Part 6

The Winterport man had reported that the steamship line would make a new rate for apples by the barrel to Boston that fall; and Jeff decided to go down to the wharf and make inquiries. He parked his car on the edge of the wharf, in the lee of the freight sheds, and this time threw an old rubber blanket over the hood to keep the plugs dry, before turning toward the office. With the departure of the boat, business hereabouts was done for the day; and save for a light in the office, and another on the pier toward shore, the wharf was dark. Jeff’s errand occupied some ten minutes’ time; and while he was inside a fiercer squall of rain burst over the harbor. He could hear the water drumming on the roof.

When the squall had passed he returned to his car and took the blanket off the hood and threw it into the dark cavern of the tonneau, then cranked the engine and turned around and started home. His lights, run from the magneto, were dim and uncertain; his attention was all upon the road. The car skidded and slid and slued and bumped; but it came to no disaster. He drove into his own barn toward seven o’clock in the evening, and left his purchases untouched while he went into the house to change into overalls, so that he might do his chores.

When he came back into the barn he saw someone standing motionless beside the machine. He lifted the lantern which he carried, so that its light flooded the still figure, and perceived that the person who stood there, facing him, was a woman.

II

This woman, in these surroundings, was an amazing apparition. Against the background of his old hayrick, still half full of hay, Jeff saw her outlined. She wore a sailor’s oilskin coat, buttoned about her throat; and beneath the skirts of the draggled coat he glimpsed slim silk-clad ankles and badly soiled white satin pumps. She wore no hat; her hair was wet and all awry; and there was a thin streak of blood from a scratch upon her temple that had trickled down across the bridge of her nose in a slanting direction. Yet in spite of these difficulties he perceived that she was very beautiful.

At sight of her Jeff had stopped in his tracks and still stood motionless with surprise, the lantern in his lifted hand. The woman’s white fingers fumbled nervously at the fastenings of the oilskin coat she wore; she waited for a moment in silence; but when he did not speak she nodded in an uneasy little way and stammeringly said to him, “Good evening!” Her voice was full and throaty and pleasantly modulated.

Jeff replied, “Howdo!”

She began to speak very rapidly.

“You’re probably wondering how I came here. I was in your car. On the floor of the back seat. Almost crushed. That big bag fell off the seat on top of me when you hit that terrible bump. It banged my head down on a piece of iron. I’m afraid it has bled a little. I was almost smothered. The road was so rough.”

She was panting as though she had run a race; and Jeff watched her steadfastly for a moment, and then, for sheer relief from his astonishment, gripped the commonplace with both hands.

“You better come in the house and wash up,” he told her slowly, “and get warm. I guess you’re kind of wet.”

She nodded. “Yes. I’d like that. I’d like to do that.”

He perceived that she was fighting for self-control, putting down the revolt of jangling nerves.

“Come through here, ma’am,” he bade her, and led the way through the woodshed and into the kitchen. There he set his lantern on the table and brought fresh water from the pump. “I’ve been away since morning,” he explained. “The water in the tank is cold. You want to wait till I heat some up?”

She shook her head. “This will do finely.”

He went through into the bedroom and returned with a heavy porcelain bowl, which he set in the sink, removing the granite-ware wash-basin. The woman had sunk down limply in a chair beside the table. Jeff, careful not to distress her by his scrutiny, unwrapped a fresh bar of soap, brought out a clean towel. Then with half a dozen motions he threw shavings and bits of kindling into the stove, touched a match to them, laid a stick or two of hardwood atop. “That’ll warm the kitchen up pretty quick,” he told her. He understood that she wished to be alone, yet was not sure what he should do. At last he said awkwardly, “I’ll be doing the chores,” and lighted a lamp for her, then took the lantern and departed through the shed again.

When he had gone only a few steps he stopped, considered, then returned and knocked upon the door through which he had come out. She bade him enter; and when he did so he found her on her feet, unfastening the long black coat.

“You could go into the bedroom,” he said tentatively.

She shook her head, smiling gratefully. “I’m sure this is fine. But I would like a comb.”

