Chapter 44

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_ Chapter XLIV

When Ellen did not return, there was some alarm in the Brewster household. Mrs. Zelotes came over, finally, in a quiver of anxiety.

"Maybe I had better start out and see if I can find her," said Andrew.

"I think you had better," returned his mother. "She went before eight o'clock, and it's most midnight, and I've set at my window watchin' ever since. I don't see what you've been thinkin' about, waitin' all this time. I guess if I was a man I shouldn't have waited."

"I think she may have gone in to see Abby Atkins--it's on the way--and not realized how late it was," said Fanny, obstinately, but with a very white face. She drew her thread through with a jerk. It knotted, and she broke it off viciously.

"Fiddlesticks!" said her mother-in-law.

"There's no use imaginin' things," said Fanny, angrily; "but I think myself you'd better go now, Andrew, and see if you can see anything of her."

"I'm goin' with him," announced Mrs. Zelotes.

"Now, mother, you'd better stay where you be," said Andrew, putting on his hat. Then the door flew open, and Amos Lee, who had seen the light in the windows, and was burning to impart the news of the tragedy, rushed in.

"Heard what's happened?" he cried out.

They all thought of Ellen. "What?" demanded Andrew, in a terrible voice. Fanny dropped her work and stared at him, with her chin falling as if she were dying. Mrs. Zelotes made a queer gurgling noise in her throat. Lee stared at them a second, bewildered by the effect of his own words, although they had for him such a tragic import. Andrew caught hold of him in a grasp like the clamp of a machine. "What?" he demanded again.

"The boss has been shot," cried Lee, getting his breath.

Andrew dropped his arm, and they all stared at him. Lee went on fluently, as if he were a fakir at a fair.

"Nahum Beals did it. The boss went back to the office to get his pocketbook; McLaughlin saw him; then he went down the stairs; Nahum, he--he fired; he had been hidin' underneath the stairs. Carl Olfsen caught him, and he's in jail. Your daughter she was there when the shot came, and run up and held his head. The young boss he sent her in Dr. James's buggy to Mrs. Lloyd to break the news. She 'ain't got home?"

"No," gasped Andrew.

"The boss has been shot; he's dead by this time," repeated Lee. "Beals did it; they've got him." There was the most singular evenness and impartiality in his tone, although he was evidently strained to a high pitch of excitement. It was impossible to tell whether he exulted in or was aghast at the tragedy.

"Oh, that poor woman!" cried Fanny.

"I'd like to know what they'll do next," cried Mrs. Zelotes. "I should call it pretty work."

"Nahum Beals has acted to me as if he was half crazy for some time," said Fanny.

"No doubt about it," said Lee; "but I shouldn't wonder if he had to swing."

"It's dreadful," said Fanny. "I wonder when she's comin' home."

"Seems as if they might have got somebody besides that girl to have gone there," said Mrs. Zelotes.

"She happened to be right on the spot," said Lee, importantly.

Andrew seemed speechless; he leaned against the mantel-shelf, gazing from one to the other, breathing hard. He had had bitter feelings against the murdered man, and a curious sense of guilt was over him. He felt almost as if he were the murderer.

"Andrew, I dun'no' but you'd better go up there and see if she's comin' home," said Fanny; and he answered heavily that maybe he had better, when they heard wheels, which stopped before the house.

"They're bringin' her home," said Lee.

Andrew ran and threw open the front door. He had a glimpse of Robert's pale face, nodding to him from the buggy as he drove away, and Ellen came hastening up the walk.

"Well, Ellen, this is pretty dreadful news," said her father, tremulously.

"So you have heard?"

"Amos Lee has just come in. It's a terrible thing, Ellen."

"Yes, it's terrible," returned Ellen, in a quick, strained voice. She entered the sitting-room, and when she met her mother's anxious, tender eyes, she stood back against the wall, with her hands to her face, sobbing. Fanny ran to her, but her grandmother was quicker. She had her arms around the girl before the mother had a chance.

"If they couldn't get somebody besides you," she said, in a voice of intensest love and anger, "I should call it pretty work. Now you go straight to bed, Ellen Brewster, and I'm goin' to make a bowl of sage tea, and bring it up, and see if it won't quiet your nerves. I call it pretty work."

