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The Millionaire Baby

by Anna Katharine Green · English · Gutenberg #38347 · 400,198 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Millionaire Baby

Author: Anna Katharine Green

Illustrator: Arthur Ignatius Keller


        
Release date: December 19, 2011 [eBook #38347]

Language: English

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THE MILLIONAIRE BABY

[Illustration: "I HAVE SAID SO MUCH THAT I MUST SAY MORE. LISTEN AND BE
MY FRIEND." _p. 288_]


THE MILLIONAIRE BABY

by

ANNA KATHARINE GREEN

Author of The Filigree Ball,
The Leavenworth Case, Etc.

With Illustrations by Arthur I. Keller







Indianapolis
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
Publishers

Copyright 1905
The Bobbs-Merrill Company




CONTENTS

  CHAPTER                                                           PAGE
      I       Two Little Shoes                                         1
     II       "A Fearsome Man"                                        30
    III       A Charming Woman                                        39
     IV       Chalk-Marks                                             52
      V       The Old House in Yonkers                                69
     VI       Doctor Pool                                             80
    VII       "Find the Child!"                                       98
   VIII       "Philo! Philo! Philo!"                                 109
     IX       The Bungalow                                           122
      X       Temptation                                             132
     XI       The Secret of the Old Pavilion                         140
    XII       Behind the Wall                                        176
   XIII       "We Shall Have to Begin Again"                         196
    XIV       Espionage                                              201
     XV       A Phantasm                                             207
    XVI       "An All-Conquering Beauty"                             211
   XVII       In the Green Boudoir                                   232
  XVIII       "You Look As If--As If--"                              249
    XIX       Frenzy                                                 263
     XX       "What Do You Know?"                                    274
    XXI       Providence                                             289
   XXII       On the Second Terrace                                  315
  XXIII       A Coral Bead                                           321
   XXIV       "Shall I Give Him My Word, Harry?"                     331
    XXV       The Work of an Instant                                 338
   XXVI       "He Will Never Forgive"                                340
  XXVII       The Final Struggle                                     350




THE MILLIONAIRE BABY




I

TWO LITTLE SHOES


The morning of August eighteenth, 190-, was a memorable one to me. For
two months I had had a run of bad luck. During that time I had failed to
score in at least three affairs of unusual importance, and the result
was a decided loss in repute as well as great financial embarrassment.
As I had a mother and two sisters to support and knew but one way to do
it, I was in a state of profound discouragement. This was before I took
up the morning papers. After I had opened and read them, not a man in
New York could boast of higher hopes or greater confidence in his power
to rise by one bold stroke from threatened bankruptcy to immediate
independence.

The paragraph which had occasioned this amazing change must have passed
under the eyes of many of you. It created a wide-spread excitement at
the time and raised in more than one breast the hope of speedy fortune.
It was attached to, or rather introduced, the most startling feature of
the week, and it ran thus:

A FORTUNE FOR A CHILD.

_By cable from Southampton._

     A reward of five thousand dollars is offered, by Philo Ocumpaugh,
     to whoever will give such information as will lead to the recovery,
     alive or dead, of his six-year-old daughter, Gwendolen, missing
     since the afternoon of August the 16th, from her home in
     ----on-the-Hudson, New York, U. S. A.

     Fifty thousand dollars additional and no questions asked if she is
     restored unharmed within the week to her mother at Homewood.

     All communications to be addressed to Samuel Atwater,
     ----on-the-Hudson.

A minute description of the child followed, but this did not interest
me, and I did not linger over it. The child was no stranger to me. I
knew her well and consequently was quite aware of her personal
characteristics. It was the great amount offered for her discovery and
restoration which moved me so deeply. Fifty thousand dollars! A fortune
for any man. More than a fortune to me, who stood in such need of ready
money. I was determined to win this extraordinary sum. I had my reason
for hope and, in the light of this unexpectedly munificent reward,
decided to waive all the considerations which had hitherto prevented me
from stirring in the matter.

There were other reasons less selfish which gave impetus to my resolve.
I had done business for the Ocumpaughs before and been well treated in
the transaction. I recognized and understood both Mr. Ocumpaugh's
peculiarities and those of his admired and devoted wife. As man and
woman they were kindly, honorable and devoted to many more interests
than those connected with their own wealth. I also knew their hearts to
be wrapped up in this child,--the sole offspring of a long and happy
union, and the actual as well as prospective inheritor of more millions
than I shall ever see thousands, unless I am fortunate enough to solve
the mystery now exercising the sympathies of the whole New York public.

You have all heard of this child under another name. From her birth she
has been known as the Millionaire Baby, being the direct heir to three
fortunes, two of which she had already received. I saw her first when
she was three years old--a cherubic little being, lovely to look upon
and possessing unusual qualities for so young a child. Indeed, her
picturesque beauty and appealing ways would have attracted all eyes and
won all hearts, even if she had not represented in her small person the
wealth both of the Ocumpaugh and Rathbone families. There was an
individuality about her, combined with sensibilities of no ordinary
nature, which, fully accounted for the devoted affection with which she
was universally regarded; and when she suddenly disappeared, it was easy
to comprehend, if one did not share, the thrill of horror which swept
from one end of our broad continent to the other. Those who knew the
parents, and those who did not, suffered an equal pang at the awful
thought of this petted innocent lost in the depths of the great unknown,
with only the false caresses of her abductors to comfort her for the
deprivation of all those delights which love and unlimited means could
provide to make a child of her years supremely happy.

Her father--and this was what gave the keen edge of horror to the whole
occurrence--was in Europe when she disappeared. He had been cabled at
once and his answer was the proffered reward with which I have opened
this history. An accompanying despatch to his distracted wife announced
his relinquishment of the project which had taken him abroad and his
immediate return on the next steamer sailing from Southampton. As this
chanced to be the fastest on the line, we had reason to expect him in
six days; meanwhile--

But to complete my personal recapitulations. When the first news of this
startling abduction flashed upon my eyes from the bulletin boards, I
looked on the matter as one of too great magnitude to be dealt with by
any but the metropolitan police; but as time passed and further details
of the strange and seemingly inexplicable affair came to light, I began
to feel the stirring of the detective instinct within me (did I say that
I was connected with a private detective agency of some note in the
metropolis?) and a desire, quite apart from any mere humane interest in
the event itself, to locate the intelligence back of such a desperate
crime: an intelligence so keen that, up to the present moment, if we may
trust the published accounts of the affair, not a clue had been
unearthed by which its author could be traced, or the means employed for
carrying off this petted object of a thousand cares.

To be sure, there was a theory which eliminated all crime from the
occurrence as well as the intervention of any one in the child's fate:
she might have strayed down to the river and been drowned. But the
probabilities were so opposed to this supposition, that the police had
refused to embrace it, although the mother had accepted it from the
first, and up to the present moment, or so it was stated, had refused to
consider any other. As she had some basis for this conclusion--I am
still quoting the papers, you understand--I was not disposed to ignore
it in the study I proceeded to make of the situation. The details, as I
ran them over in the hurried trip I now made up the river to ----, were
as follows:

On the afternoon of Wednesday, August sixteenth, 190-, the guests
assembled in Mrs. Ocumpaugh's white and gold music-room were suddenly
thrown into confusion by the appearance among them of a young girl in a
state of great perturbation, who, running up to the startled hostess,
announced that Gwendolen, the petted darling of the house, was missing
from the bungalow where she had been lying asleep, and could not be
found, though a dozen men had been out on search.

The wretched mother, who, as it afterward transpired, had not only given
the orders by which the child had been thus removed from the excitement
up at the house, but had actually been herself but a few moments before
to see that the little one was well cared for and happy, seemed struck
as by a mortal blow at these words and, uttering a heart-rending scream,
ran out on the lawn. A crowd of guests rushed after her, and as they
followed her flying figure across the lawn to the small copse in which
lay hidden this favored retreat, they could hear, borne back on the
wind, the wild protests of the young nurse, that she had left the child
for a minute only and then to go no farther than the bench running along
the end of the bungalow facing the house; that she had been told she
could sit there and listen to the music, but that she never would have
left the child's side for a minute if she had not supposed she would
hear her least stir--protests which the mother scarcely seemed to heed,
and which were presently lost in the deep silence which fell on all, as,
brought to a stand in the thick shrubbery surrounding the bungalow, they
saw the mother stagger up to the door, look in and turn toward them with
death in her face.

"The river!" she gasped, "the river!" and heedless of all attempt to
stop her, heedless even of the efforts made by the little one's nurse to
draw her attention to the nearness of a certain opening in the high
hedge marking off the Ocumpaugh grounds on this side, she ran down the
bank in the direction of the railway, but fainted before she had more
than cleared the thicket. When they lifted her up, they all saw the
reason for this. She had come upon a little shoe which she held with
frantic clutch against her breast--her child's shoe, which, as she
afterward acknowledged, she had loosened with her own hand on the little
one's foot.

Of course, after this the whole hillside was searched down to the fence
which separated it from the railroad track. But no further trace of the
missing child was found, nor did it appear possible to any one that she
could have strayed away in this direction. For not only was the bank
exceedingly steep and the fence at its base impassable, but a gang of
men, working as good fortune would have it, at such a point on the road
below as to render it next to impossible for her to have crossed the
track within a half-mile either way without being observed, had one and
all declared that not one of them had seen her or any other person
descend the slope.

This, however, made but little impression on the mother. She would
listen to no hints of abduction, but persisted in her declaration that
the river had swallowed her darling, and would neither rest nor turn her
head from its waters till some half a dozen men about the place had been
set systematically to work to drag the stream.

Meanwhile, the police had been notified and the whole town aroused. The
search, which had been carried on up to this time in a frantic but
desultory way, now became methodical. Nor was it confined to the
Ocumpaugh estate. All the roads and byways within half a mile either way
were covered by a most careful investigation. All the near-by houses
were entered, especially those which the child was most in the habit of
frequenting, but no one had seen her, nor could any trace of her
presence be found. At five o'clock all hope of her return was abandoned
and, much against Mrs. Ocumpaugh's wish, who declared that the news of
the child's death would affect her father far less than the dreadful
possibilities of an abduction, the exact facts of the case had been
cabled to Mr. Ocumpaugh.

The night and another day passed, bringing but little relief to the
situation. Not an eye had as yet been closed in Homewood, nor had the
search ceased for an instant. Not an inch of the great estate had been
overlooked, yet men could still be seen beating the bushes and peering
into all the secluded spots which once had formed the charm of this
delightful place. As on the land, so on the river. All the waters in the
dock had been dragged, yet the work went on, some said under the very
eye of Mrs. Ocumpaugh. But there was no result as yet.

In the city the interest was intense. The telegraph at police
headquarters had been clicking incessantly for thirty-six hours under
the direction, some said, of the superintendent himself. Everything
which could be done had been done, but as yet the papers were able to
report nothing beyond some vague stories of a child, with its face very
much bound up, having been seen at the heels of a woman in the Grand
Central Station in New York, and hints of a covered wagon, with a crying
child inside, which had been driven through Westchester County at a
great pace shortly before sunset on the previous day, closely followed
by a buggy with the storm-apron up, though the sun shone and there was
not a cloud in the sky; but nothing definite, nothing which could give
hope to the distracted mother or do more than divide the attention of
the police between two different but equally tenable theories. Then came
the cablegram from Mr. Ocumpaugh, which threw amateur as well as
professional detectives into the field. Among the latter was myself;
which naturally brings me back once more to my own conclusions.

Of one thing I felt sure. Very early in my cogitations, before we had
quitted the Park Avenue tunnel in fact, I had decided in my own mind
that if I were to succeed in locating the lost heiress, it must be by
subtler methods than lay open to the police. I was master of such
methods (in this case at least), and though one of many owning to
similar hopes on this very train which was rushing me through to
Homewood, I had no feeling but that of confidence in a final success.
How well founded this confidence was, will presently appear.

The number of seedy-looking men with a mysterious air who alighted in my
company at ---- station and immediately proceeded to make their way up
the steep street toward Homewood, warned me that it would soon be
extremely difficult for any one to obtain access to the parties most
interested in the child's loss. Had I not possessed the advantage of
being already known to Mrs. Ocumpaugh, I should have immediately given
up all hope of ever obtaining access to her presence; and even with this
fact to back me, I approached the house with very little confidence in
my ability to win my way through the high iron gates I had so
frequently passed before without difficulty.

And indeed I found them well guarded. As I came nearer, I could see man
after man being turned away, and not till my card had been handed in,
and a hurried note to boot, did I obtain permission to pass the first
boundary. Another note secured me admission to the house, but there my
progress stopped. Mrs. Ocumpaugh had already been interviewed by five
reporters and a special agent from the New York police. She could see no
one else at present. If, however, my business was of importance, an
opportunity would be given me to see Miss Porter. Miss Porter was her
companion and female factotum.

As I had calculated upon having a half-dozen words with the mother
herself, I was greatly thrown out by this; but going upon the principle
that "half a loaf was better than no bread," I was about to express a
desire to see Miss Porter, when an incident occurred which effectually
changed my mind in this regard.

The hall in which I was standing and which communicated with the side
door by which I had entered, ended in a staircase, leading, as I had
reason to believe, to the smaller and less pretentious rooms in the rear
of the house. While I hesitated what reply to give the girl awaiting my
decision, I caught the sound of soft weeping from the top of this
staircase, and presently beheld the figure of a young woman coming
slowly down, clad in coat and hat and giving every evidence both in
dress and manner of leaving for good. It was Miss Graham, a young woman
who held the position of nursery-governess to the child. I had seen her
before, and had no small admiration for her, and the sensations I
experienced at the sight of her leaving the house where her services
were apparently no longer needed, proved to me, possibly for the first
time, that I had more heart in my breast than I had ever before
realized. But it was not this which led me to say to the maid standing
before me that I preferred to see Mrs. Ocumpaugh herself, and would call
early the next day. It was the thought that this sorrowing girl would
have to pass the gauntlet of many prying eyes on her way to the station
and that she might be glad of an escort whom she knew and had shown some
trust in. Also,--but the reasons behind that _also_ will soon become
sufficiently apparent.

I was right in supposing that my presence on the porch outside would be
a pleasing surprise to her. Though her tears continued to flow she
accepted my proffered companionship with gratitude, and soon we were
passing side by side across the lawn toward a short cut leading down the
bank to the small flag-station used by the family and by certain favored
neighbors. As we threaded the shrubbery, which is very thick about the
place, she explained to me the cause of her abrupt departure. The sight
of her, it seems, had become insupportable to Mrs. Ocumpaugh. Though no
blame could be rightfully attached to her, it was certainly true that
the child had been carried off while in her charge, and however hard it
might be for _her_, few could blame the mother for wishing her removed
from the house desolated by her lack of vigilance. But she was a good
girl and felt the humiliation of her departure almost in the light of a
disgrace.

As we came again into an open portion of the lawn, she stopped short and
looked back.

"Oh!" she cried, gripping me by the arm, "there is Mrs. Ocumpaugh still
at the window. All night she has stood there, except when she flew down
to the river at the sound of some imaginary call from the boats. She
believes, she really believes, that they will yet come upon Gwendolen's
body in the dock there."

Following the direction of her glance, I looked up. Was that Mrs.
Ocumpaugh--that haggard, intent figure with eyes fixed in awful
expectancy on the sinister group I could picture to myself down at the
water's edge? Never could I have imagined such a look on features I had
always considered as cold as they were undeniably beautiful. As I took
in the misery it expressed, that awful waiting for an event momently
anticipated, and momently postponed, I found myself, without reason and
simply in response to the force of her expression, unconsciously sharing
her expectation, and with a momentary forgetfulness of all the
probabilities, was about to turn toward the spot upon which her glances
were fixed, when a touch on my arm recalled me to myself.

"Come!" whispered my trembling companion. "She may look down and see us
here."

I yielded to her persuasion and turned away into the cluster of trees
that lay between us and that opening in the hedge through which our
course lay. Had I been alone I should not have budged till I had seen
some change--any change--in the face whose appearance had so deeply
affected me.

"Mrs. Ocumpaugh certainly believes that the body of her child lies in
the water," I remarked, as we took our way onward as rapidly as
possible. "Do you know her reasons for this?"

"She says, and I think she is right so far, that the child has been bent
for a long time on fishing; that she has heard her father talk
repeatedly of his great luck in Canada last year and wished to try the
sport for herself; that she has been forbidden to go to the river, but
must have taken the first opportunity when no eye was on her to do so;
and--and--Mrs. Ocumpaugh shows a bit of string which she found last
night in the bushes alongside the tracks when she ran down, as I have
said, at some imaginary shout from the boats--a string which she
declares she saw rolled up in Gwendolen's hand when she went into the
bungalow to look at her. Of course, it may not be the same, but Mrs.
Ocumpaugh thinks it is, and--"

"Do you think it possible, after all, that the child did stray down to
the water?"

"No," was the vehement disclaimer. "Gwendolen's feet were excessively
tender. She could not have taken three steps in only one shoe. I should
have heard her cry out."

"What if she went in some one's arms?"

"A stranger's? She had a decided instinct against strangers. Never could
any one she did not know and like have carried her so far as that
without her waking. Then those men on the track,--they would have seen
her. No, Mr. Trevitt, it was not in _that_ direction she went."

The force of her emphasis convinced me that she had an opinion of her
own in regard to this matter. Was it one she was ready to impart?

"In what direction, then?" I asked, with a gentleness I hoped would
prove effective.

Her impulse was toward a frank reply. I saw her lips part and her eyes
take on the look which precedes a direct avowal, but, as chance would
have it, we came at that moment upon the thicket inclosing the bungalow,
and the sight of its picturesque walls, showing brown through the
verdure of the surrounding shrubbery, seemed to act as a check upon her,
for, with a quick look and a certain dry accent quite new in her speech,
she suddenly inquired if I did not want to see the place from which
Gwendolen had disappeared.

Naturally I answered in the affirmative and followed her as she turned
aside into the circular path which embraces this hidden retreat; but I
had rather have heard her answer to my question, than to have gone
anywhere or seen anything at that moment. Yet, when in full view of the
bungalow's open door, she stopped to point out to me the nearness of the
place to that opening in the hedge we had just been making for, and when
she even went so far as to indicate the tangled little path by which
that opening could be reached directly from the farther end of the
bungalow, I considered that my question had been answered, though in
another way than I anticipated, even before I noted the slight flush
which rose to her cheek under my earnest scrutiny.

As it is important for the exact location of the bungalow to be
understood, I subjoin a diagram of this part of the grounds:

[Illustration: LAWN EXTENDING TO THE HIGHWAY.

A The Ocumpaugh mansion. B The Bungalow. C Mrs. Carew's house. D Private
path. E Gap in hedge leading to the Ocumpaugh grounds. F Gap leading
into Mrs. Carew's grounds. G Bench at end of bungalow.]

As I took this all in, I ventured to ask some particulars of the family
living so near the Ocumpaughs.

"Who occupies that house?" I asked, pointing to the sloping roofs and
ornamental chimneys arising just beyond us over the hedge-rows.

"Oh, that is Mrs. Carew's home. She is a widow and Mrs. Ocumpaugh's
dearest friend. How she loved Gwendolen! How we all loved her! And now,
that _wretch_--"

She burst into tears. They were genuine ones; so was her grief.

I waited till she was calm again, then I inquired very softly:

"What wretch?"

"You have not been inside," she suggested, pointing sharply to the
bungalow.

I took the implied rebuke and entered the door she indicated. A man was
sitting within, but he rose and went out when he saw us. He wore a
policeman's badge and evidently recognized her or possibly myself. I
noted, however, that he did not go far from the doorway.

"It is only a den," remarked Miss Graham.

I looked about me. She had described it perfectly: a place to lounge in
on an August day like the present. Walls of Georgia pine across one of
which hung a series of long dark rugs; a long, low window looking toward
the house, and a few articles of bamboo furniture describe the place.
Among the latter was a couch. It was drawn up underneath the window, on
the other side of which ran the bench where my companion declared she
had been sitting while listening to the music.

"Wouldn't you think my attention would have been caught by the sound of
any one moving about here?" she cried, pointing to the couch and then to
the window. "But the window was closed and the door, as you see, is
round the corner from the bench."

