Footprints by Kay Cleaver Strahan

I

I had been as nervous as an old woman about Aunt Gracia all during these everlasting proceedings. She and I had ridden to Quilterville together to keep from crowding the carriage.

We were no sooner mounted, and off, than she began to talk to me about hoping I'd be "discreet" at the inquest. I did not understand her, at first. We had held sort of a family council before we had left home and Grandfather had talked to us. Over and over-you know how unusual it is for Grandfather to be reiterative-he had impressed upon us the necessity for telling the absolute truth.

He explained, of course, that he did not suppose any of us would lie, but that affairs of this sort were apt to invite attempted diplomacy, finesse. None of us, Grandfather went on to say, had any reason to fear the truth. Truth, he asked us to remember, was the one thing that could not ultimately be defeated. He gave us rather a sermon, insisting that truth bred truth as surely as cabbages bred cabbages, or as lies bred lies. Grandfather, as you know, would neither dictate nor appeal; but he came closer to each, in this talk to us, than I had ever heard him come.

I was still thinking of his last statement (Lucy would call it a pearl), "One cannot bargain with truth," when Aunt Gracia began her talk about discretion. It seemed to me that she was unsaying most of the things Grandfather had said; but it was easier to doubt my own understanding than it was to doubt either Aunt Gracia's dutifulness or her rigid integrity. It wasn't long, though, until she gave me no opportunity for choice; so then I asked her, straight, if she was disagreeing with what Grandfather had said to us in the parlour.

She answered that Grandfather was old, very old, and at present frightfully weakened from shock, grief, and the impending horror of disgrace. She said that, fundamentally, what Grandfather had been telling us about truth was sound; but, in many circumstances, truth should become a delicate thing, to be handled delicately, not swung as a bludgeon. She said that truth might breed truth, if it were planted in the proper soil. If it were tossed carelessly to the four winds it might breed nothing-as cabbage seeds sown in the sagebrush would breed nothing-or it might breed anything: destruction, disgrace. Grandfather's idealism, she remarked, like many other beautiful things, was not always the most practical asset in a time of emergency.

You will understand, Judy, that I actually had to turn in my saddle and look to make sure that it was Aunt Gracia, of the nonadjustable moralities, who was riding beside me.

She misread my look, because she said: "Exactly, Neal. We are to use the truth to-day, but we are to use it carefully, with discretion. For instance, dear, the fact that I can find comfort in the knowledge that Dick died in a state of perfect grace, need not be brought out. Unless we are directly questioned, I should think the entire circumstance of Dick's recent baptism might better be omitted from the testimony. Too, I can see no reason for telling anyone who may be there to-day about the fact that Dick and Christopher had recently exchanged rooms."

"Aunt Gracia," I asked, "do you think that some one of us meant to kill Chris, and blundered into Father's room, by mistake?"

She evaded that by saying it was more important, now, to plan for the future than it was to probe into the past.

I told her that I agreed with her. But, I fancy, we did not mean the same thing. It was a peach of a morning, Judy. The snow had melted. The air was sweet. Hiroshige had done the sky, and our brown old hills lay softly in front of it. It was not the realization of death, it was the realization of life-of a world alive; even our hills were only napping-that made me go suddenly rabid.

Aunt Gracia interrupted my ravings. "Don't, Neal. Don't," she commanded. "You sound like Jasper in _Edwin Drood_."

That was plain enough, wasn't it? "Aunt Gracia," I said, "it is bothering you, isn't it, to decide whether I shot Father because I thought that he was going insane, or whether I meant to go into Chris's room that night, and shot Father by mistake?"

"Why do you say that? " she asked.

"Because you say we must mention neither the baptism nor the changed rooms at the inquest to-day. Because I know that you have suspected me, from the first. Would it help you any to have me swear to you, out here in the open, that I am as innocent as you are?"

"Yes," she said.

"I swear it, Aunt Gracia."

We rode along and had made the ford before she said another word. She came up beside me on the east river path.

"Neal," she said, "this is an irreligious community. Consequently, there are two words they like to roll around their tongues-‘Religious fanatic. ' I am hoping they won't think of those two words to-day."

She grew intense. She does, you know, once in a blue moon. She said that she wasn't a coward. She said she would be glad to say that she had killed Father, and then go to join him, and Mother, and the others in one of the highest states of glory. But, she said, such a false confession could do nothing but bring added shame and grief to the family. If only, she said, she were not a Quilter-then how eagerly she would sacrifice her own life and honour for the honour of the Quilters.