CHAPTER VAGAIN THE MOVING FIGURE
When it was in my fingers, I looked all about in a guilty way to see if any one had seen me pick it up, and then, with the metal icy cold in my hand, my head swam. I knew the meaning of my find. The thing had not come out of its hiding to spring upon us of its own accord. Human hands had preserved it, and human feet had brought it into the garden in the dead of a winter night, and human fright had been the cause of leaving it behind.
I had searched once for this trinket, with a plan to use it as a weapon of evil, and now it was mine. It was mine, and yet all my love for the Judge and Julianna, for whom I would have given my life, made me look upon it as if it were a snake. My first thought was its destruction. I wanted to throw it in the furnace. I longed to have an anvil and hammer, so that I could beat it into a pulp of gold. I wished a crack in the earth might open miles deep so I could drop it in.
I went into the kitchen where the cook was busy with her pastry, and up to my own room. It was there I began to think sensibly. I believedthat whoever might want to come now and say, “I know. That is a murderer’s child,” no longer would have the proof. I believed that Julianna was safe again. So long as I had the locket and Monty Cranch was lost in the depths of time and perhaps dead, no real harm, I thought, could come to her. Often enough I had remembered the moment when Mr. Roddy had begged the Judge to condemn Monty to death by an accusation of a crime he never committed, and how I had said, perhaps, the words that prevented the master from agreeing to the devilish plot. I had often wondered if I had not been the cause of all the Judge’s troubles by my speaking then. This thought, for the moment, prevented me from hurrying downstairs in time to catch the Judge before he went out. I could hear him hunting around the corners for his grapevine stick, humming a tune.
“What good, after all, to tell?” said I to myself. “Just as he kept a secret for the happiness of his wife, I will keep one for the sake of his peace of mind.”
I heard the front door close and knew that he had gone.
“If I took the locket to him,” I thought, “what would he believe? Only that I had had it in my possession all these years. After all, I am only a servant. He would be suspicious. Hewould believe I had invented the story of finding it in the yard. It would spoil all his trust in me and that would break my heart.”
So my thoughts went around and a week passed, in which there was not a night that I did not sit in my bedroom window, looking out at the cold garden and the black alley, expecting to see some one lurking there. A hundred times I took the locket out of its hiding-place and wondered what to do, and at last it came to me that the first question the Judge would ask was why I had not told him at once. That was enough to clinch the matter; until to-night the secret has been my own and you can blame me or not, as you see fit.
It was painful enough for me—a lonely old maid—with nothing but memories of a wasted girlhood and no one to help me see the right of things. Many is the night I have wet my pillow with tears, being afraid that I had always played the wrong part and would finally be the cause of the ruin of those I had grown to love.
Of all those bad moments, none was more bitter than that when the Judge told me that the day would come when Julianna must know the truth. To this day I remember the study as it was then. Workmen had been redecorating the walls, and all the furniture was moved into the centre of the room, strips of paper were gathered into a tangled pile on the floor, and in the middleof the confusion, the Judge was sitting in his easy-chair, with his eyes looking a thousand miles away, and his lips moving just enough to keep his old pipe alight. He looked up as I drew the curtains.
“Don’t light the lamp yet,” he said. “You are a woman and I want to talk to you.”
“It’s about Julianna,” said I.
“Yes,” said he, “about her. She is eighteen. Her birthday is scarcely a week away. I suppose she will fall in love sometime?”
“Of course,” I answered. “Women are not cast in her mould to be old maids.”
“Isn’t it funny?” he said. “I just began to think of it yesterday. I never realized. I thought we had at least ten years more before there would be any chance. They are women before one can turn around! It is surprising.”
“It’s terrible,” I added.
“Yes,” said he, “it’s terrible! Because if any man won her, then I would have to tell—”
He stopped there and shut his two fists.
“Tell the truth!” I exclaimed.
“Yes,” said he. “ I ’d have to tell him. Could I let him be cheated?”
“Cheated!” I cried. “No man is good enough for her, that’s what I think!”
“I said cheated!” he answered roughly, as if he was trying to harden his own feelings. “Hewould be putting dependence upon her inherited characteristics, wouldn’t he? And then, if anything ever cropped out in her, if he didn’t know, how could he understand her or forgive her or help her?”
“Judge,” said I, “you spoke of my being a woman. Well, sir, I am an ignorant woman, but I know well enough that there are some things that you and I had best leave alone—some things that God will take care of by Himself.”
