Chapter 14

“Midnight.“My dear Judge Carver:“I am fully aware of the fact that I am doing a cowardly thing in writing you this letter. It is simply an attempt on my part to shift my own burden to another’s shoulders, and my shoulders should surely be sufficiently used to burdens by this time. But this one is of so strange, awkward, and terrible a shape that I must get rid of it at any cost to my pride or sense of fair play—or to your peace of mind. If the verdict to-morrow is guilty, of course, I’ll not send the letter, but simply turn the facts over to the prosecutor. I am spending to-night writing you this in case it is not guilty.“It was I who killed Madeleine Bellamy. It seems simply incredible to me that everyone should not have guessed it long before now.“Kathleen Page, Melanie Cordier, Laura Roberts, Patrick, Sue, I myself—we told you so over and over again. That singularly obnoxious and alert Mr. Farr—is it possible that he has never suspected—not even when I explained to him that at ten o’clock I was in the flower room, washing off my hands? And yet a few minutes later he was asking me if there wasn’t a sink in the pantry where my poor Sue might have cleansed her own hands of Mimi Bellamy’s blood—and every face in the court was sick with the horror of that thought.“We told you everything, and no one even listened.“Who knew about the path across the meadow to the summerhouse? I, not Sue. Who could see the study window clearly from the rose garden? I, not Sue. Who had that hour and a half between 8:30 and ten absolutely alone and unobserved? I, not Sue. Who had every motive that was ascribed to Sue multiplied ten times over? I, who had known poverty beside which Sue’s years in New York were a gay adventure; who had not only a child to fight for, but that child’s children; who, after a lifetime of grim nightmare, had found paradise; and who saw coming to thrust me out from that paradise not an angel with a flaming sword, but a little empty-headed, empty-hearted chit, cheap, mercenary, and implacable, as only the empty-headed can be.“I know, Judge Carver, that the burden that I am trying to shift to your shoulders should be heaviest of all with the weight of remorse; and there is in it, I can swear to you, enough remorse to bow stronger shoulders than either yours or mine—but none, none for the death of Mimi Bellamy.“Remorse for these past weeks has eaten me to the bone—for the shame and terror and peril that I have brought to my children, for the sorrow and menace that I have brought to that gentle soul, Stephen Bellamy—even for the death of poor Elliot Farwell; that was my doing, too, I think. I do not shirk it.“I am rather an old-fashioned person. I believe in hell, and I believe that I shall probably go there because I killed Mimi Bellamy and because I’m not sorry for it; but the hell that I’ve been living through every day and every night since she died is not one shadow darker because it was I who gave her the little push that sped her from one world to another.“When that unpleasant Mr. Farr was invoking the vengeance of heaven and earth on the fiend who had stopped forever the silver music of the dead girl’s laughter, I remembered that the last time that she laughed it had been at an old woman on her knees begging for the happiness and safety of two babies—and the world did not seem to me to have lost much when that laughter ceased. That is frightful, isn’t it? But that is true.“I’ll try to go back so that you can understand exactly what happened; then you can tell better, perhaps, what I should do and what you should do with me. First of all, I must go very far back, indeed—back thirty years, to a manufacturing town in northern New York.“Thirty-one years ago last June, my husband left me with the nineteen-year-old daughter of my Norwegian landlady. You couldn’t exactly blame him, of course. Trudie was as pretty as the girl on the cover of the most expensive candy box you ever saw, and as unscrupulous as Messalina—and I wasn’t either.“I was much too busy being sick and miserable and cross and sorry for myself to be anything else at all, so he walked off with Trudie and nineteen dollars and fifty cents out of the teapot and left me with a six-weeks-old baby and a gold wedding ring that wasn’t exactly gold. And my landlady wouldn’t give me even one day’s grace rent free, because she was naturally a little put out by her daughter’s unceremonious departure, and quite frankly held me to blame for it, as she said a girl who couldn’t hold her own man wasn’t likely worth her board and keep.“So, just like the lady in the bad melodramas, I wrapped my baby up in a shawl and started out to find work at the factory. Of course I didn’t find it. It was a slack season at the factories, and I looked like a sick little scarecrow, and I hadn’t even money for car fare. I spent the first evening of my career as a breadwinner begging for pennies on the more prominent street corners. It’s one way to get bread.“In the next twenty years I tried a great many other ways of getting it, including, on two occasions, stealing it. But that was only the first year; after that we always had bread, though often there wasn’t enough of it, and generally it was stale, and frequently there wasn’t anything to put on it.“When people talk about the fear of poverty, I wonder whether they have the remotest idea of what they’re talking about. I wasn’t rich when I married Dan; I was the daughter of a not oversuccessful lawyer, and I thought that we were quite poor, because often we went through periods where pot roast instead of chicken played a prominent part in the family diet, and my best dress had to be of tarlatan instead of taffeta, and I possessed only two pairs of kid gloves that reached to my elbow, and one that reached to my shoulder.“I was very, very sorry for myself during those periods, and used to go around with faintly pink eyes and a strong sense of martyrdom. I wasn’t at all a noble character. I liked going to cotillions at night and staying in bed in the morning, and wringing terrified proposals from callow young men who were completely undone by the combination of moonlight and mandolin playing. Besides playing the mandolin, I could make two kinds of candy and feather-stitch quite well and dance the lancers better than anyone in town—and I knew most of Lucile by heart. Thus lavishly equipped for the exigencies of holy matrimony, I proceeded to elope with Mr. Daniel Ives.“I won’t bother you much with Dan. He was the leading man in a stock company that came to our town, and three weeks after he saw me sitting worshipping in the front row we decided that life without each other would be an empty farce and shook the dust of that town from our heels forever. It was very, very romantic, indeed, for the first six days—and after that it wasn’t so romantic.“Because I, who could feather-stitch so nicely, was a bad cook and a bad manager and a bad housewife and a bad sport—a bad wife, in short. I wasn’t precisely happy, and I thought that it was perfectly safe to be all those things, because it simply never entered my head that one human being could get so tired of another human being that he could quietly walk out and leave her to starve to death. And I was as wrong about that, as I’d been about everything else.“I’m telling you all this not to excuse myself, but simply to explain, so that you will understand a little, perhaps, what sent my feet hurrying across the meadow path, what brought them back to the flower room at ten o’clock that night. I think that two people went to meet Madeleine Bellamy in the cottage that night—a nice, well-behaved little white-headed lady and the wilful, spoiled, terrified girl that the nice old lady thought that she had killed thirty years ago. It’s only fair to you that I should explain that, because of what I’m going to ask you to decide. And it is only fair to myself that I should say this.“For twenty years I was too cold, too hot, too tired and sick and faint ever to be really comfortable for one moment. And I won’t pretend that I looked forward with equanimity to surrendering one single comfort or luxury that had finally come to make life beautiful and gracious. But that wasn’t why I killed Madeleine Bellamy. I ask you to believe that.“The real terror of poverty isn’t that we ourselves suffer. It is that we are absolutely and utterly powerless to lift one finger to protect and defend those who are dearest to us in the world. Judge Carver, when Pat was sick when he was a baby I didn’t have enough money to get a doctor for him; I didn’t have enough money to get medicine. When I went to work I had to leave him with people who were vile and filthy and debased in body and soul, because they were the only people that I could afford to leave him with.“Once when I came home I couldn’t wake him up, and the woman who was with him was terrified into telling me that he’d been crying so dreadfully that she’d given him some stuff that a Hungarian woman on the next floor said was fine for crying babies. I carried him and the bottle with the stuff in it ten blocks to a drug store—and they told me that it had opium in it. She’d given him half the bottle—to my Pat. And another time the woman with him got drunk and—— But I can’t talk about that, not even to make you understand. He never had any toys in his life but some tin cans and empty spools and pieces of string. He never had anything but me.“And I swore to myself that as long as he had me he should have everything. I would be beauty to him, and peace and gentleness and graciousness and gaiety and strength. I wasn’t beautiful or peaceful or gentle or gracious or gay or strong, but I made myself all those things for him. That isn’t vanity—that’s the truth. I swore that he should never see me shed one tear, that he should never hear me lift my voice in anger, that he should never see me tremble before anything that fate should hold in store for either of us. He never did—no, truly, he never did. That was all that I could give him, but I did give him that.“It took me seventeen years to save up enough railway fare to get out of that town. Then I came to Rosemont. A nice woman that I did some sewing for in the town had a sister in Rosemont. She told me that it was a lovely place and that she thought that there was a good opening there for some work, and that her sister was looking for boarders. So I took the few dollars that I’d saved and went, and you know the rest.“Of course there are some things that you don’t know—you don’t know how brave and gay and gentle Pat has always been to me; you don’t know how happy we all were in the flat in New York, after he married Sue and the babies came. Sue helped me with the housekeeping, and Sue did some secretarial work at the university, and Pat did anything that turned up, and did it splendidly. We always had plenty to eat, and it was really clean and sunny, and we were all perfectly healthy and happy. Only, Sue never did talk about it much, because she is a very reserved child, in any case, and in this case she was afraid that it might seem a reflection on the Thornes that she had to live in a little walk-up flat in the Bronx, with no servants and pretty plain living.“And Mr. Lambert was nervous about bringing out anything about it in direct examination for fear that in cross-examination Mr. Farr would twist things around to make it look as though Sue had undergone the tortures of the damned. Of course, we didn’t have much, but we had enough to make it seem a luxurious and care-free existence in comparison to the one that Pat and I had lived for over fifteen years.“Those things you don’t know—and one other. You don’t know Polly and Pete, do you, Judge Carver?“They are very wonderful children. I suppose that every grandmother thinks that her grandchildren are rather wonderful; but I don’t just think it about them; they are. Anyone would tell you that—anyone who had ever seen them. They’re the bravest, happiest, strongest little things. You could be with them for weeks and never once hear them cry. Of course, once in a very long while—if you have to scold them, for instance—because Pete is quite sensitive; but then you almost never have to scold them, and when Pete broke his leg last winter and Dr. Chilton set it he said that he had never seen such courage in a child. And when Polly was only two years old, she walked straight out into the ocean up to her chin, and she’d have gone farther still if her father hadn’t caught her up. She rides a pony better than any seven-year-old child in Rosemont, too, and she isn’t five yet—not until January—and the only time that she ever fell off the pony she never even whimpered—not once.“They are very beautiful children too. Pete is quite fair and Polly is very dark, but they both have blue eyes and very dark eyelashes. They are so brown, too, and tall. It doesn’t seem possible that either of them could ever be sick or unhappy; but still, you have to be careful. Polly has been threatened twice with mastoiditis, and Pete has to have his leg massaged three times a week, because he still limps a little.“That’s why I killed Madeleine Bellamy.“The first time I realized that there was anything between her and Pat was almost a month before the murder, some time early in May, I think. Sue had been having quite a dinner party, and I’d slipped out to the garden as usual as soon as I could get away. I decided to gather some lilacs, and I came back to the house to get the scissors from the flower room. As I passed the study I saw Pat and Mimi silhouetted against the study window; she was bending over, pretending to look at the ship he was making, but she wasn’t looking at it—she was looking at Pat.