It was Sunday afternoon, and Marcreta was expecting a caller. "How long do you think he'll stay?" Clinton demanded as they rose from their two o'clock dinner.
"As long as I'll let him, I suppose."
"Well, call a time-limit, Crete." And then recalled suddenly to the realization that he must begin making the best of a situation that gave every evidence of forcing itself upon him for life, he added hastily, "What's the use of trying that new cure if you're going to pull against it all the time?"
"Do you call this 'pulling against it'?"
"I do, decidedly. Every time that man comes here you're strung about an octave higher than normal."
She looked at him, astonished. "Why, Clinton, I don't feel it myself. I'm not conscious that he affects me that way."
"He does, though. We all know people who affect us that way. And it is not a question of attraction or aversion. Liking or disliking them doesn't alter the fact that they have the power to screw us up. Sometimes, of course, it's a beneficial stimulant, but you shouldn't be taking anything like that just now. Give Dr. Reynolds a chance."
"I will give him a chance. But to-day——Well, I promised Mr. Glover that I'd listen to something that he has written."
"Help! Then he'll probably be here to supper. I didn't know he'd broken into the writing game."
"I didn't either until the other day. But I think it is some advertising for the new springs. He is very versatile. He does a number of things and does them well."
Her brother glanced at her sharply without replying. That note of championship in her voice put an edge on his nerves.
But she was mistaken in her guess concerning advertising matter for the American Carlsbad. For when she and Richard Glover were alone in the living-room he produced a copy of one of the popular magazines. "You remember you said I might read you something to-day?" he began, drawing his chair into a better light.
"Yes. I have been looking forward to it with pleasure. But I thought it would be in manuscript. It is something you have had published?"
"My first attempt at anything in this line. It's a serial story and this is the initial instalment. You see, I had a good deal of leisure time on my hands when I was down at Mont-Mer and I've always wanted to try my luck with a pen. I call this 'A Brother of Bluebeard.'"
"That's a gruesome title, but excellently chosen if it's a mystery-story. I'm shivering already."
He settled himself with his back to the light and his profile toward her. "I may as well tell you at first that I am not bringing this out under my own name."
"Why not?"
"Because I wouldn't have felt quite free about writing it if I were standing out in the open."
"Oh, it's a true story?"
"No, I can hardly claim that for it. It's rather a fantastic plot as you will see. But every writer knows this, that when you first break into print whatever you write is supposed to be transcribed almost verbatim from actual experience, preferably your own experience. No matter how at variance with your own life-plot the story may be, the people who know you will leap to the conclusion that it is rooted in autobiography. Imagination is the very last thing that our friends are willing to allow us."
"What nom-de-plume do you use?"
"Ralph Regan. It's short and snappy and sounds as if it might be genuine, don't you think?"
He found the place and began to read in a resonant, well-modulated voice. The opening paragraph was a little stilted, a bit amateurish, but after that the story swung into bold and breathless action. It gripped its hearer with a compelling force that held her tense and motionless in her chair. Only the sound of the reader's voice and the crisp crackle of paper when he turned a page broke the quiet of the room. Outside, a gray January mist engulfed the city, and electric bulbs from the houses across the street cut bleary patches in the mantle of fog. For almost an hour Richard Glover read in his clear, unhurried voice, and Marcreta listened, her wide eyes fastened upon his face.
When he had finished, with the irritating promise, "To Be Continued," he laid the periodical face-down upon the library-table and turned toward her. In his amber eyes was a new light. A railroad switchman who faces the company's president after saving a train from destruction might wear just that expression.
Marcreta seemed bereft of speech. She was staring at one of the lights in the house across the street as though it had hypnotized her. One of the delicate white hands was clasped tight upon the arm of her chair. Richard Glover told himself that he had never seen her look so beautiful. And for the first time since he had known her, there was not a suggestion of invalidism in her tall, regal figure. She was wearing a filmy gray dress with a touch of pink that seemed to give a heightened flush to her cheeks. He allowed several seconds to pass. Was it possible, he was wondering, that this "first story" had won that tribute most coveted by all authors—the tribute of breathless silence?
"Well?" he ventured at last. "What do you think of it?"
She brought her eyes back to the room, to the magazine lying face-down upon the table, but not to him. "I think," she said with a long sigh, "that you are a wonderfully clever man."
The light flickered out of his eyes. He leaned toward her with a pleading gesture. "Is that all you are going to say to me?"
"Isn't that enough? Wouldn't you rather have me say that than anything else?"
"You know I wouldn't. You know that there are many other things that I would far rather have you say." He came over and stood beside her chair. "Marcreta," he begged, "say just one of them. Say this—that you are glad to have me come here. I wrote that story for you; because I know that you value creative power more than anything else in the world. Are you glad that I did it? Are you glad that I brought it to you?"
She was looking at him now, all her ardent soul in her eyes. "Iamglad," she breathed. "I can't tell you how glad."
"Then I think you ought to give me some reward. I ought to have at least——"
She put out her hand with the imperious little gesture that he had come to know well. "Not just now. Please, not just now. You see, you have rather—swept me off my feet. Isn't that enough for one day?"
"It is enough," he assured her exultantly. And when, a few moments later, he climbed into the roadster that was waiting at the curb, he was repeating the three words over and over to himself like a hilarious refrain.
Just at dusk Clinton came home and found his sister still sitting in front of the gas logs where Richard Glover had left her. His step startled her out of a reverie. "Oh, it's you, Clint! I'm so glad you've come. The house has been full of ghosts."
"I suppose so. Glover come?"
"Yes. He has come and gone."
He reached down swiftly and felt one of her hands. It was icy. "Something has happened, Crete." The words were not a question, but they demanded a reply. And she gave it without hesitation.
"Yes, something has happened. I've got to take some action about it too, but I haven't decided yet what it shall be."
He stood on the hearth-rug looking down at her with a curious mixture of annoyance and admiration in his eyes. It had always been so, he reflected. About the trivial things of life she was willing to abide by his judgment, but in every vital issue she took the initiative and pushed her own convictions through. In the moment of large emergency she had always stood superbly alone. As he looked at her a half-audible sigh escaped him. After all, this semblance of vitality was but the ephemeral stimulation of excitement. And he dreaded the bleak reaction from it; that sudden ebbing away of hope, known to all of those who have kept long vigils beside sick beds.
