Chapter 9

“Nothing in either,” said she; and Violet, with a sigh, turned towards the table.

This was an immense affair, made to accommodate itself to the shape of the room, but with a hollowed-out space on the window-side large enough to hold a chair for the sitter who would use its top as a desk. On it were various articles suitable to its double use. Without being crowded, it displayed a pile of magazines and pamphlets, boxes for stationery, a writing pad with its accompaniments, a lamp, and some few ornaments, among which was a large box, richly inlaid with pearl and ivory, the lid of which stood wide open.

“Don’t touch,” admonished Violet, as Hetty stretched out her hand to move some little object aside. “You have already worked here busily in the search you made this morning.”

“We handled everything.”

“Did you go through these pamphlets?”

“We shook open each one. We were especially particular here, since it was at this table I saw Mrs. Quintard stop.”

“With head level or drooped?”

“Drooped.”

“Like one looking down, rather than up, or around?”

“Yes. A ray of red light shone on her sleeve. It seemed to me the sleeve moved as though she were reaching out.”

“Will you try to stand as she did and as nearly in the same place as possible?”

Hetty glanced down at the table edge, marked where the gules dominated the blue and green, and moved to that spot, and paused with her head sinking slowly towards her breast.

“Very good,” exclaimed Violet. “But the moon was probably in a very different position from what the sun is now.”

“You are right; it was higher up; I chanced to notice it.”

“Let me come,” said Violet.

Hetty moved, and Violet took her place but in a spot a step or two farther front. This brought her very near to the centre of the table. Hanging her head, just as Hetty had done, she reached out her right hand.

“Have you looked under this blotter?” she asked, pointing towards the pad she touched. “I mean, between the blotter and the frame which holds it?”

“I certainly did,” answered Hetty, with some pride.

Violet remained staring down. “Then you took off everything that was lying on it?”

“Oh, yes.”

Violet continued to stare down at the blotter. Then impetuously:

“Put them back in their accustomed places.”

Hetty obeyed.

Violet continued to look at them, then slowly stretched out her hand, but soon let it fall again with an air of discouragement. Certainly the missing document was not in the ink-pot or the mucilage bottle. Yet something made her stoop again over the pad and subject it to the closest scrutiny.

“If only nothing had been touched!” she inwardly sighed. But she let no sign of her discontent escape her lips, simply exclaiming as she glanced up at the towering spaces overhead: “The books! the books! Nothing remains but for you to call up all the servants, or get men from the outside and, beginning at one end--I should say the upper one--take down every book standing within reach of a woman of Mrs. Quintard’s height.”

“Hear first what Mrs. Quintard has to say about that,” interrupted the woman as that lady entered in a flutter of emotion springing from more than one cause.

“The young lady thinks that we should remove the books,” Hetty observed, as her mistress’s eye wandered to hers from Violet’s abstracted countenance.

“Useless. If we were to undertake to do that, Carlos would be here before half the job was finished. Besides, Hetty must have told you my extreme aversion to nicely bound books. I will not say that when awake I never place my hand on one, but once in a state of somnambulism, when every natural whim has full control, I am sure that I never would. There is a reason for my prejudice. I was not always rich. I once was very poor. It was when I was first married and long before Clement had begun to make his fortune. I was so poor then that frequently I went hungry, and what was worse saw my little daughter cry for food. And why? Because my husband was a bibliomaniac. He would spend on fine editions what would have kept the family comfortable. It is hard to believe, isn’t it? I have seen him bring home a Grolier when the larder was as empty as that box; and it made me hate books so, especially those of extra fine binding, that I have to tear the covers off before I can find courage to read them.”

O life! life! how fast Violet was learning it!

“I can understand your idea, Mrs. Quintard, but as everything else has failed, I should make a mistake not to examine these shelves. It is just possible that we may be able to shorten the task very materially; that we may not have to call in help, even. To what extent have they been approached, or the books handled, since you discovered the loss of the paper we are looking for?”

“Not at all. Neither of us went near them.” This from Hetty.

