It wasn't love of the work alone, or the feeling that I ought to earn my salary, that pushed me on. There was something else—I wanted to clear Esther Maitland. I wanted it bad. I kept thinking of her eyes looking at me when I gave her the drink of water and it made me sort of sick. In my thoughts I kept telling my husband about it, and I always tried to make out I'd acted very smart and some way or other I knew he wouldn't think so. It wasn't that I felt guilty—I'd done nothing but what I was hired for—but there's a meanness about beating a person down, there's a meanness about staring into their white, twisted face and saying, "Ha—Ha—you're cornered and I did it!" You have to be awfully good yourself to do that sort of thing.
Thursday morning I'd got all I could and with my notes and my fountain pen I went out on the side piazza by Miss Maitland's study; there was a table there and it was quiet and secluded. So I fixed everything convenient and set to work. Taking the cigar band as the central point I built up from it something like this:
It had been dropped by a man—so few women smoke cigars you could put that down as certain. It had been dropped between half-past eight when the storm stopped and half-past ten when Miss Maitland found it. The man could not be Mr. Janney who had driven both ways, nor Dixon or Isaac who had walked to the village by the road and come back the same route. It couldn't have been Otto the chauffeur as he had stayed at Ferguson's garage visiting there with Ferguson's men. The head gardener had gone to the movies with the other Grasslands servants, and the under gardeners had been in their own homes in the village as I had taken pains to find out. Therefore it was no man living on the place at that time.
But that it was some one who was familiar with the house and its interior workings was proved by two facts:—that the dogs, heard to start barking, had suddenly quieted down, and that a rose from Miss Maitland's dress had been found inside the safe.
An expert burglar could have got round all the rest, had a key to the front door, worked out the combination—the house was virtually empty for over two hours—it was known that the family and servants were out. But the most expert burglar in the world couldn't have controlled those dogs—Mrs. Price's Airdale was as savage to strangers as a wolf and had a bark on it like a steam calliope.
The rose figured as a proof this way: It had been put inside the safe to throw suspicion on Miss Maitland, the thief was aware that she knew the combination. This would argue that he was acquainted with the habits of the household. All social secretaries are not given the leeway Miss Maitland was; all social secretaries aren't given the combination of a safe where two hundred thousand dollars' worth of jewels are kept. The man knew she had it, and tried to fix the guilt on her. Where his plan slipped up was Mrs. Price coming later, finding the rose, salting it down in a piece of tissue paper, and, for some reason of her own, not saying a word about it.
How did he get the rose? As far as I could see there was just one way. Esther Maitland had spent part of the afternoon of July the seventh altering her evening dress. Ellen had pinned it up on her and she'd taken the waist down to her study to sew on as her room was too hot. When she'd gone upstairs again—it was Ellen who gave me all this—she'd left part of the trimming on the desk. The next morning the parlor maid had given it to Ellen—all cut and picked apart, some of the roses loose in a cardboard box—to put in Miss Maitland's room. It had lain on the desk all night and, in my opinion, the thief had either known it was there or found it, taken the rose, and made his "plant" with it.
Now one man who would be familiar to the dogs and might know Miss Maitland's privileges and habits, was Chapman Price. But it wasn't he, for at nine-thirty, the hour when the thief was busy, Mr. Price was crossing the Queensborough bridge, headed for New York. And anyway, if he hadn't been, you couldn't suspect him of trying to lay the blame on the girl who was his partner. No—Chapman Price was wiped off the map with all the rest of the Grasslands crowd.
When I'd got this far I sat biting my pen handle and sizing it up. A thief, professional, had taken the jewels. He was some one unknown, having no connection with Mr. Price or Miss Maitland. The two crimes that had nearly shaken the Janney family off its throne had been committed by different parties. I was as sure of that as that the sun would rise to-morrow.
After dinner that evening I went out on the balcony and sat there, turning it all over in my head, and looking at the woods, black-edged and solid against the night sky. It was very still, not a breath, and presently, off across the garden, I heard the gravel crunch under a foot, a soft padding on the grass, and then a long, lean figure came into the brightness that shot out across the drive from the hall behind me—Ferguson.