“Ask him this, then. Ask your true friend to look you in the eye and tell you plainly that he did not murder his wife.”
Eighteen
“Yes,” the man in the homburg whispered. “Yes, I know you, don't I?” A measure of the old man's fear fell away as he peered closely at the face of Harry Sturdevant. Harry saw relief in his eyes as well. And, he thought, perhaps a hint of disappointment.
“I'm Harry Sturdevant, Tillie. It's been a few years.” He pulled the glove from his hand and offered it, hoping to lure the other man within grasp of the large bored rifle he carried. But the old man scurried three steps backward. On the last, his heel found a shard of ice Harry had chopped from the driveway and he slipped, falling heavily on his hip.
“Stay back,” he croaked as Sturdevant reached toward him. The man who bore Tilden Beckwith's name struggled to his knees, the Weatherby's bore waving in Sturdevant’ s general direction. Sturdevant straightened and relaxed. A look of sudden horror returned to the old man's face. Frantically, he patted one hand against the pocket of his coat, then reached inside and pulled free a bottle of Glenlivet Scotch, whole and unbroken. He waggled it at Sturdevant. The horror vanished. He looked pleased with himself.
“This is for him,” he said. “It's his brand, you know.”
“For him,” Sturdevant repeated blankly.
“For Tilden Beckwith. Glenlivet is his favorite. I never in my life heard him have to ask for it because everyone knew. Other people would have to say what drink they wanted, but not Grandfather Tilden.”
“Yes,” Sturdevant answered, staring. “Yes, I remember.” He turned and glanced up toward the house. A shadow moved behind the living-room curtains. When he turned again he saw the hollow-eyed old man squinting past him through dim late-afternoon light and the falling snow.
“He's in there, isn't he?” The voice fell again to a whisper. “He's come back.”
'Tillie—”
”I saw you with him, you know. I saw you yesterday at the Plaza. You were having drinks and talking, and I bet his drink was Glenlivet. You were so much older than he was. When you knew him before, you were younger. Now you're older. But he didn't change at all.”
Sturdevant shook his head. “Tillie, that was not—” He stopped himself. There didn't seem to be much use in explaining the truth of it. If this man had been following Jonathan, which was the way it sounded, he must have known perfectly well that Jonathan had a name and that name was Corbin. Another thought struck him. “Tillie, have you had other people following us? Did you have someone waiting for us outside my house this morning?”
“Not me. That wasn't my doing.”
”I see.”
“It was always Ella. I would say, Don't do this, or, I don't want to do that, and she would just slap me and go and do it anyway.”
“What sort of things would she do, Tillie?”
“Lots of things. Is he in there?”
“No. He's gone out. And you are not going to walk into that house with a loaded gun.”
“It's not to hurt him. It's just to keep him from hurting me until we have a drink and talk. None of it was my fault.”
“What, Tillie? What wasn't your fault?”
“Ella hit him. He struck Father and Ella hit him with her cane. And then they told me to go away, to go to Florida, and they sent Bigelow to Chicago after the others. But he came back for Bigelow and now he's back for Ella.”
Sturdevant suddenly felt cold. Deathly cold. The storm reached beneath his coat as if it had fingers. “Ella,” he
repeated softly. “Ella killed him.” He did not phrase it as a question.
“He knows that, doesn't he.” There was that relief again. “He told you.”
Sturdevant nodded slowly, almost afraid to speak. His mind fought against accepting the words he was hearing and the monstrous truth to which they were giving shape. “The Corbins,” he whispered finally. “They tried to kill all the Corbins.”
The old man nodded distantly. He stared into a space beyond Sturdevant’s shoulder as if watching a scene that was being played there. “He came back for my father too, you know. He was waiting for him when he died. Right there at the bed. Father saw him. Ella tried to tell him it was only the minister. He didn't even hear her. He started screaming and crying and trying to crawl up the headboard and then suddenly he just sort of melted there. They couldn't close his eyes, did you know that? They had to use thread or they wouldn't stay shut.”