At that his face screwed up in pain.
“Honor is honor!” he said, jumping up. “Truth is truth! And heredity is heredity!”
He seized his hat and went into the hall and down the front steps and off along the pavement with his long strides, like a man followed by a fiend.
It was the last word he ever spoke on the subject until Mr. Estabrook came into our life. Then I saw from the first how things were going. When I caught the look on the girl’s face as she watched the first man in whom she had taken that special interest, and when I saw him—begging your pardon—staring at her as if she were not real, I knew, with a sick feeling in my heart and throat, that the day would come when he would take her away from us.
It was like a panic to me. I could not stand it and I called the Judge. I wanted to speak withhim. I nodded and beckoned to him and tried to show him what was going on, for though a mother has the eyes of a hawk, a father is often blind. And I thought that night he was going out without my having a chance to say a word. I went down to the kitchen and then to the dark laundry, out of sight of the cook. I threw my apron over my head and cried like an old fool from fright. It was in the midst of it that I heard the gate-latch.
“The woman again!” I said to myself. “The strange woman! She feels there’s something wrong, too. She’s come back!”
I could hear my own heart thumping as I stared out into the dark, wiping my eyes to get the fog out of them. Minutes went by before I saw that it was the Judge. He had come back to hear what I had to say, and I think when I told him that he was as upset as I had been. Well I remember how his voice trembled as he told me how he had written the paper telling the whole secret, except for my knowing about it, to Julianna, in case he should die, and how, then and there, I made up my mind that if God would let me I would keep the girl from ever reading it. And to this day she does not know that I loved her that much. What made me fail to do this is something you are aware of already, just as you know all the story of the marriage and a time ofhappiness before this new and dreadful, dreadful thing, whatever it is, came to us.
Well enough for you, Mr. Estabrook, to notice the change in your wife. It is well enough for you to wonder what has come to her and why she has driven you out of your own house. But do not forget that I held her as a baby in my arms and saw her grow into a woman, as free from guilt or blame as any that ever lived. It may all be a mystery to you, sir. I tell you it is all a hundred times more a mystery to me who know no more of it than you, though in these terrible days I have been alone with her, locked into a deserted house, with every other servant sent away and the quiet of the grave over everything.
“Is it some of Monty Cranch’s wild blood?” I have asked, and with that question no end of others.
I asked them when her arm had been hurt, and was getting well in those days when she seemed to be in a dream, with her silent thoughts and her frightened face. For hours she would sit in the window at night, looking out into the park, as you know, and daytimes, when you were away, many is the time I have found her on her bed, shaking with her misery and tears.
I asked those questions, too, when one night—a month ago—she came into my bedroom, walking like a ghost in her bare feet.
“Margaret,” she whispered, trembling, “I can’t wake Mr. Estabrook. I haven’t the courage to. I want you to come to the front windows.”
“Yes,” said I. “What is the matter?”
“Oh, I don’t know!” she cried. “Come. Come. He is there again!”
I had crept through the cold hall with her, and we kneeled down together under the ledge. Moonlight was on the street. The shadows of the trees moved back and forth slowly.
“Look! Now! Behind that post over the way!” she said, pinching my arm. “Do you see him?”
“See who?” I gasped. “What is it? I see nothing.”
“He stretched his hands out!” she cried. “He isn’t real! You see nothing?”
“Nothing,” said I.
“I was afraid so!” she cried, and broke away from me and shut the door of her own room in my face. Nor have I ever since been able to get a word from her concerning that night.
It was about the same time I discovered that, though she almost never left the house, she was telephoning for messenger boys when she thought I was out of hearing. It set my curiosity on edge, I tell you. I began to watch. And then I discovered she was sending out little envelopes andgetting little envelopes in return. All my old training with Mrs. Welstoke came back to me; I made up my mind to be as sly as a weasel. Finally my chance came.
I had been out to do some shopping and walked home across the park. Just as I came within sight of the house, I saw a messenger boy come down our steps. I ran as fast as my old limbs would carry me, until I caught up with him.
“Little boy!” I said.
He looked around, half frightened and half impudent.
“There’s been a mistake!” I told him. “Where did the lady tell you to take the message.”
“Why, to the man with the gold teeth,” said he.
“There’s a mistake in it,” said I. “Give me the envelope.”
He looked at me suspiciously.
“Not on yer life,” he said. “You’ll get me in trouble. I won’t open it for anybody.”
