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.