"Let me manage it, whatever it is," he commanded. "I've told you before that you're not strong enough for these emotional scenes. It isn't as if you were a well woman."
She lapsed into silence, and he felt a sharp twinge of self-reproach. It was that double-edged remorse that chivalrous strength always feels when it reminds frailty of its weakness.
"Whatever it is, Crete," he hurried on, "can't you defer the action until a more propitious time? Can't it wait until you are stronger?"
A little choking sound came from her. He stopped short in swift alarm. Never before in all the long years of her semi-invalidism had she let him see her give way to tears. He went to her, moving uncertainly as though through unfamiliar territory. She had covered her face with her hands as though she could shut out with them the sounds of passionate sobbing.
"I'll never be any stronger, Clint.Youknow it;Iknow it. Why do we drag on with this miserable pretense? Oh, it is killing me, but it takes so long. Why can't I die?"
He recoiled before that cry, before the havoc that it revealed to him. Inwardly he cursed himself and then he remembered Glover, as he might have remembered a gun which he had accidentally discharged, believing it to be unloaded. He couldn't endure the thought thathehad hurt her and, manlike, seized upon the first scapegoat that offered itself. But he carefully refrained from a mention of the late caller. And when he spoke his voice was harsh with feeling. "Crete, how selfish of you. If you should die, what would become of me?"
The promptness of her reply struck him like a blow. "You'd marry. You're over thirty, Clint, and if it hadn't been for me you would have been married years ago and would be living a normal life in a home of your own. You think——" She was sitting upright now, facing him with a terrible courage. "You think I don't realize what you have sacrificed. Oh, if you only knew how I've lain awake at night, staring into the dark, praying to die so that I could set you free. You promised mother. I've always known that you did. But even if you hadn't, you would have promised yourself. Andthat'swhat has 'keyed me up,' as you express it. That's what is making me live an octave higher than I can stand. It isn't—any other man who is doing it. It's you."
He sat down on the broad arm of her chair as though overcome by sudden weakness. "Well, thank God you have told me this, Crete, before it eats any deeper into your soul. Sacrifice you call it. But sacrifice involves renunciation, and I have never renounced any woman for your sake. I have never been engaged—nor wanted to be."
"But you ought to," she told him violently. "You ought to, and you would if you hadn't unconsciously put the idea away from you so many times. You ought to have a home and wife and children. Oh, I know that you should, and the knowledge has made me desperate."
A dawning suspicion showed in his eyes and then they grew hard. "It must have," he said coldly. "It must have made you very desperate indeed—if you have been considering Glover as a way out."
She met the charge without resentment. "What other way is there for me? You see, there wouldn't be any danger of my—caring more for somebody else afterward. That is quite beyond the range of possibility now, so it would be safer for me than for some women. And physical disability, the thing that made me—that would have made me refuse a man of a different type, wouldn't count at all with him. His ambitions are purely material, and I could capitalize them. That's all he wants. It would really be quite a fair bargain."
Clinton Morgan rose slowly and stood looking down at his sister as though she were a stranger to whom he had just been introduced. "Well, by Gad!" he breathed, and for a moment was bereft of further speech. And then his words came slowly, and more as the detached fragments of a soliloquy than a response to her own.
"Crete, of all women in the world! You, with your temperament! With an idealism that I and most other men couldn't touch with a ten-foot pole—and yet you'd work out a proposition like that! I didn't know that you saw through Glover. I made that excuse for you, that you were too unsophisticated to see through him. But sizing him up for an adventurer, you frame up a contract that——Why, I'll be hanged if I can believe it, Crete. I simply can't believe it."
She made no defense, and he went on in the same dazed tone.
"Go out on the street and pick up the first girl you meet and bring her in here. If I should make love to her and try to get her to marry me, and succeed, I'd have a much better chance of happiness than this adventure would ever give you. For, at least, I'd be swimming with both hands free. Now listen." He seemed to become suddenly aware of her presence again. "When I fall in love, I'll begin to think about getting married. But I'm not going to be hurried into it by you or anybody else. And when I decide to marry, not you nor anybody else shall stand in my way."
She reached for him with a convulsive gesture. "Clinton, do you mean that? Do you mean that nobody should?"
"I pledge you my word. But this has got to be a bargain. You have demonstrated that you know how to make one. Now don't you ever let that man cross this threshold again."
"I've got to, Clint. After what happened this afternoon, I've got to let him come—for a while."
"Why?"
"Sit down and let me tell you about it. I'll have to tell you, or it will eat up my heart. But the thing will seem incredible."
"Not to me. I think after what I've just heard that I can believe anything."
"Well, you remember that I told you he had promised to read me something that he had written?"
"Yes, advertising matter for the new Carlsbad."
"I thought it was going to be that but I was mistaken. Itwasadvertising matter, but not for Carlsbad."
"For what, then?"
"For Richard Glover."
Clinton grunted. "I see. He is trying to win you by doing theOthellostunt on paper."
Marcreta appeared to weigh the suggestion. "I don't think it is entirely that. He wants money very badly. He has to have money, a lot of it, for this hotel venture, and he is trying every means of getting it."
"I've always been led to believe," Clinton interposed, "my friends who write have always led me to believe that story-writing (and I assume that this was some sort of story) is rather an uncertain means of capitalization for a novice."
"But this story was not written by a novice, Clint." Marcreta's voice had sunk suddenly almost to a whisper. "It was written by——"
"By whom?"
"Roger Kenwick."
Clinton Morgan stiffened in his chair. "What?" he cried. "You mean to say that he had the nerve to steal the thing and bring it out under his own name?"
"He is too clever to bring it out under his own name. He chose a fictitious name, and he changed the opening paragraph. But except for that and the alteration of the title, I pledge you my word, Clint, that that story is exactly as Roger Kenwick read it to me, before he went into the service."
