Part 2

(Note: Surely fear is a contagion. Could one isolate the germ of it and find an antitoxin? Or is it merely a form of nervous activity run amuck, like a runaway locomotive, colliding with other nervous activities and causing catastrophe? Take this up with Mr. Patton. But would he know? He, I am almost sure, has never been really afraid.)

I had a vision of my oxlike predecessor making this head-over-shoulder journey up the staircase, and in spite of my nervousness I smiled. But at that moment Mrs. Reed behind me put a hand on my arm, and I screamed. I remember yet the way she dropped back against the wall and turned white.

Mr. Reed whirled on me instantly.

“What did you see?” he demanded.

“Nothing at all.” I was horribly ashamed. “Your wife touched my arm unexpectedly. I dare say I am nervous.”

“It’s all right, Anne,” he reassured her. And to me, almost irritably:

“I thought you nurses had no nerves.”

“Under ordinary circumstances I have none.”

It was all ridiculous. We were still on the staircase.

“Just what do you mean by that?”

“If you will stop looking down into that hall I’ll be calm enough. You make me jumpy.”

He muttered something about being sorry and went on quickly. But at the top he went through an inward struggle, evidently succumbed, and took a final furtive survey of the hallway below. I was so wrought up that had a door slammed anywhere just then I think I should have dropped where I stood.

The absolute silence of the house added to the strangeness of the situation. Beauregard Square is not close to a trolley line, and quiet is the neighborhood tradition. The first rubber-tired vehicles in the city drew up before Beauregard Square houses. Beauregard Square children speak in low voices and never bang their spoons on their plates. Beauregard Square servants wear felt-soled shoes. And such outside noises as venture to intrude themselves must filter through double brick walls and doors built when lumber was selling by the thousand acres instead of the square foot.

Through this silence our feet echoed along the bare floor of the upper hall, as well lighted as belowstairs and as dismantled, to the door of the day nursery. The door was locked—double locked, in fact. For the key had been turned in the old-fashioned lock, and in addition an ordinary bolt had been newly fastened on the outside of the door. On the outside! Was that to keep me in? It was certainly not to keep any one or anything out. The feeblest touch moved the bolt.

We were all three outside the door. We seemed to keep our compactness by common consent. No one of us left the group willingly; or, leaving it, we slid back again quickly. That was my impression, at least. But the bolt rather alarmed me.

“This is your room,” Mrs. Reed said. “It is generally the day nursery, but we have put a bed and some other things in it. I hope you will be comfortable.”

I touched the bolt with my finger and smiled into Mr. Reed’s eyes.

“I hope I am not to be fastened in!” I said.

He looked back squarely enough, but somehow I knew he lied.

“Certainly not,” he replied, and opened the door.

If there had been mystery outside, and bareness, the nursery was charming—a corner room with many windows, hung with the simplest of nursery papers and full of glass-doored closets filled with orderly rows of toys. In one corner a small single bed had been added without spoiling the room. The window-sills were full of flowering plants. There was a bowl of goldfish on a stand, and a tiny dwarf parrot in a cage was covered against the night air by a bright afghan. A white-tiled bathroom connected with this room and also with the night nursery beyond.

Mr. Reed did not come in, I had an uneasy feeling, however, that he was just beyond the door. The children were not asleep. Mrs. Reed left me to let me put on my uniform. When she came back her face was troubled.

“They are not sleeping well,” she complained. “I suppose it comes from having no exercise. They are always excited.”

“I’ll take their temperatures,” I said. “Sometimes a tepid bath and a cup of hot milk will make them sleep.”

The two little boys were wide awake. They sat up to look at me and both spoke at once.

“Can you tell fairy tales out of your head?”

“Did you see Chang?”

They were small, sleek-headed, fair-skinned youngsters, adorably clean and rumpled.

“Chang is their dog, a Pekingese,” explained the mother. “He has been lost for several days.”

“But he isn’t lost, mother. I can hear him crying every now and then. You’ll look again, mother, won’t you?”

“We heard him through the furnace pipe,” shrilled the smaller of the two. “You said you would look.”

“I did look, darlings. He isn’t there. And you promised not to cry about him, Freddie.”

