Part 6

What was the result of this conscientious but no doubt unwise remonstrance? After a shock of disagreeable surprise, the two lovers did what all true lovers would have done; they entered into a solemn engagement that no considerations of fortune should prevent their marriage. They shut their eyes on the future, braved all the adverse chances of life, and almost prayed for trials in order that each might show the other greater devotion. The feeling was natural and ungovernable, and I claim also that it was beautiful and noble.

“Do you know all?” asked Bessie. “Grandfather has never proposed to leave me anything, he hated my father so! It was always understood that Aunt Mercy was to take care of me.”

“I want nothing with you,” said Foster. “I will slave myself to death for you. I will rejoice to do it.”

“O, I knew it would be so!” replied the girl, almost faint with joy and love. “I knew you would be true to me. I knew how grand you were.”

When they looked out upon the earth, after this scene, during which they had been conscious of nothing but each other, the storm had fled beyond verdant hills, and a rainbow spanned all the visible landscape, seeming to them indeed a bow of promise.

“O, we can surely be happy in such a world as this!” said Bessie, her face colored and illuminated by youth, hope, and love.

“We will find a cloud castle somewhere,” responded the young man, pointing to the western sky, piled with purple and crimson.

Bessie was about to accompany him to the gate on his departure, as was her simple and affectionate custom, when a voice called her up stairs.

“O dear!” she exclaimed, pettishly. “It seems as if I couldn’t have a moment’s peace. Good by, my darling.”

During the close of that day, at the hour which in Barham was known as “early candle-lighting,” the Lauson tragedy began to take form. The mysterious shadow which vaguely announced its on-coming was the disappearance from the family ken of that lighthouse of regularity, that fast-rooted monument of strict habit, Aunt Mercy. The kerosene lamp which had so long beamed upon her darnings and mendings, or upon her more æsthetic labors in behalf of the Barham sewing society, or upon the open yellow pages of her Scott’s Commentary and Baxter’s Saints’ Rest, now flared distractedly about the sitting-room, as if in amazement at her absence. Nowhere was seen her tall, thin, hard form, the truthful outward expression of her lean and sickly soul; nowhere was heard the afflicted squeak of her broad calfskin shoes, symbolical of the worryings of her fretful conscience. The doors which she habitually shut to keep out the night-draughts remained free to swing, and, if they could find an aiding hand or breeze, to bang, in celebration of their independence. The dog might wag his tail in wonder through the parlor, and the cat might profane the sofa with his stretchings and slumbers.

At first the absence of Aunt Mercy merely excited such pleasant considerations as these. The fact was accepted as a relief from burdens; it tended towards liberty and jocoseness of spirit. The honest and well-meaning and devout woman had been the censor of the family, and, next after the iron-headed Squire, its dictator. Bessie might dance alone about the sober rooms, and play operatic airs and waltzes upon her much-neglected piano, without being called upon to assume sackcloth and ashes for her levity. The cheerful life which seemed to enter the house because Aunt Mercy had left it was a severe commentary on the sombre and unlovely character which her diseased sense of duty had driven her to give to her unquestionably sincere religious sentiment. It hinted that if she should be taken altogether away from the family, her loss would awaken little mourning, and would soon be forgotten.

Presently, however, this persistent absence of one whose very nature it was to be present excited surprise, and eventually a mysterious uneasiness. Search was made about the house; no one was discovered up stairs but Mrs. Lauson, brooding alone; then a neighbor or two was visited by Bessie; still no Aunt Mercy. The solemn truth was, although no sanguinary sign as yet revealed it, that the Lauson tragedy had an hour since been consummated.

The search for the missing Aunt Mercy continued until it aroused the interest and temper of Squire Lauson. Determined to find his daughter once that he had set about it, and petulant at the failure of one line of investigation after another, the hard old gentleman stumped noisily about the house, his thick shoes squeaking down the passages like two bands of music, and his peeled hickory cane punching open doors and upsetting furniture. When he returned to the sitting-room from one of these boisterous expeditions, he found his wife sitting in the light of the kerosene lamp, and sewing with an impatient, an almost spiteful rapidity, as was her custom when her nerves were unbearably irritated.

