All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [107]
“ ‘Knew?” I echoed, like a question, but I knew, too, now. My friend had learned the truth–from the coldness of his wife, from the gossip of servants–and had drawn the gold ring from his finger and carried to the bed where he had lain with her and had put it beneath her pillow and had gone down and shot himself but under such circumstances that no one save his wife would ever guess it to be more than an accident. But he had made one fault of calculation. The yellow wench had found the ring.
“ ‘She knows,’ she whispered, pressing my hand hard against her bosom, which heaved and palpitated with a new wildness. ‘She knows–and she looks at me–she will always look at me.’ Then suddenly her voice dropped, and a wailing intonation came into it: ‘She will tell. All of them will know. All of them in the house will look at me and know–when they hand me the dish–when they come into the room–and their feet don’t make any noise!’ She rose abruptly, dropping my hand. I remained seated, and she stood there beside me, her back toward me, the whiteness of her face and hands no longer visible, and to my sight the blackness of her costume faded into the shadow, even in such proximity. Suddenly, in a voice which I did not recognize for its hardness, she said in the darkness above me, ‘I will not abide it, I will not abide it!’ Then she turned, and with a swooping motion leaned to kiss me upon the mouth. Then she was gone from my side and I heard her feet running up the gravel of the path. I sat there in the darkness for a time longer, turning the ring upon my finger.”
After that meeting in the summerhouse, Cass did not see Annabelle Trice for some days. He learned that she had gone to Louisville, where, he recalled, she had close friends. She had, as was natural, taken Phebe with her. Then he heard that she had returned, and that night, late, went to the summerhouse in the garden. She was there, sitting in the dark. She greeted him. She seemed, he wrote later, peculiarly cut off, remote, and vague in manner, like a somnambulist or a person drugged. He asked about her trip to Louisville, and she replied briefly that she had been down the river in Paducah, and she said that she had none there. Then, all at once, she turned on him, the vagueness changing to violence, and burst out, “You are prying–you are prying into my affairs–and I will not tolerate it.” Cass stammered out some excuse before she cut in to say, “But if you must know, I’ll tell you. I took her there.”
For a moment Cass was genuinely confused.
“Her?” he questioned.
“Phebe,” she replied, “I took her to Paducah, and she’s gone.”
“Gone–gone where?”
“Down the river,” she answered, repeated, “down the river,” and laughed abruptly, and added, “and she won’t look at me any more like that.”
“You sold her?”
“Yes, I sold her. In Paducah, to a man who was making up a coffle of Negroes for New Orleans. And nobody knows me in Paducah, nobody knew I was there, nobody knows I sold her, for I shall say she ran away into Illinois. But I sold her. For thirteen hundred dollars.”
“You got a good price,” Cass said, “even for a yellow girl as sprightly as Phebe.” And, as he reports in the journal, he laughed with some “bitterness and rudeness,” though he does not say why.