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Mrs. Balfame

[Pg 157] <h2>CHAPTER XVII</h2> The next morning, when Mrs. Balfame, running lightly down the back stairs, entered the kitchen half an hour earlier than her usual appearance in the dining-room, the front of her housefrock covered with a large apron and her sleeves pinned to the elbow, she beheld Frieda slicing potatoes. "Why!" The exclamation was impetuous, but her quick mind adapted itself. "I woke up early and thought I would come down and help," she continued evenly. "You have had so much to do of late." Frieda was regarding her with intense suspicion. "Never you have done that before," she growled. "You will see if I have the dishes by the dinner washed." "Nonsense. And everything is so different these days. I am hungry, too. I thought it would be nice to hurry breakfast." "Breakfast always is by eight. You have told me that when I come. I get up by half past six. First I air the house, and sweep the hall. Then I make the fire and put the water to boil. Then I peel the potatoes. Then I make the biscuit. Then I boil the eggs. Then I make the coffee—" "I know. You are marvellously systematic. But I thought you might make the coffee at once." "Always the coffee come last." Frieda resumed her task. [Pg 158] "But I don't eat potatoes for breakfast." "I eat the potatoes. When they fry in the pan, then I put the biscuit in the oven. Then I boil the eggs and then I make the coffee. Breakfast is by eight o'clock." Mrs. Balfame, with a good-humoured laugh, turned to leave the kitchen. But her mind, alert with apprehension, cast up a memory, vague but far from soothing. "By the way, I seem to remember that I woke up suddenly in the night and heard voices down here. Did you have visitors?" Frieda flushed the deep and angry red of her infrequent moments of embarrassment. "I have not visitors in the night." She turned on the water tap, which made noise enough to discourage further attempts at conversation; and Mrs. Balfame, to distract her mind, dusted the parlour. She dared not go out into the yard and walk off her restlessness, for there were now two sentinels preserving what they believed to be a casual attitude before her gate. She would have given much to know whether those men were watching her movements or those of her servant. Immediately after breakfast, the systematic Frieda was persuaded to go to the railway station and buy the New York papers when the train came in. Frieda might be a finished product of the greatest machine shop the world has ever known, but she was young and she liked the bustle of life at the station, and the long walk down Main Street, so different from the aristocratic repose of Elsinore Avenue. Mrs. Balfame, watching behind the curtain, saw that one of the sentinels followed her. The other continued to lean against the lamp-post whittling a stick. Both she and Frieda were watched! [Pg 159] But the disquiet induced by the not unnatural surveillance of premises identified with a recent crime was soon forgotten in the superior powers of the New York press to excite both disquiet and indignation. She had missed a photograph of herself while dusting the parlour and had forgiven the loyal thief as it was a remarkably pretty picture and portrayed a woman sweet, fashionable, and lofty. To her horror the picture which graced the first page of the great dailies was that of a hard defiant female, quite certain, without a line of letter press, to prejudice a public anxious to believe the worst. Tears of outraged vanity blurred her vision for a few moments before the full menace of that silent witness took possession of her. She knew that most people deteriorated under the mysterious but always fatal encounter of their photographs with the "staff artist," but she felt all the sensations of the outraged novice. A moment after she had dashed her tears away she turned pale; and when she finished reading the interviews the beautiful whiteness of her skin was disfigured by a greenish pallor. The interviews were written with a devilish cunning that protected the newspapers from danger of libel suit but subtly gave the public to understand that its appetite for a towering figure in the Balfame case was about to be gratified. There was no doubt that two shots had been fired from the grove simultaneously, and from revolvers of different calibre (picture of tree and gate). Was one of them—the smaller—fired by a woman? And if so, by what woman? [Pg 160] Not one of the females whose names had been linked at one time or another with the versatile Mr. Balfame but had proved her alibi, and so far as was known—although of course some one as yet unsuspected may have climbed the back fence and hid in the grove—the only two women on the premises were the widow and her extraordinarily plain servant. Balfame was shot with a .41 revolver. In one of the newspapers it was casually and not too politely remarked that Mrs. Balfame had larger hands and feet than one would expect from her general elegance of figure and aristocratic features, and in the same rambling sentence (this was written by the deeply calculating Mr. Broderick) the public was informed that certain footprints might have been those of a large woman or of a medium sized man. In the next paragraph but one Mrs. Balfame's stately height was again commented upon, but as the public had already been informed that she was an expert at target practice, reiteration of this fact was astutely avoided. A great deal was said here and there of her composure, her large studiously expressionless grey eyes, her nimble mind that so often routed her inquisitors, but