Persons Unknown Part 40

Once again, as on that night in August, a dark room lay waiting; the darkness seemed to breathe. He had matches in his pocket and once again the light discovered only emptiness. But he remembered what, that other time, the inner chamber had revealed. He found a candle and then a lamp, and, lighting that, crossed the dining-room and then the hall into the living-room. All prettily upholstered, all in order, and vacant as the eye of idiotcy. His soul knew there was nothing living in that house; and yet it seemed to him there would surely be a step upon the stair, that a voice behind him or an opening door would certainly reveal some fateful presence. There in the hall, under the stairs, a door was open and he paused to look into a closet.

It contained a sink with running water, gardening tools, wraps hanging upon nails, and, on the floor, a big silk umbrella without a handle, the rod recently broken. There were also some old flower-pots, two of them half full of earth. Nothing else.

At the foot of the stairs he called out, "Christina!" and stood and listened while his voice went dying about the empty house.

"Christina--it's I--Bryce!" and then "Nancy Cornish! Can you hear me, Nancy Cornish?" But no face leaned over the bal.u.s.ters to him. He went upstairs. But his step was heavy, and up there the silence weighed on him, like silence in a vault. Two rooms on the left told him nothing.

But in a room on his right he found a small forgotten slipper. That slipper had fitted the slim foot of some littler maid than Christina!

Holding the lamp high, he was struck to see the transom covered with poultry-wire. He went at once to the windows. Yes, there were the holes in the woodwork; even, here and there, a nail. There had been poultry wire over the windows, too. In this room some one had been held a prisoner. They had taken her away; and in such haste that they had forgotten to strip the transom and they had forgotten her slipper. At one side of the room a desk lay open, all its drawers pulled out and empty; he s.n.a.t.c.hed at the waste basket; there was a crumpled sheet of paper in it and a handful of torn-up sc.r.a.ps. He shook the sc.r.a.ps into his handkerchief and, setting the lamp on the desk, he bent above the crumpled sheet. There leaped before him, in an illiterate, but very firm hand, an opening of such unimpeachable decorum as to stagger his prying eyes.

Mrs. Hope,

Honored Madam,

There was no date or other heading. The note ran:

Mrs. Hope,

Honored Madam,

Would say don't come here or send. You can tell where by knowing my handwriting. She is not here. Where she is now I got no idee on earth. I surmise she will be heard from.

There was no signature. Why had the letter not been sent? It had evidently been volunteered upon some early intimation of Christina's disappearance. "Perhaps they found out, later, that Mrs. Hope had gone away--" Then he heard Stanley hailing him from the road.

The sheriff's party, taking advantage of his house breaking, were with him immediately. They examined the place from the small, bare, air-chamber into which Stanley, mounting on Herrick's shoulders, stuck his head, to the cellar; where only a coal-bin, almost empty beneath their flinching quest, an ice-box, and an admirable array of preserves confronted them.

Upstairs, clothes had been found in all the closets--the clothes of working people for the most part; but in one, the long, slim, sophisticatedly simple gowns of a pretty woman. In that room they had forced another desk, which kept them busy for a while with tradesmen's bills, all made out, regularly enough, to Nicola Pascoe. Nowhere was there a letter, no significant writing nor any other name. In the barn a couple of trunks disgorged only some winter coats and a smell of camphor; the tools in the shed were in empty order, and when, considerably soiled and stuck about with lint and hay, they met again in the composed and pretty living-room, there on the mantelshelf the face of Christina Hope smiled mockingly at them from a silver frame.

Indifferent to prayer or scrutiny, it had nothing to tell them. And it seemed to ask if they, on their part, had anything to say.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Nowhere was there a letter, no significant writing nor any other name.]

Herrick never knew what instinct took him back to the closet under the stairs. He could not bear to leave it; there was a little broken gla.s.s on the floor and a sudden wavering in his lamp suggested that this came from a break in one of the minute panes in a small window over head. He tried to reach this window to see if it were fastened and found it nailed down, with outside shutters that were closed. But in getting near enough for this he knocked over one of the flower-pots. "Find anything?"

Stanley cried, bounding forward.

The smashed flower-pot lay at their feet. "No, only broken something!"

Herrick instinctively picked it up and the loosened earth parted in his hand. "Yes, after all," he said, "I think I have." There had been buried, smooth and deep in the flower-pot, the diamond necklace.

CHAPTER VII

VANISHING LADY: THE SHADOW AT THE DANCE

The countryside slept vigorously and an hour's exhaustive inquiry gleaned but the one circ.u.mstance--the search party itself discovered, pinned to the first door they came to, a note informing the neighbor he might have the livestock in lieu of certain debts. It had not been there when the man had closed his house at nine o'clock. This limitation of time was their sole reward, unless they counted the talk of an old farmer, after the sheriff, promising to drop the detectives at Riley's, had gone on to his post-office. The farmer said that hours ago, when he'd been ever so long in bed and asleep, he thought he heard somebody hollerin' an' bangin' on his door. Kind o' half dreamed it. Kind o' half fancied it was a woman's voice. Storm was so bad he warn't sure. It was with this pale fancy to keep them company that Herrick and Stanley let out their car along the road again, this time in a dryly nipping air and under a troubled, scudding moon.

