Flint Part 37

She tossed the letter across the table to Miss Standish, and touched the bell under her foot.

"McGregor," she said, as the man appeared, "did you hear any one go out of the house this morning?"

"I thought I did, Miss Winifred, about six o'clock, before light,--that is, I was justly sure I heard the front door shut; but when I got there it was all right, except the outer door was unlocked, and that often happens when your father is at the Club. He do forget now and then."

"Three hours' start!" said Winifred to herself, then aloud: "McGregor, go at once to 'The Chancellor' and leave word for Mr. Flint to come here. Wait--I will send a note. Oh dear! why didn't I foresee this possibility?"

"Come!" said Miss Standish, who, even in her excitement, could swallow the last of her cup of hot coffee,--"come, let us go upstairs and see if the foolish girl has not left some clew!"

As Winifred and Miss Standish pa.s.sed out at the parlor door, Master Jimmy entered from the hall, sleek and smiling in his holiday attire.

"Great Scott!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "What started Miss Standish off like that? Our stairs make the old lady puff when she takes 'em on the slow, and at this rate Fred will have to carry her half-way.

Something's up, that's evident. Never mind, I'm not in it. McGregor,"

he called, "bring on those griddle-cakes; I smell 'em cooking. Quick now, while there's no one here to count how many I eat! Hurrah for Thanksgiving!"

McGregor failed to appear at Master Jimmy's call, and when Maria came, she said he had been sent out on an errand.

"What's up?" asked Jimmy, between mouthfuls.

"Oh, nothing--nothing--I wonder will they have the police?"

"Cops!" cried Jimmy, waking up for the first time to a genuine interest in the family excitement. "Has any one gone off with the spoons? It would be just my luck to have had a burglar in the house last night and me never got a pop at him with my air-gun loaded and close by the bed."

"It's no burglar," said the maid, with mystery in her tones.

"Not McGregor drunk!" shouted Jimmy, with a scream of delight. "That would be too good a joke."

"McGregor drunk, indeed!" sniffed Maria, indignantly. "If every one as came to this house was as good as McGregor, it would be a fine thing; but when it comes to takin' in all sorts and making a Harbor of Refuge out of a respectable home--I'm not surprised _whatever_ may happen."

"Oh, hold your tongue, Maria. Don't be a fool! Get me some more cakes, while I go up and ask Fred what's the matter. It won't take _her_ half an hour to get it out, I'll bet."

With this cheerful observation Jimmy vanished, and Maria disappeared down the kitchen stairs, declaring that that boy was "a perfect gintleman."

When Flint entered the Anstices' drawing-room a little later, Winifred was standing by the window, and though she turned away quickly, it was evident that she had been watching for him.

The thought thrilled him.

"What shall we do? Oh, what shall we do?" she broke out, as he came up to her.

He took her hands; they were burning hot.

"First of all, I will tell you what _not_ to do," Flint answered. "You are not to work yourself into a fever of distress over this unfortunate business. The responsibility is not yours but mine, and the burden of anxiety is to be mine and not yours."

"Oh, never mind me! What about Tilly Marsden? It is dreadful to think of her wandering about this great city entirely alone--and she such a simpleton. Of course, it's hopeless to try to find her. Papa says so."

"Not so hopeless as you think," said Flint, with a trifle more a.s.surance than he felt in his inmost heart. "New York stands for two things to a girl like her,--the shops and the theatres,--her ideas of the 'amus.e.m.e.nt' she speaks of in the note you sent me would be limited to one of these. Now, as this is a holiday, none of the shops would be open, and that limits it to the theatres. I shall have detectives at the door of every theatre this afternoon."

"How clever you are," murmured Winifred, "how clever and how sympathetic! You have such feeling for everybody in trouble."

This was too much for even Flint's sense of humor, which had suffered somewhat, as every one's does, from the process of falling in love.

His lips twitched.

"Then I am not more obtuse than any one you ever saw, when the sufferings of others are involved?"