“And Bigelow”—Sturdevant tried to form a question that would not betray his ignorance of that person's existence—“The man Ella sent to kill the Corbins ... he too saw Tilden when he died?”
The old man shook his head slowly. “Tilden didn't have to wait for Bigelow. He was alive again then. He was young again.”
“He didn't tell me about that,” Sturdevant said carefully. “He said only that he found Bigelow. He did not say when or where.”
Sturdevant had no clear idea why he was pursuing this Bigelow business, nor why he lied about having heard the name before, except that the words alive again and young again called up the picture of a living though not so young man who was the image of Tilden Beckwith down to the last fine detail of his face. A response formed on the old man's lips, but it froze there. His mouth fell slowly open, and his eyes stared past Sturdevant with the expression of a silent moan.
“Uncle Harry?” He heard Gwen's voice calling behind him.
“Ohhh!” The old man backed away, tears spilling on his cheeks.
“Are you okay?” He heard her voice again. Sturdevant raised a hand in reply, but he did not take his eyes from Tilden Beckwith II or from the trembling finger that was tightening over the rifle's trigger. He knew without turning what this wreck of a man was seeing. He was seeing another dead person made newly young. He was looking at Gwen Leamas standing framed in the doorway of a Victorian house and wearing a long, white Victorian gown. But he was seeing Charlotte Corbin, a graceful old woman who was murdered in Chicago forty years before. He was seeing Margaret Barrie.
It had never entered Margaret's mind that she might not return to Greenwich. If Laura Hemmings had told Teddy where she was when he came back to her house with news of finding Tilden, if Tilden could have wired her directly and not used Laura as an intermediary, she would almost surely have been on the first train east. She would have come quickly, even though it was Tilden’ s wish that she stay until his fever was broken and his cruel injuries had healed, stay until it was known that all outside threats to their happiness were gone from them. She would have come back even if she did not yet know that it was in Tilden’s mind to ask her to be his wife.
But Tilden’s message to Margaret was not at all direct. It was filtered first through Teddy, a friend deeply concerned for him, and again through Laura, a friend just as well intentìoned where Margaret's welfare was involved. It is best that you stay away, was the meaning Margaret saw in the language of the message she received. The second message, the one which broke her heart, was one which had lost even more in translation. It had occurred to Tilden near the end of his first week at Bellevue that Margaret might find herself in need of cash. He arranged, through Teddy, for the bank in Greenwich to send her a draft in the amount of five hundred dollars and to advise her of the much larger amount which was on deposit in her name. He scribbled a loving note that was meant to accompany the draft.
The draft and the intelligence of the larger deposit were forwarded by wire once Laura Hemmings provided the bank with her address, but Tilden's note did not go with it. If he had been less befogged by laudanum and less distracted by the pain of his wired jaw, he would have known that the banker, J. H. Hinckley, would not have opened a sealed envelope in order to add its message to the wire bearing the draft, nor would he have considered that Hinckley, having placed the letter in his rolltop desk to await a forwarding address, would have forgotten it entirely. What Margaret received, then, was simply the five-hundred-dollar draft and a statement of the ba
lance of her account. The transaction being complete in and of itself, Mr. Hinckley added, as was his custom in such matters, that no further communication was required from her. Margaret was crushed. It appeared to her that she had been paid in full for services rendered.
