At half-past three, Alan left the office. Sherrill had told him an hour earlier that Spearman had telephoned he would not be able to get back for a conference that afternoon; and Alan was certain now that in Spearman's absence Sherrill would do nothing further with respect to his affairs.
He halted on the ground floor of the office building and bought copies of each of the afternoon papers. A line completely across the pink page of one announced "Millionaire Ship Owner Missing!" The other three papers, printed at the same hour, did not display the story prominently; and even the one which did failed to make it the most conspicuous sensation. A line of larger and blacker type told of a change in the battle line on the west front and, where the margin might have been, was the bulletin of some sensation in a local divorce suit. Alan was some time in finding the small print which went with the millionaire ship owner heading; and when he found it, he discovered that most of the space was devoted to the description of Corvet's share in the development of shipping on the lakes and the peculiarity of his past life instead of any definite announcement concerning his fate.
The other papers printed almost identical items under small head-type at the bottom of their first pages; these items stated that Benjamin Corvet, the senior but inactive partner of the great shipping firm of Corvet, Sherrill, and Spearman, whose "disappearance" had been made the subject of sensational rumor, "is believed by his partner, Mr. Henry Spearman, to have simply gone away for a rest," and that no anxiety was felt concerning him. Alan found no mention of himself nor any of the circumstances connected with Corvet's disappearance of which Sherrill had told him.
Alan threw the papers away. There was a car line two blocks west, Sherrill had said, which would take him within a short distance of the house on Astor Street; but that neighborhood of fashion where the Sherrills—and now Alan himself—lived was less than a half hour's walk from the down-town district and, in the present turmoil of his thoughts, he wanted to be moving.
Spearman, he reflected as he walked north along the avenue, plainly had dictated the paragraphs he just had read in the papers. Sherrill, Alan knew, had desired to keep the circumstances regarding Corvet from becoming public; and without Sherrill's agreement concealment would have been impossible, but it was Spearman who had checked the suspicions of outsiders and determined what they must believe; and, by so doing, he had made it impossible for Alan to enroll aid from the newspapers or the police. Alan did not know whether he might have found it expedient to seek publicity; but now he had not a single proof of anything he could tell. For Sherrill, naturally, had retained the papers Corvet had left. Alan could not hope to obtain credence from Sherrill and, without Sherrill's aid, he could not obtain credence from any one else.
Was there, then, no one whom Alan could tell of his encounter with Spearman in Corvet's house, with probability of receiving belief? Alan had not been thinking directly of Constance Sherrill, as he walked swiftly north to the Drive; but she was, in a way, present in all his thoughts. She had shown interest in him, or at least in the position he was in, and sympathy; he had even begun to tell her about these things when he had spoken to her of some event in Corvet's house which had given him the name "Miwaka," and he had asked her if it was a ship. And there could be no possible consequent peril to her in telling her; the peril, if there was any, would be only to himself.
His step quickened. As he approached the Sherrill house, he saw standing at the curb an open roadster with a liveried chauffeur; he had seen that roadster, he recognized with a little start, in front of the office building that morning when Constance had taken him down-town. He turned into the walk and rang the bell.
The servant who opened the door knew him and seemed to accept his right of entry to the house, for he drew back for Alan to enter. Alan went into the hall and waited for the servant to follow. "Is Miss Sherrill in?" he asked.
"I'll see, sir." The man disappeared. Alan, waiting, did not hear Constance's voice in reply to the announcement of the servant, but Spearman's vigorous tones. The servant returned. "Miss Sherrill will see you in a minute, sir."
Through the wide doorway to the drawing-room, Alan could see the smaller, portièred entrance to the room beyond—Sherrill's study. The curtains parted, and Constance and Spearman came into this inner doorway; they stood an instant there in talk. As Constance started away, Spearman suddenly drew her back to him and kissed her. Alan's shoulders spontaneously jerked back, and his hands clenched; he did not look away and, as she approached, she became aware that he had seen.
She came to him, very quiet and very flushed; then she was quite pale as she asked him, "You wanted me?"
He was white as she, and could not speak at once. "You told me last night, Miss Sherrill," he said, "that the last thing that Mr. Corvet did—the last that you know of—was to warn you against one of your friends. Who was that?"
She flushed uneasily. "You mustn't attach any importance to that; I didn't mean you to. There was no reason for what Mr. Corvet said, except in Mr. Corvet's own mind. He had a quite unreasonable animosity—"
"Against Mr. Spearman, you mean."
She did not answer.
"His animosity was against Mr. Spearman, Miss Sherrill, wasn't it? That is the only animosity of Mr. Corvet's that any one has told me about."
"Yes."
"It was against Mr. Spearman that he warned you, then?"
"Yes."
"Thank you." He turned and, not waiting for the man, let himself out. He should have known it when he had seen that Spearman, after announcing himself as unable to get back to the office, was with Constance.
He went swiftly around the block to his own house and let himself in at the front door with his key. The house was warm; a shaded lamp on the table in the larger library was lighted, a fire was burning in the open grate, and the rooms had been swept and dusted. The Indian came into the hall to take his coat and hat.
