The Millionth Chance/Chapter 15
XV
REESE broke the silence that ensued. He licked his lips with his tongue.
“How dare you make such a charge against her?” he demanded.
“How dare I? Say, have you let a pretty face turn your brains to soup? What are you, anyway, coroner or counsel for the defense?” sneered Minot. “Right from the start you’ve suspected her; been wise to her all along. But because she’s pretty and looked so forlorn, you’ve tried to put it over onto some one else—me! And I would have kept my mouth if you hadn’t been so anxious to land a defendant. Why didn’t you call it suicide if you were so dead anxious to get her clear? Why did you try to hang it on me? Didn’t you think I’d fight? Didn’t you think I’d have a clear defense?”
He almost spat his contempt for Reese. The coroner, white faced, held up his hand for silence, not only to stop Minot’s flow of speech but to quell the murmurs of anger from witnesses and jurymen alike.
“Let’s hear that clear defense, Minot,” he snapped. “Do you admit going out upon the balcony?”
“Of course I do,” said Minot. “I went through the French windows at the end of the hall and pussy-footed around to the major’s window. Ravenell was waiting down below, on the ground, for me. But I saw at a glance that there was nothing doing. The major was at his desk, writing, and I knew that I could never open those windows and get through at him without his having fifteen chances to put a bullet into me.
“So I leaned over the balcony railing and shook my head at Ravenell. That was our signal for him to drift along; it meant that I’d meet him down by the lake shortly and we’d try and look around and find out if the person Miss Gilman had intended to hand those plans to was snooping around anywhere. I didn’t want Ravenell attracting attention by standing too long under the major’s window. Later, of course, I’d make another try, but not just now. I couldn’t stay on that balcony too long at a stretch. Some one might see me.
“Well, I went back along the balcony and through the French windows again. I reached the major’s door. It came to me that I might get away with it if I took a big chance. He had seemed mighty busy, wrapped up in his work, when I looked through his window. If I could get through the door and on top of him before he could call—well, the idea of gumshoeing around for whoever was waiting in the neighborhood for those plans didn’t look very good to me. There might be more than one of them, as I’ve said before.
“If I wanted those plans the only thing for me to do was to get them before they left the major’s possession. Of course, I couldn’t be sure that the major had them; Miss Gilman might have them still. But that was one of the chances of the game. I put my hand on his door-knob”
He paused and seemed to enjoy the dramatic suspense of the moment.
“Now, do you want to know why I say that Miss Gilman killed her uncle?” he asked.
“Go on,” said Reese harshly.
“I’m a detective,” said Minot. “Without bragging I may say that I’m one of the star Greenham operatives. I wouldn’t have had this case if I wasn’t. And I’ll tell you how the facts look to me. Forget, for a minute, that you’ve been trying to hang this thing on me; just remember that I’m a first-class detective. And try and think you’ve engaged me to solve this mystery and that I’m doing it. Listen!
“Miss Gilman said she heard a shot and rushed to her uncle’s room. She tells you that she found him dead upon the floor. She makes her story seem good by putting in little absurd things like her uncle’s absent-mindedness and her fear that he’d pick his teeth with his gun and that sort of thing. Wants us to believe that he kept his revolver, like his toothbrush, in a glass. But don’t forget this: she was the first one in the room; she was the one to cry for help; she was the one to find his body!”
“And you were the one,” cried Reese, “to open the door and fire the shot! You were the one to race down the corridor, pass through the French windows, leap to the ground, run through the woods to the lake, and discard the incriminating over shoes. If you didn’t commit the murder, why did you do that?”
Minot smiled.
“That was my fool play,” he said. “You wonder why? Well, as I knelt before the major’s door I heard a shot fired inside his room. I heard him crash to the floor. Naturally, I was startled. But it came to me immediately that outside that door was no place for me. It didn’t make any difference who fired that shot, or why. I might get mixed up in it some way or other. And that might mean that I’d lose my chance of getting those plans. Don’t ask me why; a man doesn’t do much reasoning at a moment like that.
