“He is. That cut was made by—by my wife; a sample of her capricious willfulness. She wished to leave a record of herself in the substance of our house as well as in our lives. That nick marks her height. She laughed when she made it. ‘Till the walls cave in or burn,’ is what she said. And I thought her laugh and smile captivating.”
Cutting short his own laugh which was much too sardonic for a lady’s ears, he made a move as if to lead the way into another portion of the room. But Violet failed to notice this, and lingering in quiet contemplation of this suggestive little nick,—the only blemish in a room of ancient colonial magnificence,—she thoughtfully remarked:
“Then she was a small woman?” adding with seeming irrelevance—“like myself.”
Roger winced. Something in the suggestion hurt him, and in the nod he gave there was an air of coldness which under ordinary circumstances would have deterred her from pursuing this subject further. But the circumstances were not ordinary, and she allowed herself to say:
“Was she so very different from me,—in figure, I mean?”
“No. Why do you ask? Shall we not join your brother on the terrace?”
“Not till I have answered the question you put me a moment ago. You wished to know my requirements. One of the most important you have already fulfilled. You have given your servants a half-holiday and by so doing ensured to us full liberty of action. What else I need in the attempt I propose to make, you will find listed in this memorandum.” And taking a slip of paper from her bag, she offered it to him with a hand, the trembling of which he would have noted had he been freer in mind.
As he read, she watched him, her fingers nervously clutching her throat.
“Can you supply what I ask?” she faltered, as he failed to raise his eyes or make any move or even to utter the groan she saw surging up to his lips. “Will you?” she impetuously urged, as his fingers closed spasmodically on the paper, in evidence that he understood at last the trend of her daring purpose.
The answer came slowly, but it came. “I will. But what—”
Her hand rose in a pleading gesture.
“Do not ask me, but take Arthur and myself into the garden and show us the flowers. Afterwards, I should like a glimpse of the sea.”
He bowed and they joined Arthur who had already begun to stroll through the grounds.
Violet was seldom at a loss for talk even at the most critical moments. But she was strangely tongue-tied on this occasion, as was Roger himself. Save for a few observations casually thrown out by Arthur, the three passed in a disquieting silence through pergola after pergola, and around beds gorgeous with every variety of fall flowers, till they turned a sharp corner and came in full view of the sea.
“Ah!” fell in an admiring murmur from Violet’s lips as her eyes swept the horizon. Then as they settled on a mass of rock jutting out from the shore in a great curve, she leaned towards her host and softly whispered:
“The promontory?”
He nodded, and Violet ventured no farther, but stood for a little while gazing at the tumbled rocks. Then, with a quick look back at the house, she asked him to point out his father’s window.
He did so, and as she noted how openly it faced the sea, her expression relaxed and her manner lost some of its constraint. As they turned to re-enter the house, she noticed an old man picking flowers from a vine clambering over one end of the piazza.
“Who is that?” she asked.
“Our oldest servant, and my father’s own man,” was Roger’s reply. “He is picking my father’s favourite flowers, a few late honeysuckles.”
“How fortunate! Speak to him, Mr. Upjohn. Ask him how your father is this evening.”
“Accompany me and I will; and do not be afraid to enter into conversation with him. He is the mildest of creatures and devoted to his patient. He likes nothing better than to talk about him.”
Violet, with a meaning look at her brother, ran up the steps at Roger’s side. As she did so, the old man turned and Violet was astonished at the wistfulness with which he viewed her.
“What a dear old creature!” she murmured. “See how he stares this way. You would think he knew me.”
“He is glad to see a woman about the place. He has felt our isolation—Good evening, Abram. Let this young lady have a spray of your sweetest honeysuckle. And, Abram, before you go, how is Father tonight? Still sitting up?”
“Yes, sir. He is very regular in his ways. Nine is his hour; not a minute before and not a minute later. I don’t have to look at the clock when he says: ‘There, Abram, I’ve sat up long enough.’”
“When my father retires before his time or goes to bed without a final look at the sea, he will be a very sick man, Abram.”
“That he will, Mr. Roger; that he will. But he’s very feeble tonight, very feeble. I noticed that he gave the boy fewer kisses than usual. Perhaps he was put out because the child was brought in a half-hour earlier than the stated time. He don’t like changes; you know that, Mr. Roger; he don’t like changes. I hardly dared to tell him that the servants were all going out in a bunch tonight.”
“I’m sorry,” muttered Roger. “But he’ll forget it by tomorrow. I couldn’t bear to keep a single one from the concert. They’ll be back in good season and meantime we have you. Abram is worth half a dozen of them, Miss Strange. We shall miss nothing.”
“Thank you, Mr. Roger, thank you,” faltered the old man. “I try to do my duty.” And with another wistful glance at Violet, who looked very sweet and youthful in the half-light, he pottered away.
The silence which followed his departure was as painful to her as to Roger Upjohn. When she broke it it was with this decisive remark:
“That man must not speak of me to your father. He must not even mention that you have a guest tonight. Run after him and tell him so. It is necessary that your father’s mind should not be taken up with present happenings. Run.”