"Dinner is at seven," Wassaquam announced. "You want some change about that?"
"No; seven is all right."
Alan went up-stairs to the room next to Corvet's which he had appropriated for his own use the night before, and found it now prepared for his occupancy. His suitcase, unpacked, had been put away in the closet; the clothing it had contained had been put in the dresser drawers, and the toilet articles arranged upon the top of the dresser and in the cabinet of the little connecting bath. So, clearly, Wassaquam had accepted him as an occupant of the house, though upon what status Alan could not guess. He had spoken of Wassaquam to Constance as his servant; but Wassaquam was not that; he was Corvet's servant—faithful and devoted to Corvet, Constance had said—and Alan could not think of Wassaquam as the sort of servant that "went with the house." The Indian's manner toward himself had been noncommittal, even stolid.
When Alan came down again to the first floor, Wassaquam was nowhere about, but he heard sounds in the service rooms on the basement floor. He went part way down the service stairs and saw the Indian in the kitchen, preparing dinner. Wassaquam had not heard his approach, and Alan stood an instant watching the Indian's tall, thin figure and the quick movements of his disproportionately small, well-shaped hands, almost like a woman's; then he scuffed his foot upon the stair, and Wassaquam turned swiftly about.
"Anybody been here to-day, Judah?" Alan asked.
"No, Alan. I called tradesmen; they came. There were young men from the newspapers."
"They came here, did they? Then why did you say no one came?"
"I did not let them in."
"What did you tell them?"
"Nothing."
"Why not?"
"Henry telephoned I was to tell them nothing."
"You mean Henry Spearman?"
"Yes."
"Do you take orders from him, Judah?"
"I took that order, Alan."
Alan hesitated. "You've been here in the house all day?"
"Yes, Alan."
Alan went back to the first floor and into the smaller library. The room was dark with the early winter dusk, and he switched on the light; then he knelt and pulled out one of the drawers he had seen Spearman searching through the night before, and carefully examined the papers in it one by one, but found them only ordinary papers. He pulled the drawer completely out and sounded the wall behind it and the partitions on both sides but they appeared solid. He put the drawer back in and went on to examine the next one, and, after that, the others. The clocks in the house had been wound, for presently the clock in the library struck six, and another in the hall chimed slowly. An hour later, when the clocks chimed again, Alan looked up and saw Wassaquam's small black eyes, deep set in their large eye sockets, fixed on him intently through the door. How long the Indian had been there, Alan could not guess; he had not heard his step.
"What are you looking for, Alan?" the Indian asked.
Alan reflected a moment. "Mr. Sherrill thought that Mr. Corvet might have left a record of some sort here for me, Judah. Do you know of anything like that?"
"No. That is what you are looking for?"
"Yes. Do you know of any place where Mr. Corvet would have been likely to put away anything like that?"
"Ben put papers in all these drawers; he put them up-stairs, too—where you have seen."
"Nowhere else, Judah?"
"If he put things anywhere else, Alan, I have not seen. Dinner is served, Alan."
Alan went to the lavatory on the first floor and washed the dust from his hands and face; then he went into the dining-room. A place had been set at the dining table around the corner from the place where, as the worn rug showed, the lonely occupant of the house had been accustomed to sit. Benjamin Corvet's armchair, with its worn leather back, had been left against the wall; so had another unworn armchair which Alan understood must have been Mrs. Corvet's; and an armless chair had been set for Alan between their places. Wassaquam, having served the dinner, took his place behind Alan's chair, ready to pass him what he needed; but the Indian's silent, watchful presence there behind him where he could not see his face, disturbed Alan, and he twisted himself about to look at him.
"Would you mind, Judah," he inquired, "if I asked you to stand over there instead of where you are?"
The Indian, without answering, moved around to the other side of the table, where he stood facing Alan.
"You're a Chippewa, aren't you, Judah?" Alan asked.
"Yes."
"Your people live at the other end of the lake, don't they?"
"Yes, Alan."
"Have you ever heard of the Indian Drum they talk about up there, that they say sounds when a ship goes down on the lake?"
The Indian's eyes sparkled excitedly. "Yes," he said.
"Do you believe in it?"
"Not just believe; I know. That is old Indian country up there, Alan—L'arbre Croche—Cross Village—Middle Village. A big town of Ottawas was there in old days; Pottawatomies too, and Chippewas. Indians now are all Christians, Catholics, and Methodists who hold camp meetings and speak beautifully. But some things of the old days are left. The Drum is like that. Everybody knows that it sounds for those who die on the lake."
"How do they know, Judah? How do you yourself know?"
"I have heard it. It sounded for my father."
"How was that?"
"Like this. My father sold some bullocks to a man on Beaver Island. The man kept store on Beaver Island, Alan. No Indian liked him. He would not hand anything to an Indian or wrap anything in paper for an Indian. Say it was like this: An Indian comes in to buy salt pork. First the man would get the money. Then, Alan, he would take his hook and pull the pork up out of the barrel and throw it on the dirty floor for the Indian to pick up. He said Indians must take their food off of the floor—like dogs.