“I seemed to feel that it was no accident that had discharged the weapon in that room. I sensed death in the report! And death by violence is an ugly thing. I couldn’t be mixed up in it; I couldn’t be held as a witness to murder or suicide and prevented from taking my chance for those plans.
“So I rushed down the hall, through the windows, to the ground and down to the lake where I met Ravenell and warned him to keep his mouth shut. So we took a good long walk on the ice and came back unconcerned. And that’s my part of it, except for this!”
He rose and pointed at Miss Gilman.
“She wasn’t in the room when I looked through the major’s window. He was alone. You, Dr. Reese, say it wasn’t accident and couldn’t have been suicide! So it was murder! And you’ve accounted for every single person that was in the house, or could have been in the house, except me, and I account for myself, here and now. I’ve told the truth and you know I’ve told the truth. And she knows it.
“The major was alone in his room when I looked in his window. Two minutes later, when I knelt before his door, some one else was in the room. There must have been, if it wasn’t accident or suicide; and you’re a doctor, Reese; you know! Who was that person, then? If it wasn’t me it must have been Miss Gilman.”
“But where’s your proof?” demanded Reese.
“Proof? Do I talk like a man that’s lying?”
In very truth, he did not. Damnable as was his accusation against Ruth Gilman, preposterous, absurd beyond reason, I yet doubt if a single one of us that heard him doubted his own innocence. Beyond question he had not killed Major Penrose. No man that ever lived, be he ever so great an actor, could have played the part of honesty so well unless, indeed, he were honest. The very fact that Minot’s confession proved him to be devoid of honor was argument, strangely enough, in his favor, now. I can not explain this. I only know that I felt it and the others, too.
But something more than mere belief in his words was needed.
“Where’s your proof?” demanded Reese hoarsely.
Minot turned to the girl again. Again his long slim forefinger singled her out.
“You were in that room,” he said. “You can not deny it! For the major’s door was locked when I knelt before it! Deny it if you can!”
He paused, and we who had held our breath breathed deeply once again. If this were his proof, we could not understand it.
“Well, what does that prove?” demanded Reese.
Minot laughed harshly.
“No two keys in this hotel are alike. I know. It was my business to find out if the key to my room would fit the lock of the major’s door. There are forty odd keys hanging behind the office desk. No two of them are alike. The major’s door was locked. Only one key could unlock it. Yet Miss Gilman would have us believe that she was not in her uncle’s room when the shot was fired!
“If she wasn’t in there, then, how did she get in there later? Is it reasonable to believe that her uncle permitted her to lock him in? Rot, and you all know it! Would a grown man permit a young girl to lock him in his room and make off with the key? Nonsense! Yet that door was locked, and when people came running to her, it was unlocked. Does she want us to believe that she unlocked it—from the outside?
“And yet, if she were innocent of murder, that was what she must have done—unlocked it from the outside. And if she were guilty of murder, she unlocked it from the inside! I dare her to deny that that is what she did.”
HE PAUSED dramatically and stared around at us. At the expressions on our faces a sense of his fatuity reached him. He gasped and sank back into his chair. For in the minds of every one of us the same conclusion had been reached. There was only Minot’s word for it that the door had been locked.
Against that word was all the other evidence against him; his possible motive, the theft of the plans, his flight. And yet, with that word of his was arrayed something else—the knowledge of his own innocence of the crime that had made him rely so utterly on his own knowledge of the locked door. For it was knowledge, not a mere makeshift lie. Had it been a lie, he would not have been so carefree, would not have staked his all upon it. I think that each and every one of us was psychologist enough to guess that.
Yet as evidence it didn’t weigh. It was his single word, and he was a suspected person. He had made the great mistake common to all innocent persons—that of thinking that their own words weigh for something.
Had he been in Reese’s place he would have laughed at such a defense. Had he been engaged by a suspected murderer, he would have laughed at relying for acquittal upon such a plea. But because he was innocent, he had advanced it confidently, certain of being cleared. And now his much-relied-on evidence had fallen flat. His story had only tended to incriminate him the more.
