The Mayor's Wife
by Anna Katharine Green · English · Gutenberg #4767 · 387,706 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Mayor's Wife
Author: Anna Katharine Green
Release date: December 1, 2003 [eBook #4767]
Most recently updated: October 3, 2016
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4767
Credits: Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer, and David Widger
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAYOR'S WIFE ***
Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer
THE MAYOR’S WIFE
by Anna Katherine Green
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I A SPY’S DUTY
II QUESTIONS
III IN THE GABLE WINDOW
IV LIGHTS-SOUNDS
V THE STRANGE NEIGHBORS NEXT DOOR
VI AT THE STAIR-HEAD
VII A MOVING SHADOW
VIII THE PARAGRAPH
IX SCRAPS
X A GLIMMER OF THE TRUTH
XI BESS
XII SEARCHINGS
XIII A DISCOVERY
XIV I SEEK HELP
XV HARDLY A COINCIDENCE
XVI IN THE LIBRARY
XVII THE TWO WEIRD SISTERS
XVIII THE MORNING NEWS
XIX THE CRY FROM THE STAIRS
XX EXPLANATION
XXI THE CIPHER
XXII MERCY
XXIII THE WIFE’S TALE
XXIV THE SINS OF THE FATHERS
XXV THE FINGER ON THE WALL
XXVI “BITTER AS THE GRAVE”
XXVII A CHILD’S PLAYTHINGS
XXVIII RESTITUTION
CHAPTER I. A SPY’S DUTY
I am not without self-control, yet when Miss Davies entered the room
with that air of importance she invariably assumes when she has an
unusually fine position to offer, I could not hide all traces of my
anxiety.
I needed a position, needed it badly, while the others--
But her eyes are on our faces, she is scanning us all with that close
and calculating gaze which lets nothing escape. She has passed me by--my
heart goes down, down--when suddenly her look returns and she singles me
out.
“Miss Saunders.” Then, “I have a word to say to you.”
There is a rustle about me; five disappointed girls sink back into their
seats as I quickly rise and follow Miss Davies out.
In the hall she faced me with these words:
“You are discreet, and you evidently desire a position. You will find
a gentleman in my sitting-room. If you come to terms with him, well and
good. If not, I shall expect you to forget all about him and his errand
the moment you leave his presence. You understand me?”
“I think so,” I replied, meeting her steady look with one equally
composed. Part of my strength--and I think I have some strength--lies in
the fact that I am quietest when most deeply roused. “I am not to talk
whatever the outcome.”
“Not even to me,” she emphasized.
Stirred still further and therefore outwardly even more calm than
before, I stopped her as she was moving on and ventured a single query.
“This position--involving secrecy--is it one you would advise me to
take, even if I did not stand in need of it so badly?”
“Yes. The difficulties will not be great to a discreet person. It is a
first-class opportunity for a young woman as experienced as yourself.”
“Thank you,” was my abrupt but grateful rejoinder; and, obeying her
silent gesture, I opened the door of the sitting-room and passed in. A
gentleman standing at one of the windows turned quickly at the sound
of my step and came forward. Instantly whatever doubt I may have felt
concerning the nature of the work about to be proposed to me yielded
to the certainty that, however much it might involve of the strange
and difficult, the man whose mission it was to seek my aid was one to
inspire confidence and respect.
He was also a handsome man, or no, I will not go so far as that; he was
only one in whom the lines of form and visage were fine enough not to
interfere with the impression made by his strong nature and intense
vitality. A man to sway women and also quite capable of moving men (this
was evident at a glance); but a man under a cloud just at present,--a
very heavy cloud which both irked and perplexed him.
Pausing in the middle of the room, he surveyed me closely for an instant
before speaking. Did I impress him as favorably as he did me? I soon had
reason to think so, for the nervous trembling of his hands ceased after
the first moment or two of silent scrutiny, and I was sure I caught the
note of hope in his voice as he courteously remarked:
“You are seeking a place, young lady. Do you think you can fill the one
I have to offer? It has its difficulties, but it is not an onerous one.
It is that of companion to my wife.”
I bowed; possibly I smiled. I do smile sometimes when a ray of real
sunshine darts across my pathway.
“I should be very glad to try such a situation,” I replied.
A look of relief, so vivid that it startled me, altered at once the
whole character of his countenance; and perceiving how intense was the
power and fascination underlying his quiet exterior, I asked myself who
and what this man was; no ordinary personage, I was sure, but who? Had
Miss Davies purposely withheld his name? I began to think so.
“I have had some experience,” I was proceeding--
But he waved this consideration aside, with a change back to his former
gloomy aspect, and a careful glance at the door which did not escape me.
“It is not experience which is so much needed as discretion.”
Again that word.
“The case is not a common one, or, rather,”--he caught himself up
quickly, “the circumstances are not. My wife is well, but--she is not
happy. She is very unhappy, deeply, unaccountably so, and I do not know
why.”
Anxious to watch the effect of these words, he paused a moment, then
added fervently:
“Would to God I did! It would make a new man of me.”
The meaning, the deep meaning in his tone, if not in the adjuration
itself, was undeniable; but my old habit of self-control stood me in
good stead and I remained silent and watchful, weighing every look and
word.
“A week ago she was the lightest hearted woman in town,--the happiest
wife, the merriest mother. To-day she is a mere wreck of her former
self, pallid, drawn, almost speechless, yet she is not ill. She will not
acknowledge to an ache or a pain; will not even admit that any change
has taken place in her. But you have only to see her. And I am as
ignorant of the cause of it all--as you are!” he burst out.
Still I remained silent, waiting, watchful.
“I have talked with her physician. He says there is something serious
the matter with her, but he can not help her, as it is not in any
respect physical, and advises me to find out what is on her mind. As if
that had not been my first care! I have also consulted her most intimate
friends, all who know her well, but they can give me no clue to her
distress. They see the difference in her, but can not tell the cause.
And I am obliged to go away and leave her in this state. For two weeks,
three weeks now, my movements will be very uncertain. I am at the beck
and call of the State Committee. At any other time I would try change
of scene, but she will neither consent to leave home without me nor to
interrupt my plans in order that I may accompany her.”
“Miss Davies has not told me your name,” I made bold to interpolate.
He stared, shook himself together, and quietly, remarked:
“I am Henry Packard.”
The city’s mayor! and not only that, the running candidate for governor.
I knew him well by name, even if I did not know, or rather had not
recognized his face.
“I beg pardon,” I somewhat tremulously began, but he waved the coming
apology aside as easily, as he had my first attempt at ingratiation.
In fact, he appeared to be impatient of every unnecessary word. This
I could, in a dim sort of way, understand. He was at the crisis of his
fate, and so was his party. For several years a struggle had gone on
between the two nearly matched elements in this western city, which, so
far, had resulted in securing him two terms of office--possibly because
his character appealed to men of all grades and varying convictions. But
the opposite party was strong in the state, and the question whether
he could carry his ticket against such odds, and thus give hope to his
party in the coming presidential election, was one yet to be tested.
Forceful as a speaker, he was expected to reap hundreds of votes from
the mixed elements that invariably thronged to hear him, and, ignorant
as I necessarily was of the exigencies of such a campaign, I knew that
not only his own ambition, but the hopes of his party, depended on the
speeches he had been booked to make in all parts of the state. And now,
three weeks before election, while every opposing force was coming to
the surface, this trouble had come upon him. A mystery in his home and
threatened death in his heart! For he loved his wife--that was apparent
to me from the first; loved her to idolatry, as such men sometimes do
love,--often to their own undoing.
All this, the thought of an instant. Meanwhile he had been studying me
well.
“You understand my position,” he commented. “Wednesday night I speak in
C---, Thursday, in R---, while she--” With an effort he pulled himself
together. “Miss--”
“Saunders,” I put in.
“Miss Saunders, I can not leave her alone in the house. Some one must be
there to guard and watch--”
“Has she no mother?” I suggested in the pause he made.
“She has no living relatives, and mine are uncongenial to her.”
This to save another question. I understood him perfectly.
“I can not ask any of them to stay with her,” he pursued decisively.
“She would not consent to it. Nor can I ask any of her friends. That
she does not wish, either. But I can hire a companion. To that she
has already consented. That she will regard as a kindness, if the lady
chosen should prove to be one of those rare beings who carry comfort in
their looks without obtruding their services or displaying the extent of
their interest. You know there are some situations in which the presence
of a stranger may be more grateful than that of a friend. Apparently, my
wife feels herself so placed now.”
Here his eyes again read my face, an ordeal out of which I came
triumphant; the satisfaction he evinced rightly indicated his mind.
“Will you accept the position?” he asked. “We have one little child. You
will have no charge of her save as you may wish to make use of her in
reaching the mother.”
The hint conveyed in the last phrase gave me courage to say:
“You wish me to reach her?”
“With comfort,” said he.
“And if in doing so I learn her trouble?”
“You will win my eternal gratitude by telling it to one who would give
ten years of his life to assuage it.”
My head rose. I began to feel that my next step must strike solid
ground.
“In other words to be quite honest--you wish me to learn her trouble if
I can.”
“I believe you can be trusted to do so.”
“And then to reveal it to you?”
“If your sense of duty permits,--which I think it will.”
I might have uttered in reply, “A spy’s duty?” but the high-mindedness
of his look forbade. Whatever humiliation his wishes put upon me, there
could be no question of the uprightness of his motives regarding his
wife.
I ventured one more question.
“How far shall I feel myself at liberty to go in this attempt?”
“As far as your judgment approves and circumstances seem to warrant. I
know that you will come upon nothing dishonorable to her, or detrimental
to our relations as husband and wife, in this secret which is destroying
our happiness. Her affection for me is undoubted, but something--God
knows what--has laid waste her life. To find and annihilate that
something is my first and foremost duty. It does not fit well with those
other duties pressing upon me from the political field, does it? That is
why I have called in help. That is why I have called you in.”
The emphasis was delicately but sincerely given. It struck my heart and
entered it. Perhaps he had calculated upon this. If so, it was because
he knew that a woman like myself works better when her feelings are
roused.
Answering with a smile, I waited patiently while he talked terms and
other equally necessary details, then dropping all these considerations,
somewhat in his own grand manner, I made this remark:
“If your wife likes me, which very possibly she may fail to do, I shall
have a few questions to ask you before I settle down to my duties. Will
you see that an opportunity is given me for doing this?”
His assent was as frank as all the rest, and the next moment he left the
room.
As he passed out I heard him remark to Miss Davies:
“I expect Miss Saunders at my house before nightfall. I shall reserve
some minutes between half-past five and six in which to introduce her to
Mrs. Packard.”
CHAPTER II. QUESTIONS
I knew all the current gossip about Mrs. Packard before I had parted
with Miss Davies. Her story was a simple one. Bred in the West, she had
come, immediately after her mother’s death, to live with that mother’s
brother in Detroit. In doing this she had walked into a fortune. Her
uncle was a rich man and when he died, which was about a year after
her marriage with Mr. Packard and removal to C--, she found herself
the recipient of an enormous legacy. She was therefore a woman of
independent means, an advantage which, added to personal attractions of
a high order, and manners at once dignified and winning, caused her
to be universally regarded as a woman greatly to be envied by all who
appreciated a well-founded popularity.
So much for public opinion. It differs materially from that just given
me by her husband.
The mayor lived on Franklin Street in a quarter I had seldom visited. As
I entered this once aristocratic thoroughfare from Carlton Avenue, I was
struck as I had been before by its heterogeneous appearance. Houses of
strictly modern type neighbored those of a former period, and it was
not uncommon to see mansion and hovel confronting each other from the
opposite side of the street. Should I find the number I sought attached
to one of the crude, unmeaning dwellings I was constantly passing, or to
one of mellower aspect and possibly historic association?
I own that I felt a decided curiosity on this point, and congratulated
myself greatly when I had left behind me a peculiarly obnoxious
monstrosity in stone, whose imposing proportions might reasonably
commend themselves to the necessities, if not to the taste of the city’s
mayor.
A little shop, one story in height and old enough for its simple wooden
walls to cry aloud for paint, stood out from the middle of a row of
cheap brick houses. Directly opposite it were two conspicuous dwellings,
neither of them new and one of them ancient as the street itself. They
stood fairly close together, with an alley running between. From the
number I had now reached it was evident that the mayor lived in one of
these. Happily it was in the fresher and more inviting one. As I noted
this, I paused in admiration of its spacious front and imposing doorway.
The latter was in the best style of Colonial architecture, and
though raised but one step from the walk, was so distinguished by the
fan-tailed light overhead and the flanking casements glazed with antique
glass, that I felt myself carried back to the days when such domiciles
were few and denoted wealth the most solid, and hospitality the most
generous.
A light wall, painted to match the house, extended without break to
the adjoining building, a structure equal to the other in age and
dimensions, but differing in all other respects as much as neglect and
misuse could make it. Gray and forbidding, it towered in its place, a
perfect foil to the attractive dwelling whose single step I now amounted
with cheerful composure.
What should I have thought if at that moment I had been told that
appearances were deceitful, and that there were many persons then living
who, if left to their choice, would prefer life in the dismal walls
from which I had instinctively turned, to a single night spent in the
promising house I was so eager to enter.
An old serving-man, with a countenance which struck me pleasantly
enough at the time, opened the door in response to my ring, only to make
instant way for Mayor Packard, who advanced from some near-by room to
greet me. By this thoughtful attention I was spared the embarrassment
from which I might otherwise have suffered.
His few words of greeting set me entirely at my ease, and I was quite
ready to follow him when a moment later he invited me to meet Mrs.
Packard.
“I can not promise you just the reception you naturally look for,” said
he, as he led me around the stairs toward an opening at their rear, “but
she’s a kind woman and can not but be struck with your own kind spirit
and quiet manner.”
Happily, I was not called upon to answer, for at that moment the door
swung open and he ushered me into a room flooded brilliantly with the
last rays of the setting sun. The woman who sat in its glow made an
instant and permanent impression upon me. No one could look intently
upon her without feeling that here was a woman of individuality and
power, overshadowed at present by the deepest melancholy. As she rose
and faced us I decided instantly that her husband had not exaggerated
her state of mind. Emotion of no ordinary nature disturbed the lines of
her countenance and robbed her naturally fine figure of a goodly portion
of its dignity and grace; and though she immediately controlled herself
and assumed the imposing aspect of a highly trained woman, ready, if
not eager, to welcome an intruding guest, I could not easily forget
the drawn look about mouth and eyes which, in the first instant of our
meeting, had distorted features naturally harmonious and beautifully
serene.
I am sure her husband had observed it also, for his voice trembled
slightly as he addressed her.
“I have brought you a companion, Olympia, one whose business and
pleasure it will be to remain with you while I am making speeches a
hundred miles away. Do you not see reason for thanking me?” This last
question he pointed with a glance in my direction, which drew her
attention and caused her to give me a kindly look.
I met her eyes fairly. They were large and gray and meant for smiling;
eyes that, with a happy heart behind them, would illumine her own beauty
and create joy in those upon whom they fell. But to-day, nothing but
question lived in their dark and uneasy depths, and it was for me to
face that question and give no sign of what the moment was to me.
“I think--I am sure, that my thanks are due you,” she courteously
replied, with a quick turn toward her husband, expressive of confidence,
and, as I thought, of love. “I dreaded being left alone.”
He drew a deep breath of relief; we both did; then we talked a little,
after which Mayor Packard found some excuse for taking me from the room.
“Now for the few words you requested,” said he; and, preceding me down
the hall, he led me into what he called his study.
I noted one thing, and only one thing, on entering this place. That
was the presence of a young man who sat at a distant table reading and
making notes. But as Mayor Packard took no notice of him, knowing and
expecting him to be there, no doubt, I, with a pardonable confusion,
withdrew my eyes from the handsomest face I had ever seen, and, noting
that my employer had stopped before a type-writer’s table, I took my
place at his side, without knowing very well what this move meant or
what he expected me to do there.
I was not long left in doubt. With a gesture toward the type-writer, he
asked me if I was accustomed to its use; and when I acknowledged some
sort of acquaintance with it, he drew an unanswered letter from a pile
on the table and requested me to copy it as a sample.
I immediately sat down before the type-writer. I was in something of a
maze, but felt that I must follow his lead. As I proceeded to insert the
paper and lay out the copy to hand, he crossed over to the young man at
the other end of the room and began a short conversation which ended in
some trivial demand that sent the young man from the room. As the door
closed behind him Mayor Packard returned to my side.
“Keep on with your work and never mind mistakes,” said he. “What I want
is to hear the questions you told me to expect from you if you stayed.”
Seemingly Mayor Packard did not wish this young man to know my position
in the house. Was it possible he did not wholly trust him? My hands
trembled from the machine and I was about to turn and give my full
thought to what I had to say. But pride checked the impulse. “No,” I
muttered in quick dissuasion, to myself. “He must see that I can do two
things at once and do both well.” And so I went on with the letter.
“When,” I asked, “did you first see the change in Mrs. Packard?”
“On Tuesday afternoon at about this time.”
“What had happened on that day? Had she been out?”
“Yes, I think she told me later that she had been out.”
“Do you know where?”
“To some concert, I believe. I did not press her with questions, Miss
Saunders; I am a poor inquisitor.”
Click, click; the machine was working admirably.
“Have you reason to think,” I now demanded, “that she brought her
unhappiness in with her, when she returned from that concert?”
“No; for when I returned home myself, as I did earlier than usual
that night, I heard her laughing with the child in the nursery. It was
afterward, some few minutes afterward, that I came upon her sitting in
such a daze of misery, that she did not recognize me when I spoke to
her. I thought it was a passing mood at the time; she is a sensitive
woman and she had been reading--I saw the book lying on the floor at her
side; but when, having recovered from her dejection--a dejection, mind
you, which she would neither acknowledge nor explain--she accompanied
me out to dinner, she showed even more feeling on our return, shrinking
unaccountably from leaving the carriage and showing, not only in this
way but in others, a very evident distaste to reenter her own house.
Now, whatever hold I still retain upon her is of so slight a nature that
I am afraid every day she will leave me.”
“Leave you!”
My fingers paused; my astonishment had got the better of me.
“Yes; it is as bad as that. I don’t know what day you will send me a
telegram of three words, ‘She has gone.’ Yet she loves me, really and
truly loves me. That is the mystery of it. More than this, her very
heart-strings are knit up with those of our child.”
“Mayor Packard,”--I had resumed work,--“was any letter delivered to her
that day?”
“That I can not say.”
Fact one for me to establish.
“The wives of men like you--men much before the world, men in the
thick of strife, social and political--often receive letters of a very
threatening character.”
“She would have shown me any such, if only to put me on my guard. She is
physically a very brave woman and not at all nervous.”
“Those letters sometimes assume the shape of calumny. Your character may
have been attacked.”
“She believes in my character and would have given me an opportunity
to vindicate myself. I have every confidence in my wife’s sense of
justice.”
I experienced a thrill of admiration for the appreciation he evinced in
those words. Yet I pursued the subject resolutely.
“Have you an enemy, Mayor Packard? Any real and downright enemy capable
of a deep and serious attempt at destroying your happiness?”
“None that I know of, Miss Saunders. I have political enemies, of course
men, who, influenced by party feeling, are not above attacking methods
and possibly my official reputation; but personal ones--wretches willing
to stab me in my home-life and affections, that I can not believe. My
life has been as an open book. I have harmed no man knowingly and, as
far as I know, no man has ever cherished a wish to injure me.”
“Who constitute your household? How many servants do you keep and how
long have they been with you?”
“Now you exact details with which only Mrs. Packard is conversant. I
don’t know anything about the servants. I do not interest myself much
in matters purely domestic, and Mrs. Packard spares me. You will have to
observe the servants yourself.”
I made another note in my mind while inquiring:
“Who is the young man who was here just now? He has an uncommon face.”
“A handsome one, do you mean?”
“Yes, and--well, what I should call distinctly clever.”
“He is clever. My secretary, Miss Saunders. He helps me in my increased
duties; has, in a way, charge of my campaign; reads, sorts and sometimes
answers my letters. Just now he is arranging my speeches--fitting them
to the local requirements of the several audiences I shall be called
upon to address. He knows mankind like a book. I shall never give the
wrong speech to the wrong people while he is with me.”
“Do you like him?--the man, I mean, not his work.”
“Well--yes. He is very good company, or would have been if, in the week
he has been in the house, I had been in better mood to enjoy him. He’s a
capital story-teller.”
