“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 be
en 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.
The Bellamy Trial (American Mystery Classics) Page 34