"A person with a very stealthy step, apparently."

"Very," she admitted. "Oh, how can I ever forgive myself! how can I
ever, ever forgive myself!"

As she stood wringing her hands in sight of that empty couch, I cast a
scrutinizing glance about me, which led me to remark:

"This interior looks new; much newer than the outside. It has quite a
modern air."

"Yes, the bungalow is old, very old; but this room, or den, or whatever
you might call it, was all remodeled and fitted up as you see it now
when the new house went up. It had long been abandoned as a place of
retreat, and had fallen into such decay that it was a perfect eyesore
to all who saw it. Now it is likely to be abandoned again, and for what
a reason! Oh, the dreadful place! How I hate it, now Gwendolen is gone!"

"One moment. I notice another thing. This room does not occupy the whole
of the bungalow."

Either she did not hear me or thought it unnecessary to reply; and
perceiving that her grief had now given way to an impatience to be gone,
I did not press the matter, but led the way myself to the door. As we
entered the little path which runs directly to that outlet in the hedge
marked E, I ventured to speak again:

"You have reasons, or so it appears, for believing that the child was
carried off through this very path?"

The reply was impetuous:

"How else could she have been spirited away so quickly? Besides,--" here
her eye stole back at me over her shoulder,--"I have since remembered
that as I ran out of the bungalow in my fright at finding the child
gone, I heard the sound of wheels on Mrs. Carew's driveway. It did not
mean much to me then, for I expected to find the child somewhere about
the grounds; but _now_, when I come to think, it means everything, for a
child's cry mingled with it (or I imagined that it did) and that
child--"

"But," I forcibly interposed, "the police should know this."

"They do; and so does Mrs. Ocumpaugh; but she has only the one idea, and
nothing can move her."

I remembered the wagon with the crying child inside which had been seen
on the roads the previous evening, and my heart fell a little in spite
of myself.

"Couldn't Mrs. Carew tell us something about this?" I asked, with a
gesture toward the house we were now passing.

"No. Mrs. Carew went to New York that morning and had only just returned
when we missed Gwendolen. She had been for her little nephew, who has
lately been made an orphan, and she was too busy making him feel at home
to notice if a carriage had passed through her grounds."

"Her servants then?"

"She had none. All had been sent away. The house was quite empty."

I thought this rather odd, but having at this moment reached the long
flight of steps leading down the embankment, I made no reply till we
reached the foot. Then I observed:

"I thought Mrs. Carew was very intimate with Mrs. Ocumpaugh."

"She is; they are more like sisters than mere friends."

"Yet she goes to New York the very day her friend gives a musicale."

"Oh, she had good reasons for that. Mrs. Carew is planning to sail this
week for Europe, and this was her only opportunity for getting her
little nephew, who is to go with her. But I don't know as she will sail,
now. She is wild with grief over Gwendolen's loss, and will not feel
like leaving Mrs. Ocumpaugh till she knows whether we shall ever see the
dear child again. But, I shall miss my train."

Here her step visibly hastened.

As it was really very nearly due, I had not the heart to detain her. But
as I followed in her wake I noticed that for all her hurry a curious
hesitancy crept into her step at times, and I should not have been
surprised at any moment to see her stop and confront me on one of the
two remaining long flights of steps leading down the steep hillside.

But we both reached the base without her having yielded to this impulse,
and presently we found ourselves in full view of the river and the small
flag-station located but a few rods away toward the left. As we turned
toward the latter, we both cast an involuntary look back at the
Ocumpaugh dock, where a dozen men could be seen at work dragging the
river-bed with grappling irons. It made a sadly suggestive picture, and
the young girl at my side shuddered violently as we noted the expression
of morbid curiosity on the faces of such onlookers, men and women, as
were drawn up at the end of the small point on which the boat-house
stood.

But I had another reason than this for urging her on. I had noticed how,
at the sight of her slight figure descending the slope, some half-dozen
men or so had separated themselves from this group, with every
appearance of intending to waylay and question her. She noticed this
too, and drawing up more closely to my side, exclaimed with marked
feeling:

"Save me from these men and I will tell you something that no one--"

But here she stopped, here our very thoughts stopped. A shout had risen
from the group at the water-edge; a shout which made us both turn, and
even caused the men who had started to follow us to wheel about and rush
back to the dock with every appearance of intense excitement.

"What is it? What can it be?" faltered my greatly-alarmed companion.

"They have found something. See! what is that the man in the boat is
holding up? It looks like--"

But she was already half-way to the point, outstripping the very men
whose importunities she had shrunk from a moment before. I was not far
behind her, and almost immediately we found ourselves wedged among the
agitated group leaning over the little object which had been tossed
ashore into the first hand outstretched to receive it.

It was a second little shoe--filled with sand and dripping with water,
but recognizable as similar to the one already found on the preceding
day high up on the bank. As this fact was borne in on us all, a groan of
pity broke from more than one pair of lips, and eye after eye stole up
the hillside to that far window in the great pile above us where the
mother's form could be dimly discerned swaying in an agitation caught
from our own excitement.

But there was one amongst us whose glance never left that little shoe.
The train she had been so anxious to take whistled and went thundering
by, but she never moved or noticed. Suddenly she reached out her hand.

"Let me see it, please," she entreated. "I was her nurse; let me take it
in my hand."

The man who held it passed it over. She examined it long and closely.

"Yes, it is hers," said she. But in another moment she had laid it down
with what I thought was a very peculiar look.

Instantly it was caught up and carried with a rush up the slope to where
Mrs. Ocumpaugh could be seen awaiting it with outstretched arms. But I
did not linger to mark her reception of it. Miss Graham had drawn me to
one side and was whispering in my ear:

"I must talk to you. I can not keep back another moment what I think or
what I feel. Some one is playing with Mrs. Ocumpaugh's fears. That shoe
is Gwendolen's, but it is not the mate of the one found on the bank
above. That was for the left foot _and so is this one_. Did you not
notice?"




II

"A FEARSOME MAN"


The effect of this statement upon me was greater than even she had
contemplated.

"You thought the child had been stolen for the reward she would bring?"
she continued. "She was not; she was taken out of pure hate, and that is
why I suffer so. What may they not do to her! In what hole hide her! My
darling, O my darling!"

She was going off into hysterics, but the look and touch I gave her
recalled her to herself.

"We need to be calm," I urged. "You, because you have something of
importance to impart, and I, because of the action I must take as soon
as the facts you have concealed become known to me. What gives you such
confidence in this belief, which I am sure is not shared by the police,
and who is the _some one_ who, as you say, is playing upon Mrs.
Ocumpaugh's fears? A short time ago it was as _the wretch_ you spoke of
him. Are not _some one_ and _the wretch_ one and the same person, and
can you not give him now a name?"

We had been moving all this time in the direction of the station and had
now reached the foot of the platform. Pausing, she cast a last look up
the bank. The trees were thick and hid from our view the Ocumpaugh
mansion, but in imagination she beheld the mother moaning over that
little shoe.

"I shall never return there," she muttered; "why do I hesitate so to
speak!" Then in a burst, as I watched her in growing excitement:
"She--Mrs. Ocumpaugh--begged me not to tell what she believed had
nothing to do with our Gwendolen's loss. But I can not keep silence.
This proof of a conspiracy against herself certainly relieves me from
any promise I may have made her. Mr. Trevitt, I am positive that I know
who carried off Gwendolen."

This was becoming interesting, intensely interesting to me. Glancing
about and noting that the group down at the water-edge had become
absorbed again in renewed efforts toward farther discoveries, I beckoned
her to follow me into the station. It was but a step, but it gave me
time to think. What was I encouraging this young girl to do? To reveal
to _me_, who had no claim upon her but that of friendship, a secret
which had not been given to the police? True, it might not be worth
much, but it was also true that it might be worth a great deal. Did she
know how much? I wanted money--few wanted it more--but I felt that I
could not listen to her story till I had fairly settled this point. I
therefore hastened to interpose a remark:

"Miss Graham, you are good enough to offer to reveal some fact hitherto
concealed. Do you do this because you have no closer friend than myself,
or because you do not know what such knowledge may be worth to the
person you give it to--in money, I mean?"

"In money? I am not thinking of money," was her amazed reply; "I am
thinking of Gwendolen."

"I understand, but you should think of the practical results as well.
Have you not heard of the enormous reward offered by Mr. Ocumpaugh?"

"No; I--"

"Five thousand dollars for information; and fifty thousand to the one
who will bring her back within the week unharmed. Mr. Ocumpaugh cabled
to that effect yesterday."

"It is a large sum," she faltered, and for a moment she hesitated. Then,
with a sweet and candid look which sank deep into my heart, she added
gravely: "I had rather not think of money in connection with Gwendolen.
If what I have to tell leads to her recovery, you can be trusted, I
know, to do what is right toward me. Mr. Trevitt, the man who stole her
from her couch and carried her away through Mrs. Carew's grounds in a
wagon or otherwise, is a long-haired, heavily whiskered man of sixty or
more years of age. His face is deeply wrinkled, but chiefly marked by a
long scar running down between his eyebrows, which are so shaggy that
they would quite hide his eyes if they were not lit up with an
extraordinary expression of resolution, carried almost to the point of
frenzy; a fearsome man, making your heart stand still when he pauses to
speak to you."

Startled as I had seldom been, for reasons which will hereafter appear,
I surveyed her in mingled wonder and satisfaction.

"His name?" I demanded.

"I do not know his name."

Again I stopped to look at her.

"Does Mrs. Ocumpaugh?"

"I do not think so. She only knows what I told her."

"And what did you tell her?"

"Ah! who are these?"

Two or three persons had entered the station, probably to wait for the
next train.

"No one who will molest you."

But she was not content till we had withdrawn to where the time-table
hung up on the opposite wall. Turning about as if to consult it, she
told the following story. I never see a time-table now but I think of
her expression as she stood there looking up as if her mind were fixed
on what she probably did not see at all.

"Last Wednesday--no, it was on the Wednesday preceding--I was taking a
ride with Gwendolen on one of the side roads branching off toward
Fordham. We were in her own little pony cart, and as we seldom rode
together like this, she had been chattering about a hundred things till
her eyes danced in her head and she looked as lovely as I had ever seen
her. But suddenly, just as we were about to cross a small wooden bridge,
I saw her turn pale and her whole sensitive form quiver. 'Some one I
don't like,' she cried. 'There is some one about whom I don't like.
Drive on, Ellie, drive on.' But before I could gather up the reins a
figure which I had not noticed before stepped from behind a tree at the
farther end of the bridge, and advancing into the middle of the road
with arms thrown out, stopped our advance. I have told you how he
looked, but I can give you no idea of the passionate fury lighting up
his eyes, or the fiery dignity with which he held his place and kept us
subdued to his will till he had looked the shrinking child all over, and
laughed, not as a madman laughs, oh, much too slow and ironically for
that! but like one who takes an unholy pleasure in mocking the happy
present with evil prophecy. Nothing that I can say will make you see him
as I saw him in that one instant, and though there was much in the
circumstance to cause fear, I think it was more awe than fright we felt,
so commanding was his whole appearance and so forcible the assurance
with which he held us there till he was ready to move. Gwendolen cried
out, but the imploring sound had no effect upon him; it only reawakened
his mirth and led him to say, in a clear, cold, mocking tone which I
hear yet, 'Cry out, little one, for your short day is nearly over. Silks
and feathers and carriages and servants will soon be a half-forgotten
memory to you; and right it is that it should be so. Ten days, little
one, only ten days more.' And with that he moved, and, slipping aside
behind the tree, allowed us to drive on. Mr. Trevitt, yesterday saw the
end of those ten days, and where is she now? Only that man knows. He is
one man in a thousand. Can not you find him?"

She turned; a train was coming, a train which it was very evident she
felt it her duty to take. I had no right to detain her, but I found time
for a question or two.

"And you told Mrs. Ocumpaugh this?"

"The moment we arrived home."

"And she? What did she think of it?"

"Mrs. Ocumpaugh is not a talkative woman. She grew very white and
clasped the child passionately in her arms. But the next minute she had
to all appearance dismissed the whole occurrence from her thoughts.
'Some socialistic fanatic,' she called him and merely advised me to stop
driving with Gwendolen for the present."

"Didn't you recall the matter to her when you found the child missing?"

"Yes; but then she appeared to regard it in a superstitious way only. It
was a warning of death, she said, and the man an irresponsible
clairvoyant. When I tried to urge my own idea upon her and describe how
I thought he might have obtained access to the bungalow and carried her
off, while still asleep, to some vehicle awaiting them in Mrs. Carew's
grounds, she only rebuked me for my folly and bade me keep still about
the whole occurrence, saying that I should only be getting some poor
half-demented old wretch into trouble for something for which he was not
in the least responsible."

"A very considerate woman," I remarked; to which Miss Graham made reply
as the train came storming up:

"Nobody knows how considerate, even if she has dismissed me rather
suddenly from her service. Don't let that wretch"--again she used the
word--"deceive her or you into thinking that the little one perished in
the water. Gwendolen is alive, I say. Find him and you will find her. I
saw his resolution in his eye."

Here she made a rush for the cars, and I had time only to get her future
address before the train started and all further opportunity of
conversation between us was over for that day.

I remained behind because I was by no means through with my
investigations. What she had told me only convinced me of the necessity
I had already recognized of making myself master of all that could be
learned at Homewood before undertaking the very serious business of
locating the child or even the aged man just described to me, and who I
was now sure had been the chief, if not the sole, instrument in her
abduction.




III

A CHARMING WOMAN


Stopping only long enough to send a telegram to my partner in New York,
(for which purpose I had to walk along the tracks to the main station) I
returned by the short cut to Homewood. My purpose in doing this was
twofold. I should have a chance of seeing if the men were still at work
in the river, and I should also have the added opportunity of quietly
revisiting the bungalow, on the floor of which I had noted some
chalk-marks, which I felt called for a closer examination than I had
given them. As I came in view of the dock, I saw that the men were still
busy, but at a point farther out in the river, as if all hope had been
abandoned of their discovering anything more inshore. But the
chalk-marks in the bungalow were almost forgotten by me in the interest
I experienced in a certain adventure which befell me on my way there.

I had just reached the opening in the hedge communicating with Mrs.
Carew's grounds, when I heard steps on the walk inside and a woman's
rich voice saying:

"There, that will do. You must play on the other side of the house,
Harry. And Dinah, see that he does so, and that he does not cross the
hall again till I come back. The sight of so merry a child might kill
Mrs. Ocumpaugh if she happened to look this way."

Moved by the tone, which was one in a thousand, I involuntarily peered
through the outlet I was passing, in the hope of catching a glimpse of
its owner, and thus was favored with the sight of a face which instantly
fixed itself in my memory as one of the most enchanting I had ever
encountered. Not from its beauty, yet it may have been beautiful; nor
from its youth, for the woman before me was not youthful, but from the
extraordinary eloquence of its expression caught at a rare moment when
the heart, which gave it life, was full. She was standing half-way down
the path, throwing kisses to a little boy who was leaning toward her
from an upper window. The child was laughing with glee, and it was this
laugh she was trying to check; but her countenance, as she made the
effort, was almost as merry as his, and yet was filled with such solemn
joy--such ecstasy of motherhood I should be inclined to call it, if I
had not been conscious that this must be Mrs. Carew and the child her
little nephew--that in my admiration for this exhibition of pure
feeling, I forgot to move on as she advanced into the hedge-row, and so
we came face to face. The result was as extraordinary to me as all the
rest. Instantly all the gay abandonment left her features, and she
showed me a grave, almost troubled, countenance, more in keeping with
her severe dress, which was as nearly like mourning as it could be and
not be made of crape.

It was such a sudden change and of so complete a character, that I was
thrown off my guard for a moment and probably betrayed the curiosity I
undoubtedly felt; for she paused as she reached me, and, surveying me
very quietly but very scrutinizingly too, raised again that marvelous
voice of hers and pointedly observed:

"This is a private path, sir. Only the friends of Mrs. Ocumpaugh or of
myself pass here."

This was a speech calculated to restore my self-possession. With a bow
which evidently surprised her, I answered with just enough respect to
temper my apparent presumption:

"I am here in the interests of Mrs. Ocumpaugh, to assist her in finding
her child. Moments are precious; so I ventured to approach by the
shorter way."

"Pardon me!" The words did not come instantly, but after some
hesitation, during which she kept her eyes on my face in a way to rob me
of all thought save that she possessed a very strong magnetic quality,
to which it were well for a man like myself to yield. "You will be my
friend, too, if you succeed in restoring Gwendolen." Then quickly, as
she crossed to the Ocumpaugh grounds: "You do not look like a member of
the police. Are you here at Mrs. Ocumpaugh's bidding, and has she at
last given up all expectation of finding her child in the river?"

I, too, thought a minute before answering, then I put on my most candid
expression, for was not this woman on her way to Mrs. Ocumpaugh, and
would she not be likely to repeat what she heard me say?

"I do not know how Mrs. Ocumpaugh feels at present. But I know what her
dearest wish is--to see her child again alive and well. That wish I
shall do my best to gratify. It is true that I am not a police
detective, but I have an agency of my own, well-known to both Mrs. and
Mr. Ocumpaugh. All its resources will be devoted to this business and I
hope to succeed, madam. If, as I suspect, you are on your way to Mrs.
Ocumpaugh, please tell her that Robert Trevitt, of Trevitt and Jupp,
hopes to succeed."

"I _will_," she emphasized. Then stepping back to me in all the grace of
her thrilling personality, she eagerly added: "If there is any
information I can give, do not be afraid to ask me. I love children, and
would give anything in the world to see Mrs. Ocumpaugh as happy with
Gwendolen again as I am with my little nephew. Are you quite sure that
there is any possibility of this? I was told that the child's shoe has
been found in the river; but almost immediately following this
information came the report that there was something odd about this
shoe, and that Mrs. Ocumpaugh had gone into hysterics. Do _you_ know
what they meant by that? I was just going over to see."

I did know what they meant, but I preferred to seem ignorant.

"I have not seen Mrs. Ocumpaugh," I evasively rejoined. "But _I_ don't
look for the child to be drawn from the water."

"Nor I," she repeated, with a hoarse catch in her breath. "It is
thirty-six hours since we lost her. Time enough for the current to have
carried her sweet little body far away from here."

I surveyed the lady before me in amazement.

"Then _you_ think she strayed down to the water?"

"Yes; it would madden me to believe otherwise; loving her so well, and
her parents so well, I dare not think of a worse fate."

Taking advantage of her amiability and the unexpected opportunity it
offered for a leading question, I hereupon ventured to say: "You were
not at home, I hear, when she vanished from the bungalow."

"No; that is, if it happened before three o'clock. I arrived from the
station just as the clock was striking the hour, and having my little
nephew with me, I was too much occupied in reconciling him to his new
home, to hear or see anything outside. Most unfortunate!" she mourned,
"most unfortunate! I shall never cease reproaching myself. A tragedy at
my door"--here she glanced across the shrubbery at the bungalow--"and I
occupied with my own affairs!"

With a flush, the undoubted result of her own earnestness, she turned as
if to go. But I could not let her depart without another question:

"Excuse me, Mrs. Carew, but you gave me permission to seem importunate.
With the exception of her nurse, you were the one person nearest the
bungalow at the time. Didn't you hear a carriage drive through your
grounds at about the hour the alarm was first started? I know you have
been asked this before, but not by me; and it is a very important fact
to have settled; very important for those who wish to discover this
child at once."

For reply she gave me a look of very honest amazement.

"Of course I did," she replied. "I came in a carriage myself from the
station and naturally heard it drive away."

At her look, at her word, the thread which I had seized with such
avidity seemed to slip from my fingers. Had little Miss Graham's theory
no better foundation than this? and were the wheels she heard only
those of Mrs. Carew's departing carriage? I resolved to press the matter
even if I ran the risk of displeasing her.

"Mrs. Carew--for it must be Mrs. Carew I am addressing--did your little
nephew cry when you first brought him to the house?"

"I think he did," she admitted slowly; "I think he did."

I must have given evidence of the sudden discouragement this brought me,
for her lips parted and her whole frame trembled with sudden
earnestness.