“But there’s money in it,” I said.
“No, there ain’t,” he answered, feeling of the envelope. “I guess I can tell!”
“Hold it up to the light, then,” said I, for the sun was shining very bright. “We’ll see who is right.”
He did this, and the writing was as plain as ifwritten on the outside. It was her own hand, too, though it was not signed.
“She must have some more,” it said.
“Where does the man with the gold teeth live?” I asked, trying to smile and look careless.
“I shan’t say!” said the boy. “There is some funny business here. Let go of me!”
He twisted himself away and ran off, looking over his shoulder to see if I was following him.
I went back to the house then, and it was when I was in my room that I heard the telephone bell and Mrs. Estabrook’s soft voice talking very low. I crept out and hung over the stair rail trying to listen. Any one could tell in a second that the poor girl was in fright.
“Who was it?” she asked. “Did they learn anything from the boy? How long ago?”
There was a pause.
“Can’t you see how terrible it would be if any one knew about her?” she said. “Do you believe she is being watched? You do! Detectives! I can’t talk any more—good-bye!”
That was what she said and for a week afterward she was walking through the house, up and down each room, like a creature in a cage, listening for every sound and nursing her head with her hands as if she were afraid it would burst. She would sit down in a chair and then jump up again, as if the place she had chosen to rest wasred-hot. Every moment she was with her husband she seemed to be holding herself in check, as if he might read some terrible thing in her eyes. Then, all of a sudden, she would get some message from outside and she would be peaceful again and sigh and fold her beautiful hands.
You can see well enough that I was ready for something queer. But when it came, it was so unaccountable that I could scarcely believe I wasn’t living in a dream. It was late one afternoon when I came down from my room and found her talking through the crack of the front door to somebody outside in the vestibule. I could hear the whisper of voices and I thought the other person was a man. I can be sly when I want to, so I did not go forward at all, but crept back and along the upper hall to the window. After a minute or two I heard the door close and somebody going down the steps. I had raised the screen already so that I could lean out to see who it was.
For some reason I felt I should know the person. I had a horrid feeling that it was somebody I had seen before. The name of Monty Cranch was almost ready on my lips in spite of my old idea, which had never left me, that I had seen him—at least in this world—for the last time. Therefore it was almost a surprise to me to find that the man was as far different from her fatheras butter from barley. Whoever the man might be, he was tall and thin and had a white, disagreeable skin and a nervous way of looking to right and left, holding his chin in his hands. I never got a good look at his face. But once he turned up his head, perhaps to look at the house. He had gold teeth—a whole front row of them! This, perhaps, was the man the messenger boy had described—the man to whom Mrs. Estabrook was addressing secret communications. Certainly it was no one I had ever seen, and certainly, too, there was something in that fleeting glance at the lower part of his face which made me have no wish to see his ugly countenance again.
His visit, at any rate, set me to thinking more than ever, and that night as I walked about the dining-room, serving the courses in place of the maid who was away, I think I felt for the first time a doubt about my mistress. She had always seemed to me like a creature of heaven, and as I stood back of her chair, looking down upon those beautiful shoulders and white arms and head of soft and shining hair, it was hard to believe she was in some conspiracy of which she had kept her husband in ignorance with the slyness of a snake. I felt sorry for him. So at the moment of my first doubt of her, I found that pity—begging your pardon!—had at last made me ready to forgetthat I had never liked him or his cold ways, and ready to forgive the once he laid violent hands on me. My mistress had not chosen to tell me anything and had acted toward me as suspicious as if she had believed me capable of meaning evil to her. She had turned my questions aside and reminded me of my place. I suppose it was only human nature for me to lose sympathy with her and begin to have it with the man who sat across the table from her, all in the dark about the curious and perhaps terrible affairs that were hanging over his home and always kind and patient and, I may say,—begging your pardon!—innocent, too! It was during that meal that I made up my mind to tell him all I knew. It seemed to me the best and safest course; I would have taken it if he had stayed another day in the house.
His going was a mystery to me. I only knew that Mrs. Estabrook said that she had asked him to go and that he had gone. The front door had hardly closed behind him that morning before she unlocked her room and called to me to come to her. I shall never lose the picture of her face as I saw it then. She was sitting in that big wing-chair which is covered with the figured cretonne and her face was as white as a newly ironed napkin. It was so white that it did not seem real, but more like the face of some vision that comes and sits for a minute and fades away before a littledraft of air. Her hands were on the chair arms just like the hands of those Egyptian kings, carved out of alabaster, that you see in museums. She might have been one of those queens of great empires in the old times. She might have heard the roar of battle and seen the retreat of her army from the windows of the palace and had plunged a thin little dagger into her breast so that she would not be captured alive. It cut me to the heart to see how beautiful she was—and how terrible!
