Lucretia has obtained beforehand all she wishes to save from the rest. An
open box is on the floor, into which her hand drops noiselessly a volume
in manuscript. On the forefinger of that hand is a ring, larger and more
massive than those usually worn by women,--by Lucretia never worn before.
Why should that ring have been selected with such care from the dead
man's hoards? Why so precious the dull opal in that cumbrous setting?
From the hand the volume drops without sound into the box, as those whom
the secrets of the volume instruct you to destroy may drop without noise
into the grave. The trace of some illness, recent and deep, nor
conquered yet, has ploughed lines in that young countenance, and dimmed
the light of those searching eyes. Yet courage! the poison is arrested,
the poisoner is no more. Minds like thine, stern woman, are cased in
coffers of steel, and the rust as yet has gnawed no deeper than the
surface. So over that face, stamped with bodily suffering, plays a calm
smile of triumph. The schemer has baffled the schemer! Turn now to the
right, pass by that narrow corridor: you are in the marriage-chamber; the
windows are closed; tall tapers burn at the foot of the bed. Now go back
to that narrow corridor. Disregarded, thrown aside, are a cloth and a
besom: the cloth is wet still; but here and there the red stains are dry,
and clotted as with bloody glue; and the hairs of the besom start up,
torn and ragged, as if the bristles had a sense of some horror, as if
things inanimate still partook of men's dread at men's deeds. If you
passed through the corridor and saw in the shadow of the wall that
homeliest of instruments cast away and forgotten, you would smile at the
slatternly housework. But if you knew that a corpse had been borne down
those stairs to the left,--borne along those floors to that marriage-
bed,--with the blood oozing and gushing and plashing below as the bearers
passed with their burden, then straight that dead thing would take the
awe of the dead being; it told its own tale of violence and murder; it
had dabbled in the gore of the violated clay; it had become an evidence