"Don't, pray, don't bring up the things I said that night!" cried Winifred, blushing rosy red.

"This is no time for jesting, dear, I know," Flint answered, coming close to her as she stood against the filmy lace curtain. "No time either for jesting or hoping; only your words did give me a gleam of encouragement to think that perhaps a girl who changed her mind so much in a few weeks might have wavered a little in a few days. Is it possible--Winifred, before I go away, as I must at once--could you find it in your heart to say 'I love you'?"

Winifred made him no answer, at least in words; but she came close to him, and laid both hands on his arm with a touching gesture of trustful affection.

So absorbed were they in one another that they did not notice how near they stood to the window, or that the curtain was too diaphanous quite to conceal them from view. Suddenly into their world of ecstatic oblivion came a crash, a sound of falling gla.s.s, a dull thud against the wall opposite to the window.

"Great Heavens!" cried Flint, looking anxiously at Winifred. "What was that? Are you sure you're not hurt, my darling?"

Even as he spoke, another report was heard outside, and, throwing open the curtains, they saw a man on the other side of the street stagger and fall. Flint rushed to the door, down the steps and across the sidewalk. A crowd had already collected.

"He is dead,--stone dead," said one, kneeling with his hand over his heart.

"Queer, isn't it--on Thanksgiving Day too?" said another.

"Who is he?--a countryman by his looks," said a third. "Fine-looking chap, too, with that crop of curly hair and these broad shoulders."

"Faith!" murmured an old woman, "it's some mother's heart 'ull bleed this day." And pulling out her beads, she knelt on the sidewalk to say a prayer over the parting soul.

The prostrate form lying along the pavement had a certain tragic dignity, almost majesty, in its att.i.tude. One arm was pressed to the heart, the other thrown out in a gesture of abandonment to despair.

The revolver, which had dropped from the nerveless hand, lay still smoking beside the still figure. From a wound in the left temple under the dark curls the blood trickled in a red stream. Death was in his look. The lips were turning blue, and the eyes glazing rapidly.

Flint came close to the dying man, and then shrank back with an involuntary start of horror. "Leonard Davitt!" he murmured below his breath. In an instant the whole situation was clear to him. By one of those flashlights which the mind sometimes sheds on a scene before it, making the hidden places clear and turning darkness to daylight, he grasped the truth. He knew that by some unlucky chance Leonard had come to New York, had seen him and Tilly Marsden in conversation, had seen them come here together, had fancied that he was wronged. Then this morning again he must have seen him with Winifred at the window,--Winifred mistaken for the girl he loved,--and then jealousy quite mastered the brooding brain, and the end was _this_.

As Flint stood over the boy's body, a great weight of sadness fell upon him. He felt like one of the figures in a Greek tragedy, innocent in intent, but drawn into a fatal entanglement of evil, and made an instrument of woe to others as innocent as himself. The blue sky above in its azure clearness seemed a type of the indifference of Heaven, the chill of the pavement a symbol of the coldness of earth. These thoughts, chasing each other through his brain with lightning rapidity, still left it clear for action.

"Stand away there, and give the man air!" he cried, clearing a little s.p.a.ce. "Go for a doctor, somebody,--quick!"

"Oh, can it be Leonard Davitt!" whispered Winifred under her breath, as pale and trembling with emotion she drew near the edge of the crowd. "Poor boy! What shall we say to his mother?"

"Hush!" Flint answered. "May we carry him into the house?"

"Of course--of course. Oh, do hurry with the doctor. Perhaps he is not dead, after all."

With that ready adaptiveness which in Americans so often supplies the place of training, four of the men stepped forward, and lifting the body gently bore it up the steps and through the open door into the drawing-room, and laid it on the lounge just under the bullet-hole in the wall.

A doctor bustled in, box in hand. He made no effort to open his case, however. One look was sufficient.

"Death must have been instantaneous," he said. "What a queer thing,--a suicide on Thanksgiving Day!"

CHAPTER XXII