Helen threw a silken shawl about her shoulders and went out into the garden. Peace, it seemed, came sweeping down from the hillsides and enveloped her. In a flower bed she saw a little grey rabbit with a white tail, and seeing it made her quiver with pleasure. The rabbit turned its head and looked at her for a moment, and then went on nibbling at the new plants. Suddenly Helen felt foolishly happy. Something delicious and exciting was going to happen, something very delightful. In her sudden joy she talked to the rabbit. “Go on eating, you can have the old flowers. Tomorrow I’ll plant cabbages for you. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Peter? You know, Peter, is your name Peter? Silly, all rabbits are named Peter. Anyway, Peter, I haven’t looked forward to anything for ages. Isn’t that funny? Or is it sad? But now I’m looking forward to something. I’m just bursting with anticipation. And I don’t know what the something can be. Isn’t that silly, Peter?” She strolled on and waved her hand at the rabbit. “I should think the cinerarias would be better to eat,” she said.
The singing of water drew her down the path toward the streamside. As she neared the bank, a flock of quail scudded into the brush with stuttering cries of alarm. Helen was ashamed that she had disturbed them. “Come back!” she called. “I won’t shoot you. The rabbit didn’t mind me. Why, I couldn’t shoot you if I wanted to.” Suddenly she recalled how Hubert had taken her out to teach her to shoot a shotgun. He had grown religiously solemn as he taught her how to hold the weapon and how to sight with both eyes open. “Now I’ll throw up a can,” he said. “I don’t want you ever to shoot at a still target—ever. It is a poor sportsman who will shoot a resting bird.” She had fired wildly at the flying can until her shoulder was stiff, and as they drove home he patted her. “It’ll be a long time before you knock over a quail,” he said. “But in a little while you ought to be able to pot rabbits.” Then she thought of the leather quail strings he brought home with clusters of birds hung by their necks. “When they drop off the strings they’re hung long enough to eat,” he said solemnly. All of a sudden Helen realized that she didn’t want to think of Hubert any more. The retrospection had almost killed her sense of peace.
It was almost dark. The night was sweet with the odor of sage. She heard the cook in the kitchen rattling the cowbell she had bought as a dinner signal. Helen pulled her shawl close and shivered and went in.
In the dining room she found her daughter before her. All traces of the afternoon’s rage were gone from Hilda’s face; she looked happy, and very satisfied with herself.
“My darling. You’re feeling better, aren’t you?” Helen cried.
“Oh, yes.”
Helen walked around the table and kissed her on the forehead. Then for a moment she hugged Hilda convulsively. “When you see how beautiful it is here, you’ll love it. I know you will.”
Hilda did not answer, but her eyes became wily.
“You will like it, won’t you, darling?” Helen insisted as she went back to her place.
Hilda was mysterious. “Well, maybe I’ll like it. Maybe I won’t have to like it.”
“What do you mean, dear?”
“Maybe I won’t be here very long.”
“Won’t be here very long?” Helen looked quickly across the table. Obviously Hilda was trying to keep some kind of secret, but it was too slippery.
“Maybe I might run away and be married.”
Helen sank back in her chair and smiled. “Oh, I see. Surely you might. It would be better to wait a few years though. Who is it this time? The prince again?”
“No, it’s not a prince. It’s a poor man, but I will love him. We made all of our plans today. He’ll come for me, I guess.”
Something stirred in Helen’s memory. “Is it the man who came to the house this afternoon?”
Hilda started up from the table. “I won’t tell you another thing,” she cried. “You haven’t any right to ask me. You just wait a little while—I’ll show you I don’t have to stay in this old house.” She ran from the room and slammed her bedroom door after her.
Helen rang for the house-boy. “Joe, exactly what did the man who came today say?”
“Say he got to see you about little girl.”
“Well, what kind of a man was he?—how old?”
“Not old man, Missie, not young man. Maybe fifty years, I guess.”
Helen sighed. It was just another of the stories, the little dramas Hilda thought out and told. And they were so real to her, poor child. Helen ate slowly, and afterwards, in the big living room, she sat before the fire—idly knocking coals from the glowing logs. She turned all the lights off. The fire glinted on the eyes of the stuffed heads on the wall, and Helen’s old habit reasserted itself. She found herself imagining how Hubert’s hands looked, how narrow his hips were, and how straight his legs. And then she made a discovery: When her mind dropped his hands they disappeared. She was not building the figure of her husband. He was gone, completely gone. For the first time in years, Helen put her hands to her face and cried, for the peace had come back, and the bursting expectancy. She dried her eyes and walked slowly about the room, smiling up at the heads with the casual eyes of a stranger who didn’t know how each animal had died. The room looked different and felt different. She fumbled with the new window bolts and threw open the wide windows to the night. And the night wind sighed in and bathed her bare shoulders with its cool peace. She leaned out of the window and listened. So many little noises came from the garden and from the hill beyond the garden. “It’s just infested with life,” she thought. “It’s just bursting with life.” Gradually as she listened she became aware of a rasping sound from the other side of the house. “If there were beavers, it would be a beaver cutting down a tree. Maybe it’s a porcupine eating out the foundations. I’ve heard of that. But there aren’t any porcupines here either.” There were vibrations of the rasping in the house itself. “It must be something gnawing on the logs,” she said. There came a little crash. The noise stopped. Helen started uneasily. She walked quickly down a passageway and stopped before the door of Hilda’s room. With her hand on the strong outside bolt she called, “Are you all right, darling?” There was no answer. Helen slipped the bolt very quietly and entered the room. One of the oaken bars was hacked out and Hilda was gone.
For a moment Helen stood rigidly at the open window, looking wistfully into the grey night. Then her face paled and her lips set in the old line of endurance. Her movements were mechanical as she retraced her steps to the living room. She climbed upon a chair, unlocked the gun case and took down a shotgun.
Dr. Phillips sat beside Helen Van Deventer in the coroner’s office. He had to come as the child’s doctor, of course, but also he thought he could keep Helen from being afraid. She didn’t look afraid. In her severe, her almost savage mourning, she looked as enduring as a sea-washed stone.
“And you expected it?” the coroner was saying. “You thought it might happen?”
Dr. Phillips looked uneasily at Helen and cleared his throat. “She had been my patient since she was born. In a case like this, she might have committed suicide or murder, depending on circumstances. Then again she might have lived on harmlessly. She could have gone all her life without making any violent move. It was impossible to say, you see.”
The coroner was signing papers. “It was a beastly way for her to do it. Of course the girl was insane, and there isn’t any reason to look into her motives. Her motives might have been tiny things. But it was a horrible way to do it. She never knew that, though. Her head in the stream and the gun beside her. I’ll instruct a suicide verdict. I’m sorry to have to talk this way before you, Mrs. Van Deventer. Finding her must have been a terrible shock to you.”
The doctor helped Helen down the steps of the court house. “Don’t look that way,” he cried. “You look as though you were going to an execution. It’s better so, I tell you. You must not suffer so.”
She didn’t look at him. “I know now. By this time I know what my life expects of me,” she said softly. “Now I know what I have always suspected. And I have the strength to endure, Doctor. Don’t you worry about me.”