"Did you think--did any one think--that those cries came from Gwendolen?
That she was carried out through my grounds? Could any one have thought
that?"

"I have been told that the nursery-governess did."

"Little Miss Graham? Poor girl! she is but defending herself from
despair. She is ready to believe everything but that the child is dead."

Was it so? Was I following the false light of a will-o'-the-wisp? No,
no; the strange coincidence of the threat made on the bridge with the
disappearance of the child on the day named, was at least real. The
thread had not altogether escaped from my hands. It was less tangible,
but it was still there.

"You may be right," I acquiesced, for I saw that her theories were
entirely opposed to those of Miss Graham. "But we must try everything,
_everything_."

I was about to ask whether she had ever seen in the adjoining grounds,
or on the roads about, an old man with long hair and a remarkable scar
running down between his eyebrows, when a young girl in the cap and
apron of a maid-servant came running through the shrubbery from the
Ocumpaugh house, and, seeing Mrs. Carew, panted out:

"Oh, do come over to the house, Mrs. Carew. Mrs. Ocumpaugh has been told
that the two shoes which have been found, one on the bank and the other
in the river, are not mates, and it has quite distracted her. She has
gone to her room and will let no one else in. We can hear her moaning
and crying, but we can do nothing. Perhaps she will see you. She called
for you, I know, before she shut her door."

"I will go." Mrs. Carew had turned quite pale, and from standing upright
in the road, had moved so as to gain support from one of the hedges.

I expected to see her turn and go as soon as her trembling fit was over,
but she did not, though she waved the girl away as if she intended to
follow her. Had I not learned to distrust my own impression of people's
motives from their manners and conduct, I should have said that she was
waiting for me to precede her.

"Two shoes and not mates!" she finally exclaimed. "What does she mean?"

"Simply that another shoe has been drawn up from the river-bottom which
does not mate the one picked up near the bungalow. Both are for the left
foot."

"Ah!" gasped this sympathetic woman. "And what inference can we draw
from that?"

I should not have answered her; but the command in her eyes or the
thrilling effect of her manner compelled me, and I spoke the truth at
once, just as I might have done to Mrs. Ocumpaugh, or, better still, to
Mr. Ocumpaugh, if either had insisted.

"But one," said I. "There is a conspiracy on the part of one or more
persons to delude Mrs. Ocumpaugh into believing the child dead. They
blundered over it, but they came very near succeeding."

"Who blundered, and what is the meaning of the conspiracy you hint at?
Tell me. Tell me what such men as you think."

Her plastic features had again shown a change. She was all anxiety now;
cheeks burning, eyes blazing--a very beautiful woman.

"We think that the case looks serious. We think from the very mystery it
displays, that there is a keen intelligence back of this crime. I can
not go any further than that. The affair is as yet too obscure."

"You amaze me!" she faltered, making an effort to collect her thoughts.
"I have always thought, just as Mrs. Ocumpaugh has, that the child had
somehow found her way to the water and was drowned. But if all this is
true we shall have to face a worse evil. A conspiracy against such a
tender little being as that! A conspiracy, and for what? Not to extort
money, or why these blundering efforts to make the child appear dead?"

She was the same sympathetic woman, agitated by real feeling as before,
yet at this moment--I do not understand now just why--I became aware of
an inner movement of caution against too great a display of candor on my
own part.

"Madam, it is all a mystery at present. I am sure that the police will
tell you the same. But another day may bring developments."

"Let us hope so!" was her ardent reply, accompanied by a gesture, the
freedom of which suited her style and person as it would not have done
those of a less impressionable woman. And, seeing that I had no
intention of leaving the spot where I stood, she moved at last from
where she held herself upright against the hedge, and entered the
Ocumpaugh grounds. "Will you call in to see me to-morrow?" she asked,
pausing to look back at a turn in the path. "I shall not sleep to-night
for thinking of those possible developments."

"Since you permit me," I returned; "that is, if I am still here. Affairs
may call me away at any moment."

"Yes, and so with me. Affairs may call me away also. I was to sail on
Saturday for Liverpool. Only Mrs. Ocumpaugh's distress detains me. If
the situation lightens, if we hear any good news to-night, or even early
to-morrow, I shall continue my preparations, which will take me again
to New York."

"I will call if you are at home."

She gave me a slight nod and vanished.

Why did I stand a good three minutes where she had left me, thinking,
but not getting anything from my thoughts, save that I was glad that I
had not been betrayed into speaking of the old man Miss Graham had met
on the bridge? Yet it might have been well, after all, if I had done so,
if only to discover whether Mrs. Ocumpaugh had confided this occurrence
to her most intimate friend.




IV

CHALK-MARKS


My next move was toward the bungalow. Those chalk-marks still struck me
as being worthy of investigation, and not only they, but the bungalow
itself. That certainly merited a much closer inspection than I had been
able to give it under Miss Graham's eye.

It was not quite a new place to me, nor was I so ignorant of its history
(and it had a history) as I had appeared to be in my conversation with
Miss Graham. Originally it had been a stabling place for horses; and
tradition said that it had once harbored for a week the horse of General
Washington. This was when the house on the knoll above had been the seat
and home of one of our most famous Revolutionary generals. Later, as the
trees grew up around this building, it attracted the attention of a new
owner, William Ocumpaugh, the first of that name to inhabit Homewood,
and he, being a man of reserved manners and very studious habits,
turned it into what we would now call, as Miss Graham did, a den, but
which he styled a pavilion, and used as a sort of study or reading-room.

His son, who inherited it, Judge Philo Ocumpaugh, grandfather of the
present Philo, was as studious as his father, but preferred to read and
write in the quaint old library up at the house, famous for its wide
glass doors opening on to the lawn, and its magnificent view of the
Hudson. His desk, which many remember (it has a place in the present
house, I believe), was so located that for forty years or more he had
this prospect ever before him, a prospect which included the sight of
his own pavilion, around which, for no cause apparent to his
contemporaries, he had caused a high wall to be built, effectually
shutting in both trees and building.

This wall has since been removed; but I have often heard it spoken of,
and always with a certain air of mystery; possibly because, as I have
said, there seemed no good reason for its erection, the place holding no
treasure and the gate standing always open; possibly because of its
having been painted, in defiance of all harmony with everything about
the place, a dazzling white; and possibly because it had not been raised
till after the death of the judge's first wife, who, some have said,
breathed her last within the precincts it inclosed.

However that may be, there seems to be no doubt that this place exerted,
very likely against his will, for he never visited it, a singular
fascination over the secretive mind of this same upright but strangely
taciturn ancestor of the Ocumpaughs. For during the forty years in which
he wrote and read at this desk, the shutters guarding the door
overlooking those decaying walls were never drawn to, or so the
tradition runs; and when he died, it was found that, by a clause in his
will, this pavilion, hut or bungalow, all of which names it bore at
different stages of its existence, was recommended to the notice of his
heirs as an object which they were at liberty to leave in its present
forsaken condition, though he did not exact this, but which was never,
under any circumstances or to serve any purpose, to be removed from its
present site, or even to suffer any demolition save such as came with
time and the natural round of the seasons, to whose tender mercies he
advised it to be left. In other words, it was to stand, and to stand
unmolested, till it fell of its own accord, or was struck to the earth
by lightning--a tragic alternative in the judgment of those who knew it
for a structure of comparative insignificance, and one which, in the
minds of many, and perhaps I may say in my own, appeared to point to
some serious and unrevealed cause not unlinked with the almost forgotten
death of that young wife to which I have just alluded.

This was years ago, far back in the fifties, and his son, who was a
minor at his death, grew up and assumed his natural proprietorship. The
hut--it was nothing but a hut now--had remained untouched--a ruin no
longer habitable. The spirit, as well as the letter, of that particular
clause in his father's will had so far been literally obeyed. The walls
being of stone, had withstood decay, and still rose straight and firm;
but the roof had begun to sag, and whatever of woodwork yet remained
about it had rotted and fallen away, till the building was little more
than a skeleton, with holes for its windows and an open gap for its
door.

As for the surrounding wall, it no longer stood out, an incongruous
landmark, from its background of trees and shrubbery. Young shoots had
started up and old branches developed till brick and paint alike were
almost concealed from view by a fresh girdle of greenery.

And now comes the second mystery.

Sometime after this latter Ocumpaugh had attained his majority--his name
was Edwin, and he was, as you already imagine, the father of the present
Philo--he made an attempt--a daring one it was afterward called--to
brighten this neglected spot and restore it to some sort of use, by
giving a supper to his friends within its broken-down walls.

This supper was no orgy, nor were the proprieties in any way
transgressed by so harmless a festivity; yet from this night a singular
change was observed in this man. Pleasure no longer charmed him, and
instead of repeating the experiment I have just described, he speedily
evinced such an antipathy to the scene of his late revel that only from
the greatest necessity would he ever again visit that part of the
grounds.

What did it mean? What had occurred on that night of innocent enjoyment
to disturb or alarm him? Had some note in his own conscience been struck
by an act which, in his cooler moments, he may have looked upon as a
species of sacrilege? Or had some whisper from the past reached him amid
the feasting, the laughing and the jesting, to render these old walls
henceforth intolerable to him? He never said, but whatever the cause of
this sudden aversion, the effect was deep and promised to be lasting.
For, one morning, not long after this event, a party of workmen was seen
leaving these grounds at daybreak, and soon it was noised about that a
massive brick partition had been put up across the interior of this same
pavilion, completely shutting off, for no reason that any one could see,
some ten feet of what had been one long and undivided room.

It was a strange act enough; but when, a few days later, it was followed
by one equally mysterious, and they saw the encircling wall which had
been so carefully raised by Judge Ocumpaugh ruthlessly pulled down, and
every sign of its former presence there destroyed, wonder filled the
highway and the curiosity of neighbors and friends passed all bounds.

But no explanations were volunteered then or ever. People might query
and peer, but they learned nothing. What was left open to view told no
tales beyond the old one, and as for the single window which was the
sole opening into the shut-off space, it was then, as now, so completely
blocked up by a network of closely impacted vines, that it offered
little more encouragement than the wall itself to the eyes of such
curiosity-mongers as crept in by way of the hedge-rows to steal a look
at the hut, and if possible gain a glimpse of an interior which had
suddenly acquired, by the very means taken to shut it off from every
human eye, a new importance pointing very decidedly toward the tragic.

But soon even this semblance of interest died out or was confined to
strange tales whispered under breath on weird nights at neighboring
firesides, and the old neglect prevailed once more. The whole place--new
brick and old stone--seemed doomed to a common fate under the hand of
time, when the present Philo Ocumpaugh, succeeding to the property,
brought new wealth and business enterprise into the family, and the old
house on the hill was replaced by the marble turrets of Homewood, and
this hut--or rather the portion open to improvement--was restored to
some sort of comfort, and rechristened the bungalow.

Was fate to be appeased by this effort at forgetfulness? No. In
emulation of the long abandoned portion so hopelessly cut off by that
dividing wall, this brightly-furnished adjunct to the great house had
linked itself in the minds of men to a new mystery--the mystery which I
had come there to solve, if wit and patience could do it, aided by my
supposedly unshared knowledge of a fact connecting me with this family's
history in a way it little dreamed of.

Naturally, my first look was at the building itself. I have described
its location and the room from which the child was lost. What I wanted
to see now, after studying those chalk-marks, was whether that partition
which had been put in, was as impassable as was supposed.

The policeman on guard having strolled a few feet away, I approached
the open doorway without hindrance, and at once took that close look I
had promised myself, of the marks which I had observed scrawled broadly
across the floor just inside the threshold. They were as interesting and
fully as important as I had anticipated. Though nearly obliterated by
the passing of the policeman's feet across them, I was still enabled to
read the one word which appeared to me significant.

If you will glance at the following reproduction of a snap-shot which I
took of this scrawl, you will see what I mean.

[Illustration]

The significant character was the 16. Taken with the "ust," there could
be no doubt that the whole writing had been a record of the date on
which the child had disappeared: August 16, 190-.

This in itself was of small consequence if the handwriting had not
possessed those marked peculiarities which I believed belonged to but
one man--a man I had once known--a man of reverend aspect, upright
carriage and a strong distinguishing mark, like an old-time scar,
running straight down between his eyebrows. This had been my thought
when I first saw it. It was doubly so on seeing it again after the
doubts expressed by Miss Graham of a threatening old man who possessed
similar characteristics.

Satisfied on this point, I turned my attention to what still more
seriously occupied it. The three or four long rugs, which hung from the
ceiling across the whole wall at my left, evidently concealed the
mysterious partition put up in Mr. Ocumpaugh's father's time directly
across this portion of the room. Was it a totally unbroken partition? I
had been told so; but I never accept such assertions without a personal
investigation.

Casting a glance through the doorway and seeing that it would take my
dreaming friend, the policeman, some two or three minutes yet to find
his way back to his post, I hastily lifted these rugs aside, one after
the other, and took a look behind them. A stretch of Georgia pine, laid,
as I readily discovered by more than one rap of my knuckles, directly
over the bricks it was intended to conceal, was visible under each;
from end to end a plain partition with no indications of its having been
tampered with since the alterations were first made.

Dismissing from my mind one of those vague possibilities, which add such
interest to the calling of a detective, I left the place, with my full
thought concentrated on the definite clue I had received from the
chalk-marks.

But I had not walked far before I met with a surprise which possibly
possessed a significance equal to anything I had already observed, if
only I could have fully understood it.

On the path into which I now entered, I encountered again the figure of
Mrs. Carew. Her face was turned full on mine, and she had evidently
retraced her steps to have another instant's conversation with me. The
next moment I was sure of this. Her eyes, always magnetic, shone with
increasing brightness as I advanced to meet her, and her manner, while
grave, was that of a woman quite conscious of the effect she produced by
her least word or action.

"I have returned to tell you," said she, "that I have more confidence in
your efforts than in those of the police officers around here. If
Gwendolen's fate is determined by any one it will be by you. So I want
to be of aid to you if I can. Remember that. I may have said this to you
before, but I wish to impress it upon you."

There was a flutter in her movements which astonished me. She was
surveying me in a straightforward way, and I could not but feel the fire
and force of her look. Happily she was no longer a young woman or I
might have misunderstood the disturbance which took place in my own
breast as I waited for the musical tones to cease.

"You are very good," I rejoined. "I need help, and shall be only too
glad to receive your assistance."

Yet I did question her, though I presently found myself walking toward
the house at her side. She may not have expected me to presume so far.
Certainly she showed no dissatisfaction when, at a parting in the path,
I took my leave of her and turned my face in the direction of the gates.
A strange sweet woman, with a power quite apart from the physical charms
which usually affect men of my age, but one not easily read nor parted
from unless one had an imperative errand, as I had.

This errand was to meet and forestall the messenger boy whom I momently
expected with the answer to my telegram. That an opportunity for gossip
was likewise afforded by the motley group of men and boys drawn up near
one of the gate-posts, gave an added interest to the event which I was
quite ready to appreciate. Approaching this group, I assimilated myself
with it as speedily as possible, and, having some tact for this sort of
thing, soon found myself the recipient of various gratuitous opinions as
to the significance of the find which had offered such a problem both to
the professional and unprofessional detective. Two mismated shoes! Had
Gwendolen Ocumpaugh by any chance worn such? No--or the ones mating them
would have been found in her closet, and this, some one shouted out, had
not been done. Only the one corresponding to that fished up from the
waters of the dock had come to light; the other, the one which the child
must really have worn, was no nearer being found than the child herself.
What did it all mean? No one knew; but all attempted some sort of
hazardous guess which I was happy to see fell entirely short of the
mark.

There was not a word of the vindictive old man described by Miss Graham,
till I myself introduced the topic. My reason or rather my excuse for
introducing it was this:

On the gate-post near me I had observed the remnants of a strip of paper
which had been pasted there and afterward imperfectly torn off. It had
an unsightly look, but I did not pay much attention to it till some
movement in the group forced me a little nearer to the post, when I was
surprised enough to see that this scrap of paper showed signs of words,
and that these words gave evidence of being a date written in the very
hand I now had no difficulty in recognizing as that of the old man
uppermost in my own mind, even if he were not the one whom Miss Graham
had seen on the bridge. This date--strange to say--was the same
significant one already noted on the floor of the bungalow--a fact which
I felt merited an explanation if any one about me could give it.

Waiting, therefore, for a lull in the remarks passing between the
stable-men and other employees about the place, I drew the attention of
the first man who would listen, to the half torn-off strip of paper on
the post, and asked if that was the way the Ocumpaughs gave notice of
their entertainments.

He started, then turned his back on me.

"That wasn't put there for the entertainment," he growled; "that was
pasted up there by some one who wanted to show off his writin'. There
don't seem to be no other reason."

As the man who spoke these words had thereby proved himself a blockhead,
I edged away from him as soon as possible toward a very decent looking
fellow who appeared to have more brains than speech.

"Do you know who pasted that date upon the post?" I inquired.

He answered very directly.

"No, or I should have been laying for him long before this. Why, it is
not only there you can see it. I found it pinned to the carriage
cushions one day just as I was going to drive Mrs. Ocumpaugh out."
(Evidently I had struck upon the coachman.) "And not only that. One of
the girls up at the house--one as I knows pretty well--tells me--I don't
care who hears it now--that it was written across a card which was left
at the door for Mrs. Ocumpaugh, and all in the same handwriting, which
is not a common one, as you can see. This means something, seeing it
was the date when our bad luck fell on us."

He had noted that.

"You don't mean to say that these things were written and put about
before the date you see on them."

"But I do. Would we have noticed since? But who are you, sir, if I may
ask? One of them detective fellows? If so, I have a word to say: Find
that child or Mrs. Ocumpaugh's blood will be on your head! She'll not
live till Mr. Ocumpaugh comes home unless she can show him his child."

"Wait!" I called out, for he was turning away toward the stable. "You
know who wrote those slips?"

"Not a bit of it. No one does. Not that anybody thinks much about them
but me."

"The police must," I ventured.

"May be, but they don't say anything about it. Somehow it looks to me as
if they were all at sea."

"Possibly they are," I remarked, letting him go as I caught sight of a
small boy coming up the road with several telegrams in his hand.

"Is one of those directed to Robert Trevitt?" I asked, crowding up with
the rest, as his small form was allowed to slip through the gate.

"Spec's there is," he replied, looking them over and handing me one.

I carried it to one side and hastily tore it open. It was, as I
expected, from my partner, and read as follows:

     Man you want has just returned after two days' absence. Am on
     watch. Saw him just alight from buggy with what looked like
     sleeping child in his arms. Closed and fastened front door after
     him. Safe for to-night.

Did I allow my triumph to betray itself? I do not think so. The question
which kept down my elation was this: Would I be the first man to get
there?




V

THE OLD HOUSE IN YONKERS


The old man whose handwriting I had now positively identified was a
former employer of mine. I had worked in his office when a lad. He was a
doctor of very fair reputation in Westchester County, and I recognized
every characteristic of his as mentioned by Miss Graham, save the frenzy
which she described as accompanying his address.

In those days he was calm and cold and, while outwardly scrupulous,
capable of forgetting his honor as a physician under a sufficiently
strong temptation. I had left him when new prospects opened, and in the
years which had elapsed had contented myself with the knowledge that his
shingle still hung out in Yonkers, though his practice was nothing to
what it used to be when I was in his employ. Now I was going to see him
again.

That his was the hand which had stolen Gwendolen seemed no longer open
to doubt. That she was under his care in the curious old house I
remembered in the heart of Yonkers, seemed equally probable; but why so
sordid a man--one who loved money above everything else in the
world--should retain the child one minute after the publication of the
bountiful reward offered by Mr. Ocumpaugh, was what I could not at first
understand. Miss Graham's theory of hate had made no impression on me.
He was heartless and not likely to be turned aside from any project he
had formed, but he was not what I considered vindictive where nothing
was to be gained. Yet my comprehension of him had been but a boy's
comprehension, and I was now prepared to put a very different estimate
on one whose character had never struck me as being an open one, even
when my own had been most credulous.

