Silence. Yes, silence was the one and only refuge remaining to her. Yet, after a few days, the constant self-restraint which it entailed, ate like a canker into her peace, and undermined a strength which she had always considered inexhaustible. Reuther began to notice her pallor, and the judge to look grave. She was forced to complain of a cold (and in this she was truthful enough) to account for her alternations of feverish impulse and deadly lassitude.
The trouble she had suppressed was having its quiet revenge. Should she continue to lie inert and breathless under the threatening hand of Fate, or risk precipitating the doom she sought to evade, by proceeding with inquiries upon the result of which she could no longer calculate?
She recalled the many mistakes made by those who had based their conclusions upon circumstantial evidence (her husband’s conviction in fact) and made up her mind to brave everything by having this matter out with Mr. Black. Then the pendulum swung back, and she found that she could not do this because, deep down in her heart, there burrowed a monstrous doubt (how born or how cherished she would not question), which Mr. Black, with an avidity she could not combat, would at once detect and pounce upon. Better silence and a slow death than that.
But was there no medium course? Could she not learn from some other source where Oliver had been on the night of that old-time murder? Miss Weeks was a near neighbour and saw everything. Miss Weeks never forgot;— to Miss Weeks she would go.
With instructions to Reuther calculated to keep that diligent child absorbed and busy in her absence, she started out upon her quest. She had reached the first gate, passed it and was on the point of opening the second one, when she saw on the walk before her a small slip of brown paper. Lifting it, she perceived upon it an almost illegible scrawl which she made out to read thus:—
For Mrs. Scoville:
Do not go wandering all over the town for clews. Look closer home.
And below:
You remember the old saying about jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Let your daughter be warned. It is better to be singed than consumed.
Warned! Reuther? Better be singed than consumed? What madness was this? How singed and how consumed? Then because Deborah’s mind was quick, it all flashed upon her, bowing her in spirit to the ground. Reuther had been singed by the knowledge of her father’s ignominy, she would be consumed if inquiry were carried further and this ignominy transferred to the proper culprit. CONSUMED! There was but one person whose disgrace could consume Reuther. Oliver alone could be meant. The doubts she had tried to suppress from her own mind were shared by others,— OTHERS!
The discovery overpowered her and she caught herself crying aloud in utter self-abandonment:
“I will not go to Miss Weeks. I will take Reuther and fly to some wilderness so remote and obscure that we can never be found.”
Yet in five minutes she was crossing the road, her face composed, her manner genial, her tongue ready for any encounter. The truth must be hers at all hazards. If it could be found here, then here would she seek it. Her long struggle with fate had brought to the fore every latent power she possessed.
One stroke on the tiny brass knocker, old-fashioned and quaint like everything else in this doll-house, brought Miss Weeks’ small and animated figure to the door. She had seen Mrs. Scoville coming, and was ready with her greeting. A dog from the big house across the way would have been welcomed there. The eager little seamstress had never forgotten her hour in the library with the half-unconscious judge.
“Mrs. Scoville!” she exclaimed, fluttering and leading the way into the best room; “how very kind you are to give me this chance for making my apologies. You know we have met before.”
“Have we?” Mrs. Scoville did not remember, but she smiled her best smile and was gratified to note the look of admiration with which Miss Weeks surveyed her more than tasty dress before she raised her eyes to meet the smile to whose indefinable charm so many had succumbed. “It is a long time since I lived here,” Deborah proceeded as soon as she saw that she had this woman, too, in her net. “The friends I had then, I scarcely hope to have now; my trouble was of the kind which isolates one completely. I am glad to have you acknowledge an old acquaintance. It makes me feel less lonely in my new life.”
“Mrs. Scoville, I am only too happy.” It was bravely said, for the little woman was in a state of marked embarrassment. Could it be that her visitor had not recognised her as the person who had accosted her on that memorable morning she first entered Judge Ostrander’s forbidden gates?
“I have been told —” thus Deborah easily proceeded, “that for a small house yours contains the most wonderful assortment of interesting objects. Where did you ever get them?”
“My father was a collector, on a very small scale of course, and my mother had a passion for hoarding which prevented anything from going out of this house after it had once come into it,— and a great many strange things have come into it. There have even been bets made as to the finding or not finding of a given object under this roof. Pardon me, perhaps I bore you.”
“Not at all. It’s very interesting. But what about the bets?”
