The Leavenworth Case, Anna Katharine Green [chrysanthemum read aloud TXT] 📗

MRS. BELDEN paused, lost in the sombre shadow which these words were calculated to evoke, and a short silence fell upon the room. It was broken by my asking for some account of the occurrence she had just mentioned, it being considered a mystery how Hannah could have found entrance into her house without the knowledge of the neighbors.

“Well,” said she, “it was a chilly night, and I had gone to bed early (I was sleeping then in the room off this) when, at about a quarter to one—the last train goes through R—— at 12.50—there came a low knock on the window-pane at the head of my bed. Thinking that some of the neighbors were sick, I hurriedly rose on my elbow and asked who was there. The answer came in low, muffled tones, ‘Hannah, Miss Leavenworth’s girl! Please let me in at the kitchen door.’ Startled at hearing the well-known voice, and fearing I knew not what, I caught up a lamp and hurried round to the door. ‘Is any one with you?’ I asked. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Then come in.’ But no sooner had she done so than my strength failed me, and I had to sit down, for I saw she looked very pale and strange, was without baggage, and altogether had the appearance of some wandering spirit. ‘Hannah!’ I gasped, ‘what is it? what has happened? what brings you here in this condition and at this time of night?’ ‘Miss Leavenworth has sent me,’ she replied, in the low, monotonous tone of one repeating a lesson by rote. ‘She told me to come here; said you would keep me. I am not to go out of the house, and no one is to know I am here.’ ‘But why?’ I asked, trembling with a thousand undefined fears; ‘what has occurred?’ ‘I dare not say,’ she whispered; ‘I am forbid; I am just to stay here, and keep quiet.’ ‘But,’ I began, helping her to take off her shawl,—the dingy blanket advertised for in the papers—‘you must tell me. She surely did not forbid you to tell me?’ ‘Yes she did; every one,’ the girl replied, growing white in her persistence, ‘and I never break my word; fire couldn’t draw it out of me.’ She looked so determined, so utterly unlike herself, as I remembered her in the meek, unobtrusive days of our old acquaintance, that I could do nothing but stare at her. ‘You will keep me,’ she said; ‘you will not turn me away?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I will not turn you away.’ ‘And tell no one?’ she went on. ‘And tell no one,’ I repeated.

“This seemed to relieve her. Thanking me, she quietly followed me up-stairs. I put her into the room in which you found her, because it was the most secret one in the house; and there she has remained ever since, satisfied and contented, as far as I could see, till this very same horrible day.”

“And is that all?” I asked. “Did you have no explanation with her afterwards? Did she never give you any information in regard to the transactions which led to her flight?”

“No, sir. She kept a most persistent silence. Neither then nor when, upon the next day, I confronted her with the papers in my hand, and the awful question upon my lips as to whether her flight had been occasioned by the murder which had taken place in Mr. Leavenworth’s household, did she do more than acknowledge she had run away on this account. Some one or something had sealed her lips, and, as she said, ‘Fire and torture should never make her speak.’”

Another short pause followed this; then, with my mind still hovering about the one point of intensest interest to me, I said:

“This story, then, this account which you have just given me of Mary Leavenworth’s secret marriage and the great strait it put her into—a strait from which nothing but her uncle’s death could relieve her—together with this acknowledgment of Hannah’s that she had left home and taken refuge here on the insistence of Mary Leavenworth, is the groundwork you have for the suspicions you have mentioned?”

“Yes, sir; that and the proof of her interest in the matter which is given by the letter I received from her yesterday, and which you say you have now in your possession.”

Oh, that letter!

“I know,” Mrs. Belden went on in a broken voice, “that it is wrong, in a serious case like this, to draw hasty conclusions; but, oh, sir, how can I help it, knowing what I do?”

I did not answer; I was revolving in my mind the old question: was it possible, in face of all these later developments, still to believe Mary Leavenworth’s own hand guiltless of her uncle’s blood?

“It is dreadful to come to such conclusions,” proceeded Mrs. Belden, “and nothing but her own words written in her own hand would ever have driven me to them, but——”

“Pardon me,” I interrupted; “but you said in the beginning of this interview that you did not believe Mary herself had any direct hand in her uncle’s murder. Are you ready to repeat that assertion?”

“Yes, yes, indeed. Whatever I may think of her influence in inducing it, I never could imagine her as having anything to do with its actual