A pistol-shot rang through the room, and the white face before me vanished. There was hot blood upon my hands; a terror seized me—what had I done? Hands were upon my shoulders. But I escaped them. I flew down the creaking stairs. People were shouting. Steps were coming after me. I flung wide the door and flew wildly, blindly, down the street. Feet were repeating the echo of mine. People were calling “Murder! murder!” Windows were flung open, men joined in the chase. People were calling “Murder!”—and my hands were red with blood. Ha! the well-known door—it was my own; his latch-key opened it. I let myself in and flew upstairs; there was a light in my old room; a nurse sat nodding over the fire. I saw my old form lying motionless upon the bed. I sprang to its side. Voices were calling at the hall-door—men were breaking it in. They had tracked me.
I seized the hand that lay upon the counterpane; a shudder ran through it. Steps were at the door, “Murder” ran through the house. There was a moment of nothingness and I woke.
It was all a terrible dream; I lay upon my own bed. The kind neighbour, hearing my cry, had called in to see if I needed anything; he was looking down with pity in his eyes, his hands cooling mine—he had dipped them in water. No! it was blood, BLOOD! and the room rang with the cries of “MURDERER!” I started up; they were putting manacles on his wrists. He was stunned, he knew not what to say; he answered not their insinuations, but passed his manacled hands now and again across his eyes, like a man who had been long sleeping.
A terrible laugh sounded round the room; it seemed to float through the doorway, and we heard it echo down the house, fading away into stillness. I tried to rise and speak, but fell back unconscious.
IV
I awoke to misery and despair. Lying still a moment, to gather my thoughts together, I heard some persons talking at the head of my bed. It was the nurse and a couple of men, doctors I soon knew them to be. They were talking excitedly, but in subdued voices; I heard every word distinctly: “Graham is to be hanged for the murder of young Varen.” I started up, gazing at them in agony.
“He did not do it. I, and I alone, am guilty.”
They had started back when I moved, in astonishment; but when I spoke they came beside me, trying to soothe me and make me lie down and rest again. To rest! O Heaven! there was no more rest for me in this world.
I told them I would explain, but they would not let me speak. I heard them whisper of my most extraordinary case. They thought I had gained consciousness while they were speaking of Graham, and, hearing their words at that critical moment, took the idea into my head that I had committed the crime.
“Let me go!” I moaned; “let me go!”
But they held me down in their cruel kindness till I had to do their bidding from very weakness.
But when the night came on, and when the old nurse was nodding in her chair, I arose in the darkness and went from the house. Up and down the streets I wandered till dawn grew grey, but no dawn arose in my heart, only black night for ever. Through the streets, never stopping, I walked till the sun grew hot and bright, and people crowded out into the pathways. I bought a paper from a newsvendor, and read the trial of Gilbert Graham. It was nearly over; all the evidence was against him. He had nothing to say for himself; once he spoke to ask if he might see his little child, and he was told she was dead. They said he seemed stunned, or as though in a dream. I read no more.
When the court was opened, and the trial came on again, I hid myself among the crowd that attended it. I saw the prisoner at the bar; he was not pale; a colour tinged his cheeks. He seemed as if he were asleep. I do not think he heard anything of what was going on. Witness after witness came to condemn him. I could not bear it. I put myself forward as a witness for the defence. They allowed me into the box. I tried to tell my story, but they would not listen to me; some laughed; some pitied me; but they would not let me speak.
“Will you not hear me?” I cried. “You cannot understand, but do not laugh; there are so many things men know nothing of, but do not scorn them because you do not understand them. Can you know what gives life to the smallest insect living on this earth? Can you explore a step beyond the grave? You cannot. I alone am guilty of this murder; by my own act, or by the act of Heaven or Hell, I know not.”
A gentleman rose in the court; he sent a message to the Judge, whispered to a constable, and I was dragged out of the house. I heard a murmur of excited voices and a whisper.