“Nor any one else?”

“No one else has been admitted to the room. We locked both doors the moment we felt satisfied that the will had been left here.”

“That’s a relief. Now I may be able to do something. Hetty, you look like a very strong woman, and I, as you see, am very little. Would you mind lifting me up to these shelves? I want to look at them. Not at the books, but at the shelves themselves.”

The wondering woman stooped and raised her to the level of the shelf she had pointed out. Violet peered closely at it and then at the ones just beneath.

“Am I heavy?” she asked; “if not, let me see those on the other side of the door.”

Hetty carried her over.

Violet inspected each shelf as high as a woman of Mrs. Quintard’s stature could reach, and when on her feet again, knelt to inspect the ones below.

“No one has touched or drawn anything from these shelves in twenty-four hours,” she declared. “The small accumulation of dust along their edges has not been disturbed at any point. It was very different with the table-top. That shows very plainly where you had moved things and where you had not.”

“Was that what you were looking for? Well, I never!”

Violet paid no heed; she was thinking and thinking very deeply.

Hetty turned towards her mistress, then quickly back to Violet, whom she seized by the arm.

“What’s the matter with Mrs. Quintard?” she hurriedly asked. “If it were night, I should think that she was in one of her spells.”

Violet started and glanced where Hetty pointed. Mrs. Quintard was within a few feet of them, but as oblivious of their presence as though she stood alone in the room. Possibly, she thought she did. With fixed eyes and mechanical step she began to move straight towards the table, her whole appearance of a nature to make Hetty’s blood run cold, but to cause that of Violet’s to bound through her veins with renewed hope.

“The one thing I could have wished!” she murmured under her breath. “She has fallen into a trance. She is again under the dominion of her idea. If we watch and do not disturb her she may repeat her action of last night, and herself show where she has put this precious document.”

Meanwhile Mrs. Quintard continued to advance. A moment more, and her smooth white locks caught the ruddy glow centred upon the chair standing in the hollow of the table. Words were leaving her lips, and her hand, reaching out over the blotter, groped among the articles scattered there till it settled on a large pair of shears.

“Listen,” muttered Violet to the woman pressing close to her side. “You are acquainted with her voice; catch what she says if you can.”

Hetty could not; an undistinguishable murmur was all that came to her ears.

Violet took a step nearer. Mrs. Quintard’s hand had left the shears and was hovering uncertainly in the air. Her distress was evident. Her head, no longer steady on her shoulders, was turning this way and that, and her tones becoming inarticulate.

“Paper! I want paper” burst from her lips in a shrill unnatural cry.

But when they listened for more and watched to see the uncertain hand settle somewhere, she suddenly came to herself and turned upon them a startled glance, which speedily changed into one of the utmost perplexity.

“What am I doing here?” she asked. “I have a feeling as if I had almost seen--almost touched--oh, it’s gone! and all is blank again. Why couldn’t I keep it till I knew--” Then she came wholly to herself and, forgetting even the doubts of a moment since, remarked to Violet in her old tremulous fashion:

“You asked us to pull down the books? But you’ve evidently thought better of it.”

“Yes, I have thought better of it.” Then, with a last desperate hope of re-arousing the visions lying somewhere back in Mrs. Quintard’s troubled brain, Violet ventured to observe: “This is likely to resolve itself into a psychological problem, Mrs. Quintard. Do you suppose that if you fell again into the condition of last night, you would repeat your action and so lead us yourself to where the will lies hidden?”

“Possibly; but it may be weeks before I walk again in my sleep, and meanwhile Carlos will have arrived, and Clement, possibly, died. My nephew is so low that the doctor is coming back at midnight. Miss Strange, Clement is a man in a thousand. He says he wants to see you. Would you be willing to accompany me to his room for a moment? He will not make many more requests and I will take care that the interview is not prolonged.”

“I will go willingly. But would it not be better to wait--”

“Then you may never see him at all.”

“Very well; but I wish I had some better news to give.”