There was a moment of silence. Clinton was recalling what she had said when he came in about ghosts. He scanned her face uneasily. And he saw in it the new expression which had startled Richard Glover. For the first time in his life he began to think of her as she might be if she were unhampered by physical infirmity. And then he fell to wondering what had passed between her and Kenwick; just how far the tragedy of his life had affected her. The Morgan reserve had kept her completely silent upon this subject and he had never had any wish to intrude himself into her confidence. He picked up the thread of the story where she had dropped it. "How could it have happened? And how did he dare?"
"I can't even make a guess at how it happened, but so far as daring goes——Well, as I said, he is desperate for money. And the thing, as looked at from his point of view, was not so very risky. Why should it be? He must have discovered in some way that the—the author was not a possible source of trouble. And who else could care about it? Never in his wildest dreams would any one conjure up the possibility that I might know. He doesn't have the least idea, of course, that I ever knew the real author. What a nemesis! That he should have chosen me, of all the people in the world, for his audience! It's so impossible that he will never suspect it."
"But what happened after he had finished? What did you do?"
"Nothing, except to compliment him on his cleverness and try to hide every emotion that I've ever had. It was hard; I think it's the hardest test I've ever had to meet. But it has given me something that I never have had before." Her voice grew husky with sudden embarrassment. "O Clint, you were right about him. I've known for quite a long time that you were right about him, but I couldn't admit it to myself; not with the course that I had decided to take. But, Clint, although I knew he was calculating and sordid and insincere, I didn't know this about him. I didn't think he hadn't a sense of honor. If I had suspected that, it would have made everything different. But you can see," she went on eagerly, "you can see now why I must let him go on coming here for a while? Why I can't let him get beyond my sight?"
Her brother nodded. "Give him enough rope and he'll hang himself, that's the idea, isn't it?"
"I've got to be very careful, you see. He has told me a good many things about himself of late, and I'm trying to fit them all together. Some of them don't match at all. And now that he has revealed himself, I'm beginning to doubt everything. That Mont-Mer secretaryship, for instance, looks very improbable to me now. I've questioned him about several prominent people down there, and he doesn't seem to have heard of any of them."
"Well, don't worry any more about it just now, Crete. Let's hustle something to eat and call it a day."
When his sister had gone to bed that night Clinton sat for a long time in the library, staring into the fireplace. The little scene which had been enacted there a few hours earlier had stirred him to the depths of his being. It brought him perplexity and a poignant self-reproach. The fact that she was not the crying type of woman made her emotional abandon a particularly haunting thing.
"I've been an awful ass," he muttered. "I can't see just now where it is exactly that I failed. But it's evident that somewhere along the line I've acted like one of the early Christian martyrs."
He picked up a little volume that was lying at his elbow. It was a dainty thing bound in gold and ivory. He remembered that Roger Kenwick had given it to his sister on that last night when he had come to bid her good-by. He had never looked into it before. Now he turned the pages idly. It was modern verse, and he read intermittently here and there. Among the leaves he came at last upon a folded bit of paper. It was in Marcreta's handwriting; evidently something that she had copied. He tilted it under the light and read the trio of stanzas.
I cannot drive thee from my memory;I cannot live and tear thee from my heart.Is there no corner of oblivion's realmWhence thy uneasy spirit may depart?If love were dead, if love could only die,And leave me desolation and despair;The emptiness of day, the aching night,All these at last my soul could learn to bear.But ever when I think thy fire is spentAnd seek the peace of death's all-sacred pain,Behold, comes Memory with her torch a-light—And all my altar flames to life again.
I cannot drive thee from my memory;I cannot live and tear thee from my heart.Is there no corner of oblivion's realmWhence thy uneasy spirit may depart?
If love were dead, if love could only die,And leave me desolation and despair;The emptiness of day, the aching night,All these at last my soul could learn to bear.
But ever when I think thy fire is spentAnd seek the peace of death's all-sacred pain,Behold, comes Memory with her torch a-light—And all my altar flames to life again.
Clinton Morgan folded the bit of paper with reverent fingers. For he knew, all at once, that this was not a copy of anything, but that he had unwittingly torn aside the veil of his sister's secret soul. He felt all of the honorable man's repugnance against outraged decency. The scrap of paper seemed to scorch his fingers. With a punctilious regard for detail, which he knew to be absurd, he tried to find the exact page where it had been concealed. Then he put the volume back upon the table and went over to the window. His conjectures concerning this romance had come to an end. Now he knew, and knowing felt suddenly weighted with guilt.
He could imagine now how she must have felt as she had sat, a few hours before, listening to the paragraphs of Kenwick's masterpiece as they fell from the glib tongue of Richard Glover. There was an expression almost of awe upon his face. She could write all that, feel all that for one man, and then deliberately plan to marry another, to sethimfree! The thing seemed preposterous, and yet he knew it to be true.
And then his thoughts reverted to Kenwick, and the days that now seemed almost like the unreal days of a dream, when he had first known him over at the fraternity-house in Berkeley. He recalled the night when he had brought him home to dinner and introduced him to Marcreta and tried to make him show off for her like a trained puppy. Perhaps it would have been better if he had never brought him. But these things were in the hands of fate and fate has an infinite number of tools. Standing there at the window, gazing at the reflection of the gas logs mirrored against the black pane, he found himself growing suddenly resentful of the casual emergencies of life. Mere cobweb threads they were but upon them hung the destinies of human souls. You turned the first corner instead of the second in an hour of aimless wandering, and the circulation of your life current was completely changed. It was folly to believe that all the corners were posted with signs to be read and heeded by that secret autocrat, the subconscious mind. The intricacies of such a universe made the brain reel. It was better to believe that we played the game blind, and that the stakes were to the courageous.
He went back to the table and turned out the reading-lamp, blotting out the sight of the white and gold book.
"Lord! What a pity!" he murmured. "She would have been such an inspiration to him. It was the devil's own luck. Poor Kenwick! Poor little Crete!"
Madame Rosalie was setting her stage for a caller. It was evidently to be an important client, for cards, crystal, horoscope, ouija-board, and other handmaidens to divination were set forth upon the table in the dim back parlor. The priestess herself, in her garnet-colored robe, moved about the room with the noiselessness of a shadow. Although it was barely dusk she drew the shades and swung the electric bulb over the end of the table. Then she stood surveying her work with the critical scrutiny of an artist experimenting for the best light upon his picture. Her too-brilliant eyes roved restlessly from one carefully arranged detail to another.