“Margaret,” she said to me, spacing off her words. “Margaret.”
“Little girl!” I cried out, forgetting the passage of all the years. And I fell on my knees beside her.
“Sh! Sh!” she said. “I need your help. It is a desperate matter. You must be calm.”
“And what shall I do?” I asked.
“This—as I tell you,” she answered, her eyes fixed on mine. “Send every one else out of the house—only before they go, I want everything taken out of this room of mine—all the furniture, all the rugs, all the pictures. I want the blinds drawn everywhere, the doors bolted. For three weeks I want no person to come across the threshold. I want you to stay that long indoors—in this house. Mr. Estabrook will not come back during that time, and to all others I wantyou to say that he is away and that I am away, too,—or ill,—or anything that will seem best to you. I never want you to come near my locked door unless I call for you.”
“But, Mrs. Estabrook!” I cried, my lips all of a tremble.
“Wait,” she said. There was a look in her eyes that seemed to go into me like a knife. “Come to my door every morning. Bring a glass of milk. Knock. If I do not answer, have the door broken down! That is all; do you hear?”
“Mercy on us!” I cried. “Tell me what this means. Are you mad?”
She put her soft hand on my cheek for a second.
“No,” said she, with a voice growing as hard as the rattling of wire nails. “Do as I say. Do it for the sake of the lives of all of us!”
I believed then that she was sane. There was something in her eyes, as I have said, that would have tamed a tiger. I got up. I did everything she had asked. The furnishings were all moved out of her room until it looked as bare as a place to rent in December. There was nothing on the floor but a mattress and a chair, which were left by her directions. I sent the servants away with instructions to come back after three weeks’ time. At last, when all was done and I was alone, walking through the house like a sour-facedghost, I climbed the stairs to her door. It was locked! I have not caught sight of her face since!
I cannot tell any one what I have been through in these days of waiting. I only know it has been like a terrible dream—like those dreams that make the perspiration come out on the forehead with the struggle to wake or cry out or toss the smothering thing from off a body’s lungs and heart. And till now, in spite of all, I have been faithful enough to my trust.
I have turned away all the visitors that came. I have gone each morning to my mistress’s door for orders that were spoken through the panels. I have walked up and down the silent rooms below, day after day, or sat in the library trying to read and listening to the tread of some one in that awful room above, with every hour dragging as if the hands of the clock on the mantel were slipping back almost as fast as they moved forward. Then the steps would stop and the clock would go on with its everlasting ticking. And if I listened hard, I could hear the big clock in the hall take up the tune like a duet. Then the one in the front room above would join in, then the one in the kitchen, until there was such a clamor of ticking that it would drive a body to distraction with a sound like a hundred typewriters all going at once.
I have heard voices, too. Voices seemed to bewhispering in the hall as if some one were welcoming people at a funeral, voices seemed to be chatting in the basement, and again there would be a murmur like a rabble of voices all talking together in a room far away. Often it was more than a fancy, I can tell you. I heard real voices in the room of my mistress.
I began to have the idea that it was not my mistress’s voice alone. There seemed to be another in argument with her. There seemed to be a strange voice speaking in an undertone—a voice I thought I never had heard before. I crept up along the hall and listened. Everything was still. But in spite of all, I began to feel that there was more than one person on the other side of those thick white panels. I knew it was folly to suppose such a thing, but I began to have the idea that another—a woman or a talkative child—was with her behind the locked door.
Once this impossible idea took hold of me, I did all I could to get a peep within the room. I had been bringing the meals, that were not enough to keep a kitten alive, to the crack she would open to take them in. Believe me, that the very first time I tried to poke my head around where I could see, that practice stopped, and my mistress, in a dull and heavy voice, told me to leave everything on the floor and go away. It seemed that she had grown suspicious. It seemed that she hadsomething to conceal. I brooded over the strangeness of it all until I began to wonder how this other person, whatever or whoever it might be, had ever entered the house. I even began to wonder whether creatures could be drawn from the air and put into the form of flesh and blood.