“I’ll get my wife’s for you,” he replied; and brought it to her. Mrs. Ranney was a good housekeeper; the comb was as clean as new. “Would there be anything else?” he asked when she had thanked him for it.

“No. But you’re very kind to me.”

“I’ll get the chores done,” he replied uncomfortably, and this time departed in good earnest to the barn.

When he had fed and watered the stock, finding a relief in the familiar routine, he removed his purchases from the car. Saw where the woman had crouched on the floor. The rubber blanket which he had thrown in at the wharf must have fallen across her back; the heavy sack of feed might well have crushed her. “Lucky she wa’n’t worse hurt,” he told himself. He was full of speculations, full of questions, half dazed with wonder. Women of such a sort as this were as though they lived in another world. Yet she was in his kitchen now.

It was necessary for him to go back to the house to get the milking pails. Again he knocked upon the door, and the woman bade him come in. She had laid aside the oilskins; he was not able at once to understand just what it was she wore. A dress, but of a sort unfamiliar to his eyes. He had seen magazine pictures of such things. An evening gown, décolletté. Her hair was loose in a warm cloud about her smooth shoulders, and she was leaning above the stove.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized, flushing with some confusion. “I’m trying to get it dry.”

He would have backed out of the kitchen. “I’m not in a hurry, ma’am.”

But she cried warmly, “No, no, it’s all right. Come in.”

“I come to get the milk pails,” he explained. “I scalded them out this morning.” He took them from the draining board at one end of the sink. “I’ll go milk now.”

She asked diffidently, “Can’t I be starting supper while you’re doing that?”

Jeff smiled faintly. “I’m used to cooking. I know where the things are.”

“I can cook,” she assured him. “What are we going to have for supper?” She was beginning to see some humor in the situation.

“Why I just figured to scramble some eggs, and make coffee,” Jeff confessed. “The things are in the pantry, in through the dining room,” he added.

“I’ll have supper all ready when you come back,” she promised.

He said reluctantly, “Well, all right,” and left her there.

When he returned, half an hour later, he found her, her hair in a loose braid, wearing one of his wife’s aprons, busy about the kitchen table. “I’ve everything ready,” she told him, “but I waited, so that things would be nice and hot.”

“I got to separate the milk first,” he explained.

She nodded and, while he performed that operation, busied herself with egg beater and mixing bowl. He took the cream down cellar, set the skim milk in the shed for his hogs. When he had washed his hands and face she summoned him to supper in the dining room. She had made an omelet and toast, and her coffee was better than his. He ate with the silent intentness of a hungry man. Afterward she insisted on washing the dishes, while he read, fitfully enough, yet with an appearance of absorption, the paper that had been left that afternoon in the mail box before the door. There was something grotesquely domestic in the situation, and Jeff’s pulses were pounding with wonder at it all.

He had asked the woman no single question. There were a thousand questions he desired to ask, but an innate delicacy restrained him. The glamour of the hour had dazed this man; his senses were confused. There was an unreality about the whole experience. The dishes, rattling in the sink, sounded no differently than when his wife washed them. The illusion that it was his wife who had come home in this guise had for a moment dominion over him. The lines of newsprint staggered and swam before his inattentive eyes. He wondered, wondered, wondered. But he asked no question of his guest.

When she had finished her self-appointed task and come into the dining room where he was sitting she seemed to expect a catechism; but Jeff kept his eyes upon his paper, as a man clings to a safe anchorage, till at last she was forced to speak.

“I’ve been expecting you to question me,” she said uncertainly.

Jeff looked up at her and then found some reassurance in the fact that the silence was thus broken. “I’ve been expecting you’d tell me without asking,” he said, smiling faintly at her.

“I ought to,” she nodded. “But there’s so much to tell; and it must sound so incredible to you. I hid in your car at the wharf, blindly, not knowing who you were. I had to get away; wanted to get away. Anywhere. To hide. For a little while. I can pay you.” She spoke uncertainly, unwilling to give offense.

Jeff shook his head good-humoredly. “I don’t run a boarding house, ma’am.”

“I have to find some place where I can stay.”

He was thoughtfully silent for a little, then asked, “How long?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps only a little while.”

“I guess you can stay here a while,” he said.

