MISSING

After a time a new conjecture brought him to his feet. To solve it he would go to the pond. If he had truly been there and done this appalling thing, he would know it by the empty imprint of the boulder he had taken from its resting place of years. If he had not, then Isabel had fled to her mother and would be found with her in the morning, and the blot of her murder, though it blackened his soul, was yet not on his hands.

He went to the water, and soon he came again with the step and face of one called out of his grave. Slowly he counted the disordered coverings of his wife's couch, stood a moment in desolate perplexity, and then went quickly and counted those of his own. A sheet and a blanket were gone. He turned to a closet and supplied the lack, and then paced the floor until dawn.

Before the servants were fairly astir he laid away the clothing Isabel had put off, and contrived to leave the house and pa.s.s through the arbor unseen until he reached its farther end; but there Mrs. Morris, in a dressing gown, opened to him before he could knock. She forced her usual laugh, but he saw the white preparedness of her face.

"She knows my crime," he thought, and was in agony to guess how she had got the knowledge and what she would do with it.

"Why, Arthur," she sweetly began, "what brings you"--But her throat closed.

"Mother," he interrupted emotionally as they shut themselves in, "is Isabel here?"

"Isabel?--No-o! Why--why, Arthur, she went home last night before ten o'clock!" The little lady knew her acting was not good, but it was better than she had hoped to make it. "Arthur Winslow! don't tell me my child is not at home! Oh, my heavens!"

"Wait, mother; listen. I beseech you. Do you absolutely know she's not here?"

"I know it! Oh, Arthur, are you only trying to break bad news to me by littles? Has Isabel destroyed herself? Has she fled?" The inquirer played well now; her pallor, that had seemed to accuse him, was gone, and her question offered a cue which he greedily took.

"Fled? Isabel! Destroyed herself,--that spotless soul? Oh no, no, no!

But Oh merciful G.o.d! I am afraid she has been stolen!" He sank into a seat and dropped his face into his hands.

The maid's steps sounded overhead, and he started up. Mrs. Morris laid a hand on his arm. She was pale again, but her words were rea.s.suring.

"It's Minnie," she murmured: "let me go and see her. She'll not be surprised; I'm always the first one up." She went, and was soon back again.

"There is no time to lose"--Arthur began.

"No, you must go. Go search for every clue that will tell us a word of her; but, whatever you do, let no one, not even Sarah, know she is missing, until we know enough ourselves to protect her from every shadow of reproach!"

"True! true! right! right!" said Arthur, while with secret terror he cried to himself: "This woman knows! She knows, she knows, and all this is make-believe, put on to gain time!"

But he saw no safer course than to help on the sham. "Right," he said again; "only, mother, dear, how shall we hide her absence?"

"We needn't hide it. You know she got another telegram last night, begging her to come at once to the wedding. We can say she went on this morning's train, before day; it makes such good Southern connections.

And now go! make your search with all your might! and after a while I'll come over and pack a trunk full of her things, and express it South, just as if she were there, and had gone so hurriedly that--Don't you see?"

Arthur said he saw it all, but he did not; he saw much that was not, and much that was he saw not. He did not see that the dust of the old street, and of the new town as well, was on Mrs. Morris's shoes; and that Isabel, in a gown which she had left at the cottage when she went to be mistress of his home, was really on the train, bound South.

Dropping all pretence of having any search to make, he hurried back to his own room, and by and by told the pleasantly astonished Sarah and Giles the simple truth as Mrs. Morris had put it into his mouth, but told it in the firm belief that he was covering a hideous crime with an all but transparent lie.

After a false show of breakfasting he went into his study,--"to work on his sermon," he said; but did nothing there but pace the floor, hold his head, and whisper, "It will not last an hour after _he_ has heard it," and, "O G.o.d, have mercy! Oh, my wife, my wife! Oh, my brain, my brain!"

XIX

A DOUBLE STILL HUNT

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 pa.s.sed 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 impa.s.sioned 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "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.