He leaned forward in his chair.
“Fortescue,” he said slowly, “this proposition put forth by these men isn’t a sporting one — it isn’t a sportsmanlike thing to do, this thing that I am just about to agree to do with respect to the Martindale-van Ware nuptials. Oh, yes,” he said, holding back with a motion of his hand the interruption that was trying to escape from Fortescue, “I know, too, it wasn’t a sporting thing which she did to me — and had you been present when I received my dismissal you would think so even more. But it isn’t for revenge that I’m going to say yes to this thing. And neither is it the money involved — at least, not exactly the money — but something that that money may procure for me — and may very likely not procure for me, likewise. So I’ll say yes. I’ll say yes not only to the first proposition but to the second, providing you’ll be kind enough to put up the five thousand as my end of the wager. I’ll see the whole thing through, Fortescue, have no fear. For I’m out now to spend my money in about as foolish a way as a man ever could spend money — to find a very fine needle in a very huge haystack.”
For perhaps the next twenty minutes the two men sat and talked, and as they talked, that which thus far had been a sketchy project became a detailed programme, as a magnet pole which has drawn about itself a set of iron filings. And at last Middleton arose. “Then I meet you to-morrow,” he said, “and we take a complete look over the ground. If I’m to get this announcement in to-morrow’s papers, I’d better be getting along back to catch the reporters before the papers lock up. I take it you’ll attend to covering that bet to-morrow, so that later I can begin to earn the five thousand dollars. All right then. See you at noon, to-morrow, Fortescue.”
“At noon,” said Fortescue, rising. “And congratulations, Jerry. You’ve absorbed a very salient American principle already. It is: get the money while the getting’s good!” And he conducted the younger man clear to the outside hall, parting with him with a heartier handshake than he had ever yet given him.
But had Middleton, as he waited for a bus downstairs on Sheridan Road in the cool night air, been able to see what was taking place back of the orange brick front and tightly drawn shades of Fortescue’s bachelor apartment, he might have found considerable food for both reflection and curiosity. For no sooner had he left and the clang of the downstairs vestibule door had sounded his complete departure, than Fortescue stepped to the portières which partly cut off the parlour from the little room adjoining and thrust his head therein. As he did so, a dark figure which sat on a chair just to one side of the opening, holding in its hand a small pencil whose tip was illuminated with a tiny electric bulb, and around whose feet on the floor lay dozens of sheets of white paper containing writing of some sort, rose in the partial gloom and stretched itself like a caged cat.
“He’s gone,” was Fortescue’s announcement. And he added a tense query. “Did you get it all?”
“Every fact, name, date, figure and detail,” came the reply.
CHAPTER VII
THE LIGHTED WINDOW
WHEN JERRY Middleton arrived at Fortescue’s fishing-shack in the afternoon of Monday, September 29, he found things very much to his liking. The little lake reflecting the sunlight of the afternoon, its shores entirely hemmed in by wooded timber-land apparently never yet desecrated by the woodman’s axe, a sloping beach with sandy bottom out from which ran a tiny pier made of planking, and the shack itself back from the beach in a natural clearing, all suggested that everything was ideal for a dweller of the earth’s big cities. And as he fitted his key in the door of the shack and threw it open, he found that he was going to be more than comfortable, for there were two complete rooms, the larger containing a bunk of clean pine, a table, two generous chairs, a fireplace of concrete with cut wood neatly stacked in front of it, two generously sized swinging coal-oil lanterns, and a little kitchen adjoining it.
So he settled down with the books and magazines that he had brought in his two packs, as well as the tackle that Fortescue had provided for him, and prepared to give himself up to solitude and fishing. He was practically monarch of the domain, and he felt like a Robinson Crusoe who owned a lake instead of an island.
As the days commenced to pass, and he glanced into the one mirror with which the shack was provided, he was startled at the manner in which the hair on his face grew seemingly by leaps and bounds. Never, since that one time in the trenches, had his face taken on such a savage, forbidding appearance, and with the sunburn that long hours spent on the little lake provided, he began to look like some wild caveman.
He did not catch many fish — but a few rose to his casts — and he found himself aware that Fortescue’s account of the finny population of the lake was a too glowing one by far. At night he usually read for a while under the light from the brilliant oil lanterns, smoked a bit and then dropped off into a sleep, rolled in blankets in his bunk, in which dreams were chiefly absent, but which when they were present were invariably dreams of that far-off land which he might never, unless perchance as a mere visitor, see again. And, strangely enough, lonely, heart-hungry as he well knew himself to be, his dreams seemed to centre always around old Dr. Phineas Harrow’s emergency hospital in Sydney, as though his subconcious mind were trying to draw forth from him the vision of a girl of whom, unluckily, he had no mental picture to serve as a dream image — a girl whom he vowed he would spend every cent gained in this reprehensible proceeding to try and locate.