From that desert purity and freedom of cold s.p.a.ce Riley's accosted them like Babylon. It was one blare and glare of hot lights and jigging music; colored globes over the gates, colored lanterns in the garden; along the driveway the blazing headlights of continually arriving and departing motor cars that hissed and shrieked and shuddered; on the veranda, where the tables indeed were nearly deserted, fur-coated men stood smoking huge cigars and women with complexions artificially secure against the wind pa.s.sed in and out; their solitaire earrings pushed forward beyond the streaming scarlet or purple of the veils that bound their heads. The change of atmosphere warmed Herrick with that unreasonable anger which the young feel against those who do not suffer when they suffer.

He followed Stanley Ingham morosely through the hubbub and felt no fitting grat.i.tude for the table miraculously provided with a fortifying meal, since Thompson, the chief detective, had not yet been able to get Kane upon the 'phone. The cabman was upstairs under guard of the others, babbling some trash about having taken the lady to the Amsterdam hotel and left her there. The thick smoke, the smell of wine and food and abominable coffee, the clatter of cheap china, the banging of the music and the motions of the "trotting" dancers in street dress, the cries of acquaintances urging them to new contortions, disgusted Herrick and set an edge upon the iron of his self-contempt. The woman calling and knocking in the night confronted him like a ghost, in the rank profusion and fever of that place. He, to eat and drink and wile away the time; what was _she_ doing? Was that she who had begged in vain for shelter, beaten by the wind and drenched by the storm, and with G.o.d knew what terrors in her heart! Out of her pale face, with the rain upon it, her eyes besought him.

Stanley, anxious, but waving a cigar, for at twenty an adventure is still an adventure, commented, "Say, old man, you want to relax! I could let things wear on me, too, if I wanted to!--What are those?"--For the detective having again fidgetted to the 'phone, Herrick had shaken out upon the table-cloth the handful of torn sc.r.a.ps from the waste-paper basket.

They were in the same handwriting as the interrupted note, but much more hurried and scrawled on cheap pad paper as if to a more intimate a.s.sociate. Only six of them were of appreciable size and these came to Herrick's hand in this order--

This time get rid of her.

I say. She but she can't g real dau mother

et rid do the way een any She can but mebbe of she's got to ain't ever b ghter to me

At the phrase "get rid of her" Stanley quailed. But what the words brought clearest to Herrick's mind was a small, spare face in its gray frame bent above its game of solitaire. Without help from the law could he make her speak? He heard Stanley saying, "How did Chris ever get mixed up with this lot? What kind of hold _can_ they have on her?"

"Sssh!'" he said, dropping his handkerchief over the sc.r.a.ps. The detective was returning.

Thompson sat down at their table, baulked and restive, and Herrick, a hundred times more so, was reduced to scowling at their surroundings.

Near him sat a wrinkled, enameled, fluffy mite stubbing out her cigarette as she giggled at a masculine bulk whose face Herrick could not see. Dark and handsome as it vaguely promised to be this did not account for a curiosity which Herrick somehow at once felt to see it; but between them reared a gorged Amazon with a high bust and a coiffure of corrugated bra.s.s. The band struck up again, this time to a music-hall ditty, so that the customers kept their seats. But the hired singers were straining their poor voices above the tumult and some musicians blacked up as negroes joined in the chorus, performing shuffles as they walked up and down and slapping steps with a dreary, noisy simulation of irrepressible glee; infected by this whirl of gaiety the Amazon frisked back from the little dyed man to whom she had been bending and gave Herrick a clear view of a portly seigneur with a close beard. Instinct had not misled his curiosity; the portly seigneur was his old acquaintance, Signor Emile Gabrielli.

He could not have told why this struck him as portentous. The men smiled and bowed. Then Gabrielli bowed to Stanley. "Didn't you know?" Stanley asked. "He brought us letters--this is his first visit. He's going to do our Italian correspondence."

It was the more remarkable that there should be, in Signor Gabrielli's honeyed civility, a kind of chill. Then Herrick remembered that he, at least, was a marked man and that his old suspicion of shady corners in the lawyer's experience had been partly due to that gentleman's extreme dislike of being "mixed up" in things. Henrietta Deutch could also have borne witness to that characteristic! Far from advancing toward their old familiarity the signor began to round up his innocent flock and insinuate it mildly from Herrick's polluted neighborhood. And though this splendor retreated Herrick did not regret being left alone, as if beside the dear ghost with the rain upon its face!

