Part 4

Though she had guessed something of this ever since she recalled the contents of the letter, the cold-blooded statement came indeed with all the force of a surprise. Susannah's figure stiffened as though she had touched a live wire. The crimson flush drained out of her face. And she heard herself saying, as though in another's voice and far away, the inadequate words: "How perfectly terrible!"

"Exactly so!" agreed Warner. "Only you haven't the remotest idea how terrible. Miss Ayer, this company--you as well as the rest of us--needs money and needs it right away. Ozias Cowler has money--a great deal of money. Somebody's bound to get it--and why not we? We use various means to get money out of suckers. There's only one way with Cowler. He's stuck on you. You can get it from him. We want you to do that--we expect you to do that."

Susannah stared at him. "Mr. Warner, I think you are crazy. I could no more do that ... I couldn't ... I wouldn't even know how ... my resignation goes into effect immediately. I couldn't possibly stay here another minute." She turned to leave the office.

"Just one moment!" Mr. Warner's words purled on. His tone was low, his accent bland--but his voice stopped her instantly. "Miss Ayer, you don't understand yet. Unless we get some money--a great deal of money--we shan't last another two weeks. The situation is--but I won't take the time to explain that. Unless we clean up that aforesaid money, we go to jail--for a good long term. If we get the money--we don't. Never mind the details. I assure you it's true."

"I'm sorry," said Susannah, her lips scarcely moving as she spoke, "but I fail to see what I have to do with that--"

"I was about to go on to say, Miss Ayer, that you have everything to do with it. You must be aware, if you look back over your service with us, that you are as much involved as anyone. Your name is on our letterhead. You have signed hundreds and perhaps thousands of letters to woman investors. Putting a disagreeable fact rather baldly, what happens to us happens to you. If it's the stir--if it's jail--for us, it's jail for you."

Susannah stared at him. She grew rigid. But she roused herself to a trembling weak defense.

"I'll tell them, if they arrest me ... all that has gone on here ..." she began.

"If you do," put in Mr. Warner smoothly, "you only create for yourself an unfavorable impression. You put yourself in the position of going back on your pals, and it will not get you immunity. If Mr. Cowler comes through, you are entitled to a share of the proceeds. Whether you take it or no is a matter for your private feelings. But the main point is that with Cowler in, this thing will be fixed, and without him in, you are in jail or a fugitive from justice."

He paused now and looked at Susannah--paused not as one who pities but as one who asks himself if he has said enough. Susannah's face proved that he had.

"Now of course you won't feel like working this morning. And I don't blame you. Go home and think it over. Your first instinct, probably, will be to see a lawyer. For your own sake, I advise you not to do that. For ours, I hope you do. If he tells you the truth, he will show you how deeply involved you are in this thing. No lawyer whom you can command will handle your case. What you'd better do is lie down and take a nap. Then at about five o'clock this afternoon, send for hot coffee and doll yourself up--Mr. Cowler will call for you at seven."

* * * * *

Susannah took part of Mr. Warner's advice. She went home immediately. But she did not take a nap. Instead, she walked up and down her bedroom for an hour, thinking hard. She could think now; in her passage home on the Subway, her first wild panic had beaten its desperate black wings to quiet. What Warner had told her she now believed implicitly. She was as much caught in the trap as any one of the three crooks with whom she had been associated. The only difference was that she did not mean to stay in the trap. She meant to escape. Also she did not mean to let it drive her from the city in which she was challenging success. She meant to stay in New York. She meant to escape. But how?

If there were only somebody to whom she could go! She had in New York a few acquaintances--but no real friends. Besides, she didn't want anybody to know; all she wanted was to get away from--to vanish from their sight. But where could she go--when--how?