That my enterprise, even with the knowledge I possessed of this man,
promised well or held out any prospects of easy fulfilment, I no longer
allowed myself to think. If money was his object--and what other could
influence a man of his temperament?--the sum offered by Mr. Ocumpaugh,
large though it was, had apparently not sufficed to satisfy his greed.
He was holding back the child, or so I now believed, in order to wring
a larger, possibly a double, amount from the wretched mother. Fifty
thousand was a goodly sum, but one hundred thousand was better; and this
man had gigantic ideas where his cupidity was concerned. I remember how
firmly he had once stood out for ten thousand dollars when he had been
offered five; and I began to see, though in an obscure way as yet, how
it might very easily be a part of his plan to work Mrs. Ocumpaugh up to
a positive belief in the child's death before he came down upon her for
the immense reward he had fixed his heart upon. The date he had written
all over the place might thus find some explanation in a plan to weaken
her nerve before pressing his exorbitant claims upon her.

Nothing was clear, yet everything was possible in such a nature; and
anxious to enter upon the struggle both for my own sake and that of the
child of whose condition under that terrible eye I scarcely dared to
think, I left Homewood in haste and took the first train for Yonkers.
Though the distance was not great, I had fully arranged my plans before
entering the town where so many of my boyish years had been spent. I
knew the old fox well enough, or thought I did, to be certain that I
should have anything but an easy entrance into his house, in case it
still harbored the child whom my partner had seen carried in there. I
anticipated difficulties, but was concerned about none but the
possibility of not being able to bring myself face to face with him.
Once in his presence, the knowledge which I secretly possessed of an old
but doubtful transaction of his, would serve to make him mine even to
the point of yielding up the child he had forcibly abducted. But would
he accord me an interview? Could I, without appeal to the police--and
you can readily believe I was not anxious to allow them to put their
fingers in my pie--force him to open his door and let me into his house,
which, as I well recalled, he locked up at nine--after which he would
receive no one, not even a patient?

It was not nine yet, but it was very near that hour. I had but twenty
minutes in which to mount the hill to the old house marked by the
doctor's sign and by another peculiarity of so distinct a nature that it
would serve to characterize a dwelling in a city as large as New
York--though I doubt if New York can show its like from the Battery to
the Bronx. The particulars of this I will mention later. I have first to
relate the relief I felt when, on entering the old neighborhood, I heard
in response to a few notes of a certain popular melody which I had
allowed to leave my lips, an added note or two which warned me that my
partner was somewhere hidden among the alleys of this very
unaristocratic quarter. Indeed, from the sound, I judged him to be in
the rear of the doctor's house and, being anxious to hear what he had to
say before advancing upon the door which might open my way to easy
fortune or complete defeat, I paused a few steps off and waited for his
appearance.

He was at my elbow before I had either seen or heard him. He was always
light of foot, but this time he seemed to have no tread at all.

"Still here," was his comforting assurance.

"Both?" I whispered back.

"Both."

"Any one else?"

"No. A boy drove away the buggy and has not come back. Sawbones keeps no
girl."

"Is the child quiet? Has there been no alarm?"

"Not a breath."

"No cops in the neighborhood? No spies around?"

"Not one. We've got it all this time. But--"

"Hush!"

"There's nobody."

"Yes, the doctor; he's fastening up his house. I must hasten; nothing
would induce me to let that innocent remain under his roof all night."

"It's not the windows he is at."

"What then?"

"The door, the big front door."

"The--"

"Yes."

I gave my partner a surprised look, undoubtedly lost in the darkness,
and drew a step nearer the house.

"It's just the same old gloom-box," I exclaimed, and paused for an
instant to mark the changes which had taken place in the surroundings.
They were very few and I turned back to fix my eye on the front door
where a rattling sound could be heard, as of some one fingering the
latch. It was this door which formed the peculiarity of the house. In
itself it was like any other that was well-fashioned and solid, but it
opened upon space--that is, if it was ever opened, which I doubted. The
stoop and even the railing which had once guarded it, had all been
removed, leaving a bare front, with this inhospitable entrance shut
against every one who had not the convenience for mounting to it by a
ladder. There was another way in, but this was round on one side, and
did not present itself to the eye unless one approached from the west
end of the street; so that to half the passers-by the house looked like
a deserted one till they came abreast of the flagged path which led to
the office door. As the windows had never been unclosed in my day and
were not now, I took it for granted that they had remained thus
inhospitably shut during all the years of my absence, which certainly
offered but little encouragement to a man bent on an errand which would
soon take him into those dismal precincts.

"What goes on behind those shuttered windows?" thought I. "I know of one
thing, but what else?" The one thing was the counting of money and the
arranging of innumerable gold pieces on the great top of a baize-covered
table in what I should now describe as the back parlor. I remembered how
he used to do it. I caught him at it once, having crept up one windy
night from my little room off the office to see what kept the doctor up
so late.

As I now stood listening in the dark street to those strange touches on
a door disused for years, I recalled the tremor with which I rounded the
top of the stair that night of long ago and the mingled fear and awe
with which I recognized, not only such a mint of money as I had never
seen out of the bank before, but the greedy and devouring passion with
which he pushed the glittering coins about and handled the bank-notes
and gloated over the pile it all made when drawn together by his hooked
fingers, till the sound, perhaps, of my breathing in the dark hall
startled him with a thought of discovery, and his two hands came
together over that pile with a gesture more eloquent even than the look
with which he seemed to penetrate the very shadows in the silent space
wherein I stood. It was a vision short, but inexpressibly vivid, of the
miser incarnate, and having seen it and escaped detection, as was my
undeserved luck that night, I needed never to ask again why he had been
willing to accept risks from which most men shrink from fear if not from
conscience. He loved money, not as the spender loves it, openly and
with luxurious instincts, but secretly and with a knavish dread of
discovery which spoke of treasure ill acquired.

And now he was seeking to add to his gains, and I stood on the outside
of his house listening to sounds I did not understand, instead of
attempting to draw him to the office-door by ringing the bell he never
used to disconnect till nine.

"Do you know that I don't quite like the noises which are being made up
there?" came in a sudden whisper to my ear. "Supposing it was the child
trying to get out! She does not know there is no stoop; she seemed
sleeping or half-dead when he carried her in, and if by any chance she
has got hold of the key and the door should open--"

"Hush!" I cried, starting forward in horror of the thought he had
suggested. "It is opening. I see a thread of light. What does it mean,
Jupp? The child? No; there is more than a child's strength in that push.
Hist!" Here I drew him flat against the wall. The door above had swung
back and some one was stamping on the threshold over our heads in what
appeared to be an outburst of ungovernable fury.

That it was the doctor I could not doubt. But why this anger; why this
mad gasping after breath and the half-growl, half-cry, with which he
faced the night and the quiet of a street which to his glance, passing
as it did over our heads, must have appeared altogether deserted? We
were consulting each other's faces for some explanation of this
unlooked-for outbreak, when the door above us suddenly slammed to and we
heard a renewal of that fumbling with lock and key which had first drawn
our attention. But the hand was not sure or the hall was dark, for the
key did not turn in the lock. Suddenly awake to my opportunity, I
wheeled Jupp about and, making use of his knee and back, climbed up till
I was enabled to reach the knob and turn it just as the man within had
stepped back, probably to procure more light.

The result was that the door swung open and I stumbled in, falling
almost face downward on the marble floor faintly checkered off to my
sight in the dim light of a lamp set far back in a bare and dismal hall.
I was on my feet again in an instant and it was in this manner, and with
all the disadvantages of a hatless head and a disordered countenance,
that I encountered again my old employer after five years of absence.

He did not recognize me. I saw it by the look of alarm which crossed his
features and the involuntary opening of his lips in what would certainly
have been a loud cry if I had not smiled and cried out with false
gaiety:

"Excuse me, doctor, I never came in by that door before. Pardon my
awkwardness. The step is somewhat high from the street."

My smile is my own, they say; at all events it served to enlighten him.

"Bob Trevitt," he exclaimed, but with a growl of displeasure I could
hardly condemn under the circumstances.

I hastened to push my advantage, for he was looking very threateningly
toward the door which was swaying gently and in an inviting way to a man
who if old, had more power in his arms than I had in my whole body.

"_Mr._ Trevitt," I corrected; "and on a very important errand. I am here
on behalf of Mrs. Ocumpaugh, whose child you have at this moment under
your roof."




VI

DOCTOR POOL


It was a direct attack and for a minute I doubted if I had not made a
mistake in making it so suddenly and without gloves. His face purpled,
the veins on his forehead started out, his great form shook with an ire
that in such domineering natures as his can only find relief in a blow.
But the right hand did not rise nor the heavy fist fall. With admirable
self-restraint he faced me for a moment, without attempting either
protest or denial. Then his blazing eyes cooled down, and with a sudden
gesture which at once relaxed his extreme tension of nerve and muscle,
he pointed toward the end of the hall and remarked with studied
politeness:

"My office is below, as you know. Will you oblige me by following me
there?"

I feared him, for I saw that studiously as he sought to hide his
impressions, he too regarded the moment as one of critical
significance. But I assumed an air of perfect confidence, merely
observing as I left the neighborhood of the front door and the proximity
of Jupp:

"I have friends on the outside who are waiting for me; so you must not
keep me too long."

He was bending to take up the lamp from a small table near the basement
stair as I threw out these words in apparent carelessness, and the flash
which shot from under his shaggy brows was thus necessarily heightened
by the glare in which he stood. Yet with all allowances made I marked
him down in my own mind as dangerous, and was correspondingly surprised
when he turned on the top step of the narrow staircase I remembered so
vividly from the experience I have before named, and in the mildest of
accents remarked:

"These stairs are a trifle treacherous. Be careful to grasp the
hand-rail as you come down."

Was the game deeper than I thought? In all my remembrance of him I had
never before seen him look benevolent, and it alarmed me, coming as it
did after the accusation I had made. I felt tempted to make a stand and
demand that the interview be held then and there. For I knew his
subterranean office very well, and how difficult it would be to raise a
cry there which could be heard by any one outside. Still, with a
muttered, "Thank you," I proceeded to follow him down, only stopping
once in the descent to listen for some sound by which I could determine
in which room of the many I knew to be on this floor the little one lay,
on whose behalf I was incurring a possible bullet from the pistol I once
saw lurking amongst bottles and corks in one of the innumerable drawers
of the doctor's table. But all was still around and overhead; too still
for my peace of mind, in which dreadful visions began to rise of a
drugged or dying child, panting out its innocent breath in darkness and
solitude. Yet no. With those thousands to be had for the asking, any man
would be a fool to injure or even seriously to frighten a child upon
whose good condition they depended; much less a miser whose whole heart
was fixed on money.

The clock struck as I put foot on the landing; so much can happen in
twenty minutes when events crowd and the passions of men reach their
boiling-point! I expected to see the old man try that door, even to
double bolt it as in the years gone by. But he merely threw a look that
way and proceeded on down the three or four steps which led into the
species of basement where he had chosen to fix his office. In another
moment that dim and dismal room broke upon my view under the vague light
of the small and poorly-trimmed lamp he carried. I saw again its musty
walls covered with books, where there were shelves laden with bottles
and a loose array of miscellaneous objects I had often handled but out
of which I never could make any meaning. I recognized it all and
detected but few changes. But these were startling ones. The old lounge
standing under the two barred windows which I had often likened in my
own mind to those of a jail, had been recovered; and lying on the table,
which I had always regarded with a mixture of awe and apprehension, I
perceived something which I had never seen there before: a Bible, with
its edges worn and its leaves rumpled as if often and eagerly handled.

I was so struck by this last discovery that I stopped, staring, in the
doorway, looking from the sacred volume to his worn but vigorous figure
drawn up in the middle of the room, with the lamp still in his hand and
his small but brilliant eyes fixed upon mine with a certain ironical
glitter in them, which gave me my first distrust of the part I had come
there to play.

"We will waste no words," said he, setting down the lamp, and seizing
with his disengaged hand the long locks of his flowing beard. "In what
respect are you a messenger from Mrs. Ocumpaugh, and what makes you
think I have her child in this house?"

I found it easier to answer the last question first.

"I know the child is here," I replied, "because my partner saw you bring
her in. I have gone into the detective business since leaving you."

"Ah!"

There was an astonishing edge to his smile and I felt that I should have
to make the most of that old discovery of mine, if I were to hold my own
with this man.

"And may I ask," he coldly continued, "how you have succeeded in
connecting me with this young child's disappearance?"

"It's straight as a string," I retorted. "You threatened the child to
its face in the hearing of its nurse some two weeks ago, on a certain
bridge where you stopped them. You even set the day when the little
Gwendolen should pass from luxury to poverty." Here I cast an
involuntary glance about the room where the only sign of comfort was the
newly upholstered lounge. "That day was the sixteenth, and we all know
what happened on that date. If this is not plain enough--" I had seen
his lip curl--"allow me to add, by way of explanation, that you have
seen fit to threaten Mrs. Ocumpaugh herself with this date, for I know
well the hand which wrote _August 16_ on the bungalow floor and in
various other places about Homewood where her eye was likely to fall."
And I let my own fall on a sort of manuscript lying open not far from
the Bible, which still looked so out of place to me on this
pagan-hearted old miser's table. "Such chirography as yours is not to be
mistaken," I completed, with a short gesture toward the disordered
sheets he had left spread out to every eye.

"I see. A detective without doubt. Did you play the detective here?"

The last question leaped like a shot from his lips.

"You have not denied the threats to which I have just called your
attention," was my cautious reply.

"What need of that?" he retorted. "Are you not a--_detective_?"

There was sarcasm, as well as taunt in the way he uttered that last
word. I was conscious of being at a loss, but put a bold front on the
matter and proceeded as if conscious of no secret misgiving.

"Can you deny as well that you have been gone two days from this place?
That during this time a doctor's buggy, drawn by a horse I should know
by description, having harnessed him three times a day for two years,
was seen by more than one observer in the wake of a mysterious wagon
from the interior of which a child's crying could be heard? The wagon
did not drive up to this house to-night, but the buggy did, and from it
you carried a child which you brought with you into this house."

With a sudden down-bringing of his old but powerful hand on the top of
the table before him, he seemed about to utter an oath or some angry
invective. But again he controlled himself, and eying me without any
show of shame or even of desire to contradict any of my assertions, he
quietly declared:

"You are after that reward, I observe. Well, you won't get it. Like many
others of your class you can follow a trail, but the insight to start
right and to end in triumphant success is given only to a genius, and
you are not a genius."

With a blush I could not control, I advanced upon him, crying:

"You have forestalled me. You have telegraphed or telephoned to Mr.
Atwater--"

"I have not left my house since I came in here three hours ago."

"Then--" I began.

But he hushed me with a look.

"It is not a matter of money," he declared almost with dignity. "Those
who think to reap dollars from the distress which has come upon the
Ocumpaugh family will eat ashes for their pains. Money will be spent,
but none of it earned, unless you, or such as you, are hired at so much
an hour to--follow trails."

Greatly astounded not only by the attitude he took, but by the calm and
almost indifferent way in which he mentioned what I had every reason to
believe to be the one burning object of his existence, I surveyed him
with undisguised astonishment till another thought, growing out of the
silence of the many-roomed house above us, gripped me with secret dread;
and I exclaimed aloud and without any attempt at subterfuge:

"She is dead, then! the child is dead!"

"I do not know," was his reply.

The four words were uttered with undeniable gloom.

"You do not know?" I echoed, conscious that my jaw had fallen, and that
I was staring at him with fright in my eyes.

"No. I wish I did. I would give half of my small savings to know where
that innocent baby is to-night. Sit down!" he vehemently commanded. "You
do not understand me, I see. You confound the old Doctor Pool with the
new."

"I confound nothing," I violently retorted in strong revulsion against
what I had now come to look upon as the attempt of a subtile actor to
turn aside my suspicions and brave out a dangerous situation by a
ridiculous subterfuge. "I understand the miser whom I have beheld
gloating over his hoard in the room above, and I understand the doctor
who for money could lend himself to a fraud, the secret results of which
are agitating the whole country at this moment."

"So!" The word came with difficulty. "So you _did_ play the detective,
even as a boy. Pity I had not recognized your talents at the time. But
no--" he contradicted himself with great rapidity; "I was not a redeemed
soul then; I might have done you harm. I might have had more if not
worse sins to atone for than I have now." And with scant appearance of
having noted the doubtful manner in which I had received this
astonishing outburst, he proceeded to cry aloud and with a commanding
gesture: "Quit this. You have undertaken more than you can handle. You,
a messenger from Mrs. Ocumpaugh? Never. You are but the messenger of
your own cupidity; and cupidity leads by the straightest of roads
directly down to hell."

"This you proved six long years ago. Lead me to the child I believe to
be in this house or I will proclaim aloud the pact you entered into
then--a pact to which I was an involuntary witness whose word, however,
will not go for less on that account. Behind the curtain still hanging
over that old closet I stood while--"

His hand had seized my arm with a grip few could have proceeded under.

"Do you mean--"

The rest was whispered in my ear.

[Illustration: "DO YOU MEAN"--THE REST WAS WHISPERED IN MY EAR.]

I nodded and felt that he was mine now. But the laugh which the next
minute broke from his lips dashed my assurance.

"Oh, the ways of the world!" he cried. Then in a different tone and not
without reverence: "Oh, the ways of God!"

I made no reply. For every reason I felt that the next word must come
from him.

It was an unexpected one.

"That was Doctor Pool unregenerate and more heedful of the things of
this world than of those of the world to come. You have to deal with
quite a different man now. It is of that very sin I am now repenting in
sackcloth and ashes. I live but to expiate it. Something has been done
toward accomplishing this, but not enough. I have been played upon,
used. This I will avenge. New sin is a poor apology for an old one."

I scarcely heeded him. I was again straining my ears to catch a
smothered sob or a frightened moan.

"What are you listening for?" he asked.

"For the sound of little Gwendolen's voice. It is worth fifty thousand
dollars, you remember. Why shouldn't I listen for it? Besides, I have a
real and uncontrollable sympathy for the child. I am determined to
restore her to her home. Your blasphemous babble of a changed heart does
not affect me. You are after a larger haul than the sum offered by Mr.
Ocumpaugh. You want some of Mrs. Ocumpaugh's fortune. I have suspected
it from the first."

"I want? Little you know what I want"--then quickly, convincingly: "You
are strangely deceived. Little Miss Ocumpaugh is not here."

"What is that I hear, then?" was the quick retort with which I hailed
the sigh, unmistakably from infantile lips, which now rose from some
place very much nearer us than the hollow regions overhead toward which
my ears had been so long turned.

"That!" He flashed with uncontrollable passion, and if I am not mistaken
clenched his hands so violently as to bury his nails in his flesh.
"Would you like to see what that is? Come!"--and taking up the lamp, he
moved, much to my surprise as well as to my intense interest, toward the
door of the small cupboard where I had myself slept when in his service.

That he still meditated some deviltry which would call for my full
presence of mind to combat successfully, I did not in the least doubt.
Yet the agitation under which I crossed the floor was more the result of
an immediate anticipation of seeing--and in this place of all others in
the world--the child about whom my thoughts had clung so persistently
for forty-two hours, than of any results to myself in the way of injury
or misfortune. Though the room was small and my passage across it
necessarily short, I had time to remember Mrs. Ocumpaugh's pitiful
countenance as I saw it gazing in agony of expectation from her window
overlooking the river, and to catch again the sounds, less true and yet
strangely thrilling, of Mrs. Carew's voice as she said: "A tragedy at my
doors and I occupied with my own affairs!" Nor was this all. A
recollection of Miss Graham's sorrow came up before my eyes also, and,
truest of all, most penetrating to me of all the loves which seemed to
encompass this rare and winsome infant, the infinite tenderness with
which I once saw Mr. Ocumpaugh lift her to his breast, during one of my
interviews with him at Homewood.

All this before the door had swung open. Afterward, I saw nothing and
thought of nothing but the small figure lying in the spot where I had
once pillowed my own head, and with no more luxuries or even comforts
about her than had been my lot under this broad but by no means
hospitable roof.

