Why had he not known her better before linking his fate to hers? Why had he never encouraged her to talk to him more about herself and her early life? Had he but done so, he might now have some clew to the mystery devouring him. He might know why so rich and independent a woman had chosen this remote town on an inaccessible road, for the completion of an act which was in itself a mystery. Why could not the will have been signed in New York? But he was not inquisitive in those days. He had taken her for what she seemed—an untrammeled, gay-hearted girl, ready to love and be his happy wife and lifelong companion; and he had been contented to keep all conversation along natural lines and do no probing. And now—this brother whom all had thought dead, come to life with menace in his acts and conversation! Also a sister—but this sister he had no belief in. The coincidence was too startlingly out of nature for him to accept a brother and a sister too. A brother or a sister; but not both. Not even Mr. Harper’s assurances should influence his credulity to this extent. “Money! money is at the bottom of it all,” was his final decision. “She knows it and is making her will, as a possible protection. But why come here?”
Thus every reflection ended.
Suddenly a vanished, half-forgotten memory came back. It brought a gleam of light into the darkness which had hitherto enveloped the whole matter. She had once spoken to him of her early life. She had mentioned a place where she used to play as a child; had mentioned it lovingly, longingly. There were hills, she had said; hills all around. And woods full of chestnut-trees, safe woods where she could wander at will. And the roads—how she loved to walk the roads. No automobiles then, not even bicycles. One could go miles without meeting man or horse. Sometimes a heavily-laden cart would go by drawn by a long string of oxen; but they were picturesque and added to the charm. Oxen were necessary where there was no railroad.
As he repeated these words to himself, he looked up. Through the downpour his eyes could catch a glimpse of the road before him, winding up a long hillside. Down this road was approaching a dozen yoke of oxen dragging a wagon piled with bales of some sort of merchandise. One question in his mind was answered. This spot was not an unknown one to her. It was connected with her childhood days. There was reason back of her choice of it as a place of meeting between her and her lawyer, or if not reason, association, and that of the tenderest kind. He felt himself relieved of the extreme weight of his oppression and ventured upon asking a question or two about Sitford, which he took pains to say he was visiting for the first time.
The information he obtained was but meager, but he did learn that there was a very fair tavern there and that the manufactures of the place were sufficient to account for a stranger’s visit. The articles made were mostly novelties.
This knowledge he meant to turn to account, but changed his mind when they finally splashed into town and stopped before the tavern which had been so highly recommended by his driver. The house, dripping though it was from every eave, had such a romantic air that he thought he could venture to cite other reasons for his stay there than the prosaic one of business. That is, if the landlady should give any evidence of being at all in accord with her quaint home and picturesque surroundings.
She showed herself and he at once gave her credit for being all he could wish in the way of credulity and good-nature, and meeting her with the smile which had done good execution in its day, he asked if she had a room for a writer who was finishing a book, and who only asked for quiet and regular meals before his own cosy fire. This to rouse her imagination and make her amenable to his wishes for secrecy.
She was a simple soul and fell easily into the trap. In half an hour Mr. Ransom was ensconced in a pleasant room over the porch, a room which he soon learned possessed many advantages. For it not only overlooked the main entrance, but was so placed as to command a view of all the rooms on his hall. In two of those rooms he bade fair to be greatly interested, Mrs. Deo having remarked that they were being prepared for a lady who was coming that night. As he had no doubt who this lady was, he encouraged the good woman to talk, and presently had the satisfaction of hearing her say that she was very happy over this lady’s coming, as she was a Sitford girl, one of the old family of Hazens, and though married now and very rich was much loved by every one in town because she had never forgotten Sitford or Sitford people.
She was coming! He had made no mistake. And this was the place of her birth, just as he had decided when he saw that long line of oxen! He realized how fortunate he was, or rather how indebted he was to Mr. Harper, since in this place only could he hope to gain satisfaction on the mooted point raised by that same gentleman. If she had been born here, so had her twin sister; so had the brother whose claims lay counter to that sister’s. Both must have been known to these people, their persons, their history and the circumstances of their supposed deaths. The clews thus afforded must prove invaluable to him. From them he must soon be able to ascertain in which story to place faith and which claimant to believe. He might have interrogated his hostess, but feared to show his interest in the supposed stranger. He preferred to wait a few hours and gather his facts from other lips.
