The Professor's Mystery Part 12

CHAPTER XI

EXPRESSIONS OF THE FAMILY AND IMPRESSIONS OF THE PRESS

With that, all the strangeness of the day, all the feeling of moving in an unnatural world which had hung about me since the dawn, blew away like the shadow of smoke. It was a summer morning of breezes and cool lights, garrulous with innumerable birds; and I was standing with my feet upon solid earth, glad beyond measure for the knowledge that I was a fool. The very idea of it had been absurd; and best of all, there were still things to be done.

"G.o.d be thanked," said I to Lady.

She smiled down at me very sweetly. "So much as that? It doesn't sound as if you appreciated Walter, Mr. Crosby. I can easily imagine a worse husband myself."

"I don't mean that," said I hastily. "At least--"

"At least you may as well come in to breakfast."

"I should say he might," Mr. Tabor cried behind her. "I have Sheila safely stowed away, and now I must make sure of you."

I must have looked nearly as puzzled as I felt.

"You see, Mr. Crosby, I owe you an apology. You helped us out of a tight place last night, and we are deeply in your debt; your coals of fire are upon all our heads."

"But--" I said, and hesitated.

"'But;' but that's what I say. I owe you an apology. We fired you out the other night because we had to. We had something going on here then which we did not care to have a stranger mixed up in. We had every regard for you--but, after all, you were an outsider, and we simply could not risk you. So we threw you out. You understand that I am speaking to you now in confidence, and because I take you to be a gallant gentleman. Neither can I explain. Of course, the explanation I did give you was a sheer bit of bluff. I know nothing against you whatever; but you forced me into saying something, and that was the most effective thing I could think of to say to a man of your kind. Believe me, I hated to do it. Will you shake hands?"

By that time I had got my breath again. "I will do more," I said laughingly. "I will congratulate you. You are one of the ablest and most convincingly finished--a--"

"Liars," he prompted.

"That I ever had the privilege of meeting," I concluded unblushingly.

Mr. Tabor clapped me on the shoulder. "Thank you. I am honored. We shall get along very well, I promise you. Lady, lead the way where breakfast waits; this low fellow and I will follow."

So the three of us made a very comfortable meal. Mrs. Tabor was not at table, and I supposed her breakfasting in bed, if indeed she were awake; and Doctor Reid, it appeared, was yet busy with his patient. We told Mr.

Tabor our adventure, turn and turn about, and I found myself listening to Lady's warm praise of what she was pleased to call my resource, with a tingling at the heart-strings. When we had done, and Mr. Tabor had listened very carefully, he sat frowning before him for a while; and I thought that he saw more in the recital than did we ourselves.

"Well," he said at last. "I suppose all's well that ends well; but I do hope that it has all ended. Are you quite sure, Mr. Crosby, that n.o.body got a look at you or Lady or the car who would be likely to have mind enough to give the affair clearly to the newspapers?"

"I'm pretty sure of it, sir," I answered. "The only people who got a good look at anything were the little group of the usual slum roughs; and from their general air and the hour of the night, the probability is that there wasn't one of them that was not pretty well befuddled."

"How about the police?"

"I didn't get a good look at the police myself; but I think that we were too fast for them. You see, Miss Tabor had the number off, and we started with considerable speed. They may have a general idea of the car, but I think that is about all."

"I wonder what Carucci will do?" mused Miss Tabor. "He looked rather unpleasant on the sidewalk."

"He will have to say something," I said uneasily. "He couldn't have careened around there very long without falling into the hands of the police; and they would certainly arrest him. They usually arrest everybody in sight when one person has got away and they don't know quite what the trouble is."

Mr. Tabor nodded. "Yes, they doubtless have him safe behind the bars by now; but I don't think that will hurt us any. Personally, I can imagine no place where I should rather have him, unless it were far upon or under the deep blue sea."

"But, father dear, that is terrible. If they have him in jail, he will have to talk, and he will be blamed for that poor wrecked room and everything. He'll have to give some explanation to save himself; and he must know that we are the only people that would be likely to come for Sheila in an automobile."

"The Italian, my dear, is not that breed of man. We may be very glad for once that he is an Italian. There is only about one thing in the world that a man of his race and cla.s.s will not do--and that is, talk to the police. It is part of his faith not to. He will either invent some all-enfolding lie that tells nothing whatsoever, or else he will not say a word."

