CHAPTER XIII
HOW ONE OATH WAS TAKEN
SHE glared defiance at the chief, then, in placid triumph, let her eyes roam the circle of faces. The Moselys were wide-eyed with interest. Doris avoided her aunt’s searching gaze. Her own eyes were downcast, her face was working. Clive Creede gave a great sigh as of relief. Vail came forward, lifted one of the little old lady’s hands from the Book and kissed it. He said nothing. It was the chief who broke the brief silence which followed the testimony.
“You—you are certain, Miss Gregg, that the time Mr. Vail was out of your sight was not longer than thirty seconds?” he asked, troubled.
“I didn’t have a stop watch,” she retorted tartly. “But the time was just long enough for me to stand up, stamp the pringles out of my joints, go to the front hall, and then to run to the top of one short flight of stairs. In that time if he had committed the murder he must have traversed the whole distance around the veranda walk to a spot below his own room, climbed the vines (making sure not to let them rustle loudly), crawl across the roof to the window, wriggle in, locate the bed and the man on it, kill him, and repeat the whole process of getting through the window to the roof and from the roof to the ground and from the ground to the front door. If he could do that in thirty seconds or less he deserves immunity for his speed record.”
“He could not have done it in less than several minutes,” said the chief, consideringly. “And if you were out in the front hall for part of that time you couldn’t have failed to hear the rustle of the vines or the steps on the roof. That would cut the time down to even less than the thirty seconds you speak of. No, he could not have done it.”
“That’s what I told you all along!” chimed in Clive Creede. “And I told you he couldn’t possibly have had any motive. He—”
“Clive!” said Miss Gregg, her voice acid. “Did you ever hear a wise old maxim that runs: ‘Save me from my friends and I’ll save myself from my enemies’? Stop wringing your hands in that silly nervous way and clap both of them tight over your mouth and keep them there. A little more of your staunch friendship and Thax would be on his way to jail. Please—”
“You did not lose sight of Mr. Vail,” summed up the chief with visible reluctance, “from about one o’clock until less than thirty seconds before the alarm was given? You could swear to that if necessary, Miss Gregg?”
“Do you suppose I’ve been keeping my palms on this scratchy old muslin just for fun?” she snapped.
“Oh, yes, I remember!” Quimby corrected himself in some confusion. “I forgot you have already sworn—that you made your statement with your hands resting on the Holy Bible. In that event, Mr. Vail, I can only apologize for my hint at arresting you. I see no evidence at present to hold you or any one else on. Miss Gregg’s word—to say nothing of her solemn oath-would convince any jury in this county and would clear you. Doctor, you will be ready to testify at the inquest that Mr. Chase had been dead less than one hour when you examined him?”
“I shall,” replied Lawton, unhesitatingly.
“One question more, Mr. Vail, if you will permit,” said the chief, with marked increase of deference, as he turned again to Thaxton. “Or, rather, two questions. In the first place, what was the cause and the nature of your quarrel with Mr. Chase—the quarrel which Mr. Creede says he interrupted this morning?”
“Mr. Creede has told you all there is to tell about that,” answered Thaxton, with some coldness of tone and manner. “Mr. Chase had read in the paper that I was obliged to maintain Vailholme as a hotel. He insisted on coming here. Not as a guest but to board. He thought it was a great joke. I did not. That is where we differed. There was no quarrel as he and I understood it. Nothing but an exchange of friendly abuse. It remained for Mr. Creede to construe it into a quarrel.”
“I see,” said the chief, doubtfully. “The second and last question is: Why did you, late in the evening, insist on transferring Mr. Chase from the room assigned to him to your own room?”
“Because the night was hot, and his room was uncomfortable and mine was cool and comfortable, and I was not going to occupy my own room all night.”
“H’m!” murmured Quimby.
The tramp of feet in the front hall put an end to any further queries he might have been framing. Whitcomb and two other constables stood in the living room doorway, arriving in answer to the telephone summons.
At once the chief ranged from inquisitor to policeman.
“First of all,” he directed his men, “bring your flashlights, and we’ll examine the ground under that window. Then we’ll climb up, the same way, if we can borrow a ladder. The vines may—”
“Flashlight?” repeated Whitcomb. “Why, Chief, it’s broad daylight! In another ten minutes the sun’ll be up.”
He went over to the nearest long window and threw open the old-fashioned wooden shutters. Into the room surged the strong dawnlight, paling the electric lamps to a sickly yellow.
In, too, through the window itself as he swung it wide, wafted a breath of sweet summer morning air, heavy of dew-soaked earth and of flowers and vibrant with the matin song of a million birds.