Meantime it rained.
CHAPTER VIII
ELIMINATION
At about three o’clock in the afternoon Mr. Ransom left his room. He had been careful almost from his first arrival to sit with his door ajar. He had, therefore, only to give it a slight push and walk out when he heard the bustle of preparation going on in the two rooms in whose future occupancy he was so vitally interested. A maid stood in the hall. A man within was pushing about furniture. The landlady was giving orders. His course downstairs did not lead him so far as those rooms, so he called out pleasantly:
“I have written till my head aches, Mrs. Deo. I must venture out notwithstanding the rain. In which direction shall I find the best walking?”
She came to him all eagerness and smiles. “It’s all bad, such a day,” said she, “but it’s muddiest down by the factories. You had better climb the hill.”
“Where the cemetery is?” he asked.
“Yes; do you object to cemeteries? Ours is thought to be very interesting. We have stones there whose inscriptions are a hundred and fifty years old. But it’s a bad day to walk amongst graves. Perhaps you had better go east. I’m sorry we should have such a storm on your first day. Must you go out?”
He forced a suffering look into his eyes, and insisting that nothing but outdoor air would help him when he had a headache, hastened downstairs and so out. A blinding gust seized him as he faced the hill, but he drew down his umbrella and hurried on. He had a purpose in following her suggestion as to a walk in this direction. Dark as the grasses were, he meant to search the cemetery for the graves of the Hazens and see what he could learn from them.
He met three persons on his way, all of whom turned to look at him. This was in the village. On the hillside he met nobody. Wind and rain and mud were all; desolation in the prospect and all but desolation in his heart. At the brow he first caught sight of the broken stone wall which separated the old burying place from the road. There lay his path. Happily he could tread it unnoticed and unwatched. There was no one within sight, high or low.
He spent a half hour among the tombs before he struck the name he was looking for. Another ten minutes before he found those of his wife’s family. Then he had his reward. On a low brown shaft he read the names of father and mother, and beneath them the following lines:
Sacred to the memory of
ANITRA
Died June 7, 1885
Aged 6 years and one day.
Of such is the Kingdom of heaven.
The twin! Georgian was mad. This record showed that her little sister lay here. Anitra—yes, that was the name of her other half. He remembered it well. Georgian had mentioned it to him more than once. And this child, this Anitra, had been buried here for fifteen years.
Deeply indignant at his wife’s duplicity, he took a look at the opposite side of the shaft where still another surp
rise awaited him. Here was the record of the brother; the brother he had so lately talked to and who had seemingly proven his claim to the name he now read:
Alfred Francesco
only son of
Georgian Toritti afterwards Georgian Hazen.
Lost at sea February, 1895.
Aged twenty-five years.
An odd inscription opening up conjectures of the most curious and interesting nature. But it was not this fact which struck him at the time, it was the possibility underlying the simple statement, Lost at sea. This, as the wry-necked man had said, admitted of a possible resurrection. Here was no body. A mound showed where Anitra had been laid away; a little mound surmounted by a headstone carved with her name. But only these few words gave evidence of the young man’s death, and inscriptions of this nature are sometimes false.
The conclusion was obvious. It was the brother and not the sister who had reappeared. Georgian was not only playing him false but deceiving the general public. In fact, knowingly or unknowingly, she was perpetrating a great fraud. He was inclined to think unknowingly. He began to regard with less incredulity Hazen’s declaration that the shock of her brother’s return had unsettled her mind.
Distressed, but no longer the prey of distracting doubt, he again examined the inscription before him and this time noticed its peculiarities. Alfred Francesco, only son of Georgian Toritti afterwards Georgian Hazen. Afterwards! What was meant by that afterwards? That the woman had been married twice, and that this Alfred Francesco was the son of her first husband rather than of the one whose name he bore? It looked that way. There was a suggestion of Italian parentage in the Francesco which corresponded well with the decidedly Italian Toritti.
