Two Days' Solitary Imprisonment, Edward Bellamy [top ten books to read txt] 📗

that I remember, I saw it in your hands."

"Before the murder, were you, Joseph? Why, that's almost enough to make one feel superstitious," said Silas, turning around in his chair, so as to look fairly at him.

Joseph had half a mind to make a clean breast of the matter then and there, and explain to them how curiously the reading of that book had affected him. But he reflected that Silas was rather unimaginative, and would probably be more mystified than enlightened by his explanation.

"I do believe it was reading that book which made you act so queerly when I brought you in the news of the murder," pursued Mrs. Kilgore.

"How is that? How did he act queerly?" asked Silas.

"I am not aware that I acted queerly at all," said Joseph doggedly.

He knew well enough he had acted queerly, and did not mean to deny that; but, as children and confused persons often do, he answered to the underlying motive rather than the language. He only thought of denying the inference of suspicion that her words seemed to him to suggest. But to Mrs. Kilgore he very naturally seemed to be prevaricating.

"Why, Joseph!" said she, in a raised voice, and with a slight asperity; "you know how you jumped up, looking like a ghost, the moment I opened the door, and the first thing you said after I 'd told you that they 'd found a murdered man in the barn, was--Why, Joseph, what's the matter?"

But I must go back a little. When the conversation turned on the book and Joseph's connection with it, a minute or so previous, Silas had quite naturally glanced over at his brother, and, as the talk went on, his glance had become a somewhat concentrated gaze, although expressive of nothing but the curiosity and slight wonder which the circumstances suggested. It would not do to have Silas think that he avoided his eyes, and so Joseph had, as soon as he felt this gaze, turned his own face rather sharply toward it. He had meant merely to meet his brother's look in a natural and unaffected manner. But, although never more sensible of just what such a manner would be, he was utterly unable to compass it. He was perfectly aware that the expression of his eyes was much too serious and challenging,--and yet he could not, for the soul of him, modify it. Nor did he dare to withdraw his gaze after it had once met his brother's, although knowing that it was fast becoming a fierce stare, and perceiving that Silas had already noticed something peculiar in it. For to drop his eyes would be utter discomfiture and rout. As Mrs. Kilgore alluded to his queer demeanor when she told him the news, his face began to flush with the anticipation of the revelation that was coming at this most unfavorable moment, even while his eyes were locked with the already startled ones of Silas. As she went on, the flush covered the lower part of his face, and rose like a spring-tide up his cheeks, and lent a fierce, congested glare to his eyes. He felt how woeful and irretrievable a thing it would be for him just then to lose his countenance, and at the thought the flush burned deeper and merged higher. It overspread his high, bald, intellectual forehead, and incarnadined his sconce up to the very top of it. At this moment it was that Mrs. Kilgore broke off her narrative with the exclamation, "Why, Joseph, what's the matter?"

At her words it seemed as if every drop of blood in his body poured into his face. He could endure it no longer. He rose abruptly, strode out of the parlor, and went to his room, although it was but eight o'clock, and he had no fire there. If he had staid another moment he must have brained Silas and his wife with the poker, such an ungovernable anger boiled up in him with the sense of his causeless, shameful discomfiture.

As Joseph left the parlor the eyes of Silas and his wife met each other, --his dull with bewilderment and terror at a spectral fear; hers keen with a definite suspicion. But even her loquacity was subdued by a real fright. She had nothing to say. Her sensation was like that of one who, hunting a hare, stumbles upon a wolf. She had been both offended and made curious by Joseph's demeanor that afternoon, but the horrid idea that within a moment had been suggested to both their minds had so little occurred to her as a serious possibility that she was even on the point of rallying Joseph on it before her husband. Some time after he had left the parlor Silas asked, with averted face:--

"What was it that he said when you told him the news?" and then she repeated his words.

And Joseph, sitting wild-eyed upon his bed in the darkness in the room above, red no longer, but pale as death, heard the murmur of the voices, and knew that she was telling him. No one of the household slept much that night, except Mrs. Kil-gore. Whenever she awoke she heard her husband tossing restlessly, but she dared not ask him what was the matter. In vain did Silas rehearse to himself all through the night-hours how petty were the trifles in Joseph's demeanor which had disturbed him. They were of the sort of trifles which create that species of certainty known as moral certainty,--the strongest of all in the mind it occupies, although so incapable of being communicated to others. It mattered little how much evidence there was, if it sufficed to lodge the faintest trace of suspicion in his mind. For, like some poisons, an atom of suspicion is as fatal as the largest quantity, Nay, perhaps, even more surely so, for against great suspicion the mind often takes arms and makes valiant head; but a little doubt, by its timid and hesitant demeanor, disarms opposition, and is readily entertained. And all that night, lying awake, and knowing that Silas was sleepless just the other side of the partition, and that the fungus of suspicion was moment by moment overgrowing his mind, he could hardly wait for morning, but would fain have rushed, even now in the darkness, to his bedside to cry: "I did not do it! Believe me, brother, I did not do it!"