“He has been here a week?”
“Yes, or almost.”
“Came on last Tuesday, didn’t he?”
“Yes, I believe that was the day.”
“Toward afternoon?”
“No; he came early; soon after breakfast, in fact.”
“Does your wife like him?”
His Honor gave a start, flushed (I can sometimes see a great deal even
while very busily occupied) and answered without anger, but with a good
deal of pride:
“I doubt if Mrs. Packard more than knows of his presence. She does not
come to this room.”
“And he does not sit at your table?”
“No; I must have some few minutes in the day free from the suggestion of
politics. Mr. Steele can safely be left out of our discussion. He does
not even sleep in the house.”
The note I made at this was very emphatic. “You should know,” said I;
then quickly “Tuesday was the day Mrs. Packard first showed the change
you observed in her.”
“Yes, I think so; but that is a coincidence only. She takes no interest
in this young man; scarcely noticed him when I introduced him; just
bowed to him over her shoulder; she was fastening on our little one’s
cap. Usually she is extremely, courteous to strangers, but she was
abstracted, positively abstracted at that moment. I wondered at it, for
he usually makes a stir wherever he goes. But my wife cares little for
beauty in a man; I doubt if she noticed his looks at all. She did not
catch his name, I remember.”
“Pardon me, what is that you say?”
“She did not catch his name, for later she asked me what it was.”
“Tell me about that, Mr. Packard.”
“It is immaterial; but I am ready to answer all your questions. It was
while we were out dining. Chance threw us together, and to fill up
the moment she asked the name of the young man I had brought into the
library that morning. I told her and explained his position and the long
training he had had in local politics. She listened, but not as closely
as she did to the music. Oh, she takes no interest in him. I wish she
did; his stories might amuse her.”
I did not pursue the subject. Taking out the letter I had been writing,
I held it out for his inspection, with the remark:
“More copy, please, Mayor Packard.”
CHAPTER III. IN THE GABLE WINDOW
A few minutes later I was tripping up-stairs in the wake of a smart
young maid whom Mayor Packard had addressed as Ellen. I liked this girl
at first sight and, as I followed her up first one flight, then another,
to the room which had been chosen for me, the hurried glimpses I had of
her bright and candid face suggested that in this especial member of the
household I might hope to find a friend and helper in case friendship
and help were needed in the blind task to which I stood committed. But
I soon saw cause--or thought I did--to change this opinion. When she
turned on me at the door of my room, a small one at the extreme end of
the third floor, I had an opportunity of meeting her eyes. The interest
in her look was not the simple one to be expected. In another person
in other circumstances I should have characterized her glance as one of
inquiry and wonder. But neither inquiry nor wonder described the present
situation, and I put myself upon my guard.
Seeing me look her way, she flushed, and, throwing wide the door,
remarked in the pleasantest of tones:
“This is your room. Mrs. Packard says that if it is not large enough or
does not seem pleasant to you, she will find you another one to-morrow.”
“It’s very pleasant and quite large enough,” I confidently replied,
after a hasty look about me. “I could not be more comfortable.”
She smiled, a trifle broadly for the occasion, I thought, and patted a
pillow here and twitched a curtain there, as she remarked with a certain
emphasis:
“I’m sure you will be comfortable. There’s nobody else on this floor
but Letty and the baby, but you don’t look as if you would be easily
frightened.” Astonished, not so much by her words as by the furtive look
she gave me, I laughed as I repeated “Frightened? What should frighten
me?”
“Oh, nothing.” Her back was to me now, but I felt that I knew her very
look. “Nothing, of course. If you’re not timid you won’t mind sleeping
so far away from every one. Then, we are always within call. The attic
door is just a few steps off. We’ll leave it unlocked and you can come
up if--if you feel like it at any time. We’ll understand.”
Understand! I eyed her as she again looked my way, with some of her own
curiosity if not wonder.
“Mrs. Packard must have had some very timorous guests,” I observed. “Or,
perhaps, you have had experiences here which have tended to alarm
you. The house is so large and imposing for the quarter it is in I can
readily imagine it to attract burglars.”
“Burglars! It would be a brave burglar who would try to get in here. I
guess you never heard about this house.”
“No,” I admitted, unpleasantly divided between a wish to draw her out
and the fear of betraying Mayor Packard’s trust in me by showing the
extent of my interest.
“Well, it’s only gossip,” she laughingly assured me. “You needn’t think
of it, Miss. I’m sure you’ll be all right. We girls have been, so far,
and Mrs. Packard--”
Here she doubtless heard a voice outside or some summons from below,
for she made a quick start toward the door, remarking in a different and
very pleasant tone of voice:
“Dinner at seven, Miss. There’ll be no extra company to-night. I’m
coming.” This to some one in the hall as she hastily passed through the
door.
Dropping the bag I had lifted to unpack, I stared at the door which had
softly closed under her hand, then, with an odd impulse, turned to look
at my own face in the glass before which I chanced to be standing. Did I
expect to find there some evidence of the excitement which this strange
conversation might naturally produce in one already keyed up to
an expectation of the mysterious and unusual? If so, I was not
disappointed. My features certainly betrayed the effect of this
unexpected attack upon my professional equanimity. What did the girl
mean? What was she hinting at? What underlay--what could underlie her
surprising remark, “I guess you never heard about this house?” Something
worth my knowing; something which might explain Mayor Packard’s fears
and Mrs. Packard’s--
There I stopped. It was where the girl had stopped. She and not I must
round out this uncompleted sentence.
Meanwhile I occupied myself in unpacking my two bags and making
acquaintance with the room which, I felt, was destined to be the scene
of many, anxious thoughts. Its first effect had been a cheerful one,
owing to its two large windows, one looking out on a stretch of clear
sky above a mass of low, huddled buildings, and the other on the wall of
the adjacent house which, though near enough to obstruct the view, was
not near enough to exclude all light. Another and closer scrutiny of the
room did not alter the first impression. To the advantages of light were
added those of dainty furnishing and an exceptionally pleasing color
scheme. There was no richness anywhere, but an attractive harmony
which gave one an instantaneous feeling of home. From the little
brass bedstead curtained with cretonne, to the tiny desk filled with
everything needful for immediate use, I saw evidences of the most
careful housekeeping, and was vainly asking myself what could have
come into Mrs. Packard’s life to disturb so wholesome a nature, when my
attention was arrested by a picture hanging at the right of the window
overlooking the next house.
It gave promise of being a most interesting sketch, and I crossed over
to examine it; but instead of doing so, found my eyes drawn toward
something more vital than any picture and twice as enchaining.
It was a face, the face of an old woman staring down at me from a
semicircular opening in the gable of the adjoining house. An ordinary
circumstance in itself, but made extraordinary by the fixity of her
gaze, which was leveled straight on mine, and the uncommon expression
of breathless eagerness which gave force to her otherwise commonplace
features. So remarkable was this expression and so apparently was it
directed against myself, that I felt like throwing up my window and
asking the poor old creature what I could do for her. But her extreme
immobility deterred me. For all the intentness of her look there was
no invitation in it warranting such an advance on my part. She simply
stared down at me in unbroken anxiety, nor, though I watched her for
some minutes with an intensity equal to her own, did I detect any change
either in her attitude or expression.
“Odd,” thought I, and tested her with a friendly bow. The demonstration
failed to produce the least impression. “A most uncanny neighbor,” was
my mental comment on finally turning away. Truly I was surrounded by
mysteries, but fortunately this was one with which I had no immediate
concern. It did not take me long to put away my few belongings and
prepare for dinner. When quite ready, I sat down to write a letter. This
completed, I turned to go downstairs. But before leaving the room I cast
another look up at my neighbor’s attic window. The old woman was still
there. As our glances met I experienced a thrill which was hardly one of
sympathy, yet was not exactly one of fear. My impulse was to pull down
the shade between us, but I had not the heart. She was so old, so feeble
and so, evidently the prey of some strange and fixed idea. What idea? It
was not for me to say, but I found it impossible to make any move
which would seem to shut her out; so I left the shade up; but her image
followed me and I forgot it only when confronted once again with Mrs.
Packard.
That lady was awaiting me at the dining-room door. She had succeeded
in throwing off her secret depression and smiled quite naturally as
I approached. Her easy, courteous manners became her wonderfully. I
immediately recognized how much there was to admire in our mayor’s wife,
and quite understood his relief when, a few minutes later, we sat at
table and conversation began. Mrs. Packard, when free and light-hearted,
was a delightful companion and the meal passed off cheerily. When we
rose and the mayor left us for some necessary business it was with
a look of satisfaction in my direction which was the best possible
preparation for my approaching tete-a-tete with his moody and
incomprehensible wife.
But I was not destined to undergo the contemplated ordeal this evening.
Guests were announced whom Mrs. Packard kindly invited me to meet, but
I begged to be allowed to enjoy the library. I had too much to consider
just now, to find any pleasure in society. Three questions filled my
mind.
What was Mrs. Packard’s secret trouble?
Why were people afraid to remain in this house?
Why did the old woman next door show such interest in the new member of
her neighbor’s household?
Would a single answer cover all? Was there but one cause for each and
every one of these peculiarities? Probably, and it was my duty to ferret
out this cause. But how should I begin? I remembered what I had read
about detectives and their methods, but the help I thus received was
small. Subtler methods were demanded here and subtler methods I must
find. Meantime, I would hope for another talk with Mayor Packard. He
might clear up some of this fog. At least, I should like to give him
the opportunity. But I saw no way of reaching him at present. Even Mrs.
Packard did not feel at liberty to disturb him in his study. I must wait
for his reappearance, and in the meantime divert myself as best I could.
I caught up a magazine, but speedily dropped it to cast a quick glance
around the room. Had I heard anything? No. The house was perfectly
still, save for the sound of conversation in the drawing-room. Yet I
found it hard to keep my eyes upon the page. Quite without my volition
they flew, first to one corner, then to another. The room was light,
there were no shadowy nooks in it, yet I felt an irresistible desire to
peer into every place not directly under my eye. I knew it to be folly,
and, after succumbing to the temptation of taking a sly look behind a
certain tall screen, I resolutely set myself to curb my restlessness
and to peruse in good earnest the article I had begun. To make sure of
myself, I articulated each word aloud, and to my exceeding satisfaction
had reached the second column when I found my voice trailing off into
silence, and every sense alarmingly alert. Yet there was nothing,
absolutely nothing in this well-lighted, cozy family-room to awaken
fear. I was sure of this the next minute, and felt correspondingly
irritated with myself and deeply humiliated. That my nerves should play
me such a trick at the very outset of my business in this house! That I
could not be left alone, with life in every part of the house, and the
sound of the piano and cheerful talking just across the hall, without
the sense of the morbid and unearthly entering my matter-of-fact brain!
Uttering an ejaculation of contempt, I reseated myself. The impulse came
again to look behind me, but I mastered it this time without too great
an effort. I already knew every feature of the room: its old-fashioned
mantel, large round center-table, its couches and chairs, and why should
I waste my attention again upon them?
“Is there anything you wish, Miss?” asked a voice directly over my
shoulder.
I wheeled about with a start. I had heard no one approach; it was not
sound which had disturbed me.
“The library bell rang,” continued the voice. “Is it ice-water you
want?”
Then I saw that it was Nixon, the butler, and shook my head in mingled
anger and perplexity; for not only had he advanced quite noiselessly,
but he was looking at me with that curious concentrated gaze which I had
met twice before since coming into this house.
“I need nothing,” said I, with all the mildness I could summon into my
voice; and did not know whether to like or not like the quiet manner in
which he sidled out of the room.
“Why do they all look at me so closely?” I queried, in genuine
confusion. “The man had no business here. I did not ring, and I don’t
believe he thought I did. He merely wanted to see what I was doing and
whether I was enjoying myself. Why this curiosity? I have never roused
it anywhere else. It is not myself they are interested in, but the cause
and purpose of my presence under this roof.” I paused to wonder over the
fact that the one member of the family who might be supposed to resent
my intrusion most was the one who took it most kindly and with least
token of surprise--Mrs. Packard.
“She accepts me easily enough,” thought I. “To her I am a welcome
companion. What am I to these?”
The answer, or rather a possible answer, came speedily. At nine o’clock
Mayor Packard entered the room from his study across the hall, and,
seeing me alone, came forward briskly. “Mrs. Packard has company and I
am on my way to the drawing-room, but I am happy to have the opportunity
of assuring you that already she looks better, and that I begin to hope
that your encouraging presence may stimulate her to throw aside her
gloom and needless apprehensions. I shall be eternally grateful to you
if it will. It is the first time in a week that she has consented to
receive visitors.” I failed to feel the same elation over this possibly
temporary improvement in his wife’s condition, but I carefully refrained
from betraying my doubts. On the contrary, I took advantage of the
moment to clear my mind of one of the many perplexities disturbing it.
“And I am glad of this opportunity to ask you what may seem a foolish,
if not impertinent question. The maid, Ellen, in showing me my room, was
very careful to assure me that she slept near me and would let me into
her room in case I experienced any alarm in the night; and when I showed
surprise at her expecting me to feel alarm of any kind in a house full
of people, made the remark, ‘I guess you do not know about this house.’
Will you pardon me if I ask if there is anything I don’t know, and
should know, about the home your suffering wife inhabits? A problem such
as you have given me to solve demands a thorough understanding of every
cause capable of creating disturbance in a sensitive mind.”
The mayor’s short laugh failed to hide his annoyance. “You will find
nothing in this direction,” said he, “to account for the condition I
have mentioned to you. Mrs. Packard is utterly devoid of superstition.
That I made sure of before signing the lease of this old house. But I
forgot; you are doubtless ignorant of its reputation. It has, or rather
has had, the name of being haunted. Ridiculous, of course, but a fact
with which Mrs. Packard has had to contend in”--he gave me a quick
glance--“in hiring servants.”
It was now my turn to smile, but somehow I did not. A vision had risen
in my mind of that blank and staring face in the attic window next door,
and I felt--well, I don’t know how I felt, but I did not smile.
Another short laugh escaped him.
“We have not been favored by any manifestations from the spiritual
world. This has proved a very matter-of-fact sort of home for us. I had
almost forgotten that it was burdened with such an uncanny reputation,
and I’m sure that Mrs. Packard would have shared my indifference if it
had not been for the domestic difficulty I have mentioned. It took us
two weeks to secure help of any kind.”
“Indeed! and how long have you been in the house? I judge that you rent
it?”
“Yes, we rent it and we have been here two months. It was the only house
I could get in a locality convenient for me; besides, the old place
suits me. It would take more than an obsolete ghost or so to scare me
away from what I like.”
“But Mrs. Packard? She may not be a superstitious woman, yet--”
“Don’t be fanciful, Miss Saunders. You will have to look deeper than
that for the spell which has been cast over my wife. Olympia afraid of
creaks and groans? Olympia seeing sights? She’s much too practical
by nature, Miss Saunders, to say nothing of the fact that she would
certainly have confided her trouble to me, had her imagination been
stirred in this way. Little things have invariably been discussed
between us. I repeat that this possibility should not give you a
moment’s thought.”
A burst of sweet singing came from the drawing-room.
“That’s her voice,” he cried. “Whatever her trouble may be she has
forgotten it for the moment. Excuse me if I join her. It is such
pleasure to have her at all like herself again.”
I longed to detain him, longed to put some of the numberless questions
my awakened curiosity demanded, but his impatience was too marked and I
let him depart without another word.
But I was not satisfied. Inwardly I determined to see him again as soon
as possible and gain a more definite insight into the mysteries of his
home.
CHAPTER IV. LIGHTS--SOUNDS
I am by nature a thoroughly practical woman. If I had not been, the many
misfortunes of my life would have made me so. Yet, when the library door
closed behind the mayor and I found myself again alone in a spot where I
had not felt comfortable from the first, I experienced an odd sensation
not unlike fear. It left me almost immediately and my full reasoning
powers reasserted themselves; but the experience had been mine and I
could not smile it away.
The result was a conviction, which even reason could not dispel,
that whatever secret tragedy or wrong had signalized this house, its
perpetration had taken place in this very room. It was a fancy, but it
held, and under its compelling if irrational influence, I made a second
and still more minute survey of the room to which this conviction had
imparted so definite an interest.
I found it just as ordinary and unsuggestive as before; an
old-fashioned, square apartment renovated and redecorated to suit modern
tastes. Its furnishings I have already described; they were such as may
be seen in any comfortable abode. I did not linger over them a moment;
besides, they were the property of the present tenant, and wholly
disconnected with the past I was insensibly considering. Only the four
walls and what they held, doors, windows and mantel-piece, remained to
speak of those old days. Of the doors there were two, one opening
into the main hall under the stairs, the other into a cross corridor
separating the library from the dining-room. It was through the
dining-room door Nixon had come when he so startled me by speaking
unexpectedly over my shoulder! The two windows faced the main door,
as did the ancient, heavily carved mantel. I could easily imagine the
old-fashioned shutters hidden behind the modern curtains, and, being
anxious to test the truth of my imaginings, rose and pulled aside one of
these curtains only to see, just as I expected, the blank surface of
a series of unslatted shutters, tightly fitting one to another with
old-time exactitude. A flat hook and staple fastened them. Gently
raising the window, and lifting one, I pulled the shutter open and
looked out. The prospect was just what I had been led to expect from the
location of the room--the long, bare wall of the neighboring house.
I was curious about that house, more curious at this moment than ever
before; for though it stood a good ten feet away from the one I was now
in, great pains had been taken by its occupants to close every opening
which might invite the glances of a prying eye. A door which had once
opened on the alley running between the two houses had been removed and
its place boarded up. So with a window higher up; the half-circle window
near the roof, I could not see from my present point of view.
Drawing back, I reclosed the shutter, lowered the window and started for
my own room. As I passed the first stair-head, I heard a baby’s laugh,
followed by a merry shout, which, ringing through the house, seemed to
dispel all its shadows.
I had touched reality again. Remembering Mayor Packard’s suggestion that
I might through the child find a means of reaching the mother, I paid
a short visit to the nursery where I found a baby whose sweetness must
certainly have won its mother’s deepest love. Letty, the nurse, was of a
useful but commonplace type, a conscientious nurse, that was all.
But I was to have a further taste of the unusual that night and to
experience another thrill before I slept. My room was dark when I
entered it, and, recognizing a condition favorable to the gratification
of my growing curiosity in regard to the neighboring house, I approached
the window and stole a quick look at the gable-end where, earlier in the
evening I had seen peering out at me an old woman’s face. Conceive my
astonishment at finding the spot still lighted and a face looking out,
but not the same face, a countenance as old, one as intent, but
of different conformation and of a much more intellectual type. I
considered myself the victim of an illusion; I tried to persuade myself
that it was the same woman, only in another garb and under a different
state of feeling; but the features were much too dissimilar for such
an hypothesis to hold. The eagerness, the unswerving attitude were
the same, but the first woman had had a weak round face with pinched
features, while this one showed a virile head and long heavy cheeks
and chin, which once must have been full of character, though they now
showed only heaviness of heart and the dull apathy of a fixed idea.
Two women, total strangers to me, united in an unceasing watch upon me
in my room! I own that the sense of mystery which this discovery brought
struck me at the moment as being fully as uncanny and as unsettling
to contemplate as the idea of a spirit haunting walls in which I was
destined for a while to live, breathe and sleep. However, as soon as I
had drawn the shade and lighted the gas, I forgot the whole thing, and
not till I was quite ready for bed, and my light again turned low, did
I feel the least desire to take another peep at that mysterious window.
The face was still there, peering at me through a flood of moonlight.
The effect was ghastly, and for hours I could not sleep, imagining that
face still staring down upon me, illuminated with the unnatural light
and worn with a profitless and unmeaning vigil.
That there was something to fear in this house was evident from the
halting step with which the servants, one and all, passed my door on
their way up to their own beds. I now knew, or thought I knew, what
was in their minds; but the comfort brought by this understanding was
scarcely sufficient to act as antidote to the keen strain to which
my faculties had been brought. Yet nothing happened, and when a clock
somewhere in the house had assured me by its own clear stroke that the
dreaded midnight hour had passed I rose and stole again to the window.
This time both moonlight and face were gone. Contentment came with the
discovery. I crept back to bed with lightened heart and soon was asleep.
