Patience Sparhawk and Her Times: A NovelAtherton, Gertrude Franklin Horn
General
Patience Sparhawk and Her Times: A Novel
Atherton, Gertrude Franklin Horn
American fiction -- 19th century
She dressed herself hastily in her black garments, and locked and
strapped her trunk. “I’ll go straight down and give myself up,” she
thought. “It’s what I ought to have done yesterday. It’s eleven o’clock.
I wish it were nine. Come.”
“Two gentlemen to see madame,” said the maid.
“What—who—what do they look like?”
“Like policemen, and yet not, madame.”
Patience gasped. Her knees gave way. Again she experienced that horrible
feeling of disintegration. Her untasted breakfast stood on a table by
the bed. She hastily drank a cup of black coffee, then walked steadily
to the drawing-room.
“You have come for me?” she asked of the men.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Where am I to go?”
“To the jail at White Plains, Westchester County. You are arrested on
charge of murder;” and he displayed the warrant.
Patience touched the bell button. “Take my trunk downstairs to the cab,”
she said to the butler. Then she stepped to the portières and said
good-bye to Rosita.
“She’s a cool one,” said one man to the other. “She done it.”
They went down in the elevator. As they left it, one of the men preceded
her, the other followed close. Both entered the cab with her. She felt
that they were regarding her with the frank curiosity of their kind, and
kept her eyes fixed on the street with an expressionless stare. On the
train they gave her a seat to herself, each taking the outside of
another, one before and one behind. The passengers did not suspect the
meaning of the party. She saw no one she knew. It was not the line that
passed Peele Manor. For small mercies she was duly thankful. She
guessed, however, that a meagre wiry black-eyed young man on the
opposite side of the aisle, a man with a mean sharp common face, was
Bart Tripp. He stared at her until she thought she should scream aloud,
or, what would be almost as fatal, relax the proud calm of her face. It
was with a sigh of profound relief that she stepped from the train at
White Plains.
“We won’t meet no one,” said one of the detectives, as they entered the
hack. “The sheriff’s got ready for you, I guess; he was wired yesterday;
but we took good care not to say what train we was coming on, so there
wouldn’t be no crowd. Feeling’s pretty high against you, I guess.”
As they drove through the ugly little town, Patience wondered why it was
called White Plains. She had never seen a more undulating country. One
or two of the environing hills were almost perpendicular. She also
noticed with the minute observance of persons approaching crises, that
the court house was a big handsome building of grey stone, and decided
that she liked its architecture. The extension behind, one of the
keepers told her, was the jail.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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