“What... what do you mean?” Jim stammered.
“Well, wouldn’t you have? I told him that I wasn’t going to put up with it any longer. I mean, I wasn’t getting any younger, and I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life just waiting for her to die.”
“And what did he say?”
“Oh, he cried,” she said, lightly. “Said he couldn’t live without me, and if I’d only give him a little time, he’d seen if he couldn’t do something about a divorce, or something. So I said I’d give him three months, and after that I’d have to give Mr. Joplin his answer.”
“Mr. Joplin?”
“Yes, don’t you remember Joplin’s, the paper shop? Old Joplin had been after me for ages.”
A forgotten cupboard opened in Jim’s memory. He saw a tall, stooping figure with thin streaks of hair plastered on a shiny scalp, steel-rimmed spectacles, and a prominent Adam’s apple, giving him the pink, paper “Books for the Bairns” in exchange for his weekly penny. Old Joplin; he hadn’t thought of him for years.
“Were you going to marry him?” he asked.
“Well, I might have. He had a nice little business, and he was crazy about me, and I wasn’t getting any younger. That’s what I told Freddie, and he saw my point.”
“When was that?”
“Oh, about a month before she was taken queer.”
It was odd to hear the old expressions again.
“It wasn’t till we were in France that I really began to put two and two together, but by that time there wasn’t anything I could do. Of course, I knew there was nothing against me, but it did look bad. I was scared to death of the trial, because you never know how they can twist things, those lawyers, but he saw to it that it was all right. I knew he would, of course. I knew that I could trust him. He was always the gentleman, your father was.”
She looked at her watch.
“Here, I’ve got to go,” she said.
“Not yet,” Jim pleaded.
“I must.” She began gathering up her things.
“Tell me just one thing more,” he asked.
“What?”
“Who was Albert?” That memory had to be cleared up.
She looked at him blankly.
“Albert?” she repeated. “I don’t remember any Albert.”
“He was a sailor.”
Recognition came into her face.
“Oh, Albert,” she said, laughing. “Fancy you remembering him. Yes. Albert — what was his other name? I’ve forgotten.”
“Who was he?”
“He was a friend of mine. He treated me very badly, Albert did. That was the time I first started going to Freddie for singing lessons. I was having trouble with Albert, and I remember one day when I had a headache, it all sort of got too much for me, and I began crying, and Freddie tried to comfort me. That’s how it all started, really. I mean, he sort of asked me questions, and I told him all about it, and that’s what really started him getting keen on me, I think. Funny, I’d forgotten all about Albert.”
“But you went on seeing him. I remember meeting you with him, and your telling me not to say anything about it at home.”
“Well, I didn’t want to upset Freddie, when he was being so kind to me,” she said. “I was supposed to have been all through with Albert, and I didn’t want to worry Freddie, knowing that I wasn’t. I remember wondering whether I’d hear from Albert when the trouble came, but of course I didn’t. He was a bad lot, really, but he was very good-looking, and he had a way with him. I wonder what’s become of him.”
A thought seemed to strike her suddenly, and she smiled, looking down at the cat’s-eye brooch.
“What is it?” Jim asked. “Have you thought of something?”
“I’ve just remembered,” she said. “It was Albert gave me this brooch. Funny, my forgetting that!”
She fingered the brooch, and then unpinned it, taking it out and looking at it as though she had not seen it for a long time. It was a meager little thing, Jim thought; queer that it should have seemed sinister to him all these years.
“Yes,” she said, as she replaced it. “He said it was good luck, or something. Well, I dare say it has been. I’ve been lucky. Did I tell you I was married, by the way?”
“No,” said Jim.
“Oh, yes, I’ve been married nearly twenty years,” she said. “He really does very well. We’re getting one of the new Plymouths next month. I haven’t done badly for myself. There is just one drawback, though, to no one knowing who I am.”
“What’s that?” Jim Cawthra asked.
“Well,” she said, a smug and almost coy look coming into her face. “You see, they don’t know, and looking at me now, no one would believe that I was once good enough for a man to commit a murder and get himself hung for me. But,” she sighed philosophically, “I suppose you can’t have everything.”
Rufus King
Ride With the Wind
Meet vital, homely, lovable Dr. Colin Starr, general practitioner in an average, small-sized American town, who uses his medicolegal knowledge to detect crime and his Lincolnesque understanding to solve the mysteries of the human heart...
The house was old, and Madam Tuffman was old too. Her title fell under the curious and stilted reaching for correctness which her circle in the community considered so important, perhaps, because they were not quite sure of themselves. As it was, she was a widow, and her son Ernest had married a Bertha Wollodon, who had become Mrs. Tuffman; and Mrs. Tuffman had been dowagered into Madam.
This amused her considerably, and her alive dark eyes would become more lively still at its use, because she would remember the days that were not (to her) so very far ago, when she and her pioneer contemporaries were so active with the processes of rearing and feeding and living that straining after social minutiae was scoffed at.
She had had two daughters and four sons; and all of them were dead except Ernest, who was the one black sheep of the lot: a charming and lowering example of the truism that the good die young.
Her house was a roomy and authentic specimen of the clapboard-and-fretwork blight and had originally possessed extensive grounds, the largest portion of which had since been absorbed by the Laurel Falls Country Club, and appropriately greened and hazarded into links. It retained, however, several acres of this hilled and valleyed section of Ohio, and you could have a charming view of the town itself, and segmentary glimpses of the Onega River, from either of its frightening turrets.
Its furnishings had not advanced with the day. Its lighting fixtures were still amazed to find their pipes wired to terminals which flowered into the black magic of incandescent bulbs, and as an offshoot from the parlor, it possessed that extinct adjunct to the wooden Indian, a cozy corner.
Slight twinges in her joints had made Madam Tuffman feel — she had said — that she was getting on. They had started shortly under a year ago, and she had instigated a series of monthly professional calls on the part of Dr. Colin Starr: a comfort she could well afford, for Edgar, her late husband, had left her enormously rich, from a knack on his part in the manufacture of box-toed shoes. Colin’s father had been Madam Tuffman’s physician until his death, following which she had called upon Colin during the rare moments when she had not felt quite well.