“ ‘Tis that poor fellow Bulger; they say his brain is turned since he had his cataleptic attack.”
I was forced along by my doctor, his arm linked in mine. Calling a cab, he put me inside, and was about to follow, when a friend of his came up and spoke to him.
“Oh, yes,” he answered, “I thought I’d find him there. He woke to consciousness just as Dr. Gill and myself were speaking of young Varen’s death, and he seemed to get it into his head that he was the murderer. He escaped from the house last night, but from his ravings I thought it probable I should find him at court to-day.”
I heard no more. Silently opening the door furthest from the speaker, I slipped out, and in the dusk of the evening made my escape.
How the night passed I know not, but, when the light came, I had but one thought: to seek out Graham and beg his forgiveness. Again I bought a morning paper, and read the finish of the trial. Graham was condemned to death.
After a day’s wandering, or maybe more—I knew nothing of time in those blank hours—I found out the prison where he lay awaiting his doom, and craved admittance, saying I was a particular friend—a friend!
They let me see him for a moment, but he did not know me. He even smiled when I asked his forgiveness; even he would not believe me.
“I do not understand it at all,” he said, laying his head on his hand wearily. “I cannot think, I cannot even feel these last few days,” and then raised his head and gazed at me eagerly. “Do you know anything of my mother?”
I did not know of her, and turned away my face.
“I had a child!” he cried. “Oh, tell me of my little child!”
“Do you not remember?—she is dead,” I told him, weeping.
He leaned his head upon his hand again. “I had forgotten.”
He spoke no more to me, and I was taken out of the place. “He will forgive me tomorrow,” I said.
But, hidden away in a low lodging-house, I was too ill to stir for many days; then early one morning I found myself at the prison door again; it opened for me readily, and when it closed I found myself confronted by my doctor and some of his friends.
“I thought our patient would turn up sooner or later,” he said. “How fortunate you should choose the time we are here!”
“I will go anywhere you will if you but let me see him once again,” I cried; “only once till he forgives me. Let me go! I must!” I cried, fighting them. “I cannot live unless I get his pardon.”
“You cannot see him,” they said.
“But I will—I must!”
“You cannot—he was hanged this morning at seven.”
I. An armband worn in mourning after a death.
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930) was a prolific American writer of poems, novels, and short stories for children and adults. Born in Massachusetts to a strict religious family, she married at the age of 40 and moved to New Jersey. Primarily known for her depictions of New England life, she penned a dozen novels and as many short story collections, and much of her work explored the changing role of women, especially in rural settings. Wilkins Freeman also wrote of things supernatural. Her 1902 “Luella Miller” is a classic of vampire fiction, free of the influence of Dracula and its imitators and closer to the theme of Conan Doyle’s 1894 novella The Parasite. In 1926, Wilkins Freeman became the first recipient of the William Dean Howells Medal for Distinction in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The following, which first appeared in Everybody’s Magazine in February 1902 and in Wilkins Freeman’s collection The Wind in the Rose-Bush and Other Sto
ries of the Supernatural (published as Mary E. Wilkins in 1903), is a haunting tale of guilt and denial.
The Wind in the Rose-Bush by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Ford Village has no railroad station, being on the other side of the river from Porter’s Falls,I and accessible only by the ford which gives it its name, and a ferry line.
The ferry-boat was waiting when Rebecca Flint got off the train with her bag and lunch basket. When she and her small trunk were safely embarked she sat stiff and straight and calm in the ferry-boat as it shot swiftly and smoothly across stream. There was a horse attached to a light country wagon on board, and he pawed the deck uneasily. His owner stood near, with a wary eye upon him, although he was chewing, with as dully reflective an expression as a cow. Beside Rebecca sat a woman of about her own age, who kept looking at her with furtive curiosity; her husband, short and stout and saturnine, stood near her. Rebecca paid no attention to either of them. She was tall and spare and pale, the type of a spinster, yet with rudimentary lines and expressions of matronhood. She all unconsciously held her shawl, rolled up in a canvas bag, on her left hip, as if it had been a child. She wore a settled frown of dissent at life, but it was the frown of a mother who regarded life as a forward child, rather than as an overwhelming fate.