Suddenly a footstep sounded outside, and there was a buzz of the electric bell. Madame Rosalie waited exactly the correct length of time before responding to its summons. The interval was expressive neither of eagerness nor indifference. When she returned to her sanctum it was to usher into it a man who moved hurriedly, drew off a pair of heavy driving-gloves, and tossed them into the Morris-chair. The astrologist removed them quietly to a settee in a far corner of the apartment and seated herself in the chair.
"They say you're the eighth wonder of the world." Her visitor spoke with a thinly veiled sarcasm as he took his place under the light. "I might as well tell you at the outset that I don't go in much for this sort of thing. I'm here upon the suggestion of somebody else. I've known a good many of you trance mediums and my experience has been that you're strong on the future and weak on the past. You play safer that way. But it happens that I want help with the past more than with the future. What's the idea now? Are you going to hypnotize me?"
His voice was not antagonistic, only briskly businesslike. He might have been suggesting that he try on the suit of clothes which a salesman was proffering for his favor.
Madame Rosalie answered in the low, slightly indifferent voice that had surprised Roger Kenwick. "Hypnotism is a coöperative measure. I couldn't hypnotize you unless you were willing and would help me."
He laughed. "That's a good deal for you to admit. Most of you people claim to be able to do anything."
"Do you wish me to try to hypnotize you?"
"No, I don't care about it especially. It takes a lot of time, doesn't it? Get busy on something that comes right down to brass tacks."
She turned the crystal sphere slowly in her hand. "You are obsessed by a fear, and you have reason to be. There is a very serious problem confronting you, and you need help in solving it. I can't help you, but perhaps I can find some one else who can."
She gathered up a bundle of cards. At first glance he had thought they were playing-cards, but he saw now that the reverse sides were all blanks. "On each of these I am going to write a word," she explained. "I'll hold it for an instant before your eyes. Read it, close your eyes, and then look at those maroon-colored curtains over there."
Without comment he followed these instructions. Ten minutes passed while the client glanced at the cards and then at the curtains. Sometimes his gaze strayed back to the bit of pasteboard before the medium had another one ready. By the end of the hour she had cast his horoscope, read his palm, and performed other mystic rites. Then she settled back in the deep chair and announced herself ready to "project the astral body." A few moments passed in absolute silence. The medium appeared to fall into a light slumber, and the man on the other side of the table was prepared to see her face contorted by the writhing pains of the trance victim. But it remained calm, almost deathlike. His shrewd eyes were sizing her up as she slept. He seemed almost to forget that he had come for spiritual counsel, and his gaze was calculating, speculative, as though he were considering her possibilities as an ally. Suddenly a voice came from the depths of the chair. It made him jump. It was not the voice of Madame Rosalie, but one that seemed vaguely familiar.
"Marstan is dead." The words died away in a kind of moan. After an interval of silence came the message, "He says to tell you that you have found the criminal, and now is the time to act." She seemed to sink deeper into oblivion. The client waited a full minute. Then he leaned over and whispered through the stillness two words—"Rest Hollow."
The medium's head rolled from side to side on the cushions of the chair, like that of a surgical patient who is trying to escape the ether sponge. "Gone!" she muttered. "All gone!"
He swept aside the cards and ouija-board and leaned closer, his hands almost touching hers. The amused skepticism had died out of his amber eyes, and the question that he asked came in a tense whisper. "Where is Ralph Regan?"
A frown drew the woman's heavy black brows together. "Gone!" she murmured again. "Gone!"
It was not possible for him to determine from her tone whether she was answering his last question or merely repeating her response to "Rest Hollow." He tried again.
And after a moment the reply came slowly through stiff lips. "The way leads over a curving road. Follow that road to a place with a high stone fence where the gates stand always open. There you will find him."
He settled back in his chair, his eyes resting, fascinated, upon the graven face.
"Marstan is here." She spoke in her own voice now and there was in it a note of infinite weariness. "He has something to say to you."
The man smiled grimly. "I should think he would. Tell him to go ahead; I'm listening."
"He says you must give up the first plan——" She frowned in the effort of transmission. "And the second plan—and try the third. He says there is a woman working in the plan too: she has just begun to work in it. You must get her aid or she might——"
He leaned forward eagerly. "Yes? She might what?"
"I don't quite get it. It's a difficult control. But he seems to be afraid of that woman. He wants very much to warn you against——"
She shivered slightly and opened her eyes. The man had left his seat and was standing close to her side. "I hope you got what you want," she said wearily. "I don't know when I've had a sitting that has cost so much."
He crossed to the settee and picked up his gloves. "It must get on your nerves. Suppose we go out somewhere and have a little bite of supper. I know a place down on Dupont; no style about it, but they give you a great little meal. What do you say?"
She glanced at the nickel clock upon the mantel. "It's almost seven," she demurred, "and I expect another client at seven-thirty."
"No more sittings to-night," he decreed. There was an almost insolent authority in his tone. "Time to call a halt. It's dinner-time in heaven, and spirits must live. You're coming out with me. Get on your street togs, little witch."
Without further protest she obeyed while her escort waited in the shabby entrance-hall. At the curb he helped her into the roadster, and five minutes later they were seated at a small bare table in one of the popular bohemian restaurants of the downtown district.
"No Martinis any more," he sighed, as he helped her out of her cheap coat with its imitation-fur collar. "Life isn't what it used to be, is it?" His own hat and expensive-looking overcoat he hung upon the peg in a diamond-shaped mirror bearing the soap-written injunction, "Try Our Tamales." "But they serve a placid little near-beer in this place that helps some. Bring two, waiter."
When the attendant returned with the glasses, he tossed off the contents of his at a gulp, but the woman sipped hers with the leisurely enjoyment of the epicure. Then she set it down and stabbed with her fork at the dish of green olives in the center of the table.