"But he must have struck her _with_ something," said Lady. "Suppose they should find _that_, father. He'd have to tell them to save himself."

I slipped my hand into my pocket. "I don't think they will find it,"

said I, and showed the thing above the table. Lady shuddered, and I quickly returned it to my pocket.

"Just what you would expect," said Mr. Tabor, "and if you had left it, I am afraid Carucci would have had some difficulty in explaining things. A marlinespike, isn't it? Poor Sheila was really very fortunate that he didn't stab her with the sharp end. A stab would have been more in his line--the beast. As it is, I don't believe the police will ever find out any of the truth of the matter."

"Well, even if they do," said I, "it won't do any great amount of harm.

They might arrest me for speeding, but that would be about all. No one in his senses would be likely to accuse us of murder."

"My good young man," Mr. Tabor answered, "they absolutely mustn't dream that we had any hand in it at all. They mustn't even hear of us. And neither must anybody else."

Lady sighed wearily. "I'm sure that it will be all right, father," she said.

"The chauffeur will be quiet for the sake of his own character," I added. "He's as anxious to avoid any connection with it as we are. And as for me, sir, you may be sure that nothing shall leak out through any indiscretion of mine."

Mr. Tabor pushed aside his finger-bowl. "I understand that, Mr.

Crosby--and I appreciate how uncomfortable it must be for you to act in the dark. Believe me, I regret very much the necessity for it, and appreciate your generosity."

Lady was looking at us, and I colored. "I'm very much at your service, Mr. Tabor," I said.

"You may perhaps wonder what this Italian has to do with us at all.

That, at least, I can tell you. He was a sailor on one of my ships in years past, and when the girls were--" He paused. "When Lady was a little girl, you understand, we took quite a voyage for Mrs. Tabor's health. Sheila was Lady's nurse--and a very pretty slip of an Irish la.s.s she was. Naturally we took her along, and the rest is one of those whimsies of fate that you can never explain. This Carucci fell in love with her; what attracted _her_ was more than any one of us could imagine, but at any rate she married him. Married him as soon as we got back to New York. Well, after that things gradually went wrong. The man got a taste for drink, which is unusual--the Italians aren't a drunken people--and although I kept him on against my captain's advice for Sheila's sake, in the end I had to let him go. From time to time, when there has been trouble, we have taken Sheila into our family to give the poor woman some protection, though her loyalty makes it pretty hard to do much for her. Carucci, however, resents our interference, and pretends that we force her from him. He is becoming very troublesome."

Mr. Tabor had lighted a cigar, puffing it slowly throughout his story.

He talked very easily; and I was ashamed of myself for wondering whether he was telling all the truth. Perhaps my encounter with him had made me suspicious, but I could not forget that Doctor Reid had given Carucci money. I felt uncomfortable; and with the mental discomfort, I realized that I had been through a sleepless and violent night, and that I was very tired. I must have shown some shadow of this sudden weariness, for Lady rose from her chair decidedly and stretched out her hand.

"Now you must go back to your room and get some sleep, Mr. Crosby. You can come back this evening if you like--we should have the evening papers by then, and we shall see how much notice has been taken of us."

"Oh, I'm all right," I protested.

"You are tired out," said Lady, "I know. I'm tired myself, and I--" she stopped, flushing.

Her father was looking at us with half a frown, and it was to him that I turned. "Well, then, I'm off," said I, "but I'll be back to help you dissect the a.s.sociated press."

I had not thought that I could sleep during the day, or even rest, except from worry. But the strain, and perhaps even more, the relief of the last twenty-four hours, must have relaxed me more than I knew; for I did sleep soundly until late in the afternoon. When I returned to the Tabors in the evening, Mrs. Tabor was still invisible; and the others were seated about the big lamp in the living-room, busy over a bale of last editions. The floor was strewn with open sheets from which wild pictures and wilder words stared upward.

"Come in and be thrilled," was Lady's greeting. "You're an unknown slayer and a mysterious criminal. We seem to be sufficiently notorious, but thus far we remain unidentified."

"Outrageous, the tone of these things," growled her father. "I never realized it before. They haven't got our names, though."

As for Doctor Reid, his mind was so concentrated upon the matter in hand that he barely looked up for a mechanical salutation and plunged again into the abyss of journalism.

"How is Mrs. Tabor?" I said, "and Mrs. Carucci--is she badly hurt?"