The House of Mystery Part 13

Norcross started.

"Please do not think I got _that_ by any supernormal means!" she added quickly. "I mention it only to be frank with you. From the moment I saw you, I was perplexed by a memory and a resemblance. Then, too, I caught the air of big things about you. That att.i.tude which you have just taken solved it all. It is the counterpart of your photograph in last Sunday's _Times_--the full-page snap shot. I must be frank with you or you will not believe me."

The mustache of Norcross raised just a trifle, and his eyes glittered.

"Pa.s.sing over what I may think of your revelations," he said, "you're a remarkable woman."

"If you're coming again," said Mrs. Markham, "perhaps you'd better not delve into my personality. It interferes. Understand, I'm really flattered to have a man like you take notice of this work. That's why I ask that your notice shan't be personal. At least not yet."

"Since this is a--a--professional relation, may I ask how much I owe you?"

"My price is twenty-five dollars a sitting--for those who can afford it."

Norcross drew out his wallet, handed Mrs. Markham three bills. Without looking at them, she dropped them on the table beside her. "You see,"

she went on as though her mind were still following their discussion, "I don't like to talk much with my--patients. I never can know when I may unconsciously steal from what they tell me."

At the entrance, Norcross hesitated, as though hoping for something more than a good-night. No more than that did she give him, however. He himself was obliged to introduce the subject in his mind. "If I should come again, would Helen tell me more?"

"Perhaps. From the excellent result to-night I should call it likely."

"Then may I come again?" His voice broke once, as with eagerness.

"Certainly. Will you make an appointment?"

"Tuesday night?"

"I had an engagement for Tuesday. Could you come as well on Friday?"

And though it meant postponing a directors' meeting, he answered promptly:

"Very well. Say Friday at eight."

And now he was in his automobile. He settled himself against the cushions and held the att.i.tude, without motion. For five minutes he sat so, until the chauffeur, who had been throwing nervous backward glances through the limousine windows, asked:

"I beg your pardon, sir, did you say 'home'?"

"Yes, home," responded Norcross. And even on those words, his voice broke again.

Mrs. Markham stood beside the table, hardly moving, until she knew by whir and horn that the Norcross automobile was gone. Then she sent Ellen to bed, and herself moved quickly to a secretary in the little alcove library back of the drawing-room. Taking a key from her bosom, she unlocked a drawer and took out a packet of yellow legal cap paper.

Holding this doc.u.ment concealed in a fold of her waist, she pa.s.sed rapidly to an apartment upstairs. She opened the door softly, and listened. Nothing sounded within but the light, even breathing of a sleeper. After a moment, she crossed the room, finding her way expertly in the darkness. Well within, she knelt and began some operation on the floor.

And her hand made a slip. A crash echoed through the house. Following the startled, half-articulate cry of a sudden awakening, Mrs. Markham, still finding her way with marvelous precision in the darkness, pa.s.sed through a set of portieres and crossed to the bed.

"Hush, dear," she said, "I only came upstairs to borrow a handkerchief.

Go to sleep. I'm sure it won't bother your rest. Don't think of it again."

IX

ROSALIE'S SECOND REPORT

As though to prove her maxim, "Nothing turns out the way you expect it," Rosalie, on her second Tuesday off, failed to meet her anxious young employer in the ladies' parlor of the Hotel Greenwich. Instead came a page, calling "Dr. Blake!" It was a note--"Stuyvesant Fish Park as soon as you get this. R. Le G.," it read. Dr. Blake leaped into a taxicab and hurried to the rendezvous. He spied her on a park bench, watching with interest the maneuvers of the little Russian girls, as they swarmed over the rocker swings. Even before he came within speaking distance of her, he perceived that something must have happened--read it in her att.i.tude, her manner of one who lulls a suppressed excitement. When she turned to answer his quick "Mme. Le Grange!" her cheeks carried a faint color, and her gray eyes were shining. But her face was serious, too; her dimples, barometer of her gayer emotions, never once rippled. Before he was fairly seated, she tumbled out the news in a rush:

"Well! I never was more fooled in my life!"

"She's a fraud!" He jumped joyously to conclusions. "You can prove it!"

Rosalie put a slender finger to her lips.

"Not so loud. Yids have ears. I ain't dead sure of anything now. I ain't even sure she don't have me followed when I leave the house.

That's why I sent for you to change meeting places. There's nothing as safe as outdoors, because you can watch the approaches."

"But is she a fake? Can you prove it?" persisted Dr. Blake.

"I'm a woman," responded Rosalie Le Grange, "not a newspaper reporter.

I can't tell my story in a headline before I git to it. I've got to go my own gait or I can't go at all. Now you listen and don't interrupt, or I'll explode. It goes back, anyhow, into our last talk.

