I could hear well enough, but at first I couldn't see any of them. But I gathered that Miss Lucy was standing up whilst she was talking, and moving around a bit now and then. I seen one of her sleeves, and then a wisp of her hair. Which was aggervating, fur I wanted to know what she was like. But her voice was so soft and quiet that you kind of knowed before you seen her how she orter look.
"Prentiss McMakin came to me that day," she was saying, "with an appeal--I hardly know how to tell you." She broke off.
"Go ahead, Lucy," says Colonel Tom's voice.
"He was insulting," she said. "He had been drink-ing. He wanted me to--to--he appealed to me to run off with him.
"I was furious--NATURALLY." Her voice changed as she said it enough so you could feel how furious Miss Lucy could get. She was like her brother Tom in some ways.
"I ordered him out of the house. His answer to that was an offer to marry me. You can imagine that I was surprised as well as angry--I was perplexed.
"'But I AM married!' I cried. The idea that any of my own people, or any one whom I had known at home, would think I wasn't married was too much for me to take in all at once.
"'You THINK you are,' said Prentiss McMakin, with a smile.
"In spite of myself my breath stopped. It was as if a chilly hand had taken hold of my heart.
I mean, physically, I felt like that.
"'I AM married,' I repeated, simply.
"I suppose that McMakin had got the story of our wedding from YOU." She stopped a minute.
The doctor's voice answered:
"I suppose so," like he was a very tired man.
"Anyhow," she went on, "he knew that we went first to Clarksville. He said:
"'You think you are married, Lucy, but you are not.'
"I wish you to understand that Prentiss McMakin did it all very, very well. That is my excuse. He acted well. There was something about him--Iscarcely know how to put it. It sounds odd, but the truth is that Prentiss McMakin was always a more convincing sort of a person when he had been drinking a little than when he was sober. He lacked warmth--he lacked temperament. I suppose just the right amount put it into him. It put the devil into him, too, I reckon.
"He told me that you and he, Tom, had been to Clarksville, and had made investigations, and that the wedding was a fraud. And he told it with a wealth of convincing detail. In the midst of it he broke off to ask to see my wedding certificate. As he talked, he laughed at it, and tore it up, saying that the thing was not worth the paper it was on, and he threw the pieces of paper into the grate. Ilistened, and I let him do it--not that the paper itself mattered particularly. But the very fact that I let him tear it showed me, myself, that I was believing him.
"He ended with an impassioned appeal to me to go with him.
"I showed him the door. I pretended to the last that I thought he was lying to me. But I did not think so. I believed him. He had done it all very cleverly. You can understand how I might--in view of what had happened?"
I wanted to see Miss Lucy--how she looked when she said different things, so I could make up my mind whether she was forgiving the doctor or not. Not that I had much doubt but what they would get their personal troubles fixed up in the end. The iron grating in the floor was held down by four good-sized screws, one at each corner. They wasn't no filling at all betwixt it and the iron grating that was in the ceiling of the room below. The space was hollow. I got an idea and took out my jack-knife.
"What are you going to do?" whispers Martha.
"S-sh-sh," I says, "shut up, and you'll see."One of the screws was loose, and I picked her out easy enough. The second one I broke the point off of my knife blade on. Like you nearly always do on a screw. When it snapped Colonel Tom he says:
"What's that?" He was powerful quick of hear-ing, Colonel Tom was. I laid low till they went on talking agin. Then Martha slides out on tiptoe and comes back in three seconds with one of these here little screw-drivers they use around sewing-machines and the little oil can that goes with it. I oils them screws and has them out in a holy minute, and lifts the grating from the floor careful and lays it careful on the rug.
By doing all of which I could get my head and shoulders down into that there hole. And by twist-ing my neck a good deal, see a little ways to each side into the room, instead of jest underneath the grating. The doctor I couldn't see yet, and only a little of Colonel Tom, but Miss Lucy quite plain.
"You mean thing," Martha whispers, "you are blocking it up so I can't hear.""Keep still," I whispers, pulling my head out of the hole so the sound wouldn't float downward into the room below. "You are jest like all other women--you got too much curiosity.""How about yourself?" says she.
"Who was it thought of taking the grating off?"I whispers back to her. Which settles her tem-porary, but she says if I don't give her a chancet at it purty soon she will tickle my ribs.
When I listens agin they are burying that there Prent McMakin. But without any flowers.
Miss Lucy, she was half setting on, half leaning against, the arm of a chair. Which her head was jest a bit bowed down so that I couldn't see her eyes. But they was the beginnings of a smile onto her face. It was both soft and sad.
"Well," says Colonel Tom, "you two have wasted almost twenty years of life.""There is one good thing," says the doctor. "It is a good thing that there was no child to suffer by our mistakes."She raised her face when he said that, Miss Lucy did, and looked in his direction.
"You call that a good thing?" she says, in a kind of wonder. And after a minute she sighs. "Per-haps," she says, "you are right. Heaven only knows. Perhaps it WAS better that he died.""DIED!" sings out the doctor.
And I hearn his chair scrape back, like he had riz to his feet sudden. I nearly busted my neck trying fur to see him, but I couldn't. I was all twisted up, head down, and the blood getting into my head from it so I had to pull it out every little while.
