III
Jeff Ranney was a man habituated to routine; he fell naturally into a regular way of doing even irregular things. The next morning his life was on the surface as it had always been. He rose to his chores, returned to his breakfast, went into the woodlot and set about the task he had postponed the day before. The woman cooked breakfast and did the work about the kitchen that his wife might have done. It would have been easy for any outsider to accept as fact her pretended status as Jeff’s niece from California.
But Jeff was not deceived by the apparent normality of this new existence. The man was immensely curious about her, absorbed in the mystery which she personified. His thoughts all that day were full of conjectures, full of hypotheses, formed and as quickly thrown away. One guess he clung to as probable fact. It seemed to him certain she had come ashore from that yacht which he had seen lying in East Harbor the night before; had come ashore as one who flees. But to the questions who she might be and why she had fled, he found a thousand answers and accepted none of them.
The question of her identity was solved that night, for on the first page of his Boston paper a headline caught his eye. It read thus:
Millionaire Viles’
Wife is a Suicide
His eyes moved down the closely printed column, intent on each word. Save for journalistic padding the first paragraph told the story:
East Harbor, Me., Oct. 18—Lucia Viles, wife of Leander Viles, the millionaire banker, committed suicide here last night by drowning. She left the Viles’ yacht, which is anchored in the harbor, in a small rowboat, at a moment when a heavy squall of rain had driven the crew to shelter; and it is presumed that she threw herself into the water as soon as she had reached a sufficient distance so that she would not be seen. The tide was running out; and the rowboat was picked up by an incoming fisherman early this morning, down below the bell buoy, three miles from the yacht’s anchorage. The body has not been recovered. Mr. Viles, millionaire husband of the dead woman, said to-day that she had been subject to fits of melancholy for some time.
Jeff read this while his guest was washing the dishes after supper. She had thrown herself zealously into these household tasks, as though her overstrained nerves found relief in them. When she came into the dining room afterward he laid the paper down in such a manner that she must see the headline which had caught his eye.
She did see it, caught up the paper, read hurriedly, looked up when she was done, to find him watching her.
“You’ve read it?” she asked. He nodded. “I didn’t think they’d have it in the papers,” she cried, as though appalled at what she had done.
“Guess you didn’t make your boat fast when you landed,” Jeff suggested.
She shook her head. “No. I pushed it off. I hoped they would think this.”
He studied her, surprised and thoughtful. “Won’t your husband be kind of worried about you?” he suggested mildly, and was startled at the fierce anger behind her reply.
“I want him to be worried! Oh, I want him to be tortured!” she cried, and became absorbed once more in that which was printed on the page before her. “The body has not been recovered,” she read aloud after a moment; and with a quick change of mood laughed at him, shuddering faintly. “It does give me a creepy feeling,” she said.
“I should think it might,” Jeff assented mildly. “Yes, I should think it would.”
She was wearing a gingham dress belonging to his wife, which he had found at her request. Now, sitting across the table from him, she began to tremble and to laugh in nervous bursts of sound.
Jeff asked, “What’s the matter! What you laughing at?”
“I can’t stop,” she told him helplessly. “It just strikes me as funny. I can’t help laughing. If I didn’t laugh I should cry. They think I’m dead. Dead!” The word was high pitched, almost like a scream.
Jeff had seen feminine hysteria before; he said sternly, “You got to stop. Now you be still.”
The woman controlled herself at once, nodding reassuringly. “Yes, I’ll be still. I will be still,” she promised. “You won’t let them find me here, will you? You won’t let them know I’m here?”
“Andy Wattles stopped here this morning, in the truck,” Jeff answered. “I told him you’d come. He’d heard me say you was thinking of coming. It was safest to tell him.”
“But I wasn’t thinking of coming!” she cried, appalled.
“My brother’s girl from California was,” he reminded her; and she nodded over and over, as a child nods, to show her understanding and her acquiescence. Her trembling had ceased; her fright was passing. She went to bed at last, somewhat reassured.
But the paper next day, in even larger headlines, announced that doubt was cast upon the theory that she was a suicide.
“Mr. Viles,” the reporter wrote, “said to-day he thought it possible his wife might have become temporarily insane; that she was subject to hours of extreme nervous depression. It is known that she took a considerable sum of money from a safe in her cabin before she left the yacht. It is possible that she went ashore upon some errand and was assaulted and robbed. The three possibilities which the police of East Harbor are considering are suicide, robbery and murder, or an insane flight.” Jeff smiled at the picture of Sam Gallop, the “police of East Harbor,” considering anything. “In order to enlist every possible helper in the search for the missing woman,” the reporter added, “Mr. Viles has offered a reward of a thousand dollars for her body or of ten thousand for information that will lead to her discovery alive.”
The woman, when she read this, shivered with dread. “They will find me,” she told Jeff wearily. “Oh, I hoped they would believe me dead.”
“I dunno as they’ll find you,” Jeff argued. “They’re not apt to look out this way. They’re more likely to think you headed for Boston or somewheres.”
“It’s hopeless,” she insisted. “I think you’d better go tell them where I am, and get the money. The ten thousand dollars. Some good will come out of it, that way. I’d like you to have the money. You’ve been kind to me.”
The man laughed reassuringly. “Shucks, ma’am,” he said. “What would I do with a lot of money like that? It’s no good except to buy things with, and I’ve got more things than I can take care of now. Don’t you fret yourself. They ain’t going to find you, ma’am.”
“Everyone knows I’m here. Those women who came to-day—” She moved her hands drearily. “Someone will tell.”
Jeff shook his head. “No, they won’t. That was Will Bissell’s wife and Mrs. McAusland. They heard from the store that you was here; and they’d heard my wife say you was coming.”
“Oh, they must have seen that I was—” She paused, unwilling to hurt him.
“Different from us folks?” he asked, smiling at her understandingly. “Well, California folks are different from people around here. They’d have thought it was funny if you was like us.”
“And my wearing your wife’s dress.”
“I told ’em your trunk was lost. You had to have something to work around the house in.”
She was, in the end, unwillingly persuaded to a more hopeful point of view. But when she had gone up the stairs to her room Jeff sat for a long time, turning the newspaper in his hands, reading over and over that which was written there. She was so beautiful, so much more beautiful than anyone he had ever seen; and the gown she wore when she came to the farm had stamped itself upon his visual memory as a part of her beauty. That a reward of ten thousand dollars should have been offered for her discovery did not surprise Jeff; though it added to the glamour which cloaked her in his eyes.
“She’s worth more,” he told himself softly. “If she was mine I’d give a hundred times that much to get her back again.” And he thought of this husband of hers, whom she wished to torture, and wondered what he had done to her, and hated this man he had never seen because the woman hated him. “He’s not going to get her back,” Jeff swore in his thoughts. “If I can help her keep away from him he’ll not get her again.” There was nothing possessive in the feeling which was awakening in him. His devotion to her was a completely unselfish force.
It was also the most powerful emotion Jeff had felt in all his fifty-seven years.