He felt it; he saw it; he heard it in our labored breathing. And yet, also, he saw the belief written upon our countenances, in our eyes. It was not evidence that he had given us; it was something greater, it was truth. We knew it. He knew that we knew it. Slowly the courage that had ebbed from him at sight of the first incredulous amazement on our faces came back to him. He read the unwilling belief in his honesty that replaced amazement.
“Ask her,” he cried shakily, “ask her.”
But there was no need to ask her. Miss Gilman had risen from her chair and was pointing at him.
“Then you didn’t do it,” she said. “You didn’t do it!” She turned to Dr. Reese. “He—couldn’t have done it—he couldn’t have done it.”
“You mean—that the door was locked? You didn’t tell us before!”
A hush followed his words; the jurymen stared at her wonderingly. As for myself, I would have leaped forward to restrain her speech, but that emotion held me paralyzed. Not that I believed for a moment in the theory of Minot, but that I was afraid the others might; that they might snatch upon some unguarded word and twist its meaning. But I could not move, so overwhelmed was I.
She shook her head.
“Not locked. But a cane was placed against the handle. I didn’t think—never thought about it. It was uncle’s habit. He would wedge a cane against the door-knob, its other end resting on the floor. It saved him from getting up to unlock the door. He always did it when he was working. You see, if any one came to the door and tried it, they would think it locked. But if he wanted them to come in—his study, wherever he happened to be, had to be cleaned once a day, you know—why, he could just call out to them to enter. Then, by pushing hard, as people will when the door doesn’t give at first, the cane would be dislodged and entrance would be made.
“But if he wished to be undisturbed, he would say so at once. The cane would hold the door against any ordinary attempt at entrance, long enough for him to cry out, at any rate, that he wished to be alone.”
“And yesterday?” said Reese, as she paused.
“Why yesterday—when I got there—the door was closed. And when I turned the knob first the door didn’t open. But I pushed against it—the cane fell to the floor. It had been there, blocking the door. It must have been there when he,” and she looked at Minot, “tried it. And as neither he nor any one else could have placed the cane there after killing uncle—he has told the truth. And I—I never thought of it till now. It was such a little thing it didn’t impress me. I was so used to it. But now I see how important”
Slowly her face, that had been white, flamed with color.
“You don’t think, you don’t dream,” she cried, “that I—oh, you can’t! It’s too awful!”
She hid her face in her hands a moment. When she lifted her eyes again they looked straight at Minot.
“Why should you say such a thing? Why should you accuse me?” She looked at Reese, at Carney, at the jurymen. “Why should I do it? My own uncle, whom I loved? Who had taken care of me—who—oh!”
Again her face was hidden in the agony of her grief and horror.
“Supposing,” said Minot coolly, “that Miss Gilman wanted to sell those plans to some one? For a private fortune for herself? How about that?”
“She delivered them to the English agent, didn’t she?” snapped Reese.
“She might ’a’ lost her nerve after bumping the old man off,” sneered Minot.
“Silence!” almost roared Reese. He spoke to the girl. “Miss Gilman, you are sure that the sound of running feet, the noise at the window, was almost simultaneous with the shot?”
“Just before it,” she answered.
Reese turned to me.
“Wrenham, it was undoubtedly Minot that you heard going by your door. Could he have had time to go out the major’s window upon the balcony, after firing the shot, and come around to the French windows, into the hall, by your door?”
I shook my head. Almost murderous as my sentiments were toward Minot, I must tell the truth.
“The footsteps sounded too soon after the shot,” I said.
“And don’t forget,” said Minot jeeringly, his sang-froid fully recovered now that the girl had corroborated his testimony as to the locked door, “that the footprints I made on the balcony show me starting from the French windows and returning to them.”
Reese turned to the jury.
“Mr. Foreman and gentlemen,” he said, “you have heard the evidence. There were four people upon the second floor, Tony Larue, Mr. Sidney Wrenham, Minot, and Miss Gilman. Larue was playing his violin at the moment the shot was fired. That is clearly established. Wrenham had been upon the balcony earlier, but has proved that he was not there when the shot was fired. Minot’s footprints are above those of Mr. Wrenham, and Minot, therefore, was there later than Mr. Wrenham. And as Minot was there just a moment before the shot was fired, it is clear that Mr. Wrenham could not have fired it. Indeed, the fact that a cane was placed against the door in such a fashion that it could only have been placed there from the inside, is proof that neither Minot nor Wrenham had any part in the killing.