"Yes, you'd better go to bed, Ellen," said Andrew, gulping as if he were swallowing a sob.

Mrs. Zelotes fairly forced Ellen towards the door, Fanny following.

"Don't talk and wake Amabel," whispered Ellen, forcing back her sobs.

"Was he dead when you got there, Ellen?" called out Lee.

Mrs. Zelotes turned back and looked at him. "It's after midnight, and time for you to be goin' home," she said. Then the three disappeared. Lee grinned sheepishly at Andrew.

"Your mother is a stepper of an old woman," said he.

"It's awful news," said Andrew, soberly. "Whatever anybody may have felt, nobody expected--"

"Of course they didn't," retorted Lee, quickly. "Nahum went a step too far." He started for the door as he spoke.

"Well, he was crazy, without any doubt!" said Andrew.

"He'll have to swing for it all the same," said Lee, going out.

"It don't seem right, if he wasn't himself when he did it."

"Lord, we're all crazy when it comes to things like that," returned Lee. Before closing the door he flashed his black eyes and white teeth at Andrew, who felt repelled.

He sat down beside the table and leaned his head upon it. To his fancy all creation seemed to circle about that one dead man. Mr. Lloyd had been for years the arbiter of his destiny, almost of his life. Andrew had regarded him with almost feudal loyalty and admiration, and lately with bitter revolt and hatred, and now he was dead. He felt no sorrow, but rather a terrible remorse because he felt no sorrow. All the bitter thoughts which he had ever had against Lloyd seemed to marshal themselves before him like an accusing legion of ghosts. And with it all there was a sense of desolation, as if some force which had been necessary to his full living had gone out of creation.

"It's over thirty years since I went to work under him," Andrew thought, and he gave a dry sob. At that moment a wonderful pity and sorrow for the dead man seemed to spring up in his soul like a light. He felt as if he loved him.

Norman Lloyd's funeral was held in the First Baptist Church of Rowe. It was crowded. Mr. Lloyd had been the most prominent manufacturer and the wealthiest man in the city. His employes filled up a great space in the body of the church.

Andrew went with his mother and wife. They arrived quite early. When Andrew saw the employes of Lloyd's marching in, he drew a great sigh. He looked at the solemn black thing raised on trestles before the pulpit with an emotion which he could not himself understand. "That man 'ain't treated me well enough for me to care anything about him," he kept urging upon himself. "He never paid any more attention to me than a gravel-stone under his feet; there ain't any reason why I should have cared about him, and I don't; it can't be that I do." Yet arguing with himself in this way, he continued to eye the casket which held his dead employer with an unyielding grief.

Mrs. Zelotes sat like a black, draped statue at the head of the pew, but her eyes behind her black veil were sharply observant. She missed not one detail. She saw everything; she counted the wreaths and bouquets on the casket, and stored in her mind, as vividly as she might have done some old mourning-piece, the picture of the near relatives advancing up the aisle.

Mrs. Lloyd came leaning on her nephew's arm, and there were Cynthia Lennox and a distant cousin, an elderly widow who had been summoned to the house of death.

Ellen sat in the body of the church, with the employes of Lloyd's, between Abby Atkins and Maria. She glanced up when the little company of mourners entered, then cast her eyes down again and compressed her lips. Maria began to weep softly, pressing her handkerchief to her eyes. Ellen's mother had begged her not to sit with the employes, but with her and her father and grandmother in their own pew, but the girl had refused.

"I must sit where I belong," said she.

"Maybe she thinks it would look as if she was putting on airs on account of--" Fanny said to Andrew when Ellen had gone out.

"I guess she's right," returned Andrew.

The employes had contributed money for a great floral piece composed of laurel and white roses, in the shape of a pillow. Mamie Brady, who sat behind Ellen, leaned over, and in a whisper whistled into her ear.

"Ain't it handsome?" said she. "Can you see them flowers from the hands?"

Ellen nodded impatiently. The great green and white decoration was in plain view from her seat, and as she looked at it she wondered if it were a sarcasm or poetic truth beyond the scope of the givers, the pillow of laurel and roses, emblematic of eternal peace, presented by the hard hands of labor to dead capital.