Perplexed and not altogether satisfied with his discoveries, he turned to leave the place when he found himself in the presence of a man carrying a kit of tools and wearing on his face a harsh and discontented expression. As this man was middle-aged and had no other protection from the rain than a rubber cape for his shoulders, the cause of his discontent was easy enough to imagine; though why he should come into this place with tools was more than Mr. Ransom could understand.
“Hello, stranger.” It was this man who spoke. “Interested in the Hazen monument, eh? Well, I’ll soon give you reason to be more interested yet. Do you see this inscription—On June 7, 1885; Anitra, aged six, and the rest of it? Well, I cut them letters there fifteen years ago. Now I’m to cut ‘em out. The orders has just come. The youngster didn’t die it seems, and I’m commanded to chip the fifteen-year-old lie out. What do you think of that? A sweet job for a day like this. Mor’n likely it’ll put me under a stone myself. But folks won’t listen to reason. It’s been here fifteen years and seventeen days and now it must come out, rain or shine, before night-fall. ‘Before the sun sets,’ so the telegram ran. I’ll be blessed but I’ll ask a handsome penny for this job.”
Mr. Ransom, controlling himself with difficulty, pointed to the little mound. “But the child seems to have been buried here,” he said.
“Lord bless you, yes, a child was buried here, but we all knew years ago that it mightn’t be Hazen’s. The schoolhouse burned and a dozen children with it. One of the little bodies was given to Mr. Hazen for burial. He believed it was his Anitra, but a good while after, a bit of the dress she wore that day was found hanging to a bush where some gipsies had been. There were lots of folks who remembered that them gipsies had passed the schoolhouse a half hour before the fire, and they now say found the little girl hiding behind the wood-pile, and carried her off. No one ever knew; but her death was always thought doubtful by every one but Mr. and Mrs. Hazen. They stuck to the old idee and believed her to be buried under this mound where her name is.”
“But one of the children was buried here,” persisted Ransom. “You must have known the number of those lost and would surely be able to tell if one were missing, as must have been the case if the gipsies had carried off Anitra before the fire.”
“I don’t know about that,” objected the stone-cutter. “There was, in those days, a little orphan girl, almost an idiot, who wandered about this town, staying now in one house and now in another as folks took compassion on her. She was never seen agin after that fire. If she was in the schoolhouse that day, as she sometimes was, the number would be made up. No one was left to tell us. It was an awful time, sir. The village hasn’t got over it yet.”
Mr. Ransom made some sympathetic rejoinder and withdrew towards the gateway, but soon came strolling back. The man had arranged his tools and was preparing to go to work.
“It seems as if the family was pretty well represented here,” remarked Ransom. “Is it the girl herself—Anitra, I believe you called her—who has ordered this record of her death removed?”
“Oh, no, you don’t know them Hazens. There’s one of ‘em who has quite a story; the twin of this Anitra. She lived to grow up and have a lot of money left her. If you lived in Sitford, or lived in New York, you’d know all about her; for her name’s been in the papers a lot this week. She’s the great lady who married and left her husband all in one day; and for what reason do you think? We know, because she don’t keep no secrets from her old friends. She’s found this sister, and it’s her as has ordered me to chip away this name. She wants it done today, because she’s coming here with this gal she’s found. Folks say she ran across her in the street and knew her at once. Can you guess how?”
“From her name?”
“Lord, no; from what I hear, she hadn’t any name. From her looks! She saw her own self when she looked at her.”
“How interesting, how very interesting,” stammered Mr. Ransom, feeling his newly won convictions shaken again. “Quite remarkable the whole story. And so is this inscription,” he added, pointing to the words Georgian Toritti, etc. “Did the woman have two husbands, and was the Alfred Hazen, whose death at sea is commemorated here, the son of Toritti or of Hazen?”
“Of Toritti,” grumbled the man, evidently displeased at the question. “A black-browed devil who it won’t do to talk about here. Mrs. Hazen was only a slip of a gal when she married him, and as he didn’t live but a couple o’ months folks have sort o’ forgiven her and forgotten him. To us Mrs. Hazen was always Mrs. Hazen; and Alf—well, he was just Alf Hazen too; a lad with too much good in him to perish in them murderous waters a thousand miles from home.”