“It might be argued that Wrenham, whose footsteps lead from his window along the balcony by Major Penrose’s room to the French windows, could have entered the room and fired the shot and then continued to the French windows. If Minot had not been on the balcony after Wrenham that theory might sound good. But Minot was on the balcony after Wrenham, therefore Mr. Wrenham is exculpated.
“The testimony of Miss Gilman and Wrenham as to the time of hearing the footsteps is proof that Minot did not fire the shot. What he just said about his double track of footprints has little bearing on the situation. He might have entered the major’s room by the window and retired the same way. It wouldn’t have been necessary for him to go through the major’s door first. But it is the element of time that clearly exonerates Minot.
“Of course, there is something in Minot’s mention of his double footprints. He could not have entered the major’s room without forcing the windows, which were closed and latched. He could not have done that—nor could Wrenham or any one else—without disturbing the major. And it is unreasonable to suppose that a retired army officer would sit complacently waiting for a burglarious visitor to shoot him down. But unreasonable things sometimes happen. When we know that something happened, and know equally that it could only have happened in an unreasonable way, then we accept the unreasonableness of the happening.
“If it were not for the time element, we would have to believe, knowing that he had a motive that might inspire murder, that Minot had somehow forced the major’s window, let himself in, and made his escape by the balcony. But we know that he could not have done that. He didn’t have time. So we come to his stopping at the major’s door, after he had spied through the major’s window.
“He says the door was locked. Miss Gilman at once accepts his statement as proof of his innocence. And so, gentlemen, must we. We know that a cane wedged against the doorknob would make the door, to a gentle, cautious touch, seem locked. We know that a cane could not be placed against the knob in such a fashion as to wedge the door tight, save from the inside of the room. That is elementary knowledge. Minot could not have pushed the door open, shot the major and replaced the cane against the inside of the door.
“Until Miss Gilman testified to the presence of the cane there, it looked as though the evidence was all against Minot. But she states that the cane was there when she rushed to her uncle’s room. I, myself, have seen the cane lying on the floor of the major’s room; so have you jurymen, but we attached no importance to it. But now it is of extreme importance. Until Miss Gilman mentioned it, there was every reason to believe that Minot, having spied upon the major, came around to his door and shot him. I believed that.
“Owing to Wrenham’s and Miss Gilman’s previous testimony yesterday, about the time, I did not believe that Minot had made his escape from the room by way of the balcony. I had figured that he undoubtedly had spied first, and then entered the room by the hall door. But now—with Miss Gilman’s testimony confronting that theory, we have to discard it. Murderer though Minot may have been at heart, he did not kill Major Penrose. There remains but one other person who was upon that floor.
“Gentlemen, that person is Miss Ruth Gilman. A moment ago, all she had to do, to avert even the breath of suspicion, was say that Minot lied about the door. But you saw her and heard her. You saw how she at once came to Minot’s rescue and saved him with a word. Would a woman who had slain her own uncle do that? Would she not, instead, have said that the door was not locked, and told the technical truth and cast all suspicion upon Minot?
“Of course she would—had she been guilty! But none of us here need waste time over the foolish charges of Minot. He himself, considering that she saved him by a word, must realize that his suspicions are mad. Miss Gilman is innocent.
“Yet I can not recant my testimony to you. I say that Major Penrose was shot down in the midst of work by a hand other than his own. He did not kill himself. He could not have done so. While at work on some calculations—that did not have to do, Miss Gilman tells me, with the submarine plans, but were some figures on a military bridge which the major was interested in—while it was thought necessary that he pretend work on the plans of the submarine it was not necessary that he waste time in aimless calculations—he was shot down. But not by the hand of his niece. Had she killed him would she so frankly admit that the door was locked? Certainly not! None of us would ever have suspected that the cane lying on the floor had been used to bar the door.