Fortunately she had plenty of money on hand, plenty at least for her immediate purposes. She owned a few pawnable things, though only a few. But at present what she needed, more even than money, was time. She must get away at once. But again where? For a moment resurgent panic tore her. Then common sense seemed to offer a solution. Here she was in the biggest city in the country; the biggest in the world. She had heard somewhere that a big city was the best place in the world to hide in. She would hide in New York. Then--

She had forgotten one terrifying fact. Byan boarded in the same house.

She realized why now. A fortnight before--shortly after Mr. Cowler appeared in the office--he had come to her for advice. He had given up one bachelor apartment, he said, and was taking another. Repairs had become inevitable in the new apartment. He did not want to go to a hotel. Did she know of a good boarding-house in which to spend a month? She did, of course--her own. Byan came there the next day; although, curiously enough, she saw but little of him. They had separate tables, and his meal-hours and hers were different.

Byan usually came in at about six o'clock. But today he might follow her. She must work quickly.

She pulled her trunk out from under the bed and began in frenzied haste to pack it. Down came all the pictures from her walls. Into the trunk went most of her clothes; some of her toilet articles; her half-dozen books; her stationery; all her slender Lares and Penates. When she had finished with her trunk, she packed her suitcase. As many thin dresses as she could crush in--inconsequent necessities--her storm boots; her tooth-brush--

Then she wrote a note to her landlady. It read: "Dear Mrs. Ray: I have been suddenly called away from the city. Will you keep my trunk until I send for it? Yours in great haste and some trouble, Susannah Ayer." She put it with her board money in an envelope, addressed to Mrs. Ray, and placed it on the trunk.

At three o'clock, her suitcase in one hand, her bag and her umbrella in the other, her long cape over her arm, she ventured into the hall.

It was vacant and silent.

She stole silently down the stairs. She met nobody. She noiselessly opened the front door. Apparently nobody noticed her. She walked briskly down the steps; turned toward the Avenue. At the corner something impelled her to look back.

Byan, his look directed downward, two fingers fumbling in his side pocket for his key, was briskly ascending the steps.

III

Lindsay drove directly from the Quinanog station to the Quinanog Arms. The Arms proved to be a tiny mid-Victorian hotel, not an inexact replica--and by no means a discreditable one--of many small rustic hotels that he had seen in England and France. Indeed Quinanog, as he caught it in glimpses, might have been one part of France or one part of England--that region which only the English Channel prevents from being the same country. The motor, which conducted him from the station to the Arms, drove on roads in which high wine-glass elms made Gothic arches; between wide meadowy stretches, brilliant with buttercups, daisies, iris; unassertive, well-proportioned houses with roomy vegetable plots and tiny patches here and there of flower garden. He arrived at so early an hour that the best of the long friendly day stretched before him. He felt disposed to spend it merely in reading and smoking. He had plenty to smoke; he had seen to that himself in New York. And he had plenty to read; Spink Sparrel had seen to that in Boston. The bottom of one of his trunks was covered with Lutetia Murray's works.

But although he smoked a great deal, he did not read at all. Until luncheon he merely followed his impulses. Those impulses took him a little way down the main street, which ran between comfortable, white colonial houses, set back from the road. He walked through the tiny triangular Common. He visited the little, poster-hung post-office; looked into the big neatly arranged general store; strolled back again. His impulses then led him to explore the grounds of the Arms and deposited him finally in the hammock on the side porch. After a simple and very well-cooked luncheon, his languor broke into a sudden restlessness. "Where is the Murray place?" he asked of the proprietor of the Arms, whose name, the letterhead of the Arms stationery stated, was Hyde.

"The Murray place!" Hyde repeated inquiringly. He was a long, noncommittal-looking person with big pale blue eyes illuminating a sandy baldness. "Oh, the _Murray_ place! You mean the old Murray place."

"I mean the house, whichever and wherever it is, that Lutetia Murray, the author, used to live in."

"Oh, sure! I get you. You see it's been empty for such a long spell that we forget all about it. The old Murray place is on the road to West Quinanog."

"It isn't occupied, you say?"

