The Mayor's Wife Part 23

"You have some very strong reason, I see, for looking upon Mr. Steele as your husband's enemy rather than friend."

The appeal was timely. With a start she woke to the realization of her position and of the suggestive words she had just uttered, and with a glance behind her at Letty and another at Nixon and the maids, who by this time had pushed their way to the foot of the stairs, she gathered herself up with a determination born of the necessity of the moment and emphatically replied:

"No; I do not know Mr. Steele well enough for that. My emotion at the unexpected tidings of his possible death springs from another cause."

Here the help, the explanation for which she had been searching, came.

"Girls," she went on, addressing them with an emphasis which drew all eyes, "I am ashamed to tell you what has so deeply disturbed me these last few days. I should blame any one of you for being affected as I was. The great love I bear my husband and child is my excuse--a poor one, I know, but one you will understand. A week ago something happened to me in the library which frightened me very much. I saw--or thought I saw--what some would call an apparition, but what you would call a ghost. Don't shriek!" (The two girls behind me had begun to scream and make as if to run away.) "It was all imagination, of course--there can not really be any such thing. Ghosts in these days? Pshaw! But I was very, nervous that night and could not help feeling that the mere fact of my thinking of anything so dreadful meant misfortune to some one in this house. Wait!" Her voice was imperious; and the shivering, terrified girls, superst.i.tious to the backbone, stopped in spite of themselves.

"You must hear it all, and you, too, Miss Saunders, who have only heard half. I was badly frightened then, especially as the ghost, spirit-man, or whatever it was, wore a look, in the one short moment I stood face to face with it, full of threat and warning. Next day Mr. Packard introduced his new secretary. Girls, he had the face of the Something I had seen, without the threatening look, which had so alarmed me."

"Bad 'cess to him!" rang in vigorous denunciation from the cook. "Why didn't ye send him 'mejitly about his business? It's trouble he'll bring to us all and no mistake!"

"That was what I feared," a.s.sented her now thoroughly composed mistress.

"So when Nixon said just now that Mr. Steele was dead, had fallen in a fit at Hudson Three Corners or something like that--I felt such wicked relief at finding that my experience had not meant danger to ourselves, but to him--wicked, because it was so selfish--that I forgot myself and cried out in the way you all heard. Blame me if you will, but don't frighten yourselves by talking about it. If Mr. Steele is indeed dead, we have enough to trouble us without that."

And with a last glance at me, which ended in a wavering half-deprecatory smile, she stepped back and pa.s.sed into her own room.

The mood in which I proceeded to my own quarters was as thoughtful as any I had ever experienced.

CHAPTER XXI. THE CIPHER

Hitherto I had mainly admired Mrs. Packard's person and the extreme charm of manner which never deserted her, no matter how she felt. Now I found myself compelled to admire the force and quality of her mind, her readiness to meet emergencies and the tact with which she had availed herself of the superst.i.tion latent in the Irish temperament. For I had no more faith in the explanation she had seen fit to give these ignorant girls than I had in the apparition itself. Emotion such as she had shown called for a more matter-of-fact basis than the one she had ascribed to it. No unreal and purely superst.i.tious reason would account for the extreme joy and self-abandonment with which she had hailed the possibility of Mr. Steele's death. The "no" she had given me when I asked if she considered this man her husband's enemy had been a lying no. To her, for some cause as yet unexplained, the secretary was a dangerous ally to the man she loved; an ally so near and so dangerous that the mere rumor of his death was capable of lifting her from the depths of despondency into a state of abnormal exhilaration and hope.

Now why? What reason had she for this belief, and how was it in my power to solve the mystery which I felt to be at the bottom of all the rest?

But one means suggested itself. I was now a.s.sured that Mrs. Packard would never take me into her actual confidence, any more than she had taken her husband. What I learned must be in spite of her precautions.

The cipher of which I had several specimens might, if properly read, give me the clue I sought. I had a free hour before me. Why not employ it in an endeavor to pick out the meaning of those odd Hebraic characters? I had in a way received her sanction to do so--if I could; and if I should succeed, what shadows might it not clear from the path of the good man whose interests it was my chief duty to consult?