“I’d always thought that she was a scatterbrained little goose, and I had never liked her particularly; even in the old days in the village I used to worry about her sometimes. She used too much perfume and too much pink powder, and she had an empty little voice and a horrid, excited little laugh. But I thought that she was good-natured and harmless enough, when I thought about her at all, and I was about to pass on, when she said something that riveted me in my footsteps.“She said, ‘Pat, listen, did you get my note?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ She asked, ‘Are you coming?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure that I can make it.’ She said, ‘Of course you can make it. We can’t talk here. It doesn’t take ten minutes to get to the cottage. You’ve got to make it.’ He said, ‘All right, I’ll be there. Look out; someone’s coming.’ They both of them turned around, and I could hear him calling to someone in the hall to come in and look at the ship.“I stood there, leaning my head against the side of the house and feeling icy cold and deathly—deathly sick. It was as though I had heard Dan calling to me across thirty years.“From that moment until this one I have never known one happy hour, one happy moment, one happy second. I spent my life spying on him—on my Pat—trying to discover how far he had gone, how far he was prepared to go. I never caught them together again, in spite of the fact that I fairly haunted the terrace under the study window, thinking that some afternoon or evening they might return. They never did. Mimi didn’t come very often to the house, as a matter of fact.“But on the evening of the nineteenth of June, at a little after half-past six, someone did come to the study window, who gave me the clew that I had been seeking so long. It was Melanie Cordier, of course. I was just coming back from the garden, where I had been tying up some climbing roses, when I saw her there by the corner near the bookcase. She had a book in her hands—quite a large, thick book in a light tan cover, and she was looking back over her shoulder with a queer, furtive look while she put something in it. She shoved it back onto the shelf and was starting toward the hall, when she drew back suddenly and stood very quiet. I thought: ‘There is someone in the hall. When Melanie goes out it will mean that the coast is clear.’“It wasn’t more than a minute later that she left, and I started around to the front of the house to get to the study and see what she had put in that book. I was hurrying so that I almost ran into Elliot Farwell, who was coming down the front steps and not looking any more where he was going than if he had been stone blind. He said, ‘Beg pardon’ and brushed by me without even lowering his eyes to see who it was, and I went on across the hall into the study, thinking that never in my life had I seen a man look so wretchedly and recklessly unhappy.“No one was in the hall; they were all in the living room, and I could hear them all laughing and talking—and I decided that if I were to find what Melanie had put in the book I’d better do it quickly, as the party might break up at any minute. I had noticed just where the book was—on the third shelf close to the wall—but there were three volumes just alike, and that halted me for a minute.“The note was in the second volume that I opened. It was addressed to ‘Mr. Patrick Ives. Urgent—Very Urgent.’ I stood looking at that ‘Urgent—Very Urgent’ for a minute, and then I put it in the straw bag that I carry for gardening and went out through the dining room to the pantry to get myself a drink of water, because I felt a little faint.“No one was in the pantry. I let the water run for a minute so that it would get cold, and then I drank three glasses of it, quite slowly, until my hand stopped shaking and that queer dizzy feeling went away. Then I started back for the hall. I got as far as the dining room, when I saw Pat standing by the desk in the corner.“There’s a screen between the dining-room door and the study, but it doesn’t quite cut off the bit near the study window. I could see him perfectly clearly. He had quite a thick little pile of white papers in his hand, and he was counting them. They were long, narrow papers, folded just like the bond that he’d given me for Christmas, a year ago—just exactly like it. And while I was standing there staring at them, Sue called to him from the hall to come out on the porch and see his guests off, and he gave a little start and shoved the papers into the left-hand drawer and went out toward the hall.“I gave him a few seconds to get to the porch, before I crossed through the study. I was terrified that if he came back and found me there he’d know I had the note and accuse me of it—and I knew that when he did that all the life that I’d died twenty lives to build for us would crumble to pieces at the first word he spoke. I couldn’t bear to have Pat know that I suspected how base he was—that I knew that he was Dan all over again—a baser, viler Dan, since Dan had only had me to keep him straight, and Pat had Sue. I felt strong enough and desperate enough to face almost anything in the world except that Pat should know that I had found him out. So I went through the study and the hall and up the stairs to my room in the left wing without one backward look.“Once in my room, I locked the door and bolted it—and pushed a chair against it, too, to make assurance triply sure. That’s the only thing that I did that entire evening that makes me think I must have been a little mad. Still, even a biased observer could hardly regard that as homicidal madness.“I went over to the chintz wing chair by the window and read the note. The chair was placed so that even in my room I could see the roses in the garden, and a little beyond the garden, the sand pile under the copper beech where the children played. They weren’t there now; I’d said good-night to them outside just a minute or so before I finished tying up the roses. I read the note through three times.“Of course, I completely misread it. I thought that what she was proposing was an elopement with Pat to California. It never once entered my head that she was referring to money that would enable Steve and herself to live a pleasanter life in a pleasanter place, and that her talk of hoodwinking Steve simply meant that she could conceal the source of the money from him.“If I had realized that, I’d never have lifted my finger to prevent her getting it. I thought she wanted Pat. I’d have given her two hundred thousand dollars to go away and leave him alone. The most ghastly and ironical thing about this whole ironical and ghastly business is that if Mimi Bellamy hadn’t been as careless and slip-shod with her use of the word ‘we,’ as she was with everything else in her life, she would be alive this day under blue skies.“Of course it was stupid of me, too, and the first time that I read it I was bewildered by the lack of endearments in it. But there was all that about her hardly being able to wait, and how happy they would be; and the note was obviously hastily written—and I had always thought she had no depth of feeling. I suppose that all of us read into a letter much what we expect to find there, and what I expected to find was a twice-told tale. I expected to find that Pat was so mad about this girl that he was willing to wreck not only his own life for her but mine and Sue’s and Polly’s and Pete’s. And I couldn’t to save my soul think of a way to stop him.“I was reading it for the third time when Melanie knocked at the door and announced dinner, and I put it back in my bag and pushed back the chair and unlocked the door and went down.“When I heard Pat and Melanie and Sue all tell you that dinner was quite as usual that night, I wondered what strange stuff we weak mortals are made of. When I think what Sue was thinking and what Pat was thinking and what I was thinking, and that we could laugh and chat and breathe as usual—no, that doesn’t seem humanly possible. Yet that’s exactly what we did.“Afterward, when they went into the study to look at the ship, I decided that I might just as well go into the rose garden and finish the work that I’d started out there. I’d noticed some dead wood on two of the plants, so I went to the flower room and got out the little knife that I kept with some other small tools in a drawer there. It’s a very good one for either budding or pruning, but I keep it carefully put away for fear that the children might cut their fingers. Then I went out to the garden.“For a while I didn’t try to think at all: I just worked. I saw Miss Page coming back from the sand pile, and a minute or so later Sue came by, running toward the back gate. She called to me that she was going to the movies and that Pat was going to play poker. I was glad that they were not going to be there; that made it easier to think—and to breathe.“As you know, she returned to the house. I don’t believe she was there more than five minutes before she came running by again and disappeared through the back gate. I sat down on the little bench at the end of the rose garden and tried to think.“I was desperately anxious to keep my head and remain cool and collected, because one thing was perfectly clear. If something wasn’t done immediately, it would be too late to do anything. The question was what to do.“I didn’t dare to go to Pat. At bottom, I must be a miserable coward; that was the simple, straightforward, and natural thing to do, and I simply didn’t dare to do it. Because I thought that he would refuse me, and that fact I couldn’t face. I was the person in all the world who should have had most trust in him, and I didn’t trust him at all. I remember that when I lie awake in the night. I didn’t trust him.“I didn’t dare to go to Sue, either, because I was afraid that if she knew the truth—or what I was pleased to consider the truth—she would leave him, at any cost to Polly and Peter or herself. I knew that she was possessed of high pride and fine courage; I didn’t know that they would be chains to bind her to Pat. I didn’t trust her either.“It wasn’t Pat and Sue and Mimi Bellamy that I was looking at, you see. It was Dan and I and the boarding-house keeper’s Trudie.“I sat on the bench in the rose garden and watched the sunlight turning into shadow and felt panic rising about me like a cold wind. I knew that Sue hadn’t a cent; her father had left her nothing at all, and she had refused to let Pat settle a cent on her, because she said that she loved to ask him for money.“And I remembered . . . I remembered that Dan had taken nineteen dollars and fifty cents out of the tea-pot. I remembered that I had learned only a few weeks before that I could only hope at best for months instead of years to live. I remembered that Sue couldn’t cook at all, and that it was I who had done up all the children’s little dresses in those New York days because she couldn’t iron, and made them, because she couldn’t sew—and I wouldn’t be there. I remembered that the only relation that she had in the world was Douglas Thorne, and that he had four children and a wife who liked jewellery and who didn’t like Sue. I remembered that the massage for Pete’s knee cost twenty dollars a week, and that when Polly had had trouble with her ear last winter the bill for the nurses and the doctors and the operation had come to seven hundred and fifty dollars. I remembered the way Polly looked on the black pony and Pete’s voice singing in the sand pile. . . .“And then suddenly everything was perfectly clear. Mimi, of course—I’d forgotten her entirely. She was waiting in the gardener’s cottage now, probably, and if I went to her there and explained to her all about Polly and Pete, and how frightfully important it was that they should be taken care of until they could take care of themselves, she would realize what she was doing. She was so young and pretty and careless that she probably hadn’t ever given them a thought. It wasn’t cruelty—it was just a reckless desire to be happy. But once she knew—— I’d tell her all about Pat’s ghastly childhood and the nightmare that my own life had been, and I’d implore her to stop and think what she was doing. Once she had stopped—once she had thought—she wouldn’t do it, of course. I felt fifty years younger, and absolutely light-headed with relief.“I looked at my little wrist watch; it said ten minutes to nine. If I waited until nine it would be almost dark, and would still give me plenty of time to catch her before she left. It wouldn’t take me more than fifteen minutes to get to the cottage, and I much preferred not to have anyone know what I was planning to do. No one would miss me if I got back by ten; I often sat in the garden until then, and I had a little flashlight in the straw bag that I used at such times, and that would serve my purpose excellently coming home across the meadows.“I decided not to go back to the house at all, but simply to slip out by the little gate near the sand pile and strike out on the path that cut diagonally across the fields to the Thorne place. There were no houses between us and Orchards, so I would be perfectly safe from observation. By the time I had gathered up my gardening things and looked again at my watch it was a little after nine, and I decided that it wouldn’t be safe to wait any longer.