“You spoke of your wife?” she suggested.

“She’s visiting my daughter, over in Augusta,” Jeff explained. “Won’t be back for a week anyways. I reckon it’d be easier for you if she was here; but you’re welcome anyways.”

She looked down helplessly at the gown she wore. “It was a mad thing to do,” she whispered, half to herself. Jeff guessed what she was thinking.

“I reckon you could wear some of my wife’s things,” he suggested.

“Have you room for me?”

There were two bedrooms on the ground floor of the farmhouse; but he thought she would prefer a measure of isolation. “I can make the bed in the room upstairs,” he replied.

“Won’t your neighbors be surprised that I am here?”

Jeff considered that for a long time in silence, till she began to be afraid the obstacle was insuperable. Then his eyes lighted with recollection, and he said slowly, “My brother moved to California and married there, and his girl has been talking about coming to see us. We can let on you’re her.”

She cried with sudden friendly warmth in her tones, “You’re ever so kind to me. I appreciate it. Your taking me in so unquestioningly.”

“That’s all right,” he told her.

“I’m going to take you at your word,” she exclaimed. “I’m going to stay.”

III

Jeff Ranney was a man habituated to routine; he fell naturally into a regular way of doing even irregular things. The next morning his life was on the surface as it had always been. He rose to his chores, returned to his breakfast, went into the woodlot and set about the task he had postponed the day before. The woman cooked breakfast and did the work about the kitchen that his wife might have done. It would have been easy for any outsider to accept as fact her pretended status as Jeff’s niece from California.

But Jeff was not deceived by the apparent normality of this new existence. The man was immensely curious about her, absorbed in the mystery which she personified. His thoughts all that day were full of conjectures, full of hypotheses, formed and as quickly thrown away. One guess he clung to as probable fact. It seemed to him certain she had come ashore from that yacht which he had seen lying in East Harbor the night before; had come ashore as one who flees. But to the questions who she might be and why she had fled, he found a thousand answers and accepted none of them.

The question of her identity was solved that night, for on the first page of his Boston paper a headline caught his eye. It read thus:

MILLIONAIRE VILES’ WIFE IS A SUICIDE

His eyes moved down the closely printed column, intent on each word. Save for journalistic padding the first paragraph told the story:

EAST HARBOR, ME., Oct. 18--Lucia Viles, wife of Leander Viles, the millionaire banker, committed suicide here last night by drowning. She left the Viles’ yacht, which is anchored in the harbor, in a small rowboat, at a moment when a heavy squall of rain had driven the crew to shelter; and it is presumed that she threw herself into the water as soon as she had reached a sufficient distance so that she would not be seen. The tide was running out; and the rowboat was picked up by an incoming fisherman early this morning, down below the bell buoy, three miles from the yacht’s anchorage. The body has not been recovered. Mr. Viles, millionaire husband of the dead woman, said to-day that she had been subject to fits of melancholy for some time.

Jeff read this while his guest was washing the dishes after supper. She had thrown herself zealously into these household tasks, as though her overstrained nerves found relief in them. When she came into the dining room afterward he laid the paper down in such a manner that she must see the headline which had caught his eye.

She did see it, caught up the paper, read hurriedly, looked up when she was done, to find him watching her.

“You’ve read it?” she asked. He nodded. “I didn’t think they’d have it in the papers,” she cried, as though appalled at what she had done.

“Guess you didn’t make your boat fast when you landed,” Jeff suggested.

She shook her head. “No. I pushed it off. I hoped they would think this.”

He studied her, surprised and thoughtful. “Won’t your husband be kind of worried about you?” he suggested mildly, and was startled at the fierce anger behind her reply.

“I want him to be worried! Oh, I want him to be tortured!” she cried, and became absorbed once more in that which was printed on the page before her. “The body has not been recovered,” she read aloud after a moment; and with a quick change of mood laughed at him, shuddering faintly. “It does give me a creepy feeling,” she said.

“I should think it might,” Jeff assented mildly. “Yes, I should think it would.”

She was wearing a gingham dress belonging to his wife, which he had found at her request. Now, sitting across the table from him, she began to tremble and to laugh in nervous bursts of sound.