"My father had to take the bullocks to the man, across to Beaver Island. He had a Mackinaw boat, very little, with a sail made brown by boiling it with tan bark, so that it would not wear out. At first the Indians did not know who the bullocks were for, so they helped him. He tied the legs of the bullocks, the front legs and the back legs, then all four legs together, and the Indians helped him put them in the boat. When they found out the bullocks were for the man on Beaver Island, the Indians would not help him any longer. He had to take them across alone. Besides, it was bad weather, the beginning of a storm.
"He went away, and my mother went to pick berries—I was small then. Pretty soon I saw my mother coming back. She had no berries, and her hair was hanging down, and she was wailing. She took me in her arms and said my father was dead. Other Indians came around and asked her how she knew, and she said she had heard the Drum. The Indians went out to listen."
"Did you go?"
"Yes; I went."
"How old were you, Judah?"
"Five years."
"That was the time you heard it?"
"Yes; it would beat once, then there would be silence; then it would beat again. It frightened us to hear it. The Indians would scream and beat their bodies with their hands when the sound came. We listened until night; there was a storm all the time growing greater in the dark, but no rain. The Drum would beat once; then nothing; then it would beat again once—never two or more times. So we knew it was for my father. It is supposed the feet of the bullocks came untied, and the bullocks tipped the boat over. They found near the island the body of one of the bullocks floating in the water, and its feet were untied. My father's body was on the beach near there."
"Did you ever hear of a ship called theMiwaka, Judah?"
"That was long ago," the Indian answered.
"They say that the Drum beat wrong when theMiwakawent down—that it was one beat short of the right number."
"That was long ago," Wassaquam merely repeated.
"Did Mr. Corvet ever speak to you about theMiwaka?"
"No; he asked me once if I had ever heard the Drum. I told him."
Wassaquam removed the dinner and brought Alan a dessert. He returned to stand in the place across the table that Alan had assigned to him, and stood looking down at Alan, steadily and thoughtfully.
"Do I look like any one you ever saw before, Judah?" Alan inquired of him.
"No."
"Is that what you were thinking?"
"That is what I was thinking. Will coffee be served in the library, Alan?"
Alan crossed to the library and seated himself in the chair where his father had been accustomed to sit. Wassaquam brought him the single small cup of coffee, lit the spirit lamp on the smoking stand, and moved that over; then he went away. When he had finished his coffee, Alan went into the smaller connecting room and recommenced his examination of the drawers under the bookshelves. He could hear the Indian moving about his tasks, and twice Wassaquam came to the door of the room and looked in on him; but he did not offer to say anything, and Alan did not speak to him. At ten o'clock, Alan stopped his search and went back to the chair in the library. He dozed; for he awoke with a start and a feeling that some one had been bending over him, and gazed up into Wassaquam's face. The Indian had been scrutinizing him with intent, anxious inquiry. He moved away, but Alan called him back.
"When Mr. Corvet disappeared, Judah, you went to look for him up at Manistique, where he was born—at least Mr. Sherrill said that was where you went. Why did you think you might find him there?" Alan asked.
"In the end, I think, a man maybe goes back to the place where he began. That's all, Alan."
"In the end! What do you mean by that? What do you think has become of Mr. Corvet?"
"I think now—Ben's dead."
"What makes you think that?"
"Nothing makes me think; I think it myself."
"I see. You mean you have no reason more than others for thinking it; but that is what you believe."
"Yes." Wassaquam went away, and Alan heard him on the back stairs, ascending to his room.
When Alan went up to his own room, after making the rounds to see that the house was locked, a droning chant came to him from the third floor. He paused in the hall and listened, then went on up to the floor above. A flickering light came to him through the half-open door of a room at the front of the house; he went a little way toward it and looked in. Two thick candles were burning before a crucifix, below which the Indian knelt, prayer book in hand and rocking to and fro as he droned his supplications.
A word or two came to Alan, but without them Wassaquam's occupation was plain; he was praying for the repose of the dead—the Catholic chant taught to him, as it had been taught undoubtedly to his fathers, by the French Jesuits of the lakes. The intoned chant for Corvet's soul, by the man who had heard the Drum, followed and still came to Alan, as he returned to the second floor.
He had not been able to determine, during the evening, Wassaquam's attitude toward him. Having no one else to trust, Alan had been obliged to put a certain amount of trust in the Indian; so as he had explained to Wassaquam that morning that the desk and the drawers in the little room off Corvet's had been forced, and had warned him to see that no one, who had not proper business there, entered the house. Wassaquam had appeared to accept this order; but now Wassaquam had implied that it was not because of Alan's order that he had refused reporters admission to the house. The developments of the day had tremendously altered things in one respect; for Alan, the night before, had not thought of the intruder into the house as one who could claim an ordinary right of entrance there; but now he knew him to be the one who—except for Sherrill—might most naturally come to the house; one, too, for whom Wassaquam appeared to grant a certain right of direction of affairs there. So, at this thought, Alan moved angrily; the house was his—Alan's. He had noted particularly, when Sherrill had showed him the list of properties whose transfer to him Corvet had left at Sherrill's discretion, that the house was not among them; and he had understood that this was because Corvet had left Sherrill no discretion as to the house. Corvet's direct, unconditional gift of the house by deed to Alan had been one of Sherrill's reasons for believing that if Corvet had left anything which could explain his disappearance, it would be found in the house.
