The Siege of the Seven Suitors Part 22

"Do you mean to say that you have really found traces of the ghost?"

"Not only that, Miss Hollister, but I have met the ghost face to face,--even more, I have had speech with him!"

Her face brightened, her eyes flashed. It was plain that she was immensely pleased.

"And are you able to say, from your encounter, that he is in fact a British subject, uneasily haunting this house in America long after the Declaration of Independence and Washington's Farewell Address have pa.s.sed into literature?"

"You have never spoken a truer word, Miss Hollister. The ghost with whom or which I have had speech is still a loyal subject of the King of England. But by means which I am not at liberty to disclose, I have persuaded him not to visit this house again."

"Then," said Miss Hollister, "I cannot do less than express my grat.i.tude; though I regret that you did not first allow me to meet him.

Still, I dare say that we shall find his bones buried somewhere beneath my foundations. Please a.s.sure me that such is your expectation."

She was leading me into deep water, but I had skirted the coasts of truth so far; and with Hezekiah on my hands I felt that it was necessary to satisfy Miss Hollister in every particular.

"To-morrow, Miss Hollister, I shall take pleasure in showing you certain hidden chambers in this house which I venture to say will afford you great pleasure. I have to-night discovered a link between the mansion as you know it and an earlier house whose timbers may indeed hide the bones of that British soldier."

"And as for the chimney?"

"And as for the chimney, I give you my word as a professional man that it will never annoy you again, and I therefore beg that you dismiss the subject from your mind."

I saw that she was about to recur to the shoe she held in her hand and at which she glanced frequently with a quizzical expression. This, clearly, was an issue that must be met promptly, and I knew of no better way than by lying. Hezekiah herself had plainly stated, on the morning of that long, eventful day, when she walked into the breakfast-room in her aunt's absence and explained Cecilia's trip to town, that it was perfectly fair to dissimulate in making explanations to Miss Hollister; that, in fact, Miss Octavia enjoyed nothing better than the injection of fiction into the affairs of the matter-of-fact day. Here, then, was my opportunity. Hezekiah had thrown the responsibility of contriving her safe exit upon my hands. No doubt, while I held the door against her aunt, that remarkable young woman was coolly sitting on the trunk within, eating another cracker and awaiting my experiments in the gentle art of lying.

"Miss Hollister," I began boldly, "the slipper you hold in your hand belongs to me, and if you have no immediate use for it I beg that you allow me to relieve you of it."

"It is yours, Mr. Ames?"

A lifting of the brows, a widening of the eyes, denoted Miss Octavia's polite surprise.

"Beyond any question it is my property," I a.s.serted.

"Your words interest me greatly, Mr. Ames. As you know, the grim hard life of the twentieth century palls upon me, and I am deeply interested in everything that pertains to adventure and romance. Tell me more, if you are free to do so, of this slipper which I now return to you."

I received Hezekiah's worn little pump into my hands as though it were an object of high consecration, and with a gravity which I hope matched Miss Octavia's own. I was, I think, by this time completely hollisterized, if I may coin the word.

"As I am nothing if not frank, Miss Hollister, I will confess to you that this shoe came into my possession in a very curious way. One day last spring I was in Boston, having been called there on professional business. In the evening, I left my hotel for a walk, crossed the Common, took a turn through the Public Garden, where many devoted lovers adorned the benches, and then strolled aimlessly along Beacon Street."

"I know that historic thoroughfare well," interrupted Miss Hollister, "as my friend Miss Prudence Biddeford has lived there for half a century, and once, while I was staying in her house, she gave me her recipe for Boston brown bread, thereby placing me greatly in her debt."

"Then, being acquainted with the neighborhood and its sublimated social atmosphere, you will be interested in the experience I am about to describe," I continued, rea.s.sured by Miss Octavia's sympathetic attention to my recital. "I was pa.s.sing a house which I have not since been able to identify exactly, though I have several times revisited Boston in the hope of doing so, when suddenly and without any warning whatever this slipper dropped at my feet. All the houses in the neighborhood seemed deserted, with windows and doors tightly boarded, and my closest scrutiny failed to discover any opening from which that slipper might have been flung. The region is so decorous, and acts of violence are so foreign to its dignity and repose, that I could scarce believe that I held that bit of tan leather in my hand. Nor did its unaccountable precipitation into the street seem the act of a housemaid, nor could I believe that a nursery governess had thus sought diversion from the roof above. I hesitated for a moment not knowing how to meet this emergency; then I boldly attacked the bell of the house from which I believed the slipper to have proceeded. I rang until a policeman, whose speech was fragrant of the Irish coasts, bade me desist, informing me that the family had only the previous day left for the sh.o.r.e. The house he a.s.sured me was utterly vacant. That, Miss Hollister, is all there is of the story. But ever since I have carried that slipper with me. It was in my pocket to-night as I traversed the upper halls of your house, seeking the ghost of that British soldier, and I had just discovered my loss when I heard you calling. In returning it you have conferred upon me the greatest imaginable favor.

I have faith that sometime, somewhere, I shall find the owner of that slipper. Would you not infer, from its diminutive size, and the fine, suggestive delicacy of its outlines that the owner is a person of aristocratic lineage and of breeding? I will confess that nothing is nearer my heart than the hope that one day I shall meet the young lady--I am sure she must be young--who wore that slipper and dropped it as it seemed from the clouds, at my feet there in sedate Beacon Street, that most solemn of residential sanctuaries."

"Mr. Ames," began Miss Hollister instantly, with an a.s.sumed severity that her smile belied, "I cannot recall that my niece Hezekiah ever visited in Beacon Street; yet I dare say that if she had done so and a young man of your pleasing appearance had pa.s.sed beneath her window, one of her slippers might very easily have become detached from Hezekiah's foot and fallen with a nice calculation directly in front of you. But now, Mr. Ames, will you kindly carry your candle into that trunk-room?"

And I had been pluming myself upon the completeness of my hollisterization! There was nothing for me but to obey, and my heart sank as my imagination pictured Hezekiah's discomfiture when we should find her seated on the huge trunk behind the door. And that stockinged foot already called in appealing accents to the shoe I held in my hand!

The foundations of the world shook as I remembered the compact by which Hezekiah was excluded from the house, and realized what the impending discovery would mean to Cecilia, her father, and the wayward Hezekiah, too! But I was in for it. Miss Octavia indicated by an imperious nod that I was to precede her into the trunk-room, and I strode before her with my candle held high.

But the sprites of mystery were still abroad at Hopefield. The room was unoccupied save for the trunks. Hezekiah had vanished. Instead of sitting there to await the coming of her aunt, she had silently departed, without leaving a trace. Miss Hollister glanced up at the trap-door in the ceiling, and so did I. It was closed, but I did not doubt that Hezekiah had crawled through it and taken herself to the roof. Miss Octavia would probably order me at once to the battlements; but worse was to come.

"Mr. Ames," she said, "will you kindly lift the lid of that largest trunk."

I had not thought of this, and I shuddered at the possibilities.

She indicated the trunk upon which Hezekiah had sat and nibbled her cracker not more than ten minutes before. Could it be possible that when I lifted the cover that golden head would be found beneath? My life has known no blacker moment than that in which I flung back the lid of that trunk. I averted my eyes in dread of the impending disclosure and held the candle close.

But the trunk was empty, incredibly empty! My courage rose again, and I glanced at Miss Octavia triumphantly. I even jerked out the trays to allay any lingering suspicion. Why had I ever doubted Hezekiah? Who was she, the golden-haired daughter of kings, to be caught in a trunk?

She had slipped up the ladder while I talked to her aunt and was even now hiding on the roof; but it was not for me to make so treasonable a suggestion. Miss Octavia might press the matter further if she liked, but I would not help her to trap Hezekiah.

Miss Hollister did not, to my surprise and relief, suggest an inspection of the roof. She nodded her head gravely and pa.s.sed out into the hall.

"Mr. Ames, if I implied a moment ago that I doubted your story of the dropping of that tan pump from a Beacon Street roof or window, I now tender you my sincerest apologies."

She put out her hand, smiling charmingly.

"Pray return to the occupations which were engaging you when I interrupted you. You have never stood higher in my regard than at this moment. To-morrow you may tell me all you please of the ghost and the mysteries of this house, and I dare say we shall find the bones of that British soldier somewhere beneath the foundations. As for that trifling bit of leather you hold in your hand, it's rather pa.s.se for Beacon Street. The next time you tell that story I suggest that you play your game of drop the slipper from a window in Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia. Still, as I always keep an umbrella in the check-room of the Parker House, I would not have you imagine that I look upon Boston as an unlikely scene for romance. The last time I was there a Mormon missionary pressed a tract upon me in the subway, and I can't deny that I found it immensely interesting."

XV

LOSS OF THE SILVER NOTE-BOOK

Hezekiah on the roof was safe for a time. Miss Octavia's gentle rejection of my Beacon Street anecdote and her intimation that Hezekiah had been an unbilled partic.i.p.ant in the comedy of the ghost had been disquieting, and in my relief at her abandonment of the search I loitered on downstairs with my hostess. I wished to impress her with the idea that I was without urgent business. Hezekiah would, beyond doubt, amuse herself after her own fashion on the roof until I was ready to release her. As I had quietly locked the trunk-room door and carried the key in my pocket I was reasonably sure of this. Humility is best acquired through tribulation, and as Hezekiah sat among the chimney-crocks nursing one stockinged foot and waiting for me to turn up with her lost slipper, it would do her no harm to nibble the bitter fruit of repentance with another biscuit. I should find her much less sure of herself when I saw fit to seek her on the roof. It was a pretty comedy we were playing, but it was best that she should not too complacently take all the curtains. Hezekiah's naughtiness had been diverting up to a point now reached and pa.s.sed, but the time had arrived for remonstrance, admonition, discipline. And it should be my grateful task to point out the error of her ways and urge her into safer avenues of conduct. Such were my reflections as I attended Miss Octavia in her descent.

The memoranda of my adventures at Hopefield Manor fall under two general headings. On the one hand was the ghost and the library chimney; on the other the extraordinary gathering of Cecilia's suitors.

As I followed at Miss Octavia's side, she seemed to have dismissed the ghost and the fractious chimney from her mind; her humor changed completely. As in the morning when, unaccountably abandoning her habitual high-flown speech, she had asked me about Cecilia's silver note-book, she seemed troubled; and when we had reached the second floor she paused and lost herself in unwonted preoccupation.

"Let us sit here a moment," she said, indicating a long davenport in the broad hall. For the first time her manner betrayed weariness. She laid her hand quietly on my arm and looked at me fixedly. "Arnold,"

she said,--"you will let me call you Arnold, won't you?" she added plaintively, and never in my life had I been so touched by anything so sweet and gentle and kind,--"Arnold, if an old woman like me should do a very foolish thing in following her own whims and then find that she had probably committed herself to a course likely to cause unhappiness, what would you advise her to do about it?"

"Miss Hollister," I answered, "if you trusted Providence this morning to send you a corps of servants when yours had been most unfortunately scattered by ghosts or rumors of ghosts, why will you not continue to have confidence that your affairs will always be directed by agencies equally alert and beneficent?"

She flashed upon me that rare wonderful smile of hers; she looked me in the eyes quizzically with her head bent slightly to one side; but for once her usual readiness seemed to have forsaken her. Could it be possible that she was losing faith in her own play-world, and that the tuneful trumpets of adventure and romance which she had set vibrating on her own key jarred dully in her ears? It pa.s.sed swiftly through my mind that it was inc.u.mbent on me to win her back to complete belief in the potency of the oracles that had called to her old age. She had dipped her paddle into bright waters and had splashed up all manner of gay imaginings, and what disasters awaited her now if she beached her argosy and found no gold at the end of the rainbow! It occurred to me, prosaic man and chimney-doctor that I was, that no one should be disappointed who has heard the dream-G.o.ds calling at twilight, or wakened to the chanting of the capstan-song, or heard the timbers creaking in the stout old caravel of romance as it wallows in the seas that wash the happy isles. I had not crawled through so many chimneys but that I still believed that dreams come true, not because they will but because they must! And in the case of Miss Octavia Hollister I felt a great responsibility; for what irremediable loss might not result to a world too little given these days to dreaming, if she, who at sixty had turned her heart trustfully to adventure, should find only sorrow and disappointment? The thing must not be! I was feeling the least bit elated over my success in solving the riddle of the ghost, and I knew that the hidden chambers and stair would delight her when I revealed them on the morrow; so I quite honestly sought to restore her to the joy of life. I felt that she was waiting for me to speak further, and I plunged ahead.

"Our meeting in the Asolando was the most interesting thing that ever happened to me, Miss Hollister. I was rapidly becoming hopelessly cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in to saucy doubts and fears as to the promise of life held out to us in the nursery, where, indeed, all education should begin and end. Your appearance at the Asolando that afternoon was well-timed to save me from death in a world that was rapidly losing for me all its illusion and witchery. But now that you have so readily won me back to the true faith, I beg of you do not yourself revert to the dreary workaday world from which you rescued me."

I had never in my life spoken more sincerely. I had never been so happy as since I knew her, and I was pleading for myself as well as for her--there where, from her own doorstep and in her own garden, one who listened attentively might hear the faint roar of trains bound toward the teeming city along iron highways. It was with relief that I saw my words had struck home. She touched my hand lightly; then she took it in both her own.

"You really believe that; you are not merely trying to please me?"

"I was never half so much in earnest! Please go on in the way you have begun. And have no fear that the charts will mislead you, or that the seas will grind your bark on hidden shoals. Shipwreck, you know, is one of the greatest joys of our adventures,--we have to be wrecked first before we find the island of the treasure-chests."

She sighed softly, but I felt that her spirits were rising.

"But those men down there? How shall I manage that?" she asked eagerly.

I snapped my fingers. We must get back into the air again. And it was remarkable how readily my long-untried wings bore me upward. The earth, after all, does not bind us so fast!

"I don't know the game; but I have found out a lot of things without being told, so tell me nothing! Remember that I have something quite remarkable, startling even, to show you to-morrow. I have even overcome, you know, the obstacle you placed in the way of my discoveries by sending in ahead of me this morning for the plans of the house."