Jeff asked, “What’s the matter! What you laughing at?”

“I can’t stop,” she told him helplessly. “It just strikes me as funny. I can’t help laughing. If I didn’t laugh I should cry. They think I’m dead. Dead!” The word was high pitched, almost like a scream.

Jeff had seen feminine hysteria before; he said sternly, “You got to stop. Now you be still.”

The woman controlled herself at once, nodding reassuringly. “Yes, I’ll be still. I will be still,” she promised. “You won’t let them find me here, will you? You won’t let them know I’m here?”

“Andy Wattles stopped here this morning, in the truck,” Jeff answered. “I told him you’d come. He’d heard me say you was thinking of coming. It was safest to tell him.”

“But I wasn’t thinking of coming!” she cried, appalled.

“My brother’s girl from California was,” he reminded her; and she nodded over and over, as a child nods, to show her understanding and her acquiescence. Her trembling had ceased; her fright was passing. She went to bed at last, somewhat reassured.

But the paper next day, in even larger headlines, announced that doubt was cast upon the theory that she was a suicide.

“Mr. Viles,” the reporter wrote, “said to-day he thought it possible his wife might have become temporarily insane; that she was subject to hours of extreme nervous depression. It is known that she took a considerable sum of money from a safe in her cabin before she left the yacht. It is possible that she went ashore upon some errand and was assaulted and robbed. The three possibilities which the police of East Harbor are considering are suicide, robbery and murder, or an insane flight.” Jeff smiled at the picture of Sam Gallop, the “police of East Harbor,” considering anything. “In order to enlist every possible helper in the search for the missing woman,” the reporter added, “Mr. Viles has offered a reward of a thousand dollars for her body or of ten thousand for information that will lead to her discovery alive.”

The woman, when she read this, shivered with dread. “They will find me,” she told Jeff wearily. “Oh, I hoped they would believe me dead.”

“I dunno as they’ll find you,” Jeff argued. “They’re not apt to look out this way. They’re more likely to think you headed for Boston or somewheres.”

“It’s hopeless,” she insisted. “I think you’d better go tell them where I am, and get the money. The ten thousand dollars. Some good will come out of it, that way. I’d like you to have the money. You’ve been kind to me.”

The man laughed reassuringly. “Shucks, ma’am,” he said. “What would I do with a lot of money like that? It’s no good except to buy things with, and I’ve got more things than I can take care of now. Don’t you fret yourself. They ain’t going to find you, ma’am.”

“Everyone knows I’m here. Those women who came to-day--” She moved her hands drearily. “Someone will tell.”

Jeff shook his head. “No, they won’t. That was Will Bissell’s wife and Mrs. McAusland. They heard from the store that you was here; and they’d heard my wife say you was coming.”

“Oh, they must have seen that I was--” She paused, unwilling to hurt him.

“Different from us folks?” he asked, smiling at her understandingly. “Well, California folks are different from people around here. They’d have thought it was funny if you was like us.”

“And my wearing your wife’s dress.”

“I told ’em your trunk was lost. You had to have something to work around the house in.”

She was, in the end, unwillingly persuaded to a more hopeful point of view. But when she had gone up the stairs to her room Jeff sat for a long time, turning the newspaper in his hands, reading over and over that which was written there. She was so beautiful, so much more beautiful than anyone he had ever seen; and the gown she wore when she came to the farm had stamped itself upon his visual memory as a part of her beauty. That a reward of ten thousand dollars should have been offered for her discovery did not surprise Jeff; though it added to the glamour which cloaked her in his eyes.

“She’s worth more,” he told himself softly. “If she was mine I’d give a hundred times that much to get her back again.” And he thought of this husband of hers, whom she wished to torture, and wondered what he had done to her, and hated this man he had never seen because the woman hated him. “He’s not going to get her back,” Jeff swore in his thoughts. “If I can help her keep away from him he’ll not get her again.” There was nothing possessive in the feeling which was awakening in him. His devotion to her was a completely unselfish force.

It was also the most powerful emotion Jeff had felt in all his fifty-seven years.