“Where’s Mercy?” he trumpeted. “Where _is_ the old gal? Has anybody eloped with her? I saw Deacon Jones about this afternoon.”

This jest was meant to amuse and perhaps to conciliate Mrs. Lauson, for whom he sometimes seemed to have a rough pity, as hard to bear as downright hostility. He had now and then a way of joking with her and forcing her to smile by looking her steadily in the eye. But this time his moral despotism failed; she answered his gaze with a defiant glare, and remained sullen; after another moment she rushed out of the room, as if craving relief from his domineering presence.

Apparently the Squire would have called her back, had not his attention been diverted by the entry of his granddaughter.

“I say, Bessie, have you looked in the garden?” he demanded. “Why the Devil haven’t you? Don’t you know Mercy’s hole where she meditates? Go there and hunt for her.”

As the girl disappeared he turned to the door through which his wife had fled, as if he still had a savage mind to roar for her reappearance. But after pondering a moment, and deciding that he was more comfortable in solitude, he sat slowly down in his usual elbow-chair, and broke out in a growling soliloquy:—

“There’s no comfort like making one’s self miserable. It’s a —— sight better than making the best of it. We’re all having a devilish fine time. We’re as happy as bugs in a rug. Hey diddle diddle, the cat’s in the fiddle—”

The continuity of his rough-laid stone-wall sarcasm was interrupted by Bessie, who rushed into the sitting-room with a low shriek and a pallid face.

“What’s the matter now?” he demanded. “Has the cow jumped over the moon?”

“O grandfather!” she gasped, “I’ve found Aunt Mercy. I’m afraid she’s dead.”

“Hey!” exclaimed the Squire, starting up eagerly as he remembered that Aunt Mercy was his own child. “You don’t say so! Where is she?”

Bessie turned and reeled out of the house; the old man thumped after her on his cane. At the bottom of the garden was a small, neglected arbor, thickly overgrown with grape-vines in unpruned leaf, whither Aunt Mercy was accustomed to repair in her seasons of unusual perplexity or gloom, there to seek guidance or relief in meditation and prayer. In this arbor they found her, seated crouchingly on a bench near the doorway, her arms stretched over a little table in front of her, and her head lying between them with the face turned from the gazers. The moon glared in a ghastly way upon her ominously white hands, and disclosed a dark yet gleaming stain, seemingly a drying pool, which spread out from beneath her forehead.

“Good Lord!” groaned Squire Lauson. “Mercy! I say, Mercy!”

He seized her hand, but he had scarcely touched it ere he dropped it, for it was the icy, repulsive, alarming hand of a corpse. We must compress our description of this scene of horrible discovery. Miss Mercy Lauson was dead, the victim of a brutal assassination, her right temple opened by a gash two inches deep, her blood already clotted in pools or dried upon her face and fingers. It must have been an hour, or perhaps two hours, since the blow had been dealt. At her feet was the fatal weapon,—an old hatchet which had long lain about the garden, and which offered no suggestion as to who was the murderer.

When it first became clear to Squire Lauson that his daughter was dead, and had been murdered, he uttered a sound between a gasp and a sob; but almost immediately afterward he spoke in his habitually vigorous and rasping voice, and his words showed that he had not lost his iron self-possession.

“Bessie, run into the house,” he said. “Call the hired men, and bring a lantern with you.”

When she returned he took the lantern, threw the gleam of it over his dead daughter’s face, groaned, shook his head, and then, leaning on his cane, commenced examining the earth, evidently in search of footmarks.

“There’s your print, Bessie,” he mumbled. “And there’s my print. But whose print’s that? That’s the man. That’s a long slim foot, with nails across the ball. That’s the man. Don’t disturb those tracks. I’ll set the lantern down there. Don’t you disturb ’em.”