Next morning, however, the first face was again at the window, as I at
once saw on raising the blind. I breakfasted alone. Mrs. Packard was not
yet down and the mayor had already left to fulfil an early appointment
down-town. Old Nixon waited on me. As he, like every other member of the
family, with the possible exception of the mayor, was still an unknown
quantity in the problem given me to solve, I allowed a few stray glances
to follow him as he moved decorously about the board anticipating my
wants and showing himself an adept in his appointed task. Once I caught
his eye and I half expected him to speak, but he was too well-trained
for that, and the meal proceeded in the same silence in which it had
begun. But this short interchange of looks had given me an idea. He
showed an eager interest in me quite apart from his duty to me as
waiter. He was nearer sixty, than fifty, but it was not his age which
made his hand tremble as he laid down a plate before me or served me
with coffee and bread. Whether this interest was malevolent or kindly
I found it impossible to judge. He had a stoic’s face with but one
eloquent feature--his eyes; and these he kept studiously lowered after
that one quick glance. Would it help matters for me to address him?
Possibly, but I decided not to risk it. Whatever my immediate loss I
must on no account rouse the least distrust in this evidently watchful
household. If knowledge came naturally, well and good; I must not seem
to seek it.
The result proved my discretion. As I was rising from the table Nixon
himself made this remark:
“Mrs. Packard will be glad to see you in her room up-stairs any time
after ten o’clock. Ellen will show you where.” Then, as I was framing
a reply, he added in a less formal tone: “I hope you were not disturbed
last night. I told the girls not to be so noisy.”
Now they had been very quiet, so I perceived that he simply wanted to
open conversation.
“I slept beautifully,” I assured him. “Indeed, I’m not easily kept
awake. I don’t believe I could keep awake if I knew that a ghost would
stalk through my room at midnight.”
His eyes opened, and he did just what I had intended him to do,--met my
glance directly.
“Ghosts!” he repeated, edging uneasily forward, perhaps with the
intention of making audible his whisper: “Do you believe in ghosts?”
I laughed easily and with a ringing merriment, like the light-hearted
girl I should be and am not.
“No,” said I, “why should I? But I should like to. I really should enjoy
the experience of coming face to face with a wholly shadowless being.”
He stared and now his eyes told nothing. Mechanically I moved to go,
mechanically he stepped aside to give me place. But his curiosity or his
interest would not allow him to see me pass out without making another
attempt to understand me. Stammering in his effort to seem indifferent,
he dropped this quiet observation just as I reached the door.
“Some people say, or at least I have heard it whispered in the
neighborhood, that this house is haunted. I’ve never seen anything,
myself.”
I forced myself to give a tragic start (I was half ashamed of my arts),
and, coming back, turned a purposely excited countenance toward him.
“This house!” I cried. “Oh, how lovely! I never thought I should have
the good fortune of passing the night in a house that is really haunted.
What are folks supposed to see? I don’t know much about ghosts out of
books.”
This nonplussed him. He was entirely out of his element. He glanced
nervously at the door and tried to seem at his ease; perhaps tried to
copy my own manner as he mumbled these words:
“I’ve not given much attention to the matter, Miss. It’s not long since
we came here and Mrs. Packard don’t approve of our gossiping with
the neighbors. But I think the people have mostly been driven away by
strange noises and by lights which no one could explain, flickering
up over the ceilings from the halls below. I don’t want to scare you,
Miss--”
“Oh, you won’t scare me.”
“Mrs. Packard wouldn’t like me to do that. She never listens to a
word from us about these things, and we don’t believe the half of it
ourselves; but the house does have a bad name, and it’s the wonder of
everybody that the mayor will live in it.”
“Sounds?” I repeated. “Lights?”--and laughed again. “I don’t think I
shall bother myself about them!” I went gaily out.
It did seem very puerile to me, save as it might possibly account in
some remote way for Mrs. Packard’s peculiar mental condition.
Up-stairs I found Ellen. She was in a talkative mood, and this time I
humored her till she had told me all she knew about the house and its
ghostly traditions. This all had come from a servant, a nurse who had
lived in the house before. Ellen herself, like the butler, Nixon, had
had no personal experiences to relate, though the amount of extra wages
she received had quite prepared her for them. Her story, or rather the
nurse’s story, was to the following effect.
The house had been built and afterward inhabited for a term of years
by one of the city fathers, a well-known and still widely remembered
merchant. No unusual manifestations had marked it during his occupancy.
Not till it had run to seed and been the home of decaying gentility, and
later of actual poverty, did it acquire a name which made it difficult
to rent, though the neighborhood was a growing one and the house itself
well-enough built to make it a desirable residence. Those who had been
induced to try living within its spacious walls invariably left at
the end of the month. Why, they hesitated to say; yet if pressed would
acknowledge that the rooms were full of terrible sights and sounds which
they could not account for; that a presence other than their own was
felt in the house; and that once (every tenant seemed to be able to
cite one instance) a hand had touched them or a breath had brushed
their cheek which had no visible human source, and could be traced to
no mortal presence. Not much in all this, but it served after a while to
keep the house empty, while its reputation for mystery did not lie idle.
Sounds were heard to issue from it. At times lights were seen glimmering
through this or that chink or rift in the window curtain, but by the
time the door was unlocked and people were able to rush in, the interior
was still and dark and seemingly untouched. Finally the police took
a hand in the matter. They were on the scent just then of a party of
counterfeiters and were suspicious of the sounds and lights in this
apparently unoccupied dwelling. But they watched and waited in vain. One
of them got a scare and that was all. The mystery went unsolved and the
sign “To Let” remained indefinitely on the house-front.
At last a family from the West decided to risk the terrors of this
domicile. The nurse, whose story I was listening to, came with them
and entered upon her duties without prejudice or any sort of belief in
ghosts, general or particular. She held this belief just two weeks. Then
her incredulity began to waver. In fact, she saw the light; almost saw
the ghost, certainly saw the ghost’s penumbra. It was one night, or
rather very early, one morning. She had been sitting up with the baby,
who had been suffering from a severe attack of croup. Hot water was
wanted, and she started for the kitchen for the purpose of making a fire
and putting on the kettle. The gas had not been lit in the hall--they
had all been too busy, and she was feeling her way down the front
stairs with a box of matches in her hand, when suddenly she heard from
somewhere below a sound which she could never describe, and at the same
moment saw a light which spread itself through all the lower hall so
that every object stood out distinctly.
She did not think of the ghost at first, her thoughts were so full of
the child; but when a board creaked in the hall floor, a board that
always creaked when stepped on, she remembered the reputation and what
had been told her about a creaking board and a light that came and went
without human agency. Frightened for a minute, she stood stock-still,
then she rushed down. Whatever it was, natural or supernatural, she went
to see it; but the light vanished before she passed the lower stair, and
only a long-drawn sigh not far from her ear warned her that the space
between her and the real hall was not the solitude she was anxious to
consider it. A sigh! That meant a person. Striking a match, she looked
eagerly down the hall. Something was moving between the two walls.
But when she tried to determine its character, it was swallowed up in
darkness,--the match had gone out. Anxious for the child and determined
to go her way to the kitchen, she now felt about for the gas-fixture and
succeeded in lighting up. The whole hall again burst into view but the
thing was no longer there; the space was absolutely empty. And so were
the other rooms, for she went into every one, lighting the gas as she
went; and so was the cellar when she reached it. For she had to go to
its extreme length for wood and wait about the kitchen till the water
boiled, during which time she searched every nook and cranny. Oh, she
was a brave woman, but she did have this thought as she went upstairs:
If the child died she would know that she had seen a spirit; if the
child got well, that she had been the victim of her own excitement.
And did the child die?
“No, it got well, but the family moved out as soon as it was safe to
leave the house. Her employees did not feel as easy about the matter as
she did.”
CHAPTER V. THE STRANGE NEIGHBORS NEXT DOOR
When I joined Mrs. Packard I found her cheerful and in all respects
quite unlike the brooding woman she had seemed when I first met her.
From the toys scattered about her feet I judged that the child had been
with her, and certainly the light in her eyes had the beaming quality we
associate with the happy mother. She was beautiful thus and my hopes of
her restoration to happiness rose.
“I have had a good night,” were her first words as she welcomed me to a
seat in her own little nook. “I’m feeling very well this morning. That
is why I have brought out this big piece of work.” She held up a baby’s
coat she was embroidering. “I can not do it when I am nervous. Are you
ever nervous?”
Delighted to enter into conversation with her, I answered in a way to
lead her to talk about herself, then, seeing she was in a favorable mood
for gossip, was on the point of venturing all in a leading question,
when she suddenly forestalled me by putting one to me.
“Were you ever the prey of an idea?” she asked; “one which you could not
shake off by any ordinary means, one which clung to you night and day
till nothing else seemed real or would rouse the slightest interest? I
mean a religious idea,” she stammered with anxious attempt of to hide
her real thought. “One of those doubts which come to you in the full
swing of life to--to frighten and unsettle you.”
“Yes,” I answered, as naturally and quietly as I knew how; “I have had
such ideas--such doubts.”
“And were you able to throw them off?--by your will, I mean.”
She was leaning forward, her eyes fixed eagerly on mine. How unexpected
the privilege! I felt that in another moment her secret would be mine.
“In time, yes,” I smiled back. “Everything yields to time and persistent
conscientious work.”
“But if you can not wait for time, if you must be relieved at once, can
the will be made to suffice, when the day is dark and one is alone and
not too busy?”
“The will can do much,” I insisted. “Dark thoughts can be kept down by
sheer determination. But it is better to fill the mind so full with what
is pleasant that no room is left for gloom. There is so much to enjoy it
must take a real sorrow to disturb a heart resolved to be happy.”
“Yes, resolved to be happy. I am resolved to be happy.” And she laughed
merrily for a moment. “Nothing else pays. I will not dwell on anything
but the pleasures which surround me.” Here she took up her work again.
“I will forget--I will--” She stopped and her eyes left her work to
flash a rapid and involuntary glance over her shoulder. Had she heard
a step? I had not. Or had she felt a draft of which I in my bounding
health was unconscious?
“Are you cold?” I asked, as her glance stole back to mine. “You are
shivering--”
“Oh, no,” she answered coldly, almost proudly. “I’m perfectly warm. I
don’t feel slight changes. I thought some one was behind me. I felt--Is
Ellen in the adjoining room?”
I jumped up and moved toward the door she indicated. It was slightly
ajar, but Ellen was not behind it.
“There’s no one here,” said I.
She did not answer. She was bending again over her work, and gave no
indication of speaking again on that or the more serious topic we had
previously been discussing.
Naturally I felt disappointed. I had hoped much from the conversation,
and now these hopes bade fair to fail me. How could I restore matters to
their former basis? Idly I glanced out of the side window I was
passing, and the view of the adjoining house I thus gained acted like
an inspiration. I would test her on a new topic, in the hope of
reintroducing the old. The glimpse I had gained into Mrs. Packard’s mind
must not be lost quite as soon as this.
“You asked me a moment ago if I were ever nervous,” I began, as I
regained my seat at her side. “I replied, ‘Sometimes’; but I might have
said if I had not feared being too abrupt, ‘Never till I came into this
house.’”
Her surprise partook more of curiosity than I expected.
“You are nervous here,” she repeated. “What is the reason of that, pray?
Has Ellen been chattering to you? I thought she knew enough not to do
that. There’s nothing to fear here, Miss Saunders; absolutely nothing
for you to fear. I should not have allowed you to remain here a night if
there had been. No ghost will visit you.”
“No, I hear they never wander above the second story,” I laughed. “If
they did I should hardly anticipate the honor of a visit. It is not
ghosts I fear; it is something quite different which affects
me,--living eyes, living passions, the old ladies next door,” I finished
falteringly, for Mrs. Packard was looking at me with a show of startling
alarm. “They stare into my room night and day. I never look out but I
encounter the uncanny glance of one or the other of them. Are they live
women or embodied memories of the past? They don’t seem to belong to the
present. I own that they frighten me.”
I had exaggerated my feelings in order to mark their effect upon her.
The result disappointed me; she was not afraid of these two poor old
women. Far from it.
“Draw your curtains,” she laughed. “The poor things are crazy and not
really accountable. Their odd ways and manners troubled me at first, but
I soon got over it. I have even been in to see them. That was to keep
them from coming here. I think if you were to call upon them they would
leave you alone after that. They are very fond of being called on. They
are persons of the highest gentility, you know. They owned this house
a few years ago, as well as the one they are now living in, but
misfortunes overtook them and this one was sold for debt. I am very
sorry for them myself. Sometimes I think they have not enough to eat.”
“Tell me about them,” I urged. Lightly as she treated the topic I
felt convinced that these strange neighbors of hers were more or less
involved in the mystery of her own peculiar moods and unaccountable
fears.
“It’s a great secret,” she announced naively. “That is, their personal
history. I have never told it to any one. I have never told it to
my husband. They confided it to me in a sort of desperation, perhaps
because my husband’s name inspired them with confidence. Immediately
after, I could see that they regretted the impulse, and so I have
remained silent. But I feel like telling you; feel as if it would divert
me to do so--keep me from thinking of other things. You won’t want to
talk about it and the story will cure your nervousness.”
“Do you want me to promise not to talk about it?” I inquired in some
anxiety.
“No. You have a good, true face; a face which immediately inspires
confidence. I shall exact no promises. I can rely on your judgment.”
I thanked her. I was glad not to be obliged to promise secrecy. It might
become my imperative duty to disregard such a promise.
“You have seen both of their faces?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Then you must have observed the difference between them. There is the
same difference in their minds, though both are clouded. One is weak
almost to the point of idiocy, though strong enough where her one
settled idea is concerned. The other was once a notable character, but
her fine traits have almost vanished under the spell which has been laid
upon them by the immense disappointment which has wrecked both their
lives. I heard it all from Miss Thankful the day after we entered this
house. Miss Thankful is the older and more intellectual one. I had known
very little about them before; no more, in fact, than I have already
told you. I was consequently much astonished when they called, for I had
supposed them to be veritable recluses, but I was still more astonished
when I noted their manner and the agitated and strangely penetrating
looks they cast about them as I ushered them into the library, which
was the only room I had had time to arrange. A few minutes’ further
observation of them showed me that neither of them was quite right.
Instead of entering into conversation with me they continued to cast
restless glances at the walls, ceilings, and even at the floor of
the room in which we sat, and when, in the hope of attracting their
attention to myself, I addressed them on some topic which I thought
would be interesting to them, they not only failed to listen, but turned
upon each other with slowly wagging heads, which not only revealed their
condition but awakened me to its probable cause. They were between walls
rendered dear by old associations. Till their first agitation was over I
could not hope for their attention.
“But their agitation gave no signs of diminishing and I soon saw that
their visit was far from being a ceremonial one; that it was one of
definite purpose. Preparing myself for I knew not what, I regarded them
with such open interest that before I knew it, and quite before I was
ready for any such exhibition, they were both on their knees before me,
holding up their meager arms with beseeching and babbling words which I
did not understand till later.
“I was shocked, as you may believe, and quickly raised them, at which
Miss Thankful told me their story, which I will now tell you.
“There were four of them originally, three sisters and one brother.
The brother early went West and disappeared out of their lives, and the
third sister married. This was years and years ago, when they were all
young. From this marriage sprang all their misfortune. The nephew which
this marriage introduced to their family became their bane as well
as their delight. From being a careless spendthrift boy he became a
reckless, scheming man, adding extravagance to extravagance, till, to
support him and meet his debts, these poor aunts gave up first their
luxuries, then their home and finally their very livelihood. Not that
they acknowledged this. The feeling they both cherished for him was
more akin to infatuation than to ordinary family love. They did not miss
their luxuries, they did not mourn their home, they did not even mourn
their privations; but they were broken-hearted and had been so for a
long time, because they could no longer do for him as of old. Shabby
themselves, and evidently ill-nourished, they grieved not over their own
changed lot, but over his. They could not be reconciled to his lack of
luxuries, much less to the difficulties in which he frequently found
himself, who was made to ruffle it with the best and be the pride of
their lives as he was the darling of their hearts. All this the poor
old things made apparent to me, but their story did not become really
interesting till they began to speak of this house we are in, and of
certain events which followed their removal to the ramshackle dwelling
next door. The sale of this portion of the property had relieved them
from their debts, but they were otherwise penniless, and were just
planning the renting of their rooms at prices which would barely serve
to provide them with a scanty living, when there came a letter from
their graceless nephew, asking for a large amount of money to save him
from complete disgrace. They had no money, and were in the midst of
their sorrow and perplexity, when a carriage drove up to the door of
this house and from it issued an old and very sick man, their long
absent and almost forgotten brother. He had come home to die, and when
told his sisters’ circumstances, and how soon the house next door would
be filled with lodgers, insisted upon having this place of his birth,
which was empty at the time, opened for his use. The owner, after long
continued entreaties from the poor old sisters, finally consented to the
arrangement. A bed was made up in the library, and the old man laid on
it.”
Mrs. Packard’s voice fell, and I cast her a humorous look.
“Were there ghosts in those days?” I lightly asked.
Her answer was calm enough. “Not yet, but the place must have been
desolate enough for one. I have sometimes tried to imagine the scene
surrounding that broken-down old man. There was no furniture in the
room, save what was indispensable to his bare comfort. Miss Thankful
expressly said there was no carpet,--you will presently see why. Even
the windows had no other protection than the bare shutters. But he was
in his old home, and seemed content till Miss Charity fell sick, and
they had to call in a nurse to assist Miss Thankful, who by this time
had a dozen lodgers to look after. Then he grew very restless. Miss
Thankful said he seemed to be afraid of this nurse, and always had a
fever after having been left alone with her; but he gave no reason for
his fears, and she herself was too straitened in means and in too much
trouble otherwise to be affected by such mere whims, and went on doing
her best, sitting with him whenever the opportunity offered, and making
every effort to conceal the anxiety she felt for her poor nephew from
her equally poor brother. The disease under which the brother labored
was a fatal one, and he had not many days to live. She was startled when
one day her brother greeted her appearance, with an earnest entreaty for
the nurse to be sent out for a little while, as this was his last day,
and he had something of great importance to communicate to her before he
died.
“She had not dreamed of his being so low as this, but when she came to
look at him, she saw, that he had not misstated his case, and that he
was really very near death. She was in a flurry and wanted to call in
the neighbors and rout her sister up from her own sick bed to care for
him. But he wanted nothing and nobody, only to be left alone with her.
“So she sent the nurse out and sat down on the side of the bed to hear
what he had to say to her, for he looked very eager and was smiling in a
way to make her heart ache.
“You must remember,” continued Mrs. Packard, “that at the time Miss
Thankful was telling this story we were in the very room where it had
all happened. As she reached this part of her narration, she pointed
to the wall partitioning off the corridor, and explained that this was
where the bed stood,--an old wooden one brought down from her own attic.
“‘It creaked when I sat down on it,’ said she, ‘and I remember that I
felt ashamed of its shabby mattress and the poor sheets. But we had no
better,’ she moaned, ‘and he did not seem to mind.’ I tell you this that
you may understand what must have taken place in her heart when, a few
minutes later, he seized her hand in his and said that he had a great
secret to communicate to her. Though he had seemed the indifferent
brother for years, his heart had always been with his home and his
people, and he was going to prove it to her now; he had made money,
and this money was to be hers and Charity’s. He had saved it for them,
brought it to them from the far West; a pile of money all honestly
earned, which he hoped would buy back their old house and make them
happy again in the old way. He said nothing of his nephew. They had not
mentioned him, and possibly he did not even know of his existence. All
was to be for them and the old house, this old house. This was perhaps
why he was content to lie in the midst of its desolation. He foresaw
better days for those he loved, and warmed his heart at his precious
secret.
“But his sister sat aghast. Money! and so little done for his comfort!
That was her first thought. The next, oh, the wonder and the hope of it!
Now the boy could be saved; now he could have his luxuries. If only it
might be enough! Five thousand, ten thousand. But no, it could not be
so much. Her brother was daft to think she could restore the old home on
what he had been able to save. She said something to show her doubt, at
which he laughed; and, peering slowly and painfully about him, drew
her hands toward his left side. ‘Feel,’ said he, ‘I have it all here. I
would trust nobody. Fifty, thousand dollars.’
“Fifty thousand dollars! Miss Thankful sprang to her feet, then sat
again, overcome by her delight. Placing her hand on the wallet he held
tied about his body, she whispered, ‘Here?’