The soup came, a rich bean chowder, which she ate almost in silence, while her companion commented casually upon the service and furnishings of the café. They had a rear table near the swinging doors that led into the kitchen. It was not more or less conspicuous than any of the others. The atmosphere of unconventionality which pervaded the place seemed to envelop all its habitués in a sort of mystic veil that was in itself a guarantee of privacy. At the table nearest them a girl was talking earnestly to a man who sat with his arm about her. Madame Rosalie, raising her eyes from her soup-plate, encountered the bold, appraising stare of her escort. She returned it impersonally and with the flicker of a smile, taking in the "freckled" eyes and the large thin hands. And when she smiled her face re-gained something of a former beauty. The man leaned toward her with a consciously confiding manner. "You call yourself Madame Rosalie," he said. "But isn't it really Mademoiselle?"
Her smile deepened but she gave him no answer. In the delicate, lacy waist and white skirt which she had donned, she looked years younger. There was a ruby pendant at her throat but she wore no other jewel. The garish light of the café, shining upon her straight black hair, gave it a luster that was like the dull gleam of jet.
"Not Mademoiselle?" he queried again, and his smile was like the password between two brother lodge-members.
And then Madame Rosalie lost some of her inscrutable reserve. "NotRosalie," she corrected. "But it's a good name; as good as any other for my trade, don't you think?"
He turned one of the clumsy glass salt-shakers between his fingers. "The name is all right," he admitted. "But—why do you do—that sort of thing? You admit yourself that it's hard on your nerves. Why do you do it—when you could do other things?"
The waiter reappeared and littered the table with an army of small oval platters. Odors of highly seasoned macaroni and ragout steamed from them. Madame Rosalie dipped daintily into the nearest dish. But in spite of her restraint, it would have been apparent to a close observer that her enjoyment of the meal was the keen avidity of one who has been long denied. When the waiter was out of hearing, she caught up the last words sharply.
"What do you mean by 'other things'?" For the first time her voice was eager, as though seeking counsel.
He shrugged. "Idon't pretend to be a clairvoyant. Yet I know that there are other things that you could do—have done."
"How do you know it?"
"Well, in the first place, if you had been a medium for very long, the clever medium that you undoubtedly are, you would have made more money at it."
"I have made money at it."
"Not as much as you should have made. You wouldn't live as you do if you had money."
If she resented this assertion, she gave no sign of it, and he went on with the cool assurance of a physician who is certain of his diagnosis. "You may persuade yourself that you are in that business because you are interested in it or because you know that you have an unaccountable power. But you are doing it chiefly for the same reason that most of us ply our trades; because you want to make money."
"Well?" She commented, "It does supply me with a living, and you know there's a theory that we must live."
He laughed. "You don't have to live the way you do. There are much easier ways for you to accomplish that end. Have you got anybody dependent on you?"
"No, but I am horribly in debt." The admission seemed to slip from her without her permission, and when the words were out a little frown puckered her forehead. The eyes of her escort were fixed upon the ruby pendant, so obviously a genuine and costly stone. She toyed absently with it, putting a cruel strain upon its slender thread-like chain of gold. "Do you know," she said slowly, "I believe you would make a wonderful hypnotist. I believe that you could even hypnotize me."
The bold amber eyes gazed straight into hers. "But you told me, didn't you, that hypnotism had to be a coöperative measure? You said, I remember, that nobody could hypnotize anybody else unless—unless the victim were willing."
One of his hands closed over hers as it reached for the sugar-bowl. She made no effort to draw it away.
"Perhaps," she answered softly, "perhaps the victimiswilling."
He stacked up a little pile of the oval platters and pushed them impatiently to one side. "I guess we understand each other all right," he said. "You need me and I need you. We've each come to the place where we need help. Now let's not waste any more time about it. Let's get down to brass tacks."
It was seven o'clock on a rainy evening, and Kenwick turned up the collar of his coat as he left the St. Germaine. Inside the Hartshire Building there was a cheerful warmth that promised well for the evening. He ignored the elevator and walked up the three flights of stairs to the floor where the photographer had his rooms. On the way, he tried to persuade himself that he was not doing this in order to gain time. But there was a good hour intervening between now and time to start for the theater, and at the end of that hour, he reflected Jarvis might not care to keep the engagement.
As he toiled upward Kenwick considered every possible detail of the scene that was before him, and then wearily discarded them all. "Why do I do it?" he challenged himself, as he reached the last landing. "How do I dare to do it? My God! I can't afford to do it; I've got to have one friend left!"
But as he had once told Jarvis, those scenes of life whose settings are scrupulously ordered usually lack dramatic climax. At the end of what he was pleased to characterize as his "confession," the photographer surveyed him with sympathetic but unastonished eyes.
"I'd begun to think that there might be something personal in it," he commented. "I could see that there was something lying heavy on your chest. It's a devilish mess, isn't it?"
The other man was looking at him with a disconcerting sharpness. But the thing for which he probed was not in Granville Jarvis's eyes.
"I seem to be such a helpless sort of brute," his host went on, and pushed a box of cigars across the table as though in an unconscious effort to make up with tobacco what he lacked in counsel. "I never can think of the right thing to do just on the spur of the minute. Inspiration has an uncomfortable habit of failing to keep her engagements with me."
"I didn't expect any advice," Kenwick told him. "But it's a relief to tell you and get it off my mind; to tell you and yet not have you think that I ought to be locked up."
"Somebody ought to be locked up," Jarvis remarked grimly. "And it's your job to find that person. Why don't you go East?"
"I am going East. I've decided to go next week. It would be hard to make you understand why I haven't done it before, but——Well, this sort of an—illness does a terrible thing to a man's soul, Jarvis. It paralyzes his initiative. It gives him the most deadly thing in this world; the patience of despair. I'm constantlywaitingfor things to clear up instead of going at them hammer and tongs."
His companion nodded. "I think I understand. It would be the hell of a situation for you back there among people you've always known, and who presumably know all about you, and not being able to bridge the gap. I can see why you wanted to get a line on yourself first, and you're right, too. After all, a man owes something to his nervous system. But since you've decided to go and brave it out back there I think I'd let things rest the way they are till you go. Sometimes life works itself out better if we don't interfere too much. Somebody is bound to make a foolish play if you let them all manage their own hands."