There were several of these strange tracks; the clayey soil of the walk, slightly tempered with sand, had preserved them with fatal distinctness; it showed them advancing to the arbor and halting close by the murdered woman. As Bessie stared at them, it seemed to her that they were fearfully familiar, though where she had seen them before she could not say.

“Keep away from those tracks,” repeated Squire Lauson as the two laborers who lived with him came down the garden. “Now, then, what are you staring at? She’s dead. Take her up—O, for God’s sake, be gentle about it!—take her up, I tell you. There! Now, carry her along.”

As the men moved on with the body he turned to Bessie and said: “Leave the lantern just there. And don’t you touch those tracks. Go on into the house.”

With his own hands he aided to lay out his daughter on a table, and drew her cap from her temples so as to expose the bloody gash to view. There was a little natural agony in the tremulousness of his stubbly and grizzly chin; but in the glitter of his gray eyes there was an expression which was not so much sorrow as revenge.

“That’s a pretty job,” he said at last, glaring at the mangled gray head. “I should like to l’arn who did it.”

It was not known till the day following how he passed the next half-hour. It seems that, some little time previous, this man of over ninety years had conceived the idea of repairing with his own hands the cracked wall of his parlor, and had for that purpose bought a quantity of plaster of Paris and commenced a series of patient experiments in mixing and applying it. Furnished with a basin of his prepared material, he stalked out to the arbor and busied himself with taking a mould of the strange footstep to which he had called Bessie’s attention, succeeding in his labor so well as to be able to show next day an exact counterpart of the sole which had made the track.

Shortly after he had left the house, and glancing cautiously about as if to make sure that he had indeed left it, his wife entered the room where lay the dead body. She came slowly up to the table, and looked at the ghastly face for some moments in silence, with precisely that staid, slightly shuddering air which one often sees at funerals, and without any sign of the excitement which one naturally expects in the witnesses of a mortal tragedy. In any ordinary person, in any one who was not, like her, denaturalized by the egotism of shattered nerves, such mere wonder and repugnance would have appeared incomprehensively brutal. But Mrs. Lauson had a character of her own; she could be different from others without exciting prolonged or specially severe comment; people said to themselves, “Just like her,” and made no further criticism, and almost certainly no remonstrance. Bessie herself, the moment she had exclaimed, “O grandmother! what shall we do?” felt how absurd it was to address such an appeal to such a person.

Mrs. Lauson replied by a glance which expressed weakness, alarm, and aversion, and which demanded, as plainly as words could say it, “How can you ask _me_?” Then without uttering a syllable, without attempting to render any service or funereal courtesy, bearing herself like one who had been mysteriously absolved from the duties of sympathy and decorum, she turned her back on the body of her step-daughter with a start of disgust, and walked hastily from the room.

Of course there was a gathering of the neighbors, a hasty and useless search after the murderer, a medical examination of the victim, and a legal inquest at the earliest practicable moment, the verdict being “death by the hand of some person unknown.” Even the funeral passed, with its mighty crowd and its solemn excitement; and still public suspicion had not dared to single out any one as the criminal. It seemed for a day or two as if the family life might shortly settle into its old tenor, the same narrow routine of quiet discontent or irrational bickerings, with no change but the loss of such inflammation as formerly arose from Aunt Mercy’s well-meant, but irritating sense of duty. The Squire, however, was permanently and greatly changed: not that he had lost the spirit of petty dictation which led him to interfere in every household act, even to the boiling of the pot, but he had acquired a new object in life, and one which seemed to restore all his youthful energy; he was more restlessly and distressingly vital than he had been for years. No Indian was ever more intent on avenging a debt of blood than was he on hunting down the murderer of his daughter. This terrible old man has a strong attraction for us: we feel that we have not thus far done him justice: he imperiously demands further description.

