“Ah,” I murmured eagerly, “Mother Jane!”
She did not answer. Instantly I took a resolution.
“Lucetta,” said I, “is Deacon Spear a rich man?”
Starting violently, she looked at me amazed.
“If he is, I should like to hazard the guess that he is the man who has held you in such thraldom for years.”
“And if he were?” said she.
“I could understand William’s antipathy to him and also his suspicions.”
She gave me a strange look, then without answering walked over and took Loreen by the hand. “Hush!” I thought I heard her whisper. At all events the two sisters were silent for more than a moment. Then Lucetta said:
“Deacon Spear is well off, but nothing will ever make me accuse living man of crime so dreadful.” And she walked away, drawing Loreen after her. In another moment she was out of the room, leaving me in a state of great excitement.
“This girl holds the secret to the whole situation,” I inwardly decided. “The belief that nothing more can be learned from her is a false one. I must see Mr. Gryce. William’s rodomontades are so much empty air, but Lucetta’s silence has a meaning we cannot afford to ignore.”
So impressed was I by this, that I took the first opportunity which presented itself of seeing the detective. This was early the next morning. He and several of the townspeople had made their appearance at Mother Jane’s cottage, with spades and picks, and the sight had naturally drawn us all down to the gate, where we stood watching operations in a silence which would have been considered unnatural by any one who did not realize the conflicting nature of the emotions underlying it. William, to whom the death of his mother seemed to be a great deliverance, had been inclined to be more or less jocular, but his sallies meeting with no response, he had sauntered away to have it out with his dogs, leaving me alone with the two girls and Hannah.
The latter seemed to be absorbed entirely by the aspect of Mother Jane, who stood upon her doorstep in an attitude so menacing that it was little short of tragic. Her hood, for the first time in the memory of those present, had fallen away from her head, revealing a wealth of gray hair which flew away from her head like a weird halo. Her features we could not distinguish, but the emotion which inspired her, breathed in every gesture of her uplifted arms and swaying body. It was wrath personified, and yet an unreasoning wrath. One could see she was as much dazed as outraged. Her lares and penates were being attacked, and she had come from the heart of her solitude to defend them.
“I declare!” Hannah protested. “It is pitiful. She has nothing in the world but that garden, and now they are going to root that up.”
“Do you think that the sight of a little money would appease her?” I inquired, anxious for an excuse to drop a word into the ear of Mr. Gryce.
“Perhaps,” said Hannah. “She dearly loves money, but it will not take away her fright.”
“It will if she has nothing to be frightened about,” said I; and turning to the girls, I asked them, somewhat mincingly for me, if they thought I would make myself conspicuous if I crossed the road on this errand, and when Loreen answered that that would not deter her if she had the money, and Lucetta added that the sight of such misery was too painful for any mere personal consideration, I took advantage of their complaisance, and hastily made my way over to the group, who were debating as to the point they would attack first.
“Gentlemen,” said I, “good-morning. I am here on an errand of mercy. Poor old Mother Jane is half imbecile and does not understand why you invade her premises with these implements. Will you object if I endeavor to distract her mind with a little piece of gold I happen to have in my pocket? She may not deserve it, but it will make your task easier and save us some possible concern.”
Half of the men at once took off their hats. The other half nudged each other’s elbows, and whispered and grimaced like the fools they were. The first half were gentlemen, though not all of them wore gentlemen’s clothes.
It was Mr. Gryce who spoke:
“Certainly, madam. Give the old woman anything you please, but—” And here he stepped up to me and began to whisper; “You have something to say. What is it?”
I answered in the same quick way: “The mine you thought exhausted has possibilities in it yet. Question Lucetta. It may prove a more fruitful task than turning up this soil.”
The bow he made was more for the onlookers than for the suggestion I had given him. Yet he was not ungrateful for the latter, as I, who was beginning to understand him, could see.
“Be as generous as you please!” he cried aloud. “We would not disturb the old crone if it were not for one of her well-known follies. Nothing will take her over forty rods away from her home. Now what lies within those forty rods? These men think we ought to see.”
The shrug I gave answered both the apparent and the concealed question. Satisfied that he would understand it so, I hurried away from him and approached Mother Jane.
“See!” said I, astonished at the regularity of her features, now that I had a good opportunity of observing them. “I have brought you money. Let them dig up your turnips if they will.”
She did not seem to perceive me. Her eyes were wild with dismay and her lips trembling with a passion far beyond my power to comfort.