“The evidence all pointed to Minot. Yet she saved him, at imminent risk to herself. A murderess, cold-blooded, crafty, would not have done that.
“So, gentlemen, we come to the conclusion that some one other than the four persons on that corridor floor killed Major Penrose. Who, I can not guess. The mystery is too much for me. According to the testimony, there was no one else above the ground floor. And those on the ground floor could hardly have committal the crime. The cook, the waitress, the chambermaid—all accounted for by their own and their mutually corroborative testimony. Captain Perkins’s voice was heard to cry out from this floor just after Miss Gilman cried out.
“It might be argued that Captain Perkins could have fired the shot and run down to the office here, and then started upstairs again. But Captain Perkins is not the spry officer he was twenty or thirty years ago. I am his physician. I know that Captain Perkins could not run along that corridor without shaking the building.” He smiled faintly. “If Captain Perkins had ever run down those stairs one of the people downstairs would have known it. The stairs would have cried aloud in agony.
“But all this is folly. Minot testifies that the shot was fired while he knelt outside the door. That meant that the murderer was inside the room at that moment! Gentleman, whoever was in there must have got out. Yet there are no marks on the balcony save those already accounted for, made by Wrenham and Minot. And he could not have left by the door, because of the cane later found wedging the door shut by Miss Gilman. And the very nature of Miss Gilman’s testimony, her quick exoneration of Minot, proves that she is not the person to have done this; that she did not enter the room while Minot was making his way along the balcony, to kill her uncle while the detective knelt outside the door, later to pretend that she had been in her own room, and had run to the major’s room on hearing the shot. It is impossible for me, and for you, too, I hope, to believe such a thing of her.”
He paused and faced the foreman. That worthy spoke.
“Yet you’re certain that it wasn’t suicide, and that it couldn’t have been accident, doctor?”
“I know it wasn’t suicide. As for accident—the testimony is absolute that there was no jar of the building sufficient to cause the tumbler that held the revolver to overturn. Indeed, as you know, the tumbler wasn’t overturned. It was merely shattered, with its broken base still lying in its socket.”
“And it ain’t possible that any one could have been concealed in that room and made his getaway after the door was opened by Miss Gilman?”
“He’d have been seen,” said the coroner-doctor.
“And no one’s invented an invisible coat yet, have they?” demanded the foreman dryly.
“Not to my knowledge,” said Reese.
“Then if it wasn’t suicide and there ain’t no sane way of figuring that it was accident, it must have been murder.” He stared at the doctor a moment. “Dr. Reese,” he said, “with all respect to you, we ain’t goin’ to bring in no such verdict as murder. We don’t believe Miss Gilman done it. And I don’t believe any of us here take much stock in fairies. And only a fairy, or a devil, or somethin’ like that could have murdered Major Penrose. It was an accident.
“You ain’t infallible, doctor, with all respect to you. You say it wasn’t suicide, and you know more about such things than we do. We’ll take your word for it. But when you say it’s murder, and then prove it’s impossible for it to have been a murder—well, we can’t swallow that, doctor. But accident—that’s something like.”
He turned to his fellow-jurymen.
“Members of this jury,” he said, “do we render a verdict that the late Major Samuel Penrose, U. S. A., retired, came to his death by accidental shooting, or don’t we? If we bring in a verdict of murder against a person unknown, we make people think that this pore little girl did it, and we didn’t have nerve enough to come right out and accuse a lady. Was it an accident?”
A chorus of affirmation answered him. He turned to Reese.
“This jury, coroner, has the honor to report to you that the deceased upstairs come to his death by accident.”
Thus informally, grotesquely almost, the jury came to its verdict. Yet I and every one else, I rather imagine, felt that the verdict was entirely unsatisfactory. Involuntarily we all stared at Ruth Gilman, to see how she would take it. And I was the one to catch her as she rose, swayed and pitched forward in a dead faint.
I turned her over to Dr. Reese and Nelly. They carried her upstairs, and the doctor came down a little later. The jury had already scattered to their homes or the village stores to gossip; Minot and Ravenell had been gruffly ordered out of the hotel by Captain Perkins and had departed.