A bare wall, a narrow cot, a table with a bottle and glass on it and the
child in the bed--that was all. But God knows, it was enough to me at
that breathless moment; and advancing eagerly, I was about to stoop over
the little head sunk deep in its pillow, when the old man stepped
between and with a short laugh remarked:

"There's no such hurry. I have something to say first, in explanation of
the anger you have seen me display; an anger which is unseemly in a man
professing to have conquered the sins and passions of lost humanity. I
did follow this child. You were right in saying that it was my horse
and buggy which were seen in the wake of the wagon which came from the
region of Homewood and lost itself in the crossroads running between the
North River and the Sound. For two days and a night I followed it,
through more difficulties than I could relate in an hour, stopping in
lonely woods, or at wretched taverns, watching, waiting for the transfer
of the child, whose destination I was bound to know even if it cost me a
week of miserable travel without comfortable food or decent lodging. I
could hear the child cry out from time to time--an assurance that I was
not following a will-o'-the-wisp--but not till to-day, not till very
late to-day, did any words pass between me and the man and woman who
drove the wagon. At Fordham, just as I suspected them of making final
efforts to escape me, they came to a halt and I saw the man get out.

"I immediately got out too. As we faced each other, I demanded what the
matter was. He appeared reckless. 'Are you a doctor?' he asked. I
assured him that I was. At which he blurted out: 'I don't know why
you've been following us so long, and I don't care. I've got a job for
you. A child in our wagon is ill.'"

With a start I attempted to look over the old man's shoulder toward the
bed. But the deep, if irregular, breathing of the child reassured me,
and I turned to hear the doctor out.

"This gave me my chance. 'Let me see her,' I cried. The man's eye
lowered. I did not like his face at all. 'If it's anything serious,' he
growled, 'I shall cut. It isn't my flesh and blood nor yet my old
woman's there. You'll have to find some place for the brat besides my
wagon if it's anything that won't get cured without nu'ssin'. So come
along and have a look.' I followed him, perfectly determined to take the
child under my own care, sick or well. 'Where were you going to take
her?' I asked. I didn't ask who she was; why should I? 'I don't know as
I am obliged to tell,' was his surly reply. 'Where we are going
oursel's,' he reluctantly added. 'But not to nu'ss. I've no time for
nu'ssin' brats, nor my wife neither. We have a journey to make.
Sarah!'--this to his wife, for by this time we were beside the wagon,
'lift up the flap and hold the youngster's hand out. Here's a doctor who
will tell us if it's fever or not.' A puny hand and wrist were thrust
out. I felt the pulse and then held out my arms. 'Give me the child,' I
commanded. 'She's sick enough for a hospital.' A grunt from the woman
within, an oath from the man, and a bundle was presently put in my arms,
from which a little moan escaped as I strode with it toward my buggy. 'I
do not ask your name,' I called back to the man who reluctantly followed
me. 'Mine is Doctor Pool and I live in Yonkers.' He muttered something
about not peachin' on a poor man who was really doin' an unfortunate a
kindness, and then slunk hurriedly back and was gone, wagon, wife and
all, by the time I had whipped up my tired old nag and turned about
toward Yonkers. But I had the child safe and sound in my arms, and my
fears of its fate were relieved. It was not well, but I anticipated
nothing serious. When it moaned I pressed it a little closer to my
breast and that was all. In three-quarters of an hour we were in
Yonkers. In fifteen minutes I had it on this bed, and had begun to
unroll the shawl in which it was closely wrapped. Did you ever see the
child about whom there has been all this coil?"

"Yes, about three years ago."

"Three years! I have seen her within a fortnight; yet I could carry
that young one in my arms for a whole hour without the least suspicion
that I was making a fool of myself."

Quickly slipping aside, he allowed me to approach the bed and take my
first look at the sleeping child's face. It was a sweet one but I did
not need the hint he had given me to find the features strange, and
lacking every characteristic of those of Gwendolen Ocumpaugh. Yet as the
cutting off of the hair will often change the whole aspect of the
face--and this child's hair was short--I was stooping in great
excitement to notice more particularly the contour of cheek and chin
which had given individuality to the little heiress, when the doctor
touched me on the arm and drew my attention to a pair of little trousers
and a shirt which were hanging on the door behind me.

"Those are the clothes I came upon under that great shawl. The child I
have been following and whom I have brought into my house under the
impression it was Gwendolen Ocumpaugh is not even a girl."




VII

"FIND THE CHILD!"


I could well understand the wrath to which this man had given way, by
the feeling which now took hold of my own breast.

"A boy!" I exclaimed.

"A boy."

Still incredulous, I leaned over the child and lifted into the full
light of the lamp one of the little hands I saw lying outside of the
coverlet. There was no mistaking it for a girl's hand, let alone a
little lady's.

"So we are both fools!" I vociferated in my unbounded indignation,
careful however to lay the small hand gently back on the panting breast.
And turning away both from the doctor and his small patient, I strolled
back into the office.

The bubble whose gay colors I had followed with such avidity had burst
in my face with a vengeance.

But once from under the influence of the doctor's sarcastic eye, my
better nature reasserted itself. Wheeling about, I threw this question
back:

"If that is a boy and a stranger, where is Gwendolen Ocumpaugh?"

A moan from the bed and a hurried movement on the part of the doctor,
who took this opportunity to give the child another dose of medicine,
were my sole response. Waiting till the doctor had finished his task and
drawn back from the bedside, I repeated the question and with increased
emphasis:

"Where, then, is Gwendolen Ocumpaugh?"

Still the doctor did not answer, though he turned my way and even
stepped forward; his long visage, cadaverous from fatigue and the shock
of his disappointment, growing more and more somber as he advanced.

When he came to a stand by the table, I asked again:

"Where is the child idolized by Mr. Ocumpaugh and mourned to such a
degree by his almost maddened wife that they say she will die if the
little girl is not found?"

The threat in my tones brought a response at last--a response which
astonished me.

"Have I not said that I do not know? Do you not believe me? Do you think
me as blind to-day to truth and honor as I was six years ago? Have you
no idea of repentance and regeneration from sin? You are a detective.
Find me that child. You shall have money--hundreds--thousands--if you
can bring me proofs of her being yet alive. If the Hudson has swallowed
her--" here his figure rose, dilated and took on a majesty which
impressed itself upon me through all my doubts--"I will have vengeance
on whoever has thus dared the laws of God and man as I would on the
foulest murderer in the foulest slums of that city which breeds
wickedness in high places as in low. I lock hands no longer with Belial.
Find me the child, or make me at least to know the truth!"

There was no doubting the passion which drove these words hot from his
lips. I recognized at last the fanatic whom Miss Graham had so
graphically described in relating her extraordinary adventure on the
bridge; and met him with this one question, which was certainly a vital
one:

"Who dropped a shoe from the little one's closet, into the water under
the dock? Did you?"

"No." His reply came quick and sharp.

"But," I insisted, "you have had something to do with this child's
disappearance."

He did not answer. A sullen look was displacing the fire of resolve in
the eyes I saw sinking slowly before mine.

"I will not acknowledge it," he muttered; adding, however, in what was
little short of a growl: "Not yet, not till it becomes my duty to avenge
innocent blood."

"You foretold the date."

"Drop it."

"You were in league with the abductor," I persisted. "I declare to your
face, in spite of all the vaunted scruples with which you seek to blind
me to your guilt, that you were in league with the abductor, knowing
what money Mrs. Ocumpaugh would pay. Only he was too smart for you, and
perhaps too unscrupulous. You would stop short of murder, now that you
have got religion. But his conscience is not so nice and so you fear--"

"You do not know what I fear and I am not going to tell you. It is
enough that I am conscious of my own uprightness and that I say, Find
the child! You have incentive enough."

It was true and it was growing stronger every minute.

"Confine yourself to such clues as are apparent to every eye," he now
admonished me with an eagerness that seemed real. "If they are pointed
by some special knowledge you believe yourself to have gained, that is
all the better--perhaps. I do not propose to say."

I saw that he had uttered his ultimatum.

"Very good," said I. "I have, nevertheless, one more question to ask
which relates to those very clues. You can not refuse to answer it if
you are really desirous of aiding me in my efforts. Where did you first
come upon the wagon which you followed so many hours in the belief that
it held Gwendolen Ocumpaugh?"

He mused a moment with downcast head, his nervous frame trembling with
the force with which he threw his whole weight on the hand he held
outspread on the table before him. Then he calmly replied:

"I will tell you that. At the gate of Mrs. Carew's grounds. You know
them? They adjoin the Ocumpaughs' on the left."

My surprise made me lower my head but not so quickly that I did not
catch the oblique glint of his eye as he mentioned the name which I was
so little prepared to hear in this connection.

"I was in my buggy on the highroad," he continued. "There was a constant
passing by of all kinds of vehicles on their way to and from the
Ocumpaugh entertainment, but none that attracted my attention till I
caught sight of the covered wagon I have endeavored to describe, being
driven out of the adjoining grounds. Then I pricked up my ears, for a
child was crying inside in the smothered way that tells of a hand laid
heavily over the mouth. I thought I knew what child this was, but you
have been a witness to my disappointment after forty-eight hours of
travel behind that wretched wagon."

"It came out of Mrs. Carew's grounds?" I repeated, ignoring everything
but the one important fact. "And during the time, you say, when Mrs.
Ocumpaugh's guests were assembling? Did you see any other vehicle leave
by the same gate at or before that time?"

"Yes, a carriage. It appeared to have no one in it. Indeed, I know that
it was empty, for I peered into it as it rolled by me down the street.
Of course I do not know what might have been under the seats."

"Nothing," was my sharp retort. "That was the carriage in which Mrs.
Carew had come up from the train. Did it pass out before the wagon?"

"Yes, by some minutes."

"There is nothing, then, to be gained by that."

"There does not seem to be."

Was his accent in uttering this simple phrase peculiar? I looked up to
make sure. But his face, which had been eloquent with one feeling or
another during every minute of this long interview till the present
instant, looked strangely impassive, and I did not know how to press the
question hovering on my lips.

"You have given me a heavy task," I finally remarked, "and you offer
very little assistance in the way of conjecture. Yet you must have
formed some."

He toyed with his beard, combing it with his nervous, muscular fingers,
and as I watched how he lingered over the tips, caressing them before he
dropped them, I felt that he was toying with my perplexities in much the
same fashion and with an equal satisfaction. Angry and out of all
patience with him, I blurted out:

"I will do without your aid. I will solve this mystery and earn your
money if not that of Mr. Ocumpaugh, with no assistance save that
afforded by my own wits."

"I expect you will," he retorted; and for the first time since I burst
in upon him like one dropping from the clouds through the unapproachable
doorway on the upper floor, he lost that look of extreme tension which
had nerved his aged figure into something of the aspect of youth. With
it vanished his impressiveness. It was simply a tired old man I now
followed upstairs to the side door. As I paused to give him a final nod
and an assurance of intended good faith toward him, he made a kindly
enough gesture in the direction of my old room below and said:

"Don't worry about the little fellow down there. He'll come out all
right. I shan't visit on him the extravagance of my own folly. I am a
Christian now." And with this encouraging remark he closed the door and
I found myself alone in the dark alley.

My first sense of relief came from the coolness of the night air on my
flushed forehead and cheeks. After the stifling atmosphere of this
underground room, reeking with the fumes of the lamp and the heat of a
struggle which his dogged confidence in himself had made so unequal, it
was pleasurable just to sense the quiet and the cool of the night and
feel myself released from the bondage of a presence from which I had
frequently recoiled but had never thoroughly felt the force of till
to-night; my next, from the touch and voice of my partner who at that
moment rose from before the basement windows where he had evidently been
lying for a long time outstretched.

"What have you two been doing down there?" was his very natural
complaint. "I tried to listen, I tried to see; but beyond a few
scattered words when your voices rose to an excited pitch, I have
learned nothing but that you were in no danger save from the overthrow
of your scheme. That has failed, has it not? You would have interrupted
me long ago if you had found the child."

"Yes," I acknowledged; drawing him down the alley, "I have failed for
to-night, but I start afresh to-morrow. Though how I can rest idle for
nine hours, not knowing under what roof, if under any, that doomed
innocent may be lying, I do not know."

"You must rest; you are staggering with fatigue now."

"Not a bit of it, only with uncertainty. I don't see my way. Let us go
down street and see if any news has come over the wires since I left
Homewood."

"But first, what a spooky old house that is! And what did the old
gentleman have to say of your tumbling in on him from space without a
'By your leave' or even an 'Excuse me'? Tell me about it."

I told him enough to allay his curiosity. That was all I thought
necessary,--and he seemed satisfied. Jupp is a good fellow, quite
willing to confine himself to his particular end of the business which
does not include the thinking end. Why should it?

There was no news--this we soon learned--only some hints of a
contemplated move on the part of the police in a district where some low
characters had been seen dragging along a resisting child of an
unexpectedly refined appearance. As no one could describe this child
and as I had refused from the first to look upon this case as one of
ordinary abduction, I laid little stress on the report, destined though
it was to appear under startling head-lines on the morrow, and startled
my more credulous partner quite out of his usual equanimity, by ordering
him on our arrival at the station to buy me a ticket for ----, as I was
going back to Homewood.

"To Homewood, so late!"

"Exactly. It will not be late there--or if it is, anxious hearts make
light sleepers."

His shoulders rose a trifle, but he bought the ticket.




VIII

"PHILO! PHILO! PHILO!"


Never have I felt a weirder sensation than when I stepped from the cars
on to the solitary platform from which a few hours before I had seen the
little nursery-governess depart for New York. The train, soon to
disappear in the darkness of the long perspective, was all that gave
life and light to the scene, and when it was gone, nothing remained to
relieve the gloom or to break the universal stillness save the quiet lap
of the water and the moaning of the wind through the trees which climbed
the heights to Homewood.

I had determined to enter if possible by way of the private path, though
I expected to find it guarded against just such intrusion. In
approaching it I was given a full view of the river and thus was in a
position to note that the dock and adjoining banks were no longer bright
with lanterns in the hands of eager men bending with fixed eyes over the
flowing waters. The search which had kept so many busy at this spot for
well on to two days had been abandoned; and the darkness seemed doubly
dark and the silence doubly oppressive in contrast.

Yet hope spoke in the abandonment; and with renewed spirit and a more
than lively courage, I turned toward the little gate through which I had
passed twice before that day. As I expected, a silent figure rose up
from the shadows to prevent me; but it fell back at the mention of my
name and business, thus proving the man to be in the confidence of Mrs.
Ocumpaugh or, at the least, in that of Miss Porter.

"I am come for a social chat with the coachman," I explained. "Lights
burn late in such extensive stables. Don't worry about me. The people at
the house are in sympathy with my investigation."

Thus we stretch the truth at great crises.

"I know you," was the answer. "But keep away from the house. Our orders
are imperative to allow no one to approach it again to-night, except
with the child in hand or with such news as would gain instant
admission."

"Trust me," said I, as I went up the steps.

It was so dark between the hedge-rows that my ascent became mere
groping. I had a lantern in my pocket which I had taken from Jupp, but I
did not choose to make use of it. I preferred to go on and up, trusting
to my instinct to tell me when I had reached a fresh flight of steps.

A gleam of light from Mrs. Carew's upper windows was the first
intimation I received that I was at the top of the bank, and in another
moment I was opposite the gap in the hedge opening upon her grounds.

For no particular reason that I know of, I here paused and took a long
survey of what was, after all, nothing but a cluster of shadows broken
here and there by squares of subdued light. I felt a vague desire to
enter--to see and talk again with the charming woman whose personality
had made such an impression upon me, if only to understand the peculiar
feelings which those indistinguishable walls awakened, and why such a
sense of anticipation should disturb my admiration of this woman and the
delight which I had experienced in every accent of her trained and
exquisite voice.

I was standing very still and in almost total darkness. The shock,
therefore, was great when, in finally making up my mind to move, I
became conscious of a presence near me, totally indiscernible and as
silent as myself.

Whose?

No watchman, or he would have spoken at the rustle I made stumbling back
against the hedge-row. Some marauder, then, or a detective, like myself?
I would not waste time in speculating; better to decide the question at
once, for the situation was eery, the person, whoever he was, stood so
near and so still, and so directly in the way of my advance.

Drawing the lantern from my pocket, I pushed open the slide and flashed
the light on the immovable figure before me. The face I beheld staring
into mine was one quite unknown to me, but as I took in its expression,
my arm gradually fell, and with it the light from the man's features,
till face and form were lost again in the darkness, leaving in my
disturbed mind naught but an impression; but such an impression!

The countenance thus flashed upon my vision must have been a haunting
one at any time, but seen as I saw it, at a moment of extreme
self-abandonment, the effect was startling. Yet I had sufficient
control over myself to utter a word or two of apology, which was not
answered, if it was even heard.

A more exact description may be advisable. The person whom I thus
encountered hesitating before Mrs. Carew's house was a man of meager
build, sloping shoulders and handsome but painfully pinched features.
That he was a gentleman of culture and the nicest refinement was evident
at first glance; that this culture and refinement were at this moment
under the dominion of some fierce thought or resolve was equally
apparent, giving to his look an absorption which the shock attending the
glare I had thus suddenly thrown on his face could not immediately
dispel.

Dazed by an encounter for which he seemed even less prepared than
myself, he stood with his heart in his face, if I may so speak, and only
gradually came to himself as the sense of my proximity forced itself in
upon his suffering and engrossed mind. When I saw that he had quite
emerged from his dream, I dropped the light. But I did not forget his
look; I did not forget the man, though I hastened to leave him, in my
desire to fulfill the purpose for which I had entered these grounds at
so late an hour.

My plan was, as I have said, to visit the Ocumpaugh stables and have a
chat with the coachman. I had no doubt of my welcome and not much doubt
of myself. Yet as I left the vicinity of Mrs. Carew's cottage and came
upon the great house of the Ocumpaughs looming in the moonlight above
its marble terraces, I felt impressed as never before both by the beauty
and magnificence of the noble pile, and shrank with something like shame
from the presumption which had led me to pit my wits against a mystery
having its birth in so much grandeur and material power. The prestige of
great wealth as embodied in this superb structure well-nigh awed me from
my task and I was passing the twin pergolas and flower-bordered walks
with hesitating foot, when I heard through one of the open windows a cry
which made me forget everything but our common heritage of sorrow and
the equal hold it has on high and low.

"Philo!" the voice rang out in a misery to wring the heart of the most
callous. "Philo! Philo!"

Mr. Ocumpaugh's name called aloud by his suffering wife. Was she in
delirium? It would seem so; but why Philo! always Philo! and not once
Gwendolen?

With hushed steps, ears ringing and heart palpitating with new and
indefinable sensations, I turned into the road to the stables.

There were men about and I caught one glimpse of a maid's pretty head
looking from one of the rear windows, but no one stopped me, and I
reached the stable just as a man came sauntering out to take his final
look at the weather.

It was the fellow I sought, Thomas the coachman.

I had not miscalculated the nature of my man. In ten minutes we were
seated together on an open balcony, smoking and beguiling the time with
a little harmless gossip. After a free and easy discussion of the great
event, mingled with the naturally-to-be-expected criticism of the
police, we proceeded under my guidance to those particulars for which I
had risked losing this very valuable hour.

He mentioned Mrs. Ocumpaugh; I mentioned Mrs. Carew.

"A beautiful woman," I remarked.

I thought he looked astonished. "_She_ beautiful?" was his doubtful
rejoinder. "What do you think of Mrs. Ocumpaugh?"

"She is handsome, too, but in a different way."

"I should think so. I've driven rich and I've driven poor. I've even sat
on the box in front of an English duchess, but never have I seen such
features as Mrs. Ocumpaugh's. That's why I consent to drive an American
millionaire's wife when I might be driving the English nobility."

"A statue!" said I; "cold!"

"True enough, but one you never tire of looking at. Besides, she can
light up wonderfully. I've seen her when she was all a-quiver, and
lovely as the loveliest. And when do you think that was?"

"When she had her child in her arms."

I spoke in lowered tones as befitted the suggestion and the
circumstances.

"No," he drawled, between thoughtful puffs of smoke; "when Mr. Ocumpaugh
sat on the seat beside her. This, when I was driving the victoria. I
often used to make excuse for turning my head about so as to catch a
glimpse of her smile at some fine view and the way she looked up at him
to see if he was enjoying it as much as she. I like women who love their
husbands."