Roger made haste to obey her. When he came back she was on the point of joining her brother but stopped to utter a final injunction:
“I shall leave the library, or wherever we may be sitting, just as the clock strikes half-past eight. Arthur will do the same, as by that time he will feel like smoking on the terrace. Do not follow either him or myself, but take your stand here on the piazza where you can get a full view of the right-hand wing without attracting any attention to yourself. When you hear the big clock in the hall strike nine, look up quickly at your father’s window. What you see may determine—oh, Arthur! still admiring the prospect? I do not wonder. But I find it chilly. Let us go in.”
Roger Upjohn, sitting by himself in the library, was watching the hands of the mantel clock slowly approaching the hour of nine.
Never had silence seemed more oppressive nor his sense of loneliness greater. Yet the boom of the ocean was distinct to the ear, and human presence no farther away than the terrace where Arthur Strange could be seen smoking out his cigar in solitude. The silence and the loneliness were in Roger’s own soul; and, in face of the expected revelation which would make or unmake his future, the desolation they wrought was measureless.
To cut his suspense short, he rose at length and hurried out to the spot designated by Miss Strange as the best point from which to keep watch upon his father’s window. It was at the end of the piazza where the honeysuckle hung, and the odour of the blossoms, so pleasing to his father, well-nigh overpowered him not only by its sweetness but by the many memories it called up. Visions of that father as he looked at all stages of their relationship passed in a bewildering maze before him. He saw him as he appeared to his childish eyes in those early days of confidence when the loss of the mother cast them in mutual dependence upon each other. Then a sterner picture of the relentless parent who sees but one straight course to success in this world and the next. Then the teacher and the matured adviser; and then—oh, bitter change! the man whose hopes he had crossed—whose life he had undone, and all for her who now ca
me stealing upon the scene with her slim, white, jewelled hand forever lifted up between them. And she! Had he ever seen her more clearly? Once more the dainty figure stepped from fairy-land, beauteous with every grace that can allure and finally destroy a man. And as he saw, he trembled and wished that these moments of awful waiting might pass and the test be over which would lay bare his father’s heart and justify his fears or dispel them forever.
But the crisis, if crisis it was, was one of his own making and not to be hastened or evaded. With one quick glance at his father’s window, he turned in his impatience towards the sea whose restless and continuous moaning had at length struck his ear. What was in its call tonight that he should thus sway towards it as though drawn by some dread magnetic force? He had been born to the dashing of its waves and knew its every mood and all the passion of its song from frolicsome ripple to melancholy dirge. But there was something odd and inexplicable in its effect upon his spirit as he faced it at this hour. Grim and implacable—a sound rather than a sight—it seemed to hold within its invisible distances the image of his future fate. What this image was and why he should seek for it in this impenetrable void, he did not know. He felt himself held and was struggling with this influence as with an unknown enemy when there rang out, from the hall within, the preparatory chimes for which his ear was waiting, and then the nine slow strokes which signalized the moment when he was to look for his father’s presence at the window.
Had he wished, he could not have forborne that look. Had his eyes been closing in death, or so he felt, the trembling lids would have burst apart at this call and the revelations it promised.
And what did he see? What did that window hold for him?
Nothing that he might not have seen there any night at this hour. His father’s figure drawn up behind the panes in wistful contemplation of the night. No visible change in his attitude, nothing forced or unusual in his manner. Even the hand, lifted to pull down the shade, moves with its familiar hesitation. In a moment more that shade will be down and—But no! the lifted hand falls back; the easy attitude becomes strained, fixed. He is staring now—not merely gazing out upon the wastes of sky and sea; and Roger, following the direction of his glance, stares also in breathless emotion at what those distances, but now so impenetrable, are giving to the eye.
A spectre floating in the air above the promontory! The spectre of a woman—of his wife, clad, as she had been clad that fatal night! Outlined in supernatural light, it faces them with lifted arms showing the ends of rope dangling from either wrist. A sight awful to any eye, but to the man of guilty heart—
Ah! it comes—the cry for which the agonized son had been listening! An old man’s shriek, hoarse with the remorse of sleepless nights and days of unimaginable regret and foreboding! It cuts the night. It cuts its way into his heart. He feels his senses failing him, yet he must glance once more at the window and see with his last conscious look—But what is this! a change has taken place in the picture and he beholds, not the distorted form of his father sinking back in shame and terror before this visible image of his secret sin, but that of another weak, old man falling to the floor behind his back! Abram! the attentive, seemingly harmless, guardian of the household! Abram! who had never spoken a word or given a look in any way suggestive of his having played any other part in the hideous drama of their lives than that of the humble and sympathetic servant!
The shock was too great, the relief too absolute for credence. He, the listener at the grotto? He, the avenger of the family’s honour? He, the insurer of little Roger’s continuance with the family at a cost the one who loved him best would rather have died himself than pay? Yes! there is no misdoubting this old servitor’s attitude of abject appeal, or the meaning of Homer Upjohn’s joyfully uplifted countenance and outspreading arms. The servant begs for mercy from man, and the master is giving thanks to Heaven. Why giving thanks? Has he been the prey of cankering doubts also? Has the father dreaded to discover that in the son which the son has dreaded to discover in the father?