Squire Lauson was at this time ninety-three years of age. The fact appeared incredible, because he had preserved, almost unimpaired, not only his moral energy and intellectual faculties, but also his physical senses, and even to an extraordinary degree his muscular strength. His long and carelessly worn hair was not white, but merely gray; and his only baldness was a shining hand’s-breadth, prolonging the height of his forehead. His face was deeply wrinkled, but more apparently with thought and passion than from decay, for the flesh was still well under control of the muscles, and the expression was so vigorous that one was tempted to call it robust. There was nothing of that insipid and almost babyish tranquillity which is commonly observable in the countenances of the extremely aged. The cheekbones were heavy, though the healthy fulness of the cheeks prevented them from being pointed; the jaws, not yet attenuated by the loss of many teeth, were unusually prominent and muscular; the heavy Roman nose still stood high above the projecting chin. In general, it was a long, large face, grimly and ruggedly massive, of a uniform grayish color, and reminding you of a visage carved in granite.

In figure the Squire was of medium height, with a deep chest and heavy limbs. He did not stand quite upright, but the stoop was in his shoulders and not in his loins, and arose from a slouching habit of carrying himself much more than from weakness. He walked with a cane, but his step, though rather short, was strong and rapid, and he could get over the ground at the rate of three miles an hour. At times he seemed a little deaf, but it was mainly from absorption of mind and inattention, and he could hear perfectly when he was interested. The great gray eyes under his bushy, pepper-and-salt eyebrows were still so sound that he only used spectacles in reading. As for voice, there was hardly such another in the neighborhood; it was a strong, rasping, dictatorial _caw_, like the utterance of a gigantic crow; it might have served the needs of a sea-captain in a tempest. A jocose neighbor related that he had in a dream descended into hell, and that in trying to find his way out he had lost his reckoning, until, hearing a tremendous volley of oaths on the surface of the earth over his head, he knew that he was under the hills of Barham, and that Squire Lauson was swearing at his oxen.

Squire Lauson was immense; you might travel over him for a week without discovering half his wonders; he was a continent, and he must remain for the most part an unknown continent. Bringing to a close our explorations into his character and past life, we will follow him up simply as one of the personages of this tragedy. He was at the present time very active, but also to a certain extent inexplicable. It was known that he had interviews with various officials of justice, that he furnished them with his plaster cast of the strange footprint which had been found in the garden, and that he earnestly impressed upon them the value of this object for the purpose of tracking out the murderer. But he had other lines of investigation in his steady old hands, as was discoverable later.

His manner towards his granddaughter and his wife changed noticeably. Instead of treating the first with neglect, and the second with persistent hostility or derision, he became assiduously attentive to them, addressed them frequently in conversation, and sought to win their confidence. With Bessie this task was easy, for she was one of those natural, unspoiled women, who long for sympathy, and she inclined toward her grandfather the moment she saw any kindness in his eyes. They had long talks about the murdered relative, about every event or suspicion which seemed to relate to her death, about the property which she had left to Bessie, and about the girl’s prospects in life.

Not so with Mrs. Lauson. Even the horror which had entered the family life could not open the hard crust which disease and disappointment had formed over her nature, and she met the old man’s attempts to make her communicative with her usual sulky or pettish reticence. There never was such an unreasonable creature as this wretched wife, who, while she remained unmarried, had striven so hard to be agreeable to the other sex. It was not with her husband alone that she fought, but with every one, whether man or woman, who came near her. Whoever entered the house, whether it were some gossiping neighbor or the clergyman or the doctor, she flew out of it on discovering their approach, and wandered alone about the fields until they departed. This absence she would perhaps employ in eating green fruit, hoping, as she said, to make herself sick and die, or, at least, to make herself sick enough to plague her husband. At meals she generally sat in glum silence, although once or twice she burst out in violent tirades, scoffing at the Squire’s management of the place, defying him to strike her, etc.

Her appearance at this time was miserable and little less than disgusting. Her skin was thick and yellow; her eyes were bloodshot and watery; her nose was reddened with frequent crying; her form was of an almost skeleton thinness; her manner was full of strange starts and gaspings. It was curious to note the contrast between her perfect wretchedness of aspect and the unfeeling coolness with which the Squire watched and studied her.