“How is she?” I demanded of Reese.
“She’ll pull through,” he said. “But some one ought to help her take charge of things—her uncle’s body, you know, all that. He is to be buried in Washington, she told me. Asked me to wire friends there to meet her.”
“I’ll go on with her,” I cut in shortly. “Tell her I’ll attend to everything.”
“I did,” he smiled. “And she seemed certain that you would.”
“But how is she—mentally? Aside from the shock that she’s been suffering.”
“Well, can’t you guess?” he asked. “Accused of murder—no, not accused, but—she’s level-headed. She sees things. That’s why she fainted. My God, Wrenham, you must know how she feels. You love her! It’s written on your face.”
“Yes,” I admitted simply.
“Well, think of her position. You and I know, the jury knows, the other witnesses know, that she didn’t kill her uncle. But the public, who must read the evidence—thank God there were no newspaper men present—but later the newspaper men will get hold of the jurymen. There’ll be talk. The public will ask, the public who don’t know her, who’ve never seen her sweet, honest, brave face—who never will see it—the public will ask: ‘If she didn’t do it, who did?”
“Wrenham, you love her. It’s up to you to get the finest detectives in America and put them on this case. It’s up to you to clear her. Also, in the meantime, until she is cleared, it’s up to you to pretend that she’s cleared already. She won’t believe you, but the fact that you don’t doubt her—you don’t, do you?” he asked savagely.
“Good God, no!” I ejaculated. “Why do you ask?”
“I loved a woman,” he said drearily. “I married her. I suspected her. The evidence was all against her—oh, absolutely, no sane man could have doubted it! I sent her away. I drove her from me. And—and Wrenham, the evidence still stands against my wife, but—but I know! She wasn’t guilty. She never pleaded, never denied—went away when I sent her. She died. And still the evidence stands. And yet—oh, my God, Wrenham, I know. I know that she was innocent! And so—though it wasn’t suicide, though it wasn’t accident, though Ruth Gilman was the only one who could have killed her uncle—I know she didn’t. And if I know it, who do not love her but who only remember that I misjudged the. woman I did love—Wrenham, never doubt her. Trust her!”
“To the end,” I said.
“But clear her! The shadow—always over her—she feels it now, poor girl, up-stairs, white, stunned. The shadow will always be there. Wrenham, you’re clever. You created Weatherby Jones. Make him real. Make him solve this problem of real life. If he can’t, get a real human being and make him do it. Clear her!”
I bowed my head in assent. Then I raised it.
“Who’s the correspondent for the Portland paper here? No press association man, is there?”
“No, just a Portland correspondent.”
“Has he wired anything yet?”
“We’re a little village,” smiled Reese. “No one has wired the papers. The correspondent has been on a hunting trip. He’s away now. But when he comes back—I see your plan. Oh, yes, I could shut his mouth. But you can’t muzzle the press; you can’t hide things from it. Sooner or later it leaks out, and the longer it’s delayed, the more pains you’ve taken to hide it, the worse it seems. Moreover, Penrose was an army man. The papers will want something. I’ll do what I can, but—Wrenham, it’s up to you.”
His manner changed.
“Here are some addresses she sent me. Friends in Washington who’ll take care of that end. She wouldn’t even let me wire yesterday of her uncle’s death, any more than she’d talk about Minot or Ravenell. Duty, her uncle’s honor, came first. When she’d kept his pledge for him, and had given Britain the plans which one of Britain’s sons had helped create—Wrenham, she’s one in a thousand. In a million! I wish you luck.”
THAT night a special car attached to the regular train bore Major Penrose’s body, Ruth Gilman, and Nelly the cook, hastily engaged to act as nurse and companion to Ruth, and myself, acting as courier and general factotum, to Portland. We reached Washington the following night, and the next day Major Penrose was buried in the family plot in the cemetery outside the Capital. Knowing that the girl was with friends, I would have left Washington immediately after the funeral but that she sent word she wished to see me.