Finally came my chance to look. Three days ago, at about eleven o’clock in the morning, I heard the lock of her door slide over and a moment later she called to me. It was long after I had done her errand and had gone away that I began to be haunted by the thought that there had been no sound of the lock turning again. I heard the voices. I thought of the possibility that I might now softly open the door.
“A look! A look!” I heard my own tongue saying, as I tiptoed up the stairs and as I twisted the door knob by little turns, each one no more than the width of a hair.
I had been right about the lock. I discovered it at last when the door yielded. I looked in through a narrow crack. On the far side of the bare, dim room was my mistress on her knees, her clasped hands resting on the floor in front of her. She had not heard me and she seemed to be writhing as if in pain. Her skin was as pale as death. The whole picture gave a body the feeling that she had been thrown forward by some strong hand. I felt sure at that moment that Ihad not been mistaken—that some other person was there. I almost believed I saw its shadow falling across the floor. But after I had looked from one end to the other of the chamber, I knew at last that no one else was there.
If I had dared to speak I would have done so, but I felt that a word would be like dynamite, and would tear the silent house into a pile of smoking bricks and plaster. I felt sure it would act like an earthquake, toppling the house over into the street. I felt that a word would be like the roaring voice of some strange god that would send everything off in thin vapor. I felt I must shut the door, and I went away remembering the words of my Julianna, “If I do not answer some morning when you knock, have the door broken in!” and my heart jumped again with new fear. It was the fear of some other person who seemed to be in the house, unseen and hidden from my eyes. For in spite of my peep into the room, I felt that it was still there.
And now you have heard all! I have told everything—all that I know—things that many a time I have sworn to myself to take through my lonesome life unspoken to the grave.
BOOK V
THE MAN WITH THE WHITE TEETH
CHAPTER IBLADES OF GRASS
When Margaret Murchie, sitting in the interior of the limousine, with the arc light playing through the thousand raindrops on the window pane spotting a face lined with the strength of a stolid old maid, had finished her narrative, there was no sound but that of the storm mourning down the avenue. Estabrook sat with his forehead in his hands. I had had enough experience in my practice with those who are struggling to overcome a great shock, not to speak until some word from him had disclosed the effect that Margaret’s story had produced. His face was hidden, but his fingers moved on his temples as if he were grinding some substance there into powder. When at last he raised his head, his expression astounded me. It had, I thought, softened rather than hardened. A little patient smile almost concealed the fear that looked out of his eyes.
“The daughter of a murderer?” he asked, touching my knee.
What could I say?
“She must be in some distress, Doctor?” he whispered.
I nodded.
It was then that the true Estabrook went tearing up through the crust of custom, manners, traditions, egotism, smugness, and self-love. From the depths of his personality, the man for whom I have since that moment had a deep regard, then called his soul and it came. He leaned forward and looked through the misty glass in the door, across the wind-swept street, at the dripping front of his home, at the dim light that burned there.
“God, sir!” he said, turning on me with his teeth set like those of a fighting animal. “What’s all this to me? I love her! She’s mine! She’s the most beautiful—the best woman in all the world!”
Margaret Murchie shivered.
After a moment Estabrook’s hands were both clutching my sleeve.
“You’ll stand by now?” he said, looking up into my face. “I can’t ask any one else. You can see that. You’ll help? What shall we do?”
“Depend on me,” I answered him. “We must be careful. Wait! Just let me review these facts. The first move must be for us to send Margaret back into the house. Do you suppose your wife knows she is out of it?”
“I don’t believe so,” said he. “I watched the window all the time we were taking Margaret into this limousine. The curtains never moved.”
“Good!” I cried. “Now, Miss Murchie, listen to what I say. How often does your mistress call you during the day?”
“Every three or four hours, I think, sir.”
“Very well. Take this umbrella and go back. Use Mr. Estabrook’s key. Enter as quietly as possible. Say nothing to any one. If your mistress should allow more than five hours to go by without calling you, go to her door and knock. If there is no answer, telephone my office. You mustn’t allow a second of delay. It will mean danger.”
Estabrook listened to these instructions with staring eyes.
“You know something!” he cried. “Tell me!”
I shook my head, opened the door, and the old servant, getting out, went waddling off across the street, her dress flapping in the wet wind.
“Come, Mr. Chauffeur!” I said to him. “ You are to spend the night with me. To-morrow—”
“To-morrow?”
“Exactly,” said I brusquely.