"And yet somebody told me the other day, Jarvis, that I was too passive in the crutches of fate; that I ought to be more combative, more aggressive."
Jarvis laughed. "I'd be willing to bet that it was a woman who told you that."
"Yes, a woman did tell me. It was that trance medium."
"I might have guessed it. By the way, I went to see her myself the other day. Your story got me interested. She ought to have paid you a liberal commission for that yarn. But I suppose she doesn't even know you wrote it. She struck me as being a mighty clever little woman. Well, it's after eight o'clock. Let's go."
They found their seats in the first row of the balcony. The house was brilliantly lighted and filling up rapidly. But although Jarvis had urged his companion to forget for a time the tangle in which he was enmeshed, it was he who returned to the theme while they sat waiting for the curtain to rise.
"The trouble is, there's a missing link in the chain somewhere. I don't mean an event, but a person. Somebody dealt those cards, of course, and whoever did it knows where the marked one is. The New York trip may be a wild goose chase after all. Did you ever think of hiring a detective to help you out?"
"Yes, I've thought of it a lot. But somehow I don't want to do it. I don't want to have anybody mixed up in my affairs as intimately as that. I can't explain my feeling about it. But there is so much noise about this sort of thing if it once rises to the surface, and if there's any graft connected with my name, I'd like to keep the scandal private. Besides," he laughed with a tolerant self-indulgence, "I don't suppose the person lives, Jarvis, who doesn't believe that way down inside of him somewhere, sleeping but never dead, is the genius of the detective. I've made a sort of a covenant with myself that I and no other shall run this thing to cover, and do it without kicking up a noise."
Jarvis was staring speculatively at the foot-lights. "It's one of the most curious cases I ever knew. I'll tell you what, Kenwick. You're the original 'Wise Man from Our Town.' Remember him?
"And when he found his eyes were out,With all his might and main,He jumped into the bramble-bushAnd scratched them back again."
"And when he found his eyes were out,With all his might and main,He jumped into the bramble-bushAnd scratched them back again."
"A dangerous experiment, I always thought," Kenwick remarked.
"So is dynamite, but sometimes we have to use it, and nothing else will take its place."
"Are you advising me to put a bomb under somebody on the chance that it might be the man who shuffled the deck?"
"No. I'm advising you to do the bramble-bush stunt. Don't jump forward; jump back."
"What do you mean?"
"Why, the more I think of it the more I believe that the solution of this mystery is to be found in the place where it began."
"But where did it begin?"
"So far as your knowledge of it extends, it began in the cañon or ravine or whatever place it was that you had the accident. If I'm not mistaken, Kenwick, that place is your bramble-bush."
The curtain rose upon the first act and there was no opportunity for further conversation. It was during the intermission between the second and third acts that Jarvis, leaning over the balcony, said suddenly, "There's a friend of yours; fourth row on the right."
Kenwick made a cursory examination of the seats and shook his head. "Don't see him. Don't see anybody I know here to-night except Aiken, our dramatic critic."
"This is a woman. Count seven seats over in the fourth row. Isn't that lady in the garnet-colored coat your Madame Rosalie?"
"You're right; it is."
"I thought I couldn't be mistaken. There's a certain air of distinction about that woman in spite of——" Jarvis stopped, for he saw that his companion was not listening. For a moment Kenwick sat there staring down at the fourth row like a man in a dream. Then he gripped Jarvis's arm. "Look!" he cried. "Down there with Madame Rosalie."
"What's the matter? You're such an excitable cuss, Kenwick."
"That fellow who's with her. Look! Jarvis,that'sthe man!"
"What man?"
"The man we've been talking about—my Missing Link."
Together they leaned over the balcony and scrutinized, with the intent gaze of a pair of detectives, the couple in the fourth row right. It may have been coincidence, or it may have been that species of visual hypnotism known to us all, which suddenly impelled Madame Rosalie's escort to turn in his seat. His eyes swept the house with a casual glance, then lifted to the balcony. Slowly they surveyed the arc of faces above the lights. The two men leaning toward him did not move. In another instant he had found them, and for a full minute he and Roger Kenwick held each other. And then the theater went black as the curtain rose on the last act.
Just before it was over Kenwick bade his companion a hurried farewell. "I'm going down and introduce myself to that fellow. I know I've seen him before somewhere, and he may be able to give me my clue. You don't mind if I break away? I want to catch him before he is lost in the crowd."
But this hope was thwarted. For hurrying down the aisle in that moment before the rush of exit, while the audience was finding its wraps, he found two seats in the fourth row empty. Slowly he walked back to the St. Germaine, his thoughts in a tumult. Why should they have wanted to leave before the end of as good a performance as that? Something must have happened. Could it be that they had wanted to escape him? At such long range it hadn't been possible for him to determine whether or not there was a flash of recognition in the other man's eyes, but his mysterious disappearance was haunting. On the following morning, before going to the "Clarion" office he took a car out to Fillmore Street.
At Madame Rosalie's shabby home a man in shirt sleeves opened the door. "Oh, she don't live here any more," he explained to the caller. "She moved a week ago. I'm gettin' the place ready for a new tenant."
"Do you know where she went?"
The man grinned. "Them mediums don't generally leave no forwardin' address. Their motto is 'Keep Movin'.' I will say, though, that the Rosalie woman was a perfect lady and paid her rent regular in advance."
Kenwick walked away, turning this latest development slowly in his mind, looking at it from every angle. At his office he worked mechanically, scarcely conscious of what he wrote. He was in two minds now about the Eastern trip. Perhaps it would be better to take Jarvis's advice and let things have their head a bit longer. And he was certain of some of his facts now. The face of the man in the fourth row had been like the flash of a torch at midnight. For most of the night he had been awake, going back over the painful trail of the past, fitting some of its previously incomprehensible details into their places. What a curious mosaic his life had been! What contrasts of light and shade! But as for going back to Mont-Mer——The idea made him shudder. No, that was one thing he would not do. It would be like courting the return of a nightmare.
