Mrs. Balfame Part 18

"I was terrified." Mrs. Balfame retorted so promptly that Rush flashed her a glance of admiration. Here was a woman who could take care of herself on the witness stand. "First I thought I heard some one trying to get into the door, and then some one sneaking up the stairs."

"Oh--yes." Frieda's tones expressed no conviction. "The educated lady can think very quick. But I say that she have come in by the door, the kitchen door. Always I take the key to the hall door. She know that, and as she not know that I am in, she go out by the kitchen door. Always in the daytime when she goes to the yard she go by the hall door."

"What a pity you did not slam the door when you came in. It would have been quite natural as you were in such agony." Rush spoke sarcastically, but he was deeply perturbed. It was impossible to tell whether the girl was telling the truth or a carefully rehea.r.s.ed story.

"Of course you know that if you tell that story to the police you will get yourself into serious trouble."

"I get her into trouble."

"Mrs. Balfame is above suspicion. It is not my business to warn you, or to defeat the ends of the law, of which apparently you know nothing--"

"I know someting. Last night I have tell Herr Kraus; and he say that since I have told the coroner I know notings, much better I touch the lady for five hundert and go home."

"O-h-h! That is the advice Old Dutch gave you! Splendid! I think the best thing I can do is to have you arrested bright and early to-morrow morning. Mrs. Balfame is cleared already. You may go."

She stared at him for a moment out of eyes that spat fire like two little guns in the top of a fort; then she swung herself about and retreated to the kitchen.

"That ought to make her disappear to-night. Her friends will hide her.

The mere fact of her disappearance will convince the police, as well as the reporters, that she is guilty. You are all right." He spoke boyishly, and his face, no longer rigid, was full of light.

"But if she is innocent?"

"No harm done. She'll be smuggled out of the country and suspicion permanently diverted from you. That is all I care about." He caught her hands impulsively in his. "I am glad, so glad! Oh!--It is too soon now, but wait--" He was out of the house before she grasped the fact that he had arrested himself on the brim of another declaration.

Mrs. Balfame went up to bed, serene once more in the belief that her future was her own, unclouded, full of attractive possibilities for a woman of her position and intellectual attainments.

She made up her mind to take a really deep course of reading, so that the most spiteful should not call her superficial; moreover, she had been conscious more than once of certain mental dissatisfactions, of uneasy vacancies in a mind sufficiently awake to begin to realise the cheapness of its furnishings. Perhaps she would take a course in history at Columbia, another in psychology.

As she put herself into a st.u.r.dy cotton night-gown and then brushed back her hair from a rather large forehead before braiding it severely for the night, she realised dimly that that way happiness might lie, that the pleasures of the intellectual life might be very great indeed. She wished regretfully that she could have been brilliantly educated in her youth. In that case she would not have married a man who would incite any spirited woman to seek the summary release, but would be to-day the wife of a judge, perhaps--some fine fellow who had showed the early promise that Dwight Rush must have done. If she could attract one man like that, at the age of forty-two, she could have had a dozen in her train when young if she had had the sense to appreciate them.

But she was philosophical, and it was not her way to quarrel very deeply with herself or with life. Her long braids were as evenly plaited as ever.

She sank into sleep, thinking of the disagreeable necessity of making the kitchen fire in the morning and cooking her own breakfast. Frieda of course would be gone.

CHAPTER XVII

The next morning, when Mrs. Balfame, running lightly down the back stairs, entered the kitchen half an hour earlier than her usual appearance in the dining-room, the front of her housefrock covered with a large ap.r.o.n and her sleeves pinned to the elbow, she beheld Frieda slicing potatoes.

"Why!" The exclamation was impetuous, but her quick mind adapted itself.

"I woke up early and thought I would come down and help," she continued evenly. "You have had so much to do of late."

Frieda was regarding her with intense suspicion. "Never you have done that before," she growled. "You will see if I have the dishes by the dinner washed."

"Nonsense. And everything is so different these days. I am hungry, too.

I thought it would be nice to hurry breakfast."

"Breakfast always is by eight. You have told me that when I come. I get up by half past six. First I air the house, and sweep the hall. Then I make the fire and put the water to boil. Then I peel the potatoes. Then I make the biscuit. Then I boil the eggs. Then I make the coffee--"

"I know. You are marvellously systematic. But I thought you might make the coffee at once."

"Always the coffee come last." Frieda resumed her task.

"But I don't eat potatoes for breakfast."

"I eat the potatoes. When they fry in the pan, then I put the biscuit in the oven. Then I boil the eggs and then I make the coffee. Breakfast is by eight o'clock."

Mrs. Balfame, with a good-humoured laugh, turned to leave the kitchen.

But her mind, alert with apprehension, cast up a memory, vague but far from soothing. "By the way, I seem to remember that I woke up suddenly in the night and heard voices down here. Did you have visitors?"