“And what then?”
“To-morrow I shall search for truth lying hidden among blades of grass!” said I. “In the mean time all the sleep I can pile into you may count more than you know!”
I had spoken with a note of authority because each moment I feared that he would become stubborn. I feared that, taking offense at my theories, he would reject my services and plunge into some folly at the moment when a most delicate balance between good and evil, life and death, safety and danger, might be overthrown on the side of terrible calamity. I was thankful when he once more showed himself tractable by climbing on the driver’s seat and turning our course homeward. It was the small hours of morning that found me under the lamp in my study, giving the distracted young man a narcotic. When his head was nodding, he struggled once to open his eyes.
“I don’t understand—anything—blades of grass—or anything,” he asserted sleepily, as I closed his door.
Exhaustion had brought its childlike petulance, but I knew that drowsiness would do its work, and that he was now safely stowed away for at least ten hours. He would not interfere with my plans before noon.
For a few moments that night I sat on the edge of my own bed.
“What if I am right?” I whispered to myself. “What a drama! What a peep into the unexplored corners of our souls!”
I went to the window. An early milk cart clattered along the thoroughfare with a figure noddingon its seat. When the mud-spattered white horse had reached a circle of light shed from the lamp on the street corner, the figure arose and, looking up at the stars in the rifts of the sky, pulled off and folded a rubber coat. The storm had blown away.
“He does a simple little act,” I said to myself as I watched the figure seat itself again. “His thoughts may be as simple. But the consequences of either! Who can say? Life itself is all on one side of a blue wall!”
Physicians, however, make good detectives. I mention this not to point out my own case particularly, but merely to call your attention to the fact that a good surgeon or practitioner has a training in those qualities of mind which produce a great solver of mysteries. A good physician must develop the powers of observation. In any physical disorder, knowing the cause, he must forecast the effect, or with the evidences of some effect before him, he must deduce the cause. Above all he must keep his mind from jumping at false conclusions, even though these conclusions are in line with all his former experiences. Physicians learn these principles by their mistakes in following clues. A good diagnostician has in him the material for an immortal police inspector. I speak modestly, and yet I must saythat the next morning proved that I was not mistaken in these theories.
Before nine o’clock I had arrived at the Marburys’. The banker himself opened the door.
“Doctor!” he cried, his face drawn out of its mask of eternal shrewdness and suspicion by a beaming smile, “what can I say? How can we ever show our gratitude?”
“Not so fast!” I reproved him. “There is danger in too much optimism. The disease is treacherous.”
“But Miss Peters, the nurse—she sees it, too! There can be no doubt. Our little Virginia is saved! You have done it!”
I shook my head.
“Not I.”
“Not you? Who, then?”
“Marbury,” said I, “I am just beginning to learn that there are other contagions than those of the body. Can we be sure, my good sir, that fear is not a disease? Do we know that love is not an infection? Can the criminal’s gloves, saturated with his personality, be safe for the hands of an honest man? Don’t we weaken by rubbing elbows with the weak? Are there not contagious germs of thought?”
He raised his eyebrows. Finance he knew well. Otherwise he was a stupid man.
“I do not believe I follow you,” he said nervously.“I was speaking of Virginia. She is so much better!”
I bowed to him politely, and, instead of entering the open door, descended the steps.
“You’re not coming in?” he exclaimed.
“Not yet,” said I. “To tell you the truth, I am looking in that grass plot next door for something dropped there. I see that no one has disturbed the grass. It has not even been cut. Hello! What’s this?”
I had reached down, picked up a metal cylinder and showed it to him.
“It looks like a rifle cartridge—one of those murderous steel-nosed bullet affairs,” said he.
“Something even more dangerous!” said I, thrusting it into my pocket. “Much more dangerous! Possibly you will believe that I am ungracious—rather odd as it were—not to mention its name.”
He shook his head. The mask of the polite student of percents had returned; he became formally polite.
“Not at all,” he answered, adjusting his black tie. “I had rather hoped you would stay to see my daughter.”
“Another crisis prevents,” I said, bowing at the door of my car. But the banker had turned his back.
“Where now, sir?” asked my chauffeur.
“The old Museum of Natural History.”
“All cobblestones in those streets, sir,” he said as we leaped forward again.
This was true. We fairly jounced our way to the old brownstone structure, which sat with such pathetic dignity on the square of discouraged grass, frowning at the surrounding tenements. The sign advertising the waxworks and “Collection of Criminology” still hung at the door of the lower floor.