Freddie, thus put on his honor, protested he was not crying for the dog.

“I want to go out and take a walk, that’s why I’m crying,” he wailed. “And I want Mademoiselle, and my buttons are all off. And my ear aches when I lie on it.”

The room was close. I threw up the windows, and turned to find Mrs. Reed at my elbows. She was glancing out apprehensively.

“I suppose the air is necessary,” she said, “and these windows are all right. But—I have a reason for asking it—please do not open the others.”

She went very soon, and I listened as she went out. I had promised to lock the door behind her, and I did so. The bolt outside was not shot.

After I had quieted the children with my mildest fairy story I made a quiet inventory of my new quarters. The rough diagram of the second floor is the one I gave Mr. Patton later. That night, of course, I investigated only the two nurseries. But, so strangely had the fear that hung over the house infected me, I confess that I made my little tour of bathroom and clothes-closet with my revolver in my hand!

I found nothing, of course. The disorder of the house had not extended itself here. The bathroom was spotless with white tile, the large clothes-closet which opened off the passage between the two rooms was full of neatly folded clothing for the children. The closet was to play its part later, a darkish little room faintly lighted by a ground glass transom opening into the center hall, but dependent mostly on electric light.

Outside the windows Mrs. Reed had asked me not to open was a porte-cochère roof almost level with the sills. Then was it an outside intruder she feared? And in that case, why the bolts on the outside of the two nursery doors? For the night nursery, I found, must have one also. I turned the key, but the door would not open.

I decided not to try to sleep that night, but to keep on watch. So powerfully had the mother’s anxiety about her children and their mysterious danger impressed me that I made frequent excursions into the back room. Up to midnight there was nothing whatever to alarm me. I darkened both rooms and sat, waiting for I know not what; for some sound to show that the house stirred, perhaps. At a few minutes after twelve faint noises penetrated to my room from the hall, Mr. Reed’s nervous voice and a piece of furniture scraping over the floor. Then silence again for half an hour or so.

Then—I was quite certain that the bolt on my door had been shot. I did not hear it, I think. Perhaps I felt it. Perhaps I only feared it. I unlocked the door; it was fastened outside.

There is a hideous feeling of helplessness about being locked in. I pretended to myself at first that I was only interested and curious. But I was frightened; I know that now. I sat there in the dark and wondered what I would do if the house took fire, or if some hideous tragedy enacted itself outside that locked door and I were helpless.

By two o’clock I had worked myself into a panic. The house was no longer silent. Some one was moving about downstairs, and not stealthily. The sounds came up through the heavy joists and flooring of the old house.

I determined to make at least a struggle to free myself. There was no way to get at the bolts, of course. The porte-cochère roof remained and the transom in the clothes-closet. True, I might have raised an alarm and been freed at once, but naturally I rejected this method. The roof of the porte-cochère proved impracticable. The tin bent and cracked under my first step. The transom then.

I carried a chair into the closet and found the transom easy to lower. But it threatened to creak. I put liquid soap on the hinges—it was all I had, and it worked very well—and lowered the transom inch by inch. Even then I could not see over it. I had worked so far without a sound, but in climbing to a shelf my foot slipped and I thought I heard a sharp movement outside. It was five minutes before I stirred. I hung there, every muscle cramped, listening and waiting. Then I lifted myself by sheer force of muscle and looked out. The upper landing of the staircase, brilliantly lighted, was to my right. Across the head of the stairs had been pushed a cotbed, made up for the night, but it was unoccupied.

Mrs. Reed, in a long, dark ulster, was standing beside it, staring with fixed and glassy eyes at something in the lower hall.

III

Some time after four o’clock my door was unlocked from without; the bolt slipped as noiselessly as it had been shot. I got a little sleep until seven, when the boys trotted into my room in their bathrobes and slippers and perched on my bed.

“It’s a nice day,” observed Harry, the elder. “Is that bump your feet?”

I wriggled my toes and assured him he had surmised correctly.

“You’re pretty long, aren’t you? Do you think we can play in the fountain to-day?”

“We’ll make a try for it, son. It will do us all good to get out into the sunshine.”