“That will come later. This house was never meant for Carlos. Hetty, you will stay here. Miss Strange, let us go now.”

“You need not speak; just let him see you.”

Violet nodded and followed Mrs. Quintard into the sick-room.

The sight which met her eyes tried her young emotions deeply. Staring at her from the bed, she saw two piercing eyes over whose brilliance death as yet had gained no control. Clements’s soul was in that gaze; Clement halting at the brink of dissolution to sound the depths behind him for the hope which would make departure easy. Would he see in her, a mere slip of a girl dressed in fashionable clothes and bearing about her all the marks of social distinction, the sort of person needed for the task upon the success of which depended his darlings’ future? She could hardly expect it. Yet as she continued to meet his gaze with all the seriousness the moment demanded, she beheld those burning orbs lose some of their demand and the fingers, which had lain inert upon the bedspread, flutter gently and move as if to draw attention to his wife and the three beautiful children clustered at the foot-board.

He had not spoken nor could she speak, but the solemnity with which she raised her right hand as to a listening Heaven called forth upon his lips what was possibly his last smile, and with the memory of this faint expression of confidence on his part, she left the room, to make her final attempt to solve the mystery of the missing document.

Facing the elderly lady in the hall, she addressed her with the force and soberness of one leading a forlorn hope:

“I want you to concentrate your mind upon what I have to say to you. Do you think you can do this?”

“I will try,” replied the poor woman with a backward glance at the door which had just been closed upon her.

“What we want,” said she, “is, as I stated before, an insight into the workings of your brain at the time you took the will from the safe. Try and follow what I have to say, Mrs. Quintard. Dreams are no longer regarded by scientists as prophecies of the future or even as spontaneous and irrelevant conditions of thought, but as reflections of a near past, which can almost without exception be traced back to the occurrences which caused them. Your action with the will had its birth in some previous line of thought afterwards forgotten. Let us try and find that thought. Recall, if you can, just what you did or read yesterday.”

Mrs. Quintard looked frightened.

“But, I have no memory,” she objected. “I forget quickly, so quickly that in order to fulfill my engagements I have to keep a memorandum of every day’s events. Yesterday? yesterday? What did I do yesterday? I went downtown for one thing, but I hardly know where.”

“Perhaps your memorandum of yesterday’s doings will help you.”

“I will get it. But it won’t give you the least help. I keep it only for my own eye, and--”

“Never mind; let me see it.”

And she waited impatiently for it to be put in her hands.

But when she came to read the record of the last two days, this was all she found:

Saturday: Mauretania nearly due. I must let Mr. Delahunt know today that he’s wanted here to-morrow. Hetty will try on my dresses. Says she has to alter them. Mrs. Peabody came to lunch, and we in such trouble! Had to go down street. Errand for Clement. The will, the will! I think of nothing else. Is it safe where it is? No peace of mind till to-morrow. Clement better this afternoon. Says he must live till Carlos gets back; not to triumph over him, but to do what he can to lessen his disappointment. My good Clement!

So nervous, I went to pasting photographs, and was forgetting all my troubles when Hetty brought in another dress to try on.

Quiet in the great house, during which the clock on the staircase sent forth seven musical peals. To Violet waiting alone in the library, they acted as a summons. She was just leaving the room, when the sound of hubbub in the hall below held her motionless in the doorway. An automobile had stopped in front, and several persons were entering the house, in a gay and unseemly fashion. As she stood listening, uncertain of her duty, she perceived the frenzied figure of Mrs. Quintard approaching. As she passed by, she dropped one word: “Carlos!” Then she went staggering on, to disappear a moment later down the stairway.

This vision lost, another came. This time it was that of Clements’s wife leaning from the marble balustrade above, the shadow of approaching grief battling with the present terror in her perfect features. Then she too withdrew from view and Violet, left for the moment alone in the great hall, stepped back into the library and began to put on her hat.

