Part 20 (2/2)

”Margaret,” she said to me many a time, ”a mother's heart has strange instincts and, I fear, true ones. There is something that tells me that little Julianna will never live.”

”Hush, the nonsense!” I answered her, laughing at her white, frightened face. ”Trouble enough you'll have with her teething without borrowing more from such things as Death! Look out the window, ma'am, at the snow that covers everything, and be thankful that we are not having a green winter.”

”Something will happen,” she said. And I believe it was her worry and nervousness that kept her from getting her strength back and wore her thinner and thinner. She would sit in her window that looked down the slope to the river, with Julianna in her lap, and gaze out at the melting snow, or, later, at the first peep of green in the meadows between the two factories up and down the valley, and at those times I would notice how tired and patient her face looked, though it would all spring up into smiles when she heard the voice of the Judge, who had come in the front door.

Then finally there came a night I remember well. It was about the full moon in the early days of April, but a wind had come up with a lot of clouds blowing across the sky. Maybe it was at ten o'clock--just after I had gone to bed, anyway, and had got to sleep--when I heard the screams--terrible, terrible screams. And I thought they were the screams of a woman.

I jumped up, threw open my window, and tried to look through the night toward the river. I could hear something splash once or twice in the water, and then all was still--still as the grave.

You know how a body feels waked out of a sleep like that. Though it was a warm breeze that blew and though I've never been timid, I was shaking like a sheet of paper. It was a minute or two before I could get it out of my mind that some one had been cut from ear to ear. Then I remembered that they had told me that rowdy parties were often boating on the water above the first dam, as the weather grew warmer, and when I listened and heard no sound of any one else in the house stirring, I began to think that my half-sleepy ears had exaggerated the sounds. And then, just as I was about to close the window, a cloud rolled off the moon, and for a second or two there was a great bath of light on the slope, and back of the stable, among the old gnarled apple trees. There were a lot of queer looking shadows among these trees, too, but none so queer as one.

This one shadow was different, for it was not still like the others, but went stopping and starting and scuttling like a crab over the gra.s.s--sometimes upright like a man and sometimes on all fours like a beast. At last it stood up and ran from tree to tree in a swaying, moving zigzag. I could see then that it was a man, but for the life of me I could not remember where I'd seen his like. Then another cloud slid over the moon and the night was as dark as velvet again.

You may be sure I pa.s.sed a restless night. Perhaps the Judge saw it, for when he came in from his regular early morning walk the next day, looking very grave and solemn and troubled, he stared at me a minute before he spoke.

”Margaret,” said he, ”you look overworked.”

”Oh, no, sir,” I said, half ashamed to tell of my fright.

”I'm glad to hear you say so,” he answered. ”I was about to ask you whether you could add to your duties by taking full charge of Julianna.”

”The baby!” said I. ”Has anything happened to Mrs. Colfax?”

”No,” he said, a bit excited, ”but I'm going to send her away to-day. I trust it will be soon enough. The doctor has been advising it this long time. Mrs. Colfax is on the edge of nervous prostration, and the baby should be taken from her now and put in your care while she is gone.”

I think I must have shrunk back from him. I remembered the screams. I could hear them again in my ears--terrible, terrible screams--at the river.

”While she is gone!” I whispered.

”Yes,” said he. ”What ails you? You have heard the plan before.”

”But the haste, sir,” I said. ”What is this dreadful hurry about?”

”Not so loud,” said he. ”You will hear the news soon enough. I may as well tell you. But it must be kept from her at any cost until she is away. A dreadful thing has happened--happened in the night,--not two hundred yards from this house. A woman has been murdered.”

”A woman!” I said. ”Who?”

”Her name was Mary Chalmers,” he said. ”She was an actress. She and her husband and their baby had come up from New York. She was found this daybreak at the dam by one of the factory watchmen. There was an overturned boat. The baby had been left asleep in the boarding-house where they were staying, and the husband had been heard to say that he would take her rowing on the river. He had been drinking. He was caught trying to catch the early morning train, and was still so befuddled that he could only say over and over again that he had no memory of where he had been. He says he is not guilty and has sent for a lawyer. The coroner has gone to the dam. That is the story and my wife must be prevented from suspecting any of it. The man will probably be held. It looks badly for him, and the case, if tried, will come before me. My wife must be kept away until it is all over; she must not suffer the morbid worry.”

”Did any one hear screams on the river last night?” I asked, biting my finger.

”Several heard them,” he said, nodding.

I felt a great relief from that answer, for I had a dread of being called as a witness and then and there I made up my mind that, come what might, I would tell nothing. ”What one sees to-morrow, and what one didn't see yesterday, makes the road easy,” Madame Welstoke had been used to say, and I recalled her words and thought highly of their wisdom. And yet I have many the time, wondered whether, if I had told of the creature I had seen, scuttling like a crab over the gra.s.s in the orchard, I might not have prevented the grisly prank that Fate has played.

That afternoon my mistress, in spite of her gentle protests, was taken to the train by the Judge and Doctor Turpin, who I've always remembered as an old fool, trying to wipe the p.r.i.c.kly heat off his forehead with a red-bordered silk handkerchief. One of the neighbors, clinking with jet beads till she sounded like a pitcher of ice water coming down the hall, went on the journey to the mountain sanitarium with Mrs. Colfax, as a sort of companion, and when all the fuss of the departure and the slam of the old cab doors and the neighing of the livery-stable hea.r.s.e horses was over, I was left alone with the baby Julianna and the Judge.

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