In the morning, however, the sun shone brightly into his room, and last night's events and misunderstandings seemed like a bad dream. He went downstairs almost cheery. He did not find Silas, but Mrs. Kilgore was about. He was rather startled to observe the entire change in her demeanor. Yesterday she was constantly following him up with her sharp black eyes and brisk questions and exclamations, but now she seemed frightened, acted in a constrained manner, and avoided his eyes.

"Where is Silas?" he asked, as they sat down to table.

"He said that there was something he must see to at the shop before work began, so he had an early breakfast," replied Mrs. Kilgore, with her eyes on her plate.

Had she been looking up, she would have seen a piteous constriction in the muscles of Joseph's face. His heart was sick, and all his regained courage sank away. It was no bad dream. Silas was afraid to meet him. He left his meal untasted, and went to the office. A dozen acquaintances stopped him on his way down-street to ask about the murder; and all day long somebody was dropping in to pester him on the same subject. He told them with a dull, abstracted air all the fresh details he knew, but felt all the time as if he cheated each auditor of the vital part of the matter, in that he failed to shout after him:--

"Silas suspects me of it!"

Silas had, indeed, left the house early for the purpose of avoiding his brother. He was in a condition of mind and nerve in which he did not dare to meet him. At tea the brothers met for the first time since the night previous. There was a constraint between them like that between strangers, but stronger and more chilling far than ever that is. There is no chill like that which comes between friends, and the nearer the friends the more deathly the cold. Silas made a little effort to speak of business-matters, but could not keep it up, and soon a silence settled over the party, only broken by the words of table-service. Mrs. Kilgore sat pale and frightened all through the meal without venturing a single phrase, and scarcely looking up from her plate.

The silence was of that kind which all felt to be more expressive than the loudest, most explicit language could be,--more merciless than any form of verbal accusation. Such silence is a terribly perfect medium, in which souls are compelled to touch each other, resent as they may the contact. Several times Joseph was on the point of rising and rushing from the table. How many more such meals could he stand or could they stand? All of them recognized that the situation had become perceptibly more serious and more pronounced on account of that silent tea-table.

There was in particular not the slightest allusion made by any one to the murder, which, seeing that it had happened but yesterday, and would naturally still have been an engrossing topic, was an omission so pointed as to be an open charge of guilt. There is such a thing as emphasizing a topic by suppressing it, as letters are sunk into stone. The omission impressed Silas as it did Joseph, but, regarding it from his point of view, it did not occur to him but that Joseph was the one solely responsible for it. He, Silas, had refrained from reference to it because his suspicions in regard to Joseph made the topic unendurable. But he could not imagine that Joseph could have had any other motive for his silence on the subject but a guilty conscience,--some secret knowledge of the crime. Thus regarded, it was a terrible confirmation. That a perception that he was suspected might cause an innocent man to act very much as if he were conscious of guilt did not occur to Silas, as, perhaps, it would have failed to occur to most persons in just his position.

After leaving the tea-table the brothers went together into the parlor, according to the family custom. They took their accustomed seats on opposite sides of the fireplace, but there was no conversation. A veil was between them. Both were thinking of the same thing,--thinking of it intensely,--and each knew that the other was thinking of it, and yet neither for worlds could have commanded the courage to speak of it. The suspicion had grown definite in Silas's mind, and yet, whenever he brought himself to the point of putting it in words, it suddenly seemed impossible, cruel, and absurd. But if Silas found it impossible to speak, far more so it seemed to Joseph.

To charge another with suspecting us is half to confess ourselves worthy of suspicion. It is demoralizing,--it is to abandon the pride of conscious rectitude. To deny an accusation is to concede to it a possibility, a color of reason; and Joseph shrank with unutterable repugnance from that. He felt that he could be torn limb from limb sooner than betray by a word that he recognized the existence of suspicion so abominable. Besides, of what avail would be a denial without evidence to disprove a suspicion which had arisen without evidence? It was a thing too impalpable to contend with. As well fight a fog as seek