The Awakening and Selected Short Fiction (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Kate Chopin [134]
“There will be no possible evidence to accuse anyone,” she assured him. “Forget it, forget it. Keep on as though it was something you had dreamed. Not only for the outside, but within yourself. Do not accuse yourself of that act, but the actions, the conduct, the ungovernable temper that made it possible. Promise me it will be a lesson to you, Gabriel; and God, who reads men’s hearts, will not call it a crime, but an accident which your unbridled nature invited. I will forget it. You must forget it. ’Ave you been to the office?”
“To-day; not yesterday. I don’t know what I did yesterday, but look for the knife—after they—I couldn’t go while he was there—and I thought every minute some one was coming to accuse me. And when I realized they weren’t—I don’t know—I drank too much, I think. Reading law! I might as well have been reading Hebrew. If Morrison thinks—See here Tante Elodie, are there any spots on this coat? Can you see anything here in the light?”
“There are no spots anywhere. Stop thinking of it, I implore you.” But he pulled off the coat and flung it across a chair. He went to the closet to get his other coat which he knew hung there. Tante Elodie, still feeble and suffering, in the depths of her chair, was not quick enough, could think of no way to prevent it. She had at first put the knife in his pocket with the intention of returning it to him. But now she dreaded to have him find it, and thus discover the part she had played in the sickening dream.
He buttoned up his coat briskly and started away.
“Please burn it,” he said, looking at the garment on the chair, “I never want to see it again.”
Six
WHEN IT BECAME distinctly evident that no slightest suspicion would be attached to him for the killing of Everson; when he plainly realized that there was no one upon whom the guilt could be fastened, Gabriel thought he would regain his lost equilibrium. If in no other way, he fancied he could reason himself back into it. He was suffering, but he some way had no fear that his present condition of mind would last. He thought it would pass away like a malignant fever. It would have to pass away or it would have to kill him.
From Tante Elodie’s he went over to Morrison’s office where he was reading law. Morrison and his partner were out of town and he had the office to himself. He had been there all morning. There was nothing for him to do now but to see anyone who called on business, and to go on with his reading. He seated himself and spread his book before him, but he looked into the street through the open door. Then he got up and shut the door. He again fastened his eyes upon the pages before him, but his mind was traveling other ways. For the hundredth time he was going over every detail of the fatal night, and trying to justify himself in his own heart.
If it had been an open and fair fight there would have been no trouble in squaring himself with his conscience; if the man had shown the slightest disposition to do him bodily harm, but he had not. On the other hand, he asked himself, what constituted a murder? Why, there was Morrison himself who had once fired at Judge Filips on that very street. His ball had gone wide of the mark, and subsequently he and Filips had adjusted their difficulties and become friends. Was Morrison any less a murderer because his weapon had missed?
Suppose the knife had swerved, had penetrated the arm, had inflicted a harmless scratch or flesh wound, would he be sitting there now, calling himself names? But he would try to think it all out later. He could not bear to be there alone, he never liked to be alone, and now he could not endure it. He closed the book without the slightest recollection of a line his eyes had followed. He went and gazed up and down the street, then he locked the office and walked away.
The fact of Everson having been robbed was very puzzling to Gabriel. He thought about it as he walked along the street.
The complete change that had taken place in his emotions, his sentiments, did not astonish him in the least: we accept