"I was comin' downstairs in the afternoon a week ago Thursday, and I saw Ellen let in a man. Good-looking man. Good dresser. Seemed about thirty-five till you looked over his hands and the creases around his eyes, when you saw he was risin' forty-five if a day. Stranger, I guess, for Ellen kept him waiting in the hall. He read the papers while he waited, and he didn't look at nothing but the financial columns. I took it from that, he was in Wall Street, though you can't never tell in New York, where they all play the market or the ponies. I didn't wait to size him up real careful; that wouldn't do. I just pa.s.sed on down to the pantry and then pa.s.sed back again. He was still there. This time he had put up his newspapers, and he was looking over some pencil notes on that yellow legal cap paper. He didn't hear me until I was close on him, the rugs in the hall are that big and soft. But when I did get close, he jumped like I had caught him in something crooked and made like he was goin' to hide the sheets. Of course, I didn't look at him, but just kept right on upstairs. When I turned into the second floor, I heard Ellen say, 'Mrs. Markham will receive you.' I didn't pay no attention to that at the time. It was only one of twenty little things I remembered. Stayed in the back of my head, waitin' to tie up with something else.

"Come Tuesday--week ago to-day and my afternoon off. I was comin' home early, about nine o'clock. I've got front door privileges, but I generally use the servants' entrance just the same. Right ahead of me, a green automobile with one of those limousine bodies drove up to the front door. It's dark down in the area by the servants' entrance. I stopped like I was huntin' through my skirt for my key, and looked. Out of the automobile come a man. He turned around to speak to the chauffeur and I got the light on his face. _Who_ do you suppose it was?

Robert H. Norcross!"

"The railroad king?"

Rosalie pursed her lips and nodded wisely.

"How did you know? You've never seen him before."

"Ain't it my business to know the faces of everybody? What do I read the personals in the magazines for? You'd know Theodore Roosevelt if you saw him first time, wouldn't you? But I made surer than that. Next day I matched the number of his automobile with the automobile register. That number belongs to Robert H. Norcross."

Dr. Blake whistled.

"Playing for big game!" he said.

"That was what struck me," said Rosalie, "and while it wasn't impossible that this Mr. Norcross might have a straight interest in the spirit world--well, when you see big medium and big money together, it looks like big _fake_. And there was the man with the notes who read the financial pages--he jumped back into my mind.

"The servants' entrance comes out through the kitchen onto the second floor. When I come into the hall, Ellen was waiting for me. She was tiptoeing and whispering.

"'Mrs. Markham,' she says, 'wanted that I should tell you she has sitters unexpected. There's some of her devil doin's going on downstairs to-night. She wanted me to catch you when you came in and ask you to go very quiet to your room.'

"While I went upstairs, I listened hard. Just before I came out on the landing of the servants' hall, I heard a bell ring, away down below.

Just a little ring--b-r-r. Now, you know if there's one thing more 'n another that I've got, it's ears--and ears that remember, too. I hadn't been a day in that house when I knew every bell in it and who was ringin' besides. This wasn't any of 'em. But that wasn't the funny thing. _It lasted just about as long as my foot rested on a step of the stairs_. I didn't make the break of going back and ringin' again; but I remembered that step--third from the top.

"'T ain't easy to admit you've been fooled, and 't ain't easy to give up somebody you've believed in. I couldn't have slept that night even if I'd wanted. I opened the registers in my room, because open registers help you to hear things, and sat in the darkness. I could catch that the sitting was over, because the front door slammed. Then Ellen came upstairs, and the bell rang b-r-r again. I could hear someone come upstairs to the second floor, where Mrs. Markham and the girl have their rooms. I listened for that bell when she struck the stairs. I couldn't hear nothing. The current has been switched off, thinks I. Maybe it was ten minutes later when I got a faint kind of thud, like somebody had let down a folding bed, though there ain't a one of those man-killers in our house. Sort of stirred up a recollection, that sound. I lay puzzling, and the answer came like a flash. Worst fake outfit I ever had anything to do with was Vango's Spirit Thought Inst.i.tute in St. Paul. I've told you before how ashamed I am of that. I left because there's some kinds of work I won't stand for. Well, he used a ceiling trap for his materializin'; though the wainscot is a sight better and more up-to-date in my experience. When he let it drop careless, in practicing before the seance, it used to make a noise like that. I fell asleep by-and-bye; and out of my dreams, which was troubled and didn't bring nothing definite, I got the general impression that Mrs. Markham wasn't all right and that I'd been fooled.

"Mrs. Markham and the little girl went to the matinee next afternoon.