Of course the tragic circumstances of Norman Lloyd's death increased the curiosity of the public. Gradually the church became crowded by a slow and solemn pressure. The aisles were filled. The air was heavy with the funeral flowers. The minister spoke at length, descanting upon the character of the deceased, his uprightness and strict integrity in business, avoiding pitfalls of admissions of weaknesses with the expertness of a juggler. He was always regarded as very apt at funerals, never saying too much and never too little. The church was very still, the whole audience wrapped in a solemn hush, until the minister began to pray; then there was a general bending of heads and devout screening of faces with hands. Then all at once a sob from a woman sounded from the rear of the church. It was hysterical, and had burst from the restraint of the weeper. People turned about furtively.

"Who was that?" whispered Mamie Brady, after a prolonged stare over her shoulders from under her red frizzle of hair. "It ain't any of the mourners."

Ellen shook her head.

"Do keep still, Mamie Brady," whispered Abby Atkins.

The sob came again, and this time it was echoed from the pew where sat the members of the dead man's family. Mrs. Lloyd began weeping convulsively. Her state of mind had raised her above natural emotion, and yet her nerves weakly yielded to it when given such an impetus. She wept like a child, and now and then a low murmur of heart-broken complaint came from her lips, and was heard distinctly over the church. Other women began to weep. The minister prayed, and his words of comfort seemed like the air in a discordant medley of sorrow.

Andrew Brewster's face twitched; he held his hands clutched tightly. Fanny was weeping, but the old woman at the head of the pew sat immovable.

When the services were over, and the great concourse of people had passed around the casket and viewed the face of the dead, with keen, sidewise observation of the funeral flowers, Mrs. Zelotes pressed out as fast as she was able without seeming to crowd, and caught up with Mrs. Pointdexter, who had sat in the rear of the church.

She came alongside as they left the church, and the two old women moved slowly down the sidewalk, with lingering glances at the funeral procession drawn up in front of the church.

"Who was that cryin' so in back; did you see?" asked Mrs. Zelotes of Mrs. Pointdexter, whose eyes were red, and whose face bore an expression of meek endurance of a renewal of her own experience of sorrow.

"It was Joe Martin's wife," said she. "I sat just behind her."

"What made her?"

Then both started, for the woman who had sobbed came up behind them, her brother, an elderly man, trying to hold her back.

"You stop, John," she cried. "I heard what she said, and I'm goin' to tell her. I'm goin' to tell everybody. Nobody shall stop me. There the minister spoke and spoke and spoke, and he never said a word as to any good he'd done. I'm goin' to tell. I wanted to stan' right up in the church an' tell everybody. He told me not to say a word about it, an' I never did whilst he was livin', but now I'm goin' to stan' up for the dead." The woman pulled herself loose from her brother, who stood behind her, frightened, and continually thrusting out a black-gloved hand of remonstrance. People began to gather. The woman, who was quite old, had a face graven with hard lines of habitual restraint, which was now, from its utter abandon, at once pathetic and terrible. She made a motion as if she were thrusting her own self into the background.

"I'm goin' to speak," she said, in a high voice. "I held my tongue for the livin', but I'm goin' to speak for the dead. My poor husband died twenty years ago, got his hand cut in a machine in Lloyd's, and had lockjaw, and I was left with my daughter that had spinal disease, and my little boy that died, and my own health none too good, and--and he--he--came to my house, one night after the funeral, and--and told me he was goin' to look out for me, and he has, he has. That blessed man gave me five dollars every week of my life, and he buried poor Annie when she died, and my little boy, and he made me promise never to say a word about it. Five dollars every week of my life--five dollars."

The woman's voice ended in a long-drawn, hysterical wail. The other women who had been listening began to weep. Mrs. Pointdexter, when she and Mrs. Zelotes moved on, was sobbing softly, but Mrs. Zelotes's face, though moved, wore an expression of stern conjecture.

"I'd like to know how many things like that Norman Lloyd did," said she. "I never supposed he was that kind of a man."

She had a bewildered feeling, as if she had to reconstruct her own idea of the dead man as a monument to his memory, and reconstruction was never an easy task for the old woman. _

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