But the tears were gathering in Olivia’s eyes.
“I’m shocked, yes, of course,” said she, sadly. “And I’m dreadfully—dreadfully sorry.”
Lucy was scandalized. This was not the way in which she had been taught to look upon a criminal.
CHAPTER VI.
In spite of all her philosophy, of all her fortitude, Olivia Denison could not deny, even to herself, that the one terrible word “murderer,” applied to the man who had proved himself such a kind friend, gave a shock such as no newly formed friendship could stand unshaken. If he had only denied the charge by so much as a look! But, on the contrary, his downcast head and hurrying step when Lucy’s indiscreet remark fell on his ears seemed like a tacit admission of the justice of it. The little maid’s characteristic comments on the matter jarred upon her greatly.
“You might have knocked me down with a feather, Miss Olivia, when they first told me it was him as made away with the young woman whose rooms we were rummaging in to-day! ‘Lor,’ I says, ‘never! A nice-spoken gentleman like that!’ Indeed, Miss——”
“Who was it told you, Lucy?” interrupted her mistress, quietly.
“It was when I was going up the road, ma’am, looking for you. For I got that frightened at last, sitting here all myself, and nobody to speak to, and such cracklings and noises as you never heard along the walls! So I went out a little way, thinking perhaps you had missed the road and lost yourself. And I came across two women and a man standing at the gate of a farmyard. And I spoke to them and they guessed where I came from; for it seems it was the farm belonging to that rude man, though I didn’t know it at the time. And they asked me in, saying as they wouldn’t keep me not a minute. And I was so glad not to be alone that I went just inside the kitchen door with them—just for a minute. But then they told me such things that I felt I couldn’t come back to this house all by myself after hearing of them. They said how that clergyman, for all his nice-seeming ways, used to be a wild sort of young man, and how he once courted her that’s now the vicar’s lady, but she wouldn’t have nothing to say to him. And so when she married his brother he got wilder and wilder, and he took to courting the farmer’s daughter that lived here on the sly like, and not fair and open. She was a masterful sort of girl, and her brother and his wife, that she lived with, let her have her own way too much, and have ideas above her station. And people think she believed he’d marry her, for her own people and every one was beginning to talk; and then one night—it was the 7th of July, Miss, ten years and a half ago—she went out to meet him, down by his own church, as people knew she’d done before, and she never came back. And nobody’s never seen nothing of her from that day to this; only there were screams heard that night down by St. Cuthbert’s—that’s his church, ma’am.”
Lucy ended in a mysterious whisper, and both she and her mistress remained silent for a little while. Then Miss Denison spoke in a warm and decided tone—
“There must have been investigations made. If there had been anything like just ground for supposing that Mr. Brander had made away with the girl, he would at least have been hunted out of the parish, even if there had not been proof enough to have him arrested.”