The House of Mystery Part 14

Now I'm comin' to her. You let me tell this story _my_ way. The cook was bakin' in the kitchen, Ellen the parlor maid, who had to stay home to answer bells, was gossipin' with her. Martin was cleanin' out the furnace. I had the run of the house. First thing I looked at was the third step from the top of the stairs. I worked out two tacks in the carpet--wasn't much trouble; they come out like they was used to it. I pulled the carpet sideways. Sure enough, there was a wide crack just below the step, and when I peeked in, I could see the electric connections. Question was, where was the bell? But I had something to think of first. Where would Mrs. Markham have a cabinet if she ever done materializin'? I had thought that all out--a little alcove library in the rear of the back parlor. Give you plenty of room, when the folding doors were open, for lights and effects. If there _was_ a ceiling trap, it must be in the rooms above. I went into--into the rooms"--here Rosalie paused an infinitesimal second as though making a mental shift--"into the room above. Just over the alcove library is a small sittin'-room. The--a bedroom opens off it--but has nothing to do with the case. It's one of those new-fangled bare floor rooms. Right over the cabinet s.p.a.ce was a big rug. I pulled it aside and pried around with a hair pin until I found a loose nail."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "I WAS LOOKING STRAIGHT DOWN ON THE BACK PARLORS"]

Rosalie paused for breath before she resumed:

"I went over the house again to be sure I was alone, before I pulled out the nail. Well, sir, what happened like to knocked me over. The minute that nail come out, a trap rose right up--on springs. I just caught it in time to stop it from making a racket. I was looking straight down on the back parlors. It's one of those flossy, ornamented ceilings down there, and a panel of those ceiling ornaments came up with the bottom of the trap. But that wasn't the funny thing about that trap, nice piece of work as it was. It's a regular cupboard. Double, you understand. s.p.a.ce in between--and all the fixings for a materializin' seance, the straight fixings that the dope sees and the crooked ones that only the medium and the spook sees, tucked inside. A shutter lamp, blue gla.s.s--a set of gauze robes, phosph.o.r.escent stars and crescents, a little rope ladder all curled up--and whole books of notes. Right on top was"--she paused impressively to get suspense for her climax--"was them notes on yellow foolscap that I seen in the hands of the visitor last week. And"--another impressive pause--"they're the dope for Robert H. Norcross!"

"The what?"

"The full information on him--dead sweetheart, pa.s.sed out thirty years ago up-state. Fine job with good little details--whoever got 'em must 'a' talked with somebody that was right close to her--an old aunt, I'm thinking. But no medium made them notes. Looks like a private detective's work. Not a bit of professional talk. The notes on Robert H. Norcross. See!"

Dr. Blake, whose face had lightened more and more as he listened, jumped up and grasped Rosalie's hand.

"Didn't I tell you!" he cried. "Didn't I tell you!"

But she failed to respond to his enthusiasm. She turned on him a grave face; and her eyes shone.

"What I'm wondering," she said, "is who plays her spook? 'Cause if she has a trap, she uses confederates, and it can't be none of the servants, unless I'm worse fooled on that little Ellen than ever I was on Mrs. Markham. That's the next thing to consider."

"Does look curious," replied Dr. Blake, "but of course you can be trusted to discover that! But about Annette?"

"Something's a little wrong there," responded Rosalie. "Quiet, and dopey, and strange. That,"--her voice fell to soft contemplation,--"is another thing to find out."

"We must get her out of there!" he exploded; "away from that vampire!"

"Well, that's what I'm takin' your money for, ain't it?" responded Rosalie.

After they parted Rosalie Le Grange stood on a corner, among the push-cart peddlers and the bargaining wives, and watched Dr. Blake's taxicab disappear down Stanton Street.

"Ain't it funny?" she said half aloud, "that a smart young man like him never thought to ask whose room it was I found the trap in?"

X

THE STREAMS CONVERGE

Bulger, trailing whiffs of out-door air, had dropped into the Norcross offices to join the late afternoon drink. He sat now sipping his highball, tilted back with an affectation of ease. Norcross, in his regular place at the gla.s.s-covered desk, laid his gla.s.s down; and his gaze wandered again to the spire of Old Trinity and then, following down, to the churchyard at its foot. Had he faced about suddenly at that moment, he would have surprised Bulger in a strained att.i.tude of attention. But he did not turn; he spoke with averted glance.

"You never asked me, Bulger, how I was making it with that medium woman."

Bulger took a deep swallow of whiskey and water that he might control his voice. When, finally, he spoke, he showed a fine a.s.sumption of indifference.

"Well, no. Can't say I'm heavily interested. When I found for you the best medium that money could buy, I decided that my job was done. Of course," he added, "I was complimented to have you tell me--what I've forgotten. If you want to consult a medium, it's really none of my business. How the Lusitania does loom up at her dock out there!"

Norcross let his eyes wander in search of the Lusitania, but his mind refused to stray from the vital subject.

"You've no business to be indifferent, Bulger. When you come to my age, you won't be. Martha says it's the most important thing. And she's right--she's right. What's the ten or twenty years I've got to live in this world, compared with all that's waiting us out there? Of course,"

he added, "I don't know much about your private life; I don't know if you have another part of you waiting."

"Who's Martha?" enquired Bulger.

"No one in _this_ world," responded Norcross. "She's a control now--Mrs. Markham's best control." Norcross jumped up, and began to pace the floor in his hurried little walk. Bulger did not fail to notice that, within a minute or two, a heavy, beady perspiration came out on his face and forehead. The room was cool; the railroad king was old and spare. Nothing save some struggle of the inner consciousness could produce that effect of mighty labor.

