IV
Will Belter stopped at the farm next morning, and lingered, talking with Jeff, watching furtively for a glimpse of the woman; asked at last, point-blank, if it was true that Jeff’s niece had come to visit him. He and Jeff were on the porch, outside the kitchen door; and Jeff nodded and, raising his voice, called to the woman, who was inside. He called her by his niece’s name.
“Mary!”
She came slowly to the door, dreading this contact with a stranger.
“This here’s Will Belter, one of our neighbors,” Jeff said by way of introduction. “He lives up on the ridge beyond the village.”
Will, greedy eyes upon her, said, “Howdo, ma’am!”
The woman watched him through the screen door, and answered, “How do you do!”
He said no more, and after a moment she turned back into the obscurity of the kitchen.
Will told Jeff, “She’s older than I figured she’d be.”
“She looks older,” Jeff agreed. “That long train trip was pretty hard; and she was kind of sick.”
“Ain’t but twenty-two or three, is she? I’d think she was thirty, anyway.”
“Twenty-four,” Jeff told him.
When Will presently went on his way Jeff watched his disappearing figure with stern eyes, and there was trouble in his countenance when he turned and saw the woman standing inside the screen door and also watching.
“Who was that?”
“I’d as soon he hadn’t come here,” Jeff confessed. “He’s a mean hound. A natural-born talebearer. Maybe we fooled him though.”
She made no comment, but both understood that her desire to remain hidden was imperiled by this man’s appearance. The shadow hung over them all that day. In the evening they read the paper together, found in it little that was new.
Afterwards the woman sat for a long time, thoughtfully silent, and at last said abruptly, “I think I’d better tell you why I ran away.”
Jeff looked across at her in surprise, hesitated. Then: “You needn’t, ’less you’re a mind to,” he assured her. “It don’t matter a bit in the world to me.”
“It is your right to know,” she decided. “And—I’d like to be able to talk about it with you. It would be a relief, I believe.”
Jeff nodded. “I expect that’s so,” he assented.
She took the paper from him, opened it to an inner page and pointed to a paragraph under a separate headline, beneath the story of her own disappearance.
“You saw this about Mr. Viles’ secretary being arrested?” she asked.
Jeff looked at the paper. The paragraph recited the fact that after a preliminary hearing Franklin Gardner, secretary to Leander Viles, had been held for the grand jury on a charge of stealing gems belonging to the missing woman.
Ranney nodded. “I heard about his being arrested, in town that day,” he told her.
“That was why I had to run away!” she cried, a sudden passion in her tones. “That was why I had to get away. Because it was I who saw him take them, and if they made me tell he would have to go to jail.”
She was leaning across the table, resting on her elbows, her fingers twisting together; and she watched Jeff anxiously, hungrily, as though to be sure he understood.
Jeff considered what she had said for a moment, and at length asked slowly, “Saw him steal them?”
“It’s a necklace,” she explained desperately. “Pearls, and a pendant set with diamonds, very beautifully. Mr. Viles used to boast how much he paid for it. He was ever so proud of it, you see. He wanted to show it to a man who is on the yacht with him, and that’s why he asked me to go down to the cabin and get it from the safe.”
Jeff was trying to fill out the gaps in her story. “That’s when you found out the necklace was gone, eh?” he inquired.
She nodded. Her words came in a rush:
“I saw Mr. Gardner come out of my cabin door, with the leather case in his hand. He dodged away; and I suppose he thought I had not seen him. And when I opened the little safe in my cabin the necklace was gone.”
Jeff grinned a little at that. “So your husband didn’t get to show it off, and brag about it, after all?”
His antipathy toward this husband of hers was increasing.
The woman shook her head. “I had to go back and tell him it was gone,” she assented. “And he went into one of his terrible rages. I was frightened. The doctors have warned him. So I tried to reassure him, told him that Mr. Gardner had the necklace.” Her hands were tightly clasped, the knuckles white. “Oh, I shouldn’t have let him know!” she cried wearily. “But I thought he must have asked Mr. Gardner to get it, must have given him the combination of the safe. Only he and I had it.”
Memories silenced her; and Jeff had to prompt her with a question: “But he hadn’t done that?”
“He hadn’t! He hadn’t!” she assented in a voice like a wail. “And when we tried to find Mr. Gardner he was gone. Gone off the yacht. Had run away. So then Mr. Viles went ashore himself, and by and by he came back, very well pleased, and said they had caught Mr. Gardner on the boat and had the necklace back again.”
“Did you run away right then?” he asked, when he saw she had forgotten to go on.
She hesitated, as though choosing her words.
“No,” she told him. “That was the day before. I was very unhappy even then. But until the next day I did not realize. Mr. Viles made me see. It was just before dinner, and I met him in the main cabin. He was very expansive and very good-humored and triumphant. He spoke of Mr. Gardner. And he said this to me.”
She repeated the words in a curious, parrot-like tone, as though they were engraved upon her memory. “He said: ‘It’s lucky you saw him, Lucia. If you hadn’t actually seen him come out of your cabin with the necklace in his hands we probably couldn’t send him to jail, even now!’”
Jeff was watching her attentively, waiting.
“I hadn’t really understood, before, that they would send him to jail,” the woman cried. “I asked Mr. Viles if he meant to do that, and begged him not to; and he just laughed at me. He said: ‘He’ll do ten years for this little piece of work, Lucia. And you’ll be the one whose testimony will send him up. That ought to be a satisfaction to you.’”
She added, with a movement of her hands as though everything were explained, “So I ran away. There was a sailor who helped me and gave me his coat, and I ran away, and got in your car because it was raining so hard and that was the first place I saw where I could hide and be sheltered from the rain.”
She broke off abruptly; and neither of them spoke for a period, while Jeff considered that which she had told him.
At length he asked gently, “You didn’t want to see this here Gardner in jail?”
The woman cried passionately, “No! No! Oh, he was wrong to steal. If I had not seen him I would never have believed—But I didn’t want to put him in jail!”
“I guess you liked him pretty well,” Jeff said. His tone was sympathetic, not inquisitive.
“Yes,” she nodded sadly, as though she spoke of one who were dead. “Yes, I did.” With a sudden confidence she added, “Why, he was my best friend. We knew each other so well. It was through him I met Mr. Viles. And then Frank had to go to Europe on business for Mr. Viles, and he was away so long, and I did not hear from him. I used to work, you know. I was a buyer in one of the New York stores. And Mr. Viles was ever so good to me, and I was tired, and he begged me so. That was how I came to marry him.”
“I don’t figure you ever loved him very much,” Jeff suggested after an interval.
“He was good to me at first,” she protested. “I think he meant to be good to me.”
Silence fell upon them both once more, and this time it persisted. By and by Jeff rose from his chair, passed behind hers and touched her shoulder roughly with his heavy hand.
“I wouldn’t worry too much,” he said cheerfully. “I wouldn’t worry too much if I was you.”
She looked up at him and smiled through sudden tears. “You’re good to me,” she told him.
“You run along to bed,” Jeff bade her. “Just forget your bothers and run along to bed.”
But when she had gone upstairs the man remained for a long time in his chair beside the warm lamp, thinking over what she had told him, supplying for himself the things she had not told. Jeff had a shrewd common sense; he was able to fill in many of the gaps, to see the truths to which even Lucia was blind. And as he thought, his eyes clouded with slow anger and his brows drew somewhat together; and when he got up at last to turn toward his bedroom there was a ferocity in his expression that no one had ever seen on Jeff Ranney’s face in all his fifty-seven years. He spoke slowly, half aloud, addressing no one at all.
“Damn the man,” he muttered. “I’d like to bust him a good one. It’d do him good.”
Upon this wish, which had a solemnity about it almost like a prayer, Jeff went to bed.