The lights had been turned up in the grand salon and it was in this scene of gorgeous colour that Mrs. Quintard came face to face with Carlos Pelacios. Those who were witness to her entrance say that she presented a noble appearance, as with the resolution of extreme desperation she stood waiting for his first angry attack.

He, a short, thick-set, dark man, showing both in features and expression the Spanish blood of his paternal ancestors, started to address her in tones of violence, but changed his note, as he met her eye, to one simply sardonic.

“You here!” he began. “I assure you, madame, that it is a pleasure which is not without its inconveniences. Did you not receive my cablegram requesting this house to be made ready for my occupancy?”

“I did.”

“Then why do I find guests here? They do not usually precede the arrival of their host.”

“Clement is very ill--”

“So much the greater reason that he should have been removed--”

“You were not expected for two days yet. You cabled that you were coming on the Mauretania.”

“Yes, I cabled that. Elisabetta,”--this to his wife standing silently in the background--“we will go to the Plaza for tonight. At three o’clock tomorrow we shall expect to find this house in readiness for our return. Later, if Mrs. Quintard desires to visit us we shall be pleased to receive her. But”--this to Mrs. Quintard herself--“you must come without Clement and the kids.”

Mrs. Quintard’s rigid hand stole up to her throat.

“Clement is dying. He is failing hourly,” she murmured. “He may not live till morning.”

Even Carlos was taken aback by this. “Oh, well!” said he, “we will give you two days.”

Mrs. Quintard gasped, then she walked straight up to him.

“You will give us all the time his condition requires and more, much more. He is the real owner of this house, not you. My brother left a will bequeathing it to him. You are my nephew’s guests, and not he yours. As his representative I entreat you and your wife to remain here until you can find a home to your mind.”

The silence seethed. Carlos had a temper of fire and so had his wife. But neither spoke, till he had gained sufficient control over himself to remark without undue rancour:

“I did not think you had the wit to influence your brother to this extent; otherwise, I should have cut my travels short.” Then harshly: “Where is this will?”

“It will be produced.” But the words faltered.

Carlos glanced at the man standing behind his wife; then back at Mrs. Quintard.

“Wills are not scribbled off on deathbeds; or if they are, it needs something more than a signature to legalize them. I don’t believe in this trick of a later will. Mr. Cavanagh”--here he indicated the gentleman accompanying them--“has done my father’s business for years, and he assured me that the paper he holds in his pocket is the first, last, and only expression of your brother’s wishes. If you are in a position to deny this, show us the document you mention; show us it at once, or inform us where and in whose hands it can be found.”

“That, for--for reasons I cannot give, I must refuse to do at present. But I am ready to swear--”

A mocking laugh cut her short. Did it issue from his lips or from those of his highstrung and unfeeling wife? It might have come from either; there was cause enough.

“Oh!” she faltered, “may God have mercy!” and was sinking before their eyes, when she heard her name, called from the threshold, and, looking that way, saw Hetty beaming upon her, backed by a little figure with a face so radiant that instinctively her hand went out to grasp the folded sheet of paper Hetty was seeking to thrust upon her.

“Ah!” she cried, in a great voice, “you will not have to wait, nor Clement either. Here is the will! The children have come into their own.” And she fell at their feet in a dead faint.

“Where did you find it? Oh! where did you find it? I have waited a week to know. When, after Carlos’s sudden departure, I stood beside Clement’s death-bed and saw from the look he gave me that he could still feel and understand, I told him that you had succeeded in your task and that all was well with us. But I was not able to tell him how you had succeeded or in what place the will had been found; and he died, unknowing. But we may know, may we not, now that he is laid away and there is no more talk of our leaving this house?”

Violet smiled, but very tenderly, and in a way not to offend the mourner. They were sitting in the library--the great library which was to remain in Clement’s family after all--and it amused her to follow the dreaming lady’s glances as they ran in irrepressible curiosity over the walls. Had Violet wished, she could have kept her secret forever. These eyes would never have discovered it.

