The detective evidently thought the occasion called for whatever comfort it was in his power to bestow.
“Yes,” said he. “For it is here she will seek you if she takes a notion to return. But woman is an uncertain quantity,” he dryly added.
At that moment the telephone bell rang. Mr. Ransom leaped to answer; but the call was only an anxious one from the Fultons, who wanted to know what news. He answered as best he could, and was recrossing disconsolately to his chair when voices rose in the hall, and a man was ushered in, whom Gerridge immediately introduced as Mr. Sims.
A runner—and with news! Mr. Ransom, summoning up his courage, waited for the inevitable question and reply. They came quickly enough.
“What have you got? Have you found the man?”
“Yes. And the lady’s been to see him; that is, if the description of her togs was correct.”
“He means Mrs. Ransom,” explained Gerridge. Then, as he marked his client’s struggle for composure, he quietly asked, “A lady in a dark green suit with yellowish furs and a blue veil over her hat?”
“That’s the ticket!”
“The clothes worn by the woman who went out of the basement door, Mr. Ransom.”
The latter turned sharply aside. The shame of the thing was becoming intolerable.
“And this woman wearing those yellow furs and the blue veil visited the man of the broken jaw?” inquired Gerridge.
“Yes, sir.”
“When?”
“About six this afternoon.”
“And where?”
“At the hotel St. Denis where I have since tracked him.”
“How long did she stay?”
“About an hour.”
“In the parlor or—”
“In the parlor. They had a great deal to say. More than one noticed them, but no one heard anything. They talked very low but they meant business.”
“Where is this man now?”
“At the same place. He has engaged a room there.”
“The man with the twisted jaw?”
“Yes.”
“Under what name?”
“Hugh Porter.”
“Ah, it was Hazen only five hours ago,” muttered Ransom. “Porter, did you say? I’ll have a talk with this Porter at once.”
“I think not tonight,” put in the detective, with the mingled authority and deference natural to one of his kind. “Tomorrow, perhaps, but tonight it would only provoke scandal.”
This was certainly true, but Mr. Ransom was not an easy man to dominate.
“I must see him before I sleep,” he insisted. “A single word may solve this mystery. He has the word. I’d be a fool to let the night go by—Ah! what’s that?”
The telephone bell had rung again. A message from the office this time. A note had just been handed in for Mr. Ransom; should they send it up?
Gerridge was at the ‘phone.
“Instantly,” he shouted down, “and be sure you hold the messenger. It may be from your lady,” he remarked to Mr. Ransom. “Stranger things than that have happened.”
Mr. Ransom reeled to the door, opened it and stood waiting. The two detectives exchanged glances. What might not that note contain!
Mr. Ransom opened it in the hall. When he came back into the room, his hand was shaking and his face looked drawn and pale. But he showed no further disposition to go out. Instead, he sank into a chair, with a motion of dismissal to the two detectives.
“Question the boy who brought this,” said he. “It is from Mrs. Ransom; written, as you see, at the St. Denis. She bids me farewell for a time, but does not favor me with any explanations. She cannot do differently, she says, and asks me to trust her and wait. Not very encouraging to sleep on; but it’s something. She has not entirely forsaken me.”
Gerridge with a shrug turned sharply towards the door. “I take it that you wouldn’t object to knowing all the messenger can tell you?”
“No, no. Question him. Find out whether she gave this to him with her own hand.”
Gerridge obeyed this injunction, but was told in reply that the note had been given him to deliver by a clerk in the hotel lobby. He could tell nothing about the lady.
This was unsatisfactory enough; but the man who had influenced her to this step had been placed under surveillance. Tomorrow they would question him; the mystery was not without a promise of solution. So Gerridge felt; but not Mr. Ransom; for at the end of the lines whose purport he had just communicated to the detective were these few, significant words:
“Make no move to find me. If you love me well enough to wait in silence for developments, happiness may yet be ours.”
CHAPTER IV
MR. RANSOM WAITS
Gerridge rose early, primed, as he said to himself, for business. But to his great disappointment he found Mr. Ransom in a frame of mind which precluded action. Indeed, that gentleman looked greatly changed. He not only gave evidence of a sleepless night but showed none of the spirit of the previous evening, and hesitated quite painfully when Gerridge asked him if he did not intend to go ahead with the interview they had promised themselves.
“That’s as it may be,” was the hesitating reply. “I hardly think that I shall visit the man you mean this morning. He interests me and I hope that none of his movements will escape you. But I’m not ready to talk to him. I prefer to wait a little; to give my wife a chance. I should feel better, and have less to forget.”
“Just as you say,” returned the detective stiffly. “He’s under our thumb at present, I can’t tell when he may wriggle out.”
“Not while your eye’s on him. And your eye won’t leave him as long as you have confidence in the reward I’ve promised you.”
“Perhaps not; but you take the life out of me. Last night you were too hot; this morning you are too cold. But it’s not for me to complain. You know where to find me when you want me.” And without more ado the detective went out.