“Lizzie!” she cried. “Lizzie! She will come back and find no home. Oh, my poor girl! My poor, poor girl!”
It was pitiable. I could not doubt her anguish or her sincerity. The delirium of a broken heart cannot be simulated. And this heart was not controlled by reason; that was equally apparent. Immediately my heart, which goes out slowly, but none the less truly on that account, was touched by something more than the surface sympathy of the moment. She may have stolen, she may have done worse, she may even have been at the bottom of the horrible crimes which have given its name to the lane we were in, but her acts, if acts they were, were the result of a clouded mind fixed forever upon the fancied needs of another, and not the expression of personal turpitude or even of personal longing or avarice. Therefore I could pity her, and I did.
Making another appeal, I pressed the coin hard into one of her hands till the contact effected what my words had been unable to do, and she finally looked down and saw what she was clutching. Then indeed her aspect changed, and in a few minutes of slowly growing comprehension she became so quiet and absorbed that she forgot to look at the men and even forgot me, who was probably nothing more than a flitting shadow to her.
“A silk gown,” she murmured. “It will buy Lizzie a silk gown. Oh! where did it come from, the good, good gold, the beautiful gold; such a little piece, yet enough to make her look fine, my Lizzie, my pretty, pretty Lizzie?”
No numbers this time. The gift was too overpowering for her even to remember that it must be hidden away.
I walked away while her delight was still voluble. Somehow it eased my mind to have done her this little act of kindness, and I think it eased the minds of the men too. At all events, every hat was off when I repassed them on my way back to the Knollys gateway.
I had left both the girls there, but I found only one awaiting me. Lucetta had gone in, and so had Hannah. On what errand I was soon to know.
“What do you suppose that detective wants of Lucetta now?” asked Loreen as I took my station again at her side. “While you were talking to Mother Jane he stepped over here, and with a word or two induced Lucetta to walk away with him toward the house. See, there they are in those thick shrubs near the right wing. He seems to be pleading with her. Do you think I ought to join them and find out what he is urging upon her so earnestly? I don’t like to seem intrusive, but Lucetta is easily agitated, you know, and his business cannot be of an indifferent nature after all he has discovered concerning our affairs.”
“No,” I agreed, “and yet I think Lucetta will be s
trong enough to sustain the conversation, judging from the very erect attitude she is holding now. Perhaps he thinks she can tell him where to dig. They seem a little at sea over there, and living, as you do, a few rods from Mother Jane, he may imagine that Lucetta can direct him where to first plant the spade.”
“It’s an insult,” Loreen protested. “All these talks and visits are insults. To be sure, this detective has some excuse, but—”
“Keep your eye on Lucetta,” I interrupted. “She is shaking her head and looking very positive. She will prove to him it is an insult. We need not interfere, I think.”
But Loreen had grown pensive and did not heed my suggestion. A look that was almost wistful had supplanted the expression of indignant revolt with which she had addressed me, and when next moment the two we had been watching turned and came slowly toward us, it was with decided energy she bounded forward and joined them.
“What is the matter now?” she asked. “What does Mr. Gryce want, Lucetta?”
Mr. Gryce himself spoke.
“I simply want her,” said he, “to assist me with a clue from her inmost thoughts. When I was in your house,” he explained with a praiseworthy consideration for me and my relations to these girls for which I cannot be too grateful, “I saw in this young lady something which convinced me that, as a dweller in this lane, she was not without her suspicions as to the secret cause of the fatal mysteries which I have been sent here to clear up. Today I have frankly accused her of this, and asked her to confide in me. But she refuses to do so, Miss Loreen. Yet her face shows even at this moment that my old eyes were not at fault in my reading of her. She does suspect somebody, and it is not Mother Jane.”
“How can you say that?” began Lucetta, but the eyes which Loreen that moment turned upon her seemed to trouble her, for she did not attempt to say any more—only looked equally obstinate and distressed.
“If Lucetta suspects any one,” Loreen now steadily remarked, “then I think she ought to tell you who it is.”
“You do. Then perhaps you—” commenced Mr. Gryce—“can persuade her as to her duty,” he finished, as he saw her head rise in protest of what he evidently had intended to demand.
“Lucetta will not yield to persuasion,” was her quiet reply. “Nothing short of conviction will move the sweetest-natured but the most determined of all my mother’s children. What she thinks is right, she will do. I will not attempt to influence her.”
