The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce — Volume 2: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians

THE THEORY OF THE DEFENSE

That is what occurred during a night in a forest, but not all of it did Irene Marlowe relate to Jenner Brading; not all of it was known to her.  When she had concluded the sun was below the horizon and the long summer twilight had begun to deepen in the hollows of the land.  For some moments Brading was silent, expecting the narrative to be carried forward to some definite connection with the conversation introducing it; but the narrator was as silent as he, her face averted, her hands clasping and unclasping themselves as they lay in her lap, with a singular suggestion of an activity independent of her will.

“It is a sad, a terrible story,” said Brading at last, “but I do not understand.  You call Charles Marlowe father; that I know.  That he is old before his time, broken by some great sorrow, I have seen, or thought I saw.  But, pardon me, you said that you—­that you—­”

“That I am insane,” said the girl, without a movement of head or body.

“But, Irene, you say—­please, dear, do not look away from me—­you say that the child was dead, not demented.”

“Yes, that one—­I am the second.  I was born three months after that night, my mother being mercifully permitted to lay down her life in giving me mine.”

Brading was again silent; he was a trifle dazed and could not at once think of the right thing to say.  Her face was still turned away.  In his embarrassment he reached impulsively toward the hands that lay closing and unclosing in her lap, but something—­he could not have said what—­ restrained him.  He then remembered, vaguely, that he had never altogether cared to take her hand.

“Is it likely,” she resumed, “that a person born under such circumstances is like others—­is what you call sane?”

Brading did not reply; he was preoccupied with a new thought that was taking shape in his mind—­what a scientist would have called an hypothesis; a detective, a theory.  It might throw an added light, albeit a lurid one, upon such doubt of her sanity as her own assertion had not dispelled.

The country was still new and, outside the villages, sparsely populated.  The professional hunter was still a familiar figure, and among his trophies were heads and pelts of the larger kinds of game.  Tales variously credible of nocturnal meetings with savage animals in lonely roads were sometimes current, passed through the customary stages of growth and decay, and were forgotten.  A recent addition to these popular apocrypha, originating, apparently, by spontaneous generation in several households, was of a panther which had frightened some of their members by looking in at windows by night.  The yarn had caused its little ripple of excitement—­had even attained to the distinction of a place in the local newspaper; but Brading had given it no attention.  Its likeness to the story to which he had just listened now impressed him as perhaps more than accidental.  Was it not possible that the one story had suggested the other—­that finding congenial conditions in a morbid mind and a fertile fancy, it had grown to the tragic tale that he had heard?

Brading recalled certain circumstances of the girl’s history and disposition, of which, with love’s incuriosity, he had hitherto been heedless—­such as her solitary life with her father, at whose house no one, apparently, was an acceptable visitor and her strange fear of the night, by which those who knew her best accounted for her never being seen after dark.  Surely in such a mind imagination once kindled might burn with a lawless flame, penetrating and enveloping the entire structure.  That she was mad, though the conviction gave him the acutest pain, he could no longer doubt; she had only mistaken an effect of her mental disorder for its cause, bringing into imaginary relation with her own personality the vagaries of the local myth-makers.  With some vague intention of testing his new “theory,” and no very definite notion of how to set about it he said, gravely, but with hesitation: 

“Irene, dear, tell me—­I beg you will not take offence, but tell me—­”

“I have told you,” she interrupted, speaking with a passionate earnestness that he had not known her to show—­“I have already told you that we cannot marry; is anything else worth saying?”

Before he could stop her she had sprung from her seat and without another word or look was gliding away among the trees toward her father’s house.  Brading had risen to detain her; he stood watching her in silence until she had vanished in the gloom.  Suddenly he started as if he had been shot; his face took on an expression of amazement and alarm:  in one of the black shadows into which she had disappeared he had caught a quick, brief glimpse of shining eyes!  For an instant he was dazed and irresolute; then he dashed into the wood after her, shouting:  “Irene, Irene, look out!  The panther!  The panther!”

In a moment he had passed through the fringe of forest into open ground and saw the girl’s gray skirt vanishing into her father’s door.  No panther was visible.