Mr. Ransom remained alone and in no enviable frame of mind. He was distrustful of himself, distrustful of the man who had made all this trouble, and distrustful of her, though he would not acknowledge it. Every baser instinct in him drove him to the meeting he declined. To see the man—to force from him the truth, seemed the only rational thing to do. But the final words of his wife’s letter stood in his way. She had advised patience. If patience would clear the situation and bring him the result he so ardently desired, then he would be patient—that is, for a day; he did not promise to wait longer. Yes, he would give her a day. That was time enough for a man suffering on the rack of such an intolerable suspense—one day.
But even that day did not pass without breaks in his mood and more than one walk in the direction of the St. Denis Hotel. If Gerridge’s eye was on him as well as on the special object of his surveillance, he must have smiled, more than once, at the restless flittings of his client about the forbidden spot. In the evening it was the same, but the next morning he remained steadfastly at his hotel. He had laid out his future course in these words: “I will extend the time to three days; then if I do not hear from her I will get that wry-necked fellow by the throat and twist an explanation from him.” But the three days passed and he found the situation unchanged. Then he set as his limit the end of the week, but before the full time had elapsed he was advised by Gerridge that he himself was being followed in his turn by a couple of private detectives; and while still under the agitation of this discovery was further disconcerted by having the following communication thrust into his hand in the open street by a young woman who succeeded in losing herself in the crowd before he had got so much as a good look at her.
You can judge of his amazement as he read the few lines it contained.
Read the papers tonight and forget the stranger at the St. Denis.
That was all. But the writing was hers. The hours passed slowly till the papers were cried in the street. What Mr. Ransom read in them increased his astonishment, I might say his anxiety. It was a paragraph about his w
ife, an almost incredible one, running thus:
A strange explanation is given of the disappearance of Mrs. Roger Ransom on her wedding-day. As our readers will remember, she accompanied her husband to the hotel, but managed to slip away and leave the house while he still stood at the desk. This act, for which nothing in her previous conduct has in any way prepared her friends, is now said to have been due to the shock of hearing, some time during her wedding-day, that a sister whom she had supposed dead was really alive and in circumstances of almost degrading poverty. As this sister had been her own twin the effect upon her mind was very serious. To find and rescue this sister she left her newly made husband in the surreptitious manner already recorded in the papers. That she is not fully herself is shown by her continued secrecy as to her whereabouts. All that she has been willing to admit to the two persons she has so far taken into her confidence—her husband and the agent who conducts her affairs—is that she has found her sister and cannot leave her. Why, she does not state. The case is certainly a curious one and Mr. Ransom has the sympathy of all his friends.
Confused, and in a state of mind bordering on frenzy, Mr. Ransom returned to the hotel and sought refuge in his own room. He put no confidence in what he had just read; he regarded it as a newspaper story and a great fake; but she had bid him read it, and this fact in itself was very disturbing. For how could she have known about it if she had not been its author, and if she was its author, what purpose had she expected it to serve?
He was still debating this question when he reached his own room. On the floor, a little way from the sill, lay a letter. It had been thrust under the door during his absence. Lifting it in some trepidation, he cast a glance at its inscription and sank staggering into the nearest chair, asking himself if he had the courage to open and read it. For the handwriting, like that of the note handed him in the street, was Georgian’s, and he felt himself in a maze concerning her which made everything in her connection seem dreamlike and unreal. It was not long, however, before he had mastered its contents. They were strange enough, as this transcription of them will show.
You have seen what has happened to me, but you cannot understand how I feel. She looks exactly like me. It is that which makes the world eddy about me. I cannot get used to it. It is like seeing my own reflected image step from the mirror and walk about doing things. Two of us, Roger, two! If you saw her you would call her Georgian. And she says that she knows you, admires you! and she says it in my voice! I try to shut my ears, but I hear her saying it even when her lips do not move. She is as ignorant as she is afflicted and I cannot leave her. She cannot hear a sound, though she can talk well enough about what is going on in her own mind, and she is so wayward and uncertain of temper, owing to her ignorance and her difficulty in understanding me, that I don’t know what she would do if once let out of my sight. I love you—I love you—but I must stay right here.
Your affectionate and most unhappy
Georgian.
The sheet with its tear-stained lines fell from his grasp. Then he caught it up again and looked carefully at the signature. It was his wife’s without doubt. Then he studied the rest of the writing and compared it with that of the note which had been thrust into his hands earlier in the day. There was no difference between them except that there were evidences of faltering in the latter, not noticeable in the earlier communication. As he noted these tokens of weakness or suffering, he caught up the telephone receiver in good earnest and called out Gerridge’s number. When the detective answered, he shouted back:
“Have you read the evening papers? If you haven’t, do so at once; then come directly to me. It’s business now and no mistake; and our first visit shall be on the fellow at the St. Denis.”
CHAPTER V
IN CORRIDOR AND IN ROOM
Three quarters of an hour later Mr. Ransom and Gerridge stood in close conference before the last mentioned hotel. The former was peremptory in what he had to say.
