“Oh, by all means, Your Honour. Good night, Your Honour.”
The door closed reverently, and His Honour stood staring absently down at the letter in his hand, the smile still in his eyes. A fat, a plethoric, an apoplectic letter; three red seals on the flap of the envelope flaunted themselves at him importantly. He turned it over carelessly. The clear, delicate, vigorous writing greeted him like a challenge:
“Judge Carver.
“To be delivered to him personally without fail.”
Very impressive! He tore open the sealed flap with irreverent fingers and shook the contents out on to the desk. Good Lord, it was a three-volume novel! Page after page of that fine writing, precise and accurate as print. He lifted it curiously, and something fluttered out and lay staring up at him from the table. A piece of blue paper, flimsy, creased and soiled, the round childish writing sprawled recklessly across its battered surface:
10 a.m., .
Pat, I’ll catch either the eight or eight-thirty bus—
Very slowly, very carefully, he picked it up, the smile dying in his incredulous eyes.
Pat, I’ll catch either the eight or eight-thirty bus. That will get me to the cottage before nine, at the latest. I’ll wait there until half past. You can make any excuse that you want to Sue, but get there—and be sure that you bring what you promised. I think you realize as well as I do that there’s no use talking anymore. We’re a long way beyond words, and from now on we’ll confine ourselves to deeds. It’s absurd to think that Steve will suspect anything. I can fool him absolutely, and once we settle the details tonight, we can get off any moment that we decide on. California! Oh, Pat, I can’t wait! And when you realize how happy we’re going to be, you won’t have any regrets either. You always did say that you wanted me to be happy—remember?
Judge Carver pushed the deep chair closer to the lamp and sat down in it heavily, pulling the closely written pages toward him. He looked old and tired.
“Midnight.
“My dear Judge Carver:
“I am fully aware of the fact that I am doing a cowardly thing in writing you this letter. It is simply an attempt on my part to shift my own burden to another’s shoulders, and my shoulders should surely be sufficiently used to burdens by this time. But this one is of so strange, awkward, and terrible a shape that I must get rid of it at any cost to my pride or sense of fair play—or to your peace of mind. If the verdict tomorrow is guilty, of course, I’ll not send the letter, but simply turn the facts over to the prosecutor. I am spending tonight writing you this in case it is not guilty.
“It was I who killed Madeleine Bellamy. It seems simply incredible to me that everyone should not have guessed it long before now.
“Kathleen Page, Melanie Cordier, Laura Roberts, Patrick, Sue, I myself—we told you so over and over again. That singularly obnoxious and alert Mr. Farr—is it possible that he has never suspected—not even when I explained to him that at ten o’clock I was in the flower room, washing off my hands? And yet a few minutes later he was asking me if there wasn’t a sink in the pantry where my poor Sue might have cleansed her own hands of Mimi Bellamy’s blood—and every face in the court was sick with the horror of that thought.
“We told you everything, and no one even listened.
“Who knew about the path across the meadow to the summerhouse? I, not Sue. Who could see the study window clearly from the rose garden? I, not Sue. Who had that hour and a half between 8:30 and ten absolutely alone and unobserved? I, not Sue. Who had every motive that was ascribed to Sue multiplied ten times over? I, who had known poverty beside which Sue’s years in New York were a gay adventure; who had not only a child to fight for, but that child’s children; who, after a lifetime of grim nightmare, had found paradise; and who saw coming to thrust me out from that paradise not an angel with a flaming sword, but a little empty-headed, empty-hearted chit, cheap, mercenary, and implacable, as only the empty-headed can be.
“I know, Judge Carver, that the burden that I am trying to shift to your shoulders should be heaviest of all with the weight of remorse; and there is in it, I can swear to you, enough remorse to bow stronger shoulders than either yours or mine—but none, none for the death of Mimi Bellamy.
“Remorse for these past weeks has eaten me to the bone—for the shame and terror and peril that I have brought to my children, for the sorrow and menace that I have brought to that gentle soul, Stephen Bellamy—even for the death of poor Elliot Farwell; that was my doing, too, I think. I do not shirk it.
“I am rather an old-fashioned person. I believe in hell, and I believe that I shall probably go there because I killed Mimi Bellamy and because I’m not sorry for it; but the hell that I’ve been living through every day and every night since she died is not one shadow darker because it was I who gave her the little push that sped her from one world to another.
“When that unpleasant Mr. Farr was invoking the vengeance of heaven and earth on the fiend who had stopped forever the silver music of the dead girl’s laughter, I remembered that the last time that she laughed it had been at an old woman on her knees begging for the happiness and safety of two babies—and the world did not seem to me to have lost much when that laughter ceased. That is frightful, isn’t it? But that is true.
“I’ll try to