“He nodded and bade her look. She told me she did so; that she opened
the wallet under his eye and took out five bonds each for ten thousand
dollars. She remembers them well; there was no mistake in the figures.
She held fifty thousand dollars in her hands for the space of half a
minute; then he bade her put them back, with an injunction to watch
over him well and not to let that woman nurse come near him till she had
taken away the wallet immediately after his death. He could not bear to
part with it while alive.
“She promised. She was in a delirium of joy. In one minute her life of
poverty had changed to one of ecstatic hope. She caressed her brother.
He smiled contentedly, and sank into coma or heavy sleep. She remained
a few minutes watching him. Picture after picture of future contentment
passed before her eyes; phantasmagoria of joy which held her enthralled
till chance drew her eyes towards the window, and she found herself
looking out upon what for the moment seemed the continuation of her
dream. This was the figure of her nephew, standing in the doorway of the
adjoining house. This entrance into the alley is closed up now, but in
those days it was a constant source of communication between the two
houses, and, being directly opposite the left-hand library window,
would naturally fall under her eye as she looked up from her brother’s
bedside. Her nephew! the one person of whom she was dreaming, for whom
she was planning, older by many years than when she saw him last, but
recognizable at once, as the best, the handsomest--but I will spare you
her ravings. She was certainly in her dotage as concerned this man.
“He was not alone. At his side stood her sister, eagerly pointing
across the alley to herself. It was the appearance of the sister which
presently convinced her that what she saw was reality and no dream.
Charity had risen from her bed to greet the newcomer, and her hasty
toilet was not one which could have been easily imagine, even by her
sister. The long-absent one had returned. He was there, and he did not
know what these last five minutes had done for them all. The joy of
what she had to tell him was too much for her discretion. Noting how
profoundly her brother slept, she slipped out of the room to the side
door and ran across the alley to her own house. Her nephew was no longer
in the doorway where she had seen him, but he had left the door ajar and
she rushed in to find him. He was in the parlor with Miss Charity, and
no sooner did her eyes fall on them both than her full heart overflowed,
and she blurted out their good fortune. Their wonder was immense and in
the conversation which ensued unnoted minutes passed. Not till the clock
struck did she realize that she had left her brother alone for a good
half-hour: This was not right and she went hurrying back, the happiest
woman in town. But it was a short-lived happiness. As she reentered the
sick-room she realized that something was amiss. Her brother had moved
from where she had left him, and now lay stretched across the foot of
the bed, where he had evidently fallen from a standing position. He was
still breathing, but in great gasps which shook the bed. When she bent
over him in anxious questioning, he answered her with a ghastly stare,
and that was all. Otherwise, everything looked the same.
“‘What has happened? What have you done?’ she persisted, trying to draw
him up on the pillow. He made a motion. It was in the direction of the
front door. ‘Don’t let her in,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t trust her, I don’t
trust her. Let me die in peace.’ Then, as Miss Thankful became conscious
of a stir at the front door, and caught the sound of a key turning in
the lock, which could only betoken the return of the nurse, he raised
himself a little and she saw the wallet hanging out of his dressing
gown. ‘I have hidden it,’ he whispered, with a nervous look toward the
door: ‘I was afraid she might come and take it from me, so I put it
in--’ He never said where. His eyes, open and staring straight before
him, took on a look of horror, then slowly glazed under the terrified
glance of Miss Thankful. Death had cut short that vital sentence, and
simultaneously with the entrance of the nurse, whose return he had so
much feared, he uttered his last gasp and sank back lifeless on his
pillow. With a cry Miss Thankful pounced on the wallet. It opened out
flat in her hand, as empty as her life seemed at that minute. But she
was a brave woman and in another instant her courage had revived. The
money could not be far away; she would find it at the first search.
Turning on the nurse, she looked her full in the face. The woman was
gazing at the empty wallet. ‘You know what was in that?’ queried Miss
Thankful. A fierce look answered her. ‘A thousand dollars!’ announced
Miss Thankful. The nurse’s lip curled. ‘Oh, you knew that it was five,’
was Miss Thankful’s next outburst. Still no answer, but a look which
seemed to devour the empty wallet. This look had its effect. Miss
Thankful dropped her accusatory tone, and attempted cajolery. ‘It was
his legacy to us,’ she explained. ‘He gave it to me just before he died.
You shall be paid out of it. Now will you call my sister? She’s up and
with my nephew, who came an hour ago. Call them both; I am not afraid to
remain here for a few moments with my brother’s body.’ This appeal,
or perhaps the promise, had its effect. The nurse disappeared, after
another careful look at her patient, and Miss Thankful bounded to her
feet and began a hurried search for the missing bonds. They could not
be far away. They must be in the room, and the room was so nearly empty
that it would take but a moment to penetrate every hiding-place. But
alas! the matter was not so simple as she thought. She looked here, she
looked there; in the bed, in the washstand drawer, under the cushions
of the only chair, even in the grate and up the chimney; but she found
nothing--nothing! She was standing stark and open-mouthed in the middle
of the floor, when the others entered, but recovered herself at sight
of their surprise, and, explaining what had happened, set them all to
search, sister, nephew, even the nurse, though she was careful to keep
close by the latter with a watchfulness that let no movement escape her.
But it was all fruitless. The bonds were not to be found, either in
that room or in any place near. They ransacked, they rummaged; they went
upstairs, they went down; they searched every likely and every unlikely
place of concealment, but without avail. They failed to come upon the
place where he had hidden them; nor did Miss Thankful or her sister ever
see them again from that day to this.”
“Oh!” I exclaimed; “and the nephew? the nurse?”
“Both went away disappointed; he to face his disgrace about which his
aunts were very reticent, and she to seek work which was all the more
necessary to her, since she had lost her pay, with the disappearance of
these bonds, whose value I have no doubt she knew and calculated on.”
“And the aunts, the two poor old creatures who stare all day out of
their upper window at these walls, still believe that money to be here,”
I cried.
“Yes, that is their mania. Several tenants have occupied these
premises--tenants who have not stayed long, but who certainly filled
all the rooms, and must have penetrated every secret spot the house
contains, but it has made no difference to them. They believe the bonds
to be still lying in some out-of-the-way place in these old walls, and
are jealous of any one who comes in here. This you can understand better
when I tell you that one feature of their mania is this: they have lost
all sense of time. It is two years since their brother died, yet to them
it is an affair of yesterday. They showed this when they talked to me.
What they wanted was for me to give up these bonds to them as soon as
I found them. They seemed to think that I might run across them in
settling, and made me promise to wake them day or night if I came across
them unexpectedly.”
“How pathetic!” I exclaimed. “Do you suppose they have appealed in the
same way to every one who has come in here?”
“No, or some whisper of this lost money would have become current in
the neighborhood. And it never has. The traditions associated with the
house,” here her manner changed a little, “are of quite another nature.
I suppose the old gentleman has walked--looking, possibly, for his lost
bonds.”
“That would be only natural,” I smiled, for her mood was far from
serious. “But,” I quietly pursued, “how much of this old woman’s story
do you believe? Can not she have been deceived as to what she saw?
You say she is more or less demented. Perhaps there never was any old
wallet, and possibly never any money.”
“I have seen the wallet. They brought it in to show me. Not that that
proves anything; but somehow I do believe in the money, and, what is
more, that it is still in this house. You will think me as demented as
they.”
“No, no,” I smiled, “for I am inclined to think the same; it lends such
an interest to the place. I wouldn’t disbelieve it now for anything.”
“Nor I,” she cried, taking up her work. “But we shall never find it. The
house was all redecorated when we came in. Not one of the workmen has
become suddenly wealthy.”
“I shall no longer begrudge these poor old souls their silent watch over
these walls that hold their treasure,” I now remarked.
“Then you have lost your nervousness?”
“Quite.”
“So have I,” laughed Mrs. Packard, showing me for the first time a face
of complete complacency and contentment.
CHAPTER VI. AT THE STAIR-HEAD
I spent the evening alone. Mrs. Packard went to the theater with friends
and Mayor Packard attended a conference of politicians. I felt my
loneliness, but busied myself trying to sift the impressions made upon
me by the different members of the household.
It consisted, as far as my present observation went, of seven persons,
the three principals and four servants. Of the servants I had seen
three, the old butler, the nurse, and the housemaid, Ellen. I now liked
Ellen; she appeared equally alive and trustworthy; of the butler I
could not say as much. He struck me as secretive. Also, he had begun to
manifest a certain antagonism to myself. Whence sprang this antagonism?
Did it have its source in my temperament, or in his? A question possibly
not worth answering and yet it very well might be. Who could know?
Pondering this and other subjects, I remained in my cozy little room
up-stairs, till the clock verging on to twelve told me that it was
nearly time for Mrs. Packard’s return.
Hardly knowing my duties as yet, or what she might expect of me, I kept
my door open, meaning to speak to her when she came in. The thought had
crossed my mind that she might not return at all, but remain away with
her friends. Some fear of this kind had been in Mr. Packard’s mind and
naturally found lodgment in mine. I was therefore much relieved when,
sharp on the stroke of midnight, I heard the front door-bell ring,
followed by the sound of her voice speaking to the old butler. I thought
its tone more cheerful than before she went out. At all events, her face
had a natural look when, after a few minutes’ delay, she came upstairs
and stepped into the nursery--a room on the same floor as mine, but
nearer the stair-head.
From what impulse did I put out my light? I think now, on looking back,
that I hoped to catch a better glimpse of her face when she came out
again, and so be in a position to judge whether her anxiety or secret
distress was in any special way connected with her child. But I forgot
the child and any motive of this kind which I may have had; for when
Mrs. Packard did reappear in the hall, there rang up from some place
below a laugh, so loud and derisive and of so raucous and threatening a
tone that Mrs. Packard reeled with the shock and I myself was surprised
in spite of my pride and usual impassibility. This, had it been all,
would not be worth the comment. But it was not all. Mrs. Packard did
not recover from the shock as I expected her to. Her fine figure
straightened itself, it is true, but only to sink again lower and lower,
till she clung crouching to the stair-rail at which she had caught for
support, while her eyes, turning slowly in her head, moved till they met
mine with that unseeing and glassy stare which speaks of a soul-piercing
terror--not fear in any ordinary sense, but terror which lays bare the
soul and allows one to see into depths which--
But here my compassion drove me to action. Advancing quietly, I caught
at her wrap which was falling from her shoulders. She grasped my hand as
I did so.
“Did you hear that laugh?” she panted. “Whose was it? Who is
down-stairs?”
I thought, “Is this one of the unaccountable occurrences which have
given the house its blighted reputation?” but I said: “Nixon let you in.
I don’t know whether any one else is below. Mayor Packard has not yet
come home.”
“I know; Nixon told me. Would you--would you mind,”--how hard she strove
to show only the indignant curiosity natural to the situation--“do you
object, I mean, to going down and seeing?”
“Not at all,” I cheerfully answered, glad enough of this chance to
settle my own doubts. And with a last glance at her face, which was far
too white and drawn to please me, I hastened below.
The lights had not yet been put out in the halls, though I saw none in
the drawing-room or library. Indeed, I ran upon Nixon coming from the
library, where he had evidently been attending to his final duties of
fastening windows and extinguishing lights. Alive to the advantage of
this opportune meeting, I addressed him with as little aggressiveness as
possible.
“Mrs. Packard has sent me down to see who laughed just now so loudly.
Was it you?”
Strong and unmistakable dislike showed in his eyes, but his voice was
restrained and apparently respectful as he replied: “No, Miss. I didn’t
laugh. There was nothing to laugh at.”
“You heard the laugh? It seemed to come from somewhere here. I was on
the third floor and I heard it plainly.”
His face twitched--a habit of his when under excitement, as I have since
learned--as with a shrug of his old shoulders he curtly answered:
“You were listening; I was not. If any one laughed down here I didn’t
hear ‘em.”
Confident that he was lying, I turned quietly away and proceeded down
the hall toward Mayor Packard’s study.
“I wish to speak to the mayor,” I explained.
“He’s not there.” The man had eagerly followed me. “He’s not come home
yet, Miss.”
“But the gas is burning brightly inside and the door ajar. Some one is
there.”
“It is Mr. Steele. He came in an hour ago. He often works here till
after midnight.”
I had heard what I wanted to know, but, being by this time at the very
threshold, I could not forbear giving the door a slight push, so as to
catch at least a momentary glimpse of the man he spoke of.
He was sitting at his post, and as he neither looked up nor stirred at
my intrusion, I had an excellent opportunity for observing again the
clear-cut profile which had roused my admiration the day before.
Certainly, seen as I saw it now, in the concentrated glow of a lamp
shaded from every other corner of the room, it was a face well worth
looking at. Seldom, perhaps never, had I beheld one cast in a more
faultless mold. Smooth-shaven, with every harmonious line open to
view, it struck the eye with the force and beauty of a cameo; masculine
strength and feminine grace equally expressed in the expansive forehead
and the perfectly modeled features. Its effect upon the observer was
instantaneous, but the heart was not warmed nor the imagination awakened
by it. In spite of the perfection of the features, or possibly because
of this perfection, the whole countenance had a cold look, as cold as
the sculpture it suggested; and, though incomparable in pure physical
attraction, it lacked the indefinable something which gives life and
meaning to such faces as Mayor Packard’s, for instance. Yet it was not
devoid of expression, nor did it fail to possess a meaning of its own.
Indeed, it was the meaning in it which held my attention. Abstracted as
the man appeared to be, even to the point of not perceiving my intruding
figure in the open doorway, the thoughts which held him were not
common thoughts, nor were they such as could be easily read, even by an
accustomed eye. Having noted this, I softly withdrew, not finding any
excuse for breaking in upon a man so occupied.
The butler stood awaiting me not three feet from the door. But taking
a lesson from the gentleman I had just left, I ignored his presence
completely, and, tripping lightly up-stairs, found Mrs. Packard awaiting
me at the head of the first flight instead of the second.
Her fears, or whatever it was which moved her, had not diminished in
my absence. She stood erect, but it was by the help of her grasp on the
balustrade; and though her diamonds shone and her whole appearance
in her sweeping dinner-dress was almost regal, there was mortal
apprehension in her eye and a passion of inquiry in her whole attitude
which I was glad her husband was not there to see.
I made haste to answer that inquiry by immediately observing:
“I saw Nixon. He was just coming out of the library. He says that he
heard no laugh. The only other person I came upon down-stairs was Mr.
Steele. He was busy over some papers and I did not like to interrupt
him; but he did not look as if a laugh of any sort had come from him.”
“Thank you.”
The words were hoarsely uttered and the tone unnatural, though she tried
to carry it off with an indifferent gesture and a quick movement toward
her room. I admired her self-control, for it was self-control, and was
contrasting the stateliness of her present bearing with the cringing
attitude of a few minutes before--when, without warning or any
premonitory sound, all that beauty and pride and splendor collapsed
before my eyes, and she fell at my feet, senseless.
CHAPTER VII. A MOVING SHADOW
I bent to lift the prostrate form of the unhappy woman who had been
placed in my care. As I did so I heard something like a snarl over
my shoulder, and, turning, saw Nixon stretching eager arms toward his
mistress, whose fall he had doubtless heard.
“Let me! let me!” he cried, his old form trembling almost to the point
of incapacity.
“We will lift her together,” I rejoined; and though his eyes sparkled
irefully, he accepted my help and together we carried her into her own
room and laid her on a lounge. I have had some training as a nurse
and, perceiving that Mrs. Packard had simply fainted, I was not at all
alarmed, but simply made an effort to restore her with a calmness that
for some reason greatly irritated the old man.
“Shall I call Ellen? Shall I call Letty?” he kept crying, shifting from
one foot to another in a frightened and fussy way that exasperated me
almost beyond endurance. “She doesn’t breathe; she is white, white! Oh,
what will the mayor say? I will call Letty.”
But I managed to keep him under control and finally succeeded
in restoring Mrs. Packard--a double task demanding not a little
self-control and discretion. When the flutter of her eyelids showed that
she would soon be conscious, I pointed out these signs of life to my
uneasy companion and hinted very broadly that the fewer people Mrs.
Packard found about her on coming to herself, the better she would be
pleased. His aspect grew quite ferocious at this, and for a moment I
almost feared him; but as I continued to urge the necessity of avoiding
any fresh cause of agitation in one so weak, he gradually shrank
back from my side where he had kept a jealous watch until now, and
reluctantly withdrew into the hall.
Another moment and Mrs. Packard had started to rise; but, on seeing
me and me only standing before her, she fell wearily back, crying in a
subdued way, which nevertheless was very intense:
“Don’t, don’t let him come in--see me--or know. I must be by myself; I
must be! Don’t you see that I am frightened?”
The words came out with such force I was startled. Leaning over her,
with the natural sympathy her condition called for, I asked quietly but
firmly:
“Whom do you mean by him? There is only one person in the hall, and that
is your butler.”
“Hasn’t Mr. Packard returned?”
“No, Madam.”
“But I thought I saw him looking at me.”
Her eyes were wild, her body shaking with irrepressible agitation.
“You were mistaken. Mayor Packard has not yet come home.”
At this double assurance, she sank back satisfied, but still trembling
and very white.
“It is Mr. Packard I meant,” she whispered presently. “Stay with me
and, when he comes in, tell him what will keep him from looking in or
speaking to me. Promise!” She was growing wild again. “Promise, if you
would be of any use to me.”
“I do promise.” At which I felt her hand grasp mine with grateful
pressure. “Don’t you wish some assistance from me? Your dress--I tried
to loosen it, but failed to find the end of the cord. Shall I try
again?”
“No, no; that is, I will do it myself.”
I did not see how she could, for her waist was laced up the back, but
I saw that she was too eager to have me go to remember this, and
recognizing the undesirability of irritating her afresh, I simply asked
if she wished me to remain within call.
But even this was more than she wanted.
“No. I am better now. I shall be better yet when quite alone.” Then
suddenly: “Who knows of this--this folly of mine?”
“Only Nixon and myself. The girls have gone to bed.”
“Nixon I can trust not to speak of it. Tell him to go. You, I know, will
remember only long enough to do for me what I have just asked.”
“Mrs. Packard, you may trust me.” The earnest, confiding look, which for
a moment disturbed the melancholy of her large eyes, touched me closely
as I shut the door between us.
“Now what is the meaning of this mystery?” I asked myself after I had
seen Nixon go downstairs, shaking his head and casting every now
and then a suspicious glance behind him. “It is not as trivial as it
appears. That laugh was tragedy to her, not comedy.” And when I paused
to recollect its tone I did not wonder at its effect upon her mind,
strained as it undoubtedly was by some secret sorrow or perplexity.
And from whose lips had that laugh sprung? Not from ghostly ones. Such
an explanation I could not accept, and how could Mrs. Packard? From
whose, then? If I could settle this fact I might perhaps determine to
what extent its effect was dependent upon its source. The butler denied
having even heard it. Was this to be believed? Did not this very denial
prove that it was he and no other who had thus shocked the proprieties
of this orderly household? It certainly seemed so; yet where all was
strange, this strange and incomprehensible denial of a self-evident fact
by the vindictive Nixon might have its source in some motive unsuggested
by the circumstances. Certainly, Nixon’s mistress appeared to have a
great deal of confidence in him.
I wished that more had been told me about the handsome secretary. I
wished that fate would give me another opportunity for seeing that
gentleman and putting the same direct question to him I had put to
Nixon.
Scarcely had this thought crossed my mind before a loud ring at the
telephone disturbed the quiet below and I heard the secretary’s voice in
reply. A minute after he appeared at the foot of the stairs. His aspect
was one of embarrassment, and he peered aloft in a hesitating way, as if
he hardly knew how to proceed.
Taking advantage of this hesitation, I ran softly down to meet him.
“Any message for Mrs. Packard?” I asked.
He looked relieved.
“Yes, from his Honor. The mayor is unavoidably detained and may not be
home till morning.”
“I will tell her.” Then, as he reached for his overcoat, I risked all on
one venture, and enlarging a little on the facts, said:
“Excuse me, but was it you we heard laughing down-stairs a few minutes
ago? Mrs. Packard feared it might be some follower of the girls’.”
Pausing in the act of putting on his coat, he met my look with an air of
some surprise.
“I am not given to laughing,” he remarked; “certainly not when alone.”
“But you heard this laugh?”
He shook his head. His manner was perfectly courteous, almost cordial.