The two weeks that followed brought no relief to this tragic misunderstanding. Margaret promptly mailed the draft back to Laura Hemmings, together with her interpretation of its meaning. Laura presumed that interpretation to be accurate because she presumed it to be based upon a clear communication from Tilden and not upon a banker's routine addendum. Furious, Laura forwarded the draft to Tilden's office with the advice that Margaret did not want his goddamned money and that no further communication would be required of him, either, if she had her way. A full five weeks had passed since he left Margaret to do his “errand” at Lyndhurst and three weeks since Margaret had departed for her Evanston visit when Tilden felt well enough to ask his head clerk, Mr. Levi Scoggins, to bring his accumulated correspondence to his room at Bellevue. It was then, to his horror, when he realized that either a terrible mistake had somehow been made or that Margaret had simply decided that she'd had enough of Greenwich, of living with her fears and in an indefinite relationship, and of Tilden Beckwith himself. He leaped into his clothes and rushed from Bellevue without the leave of any doctor. Cursing the wired jaw that prevented him from telephoning Laura Hemmings, he caught the first available train from Grand Central to Greenwich and was pounding upon Laura
Hemmings's door within three hours of opening her letter. Three hours after that, he was aboard a train to Chicago.
For the rest of his life, Tilden would mourn what might have been save for those three drugged weeks and a misplaced letter. He would never fully understand all the things which contributed to Margaret's decision that she would not return with him. There were times when he thought that the soaring ecstasy of their reunion was, in its own odd way, as responsible as any other factor for what would follow. ”I almost think,” she told him, “that it is better to be melancholy all the time, or happy all the time, than it is to swing so greatly and so often between those two ends of the same frayed rope.” She had refused to see him at first, though her resolution lasted not a quarter hour, and that was well because the ladies of the WCTU were becoming certain that their stoutest doors and Evanston's burliest policemen would not long keep him at bay. After sending down word that she would consent to a brief interview, she steeled herself and descended the stairs toward the building foyer where he waited, pacing, and she dissolved into tears at her first sight of the sutures on his face and his bandaged hands and at his first words through jaws that would not open. It took a half hour more before he could scribble all that was in his heart, all the news of the past five weeks, on the backs of every scrap of paper he could find. And all the while he cried as hard as she.
They spent that night together, appearances be damned, and all the next day as well. There was scarcely a moment when Tilden's arms were not around Margaret, or around Jonathan, or around both of them together.
It was at the end of the second day, at dinner, when Margaret told Tilden that she'd been asked to consider moving permanently to Evanston. She confessed that she'd told the ladies there that she and Jonathan were quite alone in the world and without ties to Greenwich or any other place. And they spoke to her of the wonderful opportunities that existed for women in this fine new Chicago which had risen from the great fire of 1871. Women were a great force here, they'd told her. There had been too much work to do, too much need for women's energies, to waste time perpetuating silly myths about the proper role of that sex. A newspaper, the Chicago Sun, had already printed a piece she'd written on the work of the Temperance Union and had asked her to do another on—''Do not laugh at this, Tilden”—the high-priced sporting houses of South Dearborn Street from a decent woman's perspective.
Tilden had been listening attentively enough, and he was indeed amused, but he listened as if the topic had no real significance because she and Jonathan would, after all, be returning with him as soon as she could complete the task for which she'd come.
At dinner on the third night, Margaret asked Tilden why he did not consider moving to Chicago as well. He could surely begin a new brokerage business there, or else open a new office. Tilden answered that he, in fact, had considered starting a branch office or two, and Chicago was certainly a candidate for one of them, what with all the new building still going on and most of the nation's cattle and grain wealth being funneled through that city. But such a move was at least a year or two in the future. If and when it happened, he promised Margaret, they would visit Chicago often. These words spoken, it was Margaret's silence that made him all the more attentive. And this time he did not smile.
“My heart stopped beating just now.” Tilden placed his hand against it. “I had the strangest notion and it turned me cold.”
“Your heart is listening to mine, I think,” she said softly.
“Do not say it, Margaret.” He forced these words through his wired jaw. “Please don't say you'll not return with me.”
”I will not go back to Greenwich.”
“But you love it there. You said so.”
”I love its beauty. I love our home there. Our friends. Our little cove where we slip off to swim. I do not love all the new people who are moving there from New York, like that Inspector Williams of yours. I do not love living so close to a man who hates you that I can almost feel his breath. I do not love Anthony Comstock.'`
“Gould has pulled in his claws and Comstock is gone. You have nothing to fear.”