“Oh, just this. One day two men were chaffing each other in one of the hotel lobbies, and the conversation turning upon what this house held, one of them wagered that he knew of something I could not fish out of my attic, and when the other asked what, he said an aeroplane — Why he didn’t say a locomotive, I don’t know; but he said an aeroplane, and the other, taking him up, they came here together and put me the question straight. Mrs. Scoville, you may not believe it, but my good friend won that bet. Years ago when people were just beginning to talk about air-sailing machines, my brother who was visiting me, amused his leisure hours in putting together something he called a ‘flyer.’ And what is more, he went up in it, too, but he came down so rapidly that he kept quite still about it, and it fell to me to lug the broken thing in. So when these gentlemen asked to see an aeroplane, I took them into a lean-to where I store my least desirable things, and there pointed out a mass of wings and bits of tangled wire, saying as dramatically as I could: ‘There she is!’ And they first stared, then laughed; and when one complained: ‘That’s a ruin, not an aeroplane,’ I answered with all the demureness possible; ‘and what is any aeroplane but a ruin in prospect? This has reached the ruin stage; that’s all.’ So the bet was paid and my reputation sustained. Don’t you find it a little amusing?”
“I do, indeed,” smiled Deborah. “Now, if I wanted to make the test, I should take another course from these men. I should not pick out something strange, or big, or unlikely. I should choose some every-day object, some little matter —” She paused as if to think.
“What little matter?” asked the other complacently.
“My husband once had a cap,” mused Mrs. Scoville thoughtfully. “It had an astonishingly broad peak in front. Have you a cap like that?”
Miss Weeks’ eyes opened. She stared in some consternation at Mrs. Scoville, who hastened to say:
“You wonder that I can mention my husband. Perhaps you will not be so surprised when I tell you that in my eyes he is a martyr, and quite guiltless of the crime for which he was punished.”
“You think that?” There was real surprise in the manner of the questioner. Mrs. Scoville’s brow cleared. She was pleased at this proof that her affairs had not yet reached the point of general gossip.
“Miss Weeks, I am a mother. I have a young and lovely daughter. Can I look in her innocent eyes and believe her father to have so forgotten his responsibilities as to overshadow her life with crime? No, I will not believe it. Circumstances were in favour of his conviction, but he never lifted the stick which struck down Algernon Etheridge.”
Miss Weeks, who had sat quite still during the utterance of these remarks, fidgetted about at their close, with what appeared to the speaker, a sudden and quite welcome relief.
“Oh!” she murmured; and said no more. It was not a topic she found easy of discussion.
“Let us go back to the cap,” suggested Deborah, with another of her fascinating smiles. “Are you going to show me one such as I have described?”
“Let me see. A man’s cap with an extra broad peak! Mrs. Scoville, I fear that you have caught me. There are caps hanging up in various closets, but I don’t remember any with a peak beyond the ordinary.”
“Yet they are worn? You have seen such?”
A red spot sprang out on the faded cheek of the woman as she answered impulsively:
“Oh, yes. Young Mr. Oliver Ostrander used to wear one. I wish I had asked him for it,” she pursued, naively. “I should not have had to acknowledge defeat at your very first inquiry.”
“Oh! you needn’t care about that,” laughed Deborah, in rather a hard tone for her. She had made her point, but was rather more frightened than pleased at her success. “There must be a thousand articles you naturally would lack. I could name —”
“Don’t, don’t!” the little woman put in breathlessly. “I have many odd things but of course not everything. For instance —” But here she caught sight of the other’s abstracted eye, and dropped the subject. The sadness which now spread over the very interesting countenance of her visitor, offered her an excuse for the introduction of a far more momentous topic; one she had burned to introduce but had not known how.
“Mrs. Scoville, I hear that Judge Ostrander has got your daughter a piano. That is really a wonderful thing for him to do. Not that he is so close with his money, but that he has always been so set against all gaiety and companionship. I suppose you did not know the shock it would be to him when you asked Bela to let you into the gates.”
“No! I didn’t know. But it is all right now. The judge seems to welcome the change. Miss Weeks, did you know Algernon Etheridge well enough to tell me if he was as good and irreproachable a man as they all say?”
“He was a good man, but he had a dreadfully obstinate streak in his disposition and very set ideas. I have heard that he and the judge used to argue over a point for hours. And he was most always wrong. For instance, he was wrong about Oliver.”
“Oliver?”
“Judge Ostrander’s son, you know. Mr. Etheridge wanted him to study for a professorship; but the boy was determined to go into journalism, and you see what a success he has made of it. As a professor he would probably have been a failure.”
“Was this difference of opinion on the calling he should pursue, the cause of Oliver’s leaving home in the way he did?” continued Deborah, conscious of walking on very thin ice.
But Miss Weeks rather welcomed than resented this curiosity. Indeed she was never tired of enlarging upon the Ostranders. It was, therefore, with a very encouraging alacrity she responded:
“I have never thought so. The judge would not quarrel with Oliver on so small a point as that. My idea is, though I never talk of it much, that they had a great quarrel over Mr. Etheridge. Oliver never liked the old student; I’ve watched them and I’ve seen. He hated his coming to the house so much; he hated the way his father singled him out and deferred to him and made him the confidant of all his troubles. When they went on their walks, Oliver always hung back, and more than once I have seen him make a grimace of distaste when his father urged him forward. He was only a boy, I know, but his disli............