“It was a very pleasant walk across the fields; it was still just light enough to see, and the clover smelled very sweet, and the tree toads were making a comforting little noise, and I walked quite fast, planning just what I would say to Mimi—planning just how reasonable and gentle and persuasive and convincing I was going to be.“The path comes out at an opening in the hedge to the left of the gardener’s cottage. I pushed through it and came up to the front steps; there was a light in the right-hand window. I went straight up the steps. The front door was open a little, and I pushed it open farther and went in. There was a key on the inside of the door. I hesitated for a moment, and then I closed it and turned the key and dropped it into my bag. I was afraid that she might try to leave before I’d finished explaining to her; I didn’t want her to do that.“She heard me then, and called out from the other room, ‘For heaven’s sake, what’s been the matter? I didn’t think that you were ever coming.’“She had her back turned as I came into the room; she was looking into the mirror over the piano and fluffing out her hair. There was a lamp lit on the piano and it make her hair look like flames—she really was extraordinarily beautiful, if that red-and-white-and-gold-and-blue type appeals to you. Trudie’d had a mouth that curled just that way, and those same ridiculous eyelashes. And then she saw me in the mirror and in three seconds that radiant face turned into a mask of suspicion and cruelty and malice. She whirled around and stood there looking me over from head to foot.“After a moment she said, ‘What are you doing here?’“I said, ‘I came about Pat, Madeleine.’“She said, ‘Oh, you did, did you? So that’s his game—hiding behind a woman’s skirts! Well, you can go home and tell him to come out.’“I said, ‘He doesn’t know that I’m here. I found the note.’“Mimi said, ‘They can send you to jail for taking other people’s letters. Spying and stealing from your own son! I should think you’d be ashamed. And what good do you think it’s going to do you?’“I came closer to her and said, ‘Never mind me, Madeleine, I came here to-night to implore you to leave my son alone.’“And she laughed at me—she laughed! ‘Well, you could have saved yourself the walk. When he gets here, I’ll tell him what I think of the two of you.’“I said, ‘He’s not coming. He’s playing poker at the Dallases.’“She went scarlet to her throat with anger, and she called out, ‘That’s a lie! He’s coming and you know it. Will you get out of here?’“I said, ‘Madeleine, listen to me. I swear to you that any happiness you purchase at the price that you’re willing to pay for it will rot in your hands, no matter how much you love him.’“And she laughed! ‘Love him? Pat? I don’t care two snaps of my fingers for him! But I’m going to get every cent of his that I can put my hands on, and the quicker both of you get that straight, the better it will be for all of us.’“I said, ‘I believe that is the truth, but I never believed that you would dare to say so. You can’t—you can’t realize what you are doing. You can’t purchase your pleasure with the comfort and security and health and joy of two little babies who have never harmed you once in all their lives. You can’t!’“She laughed that wicked, excited little laugh of hers again, and said through her teeth, ‘Oh, can’t I, though? Now get this straight too: I don’t care whether your precious little babies die in a gutter. Now, will you get out?’“I couldn’t breathe. I felt exactly as though I were suffocating, but I said, ‘No. I am an old woman, Madeleine, but I will go on my knees to you to beg you not to ruin the lives of those two babies.’“She said, ‘Oh, I’m sick to death of you and your babies and your melodramatics. For the last time, are you going to get out of this house or am I going to have to put you out?’“She came so close to me that I could smell the horrid perfume she wore—gardenia, I think it was—something close and sweet and hateful. I took a step back and said, ‘You wouldn’t dare to touch me—you wouldn’t dare!’“And then she did—she gave that dreadful, excited little laugh of hers and put both hands on my shoulders and pushed me, quite hard—so hard that I stumbled and went forward on my knees. I tried to catch myself, and dropped the bag and all the things in it fell out on the carpet. I knelt there staring down at them, with the blood roaring in my head and singing in my ears.“Judge Carver, what is it in our blood and bones and flesh that rises shrieking its outrage in the weakest and meekest of us at the touch of hands laid violently on our rebellious flesh? I could hear it—I could hear it crying in my ears—and there on the flowered carpet just in reach of my hand something was shining. It was the little knife that I’d been using to cut the dead wood out so that the live roses would grow better. I knelt there staring at it. That story of how all their lives flash by drowning eyes—I always thought that was an old wives’ tale—no, that’s true, I think. I could see the rose garden with all the green leaves glossy on the big Silver Moon. . . . I could see Pat and Sue laughing on the terrace, with his arm across her shoulders and the sun in their eyes and the wind in their hair. . . . I could see the children’s blue smocks through the branches of the copper beech. . . . I stood up with the knife in my hand. . . .“She screamed only once—not a very loud scream, either, but she caught at the table as she fell, and it made a dreadful crash. I heard someone laugh outside, quite loudly, and I leaned forward and blew out the lamp on the piano. There was someone coming up the front steps; I stood very still. A bell rang far back in the house, and then someone tried the door.“I thought: ‘This is the end—they have known what has happened. If no one answers, they will batter down the door. But not till they batter down the door will I move one hairbreadth from where I stand—and not then.’“After a moment I heard the feet going down the steps, then again on the gravel of the main drive, getting fainter and fainter. I waited for a moment longer, because I thought that I heard something moving in the bushes outside the window, but after a minute everything was perfectly still, and I went over to the window and shut it and pulled down the shade.“I knew that I was in great danger, and that I must think very quickly—and act quickly too. I found the little flashlight almost immediately, and lit it, and pushed down the catch and put it beside me on the floor. I wanted to have both hands free, and I didn’t dare to take the time to light the lamp. I was afraid that the person who tried the door would come back. I had realized at once, of course, that if I took the jewels the murder would look like robbery—and I had to make sure that she was dead.“That took only a minute; the rings came off quite easily, but the catch of the necklace caught, and I had to break the string. I knotted the things all into my handkerchief and put them into the bag, and the trowel and a ball of string that had fallen out, too, and the note, and a little silver box of candy that I kept for the children. There was the key to the front door too. I remembered that I must leave it in the lock as I went out. I used the flashlight to make sure that I wasn’t leaving anything, and I was—the knife was still lying there beside her.“It’s curious—of all the things that happened that night, that’s the only one that I can’t account for. I don’t remember how it got there at all—whether I placed it there or whether I dropped it or whether it fell—that’s curious, don’t you think? Anyhow, I picked it up and wiped it off very carefully on one of her white lace frills and put it back in the bag. And then I tried to get up, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t move. I knelt there, leaning forward against the cold steel of the little Franklin stove, feeling so mortally, so desperately sick that for a moment I thought I should never move again. It wasn’t the blood; it was that perfume, like dead flowers—horribly sweet and strong. . . . After a minute I got up and went out of the room and out of the house and back across the meadow to the garden gate.“I stopped only once. I followed the hedge a little way before I came to the path, and I stooped down and dug out two or three trowelfuls of earth close in to the roots and shook the pearls and the rings out of my handkerchief into the hole and covered it up and went on. At first I thought of putting the knife there, too, and then I decided that someone might have noticed it in the drawer and that it would be safer to be put back where it had come from.“How are they ever able to trace people by the weapons they have used? It seems to me that it should be so simple to hide a little thing no longer than your hand, with all the earth and the waters under the earth to hide it in.“It was the knife that I was washing in the flower room; it still had one or two little stains near the handle, but there wasn’t any blood on my hands at all. I’d been very careful.“After I’d put everything away I took the note and went upstairs. At first I thought that I’d tear it up, but then I decided that someone might find the scraps, and that the safest thing to do would be to keep it until the next day and burn it. And before the next day I knew that Sue and Stephen had no actual alibi for that night, and so I never burned the note.“That’s all. While I lay there in the dark that night—and every night since—I’ve tried saying it over and over to myself: ‘Murderess—murderess.’ A black and bloody and dreadful word; does it sound as alien to the ears of all the others whose title it is as it does to mine? Murderess! We should feel differently from the rest of the world once we have earned that dreadful title, should we not? Something sinister, something monstrous and dark should invest us, surely. It seems strange that still we who bear that name should rise to the old familiar sunlight and sleep by the old familiar starlight; that bread should still be good to us, and flowers sweet; that we should say good-morning and good-night in voices that no man shudders to hear. The strangest thing of all is to feel so little strange.“Judge Carver, I have written to you because I do not know whether any taint of suspicion still clings to any of those who have taken part in this trial. If in your mind there does, I will promptly give myself up to the proper authorities and tell them the essential facts that I have told you.“But if, in your opinion, suspicion rests on no man or woman, living or dead, I would say only this: I am not afraid to die—indeed, indeed, I am rather anxious to die. Life is no longer very dear to me. Two physicians have told me this last year that I will not live to see another. I can obtain from them a certificate to that effect, if you desire. And I have already sent to my lawyers a sealed envelope containing a full confession, marked, ‘To be sent to the authorities in case anyone should be accused of the death of Mrs. Stephen Bellamy, either before or after my death.’ I would not have any human being live through such days as these have been—no, not to save my life, or what is dearer to me than my life.“But, Judge Carver, will the ends of justice be better served if that boy who believes that my only creed is gentleness and kindness and mercy, and who has learned therefore to be merciful and gentle and kind—if that boy learns that now he must call me murderess? If those happy, happy little children who bring every bumped head and cut finger to me to kiss it and make it whole must live to learn to call me murderess?“I don’t want Polly and Pete to know—I don’t want them to know—I don’t want them to know.“If you could reach me without touching them I would not ask you to show me mercy. But if no one else need suffer for my silence, I beg of you—I beg you—forget that you are only Justice, and remember to be merciful.“Margaret Ives.”For a long time the judge sat silent and motionless, staring down at that small mountain of white pages. In his tired face his dark eyes burned, piercing and tireless. Finally they moved, with a curious deliberation, to that other pile of white pages that he had been studying when the messenger boy had come knocking at the door. Yes, there it was:“An accessory after the fact is one who while not actually participating in the crime, yet in any way helps the murderer to escape trial or conviction, either by concealing him or by assisting him to escape or by destroying material evidence or by any other means whatever. It is a serious crime in itself, but does not make him a principal——”He sat motionless, his unwavering eyes fixed on the words before him as though he would get them by heart. . . . After a long moment, he stirred, lifted his head, and drew the little pile of papers that held the life of Patrick Ives’s mother toward him.The blue paper first; the torn scraps settled down on the shining surface as lightly and inconsequently as butterflies. Then the white ones—a little mound of snow-flakes that grew under the quick, sure fingers to a little mountain—higher—higher—blue and white, they were swept into that great brass bowl that had been so conveniently designed for ashes. A match spurted, and little flames leaped gaily, and a small spiral of smoke twisted up toward the white-robed lady above the door. Across the room, between the windows beyond which shone the stars, John Marshall was smiling above the dancing flames—and she smiled back at him, gravely and wisely, as though they shared some secret understanding.The End