The lightning transition from spectral night to flush daylight came as a shock to the group. It jolted them back to normality. Joshua Q. Mosely was the first to speak.
“Guess we’ll hunt up Pee-air and have him bring the car around,” said he briskly. “I and Mrs. M. did our packing last night. No sense in our sticking here any longer. I’ll leave my address with you, Chief, and a memo about the reward. Guess we’ll move along to Lenox or maybe down to Lee for breakfast. See you before we go, Mr. Vail. So long!”
He followed the chief and his men from the room, Mrs. Mosely in tow. Dr. Lawton drifted aimlessly after Quimby.
The four who remained stood for a moment looking after the receding outlanders. Then Clive turned impulsively, remorsefully, to Vail.
“I’m so sorry old man!” he exclaimed. “So rotten sorry! I never meant—”
“Sorry?” echoed Miss Gregg. “You needn’t be. You did your best. It’s no fault of yours that Thax isn’t to be held for the Grand Jury.”
Creede winced as though she had spat in his face. He was ghastly pale, and he slumped rather than stood. He looked desperately ill.
“I was trying to help,” he pleaded, his ghastly face working. “Honestly, I was, Thax. I suppose that gas attack at my lab has dulled whatever brains I had. It seemed to me I was backing you up, and then all at once I realized I had said things that might make him think—”
“They made him think, all right,” assented the grim old lady. “And you backed Thax up, too—backed him clear up against the wall. If I hadn’t had the rare good luck to be able to prove he was innocent—”
“Oh, it’s all right, Clive,” said Vail, pitying his friend’s utter demoralization. “You meant all right. I—”
“It’s all wrong,” denied Creede brokenly. “I’ve harmed the best friend I have in the world. The fact that I was trying to help doesn’t make any difference. If you don’t mind, I’ll follow the sweet Moselys’ example—pack up and go home.”
“Nonsense!” scoffed Vail. “No harm’s done. Stay on here. You meant all right—”
“Hell is paved with the skulls of people who ‘meant all right,’” interpolated Miss Gregg, severely. “The vilest insult one rational human can heap upon another is that damning phrase, ‘He meant all right!’ It’s a polite term for ‘mischief maker’ and for ‘hoodoo.’”
Clive turned his hollowly sick eyes on her in hopeless resignation. But the sight did not soften her peppery mood.
“Clive,” she rebuked, “I’ve known you always. I knew your father. I know your brother—though I don’t mention that when I can help it. All of you have had plenty of faults. But not one of you was ever a fool. You, least of all. The war must have done queer things to your head as well as to your lungs and heart. No normal man, with all the brains you took with you to France, could have come back with so few. It isn’t in human nature. There’s a catch in this, somewhere.”
Creede bowed his head in weary acceptance of her tirade. Then he looked with furtive appeal at Doris. But the girl was again sitting with tight-clenched hands, her eyes downcast, her soft lips twitching. From her averted face he looked to Vail.
“I’m sorry, Thax,” he repeated heavily. “And I’m going. I’d rather. It’ll be pleasanter all around. If I can bother you to phone for a taxi I’ll go up and get my things together.”
“No!” urged Thaxton, touched by his chum’s misery. “No, no, old man. Don’t be so silly. I tell you it’s all—”
But Creede had slumped out of the room. Vail followed at his heels, still protesting noisily against the invalid’s decision.
Miss Gregg watched them go. Then she turned to Doris. There was something defiant, something almost apprehensive, in the old lady’s aspect as she faced her niece.
“Well?” she challenged.
Doris sprang to her feet, her great dark eyes regarding Miss Gregg with fascinated horror.
“Oh, Auntie!” she breathed, accusingly. “Auntie!”
“Well,” bluffed the old lady with a laudable effort at swagger, “what then?”
“Aunt Hester!” exclaimed the girl. “It was I who couldn’t sleep a wink last night. Not you. I heard the stable clock strike every single hour from twelve to three. And—”
“Well,” argued Miss Gregg, “what if you did? It’s nothing to boast about, is it? Have you any monopoly on hearing stable clocks strike? Have—?”
“I had, last night,” responded the girl, “so far as our suite was concerned. I lay there and listened to you snoring. You went to sleep before you had been in bed ten minutes. And you never stopped snoring one moment till Macduff began to howl so horribly. Then you jumped up and—”
“People always seem to think there’s something degrading about a snore,” commented Miss Gregg. “Personally, I like to have people snore. (As long as they do it out of earshot from me.) There’s something honest and wholesome about snoring. Just as there is in a hearty appetite. I’ve no patience with finicky eaters and noiseless sleepers. There’s something so disgustingly superior about them! Now when I eat or sleep—”
“Aunt Hester!” Doris dragged her back from the safety isles of philosophy to the facts of the moment. “You were sound asleep in your own bed all night—till the dog waked us. But you told the chief you didn’t sleep at all and you told him that awful rigmarole about hiding behind lowboys and—”
“Highboys, dear,” corrected the old lady. “Highboys. Or, to be accurate, one highboy and one desk. A highboy and a lowboy are two very different articles of furniture, as you ought to know by this time. Now, that table out in the hall there is a low—”
“You told him all that story,” Doris drove on remorselessly, “when not one single syllable of it was true. Auntie!”
