Mrs. Morris's task was too large for her. She had always taken such
care of her innocence that her cultivation of the virtues had been only
incidental. Hence, morally, she had more fat than fibre; and hence
again, though to her mind guilt was horrible, publicity was so much
worse that her first and ruling impulse toward any evil doing not her
own was to conceal it. That was her form of worldliness, the only fault
she felt certain she was free from. And here she was, without a helping
hand or a word of counsel, laboring to hide from the servants and from
the dear Byingtons, from the church and from a scoffing world, the
hideous fact that Isabel was a fugitive from the murderous wrath of a
jealous husband, and that the rector of All Angels had crumbled into
moral ruin.
"And oh," she cried, "is it the worst of it, or is it the best of it,
that in this awful extremity he keeps so sane, so marvellously sane?"
She said this the oftener because every few hours some new sign to the
contrary forced itself upon her notice. Oblivion was her cure-all.
For a while after his conference with Mrs. Morris Arthur made some
feeble show--for her eye alone--of looking after clews, and then, as
much to her joy as to her amazement, told her it was a part of his
detective strategy to return into his study, and seemingly to his
ordinary work, until time would allow certain unfoldings for which he
looked with confidence.
"Have you found out anything?" she asked, with a glaringly false
eagerness that gave him a new panic of suspicion and whetted his
cunning.
He said he had, but must beg her not to ask yet what it was. Then he
inquired if any neighbor had left town that morning for Boston, and her
heart rose into her throat as she marked the subtlety he could not keep
out of his dark face.
"Why, ye--yes--n--no, no one that I know of ex--except Leonard
Byington," she replied, and thought, "If he should accuse Leonard, we
are undone!"
To avoid that risk she would have told him, then and there, all she
knew, had she not feared she might draw his rage upon herself for aiding
the wife's flight. She must, must, must keep on good terms with him till
she and Isabel could somehow get the child. So passed the awful hours,
mother and husband each marvelling in agony over the ghastly puzzle of
the other's apathy.
Later in the day she knocked timorously at his study door. She had come
with a silly little proposition that he let her take the infant and go
South as if to join Isabel. Thus the trunk would not lie in the express
office down there, unclaimed and breeding awkward inquiries, and she
from that point, with him at this, could keep up the illusion they had
invented until Isabel herself should--eh--return!
But when he let her in, he stood before her a silent embodiment of such
remorse and foreboding that she could have burst into sobs and cries.
Yet she broached her plan, trembling visibly, while he heard her through
with melancholy deference.
In reply he commended it, but called to her notice how much better it
would be for her to go alone. Then the babe, left behind, would be an
unspoken yet most eloquent guarantee that its mother would soon
reappear.
"Very true," responded the emboldened lady; "yet on the other hand"--
He put out an interrupting touch. "The child is as safe with me as if it
were in its mother's bosom."
"Oh, it isn't so much a question of safety as"--
The father interrupted again, with a gleam in his eyes like the
outflashing of a knife. "I hold the child against all comers, and would
if I had to slay its mother to do it."
Mrs. Morris stifled an outcry and would have left him, but he would not
let her.
"Stay! Oh, listen to a soul in torment! The babe is already motherless.
Isabel can never return, mother; she is with the dead. I am not waiting
idly here for her; I am waiting busily--for her slayer. He has fled; but
when he sees he is not pursued he will come back to the spot,--to the
black, black hole. He cannot help it. I _know_ that. Oh, how well I
know it! And the moment he comes he is caught,--caught in the web of
proofs I am weaving!"
He held her arm and gazed into her gazing eyes in ferocious fear of the
web she might be weaving for him; while she, reeling sick with fear of
him, tried with all her shaken wits to sham an impassioned accord.
"And you _will_ wait?" she exclaimed approvingly. "You will not
stir till the thing is sure?"
He would not stir till the thing was sure.
[Illustration: "I am waiting busily for her slayer."]
As soon as it was dark enough to slip over to the Byingtons' unseen, she
went, bearing to Ruth Isabel's apologetic good-bys, trying her small
best to play at words with the General, and quickly getting away again,
grateful for a breath of their atmosphere, though distressfully
convinced that Ruth had divined the whole trouble, through the joy
betrayed by herself on hearing that Leonard would be away for a week.
She went home and slept like a weary child, and neither the next day nor
the next, nor the next, was so awful as this first had been; they lacked
the crackle and glare, and the crash, of the burning and falling temple.