The Affair Next Door (40 page)

"But I feared nothing, suspected nothing. Such deep and desperate
wickedness as he was planning was beyond the wildest flight of my
imagination. When he insisted upon sending for a complete set of
clothing for me, and when at his dictation I wrote a list of the
articles I wanted, I thought he was influenced by his wish as my husband
to see me dressed in articles of his own buying. That it was all a plot
to rob me of my identity could not strike such a mind as mine, and when
the packages came and were received by him in the sly way already known
to the public, I saw nothing in his caution but a playful display of
mystery that was to end in my romantic establishment in a home of love
and luxury.

"Or rather it is thus that I account for my conduct now, and yet the
precaution I took not to change the shoes in which my money was hidden,
may argue that I was not without some underlying doubt of his complete
sincerity. But if so, I hid it from myself, and, as I have every reason
to believe, from him also, doubtless excusing my action to myself by
considering that I would be none the worse off for a few dollars of my
own, even if he was my husband, and had promised me no end of pleasure
and comfort.

"That he did intend to make me happy, he had assured me more than once.
Indeed, before we had been long in this hotel room, he informed me that
great experiences lay before me; that he had prospered much in the last
five years and had now a house of his own to offer me and a large circle
of friends to make our life in it agreeable.

"'We will go to our house to-night,' said he. 'I have not been living in
it lately, and you may find it a little uncomfortable, but we will
remedy that to-morrow. Anything is better than staying here under a
false name and I cannot take you to my bachelor apartment.'

"I had doubted some of his previous statements, but this one I
implicitly believed. Why should not so elegant a man have a house of his
own; and if he had told me it was built of marble and hung with
Florentine tapestries, I should still have credited it all. I was in
fairy-land and he was my knight of romance, even when he again hung his
head in leaving the hotel and looked at once so ordinary and
uninteresting.

"The ruse he made use of to cut off all connection between ourselves and
the Mr. and Mrs. James Pope who had registered at the Hotel D— was
accepted by me with the same lack of suspicion. That he should wish to
carry no remembrance of our old life into our new home I thought a
delightful piece of folly, and when he proposed that we should bequeath
my gossamer and his own disfiguring duster to the coachman in whose hack
we were then riding, I laughed gleefully and helped him fold them up and
place them under the cushions, though I did wonder why he cut a piece
out of the neck of the former, and pouted with the happy freedom of a
self-confident woman when he said:

"'It is the first thing I ever bought for you, and I am just foolish
enough to wish to preserve this much of it for a keepsake. Do you
object, my dear?'

"As I was conscious of cherishing a similar folly in his regard, and
could have pressed even that old duster of his to my heart, I offered
him a kiss and said 'No,' and he put the scrap away in his pocket. That
it was the portion on which was stamped the name of the firm from which
it was bought did not occur to me.

"When the coach stopped, he urged me away on foot in a direction
entirely strange to me, saying we would take another hack as soon as we
had disposed of the bundles we were carrying. How he intended to do
this, I did not know. But presently he drew me towards a Chinese
laundry, where he bade me leave one of them as washing, and the other he
dropped before the opening of a sewer as we stepped up a neighboring
curb-stone.

"And still I did not suspect.

"Our ride to Gramercy Park was short, but during it he had time to put a
bill in my hand and tell me I was to pay the driver. He had also time to
secure the weapon upon which he had probably had his eye fixed from the
first. His manner of doing this I can never forgive, for it was a
lover's manner, and as such intended to deceive and cajole me. Drawing
my head down on his shoulder, he drew off my veil, saying that it was
the only article left of my own buying, and that we would leave it
behind us in this coach as we had left the gossamer in the other. 'Only
I will make sure that no other woman ever wears it,' he laughed,
slitting it up and down with his knife. When this was done he kissed me,
and then while my heart was tender and the warm tears stood in my eyes,
he drew out the pin from my hat, meeting my remonstrances with the
assurance that he hated to see my head covered, and that no hat was as
pretty as my own brown hair.