“Tell me,” said I to the freckled girl who sold admissions, “is the Man with the Rolling Eye still here?”
She put down her embroidery and removed a long end of red silk thread which she had been carrying on the tip of her tongue.
“I should certainly say not!” she answered. “He’s all wore out. They couldn’t repair him any more.”
“The machine or the man?”
“Both,” said she. “But they weren’t much of an attraction. Of course there wasn’t supposed to be any man—only the machine—the automaticon they called it. But it didn’t make enough money the last year or two to pay the repairs. The old man that run it was a swell chessplayer. The old man got sick and the machine got broken. Both were about at the end of the rope. So he went away threeweeks ago and the machine is stored in the cellar now.”
“Where did you say the old man lived?” I asked.
“I didn’t say. But I’ll write it down for you. It’s a scene-painting loft over by the river.”
She scribbled on a slip of paper, “J. Lecompte, 5 East India Place.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Um-m. You can’t fool me,” said she. “You’re in the show business!”
This was a thrust of her curiosity, but I merely bowed and left her.
“Go home as quickly as you can,” I whispered to the chauffeur. “Give Mr. Estabrook, my guest, this slip of paper. Tell him to lose no time. Tell him to bring the revolver he will find in the top drawer of my desk! Don’t wait for me. I’ll walk.”
The man gazed at me stupidly a moment before he started the machine.
“He believes I am crazy,” I said to myself as I saw him turn the corner. “Whether or not he is right, the interview will be at least interesting.”
You will agree with me that these words forecasted accurately.
CHAPTER IIIN THE PAINTED GARDEN
East India Place is not a well-known thoroughfare. In fact, it is a court, hidden between truck stables and concealed also by the boxes and bales of commission merchants. Even on a sunshiny day the dank bottom of this court is dark and smells as if it were under rather than on the earth. A warehouse occupies one side, the other presents several doorways, which might once have been the entrances to sailors’ lodgings, but which now are plastered with the rude signs of junk dealers. The numbers on these houses were all even—2-4-8-10—which left me the conclusion that Number 5 must be the warehouse and that the scene-painting loft must be on the top floor of the grimy building. Indeed, I could see that a skylight had been superimposed on the roof and my eye caught the sign at the entrance, “The Mohave Scenic Studios.” I began the ascent of boxed wooden stairways, musty with the odors of ships’ cargoes. At the top a sign confronted me, “No Admittance Except on Business. This means You”; but beneath it in red, white, and blue paint, was the message, “Usedfor Storage. New Studio at 43 Barkiston Avenue.”
I knocked. There was no answer. I tried the stump of a knob; the door yielded. I found myself in a large room with rolls and rolls of canvas in piles and huge scenic back drops pendant from the high ceiling. A skylight above, with rotting curtains drawn across the square panes, threw a strange green glare over everything. A peculiar aromatic odor, such as is sometimes wafted over the footlights into the audience, gave the deserted place a theatrical flavor which was heightened by the presence of gilded papier-maché statuettes and a huge representation of the god Buddha leaning against the bare brick wall. A spider had spun a web above one of this god’s bare shoulders; it glinted in a chance ray of direct sunlight which had entered through a tear in the curtain overhead. Above me a staging held a kitchen chair, some fire pails, and several pots whose sides were smirched with the colors they contained. The only sign of human life was the faint warm odor of pipe smoke. Knowing, then, that some one beside myself was in the loft, I proceeded gingerly between two vast canvases which hung side by side, preparing myself on my soft-footed way down this aisle to see the man I sought as I emerged from the other end. I imagined I heard a nervous, suppressed cough,indicating that the other already knew of my invasion of his strange abode.
This was not the fact. For a moment, looking from the opening, I had ample opportunity, without being seen, to observe all that spread itself before me. A painted drop hung against the wall, upon which, in delicate colors of Italian blue and rich green, was stretched a vast, imposing, and beautiful view of the Gardens of Versailles, with a wealth of flowers in full bloom extending along the velvet greensward into the depth of the landscape, where, white and regal, walls and pillars rose toward the clear sky of spring. A modern grotesque had invaded this regal scene and forbidden ground, and had placed his cot, disordered with newspapers and ragged red blankets, so boldly in the foreground that at first sight the impropriety of his presence was shocking. I could see that the man sat upon his cot cross-legged; his back, pitifully thin under a spare white shirt, was turned toward me. With one sinewy, aged hand he fondled the wisps of faded hair upon his head; with the other he moved small objects over a flat board. He was a lonely monarch upon a throne of squalor; he was playing a solitary game of chess!
