The House of Mystery Part 2

"Once I sang my little love lays there in the noon hour," answered Bulger. "I was a gallant clerk and hers the fairest fingers that ever caressed a typewriter--" The intent att.i.tude of Norcross, the fact that he neither turned nor smiled, checked Bulger. With the instinct of the courtier, he perceived that the wind lay in another tack. He racked the unused half of his mind for appropriate sentiments.

"Bully old graveyard," he brought out; "lot's of good people buried there."

"Know any of the graves?"

"Only Alexander Hamilton's. Everyone knows that."

"That one--see--that marble shaft--not one of the old ones."

"If you're curious to know," answered Bulger easily, "I'll find out on my way down to-morrow. I suppose if you were to go and look, and the reporters were to see you meditating among the tombs, we'd have a scare head to-morrow and a drop of ten points in the market." Bulger's shift to a slight levity was premeditated; he was taking guard against overplaying his part.

"No, never mind," said Norcross, "it just recalls something." He paused the fraction of a second, and his eye grew dull. "Wonder if they're--anywhere--those people down under the tombstones?"

"I suppose we all believe in immortality."

"Seeing and hearing is believing. I believe what I see. Born that way."

Norcross was speaking with a slight, agitated jerk in his voice. He rose now, and paced the floor, throwing out his feet in quick thrusts.

"I'm getting along, Bulger, and I'd like to know." More pacing. Coming to the end of his route, he peered shrewdly into the face of the younger man. "Have you read the Psychical Society's report on Mrs.

Fife?"

Bulger's mind said, "Good G.o.d no!" His lips said, "Only some newspaper stuff about them. Seemed rather remarkable if true. Something in that stuff, I suppose."

"I've read them," resumed Norcross. "Got the full set. We ought to inform ourselves on such things, Bulger. Especially when we get older.

That gravestone now. There's one like it--that I know about." Norcross, with another jerky motion, which seemed to propel him against his will, crossed to his desk and touched a bell, bringing his secretary instantly.

"Left hand side of the vault, box marked 'Private 3,'" he said. Then he resumed:

"If they could come back they would come, Bulger. Especially those we loved. Not to let us see them, you understand, but to a.s.sure us it is all right--that we'll live again. That's what I want--proof--I can't take it on faith." His voice lowered. "Thirty years!" he whispered.

"What's thirty years?"

The secretary knocked, entered, set a small, steel box on the gla.s.s top of the desk. Norcross dismissed him with a gesture, drew out his keys, opened the box. It distilled a faint scent of old roses and old papers.

Norcross looked within for a moment, as though turning the scent into memories, before he took out a locket. He opened it, hesitated, and then extended it to Bulger. It enclosed an exquisite miniature--a young woman, blonde, pretty in a blue-eyed, innocent way, but characterless, too--a face upon which life had left nothing, so that even the great painter who made the miniature from a photograph had illuminated it only with technical skill.

"Don't tell me what you think of her," Norcross said quietly; "I prefer to keep my own ideas. It was when I was a young freight clerk. She taught school up there. We were--well, the ring's in the box, too. They took it off her finger when they buried her. That's why--" to put the brake on his rapidly running sentiment, he ventured one of his rare pleasantries at this point--"that's why I'm still a stock newspaper feature as one of the great matches for ambitious society girls."

Bulger, listening, was observing also. Within the front cover of the case were two sets of initials in old English letters--"R.H.N." and "H.W." His mind, a little confused by its wanderings in strange fields, tried idly to match "H.W." with names. Suddenly he felt the necessity of expressing sympathy.

"Poor--" he began, but Norcross, by a swift outward gesture of the hand, stopped and saved him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "IT WASN'T THE MONEY; IT WAS THE GAME--"]

"Well, I got in after that," Norcross went on, "and I drove 'em! It wasn't the money; it was the game. She'd have had the spending of _that_. And it isn't just to see her--it's to know if she is still waiting--and if we'll make up for thirty years--out there."