"Lord, no! Hasn't been lived in since--well, since Lutetia Murray died. And that was--let me see--" Hyde cast a reflective eye upward. "Ten, eleven, twelve--oh, fifteen or twenty, I should say. Yes, all of fifteen years."

"Does it still belong in the Murray family?"

"Lord bless your soul, no. There hasn't been a Murray around these parts since--well, since Lutetia Murray died."

"Who owns it now?"

"The Turners. They bought it when it came up for sale after Miss Murray's death."

"Well, weren't there any heirs?"

"There was a niece--her brother's little girl. They had to sell the place and everything in it. There never _was_ a sale in Quinanog like that. Why, folks say that the mahogany would bring fancy prices in New York nowadays."

"Didn't they get as much as they should have?" Lindsay asked idly.

"Oh Lord, no! And they found her estate was awful involved, and the debts et up about all the auction brought in."

"What became of the little girl?"

"Some cousins took her."

"Where is she now?"

"Never heard tell."

"Has anybody ever lived in the Murray place since the family left?"

"No, I believe not."

"Is it to let?"

"Yes, and for sale."

"Well, why hasn't it let or sold?"

"Oh, I dunno exactly. It's a great big barn of a place. Kinda ramshackle, and of course it's off the main-traveled road. You'd need a flivver, at least, to live there nowadays. And there ain't a single modern improvement in it. No bathroom, nor electric lights, not set tubs, nor any of the things that women like. No garage neither."

"Every disability you quote makes it sound all the better to me," Lindsay commented. He meditated a moment. "I'd like to go over and look at it this afternoon. Is there anyone here to drive me?"

"Yes, Dick'll take you in the runabout." Hyde appeared to meditate in his turn, and he cocked an inquiring eye in Lindsay's direction. "You wasn't thinking of hiring the place, was you?"

Lindsay laughed. "I should say I wasn't. No, I just wanted to look at it."

"I was going to say," Hyde went on, "that it's a very pleasant location. City folks always think it's a lovely spot. If you was thinking of hiring it, my brother's the agent."

Lindsay laughed again. "Hiring a house is about as far from my plans at present as returning to France."

"Well," Hyde commented dryly, "judging from the way the Quinanog boys feel, I guess I know just about how much you want to do that."

"How soon can we go to the Murray place?" Lindsay inquired.

"Now--as far as Dick's concerned."

"By the way," Hyde dropped, as he turned toward the garage, "the Murrays called the place Blue Medders."

"Blue Meadows," Lindsay repeated aloud. And to himself, "Blue Meadows." And again, though wordlessly, "Blue Meadows." It was apparent that he liked the sound and the image the sound evoked.

The runabout chugged to Blue Meadows in less than ten minutes. The road branched off from the State highway at the least frequented place in its ample stretch; ran for a long way to West Quinanog. On this side road, houses were few and they grew fewer and fewer until they left Blue Meadows quite by itself. Its situation, though solitary, was not lonely. It sat near the road. Perhaps, Lindsay decided, it would have been too near if stately wine-glass elms, feathered with leaves all along their lissom trunks, in collaboration with a high lilac hedge now past its blooming, had not helped to sequester it. From the street, the house showed only a roof with two capacious chimneys, the upper story of its gray clapboarded façade.

Dick, a gangling freckled youth, slowed down the machine as if in preparation for a stop. "I've got the key," he volunteered, "if you want to go in."

Until that moment Lindsay had entertained no idea of going in. But Dick's words fired his imagination. "Thanks, I think I will."

Dick handed over the long, delicately wrought key. He made no move to follow Lindsay out of the car. "If you don't mind," he said, "I'll run down the road to see a cousin of mine. How soon before you'll want to start back?"

"Oh, give me half an hour or so," Lindsay decided carelessly.

The runabout chugged into the green arch which imprisoned the distance.

Alone, Lindsay strolled between lilac bushes and over the sunken flags which led to the front door. Then, changing his mind, he made an appraising tour about the outside of the place.