IV

Will Belter stopped at the farm next morning, and lingered, talking with Jeff, watching furtively for a glimpse of the woman; asked at last, point-blank, if it was true that Jeff’s niece had come to visit him. He and Jeff were on the porch, outside the kitchen door; and Jeff nodded and, raising his voice, called to the woman, who was inside. He called her by his niece’s name.

“Mary!”

She came slowly to the door, dreading this contact with a stranger.

“This here’s Will Belter, one of our neighbors,” Jeff said by way of introduction. “He lives up on the ridge beyond the village.”

Will, greedy eyes upon her, said, “Howdo, ma’am!”

The woman watched him through the screen door, and answered, “How do you do!”

He said no more, and after a moment she turned back into the obscurity of the kitchen.

Will told Jeff, “She’s older than I figured she’d be.”

“She looks older,” Jeff agreed. “That long train trip was pretty hard; and she was kind of sick.”

“Ain’t but twenty-two or three, is she? I’d think she was thirty, anyway.”

“Twenty-four,” Jeff told him.

When Will presently went on his way Jeff watched his disappearing figure with stern eyes, and there was trouble in his countenance when he turned and saw the woman standing inside the screen door and also watching.

“Who was that?”

“I’d as soon he hadn’t come here,” Jeff confessed. “He’s a mean hound. A natural-born talebearer. Maybe we fooled him though.”

She made no comment, but both understood that her desire to remain hidden was imperiled by this man’s appearance. The shadow hung over them all that day. In the evening they read the paper together, found in it little that was new.

Afterwards the woman sat for a long time, thoughtfully silent, and at last said abruptly, “I think I’d better tell you why I ran away.”

Jeff looked across at her in surprise, hesitated. Then: “You needn’t, ’less you’re a mind to,” he assured her. “It don’t matter a bit in the world to me.”

“It is your right to know,” she decided. “And--I’d like to be able to talk about it with you. It would be a relief, I believe.”

Jeff nodded. “I expect that’s so,” he assented.

She took the paper from him, opened it to an inner page and pointed to a paragraph under a separate headline, beneath the story of her own disappearance.

“You saw this about Mr. Viles’ secretary being arrested?” she asked.

Jeff looked at the paper. The paragraph recited the fact that after a preliminary hearing Franklin Gardner, secretary to Leander Viles, had been held for the grand jury on a charge of stealing gems belonging to the missing woman.

Ranney nodded. “I heard about his being arrested, in town that day,” he told her.

“That was why I had to run away!” she cried, a sudden passion in her tones. “That was why I had to get away. Because it was I who saw him take them, and if they made me tell he would have to go to jail.”

She was leaning across the table, resting on her elbows, her fingers twisting together; and she watched Jeff anxiously, hungrily, as though to be sure he understood.

Jeff considered what she had said for a moment, and at length asked slowly, “Saw him steal them?”

“It’s a necklace,” she explained desperately. “Pearls, and a pendant set with diamonds, very beautifully. Mr. Viles used to boast how much he paid for it. He was ever so proud of it, you see. He wanted to show it to a man who is on the yacht with him, and that’s why he asked me to go down to the cabin and get it from the safe.”

Jeff was trying to fill out the gaps in her story. “That’s when you found out the necklace was gone, eh?” he inquired.

She nodded. Her words came in a rush:

“I saw Mr. Gardner come out of my cabin door, with the leather case in his hand. He dodged away; and I suppose he thought I had not seen him. And when I opened the little safe in my cabin the necklace was gone.”

Jeff grinned a little at that. “So your husband didn’t get to show it off, and brag about it, after all?”

His antipathy toward this husband of hers was increasing.

The woman shook her head. “I had to go back and tell him it was gone,” she assented. “And he went into one of his terrible rages. I was frightened. The doctors have warned him. So I tried to reassure him, told him that Mr. Gardner had the necklace.” Her hands were tightly clasped, the knuckles white. “Oh, I shouldn’t have let him know!” she cried wearily. “But I thought he must have asked Mr. Gardner to get it, must have given him the combination of the safe. Only he and I had it.”

Memories silenced her; and Jeff had to prompt her with a question: “But he hadn’t done that?”