No one of official nature showed up during the ten days in which he fished and read, to check up on Fortescue’s legal tenancy of the place, and he began to see that Fortescue had been unnecessarily impressed by the dry details of the conditions under which he held his grant. It was a very bronzed young man who locked up the shack in the late afternoon of October 9, the not-to-be-forgotten day on which Pamela Martindale was to be joined in holy bonds with Carleton van Ware; a young man who wore a shaggy growth of reddish-black hair almost entirely over his face, chin and upper lip — a growth that made him look like a cross between one of the old “sundowners” to be seen on the streets of Australian cities and an understudy for a gorilla in a travelling show.
He flagged the inter-urban which ran hourly past the eastern edge of the woods that hemmed in the lake, and as he boarded the car the conductor looked startled, to say the least, at his appearance. He was now unencumbered with a pack, luckily. In exactly one hour he was dismounting from the terminal of the inter-urban at the L-road on Fifth Avenue.
He made his way — it was dark now — over to the State Street car line, and here boarded a car in which there were sufficient negro night-labourers of unprepossessing appearance, plentifully equipped with picks and shovels and bundled overalls, to take the stigma off his own appearance; but even these denizens of toil stared at him. He picked out a seat occupied by the most rough looking one of them all in which to sit, and thus rode northward to Kinzie Street, where he dismounted with a feeling of relief.
Having looked over his father’s cottage in company with Fortescue that Sunday night ten days back, previous to the morning on which he had departed for the lake, Middleton found no difficulty in locating it, a fraction of a block west of the State Street car line, its boarded windows lighted up by a sputtering arc-lamp across the street. He strode up the rickety front steps, paused a moment in front of the door graced with the tarnished enamel figures “44,” and then let himself in.
For the reason that during his previous visit here, he and Fortescue had had to make their way around by means of lighted matches, he had now to marshal his recollections of the interior arrangement of the old cottage. Closing the front door, he again struck a match. The same dusty front hallway was visible as before, with a staircase leading upstairs, and doors opening into the passageway from what had once been parlour and back-parlour respectively. The stairway itself was now completely boarded up, indicating that Fortescue had since their last visit discovered that it was unsafe as a means of going to the second floor.
The match was burning low in his fingers, so he looked about him hastily for a gas jet, for Fortescue had promised to see that the gas was turned on for his benefit during his absence at Lake Winneback. But there was nothing of this sort in the hall, so he had to light another match. With this as a guide, he went straight down to the second door — that of the back parlour — the room agreed upon by them as the place in which he should quietly change over into the garments with which he was to interrupt the Martindale-van Ware wedding.
Here he was more fortunate in the matter of gas jets, for a single old brass pipe sticking out from one wall and equipped with a tip, gave forth a stream of gas that lighted cheerfully to his match. With which accomplishment he looked about him. The room in which he stood was an old-fashioned one with high ceiling. It held one tall window made of small square panes, and on every side were to be seen plenty of cobwebs, small and large. The once flamboyant wallpaper of pink roses bulged from the walls where dampness had got in behind it, and in the trapped atmosphere was a dank musty smell.
However, what was of chief importance was the fact that Fortescue had come and had carefully deposited in this room of the deserted house the necessary articles by which Jerome Middleton was to emerge later as a tramp of the meanest sort. A cheap mirror hung on the wall underneath the gas jet; on an old soap box beneath it lay carefully folded a suit of clothing. On a nail near by ticked away a bright nickel-plated alarm clock of expensive make, wound only that morning, obviously, and correctly set so that the projected plan must move on exact schedule. Its hands pointed now to seven-fifteen. An old felt hat minus band lay upon a raincoat that was carefully folded up on the floor, and near it stood a pair of what might once have been shoes.
Middleton sat down on the box and proceeded to divest himself of the clothing he now wore. In turn he pulled off the corduroy hunting suit, his shoes, his flannel shirt, and proceeded to don, with a pronounced feeling of resentment somehow, these garments which had been provided for him.
The shoes he gazed at with repugnance. They were too large by far, they held great breaches in them — their heels were run down, and what was most distasteful, they bore all the evidences of having been worn day in and day out by some other wearer. Nevertheless he got into them with a sigh, laced them up as best he could with the old twine that served as laces, and then stood up to survey his completed appearance in the glass.
With the old greasy hat, sans band, on his head, he looked at himself curiously in the mirror. The clock ticking away near by showed the time to be ten minutes to eight, and he knew that he had plenty of time before he was to start away. As for his make-up, aided as it was by his unkempt ten-days’ growth of beard, he could only wonder helplessly whether he really were Jerome Middleton or whether he were in truth some belated wanderer of the steel highways. And having been a boy not so many years past, he grinned broadly as he began to perceive for the first time that what he was going to play to-night was a prank — a mad one, a daring one, an impudent one, yet, nevertheless, a prank only.
He put on the raincoat. There was little to transfer to the pockets of his newly-acquired clothing, but what there was — with the exception of the key to the fishing shack which he left in the corduroy suit — he conveyed pocket by pocket. A bit of money, his box of matches, the key to this house, a pocket mirror and then —
His fingers touched it in the breast-pocket of the hunting coat which he had doffed. He hastily drew it forth. It was the capacious and modern spectacle-case containing the antique sun-glasses which were all he had received from that vast estate of his father’s. And the grin that had been on his face slowly faded into a look of bitterness.