At the house of the friends with whom she was to stay a while, she received me. White, dark hollows under her eyes, her mourning somehow accentuating her slimness, she looked fragile.
She gave me her hand.
“Words,” she said, “are useless wherewith to pay a debt. I owe you so much and I can only say—thank you.”
“Some day,” I replied, relinquishing her hand, “you may say less than that to me, and still make me happier. At present your thanks are reward enough for what little I’ve done.”
“Little! So much!” She sat down and a blush colored her cheeks. “I won’t pretend to misunderstand what you mean,” she said. “That wouldn’t be fair. Not when you’ve done so much for me. To say less than ‘thank you’ would be to say”
“‘Yes,’” said I. “But I shouldn’t have suggested, so soon, I mean, when you are upset.”
“Why not?” she asked sadly. “We haven’t known each other long, but so much has happened. I guessed how you felt—in the path when you rescued me from those brutes,” she shuddered.
“And you?” I queried boldly. “Will it be—oh, I know I shouldn’t ask you; not yet! But I want so much.”
“Could you want a girl who had thought so evilly of you? Who had so little self-respect that she went to your berth in the night, and”
“I know all about that,” I interrupted her. “You thought I was a spy. You thought you might find something in my suit-case or pocketbook that would tell you whether I was or not. You were acting from the highest motives; not only were you trying to help your uncle keep his word to a dead man, but you were trying to prevent a country other than England from obtaining possession of what belonged to the United States and Great Britain. Honor and patriotism! I hope no action of mine is guided by lesser motives!”
“You knew, then? And still, you—cared?”
“Cared? Oh, my dear, if you knew how much! If you’d let me tell you”
“Sh-sh-sh!” Her hand touched my mouth, to silence me, for a blessed second, and I kissed it before she could draw it away.
More deeply, she colored. And then the blush receded and pain appeared in her eyes.
“If they had called it murder,” she said—and I knew that she referred to the verdict of the coroner’s jury—“it would not be so bad. The world would say, ‘If it was murder, she couldn’t have done it, because the jury weighed the evidence against her right then and there.’
“But accident—when sooner or later the papers will publish accounts of the conflicting testimony—they are content to call it accident, now, because all the details have not come to light. But when they do—when the world knows that I was the only one who could—don’t you see? The world will say, ‘That jury took pity on her because she was a girl. Accident? Murder, more likely. And she did it.’
“Don’t you see? It was chivalrous of them to render that verdict, but mistaken chivalry. Better for me to have been tried. I could not have been convicted as I had no motive. My name would have been blackened, yes. But the courts would have made it as white as possible, again. But now those who—love me, can not silence the tongue of slander with the statement that a jury found me innocent. Always it will seem that the jury protected me by calling it accident! To be tried for murder would have been dreadful. But at least, the man who—who married me would know what he had to face. His friends would say, ‘He married her; he must know she’s innocent.’
“But now—accident! And the man who married me would have to face the pity and scorn of his friends. People would despise her and him. They would say, ‘Poor fool, he didn’t know about her. He was fooled by that accident verdict. But every one knows.’
“Don’t you see? When a charge has been faced and defeated, one can get the benefit of the doubt. But when the charge has not been legally made”
She lifted her burning eyes to me.
“It can never be,” she said simply.
“No? What do we care what fools say?” I cried.
“We do care. We must care. Marriage concerns more than husband and wife. There might be—children,” she breathed. “And their mother’s name would be a thing for slanderers to bandy about. I couldn’t. For your sake, for—others’.”
I knew she meant it, and desolation stretched before me.
“But if,” I said, “I could find the real murderer”
“Oh, then,” she cried, “then I would say yes.”
“I’ll find him,” I promised grimly. “If I spend the rest of my life, I’ll find him.”
I rose to my feet, and she held out her hand. Her figure shook and her lips trembled.
“If—if you do—come to me,” she whispered. “But not until then. You understand. You’re young. Sooner or later, if we don’t see each other, you’ll forget. At least, it won’t be so hard—for me, too. And you don’t want to make it hard, do you? Oh, Sidney!”
Once only I kissed her. Then she pushed me gently from her, and I left the house.