The other woman continued staring at her; she was mildly stupid, except for an over-developed curiosity which made her at times sharp beyond belief. Her eyes glittered, red spots came on her flaccid cheeks; she kept opening her mouth to speak, making little abortive motions. Finally she could endure it no longer; she nudged Rebecca boldly.
“A pleasant day,” said she.
Rebecca looked at her and nodded coldly. “Yes, very,” she assented.
“Have you come far?”
“I have come from Michigan.”
“Oh!” said the woman, with awe. “It’s a long way,” she remarked presently. “Yes, it is,” replied Rebecca, conclusively.
Still the other woman was not daunted; there was something which she determined to know, possibly roused thereto by a vague sense of incongruity in the other’s appearance. “It’s a long ways to come and leave a family,” she remarked with painful slyness.
“I ain’t got any family to leave,” returned Rebecca shortly.
“Then you ain’t—”
“No, I ain’t.”
“Oh!” said the woman.
Rebecca looked straight ahead at the race of the river.
It was a long ferry. Finally Rebecca herself waxed unexpectedly loquacious. She turned to the other woman and inquired if she knew John Dent’s widow who lived in Ford Village. “Her husband died about three years ago,” said she, by way of detail.
The woman started violently. She turned pale, then she flushed; she cast a strange glance at her husband, who was regarding both women with a sort of stolid keenness.
“Yes, I guess I do,” faltered the woman finally.
“Well, his first wife was my sister,” said Rebecca with the air of one imparting important intelligence.
“Was she?” responded the other woman feebly. She glanced at her husband with an expression of doubt and terror, and he shook his head forbiddingly.
“I’m going to see her, and take my niece Agnes home with me,” said Rebecca. Then the woman gave such a violent start that she noticed it.
“What is the matter?” she asked.
“Nothin’, I guess,” replied the woman, with eyes on her husband, who was slowly shaking his head, like a Chinese toy.
“Is my niece sick?” asked Rebecca with quick suspicion.
“No, she ain’t sick,” replied the woman with alacrity, then she caught her breath with a gasp.
“When did you see her?”
“Let me see; I ain’t seen her for some little time,” replied the woman. Then she caught her breath again.
“She ought to have grown up real pretty, if she takes after my sister. She was a real pretty woman,” Rebecca said wistfully.
“Yes, I guess she did grow up pretty,” replied the woman in a trembling voice.
“What kind of a woman is the second wife?”
The woman glanced at her husband’s warning face. She continued to gaze at him while she replied in a choking voice to Rebecca:
“I—guess she’s a nice woman,” she replied. “I—don’t know, I—guess so. I—don’t see much of her.”
“I felt kind of hurt that John married again so quick,” said Rebecca; “but I suppose he wanted his house kept, and Agnes wanted care. I wasn’t so situated that I could take her when her mother died. I had my own mother to care for, and I was school-teaching. Now mother has gone, and my uncle died six months ago and left me quite a little property, and I’ve given up my school, and I’ve come for Agnes. I guess she’ll be glad to go with me, though I suppose her stepmother is a good woman, and has always done for her.”
The man’s warning shake at his wife was fairly portentous. “I guess so,” said she.
“John always wrote that she was a beautiful woman,” said Rebecca. Then the ferry-boat grated on the shore.
John Dent’s widow had sent a horse and wagon to meet her sister-in-law. When the woman and her husband went down the road, on which Rebecca in the wagon with her trunk soon passed them, she said reproachfully:
“Seems as if I’d ought to have told her, Thomas.”
“Let her find it out herself,” replied the man. “Don’t you go to burnin’ your fingers in other folks’ puddin’, Maria.”