Mr. Gryce, with one comprehensive survey of the two, hesitated no longer. I saw the rising of the blood into his forehead, which always precedes the beginning of one of his great moves, and, filled with a sudden excitement, I awaited his next words as a tyro awaits the first unfolding of the plan he has seen working in the brain of some famous strategist.
“Miss Lucetta,”—his very tone was changed, changed in a way to make us all start notwithstanding the preparation his momentary silence had given us—“I have been thus pressing and perhaps rude in my appeal, because of something which has come to my knowledge which cannot but make you of all persons extremely anxious as to the meaning of this terrible mystery. I am an old man, and you will not mind my bluntness. I have been told—and your agitation convinces me there is truth in the report—that you have a lover, a Mr. Ostrander—”
“Ah!” She had sunk as if crushed by one overwhelming blow to the earth. The eyes, the lips, the whole pitiful face that was upturned to us, remain in my memory today as the most terrible and yet the most moving spectacle that has come into my by no means uneventful life. “What has happened to him? Quick, quick, tell me!”
For answer Mr. Gryce drew out a telegram.
“From the master of the ship on which he was to sail,” he explained. “It asks if Mr. Ostrander left this town on Tuesday last, as no news has been received of him.”
“Loreen! Loreen! When he left us he passed down that way!” shrieked the girl, rising like a spirit and pointing east toward Deacon Spear’s. “He is gone! He is lost! But his fate shall not remain a mystery. I will dare its solution. I—I—Tonight you will hear from me again.”
And without another glance at any of us she turned and fled toward the house.
CHAPTER XXXIV
CONDITIONS
But in another moment she was back, her eyes dilated and her whole person exhaling a terrible purpose.
“Do not look at me, do not notice me!” she cried, but in a voice so hoarse no one but Mr. Gryce could fully understand her. “I am for no one’s eyes but God’s. Pray that he may have mercy upon me.” Then as she saw us all instinctively fall back, she controlled herself, and, pointing toward Mother Jane’s cottage, said more distinctly: “As for those men, let them dig. Let them dig the whole day long. Secrecy must be kept, a secrecy so absolute that not even the birds of the air must see that our thoughts range beyond the forty rods surrounding Mother Jane’s cottage.”
She turned and would have fled away for the second time, but Mr. Gryce stopped her. “You have set yourself a task beyond your strength. Can you perform it?”
“I can perform it,” she said. “If Loreen does not talk, and I am allowed to spend the day in solitude.”
I had never seen Mr. Gryce so agitated—no, not when he left Olive Randolph’s bedside after an hour of vain pleading. “But to wait all day! Is it necessary for you to wait all day?”
“It is necessary.” She spoke like an automaton. “Tonight at twilight, when the sun is setting, meet me at the great tree just where the road turns. Not a minute sooner, not an hour later. I will be calmer then.” And waiting now for nothing, not for a word from Loreen nor a detaining touch from Mr. Gryce, she flew away for the second time. This time Loreen followed her.
“Well, that is the hardest thing I ever had to do,” said Mr. Gryce, wiping his forehead and speaking in a tone of real grief and anxiety. “Do you think her delicate frame can stand it? Will she survive this day and carry through whatever it is she has set herself to accomplish?”
“She has no organic disease,” said I, “but she loved that young man very much, and the day will be a terrible one to her.”
Mr. Gryce sighed.
“I wish I had not been obliged to resort to such means,” said he, “but women like that only work under excitement, and she does know the secret of this affair.”
“Do you mean,” I demanded, almost aghast, “that you have deceived her with a false telegram; that that slip of paper you hold—”
“Read it,” he cried, holding it out toward me.
I did read it. Alas, there was no deception in it. It read as he said.
“However—” I began.
But he had pocketed the telegram and was several steps away before I had finished my sentence.
“I am going to start these men up,” said he. “You will breathe no word to Miss Lucetta of my sympathy nor let your own interests slack in the investigations which are going on under our noses.”
And with a quick, sharp bow, he made his way to the gate, whither I followed him in time to see him set his foot upon a patch of sage.
“You will begin at this place,” he cried, “and work east; and, gentlemen, something tells me that we shall be successful.”
With almost a simultaneous sound a dozen spades and picks struck the ground. The digging up of Mother Jane’s garden had begun in earnest.