“If I did, it made no impression on my mind. I am extremely busy just
now, working up the mayor’s next speech.” And with a smile and bow in
every way suited to his fine appearance, he took his hat from the rack
and left the house.
I drew back more mystified than ever. Which of these two men had told me
a lie? One, both, or neither? Impossible to determine. As I try never
to waste gray matter, I resolved to spend no further energy on this
question, but simply to await the next development.
It came unexpectedly and was of an entirely different nature from any I
had anticipated.
I had not retired, not knowing at what moment the mayor might return
or what I might be called upon to do when he did. It will be remembered
that one of my windows looked out upon the next house. I approached it
to see if my ever watchful neighbors had retired. Their window was
dark, but I observed what was of much more vital interest to me at that
moment. It was that I was not the only one awake and stirring in our
house. The light from a room diagonally below me poured in a stream on
the opposite wall, and it took but a moment’s consideration for me to
decide that the shadow I saw crossing and recrossing this brilliant
square was cast by Mrs. Packard.
My first impulse was to draw back--(that was the lady’s impulse not
quite crushed out of me by the occupation circumstances had compelled
me to take up)--my next, to put out my own light and seat myself at the
post of observation thus afforded me. The excuse I gave myself for this
was plausible enough. Mrs. Packard had been placed in my charge and, if
all was not right with her, it was my business to know it.
Accordingly I sat and watched each movement of my mysterious charge as
it was outlined on the telltale wall before me, and saw enough in one
half-hour to convince me that something very vigorous and purposeful was
going on in the room so determinedly closed against every one, even her
own husband.
What?
The moving silhouette of her figure, which was all that I could see, was
not perfect enough in detail for me to determine. She was busy at some
occupation which took her from one end of the room to the other; but
after watching her shadow for an hour I was no surer than at first as to
what that occupation was. It was a serious one, I saw, and now and
then the movements I watched gave evidence of frantic haste, but their
character stood unrevealed till suddenly the thought came:
“She is rummaging bureau-drawers and emptying boxes,--in other words,
packing a bag or trunk.”
Should I be witness to a flight? I thought it very likely, especially
when I heard the faint sound of a door opening below, followed by the
swish of silken skirts. I recalled Mayor Packard’s fears and began to
suspect that they were not groundless.
This called for action, and I was about to open my door and rush out
when I was deterred by the surprising discovery that the steps I heard
were coming up rather than going down, and that in another moment
she would be in the hall outside, possibly on her way to the nursery,
possibly with the intention of coming to my own room.
Greatly taken aback, I stood with my ear to the door, listening
intently. Yes, she has reached the top of the stairs and is stopping no,
she passes the nursery door, she is coming my way. What shall I say to
her,--how account for my comfortable wrapper and the fact that I have
not yet been abed? Had I but locked my door! Could I but lock it now,
unseen and unheard before the nearing step should pause! But the very
attempt were folly; no, I must stand my ground and--Ah! the step
has paused, but not at my door. There is a third one on this hall,
communicating, as I knew, with a covered staircase leading to the attic.
It was at this she stopped and it was up this staircase she went as
warily and softly as its creaking boards would allow; and while I
marveled as to what had taken her aloft so late, I heard her steps over
my head and knew that she had entered the room directly above mine.
Striking a match, I consulted my watch. It was just ten minutes to
three. Hardly knowing what my duty was in the circumstances, I blew out
the match and stood listening while the woman who was such a mystery
to all her friends moved about overhead in much the same quick and
purposeful way as had put life into her shadow while she was in her own
room.
“Packing! Nothing less and nothing more,” was my now definite decision.
“That is a trunk she is dragging forward. What a hurry she is in, and
how little she cares whether anybody hears her!”
So little did she care that during the next few minutes of acute
attention I distinguished the flinging down of article after article
on to the floor, as well as many other movements betraying haste or
irritation.
Suddenly I heard her give a bound, then the sound of a heavy lid falling
and then, after a minute or two of complete silence, the soft pat-pat of
her slippered feet descending the stair.
Half-past three.
Waiting till she was well down the second flight, I pushed my door ajar
and, flying down the hall, peered over the balustrade in time to see
her entering her room. She held a lighted candle in her hand and by its
small flame I caught a full glimpse of her figure. To my astonishment
and even to my dismay she was still in the gown she had refused to have
me unlace,--a rich yellow satin in which she must have shone resplendent
a few hours before. She had not even removed the jewels from her neck.
Whatever had occupied her, whatever had taken her hither and thither
through the house, moving furniture out of her way, lifting heavy boxes,
opening dust-covered trunks, had been of such moment to her as to
make her entirely oblivious of the rich and delicate apparel she thus
wantonly sacrificed. But it was not this alone which attracted my
attention. In her hand she held a paper, and the sight of that paper and
the way she clutched it rather disturbed my late conclusions. Had her
errand been one of search rather than of arrangement? and was this
crumpled letter the sole result of a half-hour’s ransacking in an attic
room at the dead of night? I was fain to think so, for in the course of
another half-hour her light went out. Relieved that she had not left the
house, I was still anxious as to the cause of her strange conduct.
Mayor Packard did not come in till daybreak. He found me waiting for him
in the lower hall.
“Well?” he eagerly inquired.
“Mrs. Packard is asleep, I hope. A shrill laugh, ringing through the
house shortly after her return, gave her a nervous shock and she begged
that she might be left undisturbed till morning.”
He turned from hanging up his overcoat, and gave me a short stare.
“A laugh!” he repeated. “Who could have laughed like that? We are not a
very jolly crowd here.”
“I don’t know, sir. I thought it must have been either Mr. Steele or
Nixon, the butler, but each denied it. There was no one else in this
part of the house.”
“Mrs. Packard is very sensitive just now,” he remarked. Then as he
turned away toward the library door: “I will throw myself on a lounge. I
have but an hour or two before me, as I have my preparations to make
for leaving town on the early morning train. I shall have some final
instructions to give you.”
CHAPTER VIII. THE PARAGRAPH
I was up betimes. Would Mrs. Packard appear at breakfast? I hardly
thought so. Yet who knows? Such women have great recuperative powers,
and from one so mysteriously affected anything might be expected.
Ready at eight, I hastened down to the second floor to find the lady,
concerning whom I had had these doubts, awaiting me on the threshold of
her room. She was carefully dressed and looked pale enough to have been
up for hours. An envelope was in her hand, and the smile which hailed my
approach was cold and constrained.
“Good morning,” said she. “Let us go down. Let us go down together. I
slept wretchedly and do not feel very strong. When did Mr. Packard come
in?”
“Late. He went directly to the library. He said that he had but a short
time in which to rest, and would take what sleep he could get on the
lounge, when I told him of your very natural nervous attack.”
She sighed--a sigh which came from no inconsiderable depths--then with a
proud and resolute gesture preceded me down-stairs.
Her husband was already in the breakfast-room. I could hear his voice as
we turned at the foot of the stairs. Mrs. Packard, hearing it, too,
drew herself up still more firmly and was passing bravely forward, when
Nixon’s gray head protruded from the doorway and I heard him say:
“There’s company for breakfast, ma’am. His Honor could not spare Mr.
Steele and asked me to set a place for him.”
I noted a momentary hesitation on Mrs. Packard’s part, then she silently
acquiesced and we both passed on. In another instant we were receiving
the greetings and apologies of the gentlemen. If Mr. Steele had expected
that his employer’s wife would offer him her hand, he was disappointed.
“I am happy to welcome one who has proved so useful to my husband,” she
remarked with cool though careful courtesy as we all sat down at the
table; and, without waiting for an answer, she proceeded to pour the
coffee with a proud grace which gave no hint of the extreme feeling by
which I had seen her moved the night before.
Had I known her better I might have found something extremely unnatural
in her manner and the very evident restraint she put upon herself
through the whole meal; but not having any acquaintance with her
ordinary bearing under conditions purely social, I was thrown out of my
calculations by the cold ease with which she presided at her end of the
table, and the set smile with which she greeted all remarks, whether
volunteered by her husband or by his respectful but affable secretary. I
noticed, however, that she ate little.
Nixon, whom I dared not watch, did not serve with his usual
precision,--this I perceived from the surprised look cast at him by
Mayor Packard on at least two occasions. Though to the ordinary eye a
commonplace meal, it had elements of tragedy in it which made the least
movement on the part of those engaged in it of real moment to me. I was
about to leave the table unenlightened, however, when Mrs. Packard rose
and, drawing a letter from under the tray before which she sat, let
her glances pass from one gentleman to the other with a look of decided
inquiry. I drew in my breath and by dropping my handkerchief sought an
excuse for lingering in the room an instant longer.
“Will--may I ask one of you,” she stammered with her first show of
embarrassment during the meal, “to--to post this letter for me?”
Both gentlemen were standing and both gentlemen reached for it; but it
was into the secretary’s hand she put it, though her husband’s was
much the nearer. As Mr. Steele received it he gave it the casual glance
natural under the circumstances,--a glance which instantly, however,
took on an air of surprise that ended in a smile.
“Have you not made some mistake?” he asked.
“This does not look like a letter.” And he handed her back the paper she
had given him. With an involuntary ingathering of her breath, she seemed
to wake out of some dream and, looking down at the envelope she held,
she crushed it in her hand with a little laugh in which I heard the note
of real gaiety for the first time.
“Pardon me,” she exclaimed; and, meeting his amused gaze with one
equally expressive, she carelessly added: “I certainly brought a letter
down with me.”
Bowing pleasantly, but with that indefinable air of respect which
bespeaks the stranger, he waited while she hastened back to the tray and
drew from under it a second paper.
“Pardon my carelessness,” she said. “I must have caught up a scrawl of
the baby’s in taking this from my desk.”
She brought forward a letter and ended the whole remarkable episode by
handing it now to her husband, who, with an apologetic glance at the
other, put it in his pocket.
I say remarkable; for in the folded slip which had passed back and forth
between her and the secretary, I saw, or thought I saw, a likeness to
the paper she had brought the night before out of the attic.
If Mayor Packard saw anything unusual in his wife’s action he made no
mention of it when I went into his study at nine o’clock. And it was
so much of an enigma to me that I was not ready to venture a question
regarding it.
Her increased spirits and more natural conduct were the theme of the few
sentences he addressed me, and while he urged precaution and a continued
watch upon his wife, he expressed the fondest hope that he should find
her fully restored on his return at the end of two weeks.
I encouraged his hopes, and possibly shared them; but I changed my mind,
as he probably did his, when a few minutes later we met her in the hall
hurrying toward us with a newspaper in her hand and a ghastly look on
her face. “See! see! what they have dared to print!” she cried, with a
look, full of anguish, into his bewildered face.
He took the sheet, read, and flushed, then suddenly grew white.
“Outrageous!” he exclaimed. Then tenderly, “My poor darling! that they
should dare to drag your name into this abominable campaign!”
“And for no reason,” she faltered; “there is nothing wrong with me. You
believe that; you are sure of that,” she cried. I saw the article later.
It ran something like this:
“Rumor has it that not even our genial mayor’s closet is free from the
proverbial skeleton. Mrs. Packard’s health is not what it was,--and some
say that the causes are not purely physical.”
He tried to dissimulate. Putting his arm about her, he kissed her fondly
and protested with mingled energy and feeling:
“I believe you to be all you should be--a true woman and true wife.”
Her face lighted and she clung for a moment in passionate delight to his
breast; then she caught his look, which was tender but not altogether
open, and the shadows fell again as she murmured:
“You are not satisfied. Oh, what do you see, what do others see, that I
should be the subject of doubt? Tell me! I can never right myself till I
know.”
“I see a troubled face when I should see a happy one,” he answered
lightly; then, as she still clung in very evident question to his arm,
he observed gravely: “Two weeks ago you were the life of this house, and
of every other house into which your duties carried you. Why shouldn’t
you be the same to-day? Answer me that, dear, and all my doubts will
vanish, I assure you.”
“Henry,”--drooping her head and lacing her fingers in and out with
nervous hesitation,--“you will think me very foolish,--I know that it
will sound foolish, childish even, and utterly ridiculous; but I can
explain myself no other way. I have had a frightful experience--here--in
my own house--on the spot where I have been so happy, so unthinkingly
happy. Henry--do not laugh--it is real, very real, to me. The specter
which is said to haunt these walls has revealed itself to me. I have
seen the ghost.”
CHAPTER IX. SCRAPS
We did not laugh; we did not even question her sanity; at least I did
not; there was too much meaning in her manner.
“A specter,” her husband repeated with a suggestive glance at the
brilliant sunshine in which we all stood.
“Yes.” The tone was one of utter conviction. “I had never believed in
such things--never thought about them, but--it was a week ago--in the
library--I have not seen a happy moment since--”
“My darling!”
“Yes, yes, I know; but imagine! I was sitting reading. I had just come
from the nursery, and the memory of Laura’s good-night kiss was more in
my mind than the story I was finishing when--oh, I can not think of it
without a shudder!--the page before me seemed to recede and the words
fade away in a blue mist; glancing up I beheld the outlines of a
form between me and the lamp, which a moment before had been burning
brightly. Outlines, Henry,--I was conscious of no substance, and the
eyes which met mine from that shadowy, blood-curdling Something were
those of the grave and meant a grave for you or for me. Oh, I know what
I say! There was no mistaking their look. As it burned into and through
me, everything which had given reality to my life faded and seemed as
far away and as unsubstantial as a dream. Nor has its power over me gone
yet. I go about amongst you, I eat, I sleep, or try to; I greet men,
talk with women, but it is all unreal, all phantasmagoric, even yourself
and your love and, O God, my baby! What is real and distinctive, an
absolute part of me and my life, is that shape from the dead, with its
threatening eyes which pierce--pierce--”
She was losing her self-control. Her husband, with a soothing touch on
her arm, brought her back to the present.
“You speak of a form,” he said, “a shadowy outline. The form of what? A
man or a woman?”
“A man! a man!” With the exclamation she seemed to shrink into herself
and her eyes, just now deprecating and appealing, took on a hollow
stare, as if the vision she described had risen again before her.
In spite of himself and the sympathy he undoubtedly felt for her, an
ejaculation of impatience left her husband’s lips. Obligations very far
removed from the fantasies of a disturbed mind made these unsubstantial
fears of hers seem puerile enough to this virile, outspoken man. No
doubt she heard it, and to stop the matter-of-fact protest on his lips
added quickly:
“Not the form, face and eyes of a man, as they usually appear. Hell was
in his gaze and the message he gave, if it was a message, was one of
disaster, if not death. Do you wonder that my happiness vanished before
it? That I can not be myself since that dreadful day?”
The mayor was a practical man; he kept close to the subject.
“You saw this form between you and the lighted lamp. How long did it
stay there and what became of it?”
“I can not tell you. One moment it was there and the next it was gone,
and I found myself staring into vacancy. I seem to be staring there
still, waiting for the blow destined to shatter this household.”
“Nonsense! give me a kiss and fix your thoughts on something more
substantial. What we have to fear and all we have to fear is that I may
lose my election. And that won’t kill me, whatever effect it may have on
the party.”
“Henry,”--her voice had changed to one more natural, also her manner.
The confidence expressed in this outburst, the vitality, the masculine
attitude he took were producing their effect. “You don’t believe in what
I saw or in my fears. Perhaps you are right. I am ready to acknowledge
this; I will try to look upon it all as a freak of my imagination if you
will promise to forget these dreadful days, and if people, other people,
will leave me alone and not print such things about me.”
“I am ready to do my part,” was his glad reply, “and as for the other
people you mention, we shall soon bring them to book.” Raising his
voice, he called out his secretary’s name. As it rang loud and cheery
down the hall, the joy and renewed life which had been visible in her
manner lost some of their brightness.
“What are you going to do?” she gasped, with the quickness of doubt and
strong if reasonless apprehension. “Give an order,” he explained;
then, as the secretary appeared at our end of the hall, he held out the
journal which he had taken from his wife and indicating the offensive
paragraph, said:
“Find out who did that.”
Mr. Steele with a surprised look ran his eyes over the paragraph,
knitting his brows as he did.
“It is calumny,” fell from Mrs. Packard’s lips as she watched him.
“Most certainly,” he assented, with an energy which brought a flush of
pleasure to the humiliated woman’s cheek. “It will detain me two days
or more to follow up this matter,” he remarked, with a look of inquiry
directed at Mayor Packard.
“Never mind. Two days or a week, it is all one. I would rather lose
votes than pass over such an insult. Pin me down the man who has dared
attack me through my wife, and you will do me the greatest favor one man
can show another.”
Mr. Steele bowed. “I can not forego the final consultation we had
planned to hold on the train. May I ride down with you to the station?”
“Certainly; most happy.”
Mr. Steele withdrew, after casting a glance of entirely respectful
sympathy at the woman who up to this hour had faced the world without a
shadow between her and it; and, marking the lingering nature of the look
with which the mayor now turned on his wife, I followed the secretary’s
example and left them to enjoy their few last words alone.
Verily the pendulum of events swung wide and fast in this house.
This conclusion was brought back to me with fresh insistence a few
minutes later, when, on hearing the front door shut, I stepped to the
balustrade and looked over to see if Mrs. Packard was coming up. She
was not, for I saw her go into the library; but plainly on the marble
pavement below, just where we had all been standing, in fact, I
perceived the piece of paper she had brought with her from the
dining-room and had doubtless dropped in the course of the foregoing
conversation.
Running down in great haste, I picked it up. This scrap of I knew not
what, but which had been the occasion of the enigmatic scene I had
witnessed at the breakfast-table, necessarily interested me very much
and I could not help giving it a look. I saw that it was inscribed with
Hebraic-looking characters as unlike as possible to the scrawl of a
little child.
With no means of knowing whether they were legible or not, these
characters made a surprising impression upon me, one, indeed, that was
almost photographic.
I also noted that these shapes or characters, of which there were just
seven, were written on the face of an empty envelope. This decided any
doubts I may have had as to its identity with the paper she had brought
down from the attic. That had been a square sheet, which even if folded
would fail to enter this long and narrow envelope. The interest which
I had felt when I thought the two identical was a false interest. Yet
I could not but believe that this scrap had a value of its own equal to
the one with which, under this misapprehension, I had invested it.
Carrying it back to Mrs. Packard, I handed it over with the remark that
I had found it lying in the hall. She cast a quick look at it, gave me
another look and tossed the paper into the grate. As it caught fire and
flared up, the characters started vividly into view.
This second glimpse of them, added to the one already given me, fixed
the whole indelibly in my mind. This is the way they looked.
[]; V; [];.>; V; [-]; <;
While I watched these cabalistic marks pass from red to black and
finally vanish in a wild leap up the chimney, Mrs. Packard remarked:
“I wish I could destroy the memory of all my mistakes as completely as I
can that old envelope.”
I did not answer; I was watching the weary droop of her hand over the
arm of her chair.
“You are tired, Mrs. Packard,” was my sympathetic observation. “Will you
not take a nap? I will gladly sit by you and read you to sleep.”
“No, no,” she cried, at once alert and active; “no sleep. Look at that
pile of correspondence, half of it on charitable matters. Now that
I feel better, now that I have relieved my mind, I must look over my
letters and try to take up the old threads again.”
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“Possibly. If you will go to my room up-stairs, I will join you after I
have sorted and read my mail.”
I was glad to obey this order. I had a curiosity about her room. It had
been the scene of much I did not understand the night before. Should
I find any traces there of that search which had finally ended over my
head in the attic?
I was met at the door by Ellen. She wore a look of dismay which I felt
fully accounted for when I looked inside. Disorder reigned from one end
of the room to the other, transcending any picture I may have formed in
my own mind concerning its probable condition. Mrs. Packard must have
forgotten all this disarray, or at least had supposed it to have yielded
to the efforts of the maid, when she proposed my awaiting her there.
There were bureau-drawers with their contents half on the floor, boxes
with their covers off, cupboard-doors ajar and even the closet shelves
showing every mark of a frenzied search among them. Her rich gown,
soiled to the width of half a foot around the bottom, lay with cut laces
and its trimmings in rags under a chair which had been knocked over
and left where it fell. Even her jewels had not been put away, but lay
scattered on the dresser. Ellen looked ashamed and, when I retired
to the one bare place I saw in the bay of the window, muttered as she
plunged to lift one of the great boxes:
“It’s as bad as the attic room up-stairs. All the trunks have been
emptied on to the floor and one held her best summer dresses. What shall
I do? I have a whole morning’s work before me.”
“Let me help you,” I proposed, rising with sudden alacrity. My eyes had
just fallen on a small desk at my right, also on the floor beneath and
around it. Here, there and everywhere above and below lay scraps of
torn-up paper; and on many, if not on all of them, could be seen the
broken squares and inverted angles which had marked so curiously the
surface of the envelope she had handed to Mr. Steele, and which I had
afterward seen her burn.
“A baby can make a deal of mess,” I remarked, hurriedly collecting these
scraps and making a motion of throwing them into the waste-paper basket,
but hiding them in my blouse instead.
“The baby! Oh, the baby never did that. She’s too young.”
“Oh, I didn’t know. I haven’t seen much of the child though I heard her
cry once in the nursery. How old is she?”
“Twenty months and such a darling! You never saw such curls or such
eyes. Why, look at this!”
“What?” I demanded, hurrying to the closet, where Ellen stood bending
over something invisible to me. “Oh, nothing,” she answered, coming
quickly out. But in another moment, her tongue getting the better of her
discretion, she blurted out: “Do you suppose Mrs. Packard had any
idea of going with the mayor? Her bag is in there almost packed. I was
wondering where all her toilet articles were. That accounts--” Stopping,
she cast a glance around the room, ending with a shake of the head and
a shrug. “She needn’t have pulled out all her things,” she sharply
complained. “Certain, she is a mysterious lady;--as queer as she is
kind.”
CHAPTER X. A GLIMMER OF THE TRUTH
This was a sentiment I could thoroughly indorse. Mrs. Packard was
certainly an enigma to me. Leaving Ellen to finish her work, I went
upstairs to my own room, and, taking out the scraps of paper I had so
carefully collected, spread them out before me on the lid of the desk.
They were absolutely unintelligible to me--marks and nothing more.
Useless to waste time over such unmeaning scrawls when I had other and
more tangible subjects to consider. But I should not destroy them. There
might come a time when I should be glad to give them the attention which
my present excitement forbade. Putting them back in my desk, I settled
myself into a serious contemplation of the one fact which seemed to
give a partial if not wholly satisfactory explanation of Mrs. Packard’s
peculiar conduct during the last two weeks--her belief that she had been
visited by a specter of an unholy, threatening aspect.
That it was a belief and nothing more seemed sufficiently clear to me in
the cold-blooded analysis to which I now subjected the whole matter.
Phantoms have no place in the economy of nature. That Mrs. Packard
thought herself the victim of one was simply a proof of how deeply,
though perhaps unconsciously, she had been affected by the traditions
of the house. Such sensitiveness in a mind naturally firm and uncommonly
well poised, called for attention. Yet a physician had asserted that
he could do nothing for her. Granting that he was mistaken, would an
interference of so direct and unmistakable a character be wise in the
present highly strung condition of her nerves? I doubted it. It would
show too plainly the light in which we regarded her. I dared not
undertake the responsibility of such a course in Mayor Packard’s
absence. Some other way must be found to quiet her apprehensions and
bring her into harmony again with her surroundings. I knew of only one
course. If the influence of the house had brought on this hallucination,
then the influence of the house must be destroyed. She must be made
to see that, despite its unfortunate reputation, no specter had ever
visited it; that some purely natural cause was at the bottom of the
various manifestations which had successively driven away all previous
tenants.
Could I hope to effect this? It was an undertaking of no small moment.
Had I the necessary judgment? I doubted it, but my ambition was roused.
While Mr. Steele was devoting himself to the discovery of Mayor and
Mrs. Packard’s political enemy, I would essay the more difficult task
of penetrating the mystery threatening their domestic peace. I could but
fail; a few inquiries would assure me of the folly or the wisdom of my
course.
Having reached this point and satisfied myself as to my real duty, I
rose to leave my room for another word or two with Ellen. As I did so
my eyes fell on the shade still drawn between me and the next house. The
impulse to raise it was irresistible. I must see if either of the two
old faces still occupied that gable window. It was not likely. It was
not in ordinary human nature to keep up so unremitting a watch. Yet as
the shade flew up at my touch I realized that my astonishment would
have been great and my expectations altogether disappointed if I had
not encountered the fixed countenance and the set stare with which I
had come to connect this solitary window. Miss Charity was there, and,
though I now knew what underlay her senile, if not utterly mad watch,
the impression made upon me by her hopeless countenance was as keen as
it had ever been, and lent point and impetus to the task I had just set
for myself.
It was apparent that Mrs. Packard had forgotten or changed her mind
about joining me in her own room, but nevertheless I went out,
to discover what possible duties she might have laid out for me.
Ascertaining from Ellen that Mrs. Packard had engagements which would
take her out at noon, I waited for that hour to pass, then excused
myself and went out also.
The owner of the house whose shaded history I was now determined to
learn was John Searles, a real estate agent. To his office in Main
Street I at once proceeded, not without doubts and much inward
trepidation, but buoyed up by the assurance of Mayor Packard’s approval
of any attempt, however far-fetched or unpromising, which held out the
least possibility of relieving Mrs. Packard from her superstitious fears
and restoring the peace and happiness of the household. If only Mr.
Searles should prove to be an approachable man!
I had never seen him or heard him spoken of, or I should not have
encouraged myself with this hope. At my first glimpse of his tall, gaunt
figure, hard features, and brisk impatient movements, I knew that my wit
and equanimity would be put to their full test in the interview.
He was engaged, at my entrance, in some harsh dispute with a couple of
other men, but came forward quickly enough when he saw me. Recognizing
at once that any attempt at ingratiation would fail with this man, I
entered at once upon my errand by asking a question direct enough to
command his attention, if it did not insure the desired reply.
“Mr. Searles, when you purchased the house on Franklin Street, did
you know enough about it to have an answer ready for any one who might
declare it haunted?”
The abruptness of the attack produced its effect. Annoyance swept every
hint of patience from face and manner, and he exclaimed in a tone which
conveyed, only too openly, how disagreeable the subject was to him.
“Again!”
I smiled. It would not do to show how much I felt the total lack of
sympathy in his manner.
“You will have trouble,” said I, “until it is proved that the
occurrences which have provoked this report have a very natural and
quite human source.”
He stopped in his nervous fidgeting and gave me a quick hard look.
“Who are you?” he asked, “and why has Mrs. Packard made you her
messenger instead of coming herself?”
“I am her companion, engaged by Mayor Packard to stay with her during
his contemplated absence. I am here instead of Mrs. Packard because
it is she herself who is the present sufferer from the disagreeable
experiences which attend life in the Franklin Street house.”
“Mrs. Packard?” His tone betrayed a complete incredulity. “Mrs. Packard?
a woman of such strong good sense! I think you must have been misled by
some foolish attempt at humor on her part. Does she know that you have
come to me with this complaint?”
“She does not. She is not in a condition to be consulted on the subject.
I am Mayor Packard’s emissary. He is very anxious about his wife.” Then
as Mr. Searles continued unmoved, I added in a straightforward manner,
and with all the earnestness I felt: “Mrs. Packard believes herself to
have come face to face with an undoubted specter in the library of the
house they have rented from you. She related the circumstances to her
husband and to myself this very morning. It occurred, according to her
story, several days ago; meantime her manner and appearance have shown a
great change. Mayor Packard is not the only one who has noticed it. The
whole household has been struck by her condition, though no one knew its
cause until to-day. Of course, we do not believe in the specter; that
was pure hallucination on her part. This we no more doubt than you do.”
“Then what do you want here?” he asked, after a moment of harsh
scrutiny.
“Proof which will convince her that it was an hallucination and without
the least basis in any spiritual fact,” I returned. “If you will give
me a few minutes of your time, I will explain just what I mean and also
make known to you my wishes. I can wait till you have finished your
business with the gentlemen I see over there.”
He honored me with a look, which for the first time showed any
appreciation of my feelings, and pushing open a door near by, called out
to some one within:
“Here, Robinson, talk with this lady. Her business is not in my line.”
Then, turning to me with a quick, “Step in, Madam,” he left me with the
greatest abruptness and hurried back to the gentlemen awaiting him on
the other side of the room.
I was considerably taken aback by this move, but knew no other course
than to enter the room he had pointed out and pursue my conversation
with whomever I should find there.
Alas! the gentleman who rose at my entrance was also one of the tall,
thin and nervous type. But he was not without heart, like the other, as
was soon made apparent to me. Very few human faces are plainer than the
one I now searched for the encouragement of which I stood in such
sore need, but also very few faces, handsome or otherwise, have the
attraction of so pleasant a smile. Its affable greeting was followed by
the hasty pushing forward of a chair and a kind inquiry as to what he
could do for me.
My answer woke an immediate interest. “My name is Saunders,” I said. “I
am at present an inmate of Mayor Packard’s house--a house belonging to
Mr. Searles, and one which has its drawbacks.”
The meaning look with which I uttered the last sentence called forth an
answering one. A flash of excitement broke over his features and he
cast a quick glance at the door which fortunately had swung to at my
entrance.
“Has--have they--has anything of a disagreeable nature happened to any
one in this house?” he asked with ill-concealed perturbation. “I did not
expect it during their tenantry, but if such has occurred, I am obliged
to Mrs. Packard for letting me know. She promised to, you see, and--”
“She promised!” I cried.
“Yes; in joke no doubt, being at the time in a very incredulous state
of mind. She vowed that she would let me know the very day she saw the
lights or encountered anything in the house, which could be construed
into a spiritual visitation. Has such a manifestation occurred?” he
eagerly inquired. “Has it? has it? Am I to add her name to the list of
those who have found the house uninhabitable?”
“That I am not ready to say,” was my cautious response. “Mrs. Packard,
during the period of her husband’s candidacy, would scarcely wish to
draw public attention to herself or these supernatural happenings by
any such move. I hope that what I say to you on this subject will go no
further.”
“You may rest assured that it will never become public property,” he
assured me. “One person I am bound to tell; but that is all. That person
is too much interested in the house’s good name to spread so damaging a
story. An experience, more or less disagreeable, must have occurred to
some member of the family,” continued Mr. Robinson. “Your presence here
assures me of that. What kind of experience? The--manifestations have
not always been of the same nature.”
“No; and that is what so engages my attention. These experiences differ
so much in their character. Do you happen to know the exact nature of
each? I have a theory which I long to substantiate. May I trust you with
it?”
“You certainly may, Miss. No one has thought over this matter more
earnestly than I have. Not because of any superstitious tendency on my
part; rather from the lack of it. I don’t believe in spirits. I don’t
believe in supernatural agencies of any kind; yet strange things do
happen in that house, things which we find it hard to explain.”
“Mrs. Packard’s experience was this. She believes herself to have
encountered in the library the specter of a man; a specter with a gaze
so terrifying that it impressed itself upon her as an omen of death, or
some other dire disaster. What have your other tenants seen?”
“Shadows mostly; but not always. Sometimes the outline of an arm
projecting out of darkness; sometimes, the trace of steps on the hall
floors, or the discovery in the morning of an open door which had been
carefully closed at bedtime. Once it was the trailing of ghostly fingers
across the sleeper’s face, and once a succession of groans rising from
the lower halls and drawing the whole family from their beds, to find
no one but themselves within the whole four walls. A clearly outlined
phantom has been scarce. But Mrs. Packard has seen one, you say.”
“Thinks she has seen one,” I corrected. “Mayor Packard and myself both
look upon the occurrence as a wholly imaginary one, caused by her secret
brooding over the very manifestations you mention. If she could be
convinced that these manifestations had a physical origin, she would
immediately question the reality of the specter she now believes herself
to have seen. To bring her to this point I am ready to exert myself to
the utmost. Are you willing to do the same? If so, I can assure you of
Mayor Packard’s appreciation.”
“How? What? You believe the whole thing a fraud? That all these
tenants coming from various quarters manufactured all these stories and
submitted to endless inconvenience to perpetuate a senseless lie?”
“No, I don’t think that. The tenants were honest enough, but who owned
the house before Mr. Searles?” I was resolved to give no hint of the
information imparted to me by Mrs. Packard.
“The Misses Quinlan, the two maiden ladies who live next door to Mayor
Packard.”
“I don’t know them,” said I truthfully.
“Very worthy women,” Mr. Robinson assured me. “They are as much
disturbed and as completely puzzled as the rest of us over the
mysterious visitations which have lessened the value of their former
property. They have asked me more than once for an explanation of its
marked unpopularity. I felt foolish to say ghosts, but finally I found
myself forced to do so, much to my lasting regret.”
“How? Why?” I asked, with all the force of a very rapidly increasing
curiosity.
“Because its effect upon them has been so disastrous. They were women of
intelligence previous to this, one of them quite markedly so, but from
that day they have given evidence of mental weakness which can only be
attributed to their continual brooding over this mysterious topic. The
house, whose peculiarities we are now discussing, was once their
family homestead, and they shrink from the reproach of its unfortunate
reputation. What! you don’t think so?” he impetuously asked, moved,
perhaps, by my suggestive silence. “You are suspicious of these two poor
old women? What reason have you for that, Miss Saunders? What motive
could they have for depreciating the value of what was once their own
property?”
So he knew nothing of the lost bonds! Mrs. Packard had made no mistake
when she assured me of the secrecy with which they had endured their
misfortune. It gave me great relief; I could work more safely with this
secret unshared. But the situation called for dissimulation. It was with
anything but real openness that I declared:
“You can not calculate the impulses of an affected mind. Jealousy of the
past may influence these unfortunate women. They possibly hate to see
strangers in the rooms made sacred by old associations.”
“That is possible, but how could they, shut up in a house, separated
from yours by a distance of several feet, be held accountable for the
phenomena observed in 393? There are no means of communication between
the two buildings; even the doors, which once faced each other across
the dividing alley, have been closed up. Interference from them is
impossible.”
“No more impossible than from any other outside source. Is it a fact
that the doors and windows of this strangely haunted house were always
found securely locked after each occurrence of the phenomena you have
mentioned?”
“So I have been told by every tenant I have questioned, and I was
careful to question them, I assure you.”
“That settles the matter in my mind,” I asserted. “These women know of
some means of entrance that has escaped general discovery. Cunning is a
common attribute of the unsettled brain.”
“And they are very cunning. Miss Saunders, you have put a totally new
idea into my head. I do not place much stress upon the motive you have
attributed to them, nor do I see how the appearances noted could have
been produced by these two antiquated women; but the interest they have
displayed in the effect these have had upon others has been of the most
decided nature. They have called here after the departure of every
fresh tenant, and it was all that I could do to answer their persistent
inquiries. It is to them and not to Mr. Searles I feel bound to report
the apparition seen by Mrs. Packard.”
“To them!” I ejaculated in amazement. “Why to them? They no longer have
a proprietary interest in the house.”
“Very true, but they long ago exacted a promise from me to keep a strict
account of such complaints as were raised against the house. They, in
short, paid me to do so. From time to time they have come here to
read this account. It annoys Mr. Searles, but I have had considerable
patience with them for reasons which your kind heart will instantly
suggest.”
I thought of the real pathos of the situation, and how much I might
increase his interest by giving him the full details of their pitiful
history, and the maddening hopes it engendered of a possible discovery
of the treasure they still believed to be hidden in the house. What I
said, however, was this:
“You have kept an account, you say, of the varied phenomena seen in this
house? You have that account now?”
“Yes, Miss Saunders.”
“Let us look it over together. Let us see if it does not give us some
clue to the mystery puzzling us.”
He eyed me doubtfully, or as much so as his great nature would allow.
Meantime, I gauged my man. Was he to be thoroughly and unequivocally
trusted? His very hesitation in face of his undoubted sympathy with me
seemed to insure that he was. At all events, the occasion warranted some
risk on my part. At least I persuaded myself that it did; so without
waiting for his reply, I earnestly remarked:
“The matter is more serious than you suppose. If the mayor were not
unavoidably called away by his political obligations, he would add his
entreaties to mine for a complete sifting of this whole affair.
The Misses Quinlan may very well be innocent of inciting these
manifestations; if so, we can do them no harm by a little confidential
consideration of the affair from the standpoint I have given you. If
they are not, then Mr. Searles and Mayor Packard should know it.”
It appeared to convince him. His homely face shone with the fire of
sudden interest and resolve, and, reaching for a small drawer at the
right of his desk, he opened it and drew forth a folded paper which he
proceeded to open before me with the remark:
“Here is a report that I have kept for my own satisfaction. I do not
feel that in showing it to you I am violating any trust reposed in me by
the Misses Quinlan. I never promised secrecy in the matter.”
I glanced at the paper, all eagerness. He smiled and pushed it toward
me. This is what I read:
First tenant, Mr. Hugh Dennison and family.
Night 1: Heard and saw nothing.
Night 2: The entire household wakened by a scream seemingly
coming from below. This was twice repeated before Mr. Dennison
could reach the hall; the last time in far distant and smothered
tones. Investigation revealed nothing. No person and no trace
of any persons, save themselves, could be found anywhere in the
house. Uncomfortable feelings, but no alarm as yet.
Night 3: No screams, but a sound of groaning in the library.
The tall clock standing near the drawing-room door stopped at
twelve, and a door was found open which Mr. Dennison is sure he
shut tight on retiring. A second unavailing search. One servant
left the next morning.
Night 4: Footfalls on the stairs. The library door, locked by Mr.
Dennison’s own hand, is heard to unclose. The timepiece on the
library mantel-shelf strikes twelve; but it is slightly fast, and
Mr. and Mrs. Dennison, who have crept from their room to the
stair-head, listen breathlessly for the deep boom of the great
hall clock--the one which had stopped the night before. No light
is burning anywhere, and the hall below is a pit of darkness, when
suddenly Mrs. Dennison seizes her husband’s arm and, gasping out,
“The clock, the clock!” falls fainting to the floor. He bends to
look and faintly, in the heart of the shadows, he catches in dim
outline the face of the clock, and reaching up to it a spectral
hand. Nothing else--and in another moment that, too, disappears;
but the silence is something awful--the great clock has stopped.
With a shout he stumbles downward, lights up the hall, lights up
the rooms, but finds nothing, and no one. Next morning the second
servant leaves, but her place is soon supplied by an applicant we
will call Bess.
Night 5: Mrs. Dennison sleeps at a hotel with the children. Mr.
Dennison, revolver in hand, keeps watch on the haunted stairway.
He has fastened up every door and shutter with his own hand, and
with equal care extinguished all lights. As the hour of twelve
approaches, he listens breathlessly. There is certainly a stir
somewhere, but he can not locate it, not quite satisfy himself
whether it is a footfall or a rustle that he hears. The clock
in the library strikes twelve, then the one in the hall gives one
great boom, and stops. Instantly he raises his revolver and
shoots directly at its face. No sound from human lips answers
the discharge of the weapon. In the flash which for a moment has
lighted up the whole place, he catches one glimpse of the broken
dial with its two hands pointing directly at twelve, but nothing
more. Then all is dark again, and he goes slowly back to his own
room.
The next day he threw up his lease.
Second tenant: Mrs. Crispin.
Stayed but one night. Would never tell us what she saw.
Third tenant: Mrs. Southwick. Hires Bess for maid-of-all-work, the
only girl she could get.
Night 1: Unearthly lights shining up through the house, waking
the family. Disappeared as one and all came creeping out into the
hall.
Night 2: The same, followed by deep groans. Children waked and
shrieked.
Night 3: Nothing.
Night 4: Lights, groans and strange shadows on the walls and
ceilings of the various hallways. Family give notice the next day,
but do not leave for a week, owing to sickness. No manifestations
while doctor and nurses are in the house.
House stands vacant for three months. Bess offers to remain in it
as caretaker, but her offer is refused.
Police investigate.
An amusing farce.
One of them saw something and could not be laughed out of it by his
fellows. But the general report was unsatisfactory. The mistake
was the employment of Irishmen in a task involving superstition.
Fourth tenant: Mr. Weston and family.
Remain three weeks. Leaves suddenly because the nurse encountered
something moving about in the lower hall one night when she went
down to the kitchen to procure hot water for a sick child. Bess
again offered her services, but the family would not stay under any
circumstances.
Another long period without tenant.
Mr. Searles tries a night in the empty house. Sits and dozes in
library till two. Wakes suddenly. Door he has tightly shut is
standing open. He feels the draft. Turns on light from dark
lantern. Something is there--a shape--he can not otherwise
describe it. As he stares at it, it vanishes through doorway. He
rushes for it; finds nothing. The hall is empty; so is the whole
house.