"And he?"

"Oh, she has nothing to complain of in him. He worships the ground she
walks on; and he more than worshiped the child."

Here _his_ voice fell.

I brought the conversation back as quickly as I could to Mrs. Carew.

"You like pale women," said I. "Now I like a woman who looks plain one
minute, and perfectly charming the next."

"That's what people say of Mrs. Carew. I know of lots who admire that
kind. The little girl for one."

"Gwendolen? Was she attracted to Mrs. Carew?"

"Attracted? I've seen her go to her from her mother's lap like a bird to
its nest. Many a time have I driven the carriage with Mrs. Ocumpaugh
sitting up straight inside, and her child curled up in this other
woman's arms with not a look or word for her mother."

"How did Mrs. Ocumpaugh seem to like that?" I asked between puffs of my
cigar.

"Oh, she's one of the cold ones, you know! At least you say so; but I
feel sure that for the last three years--that is, ever since this woman
came into the neighborhood--her heart has been slowly breaking. This
last blow will kill her."

I thought of the moaning cry of "Philo! Philo!" which at intervals I
still seemed to hear issue from that upper window in the great house,
and felt that there might be truth in his fears.

But it was of Mrs. Carew I had come to talk and not of Mrs. Ocumpaugh.

"Children's fancies are unaccountable," I sententiously remarked; "but
perhaps there is some excuse for this one. Mrs. Carew has what you call
magnetism--a personality which I should imagine would be very appealing
to a child. I never saw such expression in a human face. Whatever her
mood, she impresses each passing feeling upon you as the one reality of
her life. I can not understand such changes, but they are very
fascinating."

"Oh, they are easy enough to understand in her case. She was an actress
once. I myself have seen her on the stage--in London. I used to admire
her there."

"An actress!" I repeated, somewhat taken aback.

"Yes, I forget what name she played under. But she's a very great lady
now; in with all the swells and rich enough to own a yacht if she wanted
to."

"But a widow."

"Oh, yes, a widow."

I let a moment of silence pass, then nonchalantly remarked:

"Why is she going to Europe?"

But this was too much for my simple-hearted friend. He neither knew nor
had any conjecture ready. But I saw that he did not deplore her resolve.
His reason for this presently appeared.

"If the little one is found, the mother will want all her caresses. Let
Mrs. Carew hug the boy that God in his mercy has thrown into her arms
and leave other children to their mothers."

I rose to leave, when I bethought me and stopped to ask another
question.

"Who is the gentleman I have seen about here--a man with a handsome
face, but very pale and thin in his appearance, so much so that it is
quite noticeable?"

"Do you mean Mr. Rathbone?"

"I do not know his name. A light complexioned man, who looks as if
greatly afflicted by some disease or secret depression."

"Oh, that is Mr. Rathbone, sure. He is sickly-looking enough and not
without his trouble, too. They say--but it's all gossip, of course--that
he has set his heart on the widow."

"Mrs. Carew?"

"Of course, who else?"

"And she?"

"Why, she would be a fool to care for him, unless--"

"Unless what?"

Thomas laughed--a little uneasily, I could not help thinking.

"I'm afraid we're talking scandal," said he. "You know the
relationship?"

"What relationship?"

"Why, his relationship to the family. He is Gwendolen's cousin and I
have heard it said that he's named after her in Madam Ocumpaugh's
will."

"O, I see! The next heir, eh?"

"Yes, to the Rathbone property."

"So that if she is not found--"

"Your sickly man, in that case, would be well worth the marrying."

"Is Mrs. Carew so fond of money as all that? I thought she was a woman
of property."

"She is; but it takes money to make some men interesting. He isn't
handsome enough, or independent enough to go entirely on his own merits.
Besides, he has a troop of relatives hanging on to him--blood-suckers
who more than eat up his salary."

"A business man, then?"

"Yes, in some New York house. He was always very fond of Gwendolen, and
I am not surprised to hear that he is very much cut up by our trouble. I
always thought well of Mr. Rathbone myself,"--which same ended the
conversation so far as my interest in it was concerned.




IX

THE BUNGALOW


As soon as I could break away and leave him I did, and betook myself to
Mrs. Carew's house. My resolve was taken. Late as it was, I would
attempt an interview with her. The lights still burning above and below
gave me the necessary courage. Yet I was conscious of some embarrassment
in presenting my name to the astonished maid, who was in the act of
extinguishing the hall-light when my vigorous ring prevented her. Seeing
her doubtful look and the hesitation with which she held the door, I
told her that I would wait outside on the porch till she had carried up
my name to Mrs. Carew. This seemed to relieve her and in a moment I was
standing again under the vines waiting for permission to enter the
house. It came very soon, and I had to conquer a fresh embarrassment at
the sight of Mrs. Carew's nimble and gracious figure descending the
stairs in all eagerness to greet me.

"What is it?" she asked, running hastily forward so that we met in the
center of the hall. "Good news? Nothing else could have brought you back
again so soon--and at an hour so late."

There was a dangerous naivete in the way she uttered the last three
words which made me suspect the actress. Indeed I was quite conscious as
I met her thrilling and expressive glance, that I should never feel
again the same confidence in her sincerity. My judgment had been
confounded and my insight rendered helpless by what I had heard of her
art, and the fact that she had once been a capable player of "parts."

But I was man enough and detective enough not to betray my suspicion,
now that I was brought face to face with her. It had always been latent
in my breast, even in the very midst of my greatest admiration for her.
Yet I had never acknowledged to myself of what I suspected her, nor did
I now--not quite--not enough to give that point to my attack which would
have insured me immediate victory or defeat. I was obliged to feel my
way and so answered, with every appearance of friendly confidence:

"I fear then that I shall be obliged to ask your pardon. I have no good
news; rather what might be called, if not bad, of a very perplexing
character. The child has been traced"--here I purposely let my voice
halt for an instant--"here."

"Here?" her eyes opened, her lips parted in a look of surprise so
ingenuous that involuntarily I felt forced to add, by way of
explanation:

"The child, I mean, who was carried screaming along the highway in a
wagon and for whom the police--and others--have for two days been
looking."

"Oh!" she ejaculated with a slight turn of her head aside as she
motioned me toward a chair. "And is that child Gwendolen? Or don't you
know?" She was all eagerness as she again faced me.

"That will be known to-morrow," I rejoined, resisting the beautiful
brightness of her face with an effort that must have left its mark on my
own features; for she smiled with unconscious triumph as she held my
eyes for a minute in hers saying softly, "O how you excite me! Tell me
more. Where was the wagon found? Who is with it? And how much of all
this have you told Mrs. Ocumpaugh?"

With the last question she had risen, involuntarily, it seemed, and as
though she would rush to her friend if I did not at once reassure her of
that friend's knowledge of a fact which seemed to throw a gleam of hope
upon a situation hitherto entirely unrelieved.

"Mrs. Ocumpaugh has been told nothing," I hastily returned, answering
the last and most important question first. "Nor must she be; at least
not till certainty replaces doubt. She is in a critical state, I am
told. To rouse her hopes to-night only to dash them again to-morrow
would be cruel policy."

With her eyes still on my face, Mrs. Carew slowly reseated herself.
"Then there are doubts," she faltered; "doubts of its being Gwendolen?"

"There is always doubt," I replied, and openly paused in manifest
non-committal.

"Oh!" she somewhat wildly exclaimed, covering her face with her
hands--beautiful hands covered with jewels--"what suspense! what bitter
and cruel suspense! I feel it almost as much as if it were my Harry!"
was the final cry with which she dropped them again. And she did feel
it. Her features had blanched and her form was shaking. "But you have
not answered my questions as to where this wagon is at present and under
whose care? Can't you see how anxious I must be about that--if it should
prove to be Gwendolen?"

"Mrs. Carew, if I could tell you that, I could tell you more; we shall
both have to wait till to-morrow. Meanwhile, I have a favor to ask. Have
you by any chance the means of entrance to the bungalow? I have a great
and inappeasable desire to see for myself if all the nooks and corners
of that place have given up their secrets. It's an egotistical desire,
no doubt--and may strike you as folly of the rankest--but we detectives
have learned to trust nobody in our investigations, and I shall never be
satisfied till I have looked this whole spot over inch by inch for the
clue which may yet remain there. If there is a clue I must find it."

"Clue?" She was looking at me a little breathlessly. "Clue to what? Then
she wasn't in the wagon; you are still seeking her--"

"Always seeking her," I put in.

"But surely not in the bungalow!" Mrs. Carew's expression was one of
extreme surprise. "What can you find there?"

"I do not know. But I want to look. I can go to the house for a key, but
it is late; and it seems unpardonable to disturb Mrs. Ocumpaugh. Yet I
shall have to do this if you have not a key; for I shall not sleep till
I have satisfied myself that nothing can be discovered on the immediate
scene of Gwendolen's disappearance, to help forward the rescue we both
are so intent upon."

"You are right," was the hesitating reply I received. "I have a key; I
will fetch it and if you do not mind, I will accompany you to the
bungalow."

"Nothing would give me greater pleasure," I replied with my best bow;
white lies come easy in our trade.

"I will not keep you a minute," she said, rising and going into the
hall. But in an instant she was back. "A word to my maid and a covering
for my head," she explained, "and I will be with you." Her manner
pointed unmistakably to the door.

I had no alternative but to step out on the porch to await her. But she
was true to her word and in a moment she had joined me, with the key in
her hand.

"Oh, what adventures!" was her breathless cry. "Shall I ever forget this
dreadful, this interminable week! But it is dark. Even the moon is
clouded over. How shall we see? There are no lights in the bungalow."

"I have a lantern in my pocket. My only hope is that no stray gleam from
it may pierce the shrubbery and bring the police upon us."

"Do you fear the police?" she chatted away, almost as a child might.

"No; but I want to do my work alone. There will be little glory or
little money in it if they share any of my discoveries."

"Ah!" It was an irrepressible exclamation, or so it seemed: but I should
not have noted it if I had not caught, or persuaded myself that I had
caught, the oblique glint from her eye which accompanied it. But it was
very dark just at this time and I could be sure of nothing but that she
kept close to my side and seemed more than once on the point of
addressing me in the short distance we traversed before reaching the
bungalow. But nothing save inarticulate murmurs left her lips and soon
we were too busy, in our endeavors to unlock the door, to think of
conversation.

The key she had brought was rusty. Evidently she had not often made use
of it. But after a few futile efforts I succeeded in making it work, and
we stepped into the small building in a silence that was only less
profound than the darkness in which we instantly found ourselves
enveloped. Light was under my hand, however, and in another moment there
opened before us the small square room whose every feature had taken on
a ghostly and unfamiliar air from the strange hour and the unwonted
circumstances. I saw how her impressionable nature was affected by the
scene, and made haste to assume the offhand air I thought most likely to
overcome her apprehension. But the effect of the blank walls before her,
relieved, but in no reassuring way, by the long dark folds of the rugs
hanging straight down over the mysterious partition, held its own
against my well-meant efforts, and I was not surprised to hear her voice
falter as she asked what I expected to find there.

I pointed to a chair and said:

"If you will sit down, I will show you, not what I expect to find, but
how a detective goes about his work. Whatever our expectations, however
small or however great, we pay full attention to details. Now the detail
which has worried me in regard to this place is the existence of a
certain space in this building unaccounted for by these four walls; in
other words, the portion which lies behind these rugs,"--and throwing
aside the same, I let the flame from my lantern play over the walled-up
space which I had before examined with little satisfaction. "This
partition," I continued, "seems as firm as any of the walls, but I want
to make sure that it hides nothing. If the child should be in some hole
back of this partition, what a horror and what an outrage!"

"But it is impossible!" came almost in a shriek from the woman behind
me. "The opening is completely walled up. I have never known of its
being otherwise. It looked like that when I came here three years ago.
There is no possible passage through that wall."

"Why was it ever closed up? Do you know?"

"Not exactly. The family are very reticent about it. Some fancy of Mr.
Ocumpaugh's father, I believe. He was an odd man; they tell all manner
of stories about him. If anything offended him, he rid himself of it
immediately. He took a distaste to that end of the hut, as they used to
call it in the old days before it was remodeled to suit the house, so he
had it walled up. That is all we know about it."

"I wish I could see behind that wall," I muttered, dropping back the rug
I had all this time held in my hand. "I feel some mystery here which I
can not grasp." Then as I flashed my lantern about in every direction
with no visible result, added with the effort which accompanies such
disappointments: "There is nothing here, Mrs. Carew. Though it is the
scene of the child's disappearance it gives me nothing."




X

TEMPTATION


The sharp rustle of her dress as she suddenly rose struck upon my ear.

"Then let us go," she cried, with just a slight quiver of eagerness in
her wonderful voice. I comprehended its culture now. "The place is
ghostly at this hour of the night. I believe that I am really afraid."

With a muttered reassurance, I allowed the full light of the lantern to
fall directly on her face. She _was_ afraid. There was no other
explanation possible for her wild staring eyes and blue quivering lips.
For the instant I hardly knew her; then her glance rose to mine and she
smiled and it was with difficulty I refrained from acknowledging in
words my appreciation of her wonderful flexibility of expression.

"You are astonished to see me so affected," she said. "It is not so
strange as you think--it is superstition--the horror of what once
happened here--the reason for that partition--I know the whole story,
for all my attempts to deny it just now. The hour, too, is
unfortunate--the darkness--your shifting, mysterious light. It was late
like this--and dark--with just the moon to illumine the scene, when
she--Mr. Trevitt, do you want to know the story of this place?--the old,
much guessed-at, never-really-understood story which led first to its
complete abandonment, then to the building of that dividing wall and
finally to the restoration of this portion and of this alone? Do you?"

Her eagerness, in such startling contrast to the reticence she had shown
on this very subject a few minutes before, affected me peculiarly. I
wanted to hear the story--any one would who had listened to the gossip
of this neighborhood for years, but--

She evidently did not mean to give me time to understand my own
hesitation.

"I have the whole history--the touching, hardly-to-be-believed
history--up at my house at this very moment. It was written by--no, I
will let you guess."

The naivete of her smile made me forget the force of its late
expression.

"Mr. Ocumpaugh?" I ventured.

"Which Mr. Ocumpaugh? There have been so many." She began slowly,
naturally, to move toward the door.

"I can not guess."

"Then I shall have to tell you. It was written by the one who--Come! I
will tell you outside. I haven't any courage here."

"But I have."

"You haven't read the story."

"Never mind; tell me who the writer was."

"Mr. Ocumpaugh's father; he, by whose orders this partition was put up."

"Oh, you have _his_ story--written--and by himself! You are fortunate,
Mrs. Carew."

I had turned the lantern from her face, but not so far that I did not
detect the deep flush which dyed her whole countenance at these words.

"I am," she emphatically returned, meeting my eyes with a steady look I
was not sufficiently expert with women's ways, or at all events with
this woman's ways, to understand. "Seldom has such a tale been
written--seldom, let us thank God, has there been an equal occasion for
it."

"You interest me," I said.

And she did. Little as this history might have to do with the finding of
Gwendolen, I felt an almost imperative necessity of satisfying my
curiosity in regard to it, though I knew she had deliberately roused
this curiosity for a purpose which, if not comprehensible to me, was of
marked importance to her and not altogether for the reason she had been
pleased to give me. Possibly it was on account of this last mentioned
conviction that I allowed myself to be so interested.

"It is late," she murmured with a final glance towards those dismal
hangings which in my present mood I should not have been so greatly
surprised to see stir under her look. "However, if you will pardon the
hour and accept a seat in my small library, I will show you what only
one other person has seen besides myself."

It was a temptation; for several reasons it was a temptation; yet--

"I want you to see why I am frightened of this place," she said,
flashing her eyes upon me with an almost girlish appeal.

"I will go," said I; and following her quickly out, I locked the
bungalow door, and ignoring the hand she extended toward me, dropped the
key into my pocket.

I thought I heard a little gasp--the least, the smallest of sounds
possible. But if so, the feeling which prompted it was not apparent in
her manner or her voice as she led the way back to her house, and
ushered me into a hall full of packing-boxes and the general litter
accompanying an approaching departure.

"You will excuse the disorder," she cried as she piloted me through
these various encumbrances to a small but exquisitely furnished room
still glorying in its full complement of ornaments and pictures. "This
trouble which has come to one I love has made it very hard for me to do
anything. I feel helpless, at times, completely helpless."

The dejection she expressed was but momentary, however. In another
instant she was pointing out a chair and begging me to make myself
comfortable while she went for the letter (I think she called it a
letter) which I had come there to read.

What was I to think of her? What was I to think of myself? And what
would the story tell me to warrant the loss of what might have proved a
most valuable hour? I had not answered these questions when she
reentered with a bundle in her hand of discolored--I should almost call
them mouldered--sheets of much crumpled paper.

"These--" she began; then, seeing me look at them with something like
suspicion, she paused until she caught my eye, when she added gravely,
"these came to me from Mrs. Ocumpaugh. How she got them you will have to
ask her. I should say, judging from appearances--" Here she took a seat
opposite me at a small table near which I had been placed--"that they
must have been found in some old chest or possibly in some hidden drawer
of one of those curious antique desks of which more than one was
discovered in the garrets of the old house when it was pulled down to
give place to the new one."

"Is this letter, as you call it, so old?" I asked.

"It is dated thirty-five years ago."

"The garret must have been a damp one," I remarked.

She flashed me a look--I thought of it more than once afterward--and
asked if she should do the reading or I.

"You," I rejoined, all afire with the prospect of listening to her
remarkable voice in what I had every reason to believe would call forth
its full expression. "Only let me look at those sheets first, and
understand as perfectly as I may, just what it is you are going to read
to me."

"It's an explanation written for his heirs by Mr. Ocumpaugh. The story
itself," she went on, handing me over the papers she held, "begins
abruptly. From the way the sheet is torn across at the top, I judge that
the narrative itself was preceded by some introductory words now
lacking. When I have read it to you, I will tell you what I think those
introductory words were."

I handed back the sheets. There seemed to be a spell in the
air--possibly it arose from her manner, which was one to rouse
expectation even in one whose imagination had not already been stirred
by a visit at night and in more than commonly bewildering company to the
place whose dark and hitherto unknown secret I was about to hear.

"I am ready," I said, feeling my strange position, but not anxious to
change it just then for any other conceivable one.

She drew a deep breath; again fixed me with her strange, compelling
eyes, and with the final remark:

"The present no longer exists, we are back in the seventies--" began
this enthralling tale.

I did not move till the last line dropped from her lips.




XI

THE SECRET OF THE OLD PAVILION


I was as sane that night as I had ever been in my life. I am quite sure
of this, though I had had a merry time enough earlier in the evening
with my friends in the old pavilion (that time-honored retreat of my
ancestors), whose desolation I had thought to dissipate with a little
harmless revelry. Wine does not disturb my reason--the little wine I
drank under that unwholesome roof--nor am I a man given to sudden
excitements or untoward impulses.

Yet this thing happened to me.

It was after leaving the pavilion. My companions had all ridden away and
I was standing on the lawn beyond my library windows, recalling my
pleasure with them and gazing somewhat idly, I own, at that bare portion
of the old wall where the tree fell a year ago (the place where the moon
strikes with such a glitter when it rides high, as it did that night),
when--believe it or not, it is all one to me--I became conscious of a
sudden mental dread, inexplicable and alarming, which, seizing me after
an hour of unmixed pleasure and gaiety, took such a firm grip upon my
imagination that I fain would have turned my back upon the night and its
influences, only my eyes would not leave that open space of wall where I
now saw pass--not the shadow, but the veritable body of a large, black,
hungry-looking dog, which, while I looked, turned into the open gateway
connecting with the pavilion and disappeared.

With it went the oppression which held me spell-bound. The ice melted
from my blood; I could move my limbs, and again control my thoughts and
exercise my will.