“I haven’t a particle of confidence in this newspaper story,” he declared. “I haven’t much confidence in her letter. It is this man who is working us. He has a hold on her and has given her this cock and bull story to tell. A sister! A twin sister come to light after fifteen years of supposed burial! I find the circumstance entirely too romantic. Nor does an explanation of this nature fit the conditions. She was happy before she saw him in the church. He isn’t her twin sister. I tell you the game is a deep one and she is the sufferer. Her letters betray more than a disturbed mind; they betray a disturbed brain. That man is the cause and I mean to wring his secret from him. You are sure of his being still in the house?”
“He was early this morning. He has lived a very quiet life these last few days, the life of one waiting. He has not even had visitors, after that one interview he held with your wife. I have kept careful watch on him. Though a suspected character, he has done nothing suspicious while I’ve had him under my eye.”
“That’s all right and I thank you, Gerridge; but it doesn’t shake my opinion as to his being the moving power in this fraud. For fraud it is and no mistake. Of that I am fully convinced. Shall we go up? I want to surprise him in his own room where he cannot slip away or back out.”
“Leave that business to me; I’ll manage it. If you want to see him in his room, you shall.”
But this time the detective counted without his host. Mr. Porter was not in his room but in one of the halls. They encountered him as they left the elevator. He was standing reading a newspaper. The disfigured jaw could not be mistaken. They stopped where they were and looked at him.
He was intent, absorbed. As they watched, they saw his hands close convulsively on the sheet he was holding, while his lips muttered some words that made the detective look hard at his companion.
“Did you hear?” he cautiously inquired, as Mr. Ransom stood hesitating, not knowing whether to address the man or not.
“No; what did he say? Do you suppose he is reading that paragraph?”
“I haven’t a doubt of it; and his words were, ‘Here’s a damned lie!’—very much like your own, sir.”
Mr. Ransom drew the detective a few steps down the corridor.
“He said that?”
“Yes, I heard him distinctly.”
“Then my theory is all wrong. This man didn’t provide her with this imaginary twin sister.”
“Evidently not.”
“And is as surprised as we are.”
“And about as much put out. Look at him! Nothing yellow there! We shall have to go easy with him.”
Mr. Ransom looked and felt a recoil of more than ordinary dislike for the man. The latter had put the paper in his pocket and was coming their way. His face, once possibly handsome, for his eyes and forehead were conspicuously fine, showed a distortion quite apart from that given by his physical disfigurement. He was not simply angry but in a mental and moral rage, and it made him more than hideous; it made him appalling. Yet he said nothing and moved along very quietly, making, to all appearance, for his room. Would he notice them as he went by? It did not seem likely. Instinctively they had stepped to one side, and Mr. Ransom’s face was in the shadow. To both it had seemed better not to accost him while he was in this mood. They would see him later.
But this was not to be. Some instinct made him turn, and Mr. Ransom, recognizing his opportunity, stepped forward and addressed him by the name under which he had introduced himself at the reception; that of his wife’s family, Hazen.
The effect was startling. Instead of increasing his anger, as the detective had naturally expected, it appeared to have the contrary effect, for every vestige of passion immediately disappeared from his face, leaving only its natural disfigurement to plead against him. He approached them, and Ransom, at least, was conscious of a revulsion of feeling in his favor, there was such restraint and yet such undoubted power in his strange and peculiar personality.
“You know me?” said he, darting a keen and comprehensive look from one to the other.
“We should like a few words with you,” ventured Gerridge. “This gentleman thinks you can give him very valuable information about a person he is greatly interested in.”
“He is mistaken.” The words came quick and decisive in a not unmelodious voice. “I am a stranger in New York; a stranger in this country. I have few, if any, acquaintances.”
“You have one.”
It was now Mr. Ransom’s turn.
“A man with no acquaintances does not attend weddings; certainly not wedding receptions. I have seen you at one, my own. Do you not recognize me, Mr. Hazen?”
A twitch of surprise, not even Ransom could call it alarm, drew his mouth still further towards his ear; but his manner hardly altered and it was in the same affable tone that he replied:
“You must pardon my short-sightedness. I did not recognize you, Mr. Ransom.”
“Did not want to,” muttered Gerridge, satisfied in his own mind that this man was only deterred by his marked and unmistakable physiognomy from denying the acquaintanceship just advanced.
“Your congratulations did not produce the desired effect,” continued Mr. Ransom. “My happiness was short lived. Perhaps you knew its uncertain tenure when you wished me joy. I remember that your tone lacked sincerity.”
It was a direct attack. Whether a wise one or not remained to be seen. Gerridge watched the unfolding drama with interest.
“I have reason to think,” proceeded Mr. Ransom, “that the unhappy termination of that day’s felicities were in a measure due to you. You seem to know my bride very well; much too well for her happiness or mine.”
“We will argue that question in my room,” was the unmoved reply. “The open hall is quite unsuited to a conversation of this nature. Now,” said he, turning upon them when they were in the privacy of his small but not uncomfortable apartment, “you will be kind enough to repeat what you just said. I wish to thoroughly understand you.”
“You have the right,” returned Mr. Ransom, controlling himself under the detective’s eye. “I said that your presence at this wedding seemed to disturb my wife, which fact, considering the after occurrences of the day, strikes me as important enough for discussion. Are you willing to discuss it affably and fairly?”
The Anna Katharine Green Mystery Megapack Page 145