“The Sheik of Baalbec!” I whispered to myself.
The creature stopped, looked up at the skylight and its green curtains and drew a miserablesigh from the depths of his lungs. It was such a sigh that I could not restrain a shudder.
“Julianna,” said I.
He drew his head down between his shoulders like a frightened turtle and held himself stiffly as one who has been doused with a pail of ice water. For several moments he did not move; when at last he turned around, his expression was patient rather than vicious, sad rather than terror-stricken.
“What do you want?” he said, and held his mouth open so that he, too, seemed like an automaton, the springs of which had failed.
The pause gave me the opportunity to observe that he was not the man with the gold fillings. Indeed, the only part of him which seemed well preserved—which, as it were, he had saved from the wreck—was a row of white, even teeth!
“What do you want?” he repeated. “I have never seen you before. I know no reason for your speaking a word to me.”
“Your daughter—” I began.
“I have no daughter,” he cried, his eyes blazing with sudden passion. “Who are you? I tell you that you are talking nonsense. I have no daughter!”
“Fine words,” I said threateningly; “fine words. But this is no time for them. She is in vital danger—”
“Danger!” he screamed, clawing at the red blankets. “My God! Has it come? What form? Quick, I say! What form?”
“It is because you can shed light upon it that I have come,” said I. “We know little. She has sent her husband away—”
“Damn him!” he choked.
“She has locked herself in her room. She has been so for three weeks. The maid—”
“Margaret Murchie,” he whispered. “She believes that I am dead?”
I nodded.
“I know nothing,” he said. “The girl is not of me or mine.”
“Come, come,” said I. “It is time for disclosure.”
He arose, searched under the corner of the mattress a moment, and then, with a quick, panther-like movement, sprang upon the bed again, holding a revolver in his two claws.
“I have no idea of what you mean,” he cried. “I will not be questioned. If I shoot, it is self-defense. You understand that. Nor will any one be the wiser. She is not my daughter. I know nothing of her.”
“You know everything,” I cried, as anger made me reckless. “ It will not pay you to flourish that weapon. Listen!”
“Some one else coming!” he whispered.
“Yes,” I shouted. “You have seen him before. It is young Estabrook.”
The wizened creature immediately hid the revolver under the folds of the blanket and began to play nervously with the chessmen. Both of us waited, listening to the approach of the footsteps which came so cautiously behind the pendant canvas.
To see at last that I was right, that the newcomer was Estabrook, was a relief.
“Well,” said the young man, appearing suddenly around the corner. “I came. I thought I heard your voice, Doctor. You were talking?”
I pointed.
The worn, colorless face of the other man gazed up at us pathetically; his body had relaxed into the hollows of his disordered cot. Against the scene of regal gardens which was luminous as if the painted sky itself bathed all in the soft light of a spring evening, the man and his face were ridiculous and incongruous. His presence in that half-real setting seemed a satire upon the beauties achieved by man and God.
“Who?” asked Estabrook involuntarily.
“The Sheik of Baalbec,” I said.
The man looked up at me again.
“Mortimer Cranch,” said I.
He fell forward on his face. It was several moments before any of us moved. Cranch spokefirst. He had arisen, and now stood with his sad eyes fixed upon Estabrook, and I noticed for the first time that his mouth and lips showed suffering and, perhaps, strength.
“It is this, above all things, I hoped would never come,” said he. “You have resurrected me from the dead. I was buried. You have dug me up. Whatever good you may get from this strange meeting, make the most of it. If it will help to guard against the danger spoken of by this man you address as Doctor, I will be satisfied.”
“You dog!” cried Estabrook, hot with emotions of violence. “It is you who were responsible for the death of Judge Colfax.”
The other held out his knotted hands toward me.
“The whole story!” he cried. “Not a part. You must know the whole story.”
“Briefly,” I commanded.
He nodded, and began to pace the foreground of the Gardens of Versailles, back and forth like a tethered beast in a park. His voice was dispassionate. The narrative proceeded in a monotone. But if fiends could conceive a tale more dark, they would whisper it among themselves.
For this, told in the somewhat quaint narrative of a former generation, was his story.
BOOK VI
A PUPPET OF THE PASSIONS