At four o'clock he left the office and went to keep an appointment with Dr. Gregson Bennet in the Physicians' Building. Dr. Bennet belonged to that class of specialists who designate their business quarters in plural terms. His offices comprised a suite of four rooms. The sign on the door of the first one invited the caller to enter, unheralded. Complying with this injunction, Kenwick found himself in a well-lighted chamber containing a massive collection of light-green upholstery and an assortment of foreign-looking pictures artfully selected to convey the impression that their owner was on chummy terms with the capitals of Europe.
As the door closed automatically behind him, a white-uniformed figure appeared, like a perfectly trained cuckoo, from the adjoining room and announced in level tones, "The-doctor-will-see-you-in-just-a-minute." Kenwick accepted this assurance with the grave credulity that one fiction-maker accords another. He glanced at the five other patients already awaiting their turns and picked up a magazine.
By four-thirty he had read the jokes in the back of "Anybody's Magazine" for the preceding six months. No physician in reputable standing ever removes old numbers of periodicals from his files. For what better testimony can he offer in support of his claim upon a long-established practice? As Kenwick read, he was aware that his companions were being summoned one by one to embark upon that mysterious journey from whose bourne no traveler returns, departure having been arranged for around some obscure corner, to prevent exchange between arriving and retreating patient of a "Look! Stop! Listen!" signal.
By five o'clock only one other patient besides himself remained; a little woman in shiny serge suit and passée summer hat. Kenwick put down his magazine with a long-drawn sigh, and she smiled in patient sympathy. "Gets pretty tiresome waitin', doesn't it?" she ventured.
His quick eyes took in her shabby suit and the knotted ungloved hands. She was probably the mother of a growing family, he reflected, and would not get home in time now to prepare dinner. His easy sympathy flared into words.
"It's an outrage to keep people waiting like this when they have an appointment for a definite hour. They tell me Bennet's a nerve specialist, and I believe it."
She smiled wanly, but there was an eager championship in her response. "Oh, but he's wonderful! When he once begins to talk to you, you forget all about bein' mad at him. Seems like he sees right through your head to tell what's the matter with you."
The white uniform appeared and pronounced a name: "Mr. Kenwick." He rose and followed her through the door. The second room was like the first, minus reading-matter and plus wall-charts. Here he sat, gazing at the fire-escapes on the opposite building, while the white uniform made a not completely satisfying attempt to collect family statistics. And then, at last, the door of the third room opened and Dr. Bennet himself emerged. He was enveloped in a heavy white apron that recalled to Kenwick's mind the pictures he had seen in the agricultural magazines featuring model dairying.
But if the specialist had been slow to admit him, he was equally reluctant to let him go. When he had finished his examination, Kenwick stood beside the couch in the fourth and last room pulling on his coat. "Then you think I'm in pretty good condition, doctor?" Through the half-open door he could see the white uniform hovering, like an emblem of peace, above a steaming basin of warlike instruments.
"I should say," the physician told him slowly, "that you are absolutely sound. Your nerves are a bit too highly charged, but I imagine that is more a matter of temperament than overstrain."
"Is that all?"
"No, that isn't all. The history of your case, as you have given it to me, is a most interesting one. And you were right to let me make the examination and form my own conclusions before telling me anything about your history. I wish it were possible for you to recall the name of the physician who handled your case in France. I'd like to get the scientific beginning of the story. Without it I can only make a guess, and guessing is not satisfactory. But I think that in his place I should have taken the chance and operated. However, you can't judge; he may not have had the proper equipment. I wish you would come around next Saturday when the office is closed, and let me make some X-ray plates. I'd like to display them at the medical convention in April."
"And what do you advise me to do for my—my mental health?"
"Forget your mental health. Take some regular out-of-door exercise and mix with your friends. I can't give you any better prescription than that. If it were something done up in pink paper you'd be more apt to take it, I know."
Kenwick walked back through the darkening streets with a feeling of exultation. The pendulum of his despair was swinging backward to a height only attained by those who can plumb the depths of wretchedness. For the first time in six weeks he felt his old defiance of life. And recalling the pale ghost of a former prayer, he was ashamed of its cowardice. "Thatnever happens to the desperate and the lonely," he reminded himself grimly. "The best security on earth for a prolonged life is to express a sincere desire to die. After that, you lead a charmed existence. Houses burn to the ground and not one inmate escapes; ships go down with everybody aboard; pedestrians are run over by cars and shot by thugs, but none of these things come near the man who courts them. They overtake those whom others find it hard to spare, those whose lives are vivid with purpose."
As he walked back to the hotel he found himself thinking of Marcreta again. Had he ever really made a place for himself in her life? Whether he had or not, he knew that he had never, even in his blackest moments, given her up. All the plans for his future centered still about her. Well, he had a fight before him now, and not until he won it would he make himself known at the house on Pine Street.
On the corner a newsboy thrust a paper under his face. He waved it aside. "I can read all that bunk for nothing, sonny," he told him cheerfully. The huge head-lines filled him with a spiritual nausea. The chronicle of the day's tragedies for the public to batten upon! Was there never to be an end to America's greed for the sensational?
At the St. Germaine the clerk handed him a telephone call. It was from Jarvis and urged him to call him up immediately. In his own room Kenwick complied with this request. The voice of the Southerner came to him, sharply commanding, over the wire. "Can you come around right away? I want to talk it over with you."
"Talk what over?" Kenwick's voice was almost defiant.
"Why, haven't you seen it? Well, come around anyway. I'll be here for the next hour."
When Kenwick arrived at the Hartshire he found the photographer sorting over a pile of films. But as his guest entered, he swept these into a pasteboard box, and cleared off a chair for him. "Where have you been?" he demanded. "I called you at the hotel and the 'Clarion' office twice."
Kenwick gave him a brief account of the last two hours. Jarvis grunted. "Well, I don't blame you for wanting to get the seal of scientific approval but—I can't believe that you haven't read the 'Record' yet. And you a newspaper man!"
He fished the paper out from under a stack of developing-trays and searched the columns of the second page. "Remember what I suggested to you last night, that you let things take their own course for a while? Well, it seems that they've been taking them in rather a headlong fashion." He creased back the page and handed the paper to Kenwick. "Read that and see if it doesn't give you something of a jolt."
