CHAPTER VII
FAITH AND UNFAITH AND SOME MOONLIGHT
THE lanky chief did not appear at all excited. Indeed, he and his assistant went about their work with a quiet routine method that verged on boredom. They made a perfunctory tour of the robbed rooms; then they convened an impromptu court of inquiry in the living room, Quimby bidding Vogel and Mrs. Horoson to collect the entire service staff of house and grounds in the dining room and to herd them there until they should be called for, one by one.
Then after listening gravely to Vail’s account of the affair and with growing impatience to Joshua Q. Mosely’s longer and more dramatic recital, Quimby announced that the interrogation would begin. Thaxton was the first witness.
“Mr. Vail,” asked the chief, “what did you lose? I don’t see your list on this inventory of stolen goods you’ve made out for me.”
Vail looked blank.
“Good Lord!” he exclaimed. “I never thought to look. I was so bothered about the others’ losses I clean forgot—”
“Suppose you go and look now,” hinted the chief. “Be as quick as you can. We’ll delay the interrogation till you come back.”
Thaxton returned to the improvised courtroom in less than three minutes.
“Not a thing missing, so far as I can see,” he reported. “And nothing disturbed. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Chief. I seem to be the only one who escaped a visit from the thief.”
Clive Creede had been slumping low in the chair which Vail had brought him. Now, breathing hard, he got weakly to his feet and lurched through the open French window out onto the moonlit veranda.
He made his exit so unobtrusively that no one but Doris Lane chanced to note it. The girl, at sight of his haggard face and stumbling gait, followed Creede out into the moonlight. She found him leaning against one of the veranda pillars, drawing in great breaths of the cool night air.
“Are you worse?” she asked in quick anxiety. “Why don’t you go to bed? You’re not fit to be up.”
“Oh, I’m all right,” he declared, pluckily, as he straightened from his crumpled posture. “Don’t worry about me. Only—the room was so close and so crowded and so noisy—and I felt dizzy—and I had to come out here for a lungful of fresh air. I’ll go back presently.”
She hesitated, as though about to return to the others. But the sick man looked so forlorn and weak she disliked to leave him alone. Yet, knowing how sensitive he was in all things regarding his health, she masked her intent under pretense of lingering for a chat.
“I wonder if it was really an ‘inside job,’” she hazarded. “If it was, of course it must have been one of the servants. And I hate to believe that. We know every one else concerned, and we know we are all honest. That is, we know every one but the Moselys. And they couldn’t very well have done it, could they?”
“They couldn’t have done it at all,” he said, emphatically. “I know. Because you said they were the first people in the living room, waiting for dinner. I came down nearly half an hour later. I had overslept. When I changed to dinner clothes, I left my watch and my cash on my chiffonier. They were stolen. The Moselys had been downstairs a long time. And they didn’t go up again till they went after that dog fight. And then they weren’t gone two minutes before they came rushing back to tell us they’d been robbed. Not long enough for them to ransack a single unfamiliar room, to say nothing of my room and Chase’s and yours. No, we must leave the Moselys out of it.”
“Then it must be one of the servants, of course,” decided Doris.
“I wish I dared hope so,” muttered Clive, almost too low for her to catch the words.
“What do you mean?” she asked in surprise.
“I mean,” he said, wretchedly, “I mean it would be better to find out that one of them had robbed us than if— Oh, I don’t mean anything at all!” he ended, in sulky anticlimax.
She stared at him with wonder.
“I don’t understand you,” she said. “We’ve just proved it couldn’t be any one but the servants, unless, of course, it was done by some professional thief who got in. And that doesn’t seem likely.”
“No,” he said, shortly. “It doesn’t. It was done from the inside. That’s proved.... Let’s talk about something else, shan’t we?”
But Doris’s curiosity was piqued by his eagerness to sheer away from the theme.
“Tell me,” she insisted.
“Tell you what?” he countered, sullenly.