Blue Meadows was a big old house: big, so it seemed to his amateur judgment, by an incredible number of rooms; and old--and here his judgment, though swift, was more accurate--to the time of two hundred years. Outside, it had all the earmarks of Colonial architecture--plain lines, stark walls, the windows, with twenty-four lights, geometrically placed; but its lovely lines, its beautiful proportions, and the soft plushy nap which time had laid upon its front clapboardings mitigated all its severities. The shingles of the roof and sides were weather-beaten and gray, the blinds a deep old blue. At one side jutted an incongruous modern addition; into the second story of which was set a galleried piazza. At the other side stretched an endless series of additions, tapering in size to a tiny shed.

"This is Lutetia's house!" Lindsay stopped to muse. "Is it true that I spent two years with the French Army? Is it true that I served two more with the American Army? Oh, to think you didn't live to see all that, Lutetia!"

A lattice arched over the doorway and on it a big climbing rose was just coming into bud. The beautiful door showed the pointed architrave, the leaded side panels, the fanlight, the engaged columns, of Colonial times. It resisted the first attack of the key, but yielded finally to Lindsay's persuasion. He stepped into the hall.

It was a rectangular hall, running straight to the back of the house. Pairs of doors, opposite each other, gaped on both sides. At the left arose a slender straight stairway, mahogany-railed. Lindsay strolled from one room to the other, opening windows and blinds. They were big square rooms, finished in the conventional Colonial manner, with fireplaces and fireplace cupboards. The wallpaper, faded and stained, was of course quite bare of pictures and ornaments. He stopped to examine the carving on the white, painted panels above the fireplace--garlands of flowers caught with torches and masks.

Smiling to himself, Lindsay returned to the hall. "Oh, Lutetia, I should like to have seen you here!" he remarked wordlessly.

Behind the stairway, at the back, appeared another door. He opened it into darkness. Fumbling in his pocket, he produced a box of matches, lighted his way through the blackness; again opened windows and shutters. This proved to be the long back room so common in Colonial homes; running the entire width of the house. There were two fireplaces. One was small, with a Franklin stove. The other--Lindsay calculated that it would take six-foot logs. Four well-grown children, shoulder to shoulder, could have walked into it. This room was not entirely empty. In the center--by a miracle his stumbling progress had just avoided it--was a long table of the refectory type. Lindsay studied the position of the two fireplaces. He examined the ceiling. "You threw the whole lot of little rooms together to make this big room, Lutetia. You're a lady quite of my own architectural taste. I, too, like a lot of space."

He continued his explorations. From one side of the long living-room extended kitchen, laundry; servants' rooms and servants' dining-room; an endless maze of butteries, pantries, sheds. Lindsay gave them short shrift. At the other side, however, lay a little half-oval room, the first floor of that Victorian addition which he had marked from the outside.

"Oh, Lutetia, Lutetia, how could you, how could you?" he burst out at first glance. "To add this modern bit to that fine Colonial stateliness! Perhaps we're not kindred souls after all."

Hugging the wall of this room and leading to the second floor was a stairway so narrow that only one person could mount it at a time. Lindsay proved this to his own satisfaction by ascending it. It opened into a big back room of the main house, the one with the galleried piazza. Lindsay opened all the windows here; and then went rapidly from room to room, letting in the June sunshine.

They were all empty, of course--and yet, in a dozen plaintive ways--faded wall spaces, which showed the exact size of pictures, nails with carpet tufts still clinging to them, a forgotten window shade or two--they spoke eloquently of habitation. Indeed, the whole place had a friendly atmosphere, Lindsay reflected; there was none of the cold, dead connotation of most long-empty houses. This old place was spiritually warm, as though some reflection of a long-ago vivid life still hung among its shadows. From the dust, the stains, the cobwebs, it might have been vacant for a century. From the welcoming warmth of its quiet rooms, it might have been vacant but for a day.