"As this was nonsense, and as the coach was beginning to stop, I shook
my head at him and put my hat on again, but he had dropped the pin, or
so he said, and I had to alight without it.

"When I had paid the driver and the coach had driven off, I had a chance
to look up at the house before which we had stopped. Its height and
imposing appearance daunted me in spite of the great expectations I had
formed, and I ran up the stoop after him in a condition of mingled awe
and wild delight that was the poorest preparation possible for what lay
before me in the dark interior we were entering.

"He was fumbling nervously in the keyhole with his key, and I heard a
whispered oath escape him. But presently the door fell back, and we
stepped in to what looked to me like a cavern of darkness.

"'Do not be frightened!' he admonished me. 'I will strike a light in a
moment.' And after carefully closing the street door behind us, he
stretched out his hand to take mine, or so I judge, for I heard him
whisper impatiently, 'Where are you?'

"I was on the threshold of the parlor, to which I had groped my way
while he was closing the front door, so I whispered back, 'Here!' but
found voice for nothing further, for at that instant I heard a sound
proceeding from the depths of darkness in front of me, and was so struck
with terror that I fell back against the staircase, just as he passed me
and entered the room from which that stealthy noise had issued.

"'Darling!' he whispered, 'darling!' and went stumbling on in the void
of darkness before me, till suddenly by some power I cannot explain I
seemed to see, faintly but distinctly, and as if with my mind's eye
rather than with my bodily one.

"I perceived the shadowy form of a woman standing in the space before
him, and beheld him suddenly grasp her with what he meant to be a loving
cry, but which to my ears at that moment sounded strangely ferocious,
and after holding her a moment suddenly release her, at which she
uttered one low, curdling moan and sank at his feet. At the same instant
I heard a click, which I did not understand then, but which I now know
to have been the head of the hat-pin striking the register.

"Horrified past all power of speech and action, for I saw that he had
intended this blow for me, I cowered against the stairs, waiting for him
to pass out. This he did not do at once, though the delay must have been
short. He stopped long enough by the prostrate form to stir it with his
foot, probably to see if life was extinct, but no longer, yet it seemed
an eternity before I perceived him groping his way over the threshold;
an eternity in which every act of my life passed before me, and every
word and every expression with which he had beguiled me came to rack my
soul and made the horror of this mad awakening greater.

"No thought of her, or of the guilt with which he had forever damned his
soul, came to me in that first moment of misery.
My
loss,
my
escape,
and the danger in which I still stood if the least hint reached him of
the mistake he had made, filled my mind too entirely for me to dwell on
any less impersonal theme. His words, for he muttered several in that
short passage out, showed me in what a fools' paradise I had been
revelling, and how certainly I had turned his every thought towards
murder when I seized him in the street and proclaimed myself his wife.
The satisfaction with which he uttered, 'Well struck!' gave little hint
of remorse; and the gloating delight with which he added something about
the devil having assisted him to make it a safe blow as well as a deadly
one, was proof not only of his having used all his cunning in planning
this crime, but of his pleasure in its apparent success.

"That he continued in this frame of mind, and that he never lost
confidence in the precautions he had taken and in the mystery with which
the deed was surrounded, is apparent from the fact that he revisited the
Van Burnam office on the following morning, and hung again on its
accustomed nail the keys of the Gramercy Park house.

"When the front door had closed, and I knew that he had gone away in the
full belief that it was my form he had left lying behind him on that
midnight floor, all the accumulated terrors of the situation came to me
in full force, and I began to think of her as well as of myself, and
longed for courage to approach her or even the daring to call out for
help. But the thought that it was my husband who had committed this
crime held me tongue-tied, and though I soon began to move inch by inch
in her direction, it was some time before I could so far overcome my
terror as to enter the room where she lay.