“We always took Chang for a walk every day, Mademoiselle and Chang and Freddie and I.”

Freddie had found my cap on the dressing table and had put it on his yellow head. But now, on hearing the beloved name of his pet, he burst into loud grief-stricken howls.

“Want Mam’selle,” he cried. “Want Chang too. Poor Freddie!”

The children were adorable. I bathed and dressed them and, mindful of my predecessor’s story of crackers and milk, prepared for an excursion kitchenward. The nights might be full of mystery, murder might romp from room to room, but I intended to see that the youngsters breakfasted. But before I was ready to go down breakfast arrived.

Perhaps the other nurse had told the Reeds a few plain truths before she left; perhaps, and this I think was the case, the cloud had lifted just a little. Whatever it may have been, two rather flushed and blistered young people tapped at the door that morning and were admitted, Mr. Reed first, with a tray, Mrs. Reed following with a coffee-pot and cream.

The little nursery table was small for five, but we made room somehow. What if the eggs were underdone and the toast dry? The children munched blissfully. What if Mr. Reed’s face was still drawn and haggard and his wife a limp little huddle on the floor? She sat with her head against his knee and her eyes on the little boys, and drank her pale coffee slowly. She was very tired, poor thing. She dropped asleep sitting there, and he sat for a long time, not liking to disturb her.

It made me feel homesick for the home I didn’t have. I’ve had the same feeling before, of being a rank outsider, a sort of defrauded feeling. I’ve had it when I’ve seen the look in a man’s eyes when his wife comes-to after an operation. And I’ve had it, for that matter, when I’ve put a new baby in its mother’s arms for the first time. I had it for sure that morning, while she slept there and he stroked her pretty hair.

I put in my plea for the children then.

“It’s bright and sunny,” I argued. “And if you are nervous I’ll keep them away from other children. But if you want to keep them well you must give them exercise.”

It was the argument about keeping them well that influenced him, I think. He sat silent for a long time. His wife was still asleep, her lips parted.

“Very well,” he said finally, “from two to three, Miss Adams. But not in the garden back of the house. Take them on the street.”

I agreed to that.

“I shall want a short walk every evening myself,” I added. “That is a rule of mine. I am a more useful person and a more agreeable one if I have it.”

I think he would have demurred if he dared. But one does not easily deny so sane a request. He yielded grudgingly.

That first day was calm and quiet enough. Had it not been for the strange condition of the house and the necessity for keeping the children locked in I would have smiled at my terror of the night. Luncheon was sent in; so was dinner. The children and I lunched and supped alone. As far as I could see, Mrs. Reed made no attempt at housework; but the cot at the head of the stairs disappeared in the early morning and the dog did not howl again.

I took the boys out for an hour in the early afternoon. Two incidents occurred, both of them significant. I bought myself a screw driver—that was one. The other was our meeting with a slender young woman in black who knew the boys and stopped them. She proved to be one of the dismissed servants—the waitress, she said.

“Why, Freddie!” she cried. “And Harry too! Aren’t you going to speak to Nora?”

After a moment or two she turned to me, and I felt she wanted to say something, but hardly dared.

“How is Mrs. Reed?” she asked. “Not sick, I hope?”

She glanced at my St. Luke’s cloak and bonnet.

“No, she is quite well.”

“And Mr. Reed?”

“Quite well also.”

“Is Mademoiselle still there?”

“No, there is no one there but the family. There are no maids in the house.”

She stared at me curiously.

“Mademoiselle has gone? Are you cer—— Excuse me, Miss. But I thought she would never go. The children were like her own.”

“She is not there, Nora.”

She stood for a moment debating, I thought. Then she burst out:

“Mr. Reed made a mistake, miss. You can’t take a houseful of first-class servants and dismiss them the way he did, without half an hour to get out bag and baggage, without making talk. And there’s talk enough all through the neighborhood.”

“What sort of talk?”

“Different people say different things. They say Mademoiselle is still there, locked in her room on the third floor. There’s a light there sometimes, but nobody sees her. And other folks say Mr. Reed is crazy. And there is worse being said than that.”