He opened them up, and now, sitting on the box, placed them gingerly on his nose and hooked the ponderous bows back of his ears. Weighty they were indeed, and unpleasant to wear to say the least. And with their donning the whistling yellow flame of the gas jet turned to a whistling blue flame instead, creating, with such lugubriously tinted illumination, an even less cheerful place of this dismal deserted room than it was before.
He rose from his improvised seat, and peered at himself in the mirror. If he had been grotesque before, he was now doubly so, with his eyes concealed back of these old oblong blue lenses with their thick leaden frames and their bows held by crude spread leg pins. And as he stared disconsolately at his reflection, he became suddenly conscious that the illumination of the room was dying out. Fascinatedly he watched the gas jet that was reflected in the mirror over his left shoulder; its flame slowly dropped, dropped, dropped, and then faded away.
He stood in darkness, pitch black darkness, stygian darkness. Fortescue had mentioned that the old house held an old-fashioned gas-meter in which an American quarter dropped in the slot provided the gas, but only so much of it. The latter had obviously prepared for a flow of gas to-night by dropping the necessary coin, but somewhere in the system of pipes — perhaps in the basement — was a bad leak, and the quarter’s worth had flown forth in a very brief time.
But as he stood there in the dark, quite forgetful now of the leaden weight across the bridge of his nose and ears, wondering whether to spend his remaining time here in the company of lighted matches, or to try and search out the recalcitrant gas-meter and provide it with another quarter-dollar, something happened that quite arrested his unformed decisions. For the black outside the one window at his left elbow was suddenly pierced by a single brilliant rectangle of light — the light from a window exactly opposite it in which someone had suddenly drawn up a shade, perhaps to let in the fresh air. Middleton’s hand, halfway toward the pocket containing his matches, stopped in mid-air, and he dropped it to his side. For the sight that was disclosed was of a peculiar nature, to say the least.
An old man with a white beard stood in full line with the other window, and not far from it. He wore a long robe of black cloth bearing a number stitched on it in large white figures and he stood at what appeared to be the head of a long table, for its end was just visible together with the old man’s chair.
It was the peculiarity of this robe worn by the old man, made as it was of dead black cloth and bearing its white numerals, disclosing itself as a “12” when he turned, that caused Middleton to step to his own window and there, almost with his nose pressed to the pane, oblivious entirely to the leaden glasses which were on his nose, endeavour to gain a more complete inkling of what this garb was intended for. The window whence came the oblong of bright light was exactly opposite and perhaps fifteen feet distant from him in the blackness — a goodly sized fishpole would have reached across from the sill of his own to the sill of the other, and he felt like a person gifted with the power of invisibility, shrouded as he was in utter darkness, and the place toward which he gazed so generously lighted up.
And now, if the old man himself constituted a thing unexplainable, his subsequent procedure was a thing even more so.
For he stepped back to his position at the table end. From a point below the level of the sill he raised to the table a large white cardboard placard on which, in unmistakable black letterings was the name JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER. The old man, after propping the placard against a large book, proceeded to take from a pocket of his robe a handful of white cards, with which in his hand he passed entirely from view around the visible end of the table only to reappear a minute or two late minus the tickets. It seemed, however, that he did retain one, and on this he wrote something with a firm hand and turned it face downward at his place. He then disappeared again, and when he came once more into sight he had collected all the tickets. One by one he counted them over, placing one to one side and another to another, and then, his lips moving as though he were speaking to a considerable number of people, but the words of which were quite inaudible to Middleton because of the closed window in front of him, shook his head negatively.
Once more — the second time! — the old man reached down at his side and picked up another large placard on which, as he propped it against the same big
book that had supported the other, were the black letters spelling the simple name HENRY FORD. All over again, to almost the finest detail, the same performance as before took place. Tickets were passed around to those invisible occupants of the long table, the old man came back and marked his own — and now Middleton knew for certain that ballots were being taken on something by a not inconsiderable group of men.
Again, as before, the old man rose and, circling the table, came back with a large fistful of tickets which showed that not less than twenty men were grouped along that table. He counted them briskly and deftly. Again he stroked his white beard and, adjusting a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles on his face, shook his head.
And now came a development which was the most startling of all the incidents that had thus far taken place. For the next placard which was raised to the table bore in black letters the three words: JEROME HERBERT MIDDLETON.
And Middleton gasped — a truly audible gasp. As in a daze he saw the old man again pass forth with the tickets, then eappear, then proceed to mark the one ticket that had been retained. As in a daze he saw the old man again disappear from view and return with the marked tickets. The latter counted them as before, then stroked his beard — then counted them again, and slowly nodding, rose and addressed a few silent words to the men assembled there. Those words, whatever they were, Middleton would have given a world to hear, but, as before, they were cut off entirely by the window in front of him, and as the address went on he tugged frantically yet cautiously at the sash, only to find that it would not move — that it was apparently nailed down tight.
The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro Page 7