CHAPTER XXXV
THE DOVE
I remained at the gate. I had been bidden to show my interest in what was going on in Mother Jane’s garden, and this was the way I did it. But my thoughts were not with the diggers. I knew, as well then as later, that they would find nothing worth the trouble they were taking; and, having made up my mind to this, I was free to follow the lead of my own thoughts.
They were not happy ones; I was neither satisfied with myself nor with the prospect of the long day of cruel
suspense that awaited us. When I undertook to come to X., it was with the latent expectation of making myself useful in ferreting out its mystery. And how had I succeeded? I had been the means through which one of its secrets had been discovered, but not the secret; and while Mr. Gryce was good enough, or wise enough, to show no diminution in his respect for me, I knew that I had sunk a peg in his estimation from the consciousness I had of having sunk two, if not three pegs, in my own.
This was a galling thought to me. But it was not the only one which disturbed me. Happily or unhappily, I have as much heart as pride, and Lucetta’s despair, and the desperate resolve to which it had led, had made an impression upon me which I could not shake off.
Whether she knew the criminal or only suspected him; whether in the heat of her sudden anguish she had promised more or less than she could perform, the fact remained that we (by whom I mean first and above all, Mr. Gryce, the ablest detective on the New York force, and myself, who, if no detective, am at least a factor of more or less importance in an inquiry like this) were awaiting the action of a weak and suffering girl to discover what our own experience should be able to obtain for us unassisted.
That Mr. Gryce felt that he was playing a great card in thus enlisting her despair in our service, did not comfort me. I am not fond of games in which real hearts take the place of painted ones; and, besides, I was not ready to acknowledge that my own capacity for ferreting out this mystery was quite exhausted, or that I ought to remain idle while Lucetta bent under a task so much beyond her strength. So deeply was I impressed by this latter consideration, that I found myself, even in the midst of my apparent interest in what was going on at Mother Jane’s cottage, asking if I was bound to accept the defeat pronounced upon my efforts by Mr. Gryce, and if there was not yet time to retrieve myself and save Lucetta. One happy thought, or clever linking of cause to effect, might lead me yet to the clue which we had hitherto sought in vain. And then who would have more right to triumph than Amelia Butterworth, or who more reason to apologize than Ebenezar Gryce! But where was I to get my happy thought, and by what stroke of fortune could I reasonably hope to light upon a clue which had escaped the penetrating eye of my quondam colleague? Lucetta’s gesture and Lucetta’s exclamation, “He passed that way!” indicated that her suspicions pointed in the direction of Deacon Spear’s cottage; so did William’s wandering accusations: but this was little help to me, confined as I was to the Knollys demesnes, both by Mr. Gryce’s command and by my own sense of propriety. No, I must light on something more tangible; something practical enough to justify me in my own eyes for any interference I might meditate. In short, I must start from a fact, and not from a suspicion. But what fact? Why, there was but one, and that was the finding of certain indisputable tokens of crime in Mother Jane’s keeping. That was a clue, a clue, to be sure, which Mr. Gryce, while ostensibly following it in his present action, really felt to lead nowhere, but which I—Here my thoughts paused. I dare not promise myself too satisfactory results to my efforts, even while conscious of that vague elation which presages success, and which I could only overcome by resorting again to reasoning. This time I started with a question. Had Mother Jane committed these crimes herself? I did not think so; neither did Mr. Gryce, for all the persistence he showed in having the ground about her humble dwelling-place turned over. Then, how had the ring of Mr. Chittenden come to be in her possession, when, as all agreed, she never was known to wander more than forty rods away from home? If the crime by which this young gentleman had perished had taken place up the road, as Lucetta’s denouncing finger plainly indicated, then this token of Mother Jane’s complicity in it had been carried across the intervening space by other means than Mother Jane herself. In other words, it was brought to her by the perpetrator, or it was placed where she could lay hand on it; neither supposition implying guilt on her part, she being in all probability as innocent of wrong as she was of sense. At all events, such should be my theory for the nonce, old theories having exploded or become of little avail in the present aspect of things. To discover, then, the source of crime, I must discover the means by which this ring reached Mother Jane—an almost hopeless task, but not to be despaired of on that account: had I not wrung the truth in times gone by from that piece of obstinate stolidity the Van Burnam scrub-woman? and if I could do this, might I not hope to win an equal confidence from this half-demented creature, with a heart so passionate it beat to but one tune, her Lizzie? I meant at least to try, and, under the impulse of this resolve, I left my position at the gate and recrossed the road to Mother Jane, whose figure I could dimly discern on the farther side of her little house.
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