In this woful way was the Lauson family getting on when the country around was electrified by an event which almost threw the murder itself into the shade. Henry Foster, the accepted lover of Bessie Barron, a professor in the Scientific College of Hampstead, was suddenly arrested as the assassin of Miss Mercy Lauson.

“What does this mean!” was his perfectly natural exclamation, when seized by the officers of justice; but it was uttered with a sudden pallor which awakened in the bystanders a strong suspicion of his guilt. No definite answer was made to his question until he was closeted with the lawyer whom he immediately retained in his defence.

“I should like to get at the whole of your case, Mr. Foster,” said the legal gentleman. “I must beg you, for your own sake, to be entirely frank with me.”

“I assure you that I know nothing about the murder,” was the firm reply. “I don’t so much as understand why I should be suspected of the horrible business.”

The lawyer, Mr. Adams Patterson, after studying Foster in a furtive way, as if doubtful whether there had been perfect honesty in his assertion of innocence, went on to state what he supposed would be the case of the prosecution.

“The evidence against you,” he said, “so far at least as I can now discover, will all be circumstantial. They will endeavor to prove your presence at the scene of the tragedy by your tracks. Footmarks, said to correspond to yours, were found passing the door of the arbor, returning to it and going away from it.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Foster. “I remember,—I did pass there. I will tell you how. It was in the afternoon. I was in the house during a thunder-storm which happened that day, and left it shortly after the shower ended. I went out through the garden because that was the nearest way to the rivulet at the bottom of the hill, and I wished to make some examinations into the structure of the water-bed. A part of the garden walk is gravelled, and on that I suppose my tracks did not show. But near the arbor the gravel ceases, and there I remember stepping into the damp mould. I did pass the arbor, and I did return to it. I returned to it because it had been a heavenly place to me. It was there that I proposed to Miss Barron, and that she accepted me. The moment that I had passed it I reproached myself for doing so. I went back, looked at the little spot for a moment, and left a kiss on the table. It was on that table that her hand had rested when I first dared to take it in mine.”

His voice broke for an instant with an emotion which every one who has ever loved can at least partially understand.

“Good Heavens! to think that such an impulse should entangle me in such a charge!” he added, when he could speak again.

“Well,” he resumed, after a long sigh, “I left the arbor,—my heart as innocent and happy as any heart in the world,—I climbed over the fence and went down the hill. That is the last time that I was in those grounds that day. That is the whole truth, so help me God!”

The lawyer seemed touched. Even then, however, he was saying to himself, “They always keep back something, if not everything.” After meditating for a few seconds, he resumed his interrogatory.

“Did any one see you? did Miss Barron see you, as you passed through the garden?”

“I think not. Some one called her just as I left her, and she went, I believe, up stairs.”

“Did you see the person who called? Did you see any one?”

“No one. But the voice was a woman’s voice. I took it to be that of a servant.”

Mr. Patterson fell into a thoughtful silence, his arms resting on the elbows of his chair, and his anxious eyes wandering over the floor.

“But what motive?” broke out Foster, addressing the lawyer as if he were an accuser and an enemy,—“what sufficient motive had I for such a hideous crime?”

“Ah! that is just it. The motive! They will make a great deal of that. Why, you must be able to guess what is alleged. Miss Lauson had made a will in her niece’s favor, but had threatened to disinherit her if she married you. This fact,—as has been made known by an incautious admission of Miss Bessie Barron,—this fact you were aware of. The death came just in time to prevent a change in the will. Don’t you see the obvious inference of the prosecution?”

“Good Heavens!” exclaimed Foster, springing up and pacing his cell. “I murder a woman,—murder my wife’s aunt,—for money,—for twenty thousand dollars! Am I held so low as that? Why, it is a sum that any clever man can earn in this country in a few years. We could have done without it. I would not have asked for it, much less murdered for it. Tell me, Mr. Patterson, do you suppose me capable of such degrading as well as such horrible guilt?”