"Quite right," assented Warriner. "Betty looks pretty white, and you have been traveling for two days. Let me know, at any time, if I can be of service."
We both of us accompanied Warriner to the porch, and saw him drive away. As we re-entered the hall the closed door of the library shone white and ghostly at the end of the passage.
"That horrible room!" panted Betty, her hand tight clutched on my arm. "I can never, never enter it again."
I tried to soothe her as best I could, but the poor girl's nerves had been badly overstrained, and it was a long time before I could get the upper hand of her hysterical mood. I positively refused to say one more word on the general subject of the tragedy, or the particular contents of Eunice Trevor's ante mortem statement; and, after a while, Betty gave in and was reasonable again. But both of us knew that the question had not been settled, that it was only postponed. And to-morrow it would return again to plague us.
Chapter XVI
Ad Interim
I never sent for Warriner to come and discuss Eunice Trevor's astonishing communication. Why? Well, what would have been the use? After all, the woman had told us little or nothing which we had not known already; certainly, there was no definite information in her statement upon which to base a working hypothesis. Granted that there was a guilty secret, it lay hidden for all time in S. Saviour's churchyard. Both Eunice Trevor and John Thaneford may have been innocent of any actual participation in the tragedy of Francis Graeme's death, but it was by no means clear that they could not have taken steps to prevent it. The coroner's jury had given their verdict, the magistrate had found no case against the one suspected person, Dave Campion, and there was really no valid warrant for reopening the inquiry. Besides, this was a purely family affair, and Chalmers Warriner was an outsider. I dare say it was despicably small-minded of me, but Betty was now my wife, and both she and Warriner ought to realize that the intimacy between them could not be continued on the old free footing. Jealous. Well perhaps, I was uneasily conscious of an unworthy feeling in the matter. But I was master of "Hildebrand Hundred," and surely I had the right to determine what friendships were desirable and what were not. Warriner was a man of mature age, Betty was young and impulsive; it was my bounden duty to guard her from every sidelong look, from every whispered word. Not that I ever discussed the question with her; I merely took my stand and it was her wifely obligation to yield to my judgment. So far as I could tell, she never even noticed that Warriner no longer came to the "Hundred" in the old informal way. And that was as it should be.
But the issues raised by Eunice Trevor's statement were not to be set aside so easily. It was annoying, but Betty persisted in taking the dead woman's warning both literally and seriously; she actually begged me to formally abandon the "Hundred" to John Thaneford, as the legal next-of-kin, and perhaps leave Maryland altogether.
This I could not consent to do; I was too proud, or perhaps too stubborn, to be frightened by the vaporings of a highly wrought and undoubtedly neurotic imagination. There was not the shadow of a proof that Francis Graeme's death had been due to premeditated violence, and as for the alleged tragedies in the dim past, I neither knew nor cared anything about them. What if five men had died, under unexplained circumstances, in that particular room? All this was ancient history running back over a period of sixty odd years, and there are many coincidences in life. There is no greater tyranny than that of superstition, and once in bondage to its shadowy overlordship orderly existence becomes impossible.