"Don't stammer," she said sharply. "Grandy's always right. He knows me better than I know myself, almost."
She thought, But I mustn't ever tell Grandy how wrong he was or what he did to me. It would break his heart if he knew. Besides, it's all over now, and it doesn't matter. He must have known it wouldn't last. Oh, Grandy must have known. And if I hadn't been so proud
and wanted to run away and hide everything, he'd have drawn out the sting long ago. I teas a fool. I should have trusted him. She beat back her depression. She beat back fear.
Then she remembered the strange talk last night with Francis, about the will. The taste of fear rose in her throat. She thought, What's the matter with me?
She left Oliver and went toward the living room.
"Don't look like that!' Tyl cried. "Don't!" Jane was in there, crouching against the wall by the study door, like an animal stiff with fear. Tyl's hands went up to her eyes. She thought, No, I can't stand it.
“I'm awfully sorry," Jane said, straightening. "I don't know what's he matter with me."
“I'm sorry too," said Mathilda. "I don't know why I . . . screamed it you. I guess it's just nerves." She smiled faintly.
“I guess it's just nerves," Jane agreed. She smiled faintly back.
Tyl thought, watching Jane walk away, I need another girl to talk to. It didn't strike her that this was the first time Grandy hadn't seemed better than another girl to talk to.
Chapter Twenty-three
There was the funeral to face that afternoon. They made themselves sandwiches for lunch and snatched them in the kitchen, it was a queer, unsettled kind of meal, as if they were all just marking time, waiting time out until it should go by and bury Althea and release them to normal processes of grief and adjustment.
Francis wasn't there. The odd thing was that no one mentioned him. Grandy said nothing. Oliver was bound up in his inner struggle and seemed not to notice. It was not Jane's place, perhaps, to say anything about a missing guest But Mathilda kept expecting him or at least expecting someone to say a word that would explain where he was, where he had gone, for how long. She did not ask any questions herself.
When they set out in the chauffeured car lent by a friend, then were the four of them—Grandy, Oliver, Jane and Mathilda. The four of them got in and settled themselves as if no one were missing. Francis wasn't there.
Mathilda thought perhaps he would meet them at the chapel. He would be among the others and he would come back with them when it was all over. Nobody asked any questions. It was a little strange that Grandy seemed not to have noticed at all. Mathilda's
so-called husband was not where he ought to have been, even if he were only pretending. Not there, not by her side. Not there, as he had been yesterday. People would wonder.
Jane was quiet as a mouse. Jane didn't ask. Oliver didn't ask. Mathilda, herself, although the question was beginning to beat hard in her mind, didn't venture to ask. It would have been queer if she were the one to ask. She thought if she waited surely his absence would be explained. If she just waited.
The little chapel downtown in the small city was thronged with friends, the whole picturesque lot of them. Tyl sat beside Grandy and modeled herself after him in frozen calm. Be a lady. Never betray an emotion.
The ceremony was only an ordeal. She thought, if only Francis had come. If only he were on her other side, where he ought to be. But that wasn't true. He had no place—no real place and no real obligation. He only pretended. Oh, but why wasn't he there, pretending, now? She counted the scallops in the frieze. This was not the time to feel what you really felt about Althea, or remember her as she was, or try to understand her life and her death. Don't cry. Count the folds in the curtains. One, two, three, four.
When it was over, some few friends came back with them and there was tea, Francis wasn't there.
When people had thinned out, drifted off, finally gone, Oliver at last asked the question, "Say, where is Francis? Where's he been? He wasn't there at the chapel, was he?" Oliver's face turned to Mathilda for the answer.
Like throwing a ball, Mathilda thought. Don't they know!
"When he left us this morning, I believe he said he was going downtown." Grandy was mildly speculative. "Didn't he, Jane?"
Jane said, "Yes," faintly. "Yes, he did, Mr. Grandison."
"That is strange. . . . Tyl, do you know where Francis is?"
The ball had come back to her. "I don't know where he is" she said stiffly. “I don't know a thing about him. I never did. It's about time all of you knew lie isn't my husband."
Jane knew already that Francis was a fraud. That could be seen in the steadiness of her eyes and heard in the murmur she made, which was only polite.
But Oliver was shocked right out of his chair. Mathilda had to tell him the details, and he wanted to hash them over and exclaim and wonder and go around and around over the puzzle of Francis. At the same time, she thought she could see a kind of inner gleam, a repressed sparkle in his eyes when he looked at her. Tyl felt herself getting angry. She answered him in a series of grudging short phrases. She didn't want Oliver's gossipy rehash. She didn't want to hear Oliver's ideas of why people behaved as they did. She didn't want to hear Oliver wondering what made Francis tick. She felt he wouldn't know.
She was sick and ashamed of the emotional background to Francis' story. She couldn't tell them that, of course. How she'd been in such a weeping, wailing, brokenhearted, upset state over Oliver. But without that part the whole story sounded trivial and cold. Here was a man who claimed she had married him. Why had she? Presumably because she had wanted to. And then she forgot. No background of emotional distress to explain how it all might have happened. Her upset and her silly baby thoughts of revenge. Ridiculously, she found herself defending Francis. Of course, it was a lie, but it had been a good lie.
"You don't understand," she cried.
"My God, do you?" cried Oliver, and she was too angry to answer.
Jane said perhaps he'd run away. She said it looking at Grandy as if they two had secrets about Francis.
Mathilda said in anger, Tm going to bed." How had she got herself into such a temper?
Halfway up the stairs, a ring at the front door stopped her and sent her heart leaping. It was only someone to see Grandy. Might as well go up. But that voice? She stopped and looked down again. All she could see was the top of the man's red head. Francis had dark hair, not quite black. Francis hadn't come back at all; hadn't been seen all day.
Chapter Twenty-four
The cellar was dry. That, at least, was a blessing. He was alive and uninjured. More blessings to count. How long he would be able to count these or to count at all was very doubtful. Francis expected the worst. He expected that an attempt would be made to kill him. He expected it to succeed. He did not know how he could counter such an attempt, bound and tied as he was with strong harsh ropes, gagged as he was with old rags, trussed up like a chicken for the roasting, ridiculously helpless.
It was fantastic to be so helpless. Francis thought of the movies he had seen, of the many, many scenes in which a hero had been marched at the point of a hidden gun out of the cheerful streets to some lonely lair and been tied up. He thought that if he escaped to
see another such movie, he would understand, he would sympathize, he would be more anxious. He would not wonder why the fellow went so quietly, nor would he be quite so confident that somehow, with his teeth, or his clever fingers, or by rolling about, the hero would get loose in time.