there also, but she had seen Margaret slip a note into Bryan’s hand, and he had slid it into his pocket. She was fishing in her hand-bag while she was telling me this, and I do not even now know how or when she had got it from him later on. She passed it to me, and I must say my flesh crept when I read it. It was in Margaret’s clear strong hand.
“Please burn all letters at once, and destroy what I gave you this afternoon. M.”
Just how she got possession of that note I do not know, nor did she say. He had no idea that she knew he had it, and certainly she got it. But after that, I imagine, all hell must have broken loose in the house when she read it. To her, then, and since, it had meant only one thing: that Margaret and Bryan Dalton had killed Mrs. Lancaster as a preliminary to a flight together, and that the crime was the result of a plot long concocted and carefully carried out.
For she had never found the overalls.
That night, Thursday, she had searched for them, and for any letters from Margaret. He had discovered what she was doing and had tried to stop her, but she was like a crazy woman. There was no sign that he had burned anything in any of the fireplaces, or in the furnace either. But of course that idiot Daniels had had his usual fire in No Man’s Land, and during that three or four hours in the afternoon after the murder he could easily have walked out and dropped something there. Nobody would have been likely to notice. Or maybe he did it at night. She did not know.
That was the story Laura Dalton told me the Tuesday afternoon after our two murders; stripping away for once the hypocrisies and traditional reticences of the Crescent and revealing a naked and suffering soul. She had done it with a certain amount of dignity at that, save for one or two outbursts; stretching and pulling at her gloves, keeping her voice down, and even—heaven help us!—once settling her skirt so that it hung at the correct length about her ankles.
All I could do was to make her promise that she would not go to the police for a day or so at least; and at last she drew on her gloves, straightened her hat, and went away with that odd self-possession which seems to characterize all the older women of the Crescent. Time takes its toll of them, death and tragedy come inevitably, but they face the world with quiet faces and unbroken dignity.
I even heard her thanking Annie as she let her out the front door.