So they still believed Hazen dead! No intimation of his return had as yet reached Sitford. This was what Ransom wanted to know. But there was still much to learn. Should he venture an additional question? No, that would show more than a stranger’s interest in a topic so purely local. Better leave well enough alone and quit the spot before he committed himself.
Uttering some commonplace observation about the fatality attending certain families, he nodded a friendly good-by and made for the entrance.
As he stepped below the brow of the hill he heard the first click of the workman’s hammer on the chisel with which he proposed to eliminate the word Anitra from the list of the Hazen dead.
CHAPTER IX
HUNTER’S INN
When Mr. Ransom re-entered the hotel, which he did under a swoop of wind which turned his umbrella inside out and drenched him through in an instant, it was to find the house in renewed turmoil, happily explained by the landlady, whom he ran across on the stairs.
“Oh, Mr. Johnston!” she cried as she edged by him with a pile of bed-linen on her arm. “Please excuse all this fuss. Another guest is coming—I have just got a telegram. A famous lawyer from New York. Our house will be full tonight.”
“Where will you put him?” inquired Mr. Ransom with a good-natured air. “There seem to be no unoccupied rooms on this hall.”
“More’s the pity,” she sighed, with a half-inquiring, half deprecatory look at this fortunate first comer. “I shall have to put him below, poor man. I’m afraid he won’t like it, but—” Mr. Ransom remained silent. “But,” she went on with sudden cheerfulness, “I will make it up in the suppe
r. That shall be as good a one as our kitchen will provide. Four city guests all in one day! That’s a good many for this quiet hotel.”
“Four!” retorted Mr. Ransom as he turned towards his own door. “The number has grown by two since I went out.”
“Oh, I didn’t tell you. The lady—her name’s Mrs. Ransom—brings her sister with her. The little girl who—yes, I am coming.” This latter to some perplexed domestic down the hall, who had already called her twice. “I mustn’t stand talking here,” she apologized as she hurried away. “But do take care of yourself. You are dreadful wet. How I wish the weather would clear up!”
Mr. Ransom wished the same. To say nothing of his own inconvenience, it was a source of anxiety to him that she should have to ride these inevitable ten miles in such a chilling downpour. Besides, a storm of this kind complicated matters; gave him less sense of freedom, shut him in, as it were, with the mystery he was there to unravel, but which for some reason, hardly explainable to himself, filled him with such a sense of foreboding that he had moments in which he thought only of escape. But his part must be played and he prepared himself to play it well. Having changed his clothes and warmed himself with a draft of whisky, he sat down at his table and was busy writing when the maid came in to ask if he would wait for his supper till the coach came, or have it earlier and served in his own room.
With an air of petulance, he looked up, rapped on the table, and replied:
“Here! here! I’m too busy to meet strangers. An early supper and an early bed. That’s the way I get through my work.”
The girl stared and went softly out. Work!—that? Sitting at a table and just putting words on paper. If it was beds he had to drag around now, or a dozen hungry, clamoring men to feed all at once, and all with the best cuts, or stairs to run up fifty times a day, or—but I need not fill out her thought. It made her voluble in the kitchen and secured him the privacy which his incognito demanded.
His supper over, he waited feverishly for the coach, which ordinarily was due at seven in the evening. Tonight it bade fair to be late, owing to the bad condition of the roads and the early darkness. The wind had gone down, but it still rained. Not quite so tempestuously as when he roamed the cemetery, but steadily enough to keep eaves and branches dripping. The sound of this ceaseless drip was eerie enough to his strained senses, waiting as he was for an event which might determine the happiness or the misery of his life. He tried to forget it and wrote diligently, putting down words whose meaning he did not stop to consider, so that he had something to show to prying eyes if such should ever glance through his papers. But the sound had got on his brain, and presently became so insistent that he rose again and flung his window up to see if he were deceived in thinking he heard a deep roar mingling with the incessant patter, a roar which the wind had hitherto prevented him from separating from the general turmoil, but which now was apparent enough to call for some explanation.
The Anna Katharine Green Mystery Megapack Page 147