Ciphers have always possessed a fascination for me. This one, from the variety of its symbols, offered a study of unusual interest. Collecting the stray specimens which I had picked up, I sat down in my cozy little room and laid them all out before me, with the following result:

__________________________

[transcriber's note: the symbols cannot be converted to ASCII so I have shown them as follows:]

[] is a Square

[-] is sides and bottom of a square,

C is top, bottom and left side of a square,

L is left side and bottom of a square,,

V is two lines forming a V shape

. appearing before a symbol should be inside the symbol

) appearing before a symbol means the mirror image of that symbol

^ appearing before a symbol means the inverted symbol

? is a curve inside the symbol

all other preceding symbols are my best approximation for shapes shown inside that symbol.

; is used to separate each symbol __________________________

1. []; V; [];.>; V; [-]; <;>

2. []; V; [];.>; V; [-]; <; l;="" ).l;=""><; )7;.7;="">

3. []; V; [];.>; V; [-]; <; ).l;.c;[];.l;="">;,C; [];.<; ^[-];=""><;>

4. []; V; [];.>; V; [-]; <;><; l;="">; ^V; L; V; []; )L; ^V; [-]; []; V; ).C; ^[-]; >; )C; ),C; V; <; c;="" ^v;="" ^[-];.="">; [-]; <;>

5. *>; []; V; []; *V; []; ~7; )C;.>; ^[o]; )L; ^V; []; Lo; ^V; )C; )7*; V; )C?; L; )L; 7;.>;.^[-]; )L; >; <;:[-], [-];=""><;?[-]; )7;="" [-];="" )c;="" [];.c;="" [-];="" *7;="" l;.7;="" ^v;="" )o7;="" *="">; C; ^V;.C;.<; [-];="" [];="" 7;.c;="" )l;:7;="" [-];="" )*l;="" c;="" ^v;.l;.="">; ^[%]; C; 7; *L; 7; ):L; )7; ^.V; []; [-];.L;[-]

No. 1: My copy of the characters, as I remember seeing them on the envelope which Mrs. Packard had offered to Mr. Steele and afterward thrown into the fire.

Nos. 2, 3 and 4: The discarded sc.r.a.ps I had taken from the waste-basket in her room.

No. 5: The lengthy communication in another hand, which Mrs. Packard had found pinned on the baby's cloak, and at my intercession had handed over to me.

A goodly array, if the latter was a specimen of the same cipher as the first, a fact which its general appearance seemed to establish, notwithstanding the few added complexities observable in it, and one which a remembrance of her extreme agitation on opening it would have settled in my mind, even if these complexities had been greater and the differences even more p.r.o.nounced than they were. Lines entirely unsuggestive of meaning to her might have aroused her wonder and possibly her anger, but not her fear; and the emotion which I chiefly observed in her at that moment had been fear.

So! out of these one hundred and fifty characters, many of them mere repet.i.tions, it remained for me to discover a key whereby their meaning might be rendered intelligible.

To begin, then, what peculiarities were first observable in them?

Several.

First: The symbols followed one after the other without breaks, whether the communication was limited to one word or to many.

Second: Nos. 2, 3 and 4 started with the identical characters which made up No. 1.

Third: While certain lines in Nos. 2, 3 and 4 were heavier than others, no such distinction was observable in the characters forming No. 1.

Fourth: This distinction was even more marked in the longer specimen written by another hand, viz.: No. 5.

Fifth: This distinction, which we will call shading, occurred intermittently, sometimes in two consecutive characters, but never in three.

Sixth: This shading was to be seen now on one limb of the character it apparently emphasized and now on another.

Seventh: In the three specimens of the seven similar characters commencing Nos. 2, 3 and 4, the exact part shaded was not always the same as for instance, it was the left arm of the second character in No.

2 which showed the heavy line, while the shading was on the right-hand arm of the corresponding character in No. 3.

Eighth: These variations of emphasis in No. 4 coincided sometimes with those seen in No. 2 and again with those in No. 3.