As Bulger handed back the locket, the secretary knocked again. Norcross started; something seemed to snap into place; he was again the silent, guarded baron of the railroads. He dropped the locket into the box, closed it. "The automobile," said his secretary. Norcross nodded, and indicated the box. The secretary bore it away.

"Come up to dinner Tuesday," said Norcross in his normal tone. But his voice quavered a little for a moment as he added:

"You're good at forgetting?"

"Possessor of the best forgettery you ever saw," responded Bulger.

Forthwith, they turned to speech of the railroad rate bill.

When, after a mufti dinner at the club, Bulger reached his bachelor apartments, he found a telegram. The envelope bore his office address; by that sign he knew, even before he unfolded the yellow paper, that it was the important telegram from his partner, the crucial telegram, for which he had been waiting these two days. It must have come to the office after he left. He got out the code book from his desk, laid it open beside the sheet, and began to decipher, his face whitening as he went on:

b.u.t.tE, MONT.

Reports of expert phony. Think Oppendike salted it on him. They will finish this vein in a month. Then the show will bust.

Federated Copper Company will not bite and too late now to unload on public. Something must be done. Can't you use your drag with Norcross somehow?

WATSON.

Bulger, twisting the piece of yellow paper, stared out into the street.

His "drag with Norcross!" What had that ever brought, what could it ever bring, except advertising and vague standing? Yet Norcross by a word, a wink, could give him information which, rightly used, would cancel all the losses of this unfortunate plunge in the Mongolia Mine.

But Norcross would never give that word, that wink; and to fish for it were folly. Norcross never broke the rules of the lone game which he played.

As Bulger stood there, immovable except for the nervous hands which still twisted and worried the telegram, he saw a sign on the building opposite. The first line, bearing the name, doubtless, was illegible; the second, fully legible, lingered for a long time merely in his perceptions before it reached and touched his consciousness.

"CLAIRVOYANT," it read.

He started, leaned on a table as though from weakness, and continued to stare at the sign.

"Who is the cleverest fakir in that business?" he said at length to himself.

And then, after a few intent minutes:

"When he was a freight clerk--thirty years ago--that was at Farnham Mills--'H.W.'--granite shaft--sure it can be done!"

III

THE LIGHT

As Dr. Blake tucked his racket under his arm and came down to the net, the breeze caught a corner of her veil and let the sunlight run clear across her face. He realized, in that moment, how the burning interest as a man, which he had developed in these three weeks for Annette Markham, had quite submerged his interest as a physician. For health, this was a different creature from the one whom he had studied in the parlor-car. Her color ran high; the greatest alarmist in the profession would have wasted no thought on her heart valves; the look as of one "called" had pa.s.sed. Though she still appeared a little grave, it was a healthy, attractive gravity; and take it all in all she had smiled much during three weeks of daily walks and rides and tennis. Indeed, now that he remembered it, her tennis measured the gradual change. She would never be good at tennis; she had no inner strength and no "game sense." But at first she had played in a kind of stupor; again and again she would stand at the backline in a brown study until the pa.s.sage of the ball woke her with an apologetic start. Now, she frolicked through the game with all vigor, zest and attention, going after every shot, smiling and sparkling over her good plays, prettily put out at her bad ones.

While he helped her on with her sweater--lingering too long over that little service of courtesy--he expressed this.

"Do you know that for physical condition you're no more the same girl whom I first met than--than I am!"

She laughed a little at the comparison. "And you are no more the same man whom I first met--than I am!"

He laughed too at this tribute to his summer coating of bronze over red. "I feel pretty fit," he admitted.

"My summer always has that effect," she went on. "Do you know that for all I've been so much out of the active world"--a shadow fell on her eyes,--"I long for country and farms? How I wish I could live always out-of-doors! The day might come--" the shadow lifted a little--"when I'd retire to a farm for good."