Unless Spearman had visited the house during the day and had obtained what he had been searching for the night before—and Alan believed he had not done that—it was still in the house. Alan's hands clenched; he would not give Spearman such a chance as that again; and he himself would continue his search of the house—exhaustively, room by room, article of furniture by article of furniture.
Alan started and went quickly to the open door of his room, as he heard voices now somewhere within the house. One of the voices he recognized as Wassaquam's; the other indistinct, thick, accusing—was unknown to him; it certainly was not Spearman's. He had not heard Wassaquam go down-stairs, and he had not heard the doorbell, so he ran first to the third floor; but the room where he had seen Wassaquam was empty. He descended again swiftly to the first floor, and found Wassaquam standing in the front hall, alone.
"Who was here, Judah?" Alan demanded.
"A man," the Indian answered stolidly. "He was drunk; I put him out."
"What did he come for?"
"He came to see Ben. I put him out; he is gone, Alan."
Alan flung open the front door and looked out, but he saw no one.
"What did he want of Mr. Corvet, Judah?"
"I do not know. I told him Ben was not here; he was angry, but he went away."
"Has he ever come here before?"
"Yes; he comes twice."
"He has been here twice?"
"More than that; every year he comes twice, Alan. Once he came oftener."
"How long has he been doing that?"
"Since I can remember."
"Is he a friend of Mr. Corvet?"
"No friend—no!"
"But Mr. Corvet saw him when he came here?"
"Always, Alan."
"And you don't know at all what he came about?"
"How should I know? No; I do not."
Alan got his coat and hat. The sudden disappearance of the man might mean only that he had hurried away, but it might mean too that he was still lurking near the house. Alan had decided to make the circuit of the house and determine that. But as he came out on to the porch, a figure more than a block away to the south strode with uncertain step out into the light of a street lamp, halted and faced about, and shook his fist back at the house. Alan dragged the Indian out on to the porch.
"Is that the man, Judah?" he demanded.
"Yes, Alan."
Alan ran down the steps and at full speed after the man. The other had turned west at the corner where Alan had seen him; but even though Alan slipped as he tried to run upon the snowy walks, he must be gaining fast upon him. He saw him again, when he had reached the corner where the man had turned, traveling westward with that quick uncertain step toward Clark Street; at that corner the man turned south. But when Alan reached the corner, he was nowhere in sight. To the south, Clark Street reached away, garish with electric signs and with a half dozen saloons to every block. That the man was drunk made it probable he had turned into one of these places. Alan went into every one of them for fully a half mile and looked about, but he found no one even resembling the man he had been following. He retraced his steps for several blocks, still looking; then he gave it up and returned eastward toward the Drive.
The side street leading to the Drive was less well lighted; dark entry ways and alleys opened on it; but the night was clear. The stars, with the shining sword of Orion almost overhead, gleamed with midwinter brightness, and to the west the crescent of the moon was hanging and throwing faint shadows over the snow. Alan could see at the end of the street, beyond the yellow glow of the distant boulevard lights, the smooth, chill surface of the lake. A white light rode above it; now, below the white light, he saw a red speck—the masthead and port lanterns of a steamer northward bound. Farther out a second white glow appeared from behind the obscuration of the buildings and below it a green speck—a starboard light. The information he had gained that day enabled him to recognize in these lights two steamers passing one another at the harbor mouth.
"Red to red," Alan murmured to himself. "Green to green—Red to red, perfect safety, go ahead!" he repeated.
It brought him, with marvelous vividness, back to Constance Sherrill. Events since he had talked with her that morning had put them far apart once more; but, in another way, they were being drawn closer together. For he knew now that she was caught as well as he in the mesh of consequences of acts not their own. Benjamin Corvet, in the anguish of the last hours before fear of those consequences had driven him away, had given her a warning against Spearman so wild that it defeated itself; for Alan merely to repeat that warning, with no more than he yet knew, would be equally futile. But into the contest between Spearman and himself—that contest, he was beginning to feel, which must threaten destruction either to Spearman or to him—she had entered. Her happiness, her future, were at stake; her fate, he was certain now, depended upon discovery of those events tied tight in the mystery of Alan's own identity which Spearman knew, and the threat of which at moments appalled him. Alan winced as there came before him in the darkness of the street the vision of Constance in Spearman's arms and of the kiss that he had seen that afternoon.
He staggered, slipped, fell suddenly forward upon his knees under a stunning, crushing blow upon his head from behind. Thought, consciousness almost lost, he struggled, twisting himself about to grasp at his assailant. He caught the man's clothing, trying to drag himself up; fighting blindly, dazedly, unable to see or think, he shouted aloud and then again, aloud. He seemed in the distance to hear answering cries; but the weight and strength of the other was bearing him down again to his knees; he tried to slip aside from it, to rise. Then another blow, crushing and sickening, descended on his head; even hearing left him and, unconscious, he fell forward on to the snow and lay still.
"The name seems like Sherrill," the interne agreed. "He said it before when we had him on the table up-stairs; and he has said it now twice distinctly—Sherrill."