“Midnight.“My dear Judge Carver:“I am fully aware of the fact that I am doing a cowardly thing in writing you this letter. It is simply an attempt on my part to shift my own burden to another’s shoulders, and my shoulders should surely be sufficiently used to burdens by this time. But this one is of so strange, awkward, and terrible a shape that I must get rid of it at any cost to my pride or sense of fair play—or to your peace of mind. If the verdict to-morrow is guilty, of course, I’ll not send the letter, but simply turn the facts over to the prosecutor. I am spending to-night writing you this in case it is not guilty.“It was I who killed Madeleine Bellamy. It seems simply incredible to me that everyone should not have guessed it long before now.“Kathleen Page, Melanie Cordier, Laura Roberts, Patrick, Sue, I myself—we told you so over and over again. That singularly obnoxious and alert Mr. Farr—is it possible that he has never suspected—not even when I explained to him that at ten o’clock I was in the flower room, washing off my hands? And yet a few minutes later he was asking me if there wasn’t a sink in the pantry where my poor Sue might have cleansed her own hands of Mimi Bellamy’s blood—and every face in the court was sick with the horror of that thought.“We told you everything, and no one even listened.“Who knew about the path across the meadow to the summerhouse? I, not Sue. Who could see the study window clearly from the rose garden? I, not Sue. Who had that hour and a half between 8:30 and ten absolutely alone and unobserved? I, not Sue. Who had every motive that was ascribed to Sue multiplied ten times over? I, who had known poverty beside which Sue’s years in New York were a gay adventure; who had not only a child to fight for, but that child’s children; who, after a lifetime of grim nightmare, had found paradise; and who saw coming to thrust me out from that paradise not an angel with a flaming sword, but a little empty-headed, empty-hearted chit, cheap, mercenary, and implacable, as only the empty-headed can be.“I know, Judge Carver, that the burden that I am trying to shift to your shoulders should be heaviest of all with the weight of remorse; and there is in it, I can swear to you, enough remorse to bow stronger shoulders than either yours or mine—but none, none for the death of Mimi Bellamy.“Remorse for these past weeks has eaten me to the bone—for the shame and terror and peril that I have brought to my children, for the sorrow and menace that I have brought to that gentle soul, Stephen Bellamy—even for the death of poor Elliot Farwell; that was my doing, too, I think. I do not shirk it.“I am rather an old-fashioned person. I believe in hell, and I believe that I shall probably go there because I killed Mimi Bellamy and because I’m not sorry for it; but the hell that I’ve been living through every day and every night since she died is not one shadow darker because it was I who gave her the little push that sped her from one world to another.“When that unpleasant Mr. Farr was invoking the vengeance of heaven and earth on the fiend who had stopped forever the silver music of the dead girl’s laughter, I remembered that the last time that she laughed it had been at an old woman on her knees begging for the happiness and safety of two babies—and the world did not seem to me to have lost much when that laughter ceased. That is frightful, isn’t it? But that is true.“I’ll try to go back so that you can understand exactly what happened; then you can tell better, perhaps, what I should do and what you should do with me. First of all, I must go very far back, indeed—back thirty years, to a manufacturing town in northern New York.“Thirty-one years ago last June, my husband left me with the nineteen-year-old daughter of my Norwegian landlady. You couldn’t exactly blame him, of course. Trudie was as pretty as the girl on the cover of the most expensive candy box you ever saw, and as unscrupulous as Messalina—and I wasn’t either.“I was much too busy being sick and miserable and cross and sorry for myself to be anything else at all, so he walked off with Trudie and nineteen dollars and fifty cents out of the teapot and left me with a six-weeks-old baby and a gold wedding ring that wasn’t exactly gold. And my landlady wouldn’t give me even one day’s grace rent free, because she was naturally a little put out by her daughter’s unceremonious departure, and quite frankly held me to blame for it, as she said a girl who couldn’t hold her own man wasn’t likely worth her board and keep.“So, just like the lady in the bad melodramas, I wrapped my baby up in a shawl and started out to find work at the factory. Of course I didn’t find it. It was a slack season at the factories, and I looked like a sick little scarecrow, and I hadn’t even money for car fare. I spent the first evening of my career as a breadwinner begging for pennies on the more prominent street corners. It’s one way to get bread.“In the next twenty years I tried a great many other ways of getting it, including, on two occasions, stealing it. But that was only the first year; after that we always had bread, though often there wasn’t enough of it, and generally it was stale, and frequently there wasn’t anything to put on it.“When people talk about the fear of poverty, I wonder whether they have the remotest idea of what they’re talking about. I wasn’t rich when I married Dan; I was the daughter of a not oversuccessful lawyer, and I thought that we were quite poor, because often we went through periods where pot roast instead of chicken played a prominent part in the family diet, and my best dress had to be of tarlatan instead of taffeta, and I possessed only two pairs of kid gloves that reached to my elbow, and one that reached to my shoulder.“I was very, very sorry for myself during those periods, and used to go around with faintly pink eyes and a strong sense of martyrdom. I wasn’t at all a noble character. I liked going to cotillions at night and staying in bed in the morning, and wringing terrified proposals from callow young men who were completely undone by the combination of moonlight and mandolin playing. Besides playing the mandolin, I could make two kinds of candy and feather-stitch quite well and dance the lancers better than anyone in town—and I knew most of Lucile by heart. Thus lavishly equipped for the exigencies of holy matrimony, I proceeded to elope with Mr. Daniel Ives.“I won’t bother you much with Dan. He was the leading man in a stock company that came to our town, and three weeks after he saw me sitting worshipping in the front row we decided that life without each other would be an empty farce and shook the dust of that town from our heels forever. It was very, very romantic, indeed, for the first six days—and after that it wasn’t so romantic.“Because I, who could feather-stitch so nicely, was a bad cook and a bad manager and a bad housewife and a bad sport—a bad wife, in short. I wasn’t precisely happy, and I thought that it was perfectly safe to be all those things, because it simply never entered my head that one human being could get so tired of another human being that he could quietly walk out and leave her to starve to death. And I was as wrong about that, as I’d been about everything else.“I’m telling you all this not to excuse myself, but simply to explain, so that you will understand a little, perhaps, what sent my feet hurrying across the meadow path, what brought them back to the flower room at ten o’clock that night. I think that two people went to meet Madeleine Bellamy in the cottage that night—a nice, well-behaved little white-headed lady and the wilful, spoiled, terrified girl that the nice old lady thought that she had killed thirty years ago. It’s only fair to you that I should explain that, because of what I’m going to ask you to decide. And it is only fair to myself that I should say this.“For twenty years I was too cold, too hot, too tired and sick and faint ever to be really comfortable for one moment. And I won’t pretend that I looked forward with equanimity to surrendering one single comfort or luxury that had finally come to make life beautiful and gracious. But that wasn’t why I killed Madeleine Bellamy. I ask you to believe that.“The real terror of poverty isn’t that we ourselves suffer. It is that we are absolutely and utterly powerless to lift one finger to protect and defend those who are dearest to us in the world. Judge Carver, when Pat was sick when he was a baby I didn’t have enough money to get a doctor for him; I didn’t have enough money to get medicine. When I went to work I had to leave him with people who were vile and filthy and debased in body and soul, because they were the only people that I could afford to leave him with.“Once when I came home I couldn’t wake him up, and the woman who was with him was terrified into telling me that he’d been crying so dreadfully that she’d given him some stuff that a Hungarian woman on the next floor said was fine for crying babies. I carried him and the bottle with the stuff in it ten blocks to a drug store—and they told me that it had opium in it. She’d given him half the bottle—to my Pat. And another time the woman with him got drunk and—— But I can’t talk about that, not even to make you understand. He never had any toys in his life but some tin cans and empty spools and pieces of string. He never had anything but me.“And I swore to myself that as long as he had me he should have everything. I would be beauty to him, and peace and gentleness and graciousness and gaiety and strength. I wasn’t beautiful or peaceful or gentle or gracious or gay or strong, but I made myself all those things for him. That isn’t vanity—that’s the truth. I swore that he should never see me shed one tear, that he should never hear me lift my voice in anger, that he should never see me tremble before anything that fate should hold in store for either of us. He never did—no, truly, he never did. That was all that I could give him, but I did give him that.“It took me seventeen years to save up enough railway fare to get out of that town. Then I came to Rosemont. A nice woman that I did some sewing for in the town had a sister in Rosemont. She told me that it was a lovely place and that she thought that there was a good opening there for some work, and that her sister was looking for boarders. So I took the few dollars that I’d saved and went, and you know the rest.“Of course there are some things that you don’t know—you don’t know how brave and gay and gentle Pat has always been to me; you don’t know how happy we all were in the flat in New York, after he married Sue and the babies came. Sue helped me with the housekeeping, and Sue did some secretarial work at the university, and Pat did anything that turned up, and did it splendidly. We always had plenty to eat, and it was really clean and sunny, and we were all perfectly healthy and happy. Only, Sue never did talk about it much, because she is a very reserved child, in any case, and in this case she was afraid that it might seem a reflection on the Thornes that she had to live in a little walk-up flat in the Bronx, with no servants and pretty plain living.“And Mr. Lambert was nervous about bringing out anything about it in direct examination for fear that in cross-examination Mr. Farr would twist things around to make it look as though Sue had undergone the tortures of the damned. Of course, we didn’t have much, but we had enough to make it seem a luxurious and care-free existence in comparison to the one that Pat and I had lived for over fifteen years.“Those things you don’t know—and one other. You don’t know Polly and Pete, do you, Judge Carver?“They are very wonderful children. I suppose that every grandmother thinks that her grandchildren are rather wonderful; but I don’t just think it about them; they are. Anyone would tell you that—anyone who had ever seen them. They’re the bravest, happiest, strongest little things. You could be with them for weeks and never once hear them cry. Of course, once in a very long while—if you have to scold them, for instance—because Pete is quite sensitive; but then you almost never have to scold them, and when Pete broke his leg last winter and Dr. Chilton set it he said that he had never seen such courage in a child. And when Polly was only two years old, she walked straight out into the ocean up to her chin, and she’d have gone farther still if her father hadn’t caught her up. She rides a pony better than any seven-year-old child in Rosemont, too, and she isn’t five yet—not until January—and the only time that she ever fell off the pony she never even whimpered—not once.“They are very beautiful children too. Pete is quite fair and Polly is very dark, but they both have blue eyes and very dark eyelashes. They are so brown, too, and tall. It doesn’t seem possible that either of them could ever be sick or unhappy; but still, you have to be careful. Polly has been threatened twice with mastoiditis, and Pete has to have his leg massaged three times a week, because he still limps a little.“That’s why I killed Madeleine Bellamy.“The first time I realized that there was anything between her and Pat was almost a month before the murder, some time early in May, I think. Sue had been having quite a dinner party, and I’d slipped out to the garden as usual as soon as I could get away. I decided to gather some lilacs, and I came back to the house to get the scissors from the flower room. As I passed the study I saw Pat and Mimi silhouetted against the study window; she was bending over, pretending to look at the ship he was making, but she wasn’t looking at it—she was looking at Pat.“I’d always thought that she was a scatterbrained little goose, and I had never liked her particularly; even in the old days in the village I used to worry about her sometimes. She used too much perfume and too much pink powder, and she had an empty little voice and a horrid, excited little laugh. But I thought that she was good-natured and harmless enough, when I thought about her at all, and I was about to pass on, when she said something that riveted me in my footsteps.“She said, ‘Pat, listen, did you get my note?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ She asked, ‘Are you coming?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure that I can make it.’ She said, ‘Of course you can make it. We can’t talk here. It doesn’t take ten minutes to get to the cottage. You’ve got to make it.’ He said, ‘All right, I’ll be there. Look out; someone’s coming.’ They both of them turned around, and I could hear him calling to someone in the hall to come in and look at the ship.“I stood there, leaning my head against the side of the house and feeling icy cold and deathly—deathly sick. It was as though I had heard Dan calling to me across thirty years.“From that moment until this one I have never known one happy hour, one happy moment, one happy second. I spent my life spying on him—on my Pat—trying to discover how far he had gone, how far he was prepared to go. I never caught them together again, in spite of the fact that I fairly haunted the terrace under the study window, thinking that some afternoon or evening they might return. They never did. Mimi didn’t come very often to the house, as a matter of fact.“But on the evening of the nineteenth of June, at a little after half-past six, someone did come to the study window, who gave me the clew that I had been seeking so long. It was Melanie Cordier, of course. I was just coming back from the garden, where I had been tying up some climbing roses, when I saw her there by the corner near the bookcase. She had a book in her hands—quite a large, thick book in a light tan cover, and she was looking back over her shoulder with a queer, furtive look while she put something in it. She shoved it back onto the shelf and was starting toward the hall, when she drew back suddenly and stood very quiet. I thought: ‘There is someone in the hall. When Melanie goes out it will mean that the coast is clear.’“It wasn’t more than a minute later that she left, and I started around to the front of the house to get to the study and see what she had put in that book. I was hurrying so that I almost ran into Elliot Farwell, who was coming down the front steps and not looking any more where he was going than if he had been stone blind. He said, ‘Beg pardon’ and brushed by me without even lowering his eyes to see who it was, and I went on across the hall into the study, thinking that never in my life had I seen a man look so wretchedly and recklessly unhappy.“No one was in the hall; they were all in the living room, and I could hear them all laughing and talking—and I decided that if I were to find what Melanie had put in the book I’d better do it quickly, as the party might break up at any minute. I had noticed just where the book was—on the third shelf close to the wall—but there were three volumes just alike, and that halted me for a minute.“The note was in the second volume that I opened. It was addressed to ‘Mr. Patrick Ives. Urgent—Very Urgent.’ I stood looking at that ‘Urgent—Very Urgent’ for a minute, and then I put it in the straw bag that I carry for gardening and went out through the dining room to the pantry to get myself a drink of water, because I felt a little faint.“No one was in the pantry. I let the water run for a minute so that it would get cold, and then I drank three glasses of it, quite slowly, until my hand stopped shaking and that queer dizzy feeling went away. Then I started back for the hall. I got as far as the dining room, when I saw Pat standing by the desk in the corner.“There’s a screen between the dining-room door and the study, but it doesn’t quite cut off the bit near the study window. I could see him perfectly clearly. He had quite a thick little pile of white papers in his hand, and he was counting them. They were long, narrow papers, folded just like the bond that he’d given me for Christmas, a year ago—just exactly like it. And while I was standing there staring at them, Sue called to him from the hall to come out on the porch and see his guests off, and he gave a little start and shoved the papers into the left-hand drawer and went out toward the hall.“I gave him a few seconds to get to the porch, before I crossed through the study. I was terrified that if he came back and found me there he’d know I had the note and accuse me of it—and I knew that when he did that all the life that I’d died twenty lives to build for us would crumble to pieces at the first word he spoke. I couldn’t bear to have Pat know that I suspected how base he was—that I knew that he was Dan all over again—a baser, viler Dan, since Dan had only had me to keep him straight, and Pat had Sue. I felt strong enough and desperate enough to face almost anything in the world except that Pat should know that I had found him out. So I went through the study and the hall and up the stairs to my room in the left wing without one backward look.“Once in my room, I locked the door and bolted it—and pushed a chair against it, too, to make assurance triply sure. That’s the only thing that I did that entire evening that makes me think I must have been a little mad. Still, even a biased observer could hardly regard that as homicidal madness.