Forcing a laugh, I whistled to that dog. The lights with which the
banquet had been illuminated were out, and every servant had left the
place; but the tables had not been entirely cleared, and I could well
understand what had drawn this strange animal thither. I whistled then,
and whistled peremptorily; but no dog answered my call. Angry, for the
rules are strict at my stables in regard to wandering brutes, I strode
toward the pavilion. Entering the great gap in the wall where a gate had
once hung, I surveyed the dismal interior before me, with feelings I
could not but consider odd in a strong man like myself. Though the wine
was scarcely dry in the glass which an hour before I had raised in this
very spot amid cheers and laughter, I found it a difficult matter to
reenter there now, in the dead of night, alone and without light.

For this building, harmless as it had always seemed, had been, in a way,
cursed. For no reason that he ever gave, my father had doomed this
ancient adjunct to our home to perpetual solitude and decay. By his will
he had forbidden it to be destroyed--a wish respected by my guardians
and afterward by myself--and though there was nothing to hinder its
being cared for and in a manner used, the dismal influence which had
pervaded the place ever since his death had, under the sensations I have
mentioned, deepened into horror and an unspeakable repugnance.

Yet never having had any reason to believe myself a coward, I took
boldly enough the few steps necessary to carry me inside its dismal
precincts; and meeting with nothing but darkness and silence, began to
whistle again for the dog I had certainly seen enter here.

But no dog appeared.

Hastening out, I took my way toward the stables. As I did so I glanced
back, and again my eyes fell on that place in the wall gleaming white in
the moonlight. Again I felt the chill, the horror! Again my eyes
remained glued to this one spot; and again I beheld the passing of that
dog, running with jaws extended and head held low--fearsome, uncanny,
supernaturally horrible; a thing to flee from, if one could only flee
instead of standing stock-still on the sward, gazing with eyes that
seemed starting from their sockets till it had plunged through that gap
in the wall and again disappeared.

The occult and the imaginary have never appealed to me, and the moment I
felt myself a man again, I hurried on to the stables to call up my man
Jared.

But half-way there I paused, struck by an odd remembrance. This father
of mine, Philo Ocumpaugh, had died, or so his old servants had said,
under peculiar circumstances. I had forgotten them till now--such
stories make poor headway with me--but if I was not mistaken, the facts
were these:

He had been ailing long, and his nurses had got used to the sight of his
gaunt, white figure sitting propped up, but speechless, in the great bed
opposite the stretch of blank wall in the corner bedroom, where a
picture of his first wife, the wife of his youth, had once hung, but
which, for some years now, had been removed to where there were fewer
shadows and more sunlight. He had never been a talkative man, and in all
the five years of my own memory of him, I had never heard him raise his
voice except in command, or when the duties of hospitality required it.
Now, with the shadow of death upon him, he was absolutely speechless,
and his nurses were obliged to guess at his wishes by the movement of
his hands or the direction of his eyes. Yet he was not morose, and
sometimes was seen to struggle with the guards holding his tongue, as
though he would fain have loosed himself from their inexorable control.
Yet he never succeeded in doing so, and the nurses sat by and saw no
difference in him, till suddenly the candle, posed on a table near by,
flickered and went out, leaving only moonlight in the room. It was
moonlight so brilliant that the place seemed brighter than before,
though the beams were all concentrated on one spot, a blank space in the
middle of the wall upon which those two dim orbs in the bed were fixed
in an expectancy none there understood, for none knew that the summons
had come, and that for him the angel of death was at that moment
standing in the room.

Yet as moonlight is not the natural light for a sick man's bedside, one
amongst them had risen for another candle, when something--I had never
stopped to hear them say what--made him pause and look back, when he saw
distinctly outlined upon the white wall-space I have mentioned, the
figure--the unimaginable figure of a dog, large, fierce and
hungry-looking, which dashed by and--was gone. Simultaneously a cry came
from the bed, the first words for months--"Aline!"--the name of his
girl-wife, dead and gone for years. All sprang; some to chase the dog,
one to aid and comfort the sick man. But no dog was there, nor did he
need comfort more. He had died with that cry on his lips, and as they
gazed at his face, sunk low now in his pillow as if he had started up
and fallen back, a dead weight, they felt the terror of the moment grow
upon them till they, too, were speechless. For the aged features were
drawn into lines of unspeakable anguish and horror.

But as the night passed and morning came, all these lines smoothed out,
and when they buried him, those who had known him well talked of the
beautiful serenity which illumined the face which, since their first
remembrance of him, had carried the secret of a profound and unbroken
melancholy. Of the dog, nothing was said, even in whispers, till time
had hallowed that grave, and the little children about, grown to be men
and women. Then the garrulity of age had its way.

This story, and the images it called up, came like a shock as I halted
there, and instead of going on to the stables, I turned my steps toward
the house, where I summoned from his bed a certain old servant who had
lived longer in the family than myself.

Bidding him bring a lantern, I waited for him on the porch, and when he
came, I told him what I had seen. Instantly I knew that it was no new
story to him. He turned very pale and set down the lantern, which was
shaking very visibly in his hand.

"Did you look up?" he asked; "when you were in the pavilion, I mean?"

"No; why should I? The dog was on the ground. Besides--"

"Let us go down to the pavilion," he whispered. "I want to see for
myself if--if--"

"If what, Jared?"

He turned his eyes on me, but did not answer. Stooping, I lifted the
lantern and put it in his hand. He was quaking like a leaf, but there
was a determination in his face far beyond the ordinary. What made him
quake--he who knew of this dog only by hearsay--and what, in spite of
this fear, gave him such resolution? I followed in his wake to see what
it was.

The moon still shone clear upon the lawn, and it was with a certain
renewal of my former apprehensions that I approached the spot on the
wall where I had seen what I was satisfied not to see again. But though
I glanced that way--what man could have avoided it?--I perceived nothing
but the bare paint, and we went on and passed in without a word, Jared
leading the way.

But once on the threshold of the pavilion itself, it was for him to show
the coward. Turning, he made me a gesture; one I did not understand; and
seeing that I did not understand it, he said, after a fearful look
around:

"Do not mind the dog; that was but an appearance. Lift your eyes to the
ceiling--over there--at the extreme end toward the south--do you
see--_what_ do you see?"

"Nothing," I replied, amazed at what struck me as utter folly.

"Nothing?" he repeated in a relieved voice, as he lifted up his lantern.
"Ah!" came in a sort of muttered shriek from his lips, as he pointed up,
here and there, along the farther ceiling, over which the light now
played freely and fully. "What is that spot, and that spot, and that?
They were not there to-day. I was in here before the banquet, and _I_
would have seen. What is it? Master, what is it? They call it--"

"Well, well, what do they call it?" I asked impatiently.

"Blood! Do you not see that it is blood? What else is red and shiny and
shows in such great drops--"

"Nonsense!" I vociferated, taking the lantern in my own hand. "Blood on
the ceiling of my old pavilion? Where could it come from? There was no
quarrel, no fight; only hilarity--"

"Where did the dog come from?" he whispered.

I dropped my arm, staring at him in mingled anger and a certain
half-understood sympathy.

"You think these stains--" I began.

"Are as unreal as the dog? Yes, master."

Feeling as if I were in a dream, I tossed up the lantern again. The
drops were still there, but no longer single or scattered. From side to
side, the ceiling at this one end of the building oozed with the thick
red moisture to which he had given so dreadful a name.

Stepping back for fear the stains would resolve themselves into rain and
drop upon my forehead, I stared at Jared, who had now retreated toward
the door.

"What makes you think it blood?" I demanded.

"Because some have smelt and tasted it. We have never talked about it,
but this is not an uncommon occurrence. To-morrow all these stains will
be gone. They come when the dog circles the wall. Whence, no one knows.
It is our mystery. All the old servants have heard of it more than once.
The new ones have never been told. Nor would I have told you if you had
not seen the dog. It was a matter of honor with us."

I looked at him, saw that he believed every word he said, threw another
glance at the ceiling, and led the way out. When we had reached the
house again, I said:

"You are acquainted with the tradition underlying these appearances, as
you call them. What is it?"

He could not tell me. He knew no more than he had already stated--gossip
and old wives' tales. But later, a certain manuscript came into my
possession through my lawyer, which I will append to this.

It was written by my unhappy father, some little time before his last
illness, and given into the charge of the legal representative of our
family, with the express injunction that its seal was to remain intact
if for twenty years the apparition which had haunted him did not present
itself to the eyes of any of his children. But if within that time his
experience should repeat itself in theirs, this document was to be
handed over to the occupant of Homewood. Nineteen out of the twenty
years had elapsed, without the dog being seen or the ceiling of the
pavilion dropping blood. But not the twentieth; hence, the document was
mine.

You can easily conceive with what feelings I opened it. It was headed
with this simple line:

MY STORY WHICH I CAN WRITE BUT COULD NEVER TELL.

I am cursed with an inability to speak when I am most deeply moved,
either by anger or tenderness. This misfortune has wrecked my life. On
the verge of old age, the sorrows and the mistakes of my early life fill
my thoughts so completely that I see but one face, hear but one voice;
yet when she was living--when _she_ could see and hear, my tongue was
silent and she never knew. Aline! my Aline!

I married her when I was thirty-five and she eighteen. All the world
knows this; but what it does not know is that I loved her--toy,
plaything that she was--a body without a mind--(or, so I considered
her)--while she had but followed the wishes of her relatives in giving
her sweet youth to a cold and reticent man who might love, indeed, but
who had no power to tell that love, or even to show it in the ways which
women like, and which she liked, as I found out when it was too late.

I could not help but love her. It was ingrained within me; a part of the
curse of my life to love this gentle, thoughtless, alluring thing to
which I had given my name. She had a smile--it did not come often--which
tore at my heart-strings as it welled up, just stirring the dimples in
her cheeks, and died away again in a strange and moving sweetness.
Though I reckoned her at her worth; knew that her charm was all
physical; that she neither did nor could understand a passion like mine,
much less return it, it was none the less irresistible, and I have known
myself to stand before a certain book-shelf in the turn of the stairway
for many minutes together, because I knew that she would soon be coming
down, and that, when she did, some ribbon from her gown would flutter by
me, and I should feel the soft contact and go away happy to my books.
Yet, if she stopped to look back at me, I could only return her look
with one she doubtless called harsh, for she had not eyes to see below
the surface.

I tell you all this, lest you may not understand. She was not your
mother and you may begrudge me the affection I felt for her; if so,
thrust these leaves into the fire and seek not the explanation of what
has surprised you; for there is no word written here which does not find
its meaning in the intense love I bore for her, my young girl-wife, and
the tragedy which this love has brought into my life. She was slight in
body, slight in mind and of slight feeling. I first discovered this last
on the day I put my mother's ring on her finger. She laughed as I fitted
it close and kissed the little hand. Not from embarrassment or childish
impulse; I could have understood that; but indifferently, like one who
did not know and never could. Yet I married her, and for six months
lived in a fool's paradise. Then came that hall. It was held near here,
very near, at one of our neighbor's, in fact. I remember that we walked,
and that, coming to the driveway, I lifted her and carried her across.
Not with a smile--do not think it. More likely with a frown, though my
heart was warm and happy; for when I set her down, she shook herself,
and I thought she did it to hide a shudder, and then I could not have
spoken a word had my life depended on it.

I little knew what lay back of that shudder. Even after I had seen her
dance with him, not only once, but twice, I never dreamed that her
thoughts, light though they were, were not all with me. It took that
morsel of paper and the plain words it contained to satisfy me of this,
and then-- But passion is making me incoherent. What do you know of that
scrap of paper, hidden from the whole world from the moment I first read
it till this hour of full confession? It fluttered from some one's hand
during the dance. I did not see whose. I only saw it after it had fallen
at my feet, and as it lay there open I naturally read the words. They
were written by a man to a woman, urging flight and setting the hour
and place for meeting. I was conscious of shame in reading it, and let
these last details escape me. As I put it in my pocket I remember
thinking, "Some poor devil made miserable!" for there had been hint in
it of the husband. But I had no thought--I swear it before God--of who
that husband was till I beheld her flit back through the open doorway,
with terror in her mien and searching eyes fixed on the floor. Then hell
opened before me, and I saw my happiness go down into gulfs I had never
before sounded, even in imagination.

But even at that evil hour my countenance scarcely changed--I was
opposite a mirror, and I caught a glimpse of myself as I moved. But
there must have been some change in my voice--for when I addressed her,
she started and turned her face upon me with a wild and pathetic look
which knocked so at my heart that I wished I had never read those words,
and so could return her the paper with no misgiving as to its contents.
But having read it, I could not do this; so, beyond a petty greeting, I
said nothing and let the moment pass, and she with it; for couples were
dancing and she was soon again in the whirl. I am not a dancing man
myself, and I had leisure to think and madden myself with contemplation
of my wrecked life and questions as to what I should do to her and to
him, and to the world where such things could happen. I had forgotten
the details of time and place, or rather had put them out of my mind,
and I would not look at the words again--could not. But as the minutes
went by, the remembrance returned, startling and convincing, that the
hour was two and the place--our old pavilion.

I walked about after that like a man in whose breast the sources of life
are frozen. I chatted--I who never chatted--with women, and with men. I
even smiled--once. That was when my little white-faced wife asked me if
it were not time to go home. Even a man under torture might find
strength to smile if the inquisitor should ask if he were not ready to
be released.

And we went home.

I did not carry her this time across the driveway; but when we parted in
the library, where I always spent an hour before retiring, I picked out
a lily from a vase of flowers standing on my desk and held it out to
her. She stared at it for a moment, quite as white as the lily, then she
slowly put out her hand and took it. I felt no mercy after that, and
bade her good-night with the remark that I should have to write far into
the morning, and that she need not worry over my light, which I should
not probably put out till she was half through with her night's rest.

For answer, she dropped the lily. I found it next morning lying withered
and brown, in the hall-way.

That light did burn far into the morning; but I was not there to trim
it. Before the fatal hour had struck, I had left the house and made my
way to the pavilion. As I crossed the sward I saw the gleam of a lantern
at the masthead of a small boat riding near our own landing-place, and I
understood where he was at this hour, and by what route he hoped to take
my darling. "A route she will never travel," thought I, striving to keep
out of my mind and conscience the vision of another route, another
travel, which that sweet young body might take if my mood held and my
purpose strengthened.

There was no moon that night, and the copse in which our pavilion stands
was like a blot against the starless heavens. As I drew near it, my dog,
the invariable companion of my walks, lifted a short, sharp bark from
the stables. But I knew whose hand had fastened him, and I went on
without giving him a thought. At the door of the pavilion I stopped. All
was dark within as without, and the silence was something to overwhelm
the heart. She was not there then, nor was he. But he would be coming
soon, and up or down between the double hedge-rows.

I went to meet him. It was a small detail, but possibly a necessary one.
In her eyes he was probably handsome and gifted with all that I openly
lacked. But he was shallow and small for a man like me to be concerned
about. I laughed inwardly and with very conceivable scorn as I heard the
faint fall of his footsteps in the darkness. It was nearly two and he
meant to be prompt.

Our coming together in that narrow path was very much what I expected it
to be. I had put out my arms and touched the hedge on either side, so
that he could not escape me. When I heard him drawing close, I found
the voice I had not had for her, and observed very quietly and with the
cold politeness of a messenger:

"My wife finds herself indisposed since the ball, and begs to be excused
from joining you in the pleasant sail you proposed to her."

That, and no more; except that when he started and almost fell into my
arms, I found strength to add:

"The wind blows fresh to-night; you will have no difficulty in leaving
this shore. The difficulty will be to return."

I had no heart to kill him; he was young and he was frightened. I heard
the sob in his throat as I dropped my arm and he went flying down to the
river.

This was child's play; the rest--

My portion is to tell it; forty years ago it all befell, and till now no
word of it has ever left my lips.

There was no sound of her advancing tread across the lawn as I stepped
back into my own grounds to enter the pavilion. But as I left the path
and put foot inside the wall, I heard a far, faint sound like the harsh
closing of a door in timid hands, followed by another bark from the
dog, louder and sharper than the first--for he did not recognize my
Aline as mistress, though I had striven for six months to teach him the
place she held in my heart.

By this I knew she was coming, and that what preparations I had to make
must be made soon. They were not many. Entering the well-known place, I
lit the lantern I had brought with me and set it down near the door. It
cast a feeble light about the entrance, but left great shadows in the
rear. This I had calculated on, and into these shadows I now stepped.

The pavilion, as you remember it, is not what it was then. I had used it
little, fancying more my own library up at the house, but it was not
utterly without furnishings, and to young eyes might even look
attractive, with love, or fancied love, to mellow its harsh lines and
lend romance to its solitude. At this hour and under these circumstances
it was a dismal hole to me; and as I stood there waiting, I thought how
the place fitted the deed--if deed it was to be.

I had always thought her timid, afraid of the night and all threatening
things. But as I listened to the sound of her soft footfall at the door,
I realized that even her breast could grow strong under the influence of
a real or fancied passion. It was a shock--but I did not cry out--only
set my teeth together and turned a little so that what light there was
would fall on my form rather than on my face.

She entered; I felt rather than heard the tremulous push she gave to the
door, and the quick drawing in of her breath as she put her foot across
the threshold. These sapped my courage. This fear, this almost
hesitation, drew me from thoughts of myself to thoughts of her, and it
was in a daze of mingled purposes and regrets that I felt her at last at
my side.

"Walter!" fell softly, doubtfully from her lips.

It was the name of him the dip of whose oars as he made for his boat I
could now faintly hear in the river below us.

Turning, I looked her in the face.

"You are late," said I. God gave me words in my extremity. "Walter has
gone." Then, as the madness of terror replaced love in her eyes, I
lifted her forcibly and carried her to the window, where I drew aside
the vines. "That is his boat's lantern you see drawing away from the
dock. I bade him God-speed. He will not come again."

Without a word she looked, then fell back on my arm. It was not life
which forsook her face, and left her whole sweet body inert--that I
could have borne, for did she not merit death who had killed my love,
killed me?--but happiness, the glow of youthful blood, the dreams of a
youthful brain. And seeing this, seeing that the heart I thought a
child's heart had gone down in this shipwreck, I felt my anger swell and
master me body and soul, and before I knew it, I was towering over her
and she was cowering at my feet, crushed and with hands held up in
defense, hands that had been like rose-leaves in my grasp, futile hands,
but raised now in entreaty for her life to me, to me who had loved her.

Why did they not move me? Why did my muscles tighten instead of relax? I
do not know; I had never thought myself a cruel man, but at that instant
I felt that this toy of my strong manhood had done harm far beyond its
value, and that it would comfort me to break it and toss it far aside;
only I could not bear the cry which now left her lips:

"I am so young! not yet, not yet, Philo! I am so young! Let me live a
little while."

Was it a woman's plea, conscious of the tenderness she appealed to, or
only a child's instinctive grasping after life, just life? If it were
the first, it would be easy to finish; but a child's terror, a child's
longing--that pulled hard at my manhood, and under the possibility, my
own arm fell.

Instantly her head drooped. No defense did she utter; no further plea
did she make; she simply waited.

"You have deserved death." This I managed to utter. "But if you will
swear to obey me, you shall not pay your forfeit till you have had a
further taste of life. Not in my house; there is not sufficient freedom
within its walls for you; but in the broad world, where people dance and
sing and grow old at their leisure, without duty and without care. For
three months you shall have this, and have it to your heart's content.
Then you shall come back to me my true wife, if your heart so prompts;
if not, to tell me of your failure and quit me for ever. But--" Here I
fear my voice grew terrible, for her hands instinctively rose again.
"Those three months must be lived unstained. As you are in God's sight
this hour, I demand of you to swear that, if you forget this or
disregard it, or for any cause subject my name to dishonor, that you
will return unbidden at the first moment your reason returns to you, to
take what punishment I will. On this condition I send you away to-night.
Aline, will you promise?"

She did not answer; but her face rose. I did not understand its look.
There was pathos in it, and something else. That something else troubled
me.

"Are you dissatisfied?" I asked. "Is the time too short? Do you want
more months for dancing?"

She shook her head and the little hands rose again:

"Do not send me away," she faintly entreated; "I don't know why--but
I--had rather stay."

"With me? Impossible. Are you ready to promise, Aline?"

Then she rose and looked me in the eye with courage, almost with
resolution.

"As I live!" said she.

And I knew she would keep her word.

