She shut the door with all the emphasis she dared—but her consideration was solely for the girl lying in the room in which her mother had lain for such a long time before her. Her heavy hair was unbound and spread over the pillow. Her body lay quiet; her head kept rolling back and forth; her hands picked at the covers or twisted together, and from her lips there came constantly a plaintive murmur: Where were all her friends? Had she no friends anywhere in the world? Sometimes she spent hours trying to convince her father or her mother that she was not a thief. Sometimes she cried pitifully and begged the whole town to believe that it was impossible that she could have done the thing of which she was accused.
Presently, the greater part of the town began to believe this. Martin Moreland found he was meeting a look of cold questioning on the faces of men who always had been friendly. The pastor of the Presbyterian Church, of which he was a deacon, had entered his room at the bank and no one knew what took place behind the closed doors, but as he left the room, several customers in the bank had heard his voice distinctly as he said to Martin Moreland: “I have the feeling that the life of this girl is endangered. If it is to be saved, it is upon your head to discover the necessary evidence to save it.” That was repeated over the town, and there were many who came to feel the same way.
For once in her life Mahala was being the perfect lady that her mother had always exhorted her to be. She was lying still, having the typhoid fever, undoubtedly from germs she had accumulated in the county jail where she had drunk avidly to quench a consuming thirst while she waited for Jason—having it quietly, in a way that her mother would have highly approved had she been there to dictate exactly the manner in which a lady should have a fever.
Sitting on the back steps waiting to see if the opportunity to be of any service might arise, Jason said to Jemima early in Mahala’s illness: “I’ve been thinking. The money I put up for Mahala’s bail has been returned to me. I’ve a notion to take some of it and fix up her house in the country so that it will be ready for her to go to when she gets over this. There’s nobody here she’ll be interested in seeing. The change might give her something to think of, it might help her. How do you feel about it?”
“I think,” said Jemima, “that it would be the very thing. I’ll go with her and we’ll live together. We’ll raise chickens and calves and pigs and she’ll feel better, be stronger, than she would at what she’s been doin’.”
So the two conspirators began a plot that ended in Jason’s finding a new interest in life. He told Peter Potter what he was planning, and with his approval and his help, Jason went at the work of repairing the house and redeeming the piece of land that Mahlon Spellman had thought so worthless that he had even forgotten to mention that he ever had purchased it.
CHAPTER XVI
“The Eyes of Elizabeth”
At a famous hotel in a summer resort where people of wealth gathered, in the bridal suite, pampered and indulged in every whim, Edith Moreland was supposed to be recovering from her illness. She had been greatly disturbed over the money matter. The more she thought of it, the more frequently she said to Junior: “You know, as I have time to study about it, I see that Mahala couldn’t possibly have taken that money, even though she couldn’t account for its disappearance. You see, if I had been calling there instead of being your wife, and if I had been arrested, I couldn’t have proved that I didn’t take it.”
By unlimited and plausible lying, Junior managed to keep her reasonably satisfied. He kept her room filled with flowers. He gave her expensive pieces of jewellery. He spent the greater part of his time with her, but she only grew more irritable and felt worse. Junior could see that she really was ill and that, in spite of his best efforts, she was not regaining her health. He began to fear that she was thinking of Mahala and brooding over her when she was supposed to be talking and thinking of other things.