"His name, do you think?"
"I shouldn't say so; he seems trying to speak to some one named Sherrill."
The nurse waited a few minutes. "Yes; that's how it seems to me, sir. He said something that sounded like 'Connie' a while ago, and once he said 'Jim.' There are only four Sherrills in the telephone book, two of them in Evanston and one way out in Minoota."
"The other?"
"They're only about six blocks from where he was picked up; but they're on the Drive—the Lawrence Sherrills."
The interne whistled softly and looked more interestedly at his patient's features. He glanced at his watch, which showed the hour of the morning to be half-past four. "You'd better make a note of it," he said. "He's not a Chicagoan; his clothes were made somewhere in Kansas. He'll be conscious some time during the day; there's only a slight fracture, and— Perhaps you'd better call the Sherrill house, anyway. If he's not known there, no harm done; and if he's one of their friends and he should..."
The nurse nodded and moved off.
Thus it was that at a quarter to five Constance Sherrill was awakened by the knocking of one of the servants at her father's door. Her father went down-stairs to the telephone instrument where he might reply without disturbing Mrs. Sherrill. Constance, kimona over her shoulders, stood at the top of the stairs and waited. It became plain to her at once that whatever had happened had been to Alan Conrad.
"Yes.... Yes.... You are giving him every possible care? ... At once."
She ran part way down the stairs and met her father as he came up. He told her of the situation briefly.
"He was attacked on the street late last night; he was unconscious when they found him and took him to the hospital, and has been unconscious ever since. They say it was an ordinary street attack for robbery. I shall go at once, of course; but you can do nothing. He would not know you if you came; and of course he is in competent hands. No; no one can say yet how seriously he is injured."
She waited in the hall while her father dressed, after calling the garage on the house telephone for him and ordering the motor. When he had gone, she returned anxiously to her own rooms; he had promised to call her after reaching the hospital and as soon as he had learned the particulars of Alan's condition. It was ridiculous, of course, to attach any responsibility to her father or herself for what had happened to Alan—a street attack such as might have happened to any one—yet she felt that they were in part responsible. Alan Conrad had come to Chicago, not by their direction, but by Benjamin Corvet's; but Uncle Benny being gone, they had been the ones who met him, they had received him into their own house; but they had not thought to warn him of the dangers of the city and, afterward, they had let him go to live alone in the house in Astor Street with no better adviser than Wassaquam. Now, and perhaps because they had not warned him, he had met injury and, it might be, more than mere injury; he might be dying.
She walked anxiously up and down her room, clutching her kimona about her; it would be some time yet before she could hear from her father. She went to the telephone on the stand beside her bed and called Henry Spearman at his apartments. His servant answered; and, after an interval, Henry's voice came to her. She told him all that she knew of what had occurred.
"Do you want me to go over to the hospital?" he asked at once.
"No; father has gone. There is nothing any one can do. I'll call you again as soon as I hear from father."
He seemed to appreciate from her tone the anxiety she felt; for he set himself to soothe and encourage her. She listened, answered, and then hung up the receiver, anxious not to interfere with the expected call from her father. She moved about the room again, oppressed by the long wait, until the 'phone rang, and she sprang to it; it was her father calling from the hospital. Alan had had a few moments' consciousness, but Sherrill had not been allowed to see him; now, by the report of the nurse, Alan was sleeping, and both nurse and internes assured Sherrill that, this being the case, there was no reason for anxiety concerning him; but Sherrill would wait at the hospital a little longer to make sure. Constance's breath caught as she answered him, and her eyes filled with tears of relief. She called Henry again, and he evidently had been waiting, for he answered at once; he listened without comment to her repetition of her father's report.
"All right," he said, when she had finished. "I'm coming over, Connie."
"Now?"
"Yes; right away."
"You must give me time to dress!" His assumption of right to come to her at this early hour recalled to her forcibly the closer relation which Henry now assumed as existing between them; indeed, as more than existing, as progressing. And had not she admitted that relation by telephoning to him during her anxiety? She had not thought how that must appear to him; she had not thought about it at all; she had just done it.
She had been one of those who think of betrothal in terms of question and answer, of a moment when decision is formulated and spoken; she had supposed that, by withholding reply to Henry's question put even before Uncle Benny went away, she was thereby maintaining the same relation between Henry and herself. But now she was discovering that this was not so; she was realizing that Henry had not required formal answer to him because he considered that such answer had become superfluous; her yes, if she accepted him now, would not establish a new bond, it would merely acknowledge what was already understood. She had accepted that—had she not—when, in the rush of her feeling, she had thrust her hand into his the day before; she had accepted it, even more undeniably, when he had seized her and kissed her.
Not that she had sought or even consciously permitted, that; it had, indeed, surprised her. While they were alone together, and he was telling her things about himself, somewhat as he had at the table at Field's, Alan Conrad was announced, and she had risen to go. Henry had tried to detain her; then, as he looked down at her, hot impulse had seemed to conquer him; he caught her, irresistibly; amazed, bewildered, she looked up at him, and he bent and kissed her. The power of his arms about her—she could feel them yet, sometimes—half frightened, half enthralled her. But his lips against her cheek—she had turned her lips away so that his pressed her cheek! She had been quite unable to know how she had felt then, because at that instant she had realized that she was seen. So she had disengaged herself as quickly as possible and, after Alan was gone, she had fled to her room without going back to Henry at all.