"I had supposed, and still supposed (as was natural after seeing him
open the door with the keys he took from his pocket), that the house was
his, and the victim a member of his own household. But when, after
innumerable hesitations and a bodily shrinking that was little short of
torment, I managed to drag myself into the room and light a match which
I found on a farther mantel-shelf, I saw enough in the general
appearance of the rooms and of the figure at my feet to make me doubt
the truth of both these suppositions. Yet no other explanation came to
lighten the mystery of the occasion, and dazed as I was by the horror of
my position and the mortal dread I felt of the man who in one instant
had turned the heaven of my love into a hell of fathomless horrors, I
soon had eyes for the one fact only, that the woman lying before me was
sufficiently like myself to inspire me with the hope of preserving my
secret and keeping from my would-be slayer the knowledge of my having
escaped the doom he had prepared for me.

"For ascribe it to what motive you will, that was the one idea now
dominating my mind. I wanted him to believe me dead. I wanted to feel
that all connection between us was severed forever. He
had
killed me.
By killing my love and faith in him he had murdered the better part of
myself, and I shrank with inconceivable horror from anything that would
bring me again under his eye, or force me to assert claims that it would
be the future business of my life to forget.

"When the first match went out I had not courage to light another, so I
crept away in the darkness to listen at the foot of the stairs. There
was no sound from above, and a terrifying sense began to pervade me that
I was in that house alone. Yet there was safety in the thought, and
opportunity for what I was planning, and finally, under the stress of
the purpose that was every moment developing within me, I went softly
up-stairs and listened at all the doors till I was certain that the
house was unoccupied. Then I came down and walked resolutely back into
the parlor, for I knew if I allowed any time to pass I could never again
summon up strength to cross its grisly threshold. Yet I did nothing for
hours but crouch in one of its dismal corners, waiting for morning. That
I did not go mad in that awful interval is a wonder. I must have been
near it more than once.

"I have been asked, and Miss Butterworth has been asked, how in the
light of what we now know concerning this poor victim's presence there,
we account for her being in the darkness and showing so little terror at
our entrance and Mr. Stone's approach.
I
account for it in this way:
Two half-burned matches were found in the parlor grate. One I flung
there; the other had probably been used by her to light the dining-room
gas. If this was still lighted when we drove up, as it may have been,
then, alarmed by the sound of the stopping coach, she had put it out,
with a vague idea of hiding herself till she knew whether it was the old
gentleman who was coming or only her suspicious and unreasonable
husband. If it was not lighted then, she was probably aroused from a
sleep on the parlor sofa, and was for the moment too dazed to cry out or
resent an embrace she had not time to understand before she succumbed to
the cruel stab that killed her. Miss Butterworth, however, thinks that
the poor creature took the intruder for Franklin till she heard my
voice, when she probably became so amazed that she was in a measure
paralyzed and found it impossible to move or cry out. As Miss
Butterworth is a woman of great discretion I should think her
explanation the truest, if I did not consider her a little prejudiced
against Mrs. Van Burnam.

"But to return to myself.

"With the first glimmer of light that came through the closed shutters I
rose and began my dreadful task. Upheld by a purpose as relentless as
that which drove the author of this horror into murder, I stripped the
body and put upon it my own clothing, with the one exception of the
shoes. Then, when I had re-dressed myself in hers, I steadied up my
heart and with one wild pull dragged down the cabinet upon her so that
her face might lose its traits and her identification become impossible.

"How I had strength to do this, and how I could contemplate the result
without shrieking, I cannot now imagine. Perhaps I was hardly human at
this crisis; perhaps something of the demon which had informed him in
his awful work had entered into my breast, making this thing possible. I
only know that I did what I have said and did it calmly. More than that,
that I had mind and judgment left to give to my own appearance.
Observing that the dress I had put on was of a conspicuous plaid, I
exchanged the skirt portion with the brown silk petticoat under it, and
when I observed that it hung below the other, as of course it would, I
went through the house till I came upon some pins with which I pinned it
up out of sight. Thus equipped, I was still a person to attract
attention, especially as I had no hat to put on; my own having fallen
from my head and been covered by the dead woman's body, which nothing
would induce me to move again.