But she refused to tell me any more—evidently concluded she had said too much and got away as quickly as she could, looking rather worried.

I was a trifle over my hour getting back, but nothing was said. To leave the clean and tidy street for the disordered house was not pleasant. But once in the children’s suite, with the goldfish in the aquarium darting like tongues of flame in the sunlight, with the tulips and hyacinths of the window-boxes glowing and the orderly toys on their white shelves, I felt comforted. After all, disorder and dust did not imply crime.

But one thing I did that afternoon—did it with firmness and no attempt at secrecy, and after asking permission of no one. I took the new screw driver and unfastened the bolt from the outside of my door.

I was prepared, if necessary, to make a stand on that issue. But although it was noticed, I knew, no mention of it was made to me.

Mrs. Reed pleaded a headache that evening, and I believe her husband ate alone in the dismantled dining room. For every room on the lower floor, I had discovered, was in the same curious disorder.

At seven Mr. Reed relieved me to go out. The children were in bed. He did not go into the day nursery, but placed a straight chair outside the door of the back room and sat there, bent over, elbows on knees, chin cupped in his palm, staring at the staircase. He roused enough to ask me to bring an evening paper when I returned.

When I am on a department case I always take my off-duty in the evening by arrangement and walk round the block. Some time in my walk I am sure to see Mr. Patton himself if the case is big enough, or one of his agents if he cannot come. If I have nothing to communicate it resolves itself into a bow and nothing more.

I was nervous on this particular jaunt. For one thing my St. Luke’s cloak and bonnet marked me at once, made me conspicuous; for another, I was afraid Mr. Patton would think the Reed house no place for a woman and order me home.

It was a quarter to eight and quite dark before he fell into step beside me.

“Well,” I replied rather shakily; “I’m still alive, as you see.”

“Then it is pretty bad?”

“It’s exceedingly queer,” I admitted, and told my story. I had meant to conceal the bolt on the outside of my door, and one or two other things, but I blurted them all out right then and there, and felt a lot better at once.

He listened intently.

“It’s fear of the deadliest sort,” I finished.

“Fear of the police?”

“I—I think not. It is fear of something in the house. They are always listening and watching at the top of the front stairs. They have lifted all the carpets, so that every footstep echoes through the whole house. Mrs. Reed goes down to the first door, but never alone. To-day I found that the back staircase is locked off at top and bottom. There are doors.”

I gave him my rough diagram of the house. It was too dark to see it.

“It is only tentative,” I explained. “So much of the house is locked up, and every movement of mine is under surveillance. Without baths there are about twelve large rooms, counting the third floor. I’ve not been able to get there, but I thought that to-night I’d try to look about.”

“You had no sleep last night?”

“Three hours—from four to seven this morning.”

We had crossed into the public square and were walking slowly under the trees. Now he stopped and faced me.

“I don’t like the look of it, Miss Adams,” he said. “Ordinary panic goes and hides. But here’s a fear that knows what it’s afraid of and takes methodical steps for protection. I didn’t want you to take the case, you know that; but now I’m not going to insult you by asking you to give it up. But I’m going to see that you are protected. There will be some one across the street every night as long as you are in the house.”

“Have you any theory?” I asked him. He is not strong for theories generally. He is very practical. “That is, do you think the other nurse was right and there is some sort of crime being concealed?”

“Well, think about it,” he prompted me. “If a murder has been committed, what are they afraid of? The police? Then why a trained nurse and all this caution about the children? A ghost? Would they lift the carpets so that they could hear the specter tramping about?”

“If there is no crime, but something—a lunatic perhaps?” I asked.

“Possibly. But then why this secrecy and keeping out the police? It is, of course, possible that your respected employers have both gone off mentally, and the whole thing is a nightmare delusion. On my word it sounds like it. But it’s too much for credulity to believe they’ve both gone crazy with the same form of delusion.”

“Perhaps I’m the lunatic,” I said despairingly. “When you reduce it like that to an absurdity I wonder if I didn’t imagine it all, the lights burning everywhere and the carpets up, and Mrs. Reed staring down the staircase, and I locked in a room and hanging on by my nails to peer out through a closet transom.”