“I went over to the chintz wing chair by the window and read the note. The chair was placed so that even in my room I could see the roses in the garden, and a little beyond the garden, the sand pile under the copper beech where the children played. They weren’t there now; I’d said good-night to them outside just a minute or so before I finished tying up the roses. I read the note through three times.“Of course, I completely misread it. I thought that what she was proposing was an elopement with Pat to California. It never once entered my head that she was referring to money that would enable Steve and herself to live a pleasanter life in a pleasanter place, and that her talk of hoodwinking Steve simply meant that she could conceal the source of the money from him.“If I had realized that, I’d never have lifted my finger to prevent her getting it. I thought she wanted Pat. I’d have given her two hundred thousand dollars to go away and leave him alone. The most ghastly and ironical thing about this whole ironical and ghastly business is that if Mimi Bellamy hadn’t been as careless and slip-shod with her use of the word ‘we,’ as she was with everything else in her life, she would be alive this day under blue skies.“Of course it was stupid of me, too, and the first time that I read it I was bewildered by the lack of endearments in it. But there was all that about her hardly being able to wait, and how happy they would be; and the note was obviously hastily written—and I had always thought she had no depth of feeling. I suppose that all of us read into a letter much what we expect to find there, and what I expected to find was a twice-told tale. I expected to find that Pat was so mad about this girl that he was willing to wreck not only his own life for her but mine and Sue’s and Polly’s and Pete’s. And I couldn’t to save my soul think of a way to stop him.“I was reading it for the third time when Melanie knocked at the door and announced dinner, and I put it back in my bag and pushed back the chair and unlocked the door and went down.“When I heard Pat and Melanie and Sue all tell you that dinner was quite as usual that night, I wondered what strange stuff we weak mortals are made of. When I think what Sue was thinking and what Pat was thinking and what I was thinking, and that we could laugh and chat and breathe as usual—no, that doesn’t seem humanly possible. Yet that’s exactly what we did.“Afterward, when they went into the study to look at the ship, I decided that I might just as well go into the rose garden and finish the work that I’d started out there. I’d noticed some dead wood on two of the plants, so I went to the flower room and got out the little knife that I kept with some other small tools in a drawer there. It’s a very good one for either budding or pruning, but I keep it carefully put away for fear that the children might cut their fingers. Then I went out to the garden.“For a while I didn’t try to think at all: I just worked. I saw Miss Page coming back from the sand pile, and a minute or so later Sue came by, running toward the back gate. She called to me that she was going to the movies and that Pat was going to play poker. I was glad that they were not going to be there; that made it easier to think—and to breathe.“As you know, she returned to the house. I don’t believe she was there more than five minutes before she came running by again and disappeared through the back gate. I sat down on the little bench at the end of the rose garden and tried to think.“I was desperately anxious to keep my head and remain cool and collected, because one thing was perfectly clear. If something wasn’t done immediately, it would be too late to do anything. The question was what to do.“I didn’t dare to go to Pat. At bottom, I must be a miserable coward; that was the simple, straightforward, and natural thing to do, and I simply didn’t dare to do it. Because I thought that he would refuse me, and that fact I couldn’t face. I was the person in all the world who should have had most trust in him, and I didn’t trust him at all. I remember that when I lie awake in the night. I didn’t trust him.“I didn’t dare to go to Sue, either, because I was afraid that if she knew the truth—or what I was pleased to consider the truth—she would leave him, at any cost to Polly and Peter or herself. I knew that she was possessed of high pride and fine courage; I didn’t know that they would be chains to bind her to Pat. I didn’t trust her either.“It wasn’t Pat and Sue and Mimi Bellamy that I was looking at, you see. It was Dan and I and the boarding-house keeper’s Trudie.“I sat on the bench in the rose garden and watched the sunlight turning into shadow and felt panic rising about me like a cold wind. I knew that Sue hadn’t a cent; her father had left her nothing at all, and she had refused to let Pat settle a cent on her, because she said that she loved to ask him for money.“And I remembered . . . I remembered that Dan had taken nineteen dollars and fifty cents out of the tea-pot. I remembered that I had learned only a few weeks before that I could only hope at best for months instead of years to live. I remembered that Sue couldn’t cook at all, and that it was I who had done up all the children’s little dresses in those New York days because she couldn’t iron, and made them, because she couldn’t sew—and I wouldn’t be there. I remembered that the only relation that she had in the world was Douglas Thorne, and that he had four children and a wife who liked jewellery and who didn’t like Sue. I remembered that the massage for Pete’s knee cost twenty dollars a week, and that when Polly had had trouble with her ear last winter the bill for the nurses and the doctors and the operation had come to seven hundred and fifty dollars. I remembered the way Polly looked on the black pony and Pete’s voice singing in the sand pile. . . .“And then suddenly everything was perfectly clear. Mimi, of course—I’d forgotten her entirely. She was waiting in the gardener’s cottage now, probably, and if I went to her there and explained to her all about Polly and Pete, and how frightfully important it was that they should be taken care of until they could take care of themselves, she would realize what she was doing. She was so young and pretty and careless that she probably hadn’t ever given them a thought. It wasn’t cruelty—it was just a reckless desire to be happy. But once she knew—— I’d tell her all about Pat’s ghastly childhood and the nightmare that my own life had been, and I’d implore her to stop and think what she was doing. Once she had stopped—once she had thought—she wouldn’t do it, of course. I felt fifty years younger, and absolutely light-headed with relief.“I looked at my little wrist watch; it said ten minutes to nine. If I waited until nine it would be almost dark, and would still give me plenty of time to catch her before she left. It wouldn’t take me more than fifteen minutes to get to the cottage, and I much preferred not to have anyone know what I was planning to do. No one would miss me if I got back by ten; I often sat in the garden until then, and I had a little flashlight in the straw bag that I used at such times, and that would serve my purpose excellently coming home across the meadows.“I decided not to go back to the house at all, but simply to slip out by the little gate near the sand pile and strike out on the path that cut diagonally across the fields to the Thorne place. There were no houses between us and Orchards, so I would be perfectly safe from observation. By the time I had gathered up my gardening things and looked again at my watch it was a little after nine, and I decided that it wouldn’t be safe to wait any longer.“It was a very pleasant walk across the fields; it was still just light enough to see, and the clover smelled very sweet, and the tree toads were making a comforting little noise, and I walked quite fast, planning just what I would say to Mimi—planning just how reasonable and gentle and persuasive and convincing I was going to be.“The path comes out at an opening in the hedge to the left of the gardener’s cottage. I pushed through it and came up to the front steps; there was a light in the right-hand window. I went straight up the steps. The front door was open a little, and I pushed it open farther and went in. There was a key on the inside of the door. I hesitated for a moment, and then I closed it and turned the key and dropped it into my bag. I was afraid that she might try to leave before I’d finished explaining to her; I didn’t want her to do that.“She heard me then, and called out from the other room, ‘For heaven’s sake, what’s been the matter? I didn’t think that you were ever coming.’“She had her back turned as I came into the room; she was looking into the mirror over the piano and fluffing out her hair. There was a lamp lit on the piano and it make her hair look like flames—she really was extraordinarily beautiful, if that red-and-white-and-gold-and-blue type appeals to you. Trudie’d had a mouth that curled just that way, and those same ridiculous eyelashes. And then she saw me in the mirror and in three seconds that radiant face turned into a mask of suspicion and cruelty and malice. She whirled around and stood there looking me over from head to foot.“After a moment she said, ‘What are you doing here?’“I said, ‘I came about Pat, Madeleine.’“She said, ‘Oh, you did, did you? So that’s his game—hiding behind a woman’s skirts! Well, you can go home and tell him to come out.’“I said, ‘He doesn’t know that I’m here. I found the note.’“Mimi said, ‘They can send you to jail for taking other people’s letters. Spying and stealing from your own son! I should think you’d be ashamed. And what good do you think it’s going to do you?’“I came closer to her and said, ‘Never mind me, Madeleine, I came here to-night to implore you to leave my son alone.’“And she laughed at me—she laughed! ‘Well, you could have saved yourself the walk. When he gets here, I’ll tell him what I think of the two of you.’“I said, ‘He’s not coming. He’s playing poker at the Dallases.’“She went scarlet to her throat with anger, and she called out, ‘That’s a lie! He’s coming and you know it. Will you get out of here?’“I said, ‘Madeleine, listen to me. I swear to you that any happiness you purchase at the price that you’re willing to pay for it will rot in your hands, no matter how much you love him.’“And she laughed! ‘Love him? Pat? I don’t care two snaps of my fingers for him! But I’m going to get every cent of his that I can put my hands on, and the quicker both of you get that straight, the better it will be for all of us.’“I said, ‘I believe that is the truth, but I never believed that you would dare to say so. You can’t—you can’t realize what you are doing. You can’t purchase your pleasure with the comfort and security and health and joy of two little babies who have never harmed you once in all their lives. You can’t!’“She laughed that wicked, excited little laugh of hers again, and said through her teeth, ‘Oh, can’t I, though? Now get this straight too: I don’t care whether your precious little babies die in a gutter. Now, will you get out?’“I couldn’t breathe. I felt exactly as though I were suffocating, but I said, ‘No. I am an old woman, Madeleine, but I will go on my knees to you to beg you not to ruin the lives of those two babies.’“She said, ‘Oh, I’m sick to death of you and your babies and your melodramatics. For the last time, are you going to get out of this house or am I going to have to put you out?’“She came so close to me that I could smell the horrid perfume she wore—gardenia, I think it was—something close and sweet and hateful. I took a step back and said, ‘You wouldn’t dare to touch me—you wouldn’t dare!’“And then she did—she gave that dreadful, excited little laugh of hers and put both hands on my shoulders and pushed me, quite hard—so hard that I stumbled and went forward on my knees. I tried to catch myself, and dropped the bag and all the things in it fell out on the carpet. I knelt there staring down at them, with the blood roaring in my head and singing in my ears.“Judge Carver, what is it in our blood and bones and flesh that rises shrieking its outrage in the weakest and meekest of us at the touch of hands laid violently on our rebellious flesh? I could hear it—I could hear it crying in my ears—and there on the flowered carpet just in reach of my hand something was shining. It was the little knife that I’d been using to cut the dead wood out so that the live roses would grow better. I knelt there staring at it. That story of how all their lives flash by drowning eyes—I always thought that was an old wives’ tale—no, that’s true, I think. I could see the rose garden with all the green leaves glossy on the big Silver Moon. . . . I could see Pat and Sue laughing on the terrace, with his arm across her shoulders and the sun in their eyes and the wind in their hair. . . . I could see the children’s blue smocks through the branches of the copper beech. . . . I stood up with the knife in my hand. . . .“She screamed only once—not a very loud scream, either, but she caught at the table as she fell, and it made a dreadful crash. I heard someone laugh outside, quite loudly, and I leaned forward and blew out the lamp on the piano. There was someone coming up the front steps; I stood very still. A bell rang far back in the house, and then someone tried the door.“I thought: ‘This is the end—they have known what has happened. If no one answers, they will batter down the door. But not till they batter down the door will I move one hairbreadth from where I stand—and not then.’“After a moment I heard the feet going down the steps, then again on the gravel of the main drive, getting fainter and fainter. I waited for a moment longer, because I thought that I heard something moving in the bushes outside the window, but after a minute everything was perfectly still, and I went over to the window and shut it and pulled down the shade.“I knew that I was in great danger, and that I must think very quickly—and act quickly too. I found the little flashlight almost immediately, and lit it, and pushed down the catch and put it beside me on the floor. I wanted to have both hands free, and I didn’t dare to take the time to light the lamp. I was afraid that the person who tried the door would come back. I had realized at once, of course, that if I took the jewels the murder would look like robbery—and I had to make sure that she was dead.“That took only a minute; the rings came off quite easily, but the catch of the necklace caught, and I had to break the string. I knotted the things all into my handkerchief and put them into the bag, and the trowel and a ball of string that had fallen out, too, and the note, and a little silver box of candy that I kept for the children. There was the key to the front door too. I remembered that I must leave it in the lock as I went out. I used the flashlight to make sure that I wasn’t leaving anything, and I was—the knife was still lying there beside her.“It’s curious—of all the things that happened that night, that’s the only one that I can’t account for. I don’t remember how it got there at all—whether I placed it there or whether I dropped it or whether it fell—that’s curious, don’t you think? Anyhow, I picked it up and wiped it off very carefully on one of her white lace frills and put it back in the bag. And then I tried to get up, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t move. I knelt there, leaning forward against the cold steel of the little Franklin stove, feeling so mortally, so desperately sick that for a moment I thought I should never move again. It wasn’t the blood; it was that perfume, like dead flowers—horribly sweet and strong. . . . After a minute I got up and went out of the room and out of the house and back across the meadow to the garden gate.“I stopped only once. I followed the hedge a little way before I came to the path, and I stooped down and dug out two or three trowelfuls of earth close in to the roots and shook the pearls and the rings out of my handkerchief into the hole and covered it up and went on. At first I thought of putting the knife there, too, and then I decided that someone might have noticed it in the drawer and that it would be safer to be put back where it had come from.“How are they ever able to trace people by the weapons they have used? It seems to me that it should be so simple to hide a little thing no longer than your hand, with all the earth and the waters under the earth to hide it in.“It was the knife that I was washing in the flower room; it still had one or two little stains near the handle, but there wasn’t any blood on my hands at all. I’d been very careful.“After I’d put everything away I took the note and went upstairs. At first I thought that I’d tear it up, but then I decided that someone might find the scraps, and that the safest thing to do would be to keep it until the next day and burn it. And before the next day I knew that Sue and Stephen had no actual alibi for that night, and so I never burned the note.“That’s all. While I lay there in the dark that night—and every night since—I’ve tried saying it over and over to myself: ‘Murderess—murderess.’ A black and bloody and dreadful word; does it sound as alien to the ears of all the others whose title it is as it does to mine? Murderess! We should feel differently from the rest of the world once we have earned that dreadful title, should we not? Something sinister, something monstrous and dark should invest us, surely. It seems strange that still we who bear that name should rise to the old familiar sunlight and sleep by the old familiar starlight; that bread should still be good to us, and flowers sweet; that we should say good-morning and good-night in voices that no man shudders to hear. The strangest thing of all is to feel so little strange.“Judge Carver, I have written to you because I do not know whether any taint of suspicion still clings to any of those who have taken part in this trial. If in your mind there does, I will promptly give myself up to the proper authorities and tell them the essential facts that I have told you.“But if, in your opinion, suspicion rests on no man or woman, living or dead, I would say only this: I am not afraid to die—indeed, indeed, I am rather anxious to die. Life is no longer very dear to me. Two physicians have told me this last year that I will not live to see another. I can obtain from them a certificate to that effect, if you desire. And I have already sent to my lawyers a sealed envelope containing a full confession, marked, ‘To be sent to the authorities in case anyone should be accused of the death of Mrs. Stephen Bellamy, either before or after my death.’ I would not have any human being live through such days as these have been—no, not to save my life, or what is dearer to me than my life.“But, Judge Carver, will the ends of justice be better served if that boy who believes that my only creed is gentleness and kindness and mercy, and who has learned therefore to be merciful and gentle and kind—if that boy learns that now he must call me murderess? If those happy, happy little children who bring every bumped head and cut finger to me to kiss it and make it whole must live to learn to call me murderess?“I don’t want Polly and Pete to know—I don’t want them to know—I don’t want them to know.“If you could reach me without touching them I would not ask you to show me mercy. But if no one else need suffer for my silence, I beg of you—I beg you—forget that you are only Justice, and remember to be merciful.“Margaret Ives.”

