Part 1. A Woman Of Mystery - Chapter 8. Elimination

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_ PART I. A WOMAN OF MYSTERY
CHAPTER VIII. ELIMINATION

At about three o'clock in the afternoon Mr. Ransom left his room. He had been careful almost from his first arrival to sit with his door ajar. He had, therefore, only to give it a slight push and walk out when he heard the bustle of preparation going on in the two rooms in whose future occupancy he was so vitally interested. A maid stood in the hall. A man within was pushing about furniture. The landlady was giving orders. His course down-stairs did not lead him so far as those rooms, so he called out pleasantly:

"I have written till my head aches, Mrs. Deo. I must venture out notwithstanding the rain. In which direction shall I find the best walking?"

She came to him all eagerness and smiles. "It's all bad, such a day," said she, "but it's muddiest down by the factories. You had better climb the hill."

"Where the cemetery is?" he asked.

"Yes; do you object to cemeteries? Ours is thought to be very interesting. We have stones there whose inscriptions are a hundred and fifty years old. But it's a bad day to walk amongst graves. Perhaps you had better go east. I'm sorry we should have such a storm on your first day. Must you go out?"

He forced a suffering look into his eyes, and insisting that nothing but outdoor air would help him when he had a headache, hastened down-stairs and so out. A blinding gust seized him as he faced the hill, but he drew down his umbrella and hurried on. He had a purpose in following her suggestion as to a walk in this direction. Dark as the grasses were, he meant to search the cemetery for the graves of the Hazens and see what he could learn from them.

He met three persons on his way, all of whom turned to look at him. This was in the village. On the hillside he met nobody. Wind and rain and mud were all; desolation in the prospect and all but desolation in his heart. At the brow he first caught sight of the broken stone wall which separated the old burying place from the road. There lay his path. Happily he could tread it unnoticed and unwatched. There was no one within sight, high or low.

He spent a half hour among the tombs before
he struck the name he was looking for.
Another ten minutes before he found those
of his wife's family. Then he had his reward.
On a low brown shaft he read the names of
father and mother, and beneath them the following
lines:

Sacred to the memory of
Anitra
Died June 7, 1885
Aged 6 years and one day.
Of such is the Kingdom of heaven.

The twin! Georgian was mad. This record showed that her little sister lay here. Anitra,--yes, that was the name of her other half. He remembered it well. Georgian had mentioned it to him more than once. And this child, this Anitra, had been buried here for fifteen years.

Deeply indignant at his wife's duplicity, he took a look at the opposite side of the shaft where still another surprise awaited him. Here was the record of the brother; the brother he had so lately talked to and who had seemingly proven his claim to the name he now read:

Alfred Francesco
only son of
Georgian Toritti afterwards Georgian Hazen.
Lost at sea February, 1895.
Aged twenty-five years.

An odd inscription opening up conjectures of the most curious and interesting nature. But it was not this fact which struck him at the time, it was the possibility underlying the simple statement, Lost at sea. This, as the wry-necked man had said, admitted of a possible resurrection. Here was no body. A mound showed where Anitra had been laid away; a little mound surmounted by a headstone carved with her name. But only these few words gave evidence of the young man's death, and inscriptions of this nature are sometimes false.

The conclusion was obvious. It was the brother and not the sister who had reappeared. Georgian was not only playing him false but deceiving the general public. In fact, knowingly or unknowingly, she was perpetrating a great fraud. He was inclined to think unknowingly. He began to regard with less incredulity Hazen's declaration that the shock of her brother's return had unsettled her mind.

Distressed, but no longer the prey of distracting doubt, he again examined the inscription before him and this time noticed its peculiarities. _Alfred Francesco, only son of Georgian Toritti afterwards Georgian Hazen._ Afterwards! What was meant by that _afterwards_? That the woman had been married twice, and that this Alfred Francesco was the son of her first husband rather than of the one whose name he bore? It looked that way. There was a suggestion of Italian parentage in the Francesco which corresponded well with the decidedly Italian Toritti.

Perplexed and not altogether satisfied with his discoveries, he turned to leave the place when he found himself in the presence of a man carrying a kit of tools and wearing on his face a harsh and discontented expression. As this man was middle-aged and had no other protection from the rain than a rubber cape for his shoulders, the cause of his discontent was easy enough to imagine; though why he should come into this place with tools was more than Mr. Ransom could understand.

[Illustration: "I cut them letters there fifteen years ago. Now I'm to cut 'em out."]