“Perhaps. But how about the deadly sane young woman who preceded you? She had no imagination. Now about Reed and his wife—how do they strike you? They get along all right and that sort of thing, I suppose?”

“They are nice people,” I said emphatically. “He’s a gentleman and they’re devoted. He just looks like a big boy who’s got into an awful mess and doesn’t know how to get out. And she’s backing him up. She’s a dear.”

“Humph!” said Mr. Patton. “Don’t suppress any evidence because she’s a dear and he’s a handsome big boy!”

“I didn’t say he was handsome,” I snapped.

“Did you ever see a ghost or think you saw one?” he inquired suddenly.

“No, but one of my aunts has. Hers always carry their heads. She asked one a question once and the head nodded.”

“Then you believe in things of that sort?”

“Not a particle—but I’m afraid of them.”

He smiled, and shortly after that I went back to the house. I think he was sorry about the ghost question, for he explained that he had been trying me out, and that I looked well in my cloak and bonnet.

“I’m afraid of your chin generally,” he said; “but the white lawn ties have a softening effect. In view of the ties I have almost the courage——”

“Yes?”

“I think not, after all.” he decided. “The chin is there, ties or no ties. Good-night, and—for heaven’s sake don’t run any unnecessary risks.”

The change from his facetious tone to earnestness was so unexpected that I was still standing there on the pavement when he plunged into the darkness of the square and disappeared.

IV

At ten minutes after eight I was back in the house. Mr. Reed admitted me, going through the tedious process of unlocking outer and inner vestibule doors and fastening them again behind me. He inquired politely if I had had a pleasant walk, and without waiting for my reply fell to reading the evening paper. He seemed to have forgotten me absolutely. First he scanned the headlines; then he turned feverishly to something farther on and ran his fingers down along a column. His lips were twitching, but evidently he did not find what he expected—or feared—for he threw the paper away and did not glance at it again. I watched him from the angle of the stairs.

Even for that short interval Mrs. Reed had taken his place at the children’s door.

She wore a black dress, long sleeved and high at the throat, instead of the silk negligee of the previous evening, and she held a book. But she was not reading. She smiled rather wistfully when she saw me.

“How fresh you always look!” she said. “And so self-reliant. I wish I had your courage.”

“I am perfectly well. I dare say that explains a lot. Kiddies asleep?”

“Freddie isn’t. He has been crying for Chang. I hate night, Miss Adams. I’m like Freddie. All my troubles come up about this time. I’m horribly depressed.”

Her blue eyes filled with tears.

“I haven’t been sleeping well,” she confessed.

I should think not!

Without taking off my things I went down to Mr. Reed in the lower hall.

“I’m going to insist on something,” I said. “Mrs. Reed is highly nervous. She says she has not been sleeping. I think if I give her an opiate and she gets an entire night’s sleep it may save her a breakdown.”

I looked straight in his eyes, and for once he did evade me.

“I’m afraid I’ve been very selfish,” he said. “Of course she must have sleep. I’ll give you a powder, unless you have something you prefer to use.”

I remembered then that he was a chemist, and said I would gladly use whatever he gave me.

“There is another thing I wanted to speak about, Mr. Reed,” I said. “The children are mourning their dog. Don’t you think he may have been accidentally shut up somewhere in the house in one of the upper floors?”

“Why do you say that?” he demanded sharply.

“They say they have heard him howling.”

He hesitated for barely a moment. Then:

“Possibly,” he said. “But they will not hear him again. The little chap has been sick, and he—died to-day. Of course the boys are not to know.”

No one watched the staircase that night. I gave Mrs. Reed the opiate and saw her comfortably into bed. When I went back fifteen minutes later she was resting, but not asleep. Opiates sometimes make people garrulous for a little while—sheer comfort, perhaps, and relaxed tension. I’ve had stockbrokers and bankers in the hospital give me tips, after a hypodermic of morphia, that would have made me wealthy had I not been limited to my training allowance of twelve dollars a month.

“I was just wondering,” she said as I tucked her up, “where a woman owes the most allegiance—to her husband or to her children?”

“Why not split it up,” I said cheerfully, “and try doing what seems best for both?”