“Midnight.

“My dear Judge Carver:

“I am fully aware of the fact that I am doing a cowardly thing in writing you this letter. It is simply an attempt on my part to shift my own burden to another’s shoulders, and my shoulders should surely be sufficiently used to burdens by this time. But this one is of so strange, awkward, and terrible a shape that I must get rid of it at any cost to my pride or sense of fair play—or to your peace of mind. If the verdict to-morrow is guilty, of course, I’ll not send the letter, but simply turn the facts over to the prosecutor. I am spending to-night writing you this in case it is not guilty.

“It was I who killed Madeleine Bellamy. It seems simply incredible to me that everyone should not have guessed it long before now.

“Kathleen Page, Melanie Cordier, Laura Roberts, Patrick, Sue, I myself—we told you so over and over again. That singularly obnoxious and alert Mr. Farr—is it possible that he has never suspected—not even when I explained to him that at ten o’clock I was in the flower room, washing off my hands? And yet a few minutes later he was asking me if there wasn’t a sink in the pantry where my poor Sue might have cleansed her own hands of Mimi Bellamy’s blood—and every face in the court was sick with the horror of that thought.

“We told you everything, and no one even listened.

“Who knew about the path across the meadow to the summerhouse? I, not Sue. Who could see the study window clearly from the rose garden? I, not Sue. Who had that hour and a half between 8:30 and ten absolutely alone and unobserved? I, not Sue. Who had every motive that was ascribed to Sue multiplied ten times over? I, who had known poverty beside which Sue’s years in New York were a gay adventure; who had not only a child to fight for, but that child’s children; who, after a lifetime of grim nightmare, had found paradise; and who saw coming to thrust me out from that paradise not an angel with a flaming sword, but a little empty-headed, empty-hearted chit, cheap, mercenary, and implacable, as only the empty-headed can be.

“I know, Judge Carver, that the burden that I am trying to shift to your shoulders should be heaviest of all with the weight of remorse; and there is in it, I can swear to you, enough remorse to bow stronger shoulders than either yours or mine—but none, none for the death of Mimi Bellamy.

“Remorse for these past weeks has eaten me to the bone—for the shame and terror and peril that I have brought to my children, for the sorrow and menace that I have brought to that gentle soul, Stephen Bellamy—even for the death of poor Elliot Farwell; that was my doing, too, I think. I do not shirk it.

“I am rather an old-fashioned person. I believe in hell, and I believe that I shall probably go there because I killed Mimi Bellamy and because I’m not sorry for it; but the hell that I’ve been living through every day and every night since she died is not one shadow darker because it was I who gave her the little push that sped her from one world to another.

“When that unpleasant Mr. Farr was invoking the vengeance of heaven and earth on the fiend who had stopped forever the silver music of the dead girl’s laughter, I remembered that the last time that she laughed it had been at an old woman on her knees begging for the happiness and safety of two babies—and the world did not seem to me to have lost much when that laughter ceased. That is frightful, isn’t it? But that is true.

“I’ll try to go back so that you can understand exactly what happened; then you can tell better, perhaps, what I should do and what you should do with me. First of all, I must go very far back, indeed—back thirty years, to a manufacturing town in northern New York.

“Thirty-one years ago last June, my husband left me with the nineteen-year-old daughter of my Norwegian landlady. You couldn’t exactly blame him, of course. Trudie was as pretty as the girl on the cover of the most expensive candy box you ever saw, and as unscrupulous as Messalina—and I wasn’t either.

“I was much too busy being sick and miserable and cross and sorry for myself to be anything else at all, so he walked off with Trudie and nineteen dollars and fifty cents out of the teapot and left me with a six-weeks-old baby and a gold wedding ring that wasn’t exactly gold. And my landlady wouldn’t give me even one day’s grace rent free, because she was naturally a little put out by her daughter’s unceremonious departure, and quite frankly held me to blame for it, as she said a girl who couldn’t hold her own man wasn’t likely worth her board and keep.

“So, just like the lady in the bad melodramas, I wrapped my baby up in a shawl and started out to find work at the factory. Of course I didn’t find it. It was a slack season at the factories, and I looked like a sick little scarecrow, and I hadn’t even money for car fare. I spent the first evening of my career as a breadwinner begging for pennies on the more prominent street corners. It’s one way to get bread.

“In the next twenty years I tried a great many other ways of getting it, including, on two occasions, stealing it. But that was only the first year; after that we always had bread, though often there wasn’t enough of it, and generally it was stale, and frequently there wasn’t anything to put on it.

“When people talk about the fear of poverty, I wonder whether they have the remotest idea of what they’re talking about. I wasn’t rich when I married Dan; I was the daughter of a not oversuccessful lawyer, and I thought that we were quite poor, because often we went through periods where pot roast instead of chicken played a prominent part in the family diet, and my best dress had to be of tarlatan instead of taffeta, and I possessed only two pairs of kid gloves that reached to my elbow, and one that reached to my shoulder.

“I was very, very sorry for myself during those periods, and used to go around with faintly pink eyes and a strong sense of martyrdom. I wasn’t at all a noble character. I liked going to cotillions at night and staying in bed in the morning, and wringing terrified proposals from callow young men who were completely undone by the combination of moonlight and mandolin playing. Besides playing the mandolin, I could make two kinds of candy and feather-stitch quite well and dance the lancers better than anyone in town—and I knew most of Lucile by heart. Thus lavishly equipped for the exigencies of holy matrimony, I proceeded to elope with Mr. Daniel Ives.

“I won’t bother you much with Dan. He was the leading man in a stock company that came to our town, and three weeks after he saw me sitting worshipping in the front row we decided that life without each other would be an empty farce and shook the dust of that town from our heels forever. It was very, very romantic, indeed, for the first six days—and after that it wasn’t so romantic.

“Because I, who could feather-stitch so nicely, was a bad cook and a bad manager and a bad housewife and a bad sport—a bad wife, in short. I wasn’t precisely happy, and I thought that it was perfectly safe to be all those things, because it simply never entered my head that one human being could get so tired of another human being that he could quietly walk out and leave her to starve to death. And I was as wrong about that, as I’d been about everything else.

“I’m telling you all this not to excuse myself, but simply to explain, so that you will understand a little, perhaps, what sent my feet hurrying across the meadow path, what brought them back to the flower room at ten o’clock that night. I think that two people went to meet Madeleine Bellamy in the cottage that night—a nice, well-behaved little white-headed lady and the wilful, spoiled, terrified girl that the nice old lady thought that she had killed thirty years ago. It’s only fair to you that I should explain that, because of what I’m going to ask you to decide. And it is only fair to myself that I should say this.

“For twenty years I was too cold, too hot, too tired and sick and faint ever to be really comfortable for one moment. And I won’t pretend that I looked forward with equanimity to surrendering one single comfort or luxury that had finally come to make life beautiful and gracious. But that wasn’t why I killed Madeleine Bellamy. I ask you to believe that.

“The real terror of poverty isn’t that we ourselves suffer. It is that we are absolutely and utterly powerless to lift one finger to protect and defend those who are dearest to us in the world. Judge Carver, when Pat was sick when he was a baby I didn’t have enough money to get a doctor for him; I didn’t have enough money to get medicine. When I went to work I had to leave him with people who were vile and filthy and debased in body and soul, because they were the only people that I could afford to leave him with.

“Once when I came home I couldn’t wake him up, and the woman who was with him was terrified into telling me that he’d been crying so dreadfully that she’d given him some stuff that a Hungarian woman on the next floor said was fine for crying babies. I carried him and the bottle with the stuff in it ten blocks to a drug store—and they told me that it had opium in it. She’d given him half the bottle—to my Pat. And another time the woman with him got drunk and—— But I can’t talk about that, not even to make you understand. He never had any toys in his life but some tin cans and empty spools and pieces of string. He never had anything but me.

“And I swore to myself that as long as he had me he should have everything. I would be beauty to him, and peace and gentleness and graciousness and gaiety and strength. I wasn’t beautiful or peaceful or gentle or gracious or gay or strong, but I made myself all those things for him. That isn’t vanity—that’s the truth. I swore that he should never see me shed one tear, that he should never hear me lift my voice in anger, that he should never see me tremble before anything that fate should hold in store for either of us. He never did—no, truly, he never did. That was all that I could give him, but I did give him that.

“It took me seventeen years to save up enough railway fare to get out of that town. Then I came to Rosemont. A nice woman that I did some sewing for in the town had a sister in Rosemont. She told me that it was a lovely place and that she thought that there was a good opening there for some work, and that her sister was looking for boarders. So I took the few dollars that I’d saved and went, and you know the rest.