How could she have expected Henry to have interpreted that flight from him as disapproval when she had not meant it as that; when, indeed, she did not know herself what was stirring in her that instinct to go away alone? She had not by that disowned the new relation which he had accepted as established between them. And did she wish to disown it now? What had happened had come sooner and with less of her will active in it than she had expected; but she knew it was only what she had expected to come. The pride she had felt in being with him was, she realized, only anticipatory of the pride she would experience as his wife. When she considered the feeling of her family and her friends, she knew that, though some would go through the formal deploring that Henry had not better birth, all would be satisfied and more than satisfied; they would even boast about Henry a little, and entertain him in her honor, and show him off. There was no one—now that poor Uncle Benny was gone—who would seriously deplore it at all.
Constance had recognized no relic of uneasiness from Uncle Benny's last appeal to her; she understood that thoroughly. Or, at least, shehadunderstood that; now was there a change in the circumstances of that understanding, because of what had happened to Alan, that she found herself re-defining to herself her relation with Henry? No; it had nothing to do with Henry, of course; it referred only to Benjamin Corvet. Uncle Benny had "gone away" from his house on Astor Street, leaving his place there to his son, Alan Conrad. Something which had disturbed and excited Alan had happened to him on the first night he had passed in that house; and now, it appeared, he had been prevented from passing a second night there. What had prevented him had been an attempted robbery upon the street, her father had said. But suppose it had been something else than robbery.
She could not formulate more definitely this thought, but it persisted; she could not deny it entirely and shake it off.
To Alan Conrad, in the late afternoon of that day, this same thought was coming far more definitely and far more persistently. He had been awake and sane since shortly after noonday. The pain of a head which ached throbbingly and of a body bruised and sore was beginning to give place to a feeling merely of lassitude—a languor which revisited incoherence upon him when he tried to think. He shifted himself upon his bed and called the nurse.
"How long am I likely to have to stay here?" he asked her.
"The doctors think not less than two weeks, Mr. Conrad."
He realized, as he again lay silent, that he must put out of his head now all expectation of ever finding in Corvet's house any such record as he had been looking for. If there had been a record, it unquestionably would be gone before he could get about again to seek it; and he could not guard against its being taken from the house; for, if he had been hopeless of receiving credence for any accusation he might make against Spearman while he was in health, how much more hopeless was it now, when everything he would say could be put to the credit of his injury and to his delirium! He could not even give orders for the safeguarding of the house and its contents—his own property—with assurance that they would be carried out.
The police and hospital attendants, he had learned, had no suspicion of anything but that he had been the victim of one of the footpads who, during that month, had been attacking and robbing nightly. Sherrill, who had visited him about two o'clock, had showed that he suspected no other possibility. Alan could not prove otherwise; he had not seen his assailant's face; it was most probable that if he had seen it, he would not have recognized it. But the man who had assailed him had meant to kill; he had not been any ordinary robber. That purpose, blindly recognized and fought against by Alan in their struggle, had been unmistakable. Only the chance presence of passers-by, who had heard Alan's shouts and responded to them, had prevented the execution of his purpose, and had driven the man to swift flight for his own safety.
Alan had believed, in his struggle with Spearman in Corvet's library, that Spearman might have killed rather than have been discovered there. Were there others to whom Alan's presence had become a threat so serious that they would proceed even to the length of calculated murder? He could not know that. The only safe plan was to assume that persons, in number unknown, had definite, vital interest in his "removal" by violence or otherwise, and that, among them, he must reckon Henry Spearman; and he must fight them alone. For Sherrill's liking for him, even Constance Sherrill's interest and sympathy were nullified in practical intent by their admiration for and their complete confidence in Spearman. It did not matter that Alan might believe that, in fighting Spearman, he was fighting not only for himself but for her; he knew now certainly that he must count her as Spearman's; her! Things swam before him again dizzily as he thought of her; and he sank back and closed his eyes.
A little before six Constance Sherrill and Spearman called to inquire after him and were admitted for a few moments to his room. She came to him, bent over him, while she spoke the few words of sympathy the nurse allowed to her; she stood back then while Spearman spoke to him. In the succeeding days, he saw her nearly every day, accompanied always by her father or Spearman; it was the full two weeks the nurse had allotted for his remaining in the hospital before he saw her alone.
They had brought him home, the day before—she and her father, in the motor—to the house on Astor Street. He had insisted on returning there, refusing the room in their house which they had offered; but the doctor had enjoined outdoors and moderate exercise for him, and she had made him promise to come and walk with her. He went to the Sherrill house about ten o'clock, and they walked northward toward the park.