"Bulger," said Norcross, speaking in quick, staccato jerks, "if I told you what I'd seen and heard in the last fortnight, I couldn't make you believe it. Proofs! Proofs! I've wasted thirty years. I might have had her--the best part of her--all this time. You think I'm crazy--" he stopped and peered into Bulger's face. "If anyone had talked this way to me six months ago, I'd have thought so myself. Do you or don't you?"

he exploded.

"About as crazy as you ever were," responded Bulger. "Not to sugar coat the pill, people have always said you were crazy--just before you let off your fireworks. You've got there because you dared do things that only a candidate for Bloomingdale would attempt. But you always landed, and we've another name for it now."

"That's it!" exclaimed Norcross. "That's exactly it. I dare to say now that the dead do return! People have believed in ghosts as long as they've believed in a Divine Providence--just as many centuries and ages--every race, every nation. We hear in this generation that certain people have proved it--found! the way--set up the wires--and we laugh, and call it all fraud. I don't laugh! Why, we're on the verge of things which make the railroad and the steamboat and the telegraph seem like toys--if we only dared. I dare--I dare!" He went on pacing the floor; and now the beads had a.s.sembled into rivers, so that a tiny stream trickled down and fogged his reading-gla.s.ses. He jerked them off, wiped them, wiped his face and forehead. The action calmed him, brought him back to his reasonable grip on himself. At the end of his route across the room, he sat down abruptly.

Bulger did not miss this shift of the new Norcross back toward the old, iron, inscrutable Norcross whom the world knew. The next remark he directed against that aspect of his man.

"It's all right," said Bulger, "if you want to follow that line."

During the short pause which ensued, he thought and felt intensely.

Working under the direction of a mind infinitely his superior for intrigue and subtlety, he had instruction to play gently upon the Norcross contrariety, the Norcross habit of rejecting advice. This, if ever, seemed the time. With a bold hand, he laid his counter upon the board. "Just one thing to be careful about--of course, it's a mouse trying to steer a lion for me to advise you--but watch those people, when they get on the subject of business. Sometimes they work people, you know."

Norcross's face, fixed on the third monument from the south door of Old Trinity, permitted itself the luxury of a slight smile.

"I'm safe there," he responded. "Don't think I haven't tried her out--put tests of my own. I know what you're thinking about--Marsh and Diss Debar. I tried at my very first seance to make her talk business and I've tried it twice since. I couldn't get a single rise out of _that_. This medium receives from me her regular rate, and no more. I established that in the beginning. Though I suppose the guides could advise on business as well as on anything else. But they think about other things on the other side than this"--his hand swept over Lower Manhattan--"this money grubbing."

Bulger leaned his elbows on his knees.

"It sounds wonderful," he said.

"Not more wonderful than wireless telegraphy," answered Norcross. "And the ancients, she says, dreamed of talking with spirits long before they dreamed of talking to each other across an ocean. We only need an exceptional force to do it. And Mrs. Markham is that force. You know the locket I showed you?"

"I promised to forget it."

"Well, remember for a minute. I"--his voice exploded--"I may see her, Bulger--before the month is over, I may see her!"

Bulger threw himself back in his chair.

"What!" he exclaimed, jumping with an affectation of surprise.

It was as though the sudden motion, the exclamation had touched a spring in the mind of Norcross, had projected his spirit from that disintegrating, anaemic cell in his brain to the sound, full-blooded cells by which he did his daily business. His form, which had seemed relaxed and old, stiffened visibly. He turned his eyes on Bulger.

"Forget that, too," he said. "Some day, when I'm strong enough, you'll go with me and you'll believe too." And now the secretary had signalled the chauffeur, and Norcross had risen to go.

The streams of destiny were converging that afternoon; the lines were drawing close together. Among the towers of Lower Manhattan, Norcross sat baring his soul; on a bench in Stuyvesant Square, Rosalie Le Grange had reported the consummation of her investigations to Dr. Walter Huntington Blake; in a back parlor of the Upper West Side, Paula Markham, with many a sidelong glance at the approaches, sat memorizing the last syllable of a set of notes on yellow legal cap paper. But the master current was flowing elsewhere. In the offices of the _Evening Sun_, the stereotypers had just shot the front page of the Wall Street edition down to the clanking bas.e.m.e.nt. It carried a "beat"; and that item of news had as much to do with this story as with the ultimate destinies of the L.D. and M. railroad. On October 19, two weeks hence, the directors of the road were to meet and decide whether to pay or pa.s.s the dividend. "The directors"--that, as the _Sun_ insinuated, meant none other than Norcross. Holding a majority of the L.D. and M.

stock, holding the will of those directors, his creatures, he alone would decide whether to declare the dividend or to pa.s.s it. The stock wavered at about fifty, waiting the decision. If Norcross put it on a dividend-paying basis, it was good for eighty. To know which way he would decide, to extract any information from that inscrutable mind--that were to open a steel vault with a pen-knife. "All trading,"

the _Sun_ a.s.sured its readers, "will be speculative; it is considered a pure gamble."

As Bulger parted with Norcross on the street and turned south, a newsboy thrust the Wall Street _Sun_ into his face. The announcement of the L.D. and M. situation jumped out at him from a headline. The inside information, held for two weeks by the group of speculators in which Bulger moved, was out; the public was admitted to the transaction; now was the time, if ever, to strike. He found a sound-proof telephone, and did a few minutes of rapid talking. Then he proceeded to his office.