“Ten thousand dollars is a great deal of money!” said Frank, easily, with a languid shrug of her shoulders.
“It is a great deal! But we’re up against a great deal! If we had twice as much, it would be even better. I have a possible twelve hundred now, altogether—just a scrawny, miserable twelve hundred! I got most of it yesterday, through dabbling in this cotton of Curry’s. Tomorrow morning every cent of it goes down to Robinson & Little, and if the market is moderately steady, and he takes a two dollar margin, knowing what I do, it means I double that amount before the day’s trading is over.”
“Robinson & Little? Who are they? New friends of yours?”
“They are the big Wall Street people. I had to pay two hundred dollars—in I. O. U. form,—for a letter to that firm. I still have a suspicion it was forged, too. I’ve been getting acquainted with them, however, and showing them that I’m all right. When the eleventh hour comes, and when I have to cut in on Curry’s Postal-Union wire down-town, we’ll have to tear around to Robinson & Little’s, flop over with the market, and buy cotton short, on a stop-order. It all depends upon what margin we may have to put up, whether we make forty thousand dollars, or a hundred and forty thousand dollars. Curry, you may be sure, will try to start the thing off as quietly as possible. So a normal market will bring a more normal margin, and give us something worth while to play on!”
“Something worth while?” she mused absently. Then she came and stood by Durkin, and studied his face once more. Some sense of his isolation, of his unhappy aloofness from his kind, touched and wrung her feeling. She caught at his arm with a sudden companionable enthusiasm, and joined him in pacing the room.
“After all, there would be something big, and wide, and sweeping about this sort of work, wouldn’t there?”
“Yes; it’s a blamed sight better than pool-room piking!” he cried. “It’s living; it’s doing things!”
“I believe I could plunge in it, and glory in it!” she went on, consolingly.
“There’s just one drawback—just one nasty little blot on the face of the fun,” he ventured, catching at the sustaining arm of her enthusiasm.
“And that is—?”
“We’ve got to get this ten thousand dollars just for a day or two!”
“But have you any idea as to how, or where, or when?”
“Yes, I have,” he answered, looking at her steadily. There seemed to be some covert challenge in his glance, but she faced him unwaveringly.
“Say it out, Jim; I’m not afraid!”
“I mean you must get it! You’ve got to borrow it!”
He began bravely enough, but he hesitated before the startled scorn on her face.
“You mean I’ve—I’ve got to steal it?”
He held up a protesting hand. Then he went to the half-open door of her inner room and closed it carefully.
“No; as I said before, we can not and must not steal it. It may be called theft, of course, but every cent of it will be returned. No, no; listen to me—I have it all figured out. Only, it has to be done this very night!”
“Tonight?” she said, with a reproving little cry.
“Yes, tonight! And that is why I’ve been desperate, of course, and have been looping every telephone wire that runs near my up-town room, hoping against hope for a chance to pick up something to work on. The only thing that gave me that chance was Theodore Van Schaick’s house wire. Now, listen. Two days ago his daughter Lydia came of age. I could tell you most of the things she got, and how she has been ’phoning gratitude and thanks and girlish messages out round the city. But among other things Miss Lydia Van Schaick received from her father, was a small and neat bundle not long out of the Sub-Treasury. It was made up of one hundred equally neat little pieces of parchment, and each one of them is a one-hundred dollar banknote.”
“And I’m to crawl through one of her windows, and burglarize the house of this amount!”
“No, no, Frank—listen to me a moment. Yesterday, Miss Lydia telephoned her Uncle Cedric about this money. Not being used to a small fortune in ready cash, naturally, she feels nervous about having it around, and wants to put it somewhere. Her level-headed old Uncle Cedric advised her to take it down tomorrow to the Second National Bank, and open a deposit account with it. And this Lydia intends to do. Tonight her ten thousand dollars are laid carefully away in a glove-box, in one of her chiffonier drawers, in her own private bedroom. So tonight is our only chance!”
“Couldn’t I sand-bag her in the morning, on her way down-town?” demanded Frances, with mock seriousness. She had learned not to ask too much of life, and she was struggling to school herself to the thought of this new rôle.
“No, my dear girl; it can be done so much easier than that. Her mother and her younger sister are still at Driftwood, their summer place in Mamaroneck. At four o’clock this afternoon they sent into the city a certain Miss Annie Seabrooke. She is a St. Luke’s graduate, a professional nurse who has been looking after old Mrs. Van Schaick. This lady, apparently, is a good deal of a hypochondriac. The nurse, of course, has to get things ready for her patient’s return. I have already met Miss Seabrooke at the Grand Central Station. I have also, at Miss Lydia’s urgent request, installed her at the Holland House, over night. This, by the way, is the lady’s bag. I tried to explain to her that the whole Van Schaick house wants to be given over to Miss Lydia’s coming-of-age function.”
Frances, already carried down again by her tidal reaction of feeling, watched him through narrowed and abstracted eyes.
“In this bag, among other things, you’ll find a nurse’s uniform,” Durkin went on hurriedly, oblivious of her scrutiny. “It will fit a little loose, I’m afraid—Miss Seabrooke is a big, wide-shouldered Canadian girl. And in forty or fifty minutes from now you ought to be inside that uniform and inside the Van Schaick house—if we ever want to carry this thing through!”
“And then—?” she asked, in her dead and impersonal voice, as though her thoughts were leagues away.
“Then,” cried Durkin, “then you’ve got to get hold of a glove-box in Miss Lydia Van Schaick’s chiffonier drawer. By some means or other we’ve got to get hold of that box, and—”
She stopped him, by holding up a sudden silencing hand. Her face was white and set; he could see none of the iris of her eyes.
“It’s no use!” she said, evenly and quietly. “It’s no use. I can not and will not do it!”
Durkin fell back from her, aghast. Then he took her by the arm, and turned her about so that the light fell on her face. He could see that her lower lip was trembling.
“You back down—now?” he demanded, with a touch of incredulity.
“Yes, I back down!” she answered, letting her eyes meet his.
“Why—” he began, inadequately. “What is it?”
“It’s simply this, Jim,” she answered him—and her voice, now, was high and thin and unmodulated, constricted, by some inward tension, to a gramophonic tumult of syllables. “There has got to be a limit, somewhere. At some point we have got to draw the line. We have been forgetting a great many things. But I can not and will not be a common thief—for you—or for anything you can bring to me—or to my life!”
“You say that?”
“Yes, I do; and if you cared for me—if you thought of my feelings—if you thought of my happiness, you would never ask me to do such things—you would never make me suffer like this!”
He threw up his hands with what was almost a gesture of exasperation.
“But you will not be a common thief—it will not be stealing at all! Can’t you see that?”
“No, I can not. And you know as well as I know, that when we try to justify it we do it only by a quibble!”
“But I tell you every penny of that money will go back where it came from!”
“Then why can’t we go to Lydia Van Schaick and ask her to lend us the money?”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“No more so than what you propose!”
Durkin, drawing back from her, closed his right fist and with it pounded angrily on the palm of his left hand.
“If you’re going to back down I will go to Lydia Van Schaick, and I’ll get her money, too. I’ll go as a second-story man, as a porch-climber! I’ll go after that money as a common burglar and house-breaker. But I’ll get it, in the end, or know the reason why!”
“Oh!” she gasped, horrified. “You wouldn’t! You couldn’t!”
“I say I will!” he cried, in a passion.
“Oh, you couldn’t!” she reiterated.
“Couldn’t I?—I’ve got this machinery started, and it’s going to be kept moving!”
Something in the scene carried her years back, to the times when her father, emerging from his prolonged orgies, sick and shaken, stormed and wept for the brandy she struggled to keep away from him—and the struggle would end only, when in fear of his collapse, she surrendered the bottle to his quivering fingers.
“My God—I’ve got to have it!” Durkin was crying and storming.
There crept over her the same, slowly eviscerating pity for the defiant man who now stood before her, so tragically weak in his very protests of strength.
She turned and caught at his arm, with a sudden inward surrender that left her dazed and tottering. She struggled in vain to keep down her tears, once more torn by that old and costly and compromising hunger to be loved and sustained by him. She could not live in the face of his anger; she could not endure his hate. And the corroding bitterness, the gnawing tragedy, of her life lay in the fact that the arm to which she must turn for support was the very arm that would forever drag and hold her down.
Yet she was inarticulate, in the face of it all. She could not plead; she could not explain. She could only break out with a sudden unreasoning and passionate cry of: “You are not kind to me!”
Durkin had already shaken her hand from his arm, and was on the point of a second outburst. Then he stopped, and the gathering anger and revolt ebbed out of his face, for at that tearful and passionate cry from her he knew that the battle between them had come to an end. He knew, with an exultation in which even pity and cruelty were strangely entangled, that it was a sign of her inward capitulation, that he had won her over.