“Gould only waits. You said yourself that he's a man who eats his revenge cold. As for Comstock, he left a stain on that town, Tilden, which will never wash away.”
“New York, then,” he said urgently. “We'll be married and we'll live in New York.”
' The fate of Carrie Todd and Belle Walker can find me there just as easily, Tilden. Marry me and it will find you at the same time.”
“In which case we'll have a perfectly good reason to move to Chicago.”
Margaret took his hands. “Do you mean that, my darling?”
“To Chicago, to London, or in a hut among the heathen Chinee. It is all the same if you are with me. If you are not,there is no life for me at all.”
“Then move here now. Move to Chicago.”
”I cannot.” He touched his lips to her fingertips. “Not now. The business has been given to me by my father. It is a sacred trust. Even more sacred is my responsibility to those employees and friends who stood by me through time of great difficulty and who made sacrifices on my behalf. Please say you understand that, Margaret.”
”I do, Tilden,” she answered gently. “If I had no child, I would be on the train with you tomorrow. But I have no right to risk Jonathan's name. And I will not risk his good opinion of me if I can help it.”
He squeezed her hands until he realized that the tears he saw were from pain as well as sorrow. “Do not leave me, Margaret.” Tilden's jaw trembled. ”I will die.”
”I will never leave you, Tilden,” she whispered.
“Does that mean you will—”
Margaret.touched her fingers to his mouth. “It means I will wait for you, Tilden.”
Nothing between them changed very much from the day Margaret made that promise. The house in Greenwich was sold within the year and Tilden sent some of the money to Margaret and invested the rest in her name. Tilden traveled to Chicago twice more that summer. On the second trip he brought Lucy Stone who, having heard on Margaret's authority that the coloreds of Evanston lived in houses as nice as the whites, had elected to join Margaret. The press of business kept Tilden in New York through the early fall, but he came for a long Thanksgiving holiday and again over Christmas of l891.
Between visits and well into 1892, Tilden and Margaret exchanged letters every week without fail. A planned visit for July of 1892 was delayed by the death of Cyrus Field. Tilden was chosen as a pal
lbearer and as one of the eulogizers at Field's service. As he looked down from the pulpit and saw that Jay Gould had taken a preeminent place among the mourners, Tilden was sorely tempted to depart from his prepared text and heap public scorn upon Gould and those like him. But he chose to honor Cyrus Field by doing no such thing. Gould called enough attention to himself by coughing away a little more of his life at intervals throughout the service.
The following month, Tilden wrote to Margaret, suggesting an excursion by riverboat to New Orleans, where in September they would watch John L. Sullivan defend his title against the San Francisco Dancing Master, James J. Corbett. Margaret was thrilled. She quickly wheedled a reporter's assignment from the Chicago Sun so there would be no question of her being allowed inside the arena. Even then it took Sullivan's intercession to get her past the gate-men. John Flood was there, of course, and to Tilden's delight Nat Goodwin as well, along with Bat Masterson, once a famous frontier lawman, now a sportswriter. These men toasted Sullivan's chances before the fight, then his grace in defeat after he lost it, all with equal enthusiasm.
Tilden needed all of the three-day riverboat ride up the Mississippi to recover. Once they were back in Chicago, their sorrow over the champion's defeat turned immediately to gladness because they were to attend the wedding of Lucy Stone to a roofing contractor named Amos Tuttle who'd been called in one day to repair a leak in the shingles of Margaret's house. Lucy moved into her own home in the colored part of Evanston but still spent her days with Margaret and Jonathan. Jonathan had begun calling Tilden Uncle Tilden. Tilden told Margaret he'd much rather be called Father but could offer no practical suggestion unless of course Margaret stopped all this foolishness and came back to New York and married him. Margaret would smile and kiss him and say, once again, ”I will wait for you, Tilden.”
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