It might easily be; and as Roger recognizes this truth and the full tragedy of their mutual lives, he drops to his knees amid the honeysuckles.
“Violet, you are a wonder. But how did you dare?”
This from Arthur as the two rode to the train in the early morning.
The answer came a bit waveringly.
“I do not know. I am astonished yet, at my own daring. Look at my hands. They have not ceased trembling since the moment you threw the light upon me on the rocks. The figure of old Mr. Upjohn in the window looked so august.”
Arthur, with a short glance at the little hands she held out, shrugged his shoulders imperceptibly. It struck him that the tremulousness she complained of was due more to some parting word from their young host, than from prolonged awe at her own daring. But he made no remark to this effect, only observed:
“Abram has confessed his guilt, I hear.”
“Yes, and will die of it. The master will bury the man, and not the man the master.”
“And Roger? Not the little fellow, but the father?”
“We will not talk of him,” said she, her eyes seeking the sea where the sun in its rising was battling with a troop of lowering clouds and slowly gaining the victory.
PROBLEM V. THE DREAMING LADY
“And this is all you mean to tell me?”
“I think you will find it quite enough, Miss Strange.”
“Just the address—”
“And this advice: that your call be speedy. Distracted nerves cannot wait.”
Violet, across whose wonted piquancy there lay an indefinable shadow, eyed her employer with a doubtful air before turning away toward the door. She had asked him for a case to investigate (something she had never done before), and she had even gone so far as to particularize the sort of case she desired: “It must be an interesting one,” she had stipulated, “but different, quite different from the last one. It must not involve death or any kind of horror. If you have a case of subtlety without crime, one to engage my powers without depressing my spirits, I beg you to let me have it. I—I have not felt quite like myself since I came from Massachusetts.” Whereupon, without further comment, but with a smile she did not understand, he had handed her a small slip of paper on which he had scribbled an address. She should have felt satisfied, but for some reason she did not. She regarded him as capable of plunging her into an affair quite the reverse of what she felt herself in a condition to undertake.
“I should like to know a little more,” she pursued, making a move to unfold the slip he had given her.
But he stopped her with a gesture.
“Read it in your limousine,” said he. “If you are disappointed then, let me know. But I think you will find yourself quite ready for your task.”
“And my father?”
“Would approve if he could be got to approve the business at all. You do not even need to take your brother with you.”
“Oh, then, it’s with women only I have to deal?”
“Read the address after you are headed up Fifth Avenue.”
But when, with her doubts not yet entirely removed, she opened the small slip he had given her, the number inside suggested nothing but the fact that her destination lay somewhere near Eightieth Street. It was therefore with the keenest surprise she beheld her motor stop before the conspicuous house of the great financier whose late death had so affected the money-market. She had not had any acquaintance with this man herself, but she knew his house. Everyone knew that. It was one of the most princely in the whole city. C. Dudley Brooks had known how to spend his millions. Indeed, he had known how to do this so well that it was of him her father, also a financier of some note, had once said he was the only successful American he envied.
She was expected; that she saw the instant the door was opened. This made her entrance easy—an entrance further brightened by the delightful glimpse of a child’s cherubic face looking at her from a d
istant doorway. It was an instantaneous vision, gone as soon as seen; but its effect was to rob the pillared spaces of the wonderful hallway of some of their chill, and to modify in some slight degree the formality of a service which demanded three men to usher her into a small reception-room not twenty feet from the door of entrance.
Left in this secluded spot, she had time to ask herself what member of the household she would be called upon to meet, and was surprised to find that she did not even know of whom the household consisted. She was sure of the fact that Mr. Brooks had been a widower for many years before his death, but beyond that she knew nothing of his domestic life. His son—but was there a son? She had never heard any mention made of a younger Mr. Brooks, yet there was certainly some one of his connection who enjoyed the rights of an heir. Him she must be prepared to meet with a due composure, whatever astonishment he might show at the sight of a slip of a girl instead of the experienced detective he had every right to expect.
But when the door opened to admit the person she was awaiting, the surprise was hers. It was a woman who stood before her, a woman and an oddity. Yet, in just what her oddity lay, Violet found it difficult to decide. Was it in the smoothness of her white locks drawn carefully down over her ears, or in the contrast afforded by her eager eyes and her weak and tremulous mouth? She was dressed in the heaviest of mourning and very expensively, but there was that in her bearing and expression which made it impossible to believe that she took any interest in her garments or even knew in which of her dresses she had been attired.
“I am the person you have come here to see,” she said. “Your name is not unfamiliar to me, but you may not know mine. It is Quintard; Mrs. Quintard. I am in difficulty. I need assistance—secret assistance. I did not know where to go for it except to a detective agency; so I telephoned to the first one I saw advertised; and—and I was told to expect Miss Strange. But I didn’t think it would be you though I suppose it’s all right. You have come here for this purpose, haven’t you, though it does seem a little queer?”
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