This finished the report.
“So Mr. Searles has had his own experiences of these Mysteries!” I
exclaimed.
“As you see. Perhaps that is why he is so touchy on the subject.”
“Did he ever give you any fuller account of his experience than is
detailed here?”
“No; he won’t talk about it.”
“He tried to let the house, however.”
“Yes, but he did not succeed for a long time. Finally the mayor took
it.”
Refolding the paper, I handed it back to Mr. Robinson. I had its
contents well in mind.
“There is one fact to which I should like to call your attention,” said
I. “The manifestations, as here recorded, have all taken place in the
lower part of the house. I should have had more faith in them, if they
had occurred above stairs. There are no outlets through the roof.”
“Nor any visible ones below. At least no visible one was ever found
open.”
“What about the woman, Bess?” I asked. “How do you account for her
persistency in clinging to a place her employers invariably fled from?
She seems to have been always on hand with an offer of her services.”
“Bess is not a young woman, but she is a worker of uncommon ability,
very rigid and very stoical. She herself accounts for her willingness to
work in this house by her utter disbelief in spirits, and the fact that
it is the one place in the world which connects her with her wandering
and worthless husband. Their final parting occurred during Mr.
Dennison’s tenancy, and as she had given the wanderer the Franklin
Street address, you could not reason her out of the belief that on his
return he would expect to find here there. That is what she explained to
Mr. Searles.”
“You interest me, Mr. Robinson. Is she a plain woman? Such a one as a
man would not be likely to return to?”
“No, she is a very good-looking woman, refined and full of character,
but odd, very odd,--in fact, baffling.”
“How baffling?”
“I never knew her to look any one directly in the eye. Her manner is
abstracted and inspires distrust. There is also a marked incongruity
between her employment and her general appearance. She looks out of
place in her working apron, yet she is not what you would call a lady.”
“Did her husband come back?”
“No, not to my knowledge.”
“And where is she now?”
“Very near you, Miss Saunders, when you are at your home in Franklin
Street. Not being able to obtain a situation in the house itself, she
has rented the little shop opposite, where you can find her any day
selling needles and thread.”
“I have noticed that shop,” I admitted, not knowing whether to give more
or less weight to my suspicions in thus finding the mayor’s house under
the continued gaze of another watchful eye.
“You will find two women there,” the amiable Mr. Robinson hastened to
explain. “The one with a dark red spot just under her hair is Bess. But
perhaps she doesn’t interest you. She always has me. If it had not been
for one fact, I should have suspected her of having been in some way
connected with the strange doings we have just been considering. She was
not a member of the household during the occupancy of Mrs. Crispin and
the Westons, yet these unusual manifestations went on just the same.”
“Yes, I noted that.”
“So her connivance is eliminated.”
“Undoubtedly. I am still disposed to credit the Misses Quinlan with the
whole ridiculous business. They could not bear to see strangers in the
house they had once called their own, and took the only means suggested
to their crazy old minds to rid the place of them.”
Mr. Robinson shook his head, evidently unconvinced. The temptation was
great to strengthen my side of the argument by a revelation of their
real motive. Once acquainted with the story of the missing bonds he
could not fail to see the extreme probability that the two sisters,
afflicted as they were with dementia, should wish to protect the wealth
which was once so near their grasp, from the possibility of discovery by
a stranger. But I dared not take him quite yet into my full confidence.
Indeed, the situation did not demand it. I had learned from him what I
was most anxious to know, and was now in a position to forward my own
projects without further aid from him. Almost as if he had read my
thoughts, Mr. Robinson now hastened to remark:
“I find it difficult to credit these poor old souls with any such
elaborate plan to empty the house, even had they possessed the most
direct means of doing so, for no better reason than this one you state.
Had money been somehow involved, or had they even thought so, it would
be different. They are a little touched in the head on the subject of
money; which isn’t very strange considering their present straits. They
even show an interest in other people’s money. They have asked me more
than once if any of their former neighbors have seemed to grow more
prosperous since leaving Franklin Street.”
“I see; touched, touched!” I laughed, rising in my anxiety to hide any
show of feeling at the directness of this purely accidental attack. But
the item struck me as an important one. Mr. Robinson gave me a keen look
as I uttered the usual commonplaces and prepared to take my leave.
“May I ask your intentions in this matter?” said he.
“I wish I knew them myself,” was my perfectly candid answer. “It strikes
me now that my first step should be to ascertain whether there exists
any secret connection between the two houses which would enable the
Misses Quinlan or their emissaries to gain access to their old home,
without ready detection. I know of none, and--”
“There is none,” broke in its now emphatic agent. “A half-dozen tenants,
to say nothing of Mr. Searles himself, have looked it carefully over.
All the walls are intact; there is absolutely no opening anywhere for
surreptitious access.”
“Possibly not. You certainly discourage me very much. I had hoped much
from my theory. But we are not done with the matter. Mrs. Packard’s mind
must be cleared of its fancies, if it is in my power to do it. You will
hear from me again, Mr. Robinson. Meanwhile, I may be sure of your good
will?”
“Certainly, certainly, and of my cooperation also, if you want it.”
“Thank you,” said I, and left the office.
His last look was one of interest not untinged by compassion.
CHAPTER XI. BESS
On my way back I took the opposite side of the street from that I
usually approached. When I reached the little shop I paused. First
glancing at the various petty articles exposed in the window, I quietly
stepped in. A contracted and very low room met my eyes, faintly lighted
by a row of panes in the upper half of the door and not at all by the
window, which was hung on the inside with a heavy curtain. Against two
sides of this room were arranged shelves filled with boxes labeled in
the usual way to indicate their contents. These did not strike me as
being very varied or of a very high order. There was no counter in
front, only some tables on which lay strewn fancy boxes of thread and
other useless knick-knacks to which certain shopkeepers appear to cling
though they can seldom find customers for them. A woman stood at one of
these tables untangling a skein of red yarn. Behind her I saw another
leaning in an abstracted way over a counter which ran from wall to wall
across the extreme end of the shop. This I took to be Bess. She had
made no move at my entrance and she made no move now. The woman with
the skein appeared, on the contrary, as eager to see as the other seemed
indifferent. I had to buy something and I did so in as matter-of-fact
a way as possible, considering that my attention was more given to the
woman in the rear than to the articles I was purchasing.
“You have a very convenient place here,” I casually remarked, as I
handed out my money. With this I turned squarely about and looked
directly at her whom I believed to be Bess.
A voluble answer from the woman at my side, but not the wink of an eye
from the one whose attention I had endeavored to attract.
“I live in the house opposite,” I carelessly went on, taking in every
detail of the strange being I was secretly addressing.
“Oh!” she exclaimed in startled tones, roused into speech at last. “You
live opposite; in Mayor Packard’s house?”
I approached her, smiling. She had dropped her hands from her chin and
seemed very eager now, more eager than the other woman, to interest me
in what she had about her and so hold me to the shop.
“Look at this,” she cried, holding up an article of such cheap
workmanship that I wondered so sensible an appearing woman would cumber
her shelves with it. “I am glad you live over there,” for I had nodded
to her question. “I’m greatly interested in that house. I’ve worked
there as cook and waitress several times.”
I met her look; it was sharp and very intelligent.
“Then you know its reputation,” I laughingly suggested.
She made a contemptuous gesture. The woman was really very good-looking,
but baffling in her manner, as Mr. Robinson had said, and very hard to
classify. “That isn’t what interests me,” she protested. “I’ve other
reasons. You’re not a relative of the family, are you?” she asked
impetuously, leaning over the table to get a nearer view of my face.
“No, nor even a friend. I am in their employ just now as a companion to
Mrs. Packard. Her health is not very good, and the mayor is away a great
deal.”
“I thought you didn’t belong there. I know all who belong there. I’ve
little else to do but stare across the street,” she added apologetically
and with a deep flush. “Business is very poor in this shop.”
I was standing directly in front of her. Turning quickly about, I looked
through the narrow panes of the door, and found that my eyes naturally
rested on the stoop of the opposite house. Indeed, this stoop was about
all that could be seen from the spot where this woman stood.
“Another eve bent in constant watchfulness upon us,” I inwardly
commented. “We are quite surrounded. The house should certainly hold
treasure to warrant all this interest. But what could this one-time
domestic know of the missing bonds?”
“An old-fashioned doorway,” I remarked. “It is the only one of the kind
on the whole street. It makes the house conspicuous, but in a way I
like. I don’t wonder you enjoy looking at it. To me such a house and
such a doorway suggest mystery and a romantic past. If the place is not
haunted--and only a fool believes in ghosts--something strange must
have happened there or I should never have the nervous feeling I have in
going about the halls and up and down the stairways. Did you never have
that feeling?”
“Never. I’m not given to feelings. I live one day after another and just
wait.”
Not given to feelings! With such eyes in such a face! You should have
looked down when you said that, Bess; I might have believed you then.
“Wait?” I softly repeated. “Wait for what? For fortune to enter your
little shop-door?”
“No, for my husband to come back,” was her unexpected answer, uttered
grimly enough to have frightened that husband away again, had he been
fortunate or unfortunate enough to hear her. “I’m a married woman, Miss,
and shouldn’t be working like this. And I won’t be always; my man’ll
come back and make a lady of me again. It’s that I’m waiting for.”
Here a customer came in. Naturally I drew back, for our faces were
nearly touching.
“Don’t go,” she pleaded, catching me by the sleeve and turning
astonishingly pale for one ordinarily so ruddy. “I want to ask a favor
of you. Come into my little room behind. You won’t regret it.” This last
in an emphatic whisper.
Amazed at the turn which the conversation had taken and congratulating
myself greatly upon my success in insuring her immediate confidence, I
slipped through the opening she made for me between the tables serving
for a counter and followed her into a room at the rear, which from its
appearance answered the triple purpose of sleeping-room, parlor and
kitchen.
“Pardon my impertinence,” said she, as she carefully closed the door
behind us. “It’s not my habit to make friends with strangers, but
I’ve taken a fancy to you and think you can be trusted. Will--” she
hesitated, then burst out, “will you do something for me?”
“If I can,” I smiled.
“How long do you expect to stay over there?”
“Oh, that I can’t say.”
“A month? a week?”
“Probably a week.”
“Then you can do what I want. Miss--”
“Saunders,” I put in.
“There is something in that house which belongs to me.”
I started; this was hardly what I expected her to say.
“Something of great importance to me; something which I must have and
have very soon. I don’t want to go there for it myself. I hid it in a
very safe place one day when my future looked doubtful, and I didn’t
know where I might be going or what might happen to me. Mrs. Packard
would think it strange if she saw where, and might make it very
uncomfortable for me. But you can get what I want without trouble if you
are not afraid of going about the house at night. It’s a little box with
my name on it; and it is hidden--”
“Where?”
“Behind a brick I loosened in the cellar wall. I can describe the very
place. Oh, you think I am asking too much of you--a stranger and a
lady.”
“No, I’m willing to do what I can for you. But I think you ought to tell
me what’s in the box, so that I shall know exactly what I am doing.”
“I can’t tell; I do not dare to tell till I have it again in my own
hand. Then we will look it over together. Do you hesitate? You needn’t;
no inconvenience will follow to any one, if you are careful to rely on
yourself and not let any other person see or handle this box.”
“How large is it?” I asked, quite as breathless as herself, as I
realized the possibilities underlying this remarkable request.
“It is so small that you can conceal it under an apron or in the pocket
of your coat. In exchange for it, I will give you all I can afford--ten
dollars.”
“No more than that?” I asked, testing her.
“No more at first. Afterward--if it brings me what it ought to, I will
give you whatever you think it is worth. Does that satisfy you? Are you
willing to risk an encounter with the ghost, for just ten dollars and a
promise?”
The smile with which she said this was indescribable. I think it gave
me a more thrilling consciousness of human terror in face of the
supernatural than anything which I had yet heard in this connection.
Surely her motive for remaining in the haunted house had been
extraordinarily strong.
“You are afraid,” she declared. “You will shrink, when the time comes,
from going into that cellar at night.”
I shook my head; I had already regained both my will-power and the
resolution to carry out this adventure to the end.
“I will go,” said I.
“And get me my box?”
“Yes!”
“And bring it to me here as early the next day as you can leave Mrs.
Packard?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, you don’t know what this means to me.”
I had a suspicion, but held my peace and let her rhapsodize.
“No one in all my life has ever shown me so much kindness! Are you sure
you won’t be tempted to tell any one what you mean to do?”
“Quite sure.”
“And will go down into the cellar and get this box for me, all by
yourself?”
“Yes, if you demand it.”
“I do; you will see why some day.”
“Very well, you can trust me. Now tell me where I am to find the brick
you designate.”
“It’s in the cellar wall, about half-way down on the right-hand side.
You will see nothing but stone for a foot or two above the floor, but
after that comes the brick wall. On one of these bricks you will detect
a cross scratched. That’s the one. It will look as well cemented as the
rest, but if you throw water against it, you will find that in a little
while you will be able to pry it out. Take something to do this with, a
knife or a pair of scissors. When the brick falls out, feel behind with
your hand and you will find the box.”
“A questionable task. What if I should be seen at it?”
“The ghost will protect you!”
Again that smile of mingled sarcasm and innuendo. It was no common
servant girl’s smile, any more than her language was that of the
ignorant domestic.
“I believe the ghost fails to walk since the present tenants came into
the house,” I remarked.
“But its reputation remains; you’ll not be disturbed.”
“Possibly not; a good reason why you might safely undertake the business
yourself. I can find some way of letting you in.”
“No, no. I shall never again cross that threshold!” Her whole attitude
showed revolt and bitter determination.
“Yet you have never been frightened by anything there?”
“I know; but I have suffered; that is, for one who has no feelings. The
box will have to remain in its place undisturbed if you won’t get it for
me.”
“Positively?”
“Yes, Miss; nothing would induce me even to cross the street. But I want
the box.”
“You shall have it,” said I.
CHAPTER XII. SEARCHINGS
I seemed bound to be the prey of a divided duty. As I crossed the
street, I asked myself which of the two experiments I had in mind should
occupy my attention first. Should I proceed at once with that close
study and detailed examination of the house, which I contemplated in my
eagerness to establish my theory of a secret passage between it and the
one now inhabited by the Misses Quinlan, or should I wait to do this
until I had recovered the box, which might hold still greater secrets?
I could not decide, so I resolved to be guided by circumstances. If Mrs.
Packard were still out, I did not think I could sit down till I had a
complete plan of the house as a start in the inquiry which interested me
most.
Mrs. Packard was still out,--so much Nixon deigned to tell me in answer
to my question. Whether the fact displeased him or not I could not say,
but he was looking very sour and seemed to resent the trouble he had
been to in opening the door for me. Should I notice this, even by an
attempt to conciliate him? I decided not. A natural manner was best; he
was too keen not to notice and give his own interpretation to uncalled
for smiles or words which contrasted too strongly with his own marked
reticence. I therefore said nothing as he pottered slowly back into
his own quarters in the rear, but lingered about down-stairs till I was
quite sure he was out of sight and hearing. Then I came back and took up
my point of view on the spot where the big hall clock had stood in the
days of Mr. Dennison. Later, I made a drawing of this floor as it must
have looked at that time. You will find it on the opposite page.
[transcriber’s note: The plan shows the house to have two
rows of rooms with a hall between. In the front each room
ends in a bow window. On the right the drawing-room has two
doors opening into the hall, equally spaced near the front
and rear of the room. Across the hall are two rooms of
apparently equal size; a reception room in front and the
library behind it, both rooms having windows facing on the
alley. There is a stairway in the hall just behind the door
to the reception room. The study is behind the drawing-room.
Opposite this is a side hall and the dining-room. The
library and dining-room both open off this hall with the
dining room also having doors to the main hall and kitchen.
The side hall ends with a stoop in the alley. A small room
labeled kitchen, etc. lies behind the dining-room and the
hall extends beyond the study beside the kitchen with the
cellar stairs on the kitchen side. There is a small
rectangle in the hall about two-thirds of the way down the
side of the drawing-room which is labeled A.]
Near the place where I stood (marked A on the plan), had occurred most
of the phenomena, which could be located at all. Here the spectral hand
had been seen stopping the clock. Here the shape had passed encountered
by Mr. Weston’s cook, and just a few steps beyond where the library door
opened under the stairs Mr. Searles had seen the flitting figure which
had shut his mouth on the subject of his tenants’ universal folly.
From the front then toward the back these manifestations had invariably
peeped to disappear--where? That was what I was to determine; what I
am sure Mayor Packard would wish me to determine if he knew the whole
situation as I knew it from his wife’s story and the record I had just
read at the agent’s office.
Alas! there were many points of exit from this portion of the hall. The
drawing-room opened near; so did Mayor Packard’s study; then there was
the kitchen with its various offices, ending as I knew in the cellar
stairs. Nearer I could see the door leading into the dining-room and,
opening closer yet, the short side hall running down to what had once
been the shallow vestibule of a small side entrance, but which, as I had
noted many times in passing to and from the dining-room, was now used as
a recess or alcove to hold a cabinet of Indian curios. In which of these
directions should I carry my inquiry? All looked equally unpromising,
unless it was Mayor Packard’s study, and that no one with the exception
of Mr. Steele ever entered save by his invitation, not even his wife.
I could not hope to cross that threshold, nor did I greatly desire to
invade the kitchen, especially while Nixon was there. Should I have
to wait till the mayor’s return for the cooperation my task certainly
demanded? It looked that way. But before yielding to the discouragement
following this thought, I glanced about me again and suddenly
remembered, first the creaking board, which had once answered to the
so-called spirit’s flight, and secondly the fact which common sense
should have suggested before, that if my theory were true and the secret
presence, whose coming and going I had been considering, had fled by
some secret passage leading to the neighboring house, then by all laws
of convenience and natural propriety that passage should open from
the side facing the Quinlan domicile, and not from that holding Mayor
Packard’s study and the remote drawing-room.
This considerably narrowed my field of inquiry, and made me immediately
anxious to find that creaking board which promised to narrow it further
yet.
Where should I seek it? In these rear halls, of course, but I hated to
be caught pacing them at this hour. Nixon’s step had not roused it or
I should have noticed it, for I was, in a way, listening for this very
sound. It was not in the direct path then from the front door to the
kitchen. Was it on one side or in the space about the dining-room door
or where the transverse corridor met the main hall? All these floors
were covered in the old-fashioned way with carpet, which would seem to
show that no new boards had been laid and that the creaking one should
still be here.
I ventured to go as far as the transverse hall,--I was at full liberty
to enter the library. But no result followed this experiment; my
footsteps had never fallen more noiselessly. Where could the board be?
In aimless uncertainty I stepped into the corridor and instantly a creak
woke under my foot. I had located the direction in which one of the
so-called phantoms had fled. It was down this transverse hall.
Flushed with apparent success, I looked up at the walls on either side
of me. They were gray with paint and presented one unbroken surface from
base-board to ceiling, save where the two doorways opened, one into the
library, the other into the dining-room. Had the flying presence escaped
by either of these two rooms? I knew the dining-room well. I had had
several opportunities for studying its details. I thought I knew the
library; besides, Mr. Searles had been in the library when the shape
advanced upon him from the hall,--a fact eliminating that room as a
possible source of approach! What then was left? The recess which had
once served as an old-time entrance. Ah, that gave promise of something.
It projected directly toward where the adjacent walls had once held two
doors, between which any sort of mischief might take place. Say that the
Misses Quinlan had retained certain keys. What easier than for one of
them to enter the outer door, strike a light, open the inner one and
flash this light up through the house till steps or voices warned her of
an aroused family, when she had only to reclose the inside door, put out
the light and escape by the outer one.