"Hello, stranger." It was this man who spoke. "Interested in the Hazen monument, eh? Well, I'll soon give you reason to be more interested yet. Do you see this inscription--On June 7, 1885; Anitra, aged six, and the rest of it? Well, I cut them letters there fifteen years ago. Now I'm to cut 'em out. The orders has just come. The youngster didn't die it seems, and I'm commanded to chip the fifteen-year-old lie out. What do you think of that? A sweet job for a day like this. Mor'n likely it'll put me under a stone myself. But folks won't listen to reason. It's been here fifteen years and seventeen days and now it must come out, rain or shine, before night-fall. 'Before the sun sets,' so the telegram ran. I'll be blessed but I'll ask a handsome penny for this job."

Mr. Ransom, controlling himself with difficulty, pointed to the little mound. "But the child seems to have been buried here," he said.

"Lord bless you, yes, a child was buried here, but we all knew years ago that it mightn't be Hazen's. The schoolhouse burned and a dozen children with it. One of the little bodies was given to Mr. Hazen for burial. He believed it was his Anitra, but a good while after, a bit of the dress she wore that day was found hanging to a bush where some gipsies had been. There were lots of folks who remembered that them gipsies had passed the schoolhouse a half hour before the fire, and they now say found the little girl hiding behind the wood-pile, and carried her off. No one ever knew; but her death was always thought doubtful by every one but Mr. and Mrs. Hazen. They stuck to the old idee and believed her to be buried under this mound where her name is."

"But one of the children was buried here," persisted Ransom. "You must have known the number of those lost and would surely be able to tell if one were missing, as must have been the case if the gipsies had carried off Anitra before the fire."

"I don't know about that," objected the stone-cutter. "There was, in those days, a little orphan girl, almost an idiot, who wandered about this town, staying now in one house and now in another as folks took compassion on her. She was never seen agin after that fire. If she was in the schoolhouse that day, as she sometimes was, the number would be made up. No one was left to tell us. It was an awful time, sir. The village hasn't got over it yet."

Mr. Ransom made some sympathetic rejoinder and withdrew towards the gateway, but soon came strolling back. The man had arranged his tools and was preparing to go to work.

"It seems as if the family was pretty well represented here," remarked Ransom. "Is it the girl herself,--Anitra, I believe you called her,--who has ordered this record of her death removed?"

"Oh, no, you don't know them Hazens. There's one of 'em who has quite a story; the twin of this Anitra. She lived to grow up and have a lot of money left her. If you lived in Sitford, or lived in New York, you'd know all about her; for her name's been in the papers a lot this week. She's the great lady who married and left her husband all in one day; and for what reason do you think? We know, because she don't keep no secrets from her old friends. _She's found this sister_, and it's her as has ordered me to chip away this name. She wants it done to-day, because she's coming here with this gal she's found. Folks say she ran across her in the street and knew her at once. Can you guess how?"

"From her name?"

"Lord, no; from what I hear, she hadn't any name. _From her looks!_ She saw her own self when she looked at her."

"How interesting, how very interesting," stammered Mr. Ransom, feeling his newly won convictions shaken again. "Quite remarkable the whole story. And so is this inscription," he added, pointing to the words _Georgian Toritti_, etc. "Did the woman have two husbands, and was the Alfred Hazen, whose death at sea is commemorated here, the son of Toritti or of Hazen?"

"Of Toritti," grumbled the man, evidently displeased at the question. "A black-browed devil who it won't do to talk about here. Mrs. Hazen was only a slip of a gal when she married him, and as he didn't live but a couple o' months folks have sort o' forgiven her and forgotten him. To us Mrs. Hazen was always Mrs. Hazen; and Alf--well, he was just Alf Hazen too; a lad with too much good in him to perish in them murderous waters a thousand miles from home."

So they still believed Hazen dead! No intimation of his return had as yet reached Sitford. This was what Ransom wanted to know. But there was still much to learn. Should he venture an additional question? No, that would show more than a stranger's interest in a topic so purely local. Better leave well enough alone and quit the spot before he committed himself.

Uttering some commonplace observation about the fatality attending certain families, he nodded a friendly good-by and made for the entrance.

As he stepped below the brow of the hill he heard the first click of the workman's hammer on the chisel with which he proposed to eliminate the word _Anitra_ from the list of the Hazen dead. _

Read next: Part 1. A Woman Of Mystery: Chapter 9. Hunter's Inn

Read previous: Part 1. A Woman Of Mystery: Chapter 7. Rain

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