The next thing I remember of that night was the sight of her little
white, shivering figure looking out at me from the carriage that was to
carry her away. The night was cold, and I had tucked her in with as much
care as I might have done the evening before, when I still worshiped
her, still thought her mine, or at least as much mine as she was any
one's. When I had done this and pressed a generous gift into her hand, I
stood a minute at the carriage door, in pity of her aspect. She looked
so pinched and pale, so dazed and hopeless. Had she been alone--but the
companion with whom I had provided her was at her side and my tongue was
tied. I turned, and the driver started up the horses.

"Philo!" I heard blown by me on the wind.

Was it she who called? No, for there was anguish in the cry, the anguish
of a woman, and she was only a frightened, disheartened child whom I had
sent away to--dance.

One month, two months went by, and I began to take up my life. Another,
and she would be home for good or ill. I thought that I could live
through that other. I had heard of her; not from her--that I did not
require; and the stories were all of the same character. She was
enjoying life in the great city to which I had sent her; radiant at
night, if a little spiritless by day. She was at balls, at concerts and
at theaters. She wore jewels and shone with the best; I might be proud
of her conquests and the sweetness and dignity with which she bore
herself. Thus her friends wrote.

But she wrote nothing; I had not required it. Once, some one--a visitor
at the house--spoke of having seen her. "She was surrounded with
admirers," he had said. "How early our American women ripen!" was his
comment. "She held her head like one who has held sway for years; but I
thought her a trifle worn; as if pleasure absorbed too much of her
sleep. You must look out for her, Judge."

And I smiled grimly enough, I own, to think just how I was looking out
for her.

Then came the thunderbolt.

"I am told that no one ever sees her in the day-time; that she is
always busy, days. But she does not look as if she took that time for
rest. What can your little wife be doing? You ought to hurry up that
important opinion of yours and go see."

He was right; what was she doing? And why shouldn't I go see? There was
no obstacle but my own will; but that is the greatest obstacle a man can
have. I remained at Homewood, but the four weeks of our further
probation looked like a year.

Meanwhile, I had my way with the pavilion. I have shown you my heart,
sometimes at its best, oftenest at its worst. I will show it to you
again in this. I had a wall built round it, close against the thicket in
which it lay embedded. This wall was painted white, and near it I had
lamps placed which were lit at nightfall. Should a figure pass that wall
I could see it from my window. No one could enter that doorway now,
without running the risk of my seeing him from where I sat at my desk.

Did I feel easier? I do not know that I did. I merely followed an
impulse I dared not name to myself.

Two weeks of this final month went by. Then (it was in the evening) some
one came running up from the grounds, with the message that Mrs.
Ocumpaugh had ridden into the gate, but that she was not ready to enter
the house. Would I meet her at the pavilion?

I was in the library, at my desk, with my eyes on the wall, when this
was told me. I had just seen the fierce figure of that unmanageable dog
of mine run by that white surface, and my lips were open to order him
tied up, when he, and everything else in this whole world, was forgotten
in this crushing news of her return. For the three months were not up
and her presence here could mean but one thing--she had found temptation
too much for her, and she had come back to tell me so in obedience to
her promise.

"I will go meet Mrs. Ocumpaugh," I said.

The man stared.

"I will go meet Mrs. Ocumpaugh now," I repeated, and tried to rise.

But my limbs refused; death had entered my heart, and it was some few
minutes before I found myself upon the lawn outside.

When I got there I was trembling and so uncertain of movement that I
tottered at the gate. But seeing signs of her presence within, I
straightened myself and went in.

[Illustration: "I SHOULD NOT HAVE KNOWN THE WOMAN WHO STOOD THERE WITH
MY NAME FORMED ON HER LIPS."]

She was standing at the extreme end of the room when I entered, in the
full light of the solitary moonbeam which shot in at the western
casement. She had thrown aside her hat and coat, and never in all my
life had I seen anything so ethereal as the worn face and wasted form
she thus disclosed. Had it not been for the haunting and pathetic smile
which by some freak of fate gave poignancy to her otherwise infantile
beauty, I should not have known the woman who stood there with my name
formed on her lips.

"Destroyed!" was my thought; and the rage which I felt that moment
against fate flushed my whole being, and my arms went up, not in threat
against her, but to an avenging Heaven, when I heard an impetuous rush,
an angry growl, and the delicate, trembling figure went down under the
leap of the monstrous animal which I had taught to love me, but could
never teach to love her.

In horror and unspeakable anguish of soul I called off the dog; and,
stooping with bitter cries, I took her in my arms.

"Hurt?" I gasped. "Hurt, Aline?" I looked at her anxiously.

"No," she whispered, "happy." And before I realized my own feelings or
the passion with which I drew her to my breast, she had nestled her head
against my heart, smiled and died.

The shock of the dog's onslaught had killed her.

I would not believe it at first, but when I was quite sure, I took out
the pistol I carried in my breast and shot the cowering brute midway
between the eyes.

When this was done, I turned back to her. There was no light but the
moon, and I needed no other. The clear beams falling on her face made
her look pure and stainless and sweet. I could almost have loved her
again as I marked the tender smile which lingered from that passing
moment on her lips. "Happy," she had said. What did she mean by that
"Happy"? As I asked myself I heard a cry. The companion who had been
with her had rushed in at the doorway, and was gazing in sorrow and
amazement at the white form lying outstretched and senseless against
that farther wall.

"Oh," she cried, in a tone that assured me she had not seen the dog
lying in his blood at my back; "dead already? dead at the first glance?
at the first word? Ah, she knew better than I, poor lamb. I thought she
would get well if she once got home. She wearied so for you, sir, and
for Homewood!"

I thought myself quite mad; past understanding aright the words
addressed to me.

"She wearied--" I began.

"With all her soul for you and Homewood," the young woman repeated.
"That is, since her illness developed."

"Her illness?"

"Yes, she has been ill ever since she went away. The cold of that first
journey was too much for her. But she kept up for several weeks--doing
what no other woman ever did before with so little strength and so
little hope. Danced at night and--"

"And--and--what by day, what?" I could hardly get the words out of my
mouth.

"Studied. Learned what she thought you would
like--French--music--politics. It was to have been a surprise. Poor
soul! it took her very life. She did not sleep-- Oh, sir, what is it?"

I was standing over her, probably a terrifying figure. Lights were
playing before my eyes, strange sounds were in my ears, everything about
me seemed resolving itself into chaos.

"What do you mean?" I finally gasped. "She studied--to please _me_? Why
did she come back, then, so soon--" I paused, choked. I had been about
to give away my secret. "I mean, why did she come thus suddenly, without
warning me of what I might expect? I would have gone--"

"I told her so; but she was very determined to come to you herself--to
this very pavilion. She had set the time later, but this morning the
doctor told her that her symptoms were alarming, and without consulting
him or heeding the advice of any of us, she started for home. She was
buoyant on the way, and more than once I heard her softly repeating your
name. Her heart was very loving-- Oh, sir, you are ill!"

"No, no," I cried, crushing my hand against my mouth to keep down the
cry of anguish and despair which tore its way up from my heart. "Before
other hands touch her, other eyes see her, tell me when she began--I
will not say to love me, but to weary for me and--Homewood."

"Perhaps she has told you herself. Here is the letter, sir, she bade me
give you if she did not reach here alive. She wrote it this morning,
after the doctor told her what I have said."

"Give--give--"

She put it in my hand. I glanced at it in the moonlight, read the first
few words, and felt the world reel round me. Thrusting the letter in my
breast, I bade the woman, who watched me with fascinated eyes, to go now
and rouse the house. When she was gone I stepped back into the shadows,
and catching hold of the murderous beast, I dragged him out and about
the wall to a thick clump of bushes. Here I left him and went back to my
darling. When they came in, they found her in my arms. Her head had
fallen back and I was staring, staring, at her white throat.

That night, when all was done for her which could be done, I shut myself
into my library and again opened that precious letter. I give it, to
show how men may be mistaken when they seek to weigh women's souls:

     _My Husband:_

     I love you. As I shall be dead when you read this, I may say so
     without fear of rebuff. I did not love you then; I did not love
     anybody; I was thoughtless and fond of pleasure, and craved
     affectionate words. He saw this and worked on my folly; but when
     his project failed and I saw his boat creep away, I found that what
     feeling I had was for the man who had thwarted him, and I felt
     myself saved.

     If I had not taken cold that night I might have lived to prove
     this. I know that you do not love me very much, but perhaps you
     would have done so had you seen me grow a little wiser and more
     like what your wife should be. I was trying when--O Philo, I can
     not write--I can not think. I am coming to you--I
     love--forgive--and take me back again, alive or dead. I love you--I
     love--

As I finished, the light, which had been burning low, suddenly went out.
The window which opened before me was still unshuttered. Before me,
across the wide spaces of the lawn, shone the pavilion wall, white in
the moonlight. As I stared in horror at it, a trembling seized my whole
body, and the hair on my head rose. The dark figure of a running dog had
passed across it--_the dog which lay dead under the bushes_.

"God's punishment," I murmured, and laid my head down on that pathetic
letter and sobbed.

The morning found me there. It was not till later that the man sent to
bury the dog came to me with the cry, "Something is wrong with the
pavilion! When I went in to close the window I found the ceiling at that
end of the room strangely dabbled. It looks like blood. And the spots
grew as I looked."

Aghast, bruised in spirit and broken of heart, I went down, after that
sweet body was laid in its grave, to look. The stains he had spoken of
were gone. But I lived to see them reappear,--as you have.

God have mercy on our souls!




XII

BEHIND THE WALL


"A most pathetic and awesome history!" I exclaimed, after the pause
which instinctively followed the completion of this tale, read as few of
its kind have ever been read, by this woman of infinite resources in
feeling and expression.

"Is it not? Do you wonder that a visit in the dead of night to a spot
associated with such superstitious horrors should frighten me?" she
added as she bundled up the scattered sheets with a reckless hand.

"I do not. I am not sure but that I am a little bit frightened myself,"
I smiled, following with my eye a single sheet which had escaped to the
floor. "Allow me," I cried, stooping to lift it. As I did so I observed
that it was the first sheet, the torn one--and that a line or so of
writing was visible at the top which I was sure had not been amongst
those she had read.

"What words are those?" I asked.

"I don't know, they are half gone as you can see. They have nothing to
do with the story. I read you the whole of that."

Mistress as she was of her moods and expression I detected traces of
some slight confusion.

"The putting up of the partition is not explained," I remarked.

"Oh, that was put up in horror of the stains which from time to time
broke out on the ceiling at that end of the room."

I wished to ask her if this was her conclusion or if that line or two I
have mentioned was more intelligible than she had acknowledged it to be.
But I refrained from a sense of propriety.

If she appreciated my forbearance she did not show it. Rising, she
thrust the papers into a cupboard, casting a scarcely perceptible glance
at the clock as she did so.

I took the hint and rose. Instantly she was all smiles.

"You have forgotten something, Mr. Trevitt. Surely you do not intend to
carry away with you my key to the bungalow."

"I was thinking of it," I returned lightly. "I am not quite through with
that key." Then before she could recover from her surprise, I added
with such suavity as I had been able to acquire in my intercourse with
my more cultivated clients:

"I have to thank you, Mrs. Carew, for an hour of thrilling interest.
Absorbed though I am in the present mystery, my mind has room for the
old one. Possibly because there is sometimes a marked connection between
old family events and new. There may be some such connection in this
case. I should like the opportunity of assuring myself there is not."

She said nothing; I thought I understood why. More suavely yet, I
continued, with a slight, a very slight movement toward the door:
"Rarely have I had the pleasure of listening to such a tale read by such
an interpreter. It will always remain in my memory, Mrs. Carew. But the
episode is over and I return to my present duty and the bungalow."

"The bungalow! You are going back to the bungalow?"

"Immediately."

"What for? Didn't you see all there was to see?"

"Not quite."

"I don't know what there can be left."

"Nothing of consequence, most likely, but you can not wish me to have
any doubts on the subject."

"No, no, of course not."

The carelessness of her tone did not communicate itself to her manner.
Seeing that my unexpected proposition had roused her alarm, I grew wary
and remarked:

"I was always overscrupulous."

With a lift of her shoulders--a dainty gesture which I congratulated
myself I could see unmoved--she held out her hand in a mute appeal for
the key, but seeing that I was not to be shaken in my purpose, reached
for the wrap she had tossed on a chair and tied it again over her head.

"What are you going to do?" I asked.

"Accompany you," she declared.

"Again? I thought the place frightened you."

"It does," she replied. "I had rather visit any other spot in the whole
world; but if it is your intention to go back there, it is mine to go
with you."

"You are very good," I replied.

But I was seriously disconcerted notwithstanding. I had reckoned upon a
quiet hour in the bungalow by myself; moreover, I did not understand her
motive for never trusting me there alone. Yet as this very distrust was
suggestive, I put a good face on the matter and welcomed her company
with becoming alacrity. After all, I might gain more than I could
possibly lose by having her under my eye for a little longer. Strong as
was her self-control there were moments when the real woman showed
herself, and these moments were productive.

As we were passing out she paused to extinguish a lamp which was
slightly smoking,--I also thought she paused an instant to listen. At
all events her ears were turned toward the stairs down which there came
the murmur of two voices, one of them the little boy's.

"It is time Harry was asleep," she cried. "I promised to sing to him.
You won't be long, will you?"

"You need not be very long," was my significant retort. "I can not speak
for myself."

Was I playing with her curiosity or anxieties or whatever it was that
affected her? I hardly knew; I spoke as impulse directed and waited in
cold blood--or was it hot blood?--to see how she took it.

Carelessly enough, for she was a famous actress except when taken by
surprise. Checking an evident desire of calling out some direction up
stairs, she followed me to the door, remarking cheerfully, "You can not
be very long either; the place is not large enough."

My excuse--or rather the one I made to myself for thus returning to a
place I had seemingly exhausted, was this. In the quick turn I had made
in leaving on the former occasion, my foot had struck the edge of the
large rug nailed over the center of the floor, and unaccountably
loosened it. To rectify this mishap, and also to see how so slight a
shock could have lifted the large brass nails by which it had been held
down to the floor, seemed reason enough for my action. But how to draw
her attention to so insignificant a fact without incurring her ridicule
I could not decide in our brief passage back to the bungalow, and
consequently was greatly relieved when, upon opening the door and
turning my lantern on the scene, I discovered that in our absence the
rug had torn itself still farther free from the floor and now lay with
one of its corners well curled over--the corner farthest from the door
and nearest the divan where little Gwendolen had been lying when she was
lifted and carried away--where?

Mrs. Carew saw it too and cast me a startled look which I met with a
smile possibly as ambiguous as the feeling which prompted it.

"Who has been here?" she asked.

"Ourselves."

"Did we do that?"

"I did; or rather my foot struck the edge of the rug as I turned to go
out with you. Shall I replace it and press back the nails?"

"If you will be so good."

Do what she would there was eagerness in her tone. Remarking this, I
decided to give another and closer look at the floor and the nails. I
found the latter had not been properly inserted; or rather that there
were two indentations for every nail, a deep one and one quite shallow.
This caused me to make some examination of the others, those which had
not been drawn from the floor, and I found that one or two of them were
equally insecure, but not all; only those about this one corner.

Mrs. Carew, who had paused, confused and faltering in the doorway, in
her dismay at seeing me engaged in this inspection instead of in
replacing the rug as I had proposed, now advanced a step, so that our
glances met as I looked up with the remark:

"This rug seems to have been lately raised at this corner. Do you know
if the police had it up?"

"I don't. I believe so--oh, Mr. Trevitt," she cried, as I rose to my
feet with the corner of the rug in my hand, "what are you going to do?"

She had run forward impetuously and was now standing close beside
me--inconveniently close.

"I am going to raise this rug," I informed her. "That is, just at this
corner. Pardon me, I shall have to ask you to move."

"Certainly, of course," she stammered. "Oh, what is going to happen
now?" Then as she watched me: "There is--there _is_ something under it.
A door in the floor--a--a--Mrs. Ocumpaugh never told me of this."

"Do you suppose she knew it?" I inquired, looking up into her face,
which was very near but not near enough to be in the full light of the
lantern, which was pointed another way.

"This rug appears to have been almost soldered to the floor, everywhere
but here. There! it is thrown back. Now, if you will be so very good as
to hold the lantern, I will try and lift up the door."

"I can not. See, how my hands shake! What are we about to discover?
Nothing, I pray, nothing. Suspense would be better than that."

"I think you will be able to hold it," I urged, pressing the lantern
upon her.

"Yes; I have never been devoid of courage. But--but--don't ask me to
descend with you," she prayed, as she lifted the lantern and turned it
dexterously enough on that portion of the door where a ring lay outlined
in the depths of its outermost plank.

"I will not; but you will come just the same; you can not help it," I
hazarded, as with the point of my knife-blade I lifted the small round
of wood which filled into the ring and thus made the floor level.

"Now, if this door is not locked, we will have it up," I cried, pulling
at the ring with a will. The door was not locked and it came up readily
enough, discovering some half-dozen steps, down which I immediately
proceeded to climb.

"Oh, I can not stay here alone," she protested, and prepared to follow
me in haste just as I expected her to do the moment she saw the light
withdrawn.

"Step carefully," I enjoined. "If you will honor me with your hand--"
But she was at my side before the words were well out.

"What is it? What kind of place do you make it out to be; and is there
anything here you--do--not--want--to see?"

I flashed the light around and incidentally on her. She was not
trembling now. Her cheeks were red, her eyes blazing. She was looking at
me, and not at the darksome place about her. But as this was natural, it
being a woman's way to look for what she desires to learn in the face of
the man who for the moment is her protector, I shifted the light into
the nooks and corners of the low, damp cellar in which we now found
ourselves.

"Bins for wine and beer," I observed, "but nothing in them." Then as I
measured the space before me with my eye, "It runs under the whole
house. See, it is much larger than the room above."

"Yes," she mechanically repeated.

I lowered the lantern to the floor but quickly raised it again.

"What is that on the other side?" I queried. "I am sure there is a break
in the wall over in that corner."

"I can not see," she gasped; certainly she was very much frightened.
"Are you going to cross the floor?"

"Yes; and if you do not wish to follow me, sit down on these steps--"

"No, I will go where you go; but this is very fearful. Why, what is the
matter?"

I had stepped aside in order to avoid a trail of footprints I saw
extending across the cellar floor.

"Come around this way," I urged. "If you will follow me I will keep you
from being too much frightened."

She did as I told her. Softly her steps fell in behind mine, and thus
with wary tread and peering eyes we made our way to the remote end,
where we found--or rather where I found--that the break which I had
noticed in the uniformity of the wall was occasioned by a pile of old
boxes, arranged so as to make steps up to a hole cut through the floor
above.

With a sharp movement I wheeled upon her.

"Do you see that?" I asked, pointing back over my shoulder.

"Steps," she cried, "going up into that part of the building
where--where--"

"Will you attempt them with me? Or will you stay here, in the darkness?"

"I--will--stay--here."

It was said with shortened breath; but she seemed less frightened than
when we started to cross the cellar. At all events a fine look of daring
had displaced the tremulous aspect which had so changed the character of
her countenance a few minutes before.

"I will make short work of it," I assured her as I hastily ran up the
steps. "Drop your face into your hands and you will not be conscious of
the darkness. Besides, I will talk to you all the time. There! I have
worked my way up through the hole. I have placed my lantern on the floor
above and I see-- What! are you coming?"

"Yes, I am coming."

Indeed, she was close beside me, maintaining her footing on the toppling
boxes by a grip on my disengaged arm.

"Can you see?" I asked. "Wait! let me pull you up; we might as well
stand on the floor as on these boxes."

Climbing into the room above, I offered her my hand, and in another
moment we stood together in the noisome precincts of that abominable
spot, with whose doleful story she had just made me acquainted.

A square of impenetrable gloom confronted me at the first glance--what
might not be the result of a second?

I turned to consult the appearance of the lady beside me before I took
this second look. Had she the strength to stand the ordeal? Was she as
much moved--or possibly more moved than myself? As a woman, and the
intimate friend of the Ocumpaughs, she should be. But I could not
perceive that she was. For some reason, once in view of this mysterious
place, she was strangely, inexplicably, impass

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