But there was a singular beating at his heart, a feeling that he was plucking at a veil which he longed and feared to raise. Yet that at some other time he had raised it and lived through a shock upon the threshold of which he stood again. It was already time for another dance and the groups about the tables rose to their feet. Herrick had a moment's vision, fever keen, of the room's arrested motion. Even the Gabrielli party paused in the doorway; Herrick was moved by an uncontrollable impulse to follow and accost the Italian and oddly impelled by his excitement Stanley, too, rose to his feet; all round them the couples clasped each other; the musicians lifted their bows; after ten minutes'

enforced repose the whole world seemed to hang in expectation of the maxixe. When, just ahead of the orchestra, from somewhere outside, beyond, above, into that instant's perfect silence there thrilled forth the voice of a single instrument; the full-tongued call of a piano, leaping, swelling, swaying into the march from Faust!

A gasp of amazement, a p.r.i.c.kle, a shudder, ran over the skin of that susceptible a.s.sembly. It was a tune, just then, so well advertised! They recovered themselves with amused, scared smiles, awaiting some jest in the sequel. The piano stopped with a wild crash. Instantly, from the front courtyard where the motors waited, a bomb of oaths, cries and movement burst upon the night. The sound of men jumping and running, exclaiming, stumbling, swearing, of people bounding up the steps, of the hall filled with astonished, excited questioners merged with one phrase growing over, topping all the others--"The shadow! It's the shadow! The shadow on the blind!"

Amazement, bewilderment, incredulity, obstructed the story which Herrick traced to a knot of chauffeurs. "Yes--up there! The third window! Look, it's dark--they've turned out the lights!" As Stanley, Herrick and Thompson ran to the second story the legend still beat about their ears.

"It had its back to the window--it threw out its right arm--"

The door of the room was thrown open. The proprietor's wife, shaken with hysterical laughter, ushered in the crowd. She was a flushed, stout woman in the gaudiest of kimonos, larger than the fat man in the driving-coat to whom she appealed. "My brother here 's from Mizzouri and I was just showing him how the shadow must have done--you can't earn any reward's round here! Anyhow, you don't suppose that hussy spends all her time giving signals for murders, do you?"--"But the shadow was so slim!"

somebody said, as Mrs. Riley scornfully a.s.sisted Thompson in his researches. These coming to nothing the young men were powerless to refuse going oil to Benning's Point and telephoning from there--Thompson had begun to be suspicious of this exchange.

They had gone perhaps a mile, moving slowly, watchful of the leaves in every bush, and Herrick was remounting from the examination of a false alarm when they heard a hail in their rear and beheld approaching through the moonlight a hatless figure on a motorcycle.

The elderly cousin of Joe Patrick, whom they had not seen since he first welcomed them, bore down upon them in timid and disheveled haste.--"Yis, sor. I tried to see y' alone, sor, but yeh were gone. 'T is the reward, sor; I'd not be sharin' it with the policeman an' him takin' th' whole of it, not a doubt! An' impidence, beside, they do always give yeh! But a gintleman, sor, I don't mind tellin' him; if yeh 'll exscuse me sayin'

so, Mrs. Riley's a liar!"

Not that he really knew anything. "No more than yirselves! But the piana, sor! It stands there fer the upstairs dances, an' her not knowin'

wan note from another!--An' what's more, comin' down the back stairs from that same room wid the dhirty dishes, what did I see standin' at the back door but a car like yer own--only still as death an' no lights in its head! Wasn't that a queer thing, now? An' it gone whin I rode out."

What was that?--down the road which crossed theirs, where they had just reconnoitered for a sound! Nothing but their distorted fancy, their roused longing! "An' all I can tell surely, sor, is that awhile back, whin Riley sinds me upstairs with a bite o' supper for Mrs. Riley's brother that's just come in, barrin' the long drink, stheamin' hot, 'twas chicken an' like that yeh'd give to a lady. He has his own room, has the brother, but 'twas to hers I took the thray. An' though I saw no wan an' I heard no wan, yit sure there was some wan beyond Riley she was yellin' at an' him prayin' her 'Hoosh! Hoosh!' as I come to the door!"

"Did you hear anything of what she was saying?"

"Just the wan thing, sor, an' you'll remimber 'twas me told yeh. She said, 'I'll thank yeh to hand over that diamond necklace!'"

There was something there! They could not hear, but they could somehow feel from far behind them a stealthy purring. They turned; no lamp nor headlight but their own was anywhere to be seen. The second and less traveled road crossed theirs just above them at a narrow angle; but it, too, lay untenanted, not a breath quivering on the stillness. They saw themselves quite alone beneath the moon, breathing a night silence drenched with coldest sweetness; the last words rang in their blood with an accent that could not leave them wholly sober; they were, perhaps, a little "fey." At any rate, it was by an impulse with which reason had nothing to do that, as the old waiter continued--"'Twas for her, surely, they'd have that dark car waitin'!" Herrick held up a warning hand. The waiter hushed himself, stricken, and huddled in against their car; Herrick bent forward in a pa.s.sionate readiness, and from far in the rear, but nearing swifter than the flight of time, along the intersecting road came the tremulous vibration of a second automobile.