Frieda flushed the deep and angry red of her infrequent moments of embarra.s.sment. "I have not visitors in the night." She turned on the water tap, which made noise enough to discourage further attempts at conversation; and Mrs. Balfame, to distract her mind, dusted the parlour. She dared not go out into the yard and walk off her restlessness, for there were now two sentinels preserving what they believed to be a casual att.i.tude before her gate. She would have given much to know whether those men were watching her movements or those of her servant.

Immediately after breakfast, the systematic Frieda was persuaded to go to the railway station and buy the New York papers when the train came in. Frieda might be a finished product of the greatest machine shop the world has ever known, but she was young and she liked the bustle of life at the station, and the long walk down Main Street, so different from the aristocratic repose of Elsinore Avenue. Mrs. Balfame, watching behind the curtain, saw that one of the sentinels followed her. The other continued to lean against the lamp-post whittling a stick. Both she and Frieda were watched!

But the disquiet induced by the not unnatural surveillance of premises identified with a recent crime was soon forgotten in the superior powers of the New York press to excite both disquiet and indignation.

She had missed a photograph of herself while dusting the parlour and had forgiven the loyal thief as it was a remarkably pretty picture and portrayed a woman sweet, fashionable, and lofty. To her horror the picture which graced the first page of the great dailies was that of a hard defiant female, quite certain, without a line of letter press, to prejudice a public anxious to believe the worst.

Tears of outraged vanity blurred her vision for a few moments before the full menace of that silent witness took possession of her. She knew that most people deteriorated under the mysterious but always fatal encounter of their photographs with the "staff artist," but she felt all the sensations of the outraged novice.

A moment after she had dashed her tears away she turned pale; and when she finished reading the interviews the beautiful whiteness of her skin was disfigured by a greenish pallor.

The interviews were written with a devilish cunning that protected the newspapers from danger of libel suit but subtly gave the public to understand that its appet.i.te for a towering figure in the Balfame case was about to be gratified.

There was no doubt that two shots had been fired from the grove simultaneously, and from revolvers of different calibre (picture of tree and gate).

Was one of them--the smaller--fired by a woman? And if so, by what woman?

Not one of the females whose names had been linked at one time or another with the versatile Mr. Balfame but had proved her alibi, and so far as was known--although of course some one as yet unsuspected may have climbed the back fence and hid in the grove--the only two women on the premises were the widow and her extraordinarily plain servant.

Balfame was shot with a .41 revolver. In one of the newspapers it was casually and not too politely remarked that Mrs. Balfame had larger hands and feet than one would expect from her general elegance of figure and aristocratic features, and in the same rambling sentence (this was written by the deeply calculating Mr. Broderick) the public was informed that certain footprints might have been those of a large woman or of a medium sized man. In the next paragraph but one Mrs. Balfame's stately height was again commented upon, but as the public had already been informed that she was an expert at target practice, reiteration of this fact was astutely avoided.

A great deal was said here and there of her composure, her large studiously expressionless grey eyes, her nimble mind that so often routed her inquisitors, but was allied to a temperament of ice and a manifest power of cool and deliberate calculation.

The dullest reader was quickened into the belief that he was the real detective and that his unerring sense had carried him straight to the woman who had hated the murdered man and had quarrelled with him in public a few hours before his death.

The episode of Mrs. Balfame's offer to make her husband a gla.s.s of doctored lemonade and the disappearance of both beverage and gla.s.s was not mentioned; presumably these bright young men did not believe in digressions or in rousing a curiosity they might not be able to appease.

The interview concluded with a maddening hint at immediate developments.

Mrs. Balfame let the papers drop to the floor one by one; when she had finished the last she drew her breath painfully for several moments. The room turned black, and it was cut by rows of bared and menacing teeth, infinitely multiplied.

But she was not the woman to give way to fear for long, or even to bewilderment. There could be no real danger, and all that should concern her was the outrageous, the intolerably vulgar publicity. A woman whose good taste was both natural and cultivated, she felt this ruthless tossing of her sacred person into the public maw much as the more refined octoroons may have felt when they stood on the auction block in the good old days down South. She shuddered and gritted her teeth; she wished that she were a hysterical woman that she might find relief in shrieking at the top of her voice and smashing the furniture.

Why, oh why, could not David Balfame have been permitted by the fate which had decreed his end on that particular night to enter the house and drink the lemonade; to die decently, painlessly, bloodlessly (she shrank aside when compelled to pa.s.s those blood stains on the brick path), as any man might die when his overtaxed heart simply stopped? She would have run down the moment she heard the fall, she would have managed to get the gla.s.s out of the way if Frieda had condescended to visit the scene, which was quite unlikely. She would have run over to Doctor Lequer, who lived next door to the Gifnings, and he would have sent for the coroner. Both inevitably would have p.r.o.nounced the death due to heart failure. It was fate that had bungled, not she.

She mused, however, that she should have had a duplicate gla.s.s of lemonade to leave half consumed on the table, as it would be recalled that he had expected to imbibe a soothing draught immediately upon his return; and adjacent liquids invariably induce suspicion in cases of sudden death. But that did not matter now.