“Do you s’pose she’ll see anything?” asked the woman with a spasmodic shudder and a terrified roll of her eyes.
“See!” returned her husband with stolid scorn. “Better be sure there’s anything to see.”
“Oh, Thomas, they say—”
“Lord, ain’t you found out that what they say is mostly lies?”
“But if it should be true, and she’s a nervous woman, she might be scared enough to lose her wits,” said his wife, staring uneasily after Rebecca’s erect figure in the wagon disappearing over the crest of the hilly road.
“Wits that so easy upset ain’t worth much,” declared the man. “You keep out of it, Maria.”
Rebecca in the meantime rode on in the wagon, beside a flaxen-headed boy, who looked, to her understanding, not very bright. She asked him a question, and he paid no attention. She repeated it, and he responded with a bewildered and incoherent grunt. Then she let him alone, after making sure that he knew how to drive straight.
They had traveled about half a mile, passed the village square, and gone a short distance beyond, when the boy drew up with a sudden Whoa! before a very prosperous-looking house. It had been one of the aboriginal cottages of the vicinity, small and white, with a roof extending on one side over a piazza, and a tiny “L” jutting out in the rear, on the right hand. Now the cottage was transformed by dormer windows, a bay window on the piazzaless side, a carved railing down the front steps, and a modern hard-wood door.
“Is this John Dent’s house?” asked Rebecca.
The boy was as sparing of speech as a philosopher. His only response was in flinging the reins over the horse’s back, stretching out one foot to the shaft, and leaping out of the wagon, then going around to the rear for the trunk. Rebecca got out and went toward the house. Its white paint had a new gloss; its blinds were an immaculate apple green; the lawn was trimmed as smooth as velvet, and it was dotted with scrupulous groups of hydrangeas and cannas.
“I always understood that John Dent was well-to-do,” Rebecca reflected comfortably. “I guess Agnes will have considerable. I’ve got enough, but it will come in handy for her schooling. She can have advantages.”
The boy dragged the trunk up the fine gravel-walk, but before he reached the steps leading up to the piazza, for the house stood on a terrace, the front door opened and a fair, frizzled head of a very large and handsome woman appeared. She held up her black silk skirt, disclosing voluminous ruffles of starched embroidery, and waited for Rebecca. She smiled plac
idly, her pink, double-chinned face widened and dimpled, but her blue eyes were wary and calculating. She extended her hand as Rebecca climbed the steps.
“This is Miss Flint, I suppose,” said she.
“Yes, ma’am,” replied Rebecca, noticing with bewilderment a curious expression compounded of fear and defiance on the other’s face.
“Your letter only arrived this morning,” said Mrs. Dent, in a steady voice. Her great face was a uniform pink, and her china-blue eyes were at once aggressive and veiled with secrecy.
“Yes, I hardly thought you’d get my letter,” replied Rebecca. “I felt as if I could not wait to hear from you before I came. I supposed you would be so situated that you could have me a little while without putting you out too much, from what John used to write me about his circumstances, and when I had that money so unexpected I felt as if I must come for Agnes. I suppose you will be willing to give her up. You know she’s my own blood, and of course she’s no relation to you, though you must have got attached to her. I know from her picture what a sweet girl she must be, and John always said she looked like her own mother, and Grace was a beautiful woman, if she was my sister.”
Rebecca stopped and stared at the other woman in amazement and alarm. The great handsome blonde creature stood speechless, livid, gasping, with her hand to her heart, her lips parted in a horrible caricature of a smile.
“Are you sick!” cried Rebecca, drawing near. “Don’t you want me to get you some water!”
Then Mrs. Dent recovered herself with a great effort. “It is nothing,” she said. “I am subject to—spells. I am over it now. Won’t you come in, Miss Flint?”
As she spoke, the beautiful deep-rose colour suffused her face, her blue eyes met her visitor’s with the opaqueness of turquoise—with a revelation of blue, but a concealment of all behind.
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