“Of course there are some things that you don’t know—you don’t know how brave and gay and gentle Pat has always been to me; you don’t know how happy we all were in the flat in New York, after he married Sue and the babies came. Sue helped me with the housekeeping, and Sue did some secretarial work at the university, and Pat did anything that turned up, and did it splendidly. We always had plenty to eat, and it was really clean and sunny, and we were all perfectly healthy and happy. Only, Sue never did talk about it much, because she is a very reserved child, in any case, and in this case she was afraid that it might seem a reflection on the Thornes that she had to live in a little walk-up flat in the Bronx, with no servants and pretty plain living.

“And Mr. Lambert was nervous about bringing out anything about it in direct examination for fear that in cross-examination Mr. Farr would twist things around to make it look as though Sue had undergone the tortures of the damned. Of course, we didn’t have much, but we had enough to make it seem a luxurious and care-free existence in comparison to the one that Pat and I had lived for over fifteen years.

“Those things you don’t know—and one other. You don’t know Polly and Pete, do you, Judge Carver?

“They are very wonderful children. I suppose that every grandmother thinks that her grandchildren are rather wonderful; but I don’t just think it about them; they are. Anyone would tell you that—anyone who had ever seen them. They’re the bravest, happiest, strongest little things. You could be with them for weeks and never once hear them cry. Of course, once in a very long while—if you have to scold them, for instance—because Pete is quite sensitive; but then you almost never have to scold them, and when Pete broke his leg last winter and Dr. Chilton set it he said that he had never seen such courage in a child. And when Polly was only two years old, she walked straight out into the ocean up to her chin, and she’d have gone farther still if her father hadn’t caught her up. She rides a pony better than any seven-year-old child in Rosemont, too, and she isn’t five yet—not until January—and the only time that she ever fell off the pony she never even whimpered—not once.

“They are very beautiful children too. Pete is quite fair and Polly is very dark, but they both have blue eyes and very dark eyelashes. They are so brown, too, and tall. It doesn’t seem possible that either of them could ever be sick or unhappy; but still, you have to be careful. Polly has been threatened twice with mastoiditis, and Pete has to have his leg massaged three times a week, because he still limps a little.

“That’s why I killed Madeleine Bellamy.

“The first time I realized that there was anything between her and Pat was almost a month before the murder, some time early in May, I think. Sue had been having quite a dinner party, and I’d slipped out to the garden as usual as soon as I could get away. I decided to gather some lilacs, and I came back to the house to get the scissors from the flower room. As I passed the study I saw Pat and Mimi silhouetted against the study window; she was bending over, pretending to look at the ship he was making, but she wasn’t looking at it—she was looking at Pat.

“I’d always thought that she was a scatterbrained little goose, and I had never liked her particularly; even in the old days in the village I used to worry about her sometimes. She used too much perfume and too much pink powder, and she had an empty little voice and a horrid, excited little laugh. But I thought that she was good-natured and harmless enough, when I thought about her at all, and I was about to pass on, when she said something that riveted me in my footsteps.

“She said, ‘Pat, listen, did you get my note?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ She asked, ‘Are you coming?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure that I can make it.’ She said, ‘Of course you can make it. We can’t talk here. It doesn’t take ten minutes to get to the cottage. You’ve got to make it.’ He said, ‘All right, I’ll be there. Look out; someone’s coming.’ They both of them turned around, and I could hear him calling to someone in the hall to come in and look at the ship.

“I stood there, leaning my head against the side of the house and feeling icy cold and deathly—deathly sick. It was as though I had heard Dan calling to me across thirty years.

“From that moment until this one I have never known one happy hour, one happy moment, one happy second. I spent my life spying on him—on my Pat—trying to discover how far he had gone, how far he was prepared to go. I never caught them together again, in spite of the fact that I fairly haunted the terrace under the study window, thinking that some afternoon or evening they might return. They never did. Mimi didn’t come very often to the house, as a matter of fact.

“But on the evening of the nineteenth of June, at a little after half-past six, someone did come to the study window, who gave me the clew that I had been seeking so long. It was Melanie Cordier, of course. I was just coming back from the garden, where I had been tying up some climbing roses, when I saw her there by the corner near the bookcase. She had a book in her hands—quite a large, thick book in a light tan cover, and she was looking back over her shoulder with a queer, furtive look while she put something in it. She shoved it back onto the shelf and was starting toward the hall, when she drew back suddenly and stood very quiet. I thought: ‘There is someone in the hall. When Melanie goes out it will mean that the coast is clear.’

“It wasn’t more than a minute later that she left, and I started around to the front of the house to get to the study and see what she had put in that book. I was hurrying so that I almost ran into Elliot Farwell, who was coming down the front steps and not looking any more where he was going than if he had been stone blind. He said, ‘Beg pardon’ and brushed by me without even lowering his eyes to see who it was, and I went on across the hall into the study, thinking that never in my life had I seen a man look so wretchedly and recklessly unhappy.

“No one was in the hall; they were all in the living room, and I could hear them all laughing and talking—and I decided that if I were to find what Melanie had put in the book I’d better do it quickly, as the party might break up at any minute. I had noticed just where the book was—on the third shelf close to the wall—but there were three volumes just alike, and that halted me for a minute.

“The note was in the second volume that I opened. It was addressed to ‘Mr. Patrick Ives. Urgent—Very Urgent.’ I stood looking at that ‘Urgent—Very Urgent’ for a minute, and then I put it in the straw bag that I carry for gardening and went out through the dining room to the pantry to get myself a drink of water, because I felt a little faint.

“No one was in the pantry. I let the water run for a minute so that it would get cold, and then I drank three glasses of it, quite slowly, until my hand stopped shaking and that queer dizzy feeling went away. Then I started back for the hall. I got as far as the dining room, when I saw Pat standing by the desk in the corner.

“There’s a screen between the dining-room door and the study, but it doesn’t quite cut off the bit near the study window. I could see him perfectly clearly. He had quite a thick little pile of white papers in his hand, and he was counting them. They were long, narrow papers, folded just like the bond that he’d given me for Christmas, a year ago—just exactly like it. And while I was standing there staring at them, Sue called to him from the hall to come out on the porch and see his guests off, and he gave a little start and shoved the papers into the left-hand drawer and went out toward the hall.

“I gave him a few seconds to get to the porch, before I crossed through the study. I was terrified that if he came back and found me there he’d know I had the note and accuse me of it—and I knew that when he did that all the life that I’d died twenty lives to build for us would crumble to pieces at the first word he spoke. I couldn’t bear to have Pat know that I suspected how base he was—that I knew that he was Dan all over again—a baser, viler Dan, since Dan had only had me to keep him straight, and Pat had Sue. I felt strong enough and desperate enough to face almost anything in the world except that Pat should know that I had found him out. So I went through the study and the hall and up the stairs to my room in the left wing without one backward look.

“Once in my room, I locked the door and bolted it—and pushed a chair against it, too, to make assurance triply sure. That’s the only thing that I did that entire evening that makes me think I must have been a little mad. Still, even a biased observer could hardly regard that as homicidal madness.

“I went over to the chintz wing chair by the window and read the note. The chair was placed so that even in my room I could see the roses in the garden, and a little beyond the garden, the sand pile under the copper beech where the children played. They weren’t there now; I’d said good-night to them outside just a minute or so before I finished tying up the roses. I read the note through three times.

“Of course, I completely misread it. I thought that what she was proposing was an elopement with Pat to California. It never once entered my head that she was referring to money that would enable Steve and herself to live a pleasanter life in a pleasanter place, and that her talk of hoodwinking Steve simply meant that she could conceal the source of the money from him.

“If I had realized that, I’d never have lifted my finger to prevent her getting it. I thought she wanted Pat. I’d have given her two hundred thousand dollars to go away and leave him alone. The most ghastly and ironical thing about this whole ironical and ghastly business is that if Mimi Bellamy hadn’t been as careless and slip-shod with her use of the word ‘we,’ as she was with everything else in her life, she would be alive this day under blue skies.

“Of course it was stupid of me, too, and the first time that I read it I was bewildered by the lack of endearments in it. But there was all that about her hardly being able to wait, and how happy they would be; and the note was obviously hastily written—and I had always thought she had no depth of feeling. I suppose that all of us read into a letter much what we expect to find there, and what I expected to find was a twice-told tale. I expected to find that Pat was so mad about this girl that he was willing to wreck not only his own life for her but mine and Sue’s and Polly’s and Pete’s. And I couldn’t to save my soul think of a way to stop him.

“I was reading it for the third time when Melanie knocked at the door and announced dinner, and I put it back in my bag and pushed back the chair and unlocked the door and went down.

“When I heard Pat and Melanie and Sue all tell you that dinner was quite as usual that night, I wondered what strange stuff we weak mortals are made of. When I think what Sue was thinking and what Pat was thinking and what I was thinking, and that we could laugh and chat and breathe as usual—no, that doesn’t seem humanly possible. Yet that’s exactly what we did.

“Afterward, when they went into the study to look at the ship, I decided that I might just as well go into the rose garden and finish the work that I’d started out there. I’d noticed some dead wood on two of the plants, so I went to the flower room and got out the little knife that I kept with some other small tools in a drawer there. It’s a very good one for either budding or pruning, but I keep it carefully put away for fear that the children might cut their fingers. Then I went out to the garden.

“For a while I didn’t try to think at all: I just worked. I saw Miss Page coming back from the sand pile, and a minute or so later Sue came by, running toward the back gate. She called to me that she was going to the movies and that Pat was going to play poker. I was glad that they were not going to be there; that made it easier to think—and to breathe.

“As you know, she returned to the house. I don’t believe she was there more than five minutes before she came running by again and disappeared through the back gate. I sat down on the little bench at the end of the rose garden and tried to think.

“I was desperately anxious to keep my head and remain cool and collected, because one thing was perfectly clear. If something wasn’t done immediately, it would be too late to do anything. The question was what to do.

“I didn’t dare to go to Pat. At bottom, I must be a miserable coward; that was the simple, straightforward, and natural thing to do, and I simply didn’t dare to do it. Because I thought that he would refuse me, and that fact I couldn’t face. I was the person in all the world who should have had most trust in him, and I didn’t trust him at all. I remember that when I lie awake in the night. I didn’t trust him.

“I didn’t dare to go to Sue, either, because I was afraid that if she knew the truth—or what I was pleased to consider the truth—she would leave him, at any cost to Polly and Peter or herself. I knew that she was possessed of high pride and fine courage; I didn’t know that they would be chains to bind her to Pat. I didn’t trust her either.

“It wasn’t Pat and Sue and Mimi Bellamy that I was looking at, you see. It was Dan and I and the boarding-house keeper’s Trudie.

“I sat on the bench in the rose garden and watched the sunlight turning into shadow and felt panic rising about me like a cold wind. I knew that Sue hadn’t a cent; her father had left her nothing at all, and she had refused to let Pat settle a cent on her, because she said that she loved to ask him for money.

“And I remembered . . . I remembered that Dan had taken nineteen dollars and fifty cents out of the tea-pot. I remembered that I had learned only a few weeks before that I could only hope at best for months instead of years to live. I remembered that Sue couldn’t cook at all, and that it was I who had done up all the children’s little dresses in those New York days because she couldn’t iron, and made them, because she couldn’t sew—and I wouldn’t be there. I remembered that the only relation that she had in the world was Douglas Thorne, and that he had four children and a wife who liked jewellery and who didn’t like Sue. I remembered that the massage for Pete’s knee cost twenty dollars a week, and that when Polly had had trouble with her ear last winter the bill for the nurses and the doctors and the operation had come to seven hundred and fifty dollars. I remembered the way Polly looked on the black pony and Pete’s voice singing in the sand pile. . . .

“And then suddenly everything was perfectly clear. Mimi, of course—I’d forgotten her entirely. She was waiting in the gardener’s cottage now, probably, and if I went to her there and explained to her all about Polly and Pete, and how frightfully important it was that they should be taken care of until they could take care of themselves, she would realize what she was doing. She was so young and pretty and careless that she probably hadn’t ever given them a thought. It wasn’t cruelty—it was just a reckless desire to be happy. But once she knew—— I’d tell her all about Pat’s ghastly childhood and the nightmare that my own life had been, and I’d implore her to stop and think what she was doing. Once she had stopped—once she had thought—she wouldn’t do it, of course. I felt fifty years younger, and absolutely light-headed with relief.

