A Modern Madonna. Caroline Abbot Stanley
was extinct. I have not thought it necessary. A dozen men are here who heard him say it was accidental, and from a weapon in his own hand." He picked up the cloth used in cleaning the revolver. "This seems to substantiate his statement as to how he happened to have the pistol." Several men were examined as to the ante-mortem statement.
The coroner's report was, "Accidental killing from a weapon in the hand of the deceased." Since it had been clearly shown to be accidental, no jury was impaneled.
It was Margaret's wish that Victor should be buried from his own home. When Judge Kirtley communicated this wish to Richard De Jarnette, he was surprised to find him averse to the arrangement. He preferred that he should be buried from his home, he said briefly. They were separated, and there was no use keeping up a pretence that they were not.
The Judge remonstrated that nobody knew what had passed between them that afternoon, not even Mr. De Jarnette, nor how it would have gone in the future had Victor lived. Margaret's wish to have him buried from his own home would seem to indicate that there had been a reconciliation. At any rate, it would put a different face on the matter to the world, and make it easier for her afterwards.
"Yes," Richard agreed, grimly, "it might make things easier for her." And he consented.
The burial service was brief and wholly impersonal. The burial was private.
Margaret went to the carriage on the arm of her brother-in-law by the arrangement of the undertaker. He had not been near her since the day they separated at the close of the coroner's inquest. Victor De Jarnette's body had lain in his brother's house two days and nights and had then been taken to the house on Massachusetts Avenue the morning of the burial. This was the most that Mr. De Jarnette would consent to. Whatever was thought about the grief of the wife, at this untimely death, there was no doubt as to that of the brother. Richard De Jarnette had aged years in these few days.
As the carriage door was closed upon Margaret alone, Judge Kirtley stepped up to the undertaker.
"Does not Mr. De Jarnette ride with Mrs. De Jarnette?" he asked in a low tone.
"No, sir, he preferred to ride in the second carriage alone. The third is reserved for you, sir."
"I will trouble you to open that door," said the Judge, rather stiffly, indicating the first carriage. "You may use your third carriage for some one else or dismiss it. I shall ride with Mrs. De Jarnette."
In a green bank at Oak Hill he was laid—Oak Hill, that beautiful silent suburb which, for a century of the capital's life—the shifting, heaving, kaleidoscopic life in which men come and go, and wax and wane, and pass into obscurity in ceaseless flow—has steadily gained in population and never lost. A passionate, turbulent soul was Victor De Jarnette, not wholly bad certainly; capable of much that was generous; productive of little that was worth perpetuating; not lacking in good impulses, but casting them oftener than otherwise in a mould of wax, which melted at the first hot blast of passion—a mixture, like most of us perhaps, of good and evil, black and white. But alas!
"The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones."
That night Margaret De Jarnette sat long before the grate fire of the lonely house to which she had come a bride—looking into the darkening coals and seeing nothing—looking into the embers of a dead fire within, and finding much that had burned out. She lived relentlessly over the past two years—putting to herself searching questions and exacting an answer to every one; going down into black depths of whose existence she once had not dreamed and coming up with staring, frightened eyes from which the scales of innocence had dropped.
Then she drew a long, shuddering breath.
"That book is closed," she whispered, "never to be opened again, thank God! … My girlhood is put away with it. I am old—old!"—she threw herself on her knees beside her sleeping child—"But oh, my baby! my little one! my blessed one! I have you! I have you!"
"Semple," Richard De Jarnette said abruptly as he and his friend sat together that night—a long silence had fallen between them—"could a wound like that be self-inflicted? In God's name, tell me the truth!"
It was the question Dr. Semple had been dreading for three days. He had thought of several ways to evade it. When it came, there was something in the haggard face of the man before him that would not be denied.
"No," he said, simply. "It would be a physical impossibility."
CHAPTER XI
THE WILL
It was two weeks or more after the burial of Victor De Jarnette before his will was read. Mr. Jarvis, the attorney in whose charge it had been left, had been absent from the city at the time of the unfortunate affair, and the hearing of the will had of necessity been postponed until his return. This was a matter of very little concern to Margaret. It seemed to her rather a useless formality anyway, this coming together to hear the provisions of a legal instrument that could have but one outcome. The money would go to Philip, of course. Judge Kirtley had talked to her about her "dower rights," and a "child's part," and several other things that she did not in the least understand, but she only shook her head. She had a great abundance of money, she told him, for her own needs and Philip's, too, for that matter, and she had determined to turn over to her child at once whatever legally came to her. She had a shuddering feeling that she did not want to use Victor's money. Let it all go to Philip. In fact, Margaret had always been so far removed from any care in regard to money except the spending of it that her ideas on the subject were very vague and impractical. She had always had all the money she wanted or could possibly use, and what would anybody want with more than that? Avarice is the vice of age rather than of youth, and Margaret certainly was not avaricious.
She had spent this fortnight in adjusting herself to new conditions. When the first horror of it all passed she became aware that a great load was lifted from her heart. There was nothing to do; there was no choice pressing upon her; everything was settled, and that by no act of hers; there was no danger now of trouble about Philip, and the sharp relief she experienced at this thought made her aware of what a steadily-growing fear that had begun to be. No, that was over now, thank God! and she caught up the child in a passion of relief.
There was something infinitely touching about the girl in these days when she stood looking at the wreck of her life. It was so different from what she had thought it would be—so different! She wondered vaguely if other people—most people—saw their ships go down like this.
The sea around her was filled with wreckage. There was nothing now but to gather up the scattered bits and with such courage as she could summon, piece out another life. A very quiet subdued one this would be, with Philip as its center. It would be colorless perhaps—she shivered slightly—she was not quite twenty-one, and color had not lost its charm—but it would, at least, be peaceful.
Then, as thought projected itself into the future, and she saw this opening bud grow to the perfect flower, it seemed to her that it would not only be peaceful, but satisfying. Now he was a rolicking boy, and she would see to it that he missed none of life's pleasures that had not a sting;—now he was a lad at school, she standing by his side, thinking his thoughts and leading him on to think hers—she would keep very, very close to him! her little Philip!—then a youth at college—could she let him go away for that?—and now a man fitted for useful life, and with his strong arm shielding her, his mother, who had shielded him, smoothing the pathway for her feet as she went down life's hill. Ah! through it all how she would guard him, guide him, carry him by sheer force of mother-love across the slippery places that his feet would find. His father—and her thought of him, a motherless boy, grew tender—his father had missed this. Perhaps, if he had had it—well, she would make it up to Philip, his child, at any rate. She would try to keep him pure. This with a sudden sinking sense of her own helplessness. The first regret came to her that it was a son she had and not a daughter. A daughter she could keep with her while a son must of necessity go out into