He took the paper. The head-lines at the top of the third page riveted themselves upon his brain.
RELATIVE SEEKS MISSING MANBody of Roger Kenwick to Be Exhumed at Mont-MerThe body of Roger Kenwick, son of the late Charles Kenwick, of New York, who died at Rest Hollow last November, is to be exhumed for examination on the demand of Mrs. Hilda Fanwell, of Reno, Nevada. Mrs. Fanwell, a widow, arrived from her home last week in search of her brother, Ralph Regan, who has been a resident of Mont-Mer for the last two years. A letter received from him in the early part of November indicated, according to the sister's statement, that he was in failing health. Being unable to come to him then, owing to the illness of her husband, Mrs. Fanwell wrote several letters, none of which were answered. The description of her brother, which she furnished the police, has resulted in a demand to the authorities to have the body of Roger Kenwick exhumed.
RELATIVE SEEKS MISSING MAN
Body of Roger Kenwick to Be Exhumed at Mont-Mer
The body of Roger Kenwick, son of the late Charles Kenwick, of New York, who died at Rest Hollow last November, is to be exhumed for examination on the demand of Mrs. Hilda Fanwell, of Reno, Nevada. Mrs. Fanwell, a widow, arrived from her home last week in search of her brother, Ralph Regan, who has been a resident of Mont-Mer for the last two years. A letter received from him in the early part of November indicated, according to the sister's statement, that he was in failing health. Being unable to come to him then, owing to the illness of her husband, Mrs. Fanwell wrote several letters, none of which were answered. The description of her brother, which she furnished the police, has resulted in a demand to the authorities to have the body of Roger Kenwick exhumed.
Kenwick let the paper slide to the table. "My Lord!" he murmured. "Jarvis, what would you do about it?"
"Why shouldyoudo anything about it? This Fanwell woman is apparently the oldest Gold Dust twin. Let her do your work."
But Kenwick's eyes were still fixed upon the paper. Over it a drop of acid from the developing-tray was eating a slow passage. "But to see my name tied up to a gruesome thing like that——Why, you can't imagine how it——It gives me the feeling that—that I've just begun on this thing. And I thought when I came in here that I had all the cards in my hands."
He got up from the table slowly, like a hospital patient testing his strength on the first day out of bed. And Jarvis, after one glance at his pale face, rose too. "You've got nothing to worry about——," he began. But Kenwick waved the soothing aside with a fierce impatience.
"Nothing to worry about?" he cried hotly. "Don't offer me that stuff, Jarvis. How do I know—howcanI ever know what I may have done during those ghastly ten months?"
When Kenwick entered the St. Germaine on the evening after his interview with Jarvis, a man rose from the farther corner of the lobby and came toward him. "Kenwick!" he cried, and held out his hand. "I thought you never would come. I've been waiting here an eternity." It was Clinton Morgan.
When the first, somewhat incoherent greetings were over and the two men sat facing each other across Kenwick's untidy writing-table, a moment of embarrassed silence fell between them. Then, in a desperate attempt to start the conversation, "I'm afraid I've kept you waiting rather a long time," the host apologized.
"You have," his caller agreed. "It's been more than a year, hasn't it?" He spoke in a cheerful, matter-of-fact tone as though a mere pleasure-trip had intervened between this and their last encounter. But Kenwick was looking at him intently.
"You know—about it then?"
"Yes, we know all about it." Clinton Morgan leaned over and put his hand affectionately upon the other man's shoulder. "And, by George, Kenwick, I congratulate you. I congratulate you from the bottom of my heart. It was one chance against a thousand that you could win out. It's a miracle!"
Kenwick was scarcely conscious of the last sentences. His attention had stopped short at that word "we." He reached down and picked a burnt match from the carpet as he asked with a pathetic attempt at formal courtesy, "How is your sister?"
"Getting well, I believe. She has been——Well, this case of yours is a most enthralling one, Kenwick. Anybody would be interested, but particularly any one who has known you. We have been following it with great interest."
Kenwick looked at him incredulously. "How could you?"
The caller shifted his position uneasily. "Well, that's rather a long story. And Marcreta might prefer to tell you part of it herself. And that brings me to my errand. I came here to ask you up to the house. We've just got the old place fixed over, and,"—he glanced at his watch,—"it's not nine o'clock yet. If you haven't something else on hand that——"
Kenwick cut in almost harshly. "Are you sure that your sister would care to see me? That she wouldn't perhaps be—well, afraid of me?"
Morgan laughed. "Well, I'll be there, you know, if you should get violent and begin throwing things around."
But the other man's face did not relax. His voice came low and strained as though it were being let out cautiously under high gear. "You don't understand. Nobody can, I suppose, who hasn't been through this experience." His nervous hands stiffened upon the arms of the chair. "I tell you, Morgan, it's easier for a denizen of the underworld to live down her reputation and achieve a reputable place in society than for a man or woman to regain the confidence of the world after a period of——Well, I may as well out with the damned word—insanity."
"Don't call it that, Kenwick. It wasn't that. In the trenches you got a blow that put you out of commission. But you were simply in a dazed condition; mental aberration beginning with melancholia. You were never violently insane; never dangerous to anybody else."
"How do you know? How do I know? I've suffered the anguish of hell, wondering about it. Somebody may have been killed in that accident that restored me to life. It may have been all my fault. I don't know. I've spent the last month trying to find out in a quiet way. I suppose you think I'm a coward for not going at it more directly." He looked at his companion with a defiant appeal in his eyes. "But there were reasons why I didn't want to kick up a lot of notoriety about myself. For any harm that ever came to man or woman through me, I'm eager to pay. No court decision would have to make me do it; no court decision could keep me from doing it. But I wanted to save my name if I could. I wanted to save my name so that some time it might be fit——"
"I know." Clinton Morgan interrupted hastily. The memory of that traitorous bit of paper which he had discovered in the gold and ivory book came back to him and brought a guilty flush to his cheeks. Whether he would or no, he seemed to hold in his own hands all the threads of this tragic romance. A line of Marcreta's lyric drifted through his brain: