And yet, she thought to herself as they glided into a deep dark woods with the moon glinting palely out between branches overhead, and yet, if Mother was a sort of ballast for Father—why wasn’t I? Oh if I had only understood the need! Oh if I had been taught the evil that was possible all about for anybody to fall into!
About midnight they stopped at an inn for supper. There was dancing, and young Whitman asked Romayne if she would like to dance, but she thanked him and declined. She felt as if she were in a world that she could never be a part of, and she was beginning to be so weary and sleepy that she really did not care whether they liked it or not.
They hurried away after a little, and, revived by food and a cup of coffee, she was able to enjoy the ride once more.
Three hours later they turned into a rough mountain road and for several miles had heavy going, among trees so tall that the sky seemed as far above as the tallest city buildings, and into a wood so dense that it seemed impenetrable. Here and there, like lovely wraiths, thin, white-footed birches stalked, picked out against the dark plumes of the pines, and spicy odors filled the air. The moon was only visible in glimpses now and then, and the way at the side looked like some great primeval forest. Romayne could hardly think that they were only a few hours away from the city.
Then suddenly they came out into a partial clearing, and a great house loomed, built of logs in their bark and rough stone, with verandas ranging all around like balconies, some of them lying against the hillside, and others looking down upon a sheer precipice, with a waterfall below. One could hear the distant sound of the water falling and echoing away into the aisles of the forest as the motor stopped.
A wide oak door was flung open, and lights sprang out along the rustic balconies, where luxurious woven seats of grass and hammocks piled high with cushions invited one to rest.
Beyond the door she could see a fireplace almost big enough to walk into, with logs burning, for the night had grown cool, and Romayne was shivering in her coat, which she had thought almost too heavy to bring with her at that time of the year.
Rustic balconies ran around the room above, and rooms opened in charming vistas beyond. Rich rugs and great skins of beasts were spread around on the floor, and ancient carved oak chests and chairs that might have graced a throne room somewhere in strange lands were everywhere. Curious treasures from the Orient gleamed here and there like touches of great jewels on a lady’s gown. It was a house that common mortals may dream about sometimes or see in pictures in an architectural magazine occasionally but seldom get an acquaintance with.
And into this mansion in the forest Romayne was led, and she felt she had entered an enchanted palace. Up the wide oak stairs they took her and gave her a great room, all her own, with a white-tiled bath that might have belonged to an old Roman house, and towels of such thickness and size, embroidered with Ws, that she had to stop and examine them to see if they were just towels.
The Whitman girl unbent and visited her for a few brief moments, clad in a gauzy nightrobe of cobwebby embroidery with a wisp of rosy gossamer thrown over it, looking very young and almost sweet with her golden bobbed head and big blue eyes.
She explained to Romayne that the work was not hard—that her mother wanted someone to write a lot of notes and keep up with the mail during her absence, and for the rest she would be needed to fill in when there were not enough girls at a picnic or party.
“There are more of us coming in a few days, of course,” she ended, “and you’re so good-looking, I’m sure you can help out very well. Who’s to know you are not one of my college friends? I’m quite delighted you’re so sophisticated. I think we shall get along very well.”
There was a bit of condescension in the tone, but Romayne told herself she must not mind that.
“Now sleep as late as you want to in the morning,” said the girl on leaving her. “You must be tired after your hurry. Mother may not be here for two weeks or more, though she may drop in anytime after tomorrow. There’s no telling what she will do next. But until she comes, your duties won’t be very strenuous. Good night!”
Romayne felt better after she had gone. It was not going to be so bad, if they were all as nice as the girl. And the place certainly was wonderful. She hurried into the luxurious bed as fast as she could and was soon drifting off to sleep.
Did she or did she not hear someone calling across the hall—or was it all a dream?
“Say, Jack, when’s Kearney coming?”
Kearney! Kearney? Who was that? Was she dreaming?
In the morning she did not remember it at all.
Chapter 22
Well, she’s gone!” said Chris Hollister, bursting in on the chief late that evening.
“Gone?”
“Yes, gone! Just like that!” Chris’s face was blank with worry.
“Where?”
“That’s the worst of it. I don’t know. Nobody knows.”
“But—what do you know?”
“Well, not much. Nurse Bronson wasn’t at home, you know, and those two old noodles, not a brain between ’em, never asked her. That is, they say she got a job, but they don’t know where. She didn’t know herself. She was just going blind.”
“But—how did she get it? Didn’t they ask that?”
“Why, there seems to have been some kind of an agent, as near as I can make out, and the people who wanted her were going out of town at once, but she wasn’t told where. She didn’t even leave the name of the folks. Said she would write and send for her trunk.”
“Oh, she didn’t take a trunk,” said Evan with a relieved look.
“Then she can’t be going for long, or else she’ll send for it.”
“Perhaps,” said Chris gloomily. “Thing I can’t figure out is why they didn’t find out where she was to meet ’em. You can’t tell what these rich guys are.”
“You think it may be some of her former friends? Some of the gang?”
“Might. Or—Kearney Krupper. He’s running loose, you know. He’s a fox!”
Evan Sherwood sprang to his telephone.
“Get me the classified book, and find the list of agencies,” he said. Chris was alert at once.
“Why didn’t I think of that? Still, she mighta met someone she knew and got the job. The old ladies did say she came back on the train and ran all the way from the second corner.”
“That’s something,” said Sherwood. “Begin at the nearest.”
But most of the agencies were closed at that hour, and Evan Sherwood passed a sleepless night worrying about the girl who was “nothing more to him than the place in an African mission where his chance collection envelope went.”
In the early morning he and Chris were at it again and worked all day in relays in between the election business, which was getting more and more strenuous every day. For Sherwood had to write an editorial for the special paper they were publishing in the interest of a clean city, and Chris had to round up reports from the slum district, and there really were only so many hours in a day.
It was almost by chance and in desperation that at last they tried the Quality Employment Agency and were answered by the cool, crisp voice of Madame.
“Can you tell me if a young woman by the name of Romayne Ransom has registered at your office for a situation of any kind?”
Evan Sherwood had his question down to bare facts by this time.
There was a moment’s consideration.
“Who is this?” asked Madame coldly.
“This is a friend of Miss Ransom’s, who is anxious to locate her. She went away in a great hurry yesterday without leaving her address, and her friends are worried lest something has happened to her.”
Another pause.
“You couldn’t give me your name?”
“Why, yes—” said Sherwood. It was the first time he had met with this request in his enquiries. “My name’s Sherwood. Of the Citizens’ League. Perhaps you’ve heard of me.”
“Not Mr. Evan Sherwood,�
� said Madame with a flutter in her voice. “Of course I have, Mr. Sherwood. Say, there’s nothing wrong with that girl, is there? She had a reference from Dr. Stephens, and I’ve sent her to one of my very best customers. She seemed all right, but sometimes even a good reference isn’t well-founded. I always try to get good people. That’s why I chose the name ‘Quality’ for my agency.”
“Nothing wrong at all with the girl,” said Evan Sherwood heartily, “only that she’s too fine for any job I know. We were just worried at her disappearance. You know there are foxes around looking for prey all the time, and she is somewhat alone in the world. Who did you say she was with? Whitman? Not the Gregory Whitmans? H’m! And she’s gone away from the city. You don’t know where? Oh, well, doubtless she will write soon. We just wanted to be sure she was with all right people. Thank you very much.…”
He turned to Chris with an anxious face.
“Those Whitmans are all in the ring, aren’t they? You don’t suppose the gang has done it for some reason? You don’t suppose they think they can find out something from her? Or get at those papers her brother has?”
“It might be, but they wouldn’t have known to go after her through an agent, would they?”
“That’s so, too. And yet—”
“Yes,” said Chris. “And there’s Kearney. But he’s still in the city, or was tonight.”
“Kearney won’t leave now till after election. He has too much dirty work to do for his father, but watch him when it’s over! Chris, have our detective find out where the summer homes of the Whitmans are and, if possible, which they have gone to. The family may be scattered. They’ve likely run to cover. Find out where they all are. Then we shall have something to work from. We can’t leave that kid out among the wolves!”
“I should say not!”
Chris hurried away, glad that something definite was going to be done. Now, if Romayne had only been willing to have married him! It was going to be tremendously hard work to take care of her this way. All that about God wanting her to be on her own sounded well enough, but when it came right down to it, Chris meant to be on the job himself, unless he could go one better and get the chief to do it.
Evan Sherwood went to his bed that night with satisfaction, feeling that he had done well to find out the starting of the girl and the name of the people with whom she had gone. But he would not have slept so well if he had known that Kearney Krupper was several hours ahead of him in acquiring that knowledge, and that he was in a position to know where the Whitmans had gone without the trouble of resorting to a detective.
Now, Evan Sherwood believed in a God who guards and guides His own, just as his Aunt Patricia had written to Romayne, and he knew that his duty just now lay here in the city, at least until after that election. But he was not taking any chances so far as his own responsibility for Romayne was concerned. He knew that there were personal dangers for him in the election, and that he might be unable to do anything for her, even if she needed it, after election, because he might not be alive, so while he stayed at his post and worked with all his might, he was ferreting out information and writing down several directions for Chris to follow if anything happened to him. That African mission of his was surely becoming personal.
He called up Aunt Patty one evening on long distance in a chance moment of leisure in the hope that Aunt Martha was better and she might return and somehow get near to Romayne for him. But Aunt Patty talked in a whisper and said that Aunt Martha was lying at death’s door and might go at any moment, or she might linger yet for weeks. She had not had a moment to write, as the nurse had been taken sick and had to leave. They had had difficulty in getting another, and Aunt Martha would not let her out of her sight.
So Evan turned away from the telephone, realizing that he must not burden Aunt Patty with Romayne, and the days grew fuller and fuller of work, and nearer and nearer to election. The enemy was hot and heavy on the trail, and the number of abominable lies they had been able to rake out of the pit and bring to the light of day, and actually send masquerading in a cloak of righteousness, would be enough to amaze the angels. Evan Sherwood, sometimes, in his weariness, buried his face in his arms on his desk and wished he had never touched the dirty old wicked city. And then he would get up and go at it again.
He grew white and spent, and his friends urged him to rest. They sought to lure him to their homes for dinner and a ride in the cool evening. But he would not be lured. And nightly he called up Nurse Bronson, where she was on a case at the hospital, to ask if she had heard anything from Romayne. It was beginning to be an obsession with him—what had become of Romayne?
For strange to say, the detective had not been able to discover where the Whitman family had gone. They were booked to sail for Europe, but there was no Ransom among their party. Some of them were announced in the society column as being in Bar Harbor, but an investigation through the proper authorities revealed no social secretary there except a Miss Jones, who had been with them for years, and was old with gray bobbed hair.
A son who had recently graduated from college through polo and football, with a smattering of engineering on the side, was supposed to be in the White Mountains but had not as yet been located. It was rumored that a daughter was visiting college friends in the West, but that had not been verified nor the college friends located.
There were said to be a number of landholdings, with lodgings more or less spacious, in various parts of the United States where these favored people might flit at any moment, but no one seemed to know just where they had flitted this time nor for how long. The detective openly stated he was against it.
“It will depend on how the election goes, whether they come back soon or not,” said Evan Sherwood with narrowed eyes on space.
The next day he went himself to interview Madame and get all the facts.
“Why, I’ve just had a letter from Miss Gloria Whitman, about a cook,” said Madame, delighted to have something to contribute to the great idol of the people. “It isn’t dated and no address, so I expect she means me to write to the city number, but doesn’t that postmark look like our state? I don’t believe they’re far away, for that postmark is dated yesterday. The rest is blurred.”
Evan Sherwood went away with the precious envelope, and in some mysterious way, known only to detectives, they were able with the help of a microscope to discover the lodge in the wilderness where Romayne had been spirited away so mysteriously. No one knows how the detectives work. It is as mysterious as the way a scientist can concoct a whole whale out of an innocent little tooth dropped eons ago, and develop a theory of evolution. But at least in this case it worked, and a lonely woodsman with a canny eye, traveling on foot—to all appearances—and having lost his way, was able to hover around and be fed, and linger with a sore foot until he had laid eyes on Romayne herself, had watched her playing tennis, on a perfect court in a lovely spot above the waterfall, with Jack Whitman, was even able to carry back with him a picture of her with her lovely hair in a long braid down her back and her slim body leaping for the ball with a graceful curve of her racket.
He carried with him somewhere concealed about his shabby garments a tiny camera of wondrous powers, and two days later Evan Sherwood sat him down alone at his desk and was able to see the great house in the forest where Romayne was hidden, to watch her, as it were, sitting on wide balcony framed in its fir trees and mountains, talking to this same Jack Whitman, or walking down a wooded path and looking back smiling, and behind her walked a man whose shoulders looked like Jack Whitman’s.
There were a number of these views, all showing Romayne, with different people—some ladies and some more men. Most of them, it is true, showed her demurely keeping to herself. But there were enough with others, and it was this young Whitman that cut the deepest in the question, for Evan Sherwood had met him in the city and knew his face and figure well. He could not be deceived. And Evan Sherwood was not happy.
To all appearances the election was going
well, and everything promised a glorious victory for the League, but still he was not happy, and he wished the election was over. He found he did not really care much now how it came out—that is, down in his tired heart he did not care, for he was worked to a thread—he just wished it was over. There was something he wanted to do. He did not know how he was going to work it out yet, because his pride was in the way. But he must do it.
Romayne was beginning to work into the new life beautifully. It was such a relief to be away from the things that had tired her soul, and for all the reminders of her shame and sorrow, that for the first few days she just relaxed and thought of nothing but the beauty of the place.
And because his special girl was not on hand, Jack Whitman did as he always did, took the first pretty girl that was handy. So Romayne was shown around the mountain and the lake, and taken canoeing and tennising and driving.
She could not get away from the fact that she was looked upon as a servant on certain state occasions when guests were by, but for the most part there was an acceptance of her, and they found that she worked in well with the life. In school she had been a champion in tennis more than once and found that her skill easily returned to her now. In the clear mountain air her color returned to her cheeks, and her eyes grew brighter.
“She’s a stunning-looking girl,” stated Jack to his sister when they were talking her over. “Where did you pick her up?”
Coming Through the Rye Page 24