"I have no remembrance of what I said to her. She tried to tell me how she had been tempted and how she had not realized her own act, till the moment I bent down to kiss her lips as her husband. But I did not stop to listen - I could not. I flew immediately to Miss Tuttle with the violent demand as to whether she knew that her sister was already a wife when she married me, and when she cried out 'No!' and showed great dismay, I broke forth with the dreadful tale and cowered in unmanly anguish at her feet, and went mad and lost myself for a little while. Then I went back to my wretched wife and asked her how the awful deed had been done. She told me, and again I did not believe her and began to look upon it all as some wild dream or the distempered fancies of a disordered brain.
This thought calmed me and I spoke gently to her and even tried to take her hand. But she herself was raving now, and clung about my knees, murmuring words of such anguish and contrition that my worst fears returned and, only stopping to take the key of the Moore house from my bureau, I left the house and wandered madly - I know not where.
"I did not go back that day. I could not face her again till I knew how much of her confession was fancy and how much was fact.
I roamed the streets, carrying that key from one end of the city to the other, and at night I used it to open the house which she had declared contained so dreadful a secret.
"I had bought candles on my way there but, forgetting to take them from the store, I had no light with which to penetrate the horrible place that even the moon refused to illumine. I realized this when once in, but would not go back. All I have told about using matches to light me to the southwest chamber is true, also my coming upon the old candelabrum there, with a candle in one of its sockets. This candle I lit, my sole reason for seeking this room being my desire to examine the antique sketch for the words which she had said could be found there.
"I had failed to bring a magnifying-glass with me, but my eyes are phenomenally sharp. Knowing where to look, I was able to pick out enough words here and there in the lines composing the hair, to feel quite sure that my wife had neither deceived me nor been deceived as to certain directions being embodied there in writing. Shaken in my last lingering hope, but not yet quite convinced that these words pointed to outrageous crime, I flew next to the closet and drew out the fatal drawer.
"You have been there and know what the place is, but no one but myself can ever realize what it was for me, still loving, still clinging to a wild inconsequent belief in my wife, to grope in that mouth of hell for the spring she had chattered about in her sleep, to find it, press it, and then to hear, down in the dark of the fearsome recess, the sound of something deadly strike against what I took to be the cushions of the old settle standing at the edge of the library hearthstone.
"I think I must have fainted. For when I found myself possessed of sufficient consciousness to withdraw from that hole of death, the candle in the candelabrum was shorter by an inch than when I first thrust my head into the gap made by the removed drawers.
In putting back the drawers I hit the candelabrum with my foot, upsetting it and throwing out the burning candle. As the flames began to lick the worm-eaten boarding of the floor a momentary impulse seized me to rush away and leave the whole place to burn.
But I did not. With a sudden frenzy, I stamped out the flame, and then finding myself in darkness, griped my way downstairs and out. If I entered the library I do not remember it. Some lapses must be pardoned a man involved as I was."
"But the fact which you dismiss so lightly is an important one," insisted the major. "We must know positively whether you entered this room or not."
"I have no recollection of doing so"
"Then you can not tell us whether the little table was standing there, with the candelabrum upon it or - "
"I can tell you nothing about it."
The major, after a long look at this suffering man, turned toward Miss Tuttle.
"You must have loved your sister very much," he sententiously remarked.
She flushed and for the first time her eyes fell from their resting-place on Mr. Jeffrey's face.
"I loved her reputation," was her quiet answer, "and - " The rest died in her throat.
But we all - such of us, I mean, who were possessed of the least sensibility or insight, knew how that sentence sounded as finished in her heart" and I loved him who asked this sacrifice of me."
Yet was her conduct not quite clear.
"And to save that reputation you tied the pistol to her wrist?" insinuated the major.
"No," was her vehement reply. "I never knew what I was tying to her. My testimony in that regard was absolutely true. She held the pistol concealed in the folds of her dress. I did not dream - I could not - that she was contemplating any such end to the atrocious crime - to which she had confessed. Her manner was too light, too airy and too frivolous - a manner adopted, as I now see, to forestall all questions and hold back all expressions of feeling on my part. 'Tie these hanging ends of ribbon to my wrist,' were her words. 'Tie them tight; a knot under and a bow on top. I am going out - There, don't say anything - What you want to talk about will keep till tomorrow. For one night more I am going to make merry - to - to enjoy myself.' She was laughing.
I thought her horribly callous and trembled with such an unspeakable repulsion that I had difficulty in making the knot.
To speak at all would have been impossible. Neither did I dare to look in her face. I was touching the hand and she kept on laughing - such a hollow laugh covering up such an awful resolve!
When she turned to give me that last injunction about the note, this resolve glared still in her eyes."
"And you never suspected?"
"Not for an instant. I chid not do justice either to her misery or to her conscience. I fear that I have never done her justice in anyway. I thought her light, pleasure-loving. I did not know that it was assumed to hide a terrible secret."
