“To convict Judson Clark of the murder of Howard
Lucas is to convict a probably or at least possibly
innocent man. To convict Richard Livingstone
of that crime is to convict a different man, innocent
of the crime, innocent of its memory, innocent of any
single impulse to lift his hand against a law of God
or the state.”
For a month Haverly had buzzed with whispered conjectures.
It knew nothing, and yet somehow it knew everything.
Doctor David was ill at the seashore, and Dick was
not with him. Harrison Miller, who was never
known to depart farther from his comfortable hearth
than the railway station in one direction and the
Sayre house in the other, had made a trip East and
was now in the far West. Doctor Reynolds, who
might or might not know something, had joined the
country club and sent for his golf bag.
And Elizabeth Wheeler was going around with a drawn
white face and a determined smile that faded the moment
one looked away.
The village was hurt and suspicious. It resented
its lack of knowledge, and turned cynical where, had
it been taken into confidence, it would have been
solicitous. It believed that Elizabeth had been
jilted, for it knew, via Annie and the Oglethorpe’s
laundress, that no letters came from Dick. And
against Dick its indignation was directed, in a hot
flame of mainly feminine anger.
But it sensed a mystery, too, and if it hated a jilt
it loved a mystery.
Nina had taken to going about with her small pointed
chin held high, and angrily she demanded that Elizabeth
do the same.
“You know what they are saying, and yet you
go about looking crushed.”
“I can’t act, Nina. I do go about.”
And Nina had a softened moment.
“Don’t think about him,” she said.
“He isn’t sick, or he would have had
some one wire or write, and he isn’t dead, or
they’d have found his papers and let us know.”
“Then he’s in some sort of trouble.
I want to go out there. I want to go out there!”
That, indeed, had been her constant cry for the last
two weeks. She would have done it probably, packed
her bag and slipped away, but she had no money of
her own, and even Leslie, to whom she appealed, had
refused her when he knew her purpose.
“We’re following him up, little sister,”
he said. “Harrison Miller has gone out,
and there’s enough talk as it is.”
She thought, lying in her bed at night, that they
were all too afraid of what people might say.
It seemed so unimportant to her. And she could
not understand the conspiracy of silence. Other
men went away and were not heard from, and the police
were notified and the papers told. It seemed
to her, too, that every one, her father and Nina and
Leslie and even Harrison Miller, knew more than she
did.
There had been that long conference behind closed
doors, when Harrison Miller came back from seeing
David, and before he went west. Leslie had been
there, and even Doctor Reynolds, but they had shut
her out. And her father had not been the same
since.