Through the back windows, Lindsay looked down onto what must once have been a huge rectangle of lawn; and near the house, what must once have been an oval of flower garden. The lawn, stretching to a stone wall--beyond which towered a chaos of trees--was now knee-deep in timothy-grass; the garden had reverted to jungle. He studied the garden. Close to the house, an enormous syringa bush heaped into a mountain of fragrant snow. Near, a smoke-bush was just beginning to bubble into rounds of blood-scarlet gauze. Strangled rosebushes showed yellow or crimson. Afar an enormous patch of tiger lilies gave the effect of a bizarre, orchidous tropical group. The rest was an indiscriminate early-summer tangle of sumac; elderberry; bayberry; silver birches; wild roses; daisies; buttercups; and what would later be Queen Anne's lace and goldenrod. From a back corner window, it seemed to him that he caught a glint of water; but he could not recapture it from any other point of view. However, he lost all memory of this in a more affording discovery. For the front windows gave him the reason of the name, Blue Meadows. Across the road stretched a series of meadows, all bluish purple with blooming iris.

Lindsay contemplated this charming prospect for a long interval.

"And now, Lutetia," he suddenly turned and addressed the empty rooms, "I want to find _your_ room. Which of these six was it?"

Retracing his steps, he went from room to room until, many times, he had made a complete survey of the second floor. He crossed and recrossed his own trail, as the excitement of the quest mounted in him.

"Ah!" he exclaimed aloud, "here it is! You can't escape your soul-mate, Lutetia."

It was not because the room was so much bigger than the rest that he made this decision; it was only because it was so much more quaint. At one side it merged, by means of a slender doorway, with the galleried piazza. From it, by means of that tiny flight of stairs, Lutetia could have descended to the first floor of that mid-Victorian addition. "I take it all back, Lutetia," he approved. "Middle of the nineteenth century or not, it's a wonder--this combination." At the back of Lutetia's room was a third door; as slender as the door leading to the gallery, but much lower; not four feet high. Lindsay pushed it open, crawled on hands and knees through it. He had of course, on his first exploration, entered the small room into which it led. But he had gone in and out without careful examination; it had seemed merely a four-walled room. Coming into it, however, from Lutetia's bedroom, it suddenly acquired character.

The walls were papered in white. And on the mid-Victorian dado scarcely legible now, he suddenly discovered drawings. Drawings of a curious character and of a more curious technique. He followed their fluttery maze from wall to wall--a flight of little beings, winged at the shoulders and knees, with flying locks and strange finlike hands and feet; fanciful, comic, tender.

"Oh!" Lindsay emitted aloud. "Ah!" And in an instant: "I see! This room belonged to that child Hyde spoke of."

He ascended to the garret. This was of course the big storeroom of the Colonial imagination. It too was quite empty. At one spot a post--obviously not a roof-support--ran from floor to ceiling. Lindsay gazed about a little unseeingly. "I wonder what that post was for?" he questioned himself absently. After a while, "What's become of that child?" he demanded of circumambient space.

As though this offered food for reflection, he descended by means of the main stairway to the lower floor; sat on the doorsteps a while. He mused--gazing out into the green-colored, sweet-scented June afternoon. After an interval he arose and repeated his voyage of exploration.

Again he was struck with the friendly quality of the old place. That physical dampness, which long vacant houses hold in solution, seemed entirely to have disappeared before the flood of June sunshine. The spiritual chill, which always accompanies it--that sinister quality so connotative of congregations of evil spirits--he again observed was completely lacking. As he emerged from one room to enter another, it seemed to him that the one back of him filled with--_companionship_, he described it to himself. As he continued his explorations, it seemed to him that the room he was about to enter would offer him not ghostly but human welcome. That human welcome did not come, of course. Instead, there surged upon him the rich odors of the lilacs and syringas; the staccato greetings of the birds.

After a while he went downstairs again. Sitting in the front doorway, he fell into a rich revery.