“You mean that at the time you came to Rosemont your husband was still living?” The prosecutor made no attempt to disguise the astonishment in his voice.
“I do not know whether he was living or not. He had left me, you see, almost seventeen years before I came to Rosemont. I learned three years ago that he was dead, but not when he died.”
“Mrs. Ives, I do not wish to dwell on a subject that must be painful to you, but I would like to get this straight. Were you divorced?”
“It is not at all painful to me,” said Patrick Ives’s mother gently, her small gloved hands wrung tightly together on the edge of the witness box. “It happened many years ago, and my life since has been full of so many things. We were not divorced. My husband was younger than I, and our marriage was not happy. He left me for a much younger woman.”
“It was believed in Rosemont that you were a widow, was it not?”
“Everyone in Rosemont believed me to be a widow except Pat, who had known the truth since he was quite a little boy. It was foolish of me not to tell the truth, perhaps, but I had a great distaste for pity.” She smiled again, graciously, at the prosecutor. “False pride was about the only luxury that I indulged in, in those days.”
“You say that you were supporting both your son and yourself?”
“No. Pat was doing any little jobs that he could get, as he had done since he sold papers on the corner when he was six years old.” For a moment the smile faded and she eyed the prosecutor steadfastly, almost sternly, as though daring him to challenge that statement, and for a moment it looked as though he were about to do exactly that, when abruptly, he veered.
“Were you in the garden the night of the nineteenth of June, Mrs. Ives?”
“In the rose garden—yes.”
“Did you see Miss Page on her way to the sandpile?”
“I believe that I did, although I have nothing that particularly fixes it in my mind.”
“Did you see your daughter-in-law?”
“Yes.”
For a moment the faintest shadow passed over her face—a shadow of doubt, of hesitancy. Her glance went past the prosecutor to the place where her daughter-in-law was sitting, quietly attentive, and briefly, profoundly, their eyes met. The shadow passed.
“Which way was she going?”
“She was going past the rose garden toward the back gate of the house.”
“Just one moment, Mrs. Ives. What is the distance between Mr. Ives’s house and Orchards?”
“Well, that depends on how you approach it. By road it must be almost two miles, but if you use the little footpath that cuts across the meadows north of the house, it can’t be less than a mile.”
“Do you know where that path comes out?”
“I believe that it comes out by a little summerhouse or playhouse on the Thorne estate.”
“Far from the gardener’s cottage?”
“Oh, no—Miss Page said that it was quite near it, I think. She had been using it to take the children over to the playhouse on several occasions—and as it was quite without Mrs. Ives’s knowledge, I spoke to my son about it.”
“Did other members of the household make use of this path?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Now, Mrs. Ives, when Mrs. Patrick Ives passed you in the garden, did she speak to you?”
“Yes.”
“Just what did she say?”
“As nearly as I can remember, she said that she was going to the movies with the Conroys, and that she wasn’t sure whether she would be back before I got to bed. She added that Pat was going to play poker.”
“Nothing more?”
“That is all that I remember.”
“Did you see her again that night?”
“Yes.”
“Will you tell us when?”
“I saw her twice. Not more than two or three minutes after she passed me in the rose garden, she came back and went toward the house, almost running. I was at the far end of the garden by then, working on some trellises, and I didn’t speak to her. She seemed in a great hurry, and I thought that she had probably forgotten something—her bag or a scarf for her hair, perhaps. She wasn’t wearing any hat. A minute or so later she came out of the house and ran back down the path to the back gate.”
“Was she wearing a scarf on her hair?”
“No.”
“Had she a bag?”
“I don’t remember seeing a bag, but she might well have had one.”
“She did not speak to you?”
“No.”
“And those were the two times that you refer to?”
“Oh, no,” corrected Mrs. Ives gently. “I thought of those occasions as forming one time. I saw her again, a good deal later in the evening.”
Once more the courtroom was filled with that strange stir—the movement of hundreds of bodies moving an inch nearer to the edges of chairs.
“Good Lord!” murmured the reporter devoutly. “She’s going to give the girl an alibi! Look out, you old fox!”
The prosecutor, thus disrespectfully and inaudibly adjured, moved boldly forward. “At what time did you see your daughter-in-law, Mrs. Ives?”
“You’ve got to grant him nerve,” continued the reporter, unabashed. “Or probably he’s betting that the old lady wouldn’t perjure herself even to save her son’s wife. I’d rather bet it myself.”
Mrs. Ives, who had been sitting silently studying her linked fingers, raised an untroubled countenance to the prosecutor’s, but for the first time she spoke as though she were weighing her words: “It is difficult for me to give you the exact time, as I did not look at a clock. I had been in bed for quite a little while, however, and had turned out the light. I should say, roughly, that it might have been half-past ten. It was quite dark when I came into the house myself, I remember, and I believe that it stayed light at that time until long after nine.”
“It was your habit to work in the garden until it was dark?”
“Yes; gardening