“Tell me whom you suspect,” returned Doris. “You suspect some one. I know you do. Who is it?”
“I didn’t say I suspected any one,” he made troubled answer. “I’d rather not talk about it at all, if you don’t mind.”
“But I do mind,” she protested. “Why, Clive, all of us have been living here in this corner of the Berkshires every summer since we were born! We’ve all known one another all our lives. It’s—it’s a terrible thing to feel that one of us may be a thief. Won’t you tell me whom you suspect?”
Clive looked glumly down into her appealingly upraised face for a moment. Then he squared his shoulders and spoke.
“You’ve asked for it,” said he, speaking between his shut teeth and with growing reluctance. “I’d give ten years’ income not to tell you—and I’d give ten years of my life not to believe it’s he.”
“Who?”
He hesitated. Then, a tinge of evasion in his unhappy voice, he replied:
“Every one of us was robbed.... Except one.”
“What’s that got to do with it?” she asked. “Thax was the only one of us who wasn’t robbed. That doesn’t answer my question at all.”
He said nothing.
“Clive Creede!” she burst forth, incredulously. “Do you mean to say you are—are—imbecile enough to believe such a thing of Thax? Why, I— Clive!”
There was a world of amazed contempt in her young voice. The man winced. Yet he held his ground doggedly.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” he said. “I know, as well as you do, that Thax didn’t do it through dishonesty or because he needed the money. He has more cash now than he can spend. But—”
“Then why—”
“Either he did it as a mammoth practical joke or else—”
“Thax is not a practical joker,” she interpolated. “No one but a fool plays practical jokes.”
“Or else,” he resumed, “he did it to get rid of his unwelcome guests. That is the most likely solution.”
“The most likely solution,” she said hotly, “the only sane solution is that he didn’t do it at all. It’s absurd to think he did. He—”
“He is the only one of us who wasn’t robbed,” persisted Clive. “He is the only one of us familiar enough with every room and every piece of furniture to have gone through the house so quickly and so thoroughly, taking only the most valuable things from each of them. Nobody else would have had time to or a chance to. He is the only one of us who could have been seen going from room to room without being suspected. I thought of all that. But I wouldn’t believe it till he said himself just now that he hadn’t been robbed. That proved it to me. That’s why I came out here. It turned me sick to think—”
“Clive,” said the girl, quietly, “either the war or else those exploding chemicals in your Rackrent Farm laboratory seems to have had a distressing effect on your mentality. I’ve known you ever since I was born. In the old days you could never have made yourself believe such a thing of Thax Vail. You know you couldn’t. Oh, if—”
Her sweet voice trembled. She turned away, staring blindly out into the moonlight.
“I’m sorry,” said Clive, briefly.
He hesitated, looking in distress at her averted head. Then with a catch of the breath he turned and strode into the living room.
Doris took a step toward the French window to follow him. But there were tears in her eyes, and she felt strangely shaken and unhappy from her talk with Creede. She did not wish the others to see her until she should have had time to recover her self-control. Wherefore she remained where she was.
She was dully astonished that Clive’s disbelief in Vail should have moved her so profoundly. She had not realized, until she heard him attacked, all that Thaxton was coming to mean to her. A glimpse of this new wonder-feeling had been vouchsafed her when she saw Vail knock down a man so much larger and bulkier than himself. The sight had thrilled her unaccountably. But it had been as nothing to the reaction at hearing his honesty doubted.
Long she stood there, forcing herself to look in the face this astounding situation wherein her heart had so imperceptibly floundered. At last, turning from her blind survey of the moon-flooded lawn, she moved toward the living room.
At her first step she paused. Some one was rounding the house from the front, treading heavily on the rose-bordered gravel path that skirted the veranda. Doris waited for the newcomer to draw nearer.
On came the heavy, fast-moving steps. And now they were mounting the veranda’s side stair. In the moonlight, the face and body of a man were clearly revealed.