The Millbank Case: A Maine Mystery of To-day — Themes and Context

e two rooms, Mrs. Parlin ruled as undisputed as during her thirty years of wifehood. Within, Wing held control, and while no small share of his personal work was done here, the great room saw much of his private life of which his everyday acquaintances had little suspicion. The cases contained many a volume that belongs to literature rather than law, and here he found that best of rest from the onerous demands of a constantly growing practice--complete change in matter and manner of thought.

On the night of the 10th of May, 1880, the light burned late in Lawyer Wing’s library. It was the scandal of Millbank that this occurred often. The village was given to regarding the night as a time when no man should work. “Early to bed and early to rise” was its motto, and though an opposite practice had left Theodore Wing with more of health, wealth, and wisdom than most Millbankians possessed, he had never succeeded in reconciling his townsmen to his methods. But to-night conditions were more outrageous than usual. Mrs. Merrick, from the bed of an ailing grandchild, glanced up the hill at midnight and saw the light still burning. Old Doctor Portus, coming villageward from a confinement case, an hour later, saw the light as he passed the house and shook his head with dire prognostications. If Wing should be sick, old Doctor Portus would certainly not be called in attendance, and therefore he could measure this outrage of nature’s laws with a mind uninfluenced by personal bias.

At four o’clock, however, a farmer’s son, who had yielded the night to Millbank’s temptations, hurrying farmward to his morning chores, saw no light growing dim in the first flush of the spring morning to attract his attention to a scene that later knowledge revealed. At six, the hired man came down the back stairs and went through the woodshed to the barns. Turning the heavy wooden bar that held the great doors fast, he swung them open and let in the soft morning air.

Then, his eye travelled along the stretch of house and he saw something that startled him. The side door was standing ajar--half open--and on the stone step was a huddled mass that looked strangely like a man, half lying and half crouching. Before the hired man had passed half the distance to the door, he knew that the huddled mass was Theodore Wing. His head and right arm rested on the threshold and held the door from closing; his body was on the stone step. There was blood spattered on the white of the westerly door-post, and the left temple of the man, which was upward as he lay, showed a spot around which the flesh was blackened as if powder-burnt, while between the head and the threshold a thin stream of blood still flowed and fell drop by drop on the stone below. The eyes were wide open and the look in them seemed to say that, suddenly as death had come, it had not come too suddenly for the man to realise that here had fallen the end of his hopes and ambitions, his strivings and accomplishments, in a form that left him powerless to strike a blow in his own behalf.

This murder was the most tragic event that had ever happened in the history of Millbank. It caused the more terror in that, so far as any one could understand, it was absolutely without motive. It was not known that Theodore Wing had an enemy in the world. Millbank was proud of him with a wholesome, kindly pride, which found much of self-gratulation in having such a citizen. Yet this man had been struck down by a murderer’s hand, so silently that no sound had been heard, and the murderer had gone as he had come, without leaving trace of his coming or going.

Contrary to expectation aroused by the first news, the house seemed not to have been entered. The whole of the crime was evidenced in the dead man on the stone step. Apparently, there had been a ring at the bell and a shot from a pistol, held close to the head of the man, as he stood in the doorway, by some one who had stationed himself at the easterly end of the doorstep, and who, his purpose accomplished, slipped into the darkness which had opened to give him way for this deed. It was uncanny in the extreme and gave a sense of insecurity to life that an ordinary murder, due to traceable causes, would have failed utterly to give.