“You see, don’t you?… You see what I’ve got to put up with, don’t you?… You only get it for a little while when you come here, but with me it’s all the time and all the time”—Suddenly she turned to him, looked him directly in the eye, and speaking quietly to him, but with a curious, brooding and disturbing inflection in her voice, she said:
“Do you know what day this is?”
“No.”
“Do you realize that Ben died five years ago this morning?—I was thinking of it yesterday when she was talking about getting that room ready for those people who are coming,” she muttered, and with a note of weary bitterness in her voice. For a moment her big-boned face was marked with the faint tension of hysteria, and her eyes looked dark and lustreless and strained as she plucked absently at her large chin. “But do you see how she can do it?” she went on in a low tone of brooding and weary resignation. “Do you understand how she can ever bear to go back in there? Do you see how she can rent that room out to any cheap lodger who comes along? Do you realize that she’s got the same bed in there he died on,” she said morbidly, “the same mattress?—K-k-k-k-k-k!” she laughed softly and huskily, poking at his ribs. “She’ll have you sleeping on it next—”
“I’ll be damned if she does!”
“K-k-k-k-k-k-k!”
“Do you think I could be sleeping on it now?” Eugene said with a feeling of black horror and dread around his heart.
“K-k-k-k-k-k!” she snickered. “Would you like that? Would you sleep better if you knew it was?… No,” she said quietly, shaking her head. “Uh-uh! I don’t think so. It’s still up there in the same room. She may have painted the bed, but otherwise I don’t think she’s changed a thing. Have you ever been back up there since he died?” she said curiously.
“My God, no! Have you?”
She shook her head: “Not I,” she said with weary finality. “I’ve never even been upstairs since that morning…. Hugh hates the place,” she muttered, looking towards him. “He doesn’t even like to stop and wait for me. He won’t come in.”
Then she was silent for a moment as they looked at the gaunt ugly bay of the room upstairs where Ben had died. In the yard the maple trees were thinning rapidly; the leaves were sere and yellow and were floating to the ground. And the old house stood there in all its ugly, harsh, and prognathous bleakness, its paint of rusty yellow scaling from it in