But she was of a sympathetic temperament, our Violet, so after a moment’s delay, during which she satisfied herself that little, if anything, had been touched in the room since her departure from it a week before, she quietly observed:

“You were right in persisting that you hid it in this room. It was here I found it. Do you notice that photograph on the mantel which does not stand exactly straight on its easel?”

“Yes.”

“Supposing you take it down. You can reach it, can you not?”

“Oh, yes. But what--”

“Lift it down, dear Mrs. Quintard; and then turn it round and look at its back.”

Agitated and questioning, the lady did as she was bid, and at the first glance gave a cry of surprise, if not of understanding. The square of brown paper, acting as a backing to the picture, was slit across, disclosing a similar one behind it which was still intact.

“Oh! was it hidden in here?” she asked.

“Very completely,” assented Violet. “Pasted in out of sight by a lady who amuses herself with mounting and framing photographs. Usually, she is conscious of her work, but this time she performed her task in a dream.”

Mrs. Quintard was all amazement.

“I don’t remember touching these pictures,” she declared. “I never should have remembered. You are a wonderful person, Miss Strange. How came you to think these photographs might have two backings? There was nothing to show that this was so.”

“I will tell you, Mrs. Quintard. You helped me.”

“I helped you?”

“Yes. You remember the memorandum you gave me? In it you mentioned pasting photographs. But this was not enough in itself to lead me to examine those on the mantel, if you had not given me another suggestion a little while before. We did not tell you this, Mrs. Quintard, at the time, but during the search we were making here that day, you had a lapse into that peculiar state which induces you to walk in your sleep. It was a short one, lasting but a moment, but in a moment one can speak, and, this you did--”

“Spoke? I spoke?”

“Yes, you uttered the word ‘paper!’ not the paper, but ‘paper!’ and reached out towards the shears. Though I had not much time to think of it then, afterwards upon reading your memorandum I recalled your words, and asked myself if it was not paper to cut, rather than to hide, you wanted. If it was to cut, and you were but repeating the experience of the night before, then the room should contain some remnants of cut paper. Had we seen any? Yes, in the basket, under the desk we had taken out and thrown back again a strip or so of wrapping paper, which, if my memory did not fail me, showed a clean-cut edge. To pull this strip out again and spread it flat upon the desk was the work of a minute, and what I saw led me to look all over the room, not now for the folded document, but for a square of brown paper, such as had been taken out of this larger sheet. Was I successful? Not for a long while, but when I came to the photographs on the mantel and saw how nearly they corresponded in shape and size to what I was looking for, I recalled again your fancy for mounting photographs and felt that the mystery was solved.

“A glance at the back of one of them brought disappointment, but when I turned about its mate--You know what I found underneath the outer paper. You had laid the will against the original backing and simply pasted another one over it.

“That the discovery came in time to cut short a very painful interview has made me joyful for a week.

“And now may I see the children?”

END OF PROBLEM V

PROBLEM VI. THE HOUSE OF CLOCKS

Miss Strange was not in a responsive mood. This her employer had observed on first entering; yet he showed no hesitation in laying on the table behind which she had ensconced herself in the attitude of one besieged, an envelope thick with enclosed papers.

“There,” said he. “Telephone me when you have read them.”

“I shall not read them.”

“No?” he smiled; and, repossessing himself of the envelope, he tore off one end, extracted the sheets with which it was filled, and laid them down still unfolded, in their former place on the table-top.

The suggestiveness of the action caused the corners of Miss Srange’s delicate lips to twitch wistfully, before settling into an ironic smile.

Calmly the other watched her.

“I am on a vacation,” she loftily explained, as she finally met his studiously non-quizzical glance. “Oh, I know that I am in my own home!” she petulantly acknowledged, as his gaze took in the room; “and that the automobile is at the door; and that I’m dressed for shopping. But for all that I’m on a vacation--a mental one,” she emphasized; “and business must wait. I haven’t got over the last affair,” she protested, as he maintained a discreet silence, “and the season is so gay just now--so many balls, so many--But that isn’t the worst. Father is beginning to wake up--and if he ever suspects--” A significant gesture ended this appeal.