It was a mild, sunny morning with warm wind from the south, which sucked up the last patches of snow from the lawns and dried the tiny trickles of water across the walks. Looking to the land, one might say that spring soon would be on the way; but, looking to the lake, midwinter held. The counterscrap of concrete, beyond the withered sod that edged the Drive, was sheathed in ice; the frozen spray-hummocks beyond steamed in the sun; and out as far as one could see, floes floated close together, exposing only here and there a bit of blue. Wind, cold and chilling, wafted off this ice field, taking the warm south breeze upon its flanks.
Glancing up at her companion from time to time, Constance saw the color coming to his face, and he strode beside her quite steadily. Whatever was his inheritance, his certainly were stamina and vitality; a little less—or a little dissipation of them—and he might not have recovered at all, much less have leaped back to strength as he had done. For since yesterday, the languor which had held him was gone.
They halted a minute near the south entrance of the park at the St. Gaudens' "Lincoln," which he had not previously seen. The gaunt, sad figure of the "rail-splitter" in his ill-fitting clothes, seemed to recall something to him; for he glanced swiftly at her as they turned away.
"Miss Sherrill," he asked, "have you ever stayed out in the country?"
"I go to northern Michigan, up by the straits, almost every summer for part of the time, at least; and once in a while we open the house in winter too for a week or so. It's quite wild—trees and sand and shore and the water. I've had some of my best times up there."
"You've never been out on the plains?"
"Just to pass over them on the train on the way to the coast."
"That would be in winter or in spring; I was thinking about the plains in late summer, when we—Jim and Betty, the children of the people I was with in Kansas—"
"I remember them."
"When we used to play at being pioneers in our sunflower shacks."
"Sunflower shacks?" she questioned.
"I was dreaming we were building them again when I was delirious just after I was hurt, it seems. I thought that I was back in Kansas and was little again. The prairie was all brown as it is in late summer, brown billows of dried grass which let you see the chips of limestone and flint scattered on the ground beneath; and in the hollows there were acres and acres of sunflowers, three times as tall as either Jim or I, and with stalks as thick as a man's wrist, where Jim and Betty and I ... and you, Miss Sherrill, were playing."
"I?"
"We cut paths through the sunflowers with a corn knife," Alan continued, not looking at her, "and built houses in them by twining the cut stalks in and out among those still standing. I'd wondered, you see, what you must have been like when you were a little girl, so, I suppose, when I was delirious, I saw you that way."
She had looked up at him a little apprehensively, afraid that he was going to say something more; but his look reassured her.
"Then that," she hazarded, "must have been how the hospital people learned our name. I'd wondered about that; they said you were unconscious first, and then delirious and when you spoke you said, among other names, mine—Connie and Sherrill."
He colored and glanced away. "I thought they might have told you that, so I wanted you to know. They say that in a dream, or in delirium, after your brain establishes the first absurdity—like your playing out among the sunflowers with me when we were little—everything else is consistent. I wouldn't call a little girl 'Miss Sherrill,' of course. Ever since I've known you, I couldn't help thinking a great deal about you; you're not like any one else I've ever known. But I didn't want you to think I thought of you—familiarly."
"I speak of you always as Alan to father," she said.
He was silent for a moment. "They lasted hardly for a day—those sunflower houses, Miss Sherrill," he said quietly. "They withered almost as soon as they were made. Castles in Kansas, one might say! No one could live in them."
Apprehensive again, she colored. He had recalled to her, without meaning to do so, she thought, that he had seen her in Spearman's arms; she was quite sure that recollection of this was in his mind. But in spite of this—or rather, exactly because of it—she understood that he had formed his own impression of the relation between Henry and herself and that, consequently, he was not likely to say anything more like this.
They had walked east, across the damp, dead turf to where the Drive leaves the shore and is built out into the lake; as they crossed to it on the smooth ice of the lagoon between, he took her arm to steady her.
"There is something I have been wanting to ask you," she said.
"Yes."
"That night when you were hurt—it was for robbery, they said. What do you think about it?" She watched him as he looked at her and then away; but his face was completely expressionless.
"The proceedings were a little too rapid for me to judge, Miss Sherrill."
"But there was no demand upon you to give over your money before you were attacked?"
"No."
She breathed a little more quickly. "It must be a strange sensation," she observed, "to know that some one has tried to kill you."
"It must, indeed."
"You mean you don't think that he tried to kill you?"
"The police captain thinks not; he says it was the work of a man new to the blackjack, and he hit harder and oftener than he needed. He says that sort are the dangerous ones—that one's quite safe in the hands of an experienced slugger, as you would be with the skilful man in any line. I never thought of it that way before. He almost made it into an argument for leaving the trained artists loose on the streets, for the safety of the public, instead of turning the business over to boys only half educated."
"What do you think about the man yourself?" Constance persisted.
"The apprentice who practiced on me?"
She waited, watching his eyes. "I was hardly in a condition, Miss Sherrill, to appreciate anything about the man at all. Why do you ask?"
"Because—" She hesitated an instant, "if you were attacked to be killed, it meant that you must have been attacked as the son of—Mr. Corvet. Then that meant—at least it implied, that Mr. Corvet was killed, that he did not go away. You see that, of course."
"Were you the only one who thought that? Or did some one speak to you about it?"
"No one did; I spoke to father. He thought—"
"Yes."