“My dear,” demanded Miss Gregg, evasion falling from her as she came at last to bay, “would you rather have had me tell one small lie or have Thaxton Vail lose one large life? Circumstantial evidence—his own knife and his absence from the house at just the critical time and all that—and Clive Creede’s rank idiocy in blabbing the very worst things he could have blabbed—all that would have sent Thax to prison without bail to wait his trial. And, ten to one, it would have convicted him. I was thinking of that when my inspiration came. Direct from On High, as I shall always believe. And I spoke up. Then my own niece tries to blame me for saving him! Gratitude is a—”
“But, Auntie!” protested the confused Doris. “Surely you could have told the story without taking oath on it. Perjury is a terrible thing. Even to save a life. Oh, how could you?”
“I didn’t commit perjury,” stoutly denied Miss Gregg. “I did nothing of the kind. I didn’t take any oath at all. Not one.”
“You laid your hands on the Bible,” insisted Doris. “You brought it in from the lectern. And you laid both hands on it when you testified. You said you did it in case your bare word should be doubted. You laid your dear wicked hands on it and—”
“On what?” challenged Miss Gregg, sullenly.
“On the Elzevir Bible,” replied Doris, with all of youth’s intolerance at such infantile dodging.
But to the girl’s surprise the old lady glared indignantly at her.
“I did nothing of the sort!” declared Miss Gregg. “Absolutely nothing of the sort. In the first place, I took care not to say I was on oath and not to swear to anything at all. In the second place, the Elzevir Bible is in the bottom drawer of Thax’s desk. I know, because I put it there not half an hour ago.”
She crossed to the table and snatched up the muslin-swathed book, this time with no reverence at all. Peeling off the sleazy cover, she disclosed the volume itself to the girl’s wondering eyes.
It was a bulky copy of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary.
“Auntie!” babbled the astounded Doris.
“I have every respect for Noah Webster,” remarked Miss Gregg. “The world owes him a great debt. But I refuse to believe his excellent dictionary was inspired from Heaven or that I committed perjury when I laid my hands on it in endorsement of the story I told.”
“Auntie! I—”
“And, by the way,” pursued the old lady, “I shall persuade Ezra Lawton to hold the inquest here, and I shall see that this book is placed on the table for the witnesses’ oaths to be taken on. Personally, I shall tell him I have conscientious objections to swearing, and when I testify I shall merely ‘affirm’ (that is permissible in law, you know) with my saintly hands resting on this equally saintly tome.”
She ceased and glared once more at her marveling niece, this time with an unbearable air of virtue. Doris returned the look for a second. Then, racked by a spasm of mingled tears and laughter, she caught the little old woman tight in her strong young arms.
“Oh!” she gasped between laughing and weeping. “How I pity poor Saint Peter when you get to the Pearly Gates! Five minutes after he refuses to let you in you’ll make a triumphant entrance, carrying along his bunch of keys and his halo! But it was glorious in you to save Thax that way. You’re wonderful! And—and it was all a—a fib about your thinking he had stolen those things? Please say it was! Please do!”
“My dear,” Miss Gregg instructed her, “if I had said I lay awake through utter faith in the boy it wouldn’t have carried half the weight as if I made them think I started out on my vigil with a belief in his guilt. Can’t you see that? Of course, he never stole those things. I made that quite clear to you last evening, didn’t I?”
“And—and, Auntie—you—you KNOW he’s innocent of—of this other awful charge, don’t you? Say you do!”
“The worst affront that can be offered is an affront to the intelligence,” Miss Gregg informed her. “Which means your question is a black insult to me. I didn’t grip his hand as Clive did, or shout ‘Shame!’ as you did when he was accused. None of those ‘Hands-Across-the-Sea’ demonstrations were needed to show my faith in him. My faith isn’t only in the man himself, but in his sanity. Whatever else Thax Vail is he’s not a born fool. Not brilliant. But assuredly not a fool. He wouldn’t kill young Chase or any one else—with a knife that every one would recognize at once as Thax’s own—and then go away, leaving it in the wound for the police to find. No, Thax didn’t kill Chase. But some one who hates Thax did.”
“What—”
“Why else should he do it with that knife? There must have been plenty of more suitable weapons at hand—unless he has killed so many people this week that all his own weapons are in the wash.”
“But who—?”
“He must have picked up the knife here,” insisted Miss Gregg, “after I used it for a corkscrew—either right afterward or else finding it here in the night after we’d all gone to bed. These windows with their backnumber clasps are ridiculously easy to open from outside. And from where Thax sat or lay in the study the sound of any one entering this room carefully couldn’t have been heard. Whoever came in to kill Willis Chase must have planned to do it with some other weapon—some weapon he brought along to do it with. Then he saw the knife, and he knew it would switch suspicion to Thax. So he used that.”
“But the windows here were still fastened from inside, just now,” argued Doris. “Besides, it’s proved the murderer got in through a window upstairs. He couldn’t have come in through these windows and gotten the knife and then have gone out again and closed and locked them from the inside. He couldn’t. And Thax was the last person downstairs here last night. So nobody from inside the house, either, could have gotten down here and stolen the knife and gone upstairs with it again. The study door is right at the foot of the stairs. Thax couldn’t have helped seeing and hearing him, even if he’d been able to step twice over Macduff without disturbing the dog. No, it couldn’t be.”
“You are quite right,” agreed Miss Gregg. “It couldn’t. Lots of things in this mystery-drama world can’t be. But most of them are. Which reminds me I must wake Horoson and have her get some coffee made. We’ll all be the better for breakfast.”
She bustled to the hall as she spoke. Thaxton Vail was standing in the front doorway looking disconsolately out into the sunrise.
“He went,” reported Vail, turning back into the house as Miss Gregg and Doris emerged into the hallway. “I’m sorry. For he isn’t fit to. He’s still all in.”
“Who?” asked Doris, her mind still adaze.
“Clive Creede. This thing has cut him up fearfully. He talked a lot of rot about having injured me and not having the courage to face me again. I told him it was absurd. But he went. He wouldn’t even wait for a taxi. Just went afoot, leaving his luggage to be sent for. Poor chap!”
Miss Gregg passed on into the kitchen regions. The police, their inspection of the house’s exterior completed, were trooping ponderously upstairs, Lawton still trailing along dully in their wake. Doris and Vail stood alone in the glory of sunrise that flooded the wide old hall.
For another few moments neither of them spoke again, but stood there side by side looking out on the fire-red eastern sky and at the marvel of sunrise on trees and lawn. Unconsciously their hands had met and were close clasped. It was Doris who spoke at last.
“It was splendid of you,” she said, “not to be angry with Clive for his awful blunders. I—somehow I feel as if I never want to set eyes on him again. My father used to say: ‘I can endure a criminal, but I hate a fool.’ I thought it was a brutally cynical thing to say. But now—well, I can understand what Dad meant.”
“You mustn’t blame old Clive!” begged Vail. “He’s sick and upset and hardly knows what he’s saying or doing. He thought I was in trouble. And he came to my defense. If he did it bunglingly his muddled brain and not his heart went back on him. I’m sorry Miss Gregg spoke to him as she did. It cut him up fearfully.”
“Dear little Aunt Hester!” sighed Doris. “She knew us all when we were babies. And she can’t get over the notion we’re still five years old and that we must be scolded when we’re bad or when we blunder. She’s—she’s a darling!”
“I ought to think so if any one does,” assented Vail. “If it hadn’t been for her testimony I’d be on my way to jail before now. But to think of her having to sit behind my desk all those hours! It was an outrage! The dear old soul!”
Doris reddened, made as though to enlighten him, then shut her lips in a very definite line. Knowing the man as she did, she believed he was quite capable of refusing to profit by Miss Gregg’s subterfuge, and that he would announce at the inquest that the old lady had sacrificed the truth in a splendid effort to save him. Wherefore, being a wise girl, Doris held her peace.
“In books,” said Vail, presently, “the falsely suspected hero thanks the heroine eloquently for her trust in him. I’m not going to thank you, Doris. But I think you know what your glorious trust means to me.”
She looked down; under the strange light in his eyes. And in doing so she realized her hand was still interclasped with his. She made a conscientious effort to withdraw it. But the last few hours apparently had sapped her athletic young strength. For she lacked the muscular power to resist his tender grasp. That grasp grew tighter as he said, hurriedly, incoherently:
“When I get out of this tangle—and I’m not going to let you be mixed up in it with me—there are all sorts of things I’m going to say to you, whether I have the right to or not. Till then—”
He checked himself, his ardent words ending in a growl of disgust. Up the driveway toward the house was striding Osmun Creede.