But alas! at this point I remembered that this, as well as all other
outside doors, had invariably been protected by bolt, and that these
bolts had never been found disturbed. Veritably I was busying myself for
nothing over this old vestibule. Yet before I left it I gave it another
glance; satisfied myself that its walls were solid; in fact, built of
brick like the house. This on two sides; the door occupied the third and
showed the same unbroken coat of thick, old paint, its surface barely
hidden by the cabinet placed at right angles to it. Enough of it,
however, remained exposed to view to give me an opportunity of admiring
its sturdy panels and its old-fashioned lock. The door was further
secured by heavy pivoted bars extending from jamb to jamb. An
egg-and-dart molding extended all around the casing, where the inner
door had once hung. All solid, all very old-fashioned, but totally
unsuggestive of any reasonable solution of the mystery I had vaguely
hoped it to explain. Was I mistaken in my theory, and must I look
elsewhere for what I still honestly expected to find? Undoubtedly; and
with this decision I turned to leave the recess, when a sensation, of
too peculiar a nature for me readily to understand it, caused me to stop
short, and look down at my feet in an inquiring way and afterward to
lift the rug on which I had been standing and take a look at the floor
underneath. It was covered with carpet, like the rest of the hall,
but this did not disguise the fact that it sloped a trifle toward the
outside wall. Had not the idea been preposterous, I should have said
that the weight of the cabinet had been too much for it, causing it to
sag quite perceptibly at the base-board. But this seemed too improbable
to consider. Old as the house was, it was not old enough for its beams
to have rolled. Yet the floor was certainly uneven, and, what was
stranger yet, had, in sagging, failed to carry the base-board with it.
This I could see by peering around the side of the cabinet. Was it an
important enough fact to call for explanation? Possibly not; yet when
I had taken a short leap up and come down on what was certainly an
unstable floor, I decided that I should never be satisfied till I had
seen that cabinet removed and the floor under it rigidly examined.
Yet when I came to take a look at this projection from the library
window and saw that this floor, like that of the many entrances, was
only the height of one step from the ground, I felt the folly into
which my inquiring spirit had led me, and would have dismissed the whole
subject from my mind if my eyes had not detected at that moment on
one of the tables an unusually thin paper-knife. This gave me an idea.
Carrying it back with me into the recess, I got down on my knees, and
first taking the precaution to toss a little stick-pin of mine under
the cabinet to be reached after in case I was detected there by Nixon,
I insinuated the cutter between the base-board and the floor and found
that I could not only push it in an inch or more before striking the
brick, but run it quite freely around from one corner of the recess to
the other. This was surely surprising. The exterior of this vestibule
must be considerably larger than the interior would denote. What
occupied the space between? I went upstairs full of thought. Sometime,
and that before long, I would have that cabinet removed.
CHAPTER XIII. A DISCOVERY
Mrs. Packard came in very soon after this. She was accompanied by two
friends and I could hear them talking and laughing in her room upstairs
all the afternoon. It gave me leisure, but leisure was not what I stood
in need of, just now. I desired much more an opportunity to pursue my
inquiries, for I knew why she had brought these friends home with her
and lent herself to a merriment that was not natural to her. She wished
to forestall thought; to keep down dread; to fill the house so full of
cheer that no whisper should reach her from that spirit-world she had
come to fear. She had seen--or believed that she had seen--a specter,
and she had certainly heard a laugh that had come from no explicable
human source.
The brightness of the sunshiny day aided her unconsciously in this
endeavor. But I foresaw the moment when this brightness would disappear
and her friends say good-by. Then the shadows must fall again more
heavily than ever, because of their transient lifting. I almost wished
she had indeed gone with her husband, and found myself wondering why he
had not asked her to do so when he found what it was that depressed her.
Perhaps he had, and it was she who had held back. She may have made
up her mind to conquer this weakness, and to conquer it where it had
originated and necessarily held the strongest sway. At all events, he
was gone and she was here, and I had done nothing as yet to relieve that
insidious dread with which she must anticipate a night in this house
without his presence.
I wondered if it would be any relief to her to have Mr. Steele remain
upon the premises. I had heard him come in about three o’clock and go
into the study, and when the time came for her friends to take their
leave, and their voices in merry chatter came up to my ear from the open
boudoir door, I stole down to ask her if I could suggest it to him. But
I was too late. Just as I reached the head of the stairs on the second
floor he came out of the study below and passed, hat in hand, toward the
front door.
“What a handsome man!” came in an audible whisper from one of the
ladies, who now stood in the lower hall.
“Who is he?” asked the other.
I thought he held the door open one minute longer than was necessary to
catch her reply. It was a very cold and unenthusiastic one.
“That is Mr. Packard’s secretary,” said she. “He will join the mayor
just as soon as he has finished certain preparations intrusted to him.”
“Oh!” was their quiet rejoinder, but a note of disappointment rang in
both voices as the door shut behind him.
“One does not often see a perfectly handsome man.”
I stepped down to meet her when she in turn had shut the door upon them.
But I stopped half-way. She was standing with her head turned away from
me and the knob still in her hand. I saw that she was thinking or was
the prey of some rapidly growing resolve.
Suddenly she seized the key and turned it.
“The house is closed for the night,” she announced as she looked up and
met my astonished gaze. “No one goes out or comes in here again till
morning. I have seen all the visitors I have strength for.”
And though she did not know I saw it, she withdrew the key and slipped
it into her pocket. “This is Nixon’s night out,” she murmured, as she
led the way to the library. “Ellen will wait on us and we’ll have the
baby down and play games and be as merry as ever we can be,--to keep
the ghosts away,” she cried in fresh, defiant tones that had just the
faintest suggestion of hysteria in them. “We shall succeed; I don’t mean
to think of it again. I’m right in that, am I not? You look as if you
thought so. Ah, Mr. Packard was kind to secure me such a companion.
I must prove my gratitude to him by keeping you close to me. It was a
mistake to have those light-headed women visit me to-day. They tired
more than they comforted me.”
I smiled, and put the question which concerned me most nearly.
“Does Nixon stay late when he goes out?”
She threw herself into a chair and took up her embroidery.
“He will to-night,” was her answer. “A little grandniece of his is
coming on a late train from Pittsburgh. I don’t think the train is due
till midnight, and after that he’s got to take her to his daughter’s on
Carey Street. It will be one o’clock at least before he can be back.”
I hid my satisfaction. Fate was truly auspicious. I would make good use
of his absence. There was nobody else in the house whose surveillance I
feared.
“Pray send for the baby now,” I exclaimed. “I am eager to begin our
merry evening.”
She smiled and rang the bell for Letty, the nurse.
Late that night I left my room and stole softly down-stairs. Mrs.
Packard had ordered a bed made up for herself in the nursery and had
retired early. So had Ellen and Letty. The house was therefore clear
below stairs, and after I had passed the second story I felt myself
removed from all human presence as though I were all alone in the house.
This was a relief to me, yet the experience was not a happy one. Ellen
had asked permission to leave the light burning in the hall during the
mayor’s absence, so the way was plain enough before me; but no parlor
floor looks inviting after twelve o’clock at night, and this one held
a secret as yet unsolved, which did not add to its comfort or take
the mysterious threat from the shadows lurking in corners and under
stairways which I had to pass. As I hurried past the place where the
clock had once stood, I thought of the nurses’ story and of the many
frightened hearts which had throbbed on the stairway I had just left and
between the walls I was fast approaching; but I did not turn back. That
would have been an acknowledgment of the truth of what I was at this
very time exerting my full faculties to disprove.
I knew little about the rear of the house and nothing about the cellar.
But when I had found my way into the kitchen and lit the candle I had
brought from my room, I had no difficulty in deciding which of the
many doors led below. There is something about a cellar door which is
unmistakable, but it took me a minute to summon up courage to open it
after I had laid my hand on its old-fashioned latch. Why do we so hate
darkness and the chill of unknown regions, even when we know they are
empty of all that can hurt or really frighten us? I was as safe there
as in my bed up-stairs, yet I had to force myself to consider more than
once the importance of my errand and the positive result it might have
in allaying the disturbance in more than one mind, before I could
lift that latch and set my foot on the short flight which led into the
yawning blackness beneath me.
But once on my way I took courage. I pictured to myself the collection
of useful articles with which the spaces before me were naturally
filled, and thought how harmless were the sources of the grotesque
shadows which bowed to me from every side and even from the cement floor
toward the one spot where the stones of the foundation showed themselves
clear of all encumbering objects. As I saw how numerous these articles
were, and how small a portion of the wall itself was really visible, I
had my first practical fear, and a practical fear soon puts imaginary
ones to flight. What if some huge box or case of bottles should have
been piled up in front of the marked brick I was seeking? I am strong,
but I could not move such an object alone, and this search was a
solitary one; I had been forbidden to seek help.
The anxiety this possibility involved nerved me to instant action. I
leaped forward to the one clear spot singled out for me by chance and
began a hurried scrutiny of the short strip of wall which was all that
was revealed to me on the right-hand side. Did it hold the marked brick?
My little candle shook with eagerness and it was with difficulty I
could see the face of the brick close enough to determine. But fortune
favored, and presently my eye fell on one whose surface showed a ruder,
scratched cross. It was in the lowest row and well within reach of my
hand. If I could move it the box would soon be in my possession--and
what might that box not contain!
Looking about, I found the furnace and soon the gas-jet which made
attendance upon it possible. This lit, I could set my candle down, and
yet see plainly enough to work. I had shears in my pocket. I have had a
man’s training in the handling of tools and felt quite confident that I
could pry this brick out if it was as easily loosened as Bess had given
me to understand. My first thrust at the dusty cement inclosing it
encouraged me greatly. It was very friable and so shallow that my
scissors’-point picked it at once. In five minutes’ time the brick was
clear, so that I easily lifted it out and set it on the floor. The small
black hole which was left was large enough to admit my hand. I wasted no
time thrusting it in, expecting to feel the box at once and draw it out.
But it was farther back than I expected, and while I was feeling about
something gave way and fell with a slight, rustling noise down out of my
reach. Was it the box? No, for in another instant I had come in contact
with its broken edges and had drawn it out; the falling object must
have been some extra mortar, and it had gone where? I did not stop to
consider then. The object in my hand was too alluring; the size, the
shape too suggestive of a package of folded bonds for me to think
of anything but the satisfaction of my curiosity and the consequent
clearing of a very serious mystery.
Just at this moment, one of intense excitement, I heard, or thought I
heard, a stealthy step behind me. Forcing myself to calmness, however, I
turned and, holding the candle high convinced myself that I was alone in
the cellar.
Carrying the box nearer the light, I pulled off its already loosened
string and lifted the cover. In doing this I suffered from no qualms
of conscience. My duty seemed very clear to me, and the end, a totally
impersonal one, more than justified the means.
A folded paper met my eyes--one--not of the kind I expected; then some
letters whose address I caught at a glance. “Elizabeth Brainard”--a
discovery which might have stayed my hand at another time, but nothing
could stay it now. I opened the paper and looked at it. Alas! it was
only her marriage certificate; I had taken all this trouble and all
this risk, only to rescue for her the proof of her union with one John
Silverthorn Brainard. The same name was on her letters. Why had Bess
so strongly insisted on a secret search, and why had she concealed her
license in so strange a place?
Greatly sobered, I restored the paper to its place in the box,
slipped on the string and prepared to leave the cellar with it. Then I
remembered the brick on the floor and the open hole where it had been,
and afterward the something which had fallen over within and what this
space might mean in a seemingly solid wall.
More excited now even than I had been at any time before, I thrust
my hand in again and tried to sound the depth of this unexpected
far-reaching hole; but the size of my arm stood in the way of my
experiment, and, drawing out my hand, I looked about for a stick and
finding one, plunged that in. To my surprise and growing satisfaction
it went in its full length--about three feet. There was a cavity on the
other side of this wall of very sizable dimensions. Had I struck the
suspected passage? I had great hope of it. Nothing else would account
for so large a space on the other side of a wall which gave every
indication of being one with the foundation. Catching up my stick I made
a rude estimate of its location, after which I replaced the brick, put
out the gas, and caught up Bess’ box. Trembling, and more frightened now
than at my descent at my own footfall and tremulous pursuing shadow, I
went up-stairs.
As I passed the corridor leading to the converted vestibule which had
so excited my interest in the afternoon, I paused and made a hurried
calculation. If the stick had been three feet long, as I judged, and my
stride was thirty inches, then the place of that hole in the wall below
was directly in a line with where I now stood,--in other words, under
the vestibule floor, as I had already, suspected.
How was I to verify this without disturbing Mrs. Packard? That was a
question to sleep on. But it took me a long time to get to sleep.
CHAPTER XIV. I SEEK HELP
A bad night, a very bad night, but for all that I was down early the
next morning. Bess must have her box and I a breath of fresh air before
breakfast, to freshen me up a bit and clear my mind for the decisive
act, since my broken rest had failed to refresh me.
As I reached the parlor floor Nixon came out of the reception-room.
“Oh, Miss!” he exclaimed, “going out?” surprised, doubtless, to see me
in my hat and jacket.
“A few steps,” I answered, and then stopped, not a little disturbed; for
in moving to open the door he had discovered that the key was not in it
and was showing his amazement somewhat conspicuously.
“Mrs. Packard took the key up to her room,” I explained, thinking that
some sort of explanation was in order. “She is nervous, you know, and
probably felt safer with it there.”
The slow shake of his head had a tinge of self-reproach in it.
“I was sorry to go out,” he muttered. “I was very sorry to go out,”--but
the look which he turned upon me the next minute was of a very different
sort. “I don’t see how you can go out yet,” said he, “unless you go by
the back way. That leads into Stanton Street; but perhaps you had just
as lief go into Stanton Street.”
There was impertinence in his voice as well as aggressiveness in his
eye, but I smiled easily enough and was turning toward the back with
every expectation of going by way of Stanton Street, when Letty came
running down the stairs with the key in her hand. I don’t think he was
pleased, but he opened the door civilly enough and I gladly went out,
taking with me, however, a remembrance of the furtive look with which he
had noted the small package in my hand. I pass over the joy with which
Bess received the box and its desired contents. I had lost all interest
in the matter, which was so entirely personal to herself, and, declining
the ten dollars which I knew she could ill afford, made my visit so
short that I was able to take a brisk walk down the street and yet be
back in time for breakfast.
This, like that of the preceding day, I took alone. Mrs. Packard was
well but preferred to eat up-stairs. I did not fret at this; I
was really glad, for now I could think and plan my action quite
unembarrassed by her presence. The opening under the vestibule floor
was to be sounded, and sounded this very morning, but on what pretext? I
could not take Mrs. Packard into my counsel, for that would be to lessen
the force of the discovery with which I yet hoped to dissipate at
one blow the superstitious fears I saw it was otherwise impossible to
combat. I might interest Ellen, and I was quite certain that I could
interest the cook; but this meant Nixon, also, who was always around and
whose animosity to myself was too mysteriously founded for me to trust
him with any of my secrets or to afford him any inkling of my real
reason for being in the house.
Yet help I must have and very efficient help, too. Should I telegraph to
Mayor Packard for some sort of order which would lead to the tearing
up of this end of the house? I could not do this without fuller
explanations than I could give in a telegram. Besides, he was under
sufficient pressure just now for me to spare him the consideration of so
disturbing a matter, especially as he had left a substitute behind
whose business it was, not only to relieve Mrs. Packard in regard to the
libelous paragraph, but in all other directions to which his attention
might be called. I would see Mr. Steele; he would surely be able to
think up some scheme by which that aperture might be investigated
without creating too much disturbance in the house.
An opportunity for doing this was not long in presenting itself. Mr.
Steele came in about nine o’clock and passed at once into the study. The
next moment I was knocking at his door, my heart in any mouth, but my
determination strung up to the point of daring anything and everything
for the end I had in view.
Fortunately he came to the door; I could never have entered without his
encouragement. As I met his eye I was ashamed of the color my cheeks
undoubtedly showed, but felt reconciled the next minute, for he was not
quite disembarrassed himself, though he betrayed it by a little extra
paleness rather than by a flush, such as had so disturbed myself.
Both of us were quite natural in a moment, however, and answering his
courteous gesture I stepped in and at once opened up my business.
“You must pardon me,” said I, “for this infringement upon the usual
rules of this office. I have something very serious to say about Mrs.
Packard--oh, she’s quite well; it has to do with a matter I shall
presently explain--and I wish to make a request.”
“Thank you for the honor,” he said, drawing up a chair for me.
But I did not sit, neither did I speak for a moment. I was contemplating
his features and thinking how faultless they were.
“I hardly know where to begin,” I ventured at last. “I am burdened with
a secret, and it may all appear puerile to you. I don’t know whether
to remind you first of Mayor Packard’s intense desire to see his wife’s
former cheerfulness restored--a task in which I have been engaged to
assist--or to plunge at once into my discoveries, which are a little
peculiar and possibly important, in spite of my short acquaintance with
the people under this roof and the nature of my position here.”
“You excite me,” were his few quick but sharply accentuated words. “What
secret? What discoveries? I didn’t know that the house held any that
were worth the attention of sensible persons like ourselves.”
I had not been looking at him directly, but I looked up at this and was
astonished to find that his interest in what I had said was greater than
appeared from his tone or even from his manner.
“You know the cause of Mrs. Packard’s present uneasiness?” I asked.
“Mayor Packard told me--the paragraph which appeared in yesterday
morning’s paper. I have tried to find out its author, but I have failed
so far.”
“That is a trifle,” I said. “The real cause--no, I prefer to stand,” I
put in, for he was again urging me by a gesture to seat myself.
“The real cause--” he repeated.
“--is one you will smile at, but which you must nevertheless respect.
She thinks--she has confided to us, in fact--that she has seen, within
these walls, what many others profess to have seen. You understand me,
Mr. Steele?”
“I don’t know that I do, Miss Saunders.”
“I find it hard to speak it; you have heard, of course, the common
gossip about this house.”
“That it is haunted?” he smiled, somewhat disdainfully.
“Yes. Well, Mrs. Packard believes that she has seen what--what gives
this name to the house.”
“A ghost?”
“Yes, a ghost--in the library one night.”
“Ah!”
The ejaculation was eloquent. I did not altogether understand it, but
its chief expression seemed to be contempt. I began to fear he would not
have sufficient sympathy with such an unreasoning state of mind to give
me the attention and assistance I desired. He saw the effect it had upon
me and hastened to say:
“The impression Mrs. Packard has made upon me was of a common-sense
woman. I’m sorry to hear that she is the victim of an hallucination.
What do you propose to do about it?--for I see that you have some
project in mind.”
Then I told him as much of my story as seemed necessary to obtain his
advice and to secure his cooperation. I confided to him my theory of the
unexplainable sights and sounds which had so unfortunately aroused Mrs.
Packard’s imagination, and what I had done so far to substantiate it. I
did not mention the bonds, nor tell him of Bess and her box, but led
him to think that my experiments in the cellar had been the result of my
discoveries in the side entrance.
He listened gravely--I hardly feel justified in saying with a surprise
that was complimentary. I am not sure that it was. Such men are
difficult to understand. When I had finished, he remarked with a smile:
“So you conclude that the floor of this place is movable and that
the antiquated ladies you mention have stretched their old limbs in a
difficult climb, just for the game of frightening out tenants they did
not desire for neighbors?”
“I know that it sounds ridiculous,” I admitted, refraining still, in
spite of the great temptation, from mentioning the treasure which it was
the one wish of their lives to protect from the discovery of others. “If
they were quite sane I should perhaps not have the courage to suggest
this explanation of what has been heard and seen here. But they are not
quite sane; a glance at their faces is enough to convince one of this,
and from minds touched with insanity anything can be expected. Will you
go with me to this side entrance and examine the floor for yourself?
The condition of things under it I will ask you to take my word for; you
will hardly wish to visit the cellar on an exploring expedition till you
are reasonably assured of its necessity.”
His eye, which had grown curiously cold and unresponsive through this,
turned from me toward the desk before which he had been sitting. It
was heaped high with a batch of unopened letters, and I could readily
understand what was in his mind.
“You will be helping the mayor more by listening to me,” I continued
earnestly, “than by anything you can do here. Believe me, Mr. Steele, I
am no foolish, unadvised girl. I know what I am talking about.”
He suppressed an impatient sigh and endeavored to show a proper
appreciation of my own estimate of myself and the value of my
communication.
“I am at your service,” said he.
I wished he had been a little more enthusiastic, but, careful not to
show my disappointment, I added, as I led the way to the door:
“I wish we could think of some way of securing ourselves from
interruption. Nixon does not like me, and will be sure to interest
himself in our movements if he sees us go down that hall together.”
“Is there any harm in that?”
“There might be. He is suspicious of me, which makes it impossible for
one to count upon his conduct. If he saw us meddling with the cabinet,
he would be very apt to rush with his complaints to Mrs. Packard, and
I am not ready yet to take her into our confidence. I want first to be
sure
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