"Well, if Mr. Corvet was murdered—I'm following what father thought, you understand—it involved something a good deal worse perhaps than anything that could have been involved if he had only gone away. The facts we had made it certain that—if what had happened to him was death at the hands of another—he must have foreseen that death and, seeking no protection for himself ... it implied, that he preferred to die rather than to ask protection—that there was something whose concealment he thought mattered even more to him than life. It—it might have meant that he considered his life was ... due to whomever took it." Her voice, which had become very low, now ceased. She was speaking to Alan of his father—a father whom he had never known, and whom he could not have recognized by sight until she showed him the picture a few weeks before; but she was speaking of his father.
"Mr. Sherrill didn't feel that it was necessary for him to do anything, even though he thought that?"
"If Mr. Corvet was dead, we could do him no good, surely, by telling this to the police; if the police succeeded in finding out all the facts, we would be doing only what Uncle Benny did not wish—what he preferred death to. We could not tell the police about it without telling them all about Mr. Corvet too. So father would not let himself believe that you had been attacked to be killed. He had to believe the police theory was sufficient."
Alan made no comment at once. "Wassaquam believes Mr. Corvet is dead," he said finally. "He told me so. Does your father believe that?"
"I think he is beginning to believe it."
They had reached the little bridge that breaks the Drive and spans the channel through which the motor boats reach harbor in the lagoon; he rested his arms upon the rail of the bridge and looked down into the channel, now frozen. He seemed to her to consider and to decide upon something.
"I've not told any one," he said, now watching her, "how I happened to be out of the house that night. I followed a man who came there to the house. Wassaquam did not know his name. He did not know Mr. Corvet was gone; for he came there to see Mr. Corvet. He was not an ordinary friend of Mr. Corvet's; but he had come there often; Wassaquam did not know why. Wassaquam had sent the man away, and I ran out after him; but I could not find him."
He stopped an instant, studying her. "That was not the first man who came to the house," he went on quickly, as she was about to speak. "I found a man in Mr. Corvet's house the first night that I spent there. Wassaquam was away, you remember, and I was alone in the house."
"A man there in the house?" she repeated.
"He wasn't there when I entered the house—at least I don't think he was. I heard him below, after I had gone up-stairs. I came down then and saw him. He was going through Mr. Corvet's things—not the silver and all that, but through his desks and files and cases. He was looking for something—something which he seemed to want very much; when I interfered, it greatly excited him."
They had turned back from the bridge and were returning along the way that they had come; but now she stopped and looked up at him.
"What happened when you 'interfered'?"
"A queer thing."
"What?"
"I frightened him."
"Frightened him?" She had appreciated in his tone more significance than the casual meaning of the words.
"He thought I was a ghost."
"A ghost. Whose ghost?"
He shrugged. "I don't know; some one whom he seemed to have known pretty well—and whom Mr. Corvet knew, he thought."
"Why didn't you tell us this before?"
"At least—I am telling you now, Miss Sherrill. I frightened him, and he got away. But I had seen him plainly. I can describe him.... You've talked with your father of the possibility that something might 'happen' to me such as, perhaps, happened to Mr. Corvet. If anything does happen to me, a description of the man may ... prove useful."
He saw the color leave her face, and her eyes brighten; he accepted this for agreement on her part. Then clearly and definitely as he could, he described Spearman to her. She did not recognize the description; he had known she would not. Had not Spearman been in Duluth? Beyond that, was not connection of Spearman with the prowler in Corvet's house the one connection of all most difficult for her to make? But he saw her fixing and recording the description in her mind.
They were silent as they went on toward her home. He had said all he could, or dared to say; to tell her that the man had been Spearman would not merely have awakened her incredulity; it would have destroyed credence utterly. A definite change in their relation to one another had taken place during their walk. The fullness, the frankness of the sympathy there had been between them almost from their first meeting, had gone; she was quite aware, he saw, that he had not frankly answered her questions; she was aware that in some way he had drawn back from her and shut her out from his thoughts about his own position here. But he had known that this must be so; it had been his first definite realization after his return to consciousness in the hospital when, knowing now her relation to Spearman, he had found all questions which concerned his relations with the people here made immeasurably more acute by the attack upon him.
She asked him to come in and stay for luncheon, as they reached her home, but she asked it without urging; at his refusal she moved slowly up the steps; but she halted when she saw that he did not go on.
"Miss Sherrill," he said, looking up at her, "how much money is there in your house?"
She smiled, amused and a little perplexed; then sobered as she saw his intentness on her answer.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"I mean—how much is ordinarily kept there?"
"Why, very little in actual cash. We pay everything by check—tradesmen and servants; and even if we happen not to have a charge account where we make a purchase, they know who we are and are always willing to charge it to us."
"Thank you. It would be rather unusual then for you—or your neighbors—to have currency at hand exceeding the hundreds?"
"Exceeding the hundreds? That means in the thousands—or at least one thousand; yes, for us, it would be quite unusual."
She waited for him to explain why he had asked; it was not, she felt sure, for any reason which could readily suggest itself to her. But he only thanked her again and lifted his hat and moved away. Looking after him from the window after she had entered the house, she saw him turn the corner in the direction of Astor Street.