was allied to a temperament of ice and a manifest power of cool and deliberate calculation. The dullest reader was quickened into the belief that he was the real detective and that his unerring sense had carried him straight to the woman who had hated the murdered man and had quarrelled with him in public a few hours before his death. The episode of Mrs. Balfame's offer to make her husband a glass of doctored lemonade and the disappearance of both beverage and glass was not [Pg 161]mentioned; presumably these bright young men did not believe in digressions or in rousing a curiosity they might not be able to appease. The interview concluded with a maddening hint at immediate developments. Mrs. Balfame let the papers drop to the floor one by one; when she had finished the last she drew her breath painfully for several moments. The room turned black, and it was cut by rows of bared and menacing teeth, infinitely multiplied. But she was not the woman to give way to fear for long, or even to bewilderment. There could be no real danger, and all that should concern her was the outrageous, the intolerably vulgar publicity. A woman whose good taste was both natural and cultivated, she felt this ruthless tossing of her sacred person into the public maw much as the more refined octoroons may have felt when they stood on the auction block in the good old days down South. She shuddered and gritted her teeth; she wished that she were a hysterical woman that she might find relief in shrieking at the top of her voice and smashing the furniture. Why, oh why, could not David Balfame have been permitted by the fate which had decreed his end on that particular night to enter the house and drink the lemonade; to die decently, painlessly, bloodlessly (she shrank aside when compelled to pass those blood stains on the brick path), as any man might die when his overtaxed heart simply stopped? She would have run down the moment she heard the fall, she would have managed to get the glass out of the way if Frieda had condescended to visit the scene, which was quite unlikely. She would have run over to Doctor[Pg 162] Lequer, who lived next door to the Gifnings, and he would have sent for the coroner. Both inevitably would have pronounced the death due to heart failure. It was fate that had bungled, not she. She mused, however, that she should have had a duplicate glass of lemonade to leave half consumed on the table, as it would be recalled that he had expected to imbibe a soothing draught immediately upon his return; and adjacent liquids invariably induce suspicion in cases of sudden death. But that did not matter now. She set her wits to work upon the identity of her companion in the grove. Was it Frieda? Or an accomplice of the girl, who was already in the house or on the alert to direct him out by the rear pathway? But why Frieda? She knew the raging hate that had filled her husband since the declaration of war, and she knew that his rivals in politics hated him with increasing virulency; as they were beginning to hate everybody that presumed to question the right and might of Germany. But she was a woman just and sensible. Nor for a moment could she visualise Old Dutch or any of his tribe shooting David Balfame because he cursed the Kaiser and sang Tipperary. The supposition was too shallow to be entertained. The person in the grove had been either a bitter political rival too intimate with the local police to be in danger of arrest, or some woman who for a time may have believed herself to be his wife in the larger village of New York. She could have sworn that that stealthy figure so close to her was a man, but women's skirts were very[Pg 163] narrow and silent these days, and after all she herself was as tall as the average man. Before noon the house was filled with sympathising and indignant friends. Cummack came up town to assure her that it was a shame; and he would ask Rush if those New York papers couldn't be had up for libel. He'd take the eleven-thirty for Dobton and consult with him. The ladies were knitting, no one more impersonally than Mrs. Balfame, although she was wondering if these kind friends expected to stay to lunch, when an automobile drove honking up to the door, and Mrs. Battle teetered over to the window. "For the land's sake," she exclaimed. "If it isn't the deputy sheriff from Dobton. Now, what do you suppose?" Mrs. Balfame stood up suddenly, and the other women sat with their needles suspended as if suddenly overcome by a noxious gas, with the exception of Mrs. Cummack, who ran over to her sister-in-law and put her plump arm about that easily compassed waist. Mrs. Balfame drew away haughtily. "I am not frightened," she said in her sweet cool voice. "I am prepared for anything after those newspapers—that is all." The bell pealed, and Mrs. Gifning, too curious to wait upon the hand-maiden, ran out and opened the front door. She returned a moment later with her little blue eyes snapping with excitement. "What do you think?" she gasped. "It is Frieda they want. She is being subp&oelig;naed to Dobton to testify before the Grand Jury. The deputy sheriff is going to take her with him." [Pg 164] Mrs. Balfame returned to her chair with such composure that no one suspected the sudden weakening of her knees. Instantly she realised the meaning of the voices she had heard in the night. Frieda had been "interviewed," either by the press or the police, and induced, probably bribed, to talk. No wonder she had not run away. But she too resumed her knitting. <hr /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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