He turned away at her word, and with long, rapid strides took the path which Miss Edith had taken earlier. The mother paused to look at him from the threshold. Hannah knitted on with a feverish haste and a frightened countenance. For a third time the bell called, now more imperatively, and Sarah mounted the crooked stairway followed by the frightened gaze of her sister.
In the cool and shaded chamber into which Sarah went, a chamber fitted with high-shouldered old mahogany furniture, the youngest piece of which had known the grandfathers of the withered old man who lay in the carved bed, the air seemed to her electric with dreadful possibilities. Mr.
Grayman was sitting up in bed, his scant white locks elfishly disheveled about the pale parchment of his face, his eyes unnaturally bright.
"Where have you been?" he demanded, with fierce querulousness. "Why did n't you come when I rang?"
She did not at first reply, but busied herself with the medicine which it was time for him to take.
"Whose voice did I hear?" the old man demanded, as soon as he had swallowed the teaspoonful of liquid she brought him.
"Hannah is here," she answered briefly.
"But I heard a man's voice," he continued, his excitement steadily mounting. "I know who it was! I know who it was!"
"Lie down," his nurse said sternly. "You know the doctor said your heart would n't stand excitement."
"It was George!" he exclaimed shrilly. "He's an impudent--" A fit of gasping choked him, but he struggled fiercely to go on. "If she speaks to him, if she looks at him even, I'll curse her! I'll curse her! I'll come back from my grave to--"
A convulsive gasping ended the sentence. He tore at his throat, at his breast, he struggled dreadfully. Old Sarah supported him in her arms, and tried to aid him, but nothing could save him from the effect of that paroxysm. With one tremendous final effort, the old man threw back his head, drew in his breath with a frightful gasp, then forced it out again in the attempt to utter a last malediction.
"Curse--" The shrill word rang through the chamber, but it was followed by no other. A strong, wrinkled hand, a hand that for a lifetime had worked faithfully for him and his, was pressed over his mouth. He choked, gasped, and then the male line of the Grayman family was extinct.
In the meantime Hannah had been sitting on the porch, knitting like an automaton, and staring at the yellow cat with eyes full of dazed terror.
She heard the disturbance in the chamber above, but it came to her very faintly until that last shrill word rang down the ancient stairway. Then she dropped her knitting in complete consternation.
"Oh, goodness!" she said aloud. "Oh, goodness gracious me!"
She was swept away completely by the sudden turmoil which had come to trouble the peaceful afternoon. With the leveling tendencies of modern days Hannah had become in a way familiar, as she had for a time lived at a distance in a town of some size, and of late years in the village, where the unruffled existence of the old Grayman place might almost seem as remote as the life of another century. But Hannah never made any application of modern principles to "the family." The Graymans were an exception to any rules of social equality or democratic tendency. The presumption of her nephew in raising his eyes to Miss Edith had always been all but incredible to the simple old soul; and to understand that a lady of the Grayman stock could for a moment have entertained feelings warmer than those of patronage for a Souther was utterly beyond Hannah's power. She had heard George say that Miss Edith had sent for him; but she had understood it no more than she would have understood a vision of the Apocalypse. The slow steps by which the girl had come to be in revolt against the family traditions, to be ready to abandon her heart-breaking resolutions, and to summon her lover, could have been made credible to old Hannah only on the theory of madness. She sat there in the silence which had followed that shrill cry from the chamber of death, dazed and half cowering, unable to think or to move.
At last she saw George Souther returning alone by the river-path. The brightness was gone from his face, and his lips were contracted sternly.
"She 's sent him away again," Hannah West said within herself. "She had to."
The universe seemed to her to be righting itself again. Some monstrous aberration might for a moment have come upon Miss Grayman, but the stars in their courses were not more steadfast than the principles of the blood. Hannah breathed more freely at the sight of her nephew's drawn face. She wished him no ill, but she could not regard this desire of his as not unlike that of a madman who would pluck the moon from the sky.
She instinctively accepted his evident failure as a proof that sanity still existed in the world, and that the moral foundations of society were still undestroyed.
"Where is mother?" George asked abruptly, as he came upon the porch.
"She ain't come down yet," Hannah answered, her thin hands going on with the knitting like a machine.
"I don't think I'll wait," he said simply. "She'll understand."
But at that instant the figure of his mother appeared on the stairway.
She came out upon the porch, bent, gray, cowering. As her eye caught the face of her son, however, she straightened herself and a new look came into her eyes.
"Where is Miss Edith?" she asked abruptly.
George came to her and took her hand gently.
"Mother," he said, "you must n't blame her. She can't break her father's heart. She has sent me away again."
His mother looked at him quietly, but with eyes that shone wildly.
"You need n't go," she announced calmly. "He is dead."
"Dead!" echoed her son.
"Dead!" cried Hannah shrilly.
"Yes," Sarah responded, with increasing calmness. "He had one of his paroxysms. The doctor said he'd go off in one of them. You'd better go to Miss Edith and tell her."
Hannah rose from her chair as if the feebleness of age had come upon her suddenly.
"The doctor said he must n't be excited," she quavered. "Did he know George was here?"
The son, who had half turned away, wheeled back again.
"Was that what killed him?" he demanded.
Old Sarah straightened herself with a supreme effort. The very strain of uttering a falsehood and of the dreadful secret which must darken her soul for the rest of her life gave to her words an added air of sincerity.
"He did n't know," she said. "He went off as peaceful as a child."
Her son waited for nothing more, but once more hastened down the river-path. Hannah stood as if transfixed.
"But, Sarah," she said, "I heard--"
Sarah looked at her with a wild regard. For a moment was silence.
"No," she said, "you heard nothing. He did not say it!"
She leaned against the doorpost and looked at her right hand strangely, as if she expected to see blood on it. Then she stood erect again, squaring her shoulders as if to a burden accepted.
"Be still," she said. "They're coming."
Mechanically old Hannah, bowed and bewildered, began to do up her knitting in the fading autumnal afternoon.
"It is growing chilly," she muttered shiveringly.
A COMEDY IN CRAPE
"For my part," observed Mrs. Sterns stoutly, turning the seam of the flannel shirt she was making for some unknown soldier, "I don't believe any one of the three was ever really engaged to Archie Lovell. He went round with all of them some, of course; but that was n't anything--with him."
A murmur from the group about her told at least of sympathy with her point of view, and assent showed itself in the remark with which Mrs.
Small continued the conversation.