"I kept company with the deceased for a year or thereabouts. I said I would marry her when I had money enough. She said I had money enough now. We had a quarrel. She refused to walk out with me any more; she wouldn't draw me my beer; she took up with my fellow-servant, David Crouch. I went to her on the Saturday, and said I would marry her as soon as we could be asked in church if she would give up Crouch. She laughed at me. She turned me out of the wash-house, and the rest of them saw her turn me out. I was not easy in my mind. I went and sat on the gate--the gate in the meadow they call Pettit's Piece. I thought I would shoot her. I went and fetched my gun and loaded it. I went out into Pettit's Piece again. I was hard put to it to make up my mind. I thought I would try my luck--I mean try whether to kill her or not---by throwing up the Spud of the plow into the air. I said to myself, if it falls flat, I'll spare her; if it falls point in the earth, I'll kill her. I took a good swing with it, and shied it up. It fell point in the earth. I went and shot her. It was a bad job, but I did it. I did it, as they said I did it at the trial. I hope the Lord will have mercy on me. I wish my mother to have my old clothes. I have no more to say."In the happier days of her life, Magdalen would have passed over the narrative of the execution, and the printed confession which accompanied it unread; the subject would have failed to attract her. She read the horrible story now--read it with an interest unintelligible to her self. Her attention, which had wandered over higher and better things, followed every sentence of the murderer's hideously direct confession from beginning to end. If the man or the woman had been known to her, if the place had been familiar to her memory, she could hardly have followed the narrative more closely, or have felt a more distinct impression of it left on her mind. She laid down the paper, wondering at herself; she took it up once more, and tried to read some other portion of the contents. The effort was useless; her attention wandered again. She threw the paper away, and went out into the garden. The night was dark; the stars were few and faint. She could just see the gravel-walk--she could just pace backward and forward between the house door and the gate.
The confession in the newspaper had taken a fearful hold on her mind. As she paced the walk, the black night opened over the sea, and showed her the murderer in the field hurling the Spud of the plow into the air. She ran, shuddering, back to the house. The murderer followed her into the parlor. She seized the candle and went up into her room. The vision of her own distempered fancy followed her to the place where the laudanum was hidden, and vanished there.
It was midnight, and there was no sign yet of the captain's return.
She took from the writing-case the long letter which she had written to Norah, and slowly read it through. The letter quieted her. When she reached the blank space left at the end, she hurriedly turned back and began it over again.
One o'clock struck from the church clock, and still the captain never appeared.
She read the letter for the second time; she turned back obstinately, despairingly, and began it for the third time. As she once more reached the last page, she looked at her watch. It was a quarter to two. She had just put the watch back in the belt of her dress, when there came to her--far off in the stillness of the morning--a sound of wheels.
She dropped the letter and clasped her cold hands in her lap and listened. The sound came on, faster and faster, nearer and nearer--the trivial sound to all other ears; the sound of Doom to hers. It passed the side of the house; it traveled a little further on; it stopped. She heard a loud knocking--then the opening of a window--then voices--then a long silence--than the wheels again coming back--then the opening of the door below, and the sound of the captain's voice in the passage.
She could endure it no longer. She opened her door a little way and called to him.
He ran upstairs instantly, astonished that she was not in bed. She spoke to him through the narrow opening of the door, keeping herself hidden behind it, for she was afraid to let him see her face.
"Has anything gone wrong?" she asked.
"Make your mind easy," he answered. "Nothing has gone wrong.""Is no accident likely to happen between this and Monday?""None whatever. The marriage is a certainty.""A certainty?"
"Yes."
"Good-night."
She put her hand out through the door. He took it with some little surprise; it was not often in his experience that she gave him her hand of her own accord.
"You have sat up too long," he said, as he felt the clasp of her cold fingers. "I am afraid you will have a bad night--I'm afraid you will not sleep."She softly closed the door.
"I shall sleep," she said, "sounder than you think for."It was past two o'clock when she shut herself up alone in her room. Her chair stood in its customary place by the toilet-table. She sat down for a few minutes thoughtfully, then opened her letter to Norah, and turned to the end where the blank space was left. The last lines written above the space ran thus: ". . . I have laid my whole heart bare to you; I have hidden nothing. It has come to this. The end I have toiled for, at such terrible cost to myself, is an end which I must reach or die. It is wickedness, madness, what you will--but it is so. There are now two journeys before me to choose between. If I can marry him--the jour ney to the church. If the profanation of myself is more than I can bear--the journey to the grave!"Under that last sentence, she wrote these lines: