CHAPTER FOUR
RECKLESSLY Caruth plunged down the half-lighted steps. The elevator had stopped running, and, in any event, he had no time to wait for elevators. Down he sped, past tight-shut doors, whose occupants slept calmly despite his noisy rush; over marble steps, through tessellated halls, round slippery corners. Twice he nearly fell, but he saved himself and went on, bursting at last like a meteor on the scandalized watchman, whom the clatter of his coming had roused from a blameless nap.
“Now, now, now!” clamored that individual. “What in hell’s bells you think you’re doing, gallopin’ like this? Why, it’s Mr. Caruth!”
“Yes, it’s I.” The young man’s breath came in gasps. One does not race down eight flights of steps without showing the effects. “Yes, it’s I! Has my man, Wilkins, gone out in the last five minutes?”
“Wilkins? Naw! Say, Mr. Caruth, you’d better go to bed and sleep it off, or it’ll be you for the psychopathic ward the first thing you know.”
“Bosh! Wilkins has run away from my rooms with a valuable letter and eighteen hundred dollars in money. Are you sure he hasn’t passed you?”
“Eighteen hundred! Gee! ’Course I’m sure. Ain’t I been here right along?”
Caruth drew a long breath and glanced up the stairway down which he had just raced. So sure had he been that Wilkins had fled that he had not stopped to search in his own apartments. A suspicion that he had made himself ridiculous began to penetrate to his brain, and he glanced shamefacedly at the watchman.
That individual was regarding him suspiciously. He caught the look, interpreted it correctly, and smiled encouragingly. “It’s all right, Mr. Caruth,” he extenuated. “It’s all to the regular for a gent to have the nightmare when he goes to sleep in his chair. Just you go back to your rooms and take a dose of bromide and say your lay-me-downs, and neither of us’ll remember anything about this to-morrow. I’d start the elevator for you if I could, but I can’t, so it’s you for the glue-foot climb.”
Caruth scarcely heard the man. His first spasm of distrust in his own action had quickly passed, and by the time the other had finished he had gone back to his first idea.
“Nonsense, Jackson!” he burst out impatiently. “I haven’t been asleep. Wilkins has fled within five minutes. If he hasn’t passed you, he must have gone some other way. How else could he go? Quick, man! He must be caught.”
But the watchman refused to be hurried. “There ain’t no way out but this,” he declared, “unless he done a high dive from the fire-escape.”
Caruth started. He had forgotten the dangerous combination of open platforms and loose-hung ladders plastered across the hall windows on each floor. If Wilkins had taken that means of escape, as was entirely probable, he must be well out of reach, and no way to find him would remain except the slow appeal to the police. He would call up the headquarters and——
Suddenly he recalled his visitor. Would she care to have the affair made public? Certainly he could not act without consulting her.
The watchman’s voice broke on him. That individual had switched on the lights in the hall, and had gone back to where a closed door gave on an alley. “We’ll take a look at that Jacob’s ladder just to satisfy you, Mr. Caruth,” he called. “See here!” He threw open the door and let Caruth step out into the night.
At first the alley seemed dark, but soon objects began to stand out in the faint light. First the skyline showed, clear against the towering sides of the chasm, then the iron of the fire-escape disentangled itself from the darkness and began to show in rectangular tracery.
Before Caruth could distinguish more, the watchman uttered an exclamation. “By George!” he cried. “Somebodyhasbeen on that escape. It’s been let down.”
Caruth looked where the other pointed. Plainly discernible now to his distended pupils, the lowest stretch of the iron ladder trailed across his field ofvision. Some one had cut loose the fastenings that held it high in the air, out of reach of casual sneak thieves, and had lowered it to the ground.
Wilkins’s selection of a route was obvious. But it was also obvious that he was gone.
Caruth turned disconsolately away. He was beginning to wonder what had become of Miss Fitzhugh. When he had started down the stairs, she had been close behind him, and he had expected her to follow, but though more than time enough for her to reach the bottom had elapsed, she had not appeared. His first thought was that she had remained above out of some belated care for her reputation. Then, quickly following, came the possibility of a more sinister explanation.
The incidents of the night to his mind admitted but one explanation. Despite her American name (which might well have been assumed) the girl was a Russian, and he who says Russia nowadays connotes revolution, plots, arrests, and all the rest of the melodrama. The girl might be a nihilist or she might be a police spy, but he was sure that she must be one or the other. And Wilkins was her enemy. She had recognized him as such—not at first, but toward the end, when he had tricked her by his feint of throwing the letter in the fire. Caruth remembered her every word. And he had left her alone! How did he know that Wilkins had gone? How did he know that he had not concealed himself and waited——
Slow and long-drawn-out when written down, the sequence of events with all its possibilities flashed like lightning through his mind. His hair rose upon his head, and the sweat stood out upon his forehead. His heart thumped furiously! Scarcely could he comprehend the words of the watchman.
Yet that individual was cursing roundly. “I’d like to know who in h——’s setting leaky pots out on that escape,” he finished. “Dropping stuff on a man’s clothes and spoilin’——”
The voice died away in an inarticulate murmur, and Caruth saw the man’s face blanch as he held out his hand. “It’s blood,” he hissed. “Blood! Blood! Somebody’s bleedin’ like a stuck pig up there. Somebody’s been murdered.” He ran down the hall and pressed the button of a police call. Then he came hurrying back.
“Here; you!” he shouted, his respectful manner falling from him like a garment. “Chase up them steps to the third floor and meet me at the window. On your way, now, Willie!”
Caruth came out of his trance and sped up the main stairway as the watchman ran up the fire-escape. One flight—two flights—three flights! Along the hall he rushed and threw open the window, just as the watchman reached it from below.
The electric lights threw a white glare upon the grating and upon a human form huddled across it in a strange, unnatural shape. The light fell upon the livid face and staring eyes and upon the darkspot that marred the whiteness of the open shirt bosom. Caruth drew his breath sobbingly. For the body was not that which he had feared to see.
The watchman bent and peered into the white face. “It’s Wilkins, all right,” he commented. “He didn’t get far with that eighteen hundred of yours. Somebody must have been laying for him. They’ve turned his pockets inside out, and I guess they got it, all right.” Deftly he ran his hand over the body.
“Nothin’ doing,” he reported. “They’ve skinned him clean. Here, Mr. Caruth! The cops’ll be here in a minute. I wish you’d chase down and put ’em wise.”
Caruth obeyed as he would have obeyed any behest of the stronger will. The situation had dazed him. An immense relief mingled with an immense terror; relief that his worst fears had not been realized; terror lest something even worse had happened in its stead. Wilkins was dead; presumably the woman still lived. But whose hand had struck the blow?
A swish of silk sounded in his ears, and he looked up. She was there before him, peering downward with curious, frightened eyes.
“Mr. Caruth,” she called, in hushed tones. “Mr. Caruth! Has anything happened?”
“Yes!” Relief was in his voice. Her bearing was not that of a murderess.
“What is it?”
“I have no time to tell you. You must go. The police are coming, and you must not be seen. Hurry!”
The unsolved mystery of the girl’s visit had grown blacker than ever, but Caruth did not hesitate. He knew that it was his duty to detain her till the fire-escape had given up its secret, but not for a moment did he pause. He refused to think of what it all meant. He only knew that he was on her side, heart and soul, and would do her bidding till he died.
“Hurry,” he repeated. “There isn’t a moment to lose.”
But the girl held back. “The letter,” she pleaded. “I cannot go without it.”
“You must. I didn’t want to tell you, but—Wilkins has been murdered, and the police are coming. The letter is out of reach, for the moment anyhow. You must go at once. The police will be here in a moment.” He hurried her to the door and peered out. Bare and silent in the first break of dawn, the street stretched interminably away. No human being seemed to stir. But as he listened a far-away rumble grew on his ears.
“The patrol wagon!” he gasped. “This way! Quick! God help you!”
In an instant she was gone, hurrying swiftly down the street, with steps that did not falter. Caruth watched till he saw a man’s figure step from the shadows to join her, and the two vanish around a corner. Then, sick at heart, as only the young canbe when they find their heart’s idol clay, he turned back to greet the police. They were at his elbow—six of them—leaping from a wagon and hurrying forward. “What’s doing?” demanded the foremost.
“Murder! On the third-floor fire-escape. The watchman is there.”
The officer spun round. “On your way, boys!” he ordered. “Front and back!” He turned to Caruth. “Who did it?” he demanded.
If the young man hesitated, it was only for an instant. “I don’t know,” he answered. “It’s my valet. He robbed me and fled. I discovered it a moment later, and started after him. He had disappeared. The watchman found his body. His pockets were empty. Some confederate must have been waiting for him.”
The two men were alone in the hall. The other officers had all vanished, some through the rear entrance; some up the stairs. The crowd that was to come had not yet gathered, though the sound of running footsteps outside showed that its first units were coming, attracted by the clatter of the patrol.
The officer, used to scenes of excitement, and knowing the importance of ideas expressed before those in touch with tragedy had time consciously or unconsciously to mould their opinions, waited to ask one more question before he too hurried to the rear.
“Suspect anybody?” he demanded. “Seen anybody suspicious?”
Caruth looked him straight in the face. “No,” he lied. “No, I’ve seen nobody. As I said, the man robbed me, and I suppose some confederate killed him for his booty.”
When the officer had gone, Caruth turned and with leaden feet climbed the weary stairs that led to his room. He did not stop at the third floor, nor go again to inspect the lump of pallid flesh that alone remained of his servant. In fact, for the time he had altogether forgotten Wilkins. The murder had driven the murdered man from his mind.
He had answered the officer on the spur of the moment, thinking only to shield the girl, and not considering the possible—yes, the inevitable—consequences. The words once said, he would have given worlds to recall them, and yet he knew that he would only have reiterated them, if given the chance.
He would have no such chance, however. The true tale of the night’s events would have been preposterous enough at best. He could fancy how a hard-headed American jury would have listened to it, and how even a fourth-rate lawyer would have proved its impossibility. But, at all events, in telling it, he would have been telling the truth, and would have had the consciousness of rectitude to support him.
But his hasty answer had made the truth impossible, and he must go on piling lie upon lie in sickening iteration. Liars need good memories; wouldhis prove equal to the task? Would no one catch him tripping? His answer had made him a criminal in the eyes of the law—an accessory after the fact. The thought sickened him; and yet mingled with his dismay was a fierce joy that he was doing it for her sake—for the sake of the woman who had walked into his life a few moments before; a woman of whose status and probably of whose real name he was ignorant.
Why had he done it, he asked himself with dazed wonder. He owed her nothing. She had forced herself on him, had cajoled him, and had finally fled, leaving him to bear the brunt of her crime—hers or her accomplices. He had done all she asked, had aided her meekly, and at the end had placed himself in shameful jeopardy without even being asked to do so. Harshly he laughed as he thought of it.
Then he threw out his hands. “There’s no use in thinking,” he muttered. “I’m a fool—but it’s stronger than I am. I must go on to the end—and lie and lie and lie.”