“I looked at my little wrist watch; it said ten minutes to nine. If I waited until nine it would be almost dark, and would still give me plenty of time to catch her before she left. It wouldn’t take me more than fifteen minutes to get to the cottage, and I much preferred not to have anyone know what I was planning to do. No one would miss me if I got back by ten; I often sat in the garden until then, and I had a little flashlight in the straw bag that I used at such times, and that would serve my purpose excellently coming home across the meadows.

“I decided not to go back to the house at all, but simply to slip out by the little gate near the sand pile and strike out on the path that cut diagonally across the fields to the Thorne place. There were no houses between us and Orchards, so I would be perfectly safe from observation. By the time I had gathered up my gardening things and looked again at my watch it was a little after nine, and I decided that it wouldn’t be safe to wait any longer.

“It was a very pleasant walk across the fields; it was still just light enough to see, and the clover smelled very sweet, and the tree toads were making a comforting little noise, and I walked quite fast, planning just what I would say to Mimi—planning just how reasonable and gentle and persuasive and convincing I was going to be.

“The path comes out at an opening in the hedge to the left of the gardener’s cottage. I pushed through it and came up to the front steps; there was a light in the right-hand window. I went straight up the steps. The front door was open a little, and I pushed it open farther and went in. There was a key on the inside of the door. I hesitated for a moment, and then I closed it and turned the key and dropped it into my bag. I was afraid that she might try to leave before I’d finished explaining to her; I didn’t want her to do that.

“She heard me then, and called out from the other room, ‘For heaven’s sake, what’s been the matter? I didn’t think that you were ever coming.’

“She had her back turned as I came into the room; she was looking into the mirror over the piano and fluffing out her hair. There was a lamp lit on the piano and it make her hair look like flames—she really was extraordinarily beautiful, if that red-and-white-and-gold-and-blue type appeals to you. Trudie’d had a mouth that curled just that way, and those same ridiculous eyelashes. And then she saw me in the mirror and in three seconds that radiant face turned into a mask of suspicion and cruelty and malice. She whirled around and stood there looking me over from head to foot.

“After a moment she said, ‘What are you doing here?’

“I said, ‘I came about Pat, Madeleine.’

“She said, ‘Oh, you did, did you? So that’s his game—hiding behind a woman’s skirts! Well, you can go home and tell him to come out.’

“I said, ‘He doesn’t know that I’m here. I found the note.’

“Mimi said, ‘They can send you to jail for taking other people’s letters. Spying and stealing from your own son! I should think you’d be ashamed. And what good do you think it’s going to do you?’

“I came closer to her and said, ‘Never mind me, Madeleine, I came here to-night to implore you to leave my son alone.’

“And she laughed at me—she laughed! ‘Well, you could have saved yourself the walk. When he gets here, I’ll tell him what I think of the two of you.’

“I said, ‘He’s not coming. He’s playing poker at the Dallases.’

“She went scarlet to her throat with anger, and she called out, ‘That’s a lie! He’s coming and you know it. Will you get out of here?’

“I said, ‘Madeleine, listen to me. I swear to you that any happiness you purchase at the price that you’re willing to pay for it will rot in your hands, no matter how much you love him.’

“And she laughed! ‘Love him? Pat? I don’t care two snaps of my fingers for him! But I’m going to get every cent of his that I can put my hands on, and the quicker both of you get that straight, the better it will be for all of us.’

“I said, ‘I believe that is the truth, but I never believed that you would dare to say so. You can’t—you can’t realize what you are doing. You can’t purchase your pleasure with the comfort and security and health and joy of two little babies who have never harmed you once in all their lives. You can’t!’

“She laughed that wicked, excited little laugh of hers again, and said through her teeth, ‘Oh, can’t I, though? Now get this straight too: I don’t care whether your precious little babies die in a gutter. Now, will you get out?’

“I couldn’t breathe. I felt exactly as though I were suffocating, but I said, ‘No. I am an old woman, Madeleine, but I will go on my knees to you to beg you not to ruin the lives of those two babies.’

“She said, ‘Oh, I’m sick to death of you and your babies and your melodramatics. For the last time, are you going to get out of this house or am I going to have to put you out?’

“She came so close to me that I could smell the horrid perfume she wore—gardenia, I think it was—something close and sweet and hateful. I took a step back and said, ‘You wouldn’t dare to touch me—you wouldn’t dare!’

“And then she did—she gave that dreadful, excited little laugh of hers and put both hands on my shoulders and pushed me, quite hard—so hard that I stumbled and went forward on my knees. I tried to catch myself, and dropped the bag and all the things in it fell out on the carpet. I knelt there staring down at them, with the blood roaring in my head and singing in my ears.

“Judge Carver, what is it in our blood and bones and flesh that rises shrieking its outrage in the weakest and meekest of us at the touch of hands laid violently on our rebellious flesh? I could hear it—I could hear it crying in my ears—and there on the flowered carpet just in reach of my hand something was shining. It was the little knife that I’d been using to cut the dead wood out so that the live roses would grow better. I knelt there staring at it. That story of how all their lives flash by drowning eyes—I always thought that was an old wives’ tale—no, that’s true, I think. I could see the rose garden with all the green leaves glossy on the big Silver Moon. . . . I could see Pat and Sue laughing on the terrace, with his arm across her shoulders and the sun in their eyes and the wind in their hair. . . . I could see the children’s blue smocks through the branches of the copper beech. . . . I stood up with the knife in my hand. . . .

“She screamed only once—not a very loud scream, either, but she caught at the table as she fell, and it made a dreadful crash. I heard someone laugh outside, quite loudly, and I leaned forward and blew out the lamp on the piano. There was someone coming up the front steps; I stood very still. A bell rang far back in the house, and then someone tried the door.

“I thought: ‘This is the end—they have known what has happened. If no one answers, they will batter down the door. But not till they batter down the door will I move one hairbreadth from where I stand—and not then.’

“After a moment I heard the feet going down the steps, then again on the gravel of the main drive, getting fainter and fainter. I waited for a moment longer, because I thought that I heard something moving in the bushes outside the window, but after a minute everything was perfectly still, and I went over to the window and shut it and pulled down the shade.

“I knew that I was in great danger, and that I must think very quickly—and act quickly too. I found the little flashlight almost immediately, and lit it, and pushed down the catch and put it beside me on the floor. I wanted to have both hands free, and I didn’t dare to take the time to light the lamp. I was afraid that the person who tried the door would come back. I had realized at once, of course, that if I took the jewels the murder would look like robbery—and I had to make sure that she was dead.

“That took only a minute; the rings came off quite easily, but the catch of the necklace caught, and I had to break the string. I knotted the things all into my handkerchief and put them into the bag, and the trowel and a ball of string that had fallen out, too, and the note, and a little silver box of candy that I kept for the children. There was the key to the front door too. I remembered that I must leave it in the lock as I went out. I used the flashlight to make sure that I wasn’t leaving anything, and I was—the knife was still lying there beside her.

“It’s curious—of all the things that happened that night, that’s the only one that I can’t account for. I don’t remember how it got there at all—whether I placed it there or whether I dropped it or whether it fell—that’s curious, don’t you think? Anyhow, I picked it up and wiped it off very carefully on one of her white lace frills and put it back in the bag. And then I tried to get up, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t move. I knelt there, leaning forward against the cold steel of the little Franklin stove, feeling so mortally, so desperately sick that for a moment I thought I should never move again. It wasn’t the blood; it was that perfume, like dead flowers—horribly sweet and strong. . . . After a minute I got up and went out of the room and out of the house and back across the meadow to the garden gate.

“I stopped only once. I followed the hedge a little way before I came to the path, and I stooped down and dug out two or three trowelfuls of earth close in to the roots and shook the pearls and the rings out of my handkerchief into the hole and covered it up and went on. At first I thought of putting the knife there, too, and then I decided that someone might have noticed it in the drawer and that it would be safer to be put back where it had come from.

“How are they ever able to trace people by the weapons they have used? It seems to me that it should be so simple to hide a little thing no longer than your hand, with all the earth and the waters under the earth to hide it in.

“It was the knife that I was washing in the flower room; it still had one or two little stains near the handle, but there wasn’t any blood on my hands at all. I’d been very careful.

“After I’d put everything away I took the note and went upstairs. At first I thought that I’d tear it up, but then I decided that someone might find the scraps, and that the safest thing to do would be to keep it until the next day and burn it. And before the next day I knew that Sue and Stephen had no actual alibi for that night, and so I never burned the note.

“That’s all. While I lay there in the dark that night—and every night since—I’ve tried saying it over and over to myself: ‘Murderess—murderess.’ A black and bloody and dreadful word; does it sound as alien to the ears of all the others whose title it is as it does to mine? Murderess! We should feel differently from the rest of the world once we have earned that dreadful title, should we not? Something sinister, something monstrous and dark should invest us, surely. It seems strange that still we who bear that name should rise to the old familiar sunlight and sleep by the old familiar starlight; that bread should still be good to us, and flowers sweet; that we should say good-morning and good-night in voices that no man shudders to hear. The strangest thing of all is to feel so little strange.

“Judge Carver, I have written to you because I do not know whether any taint of suspicion still clings to any of those who have taken part in this trial. If in your mind there does, I will promptly give myself up to the proper authorities and tell them the essential facts that I have told you.

“But if, in your opinion, suspicion rests on no man or woman, living or dead, I would say only this: I am not afraid to die—indeed, indeed, I am rather anxious to die. Life is no longer very dear to me. Two physicians have told me this last year that I will not live to see another. I can obtain from them a certificate to that effect, if you desire. And I have already sent to my lawyers a sealed envelope containing a full confession, marked, ‘To be sent to the authorities in case anyone should be accused of the death of Mrs. Stephen Bellamy, either before or after my death.’ I would not have any human being live through such days as these have been—no, not to save my life, or what is dearer to me than my life.

“But, Judge Carver, will the ends of justice be better served if that boy who believes that my only creed is gentleness and kindness and mercy, and who has learned therefore to be merciful and gentle and kind—if that boy learns that now he must call me murderess? If those happy, happy little children who bring every bumped head and cut finger to me to kiss it and make it whole must live to learn to call me murderess?

“I don’t want Polly and Pete to know—I don’t want them to know—I don’t want them to know.

“If you could reach me without touching them I would not ask you to show me mercy. But if no one else need suffer for my silence, I beg of you—I beg you—forget that you are only Justice, and remember to be merciful.

“Margaret Ives.”

For a long time the judge sat silent and motionless, staring down at that small mountain of white pages. In his tired face his dark eyes burned, piercing and tireless. Finally they moved, with a curious deliberation, to that other pile of white pages that he had been studying when the messenger boy had come knocking at the door. Yes, there it was:

“An accessory after the fact is one who while not actually participating in the crime, yet in any way helps the murderer to escape trial or conviction, either by concealing him or by assisting him to escape or by destroying material evidence or by any other means whatever. It is a serious crime in itself, but does not make him a principal——”

He sat motionless, his unwavering eyes fixed on the words before him as though he would get them by heart. . . . After a long moment, he stirred, lifted his head, and drew the little pile of papers that held the life of Patrick Ives’s mother toward him.

The blue paper first; the torn scraps settled down on the shining surface as lightly and inconsequently as butterflies. Then the white ones—a little mound of snow-flakes that grew under the quick, sure fingers to a little mountain—higher—higher—blue and white, they were swept into that great brass bowl that had been so conveniently designed for ashes. A match spurted, and little flames leaped gaily, and a small spiral of smoke twisted up toward the white-robed lady above the door. Across the room, between the windows beyond which shone the stars, John Marshall was smiling above the dancing flames—and she smiled back at him, gravely and wisely, as though they shared some secret understanding.

The End

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