“Frank!”
He swung about, suddenly, and with one clasp of his arms let wide the flood-gates of her strained emotions.
“Good God!” he cried. “You know I hate it, as much as you do! But can’t you see it’s too late now, to quibble and vacillate? Can’t you see that I’m getting nothing more out of it than you?”
He pleaded with her, hotly, impetuously. He showed her how he needed her, how he was helpless without her. He held her, and kissed the tears from her unhappy eyes—he could see them droop, pitifully, as with a narcotic, at his first intimate and tender touch. He would have to sway her now, he felt, not through her judgment, not by open attack, but only by those more circuitous and subterranean approaches of feminine feeling. And still he expostulated and pleaded, unnerving and breaking her will with his cruel kindnesses of word and caress.
“Oh, I’ll do it!” she cried, at last, mopping her stained face. “I’ll do it, Jim, if I have to!”
“But there’s nothing so terrible in it, Dear Heart,” he assuaged. “We’ve been through worse things together. And it will be made right again, every penny of it!”
“Jim,” she said slowly, as she grew calmer once more; “Jim, I want you to give me your word of honor that it will be made right! I’m—I’m too cowardly, yet, to do a thing that’s wickedness, through and through. I’ve got to see some glimmer of right in it, I’ve got to feel that it will end right, even—”
“But this will end right! It can’t help it. I give you my word of honor, now, to save you from being what you might seem, that every cent of this woman’s money goes back to her.”
She was moving her head slowly up and down, as she studied his face.
“Then you must remember, through it all, how much I’m trusting myself to you,” she said, with a forlornness that brought a lump in his throat, as she looked about the room with hopeless eyes. “Do you realize how hard all this is going to be?”
“It’s not easy, I know—but it’s our only chance.”
“Is it our only chance?” she suddenly asked. “Life is full of chances. I saw one today, if I’d only known.”
She looked at him again, with some new light sifting through all her tangle of clouds. “Yes,” she went on, more hopefully, “there might be still another way!”
“Well?” he asked, almost impatiently, as he glanced at his watch.
“It was something that happened when I went into that little Postal-Union office at Broadway and Thirty-seventh Street.” She was speaking rapidly now, with a touch of his former fire. “The relays and everything are in the same room, you know, behind the counter and a wire screen. I wanted my dressmaker, and while I was sitting at a little side-desk chewing my pen-handle and trying to boil seventeen words down to ten, a man came in with a rush message. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. It was Sunset Bryan, the race-track plunger, and it occurred to me that it might be worth while to know what he was sending out.”
“Did he see you, or does he know you?”
“I took good pains that he shouldn’t see me. So I scrawled away on my blank, and just sat there and read the ticker as the operator took the despatches off the file and sent them out. Here is the wording of Sunset Bryan’s message, as well as I can remember it: ‘Duke—of—Kendall—runs—tomorrow—get—wise—and—wire—St. Louis—and—South!’”
“Well, what of it?” Durkin asked.
“Why, this Bryan is the man who took one hundred and ten thousand dollars out of the Aqueduct ring in one day. Since the Gravesend Meeting began, people say he has made nearly half a million. He’s a sort of race-track Curry. He keeps close figures on every race he plays. He has one hundred men and more on his pay roll, and makes his calculations after the most minute investigating and figuring. It stands to reason that he manipulates a little, though the Pinkerton men, as I suppose you know, have never been able to get him off the Eastern tracks. Now, Jim, my firm belief is that there is something ‘cooked up,’ as they say, for tomorrow afternoon, and if we could only find out what this Duke of Kendall business is, we might act on it in time.”
She waited for Durkin to speak. He tapped the top of his head, meditatively, with his right forefinger, pursing his lips as his mind played over the problem.
“Yes, we might. But how are we to find out what the Duke of Kendall and his mere running means?”
“I even took the trouble to look up the Duke of Kendall. He is a MacIntosh horse, the stable companion to Mary J., and ridden by Shirley, a new jockey.”
She could see that he had little sympathy for her suggestion, and she herself lost faith in the plan even as she unfolded it.
“My idea was, Jim, that this horse was going to run—is sure to run, under heavy odds, for what they call ‘a long shot.’”
“But still, how would we be able to make sure?”
“I could go and ask Sunset Bryan himself.”
Durkin threw up his hand with a gesture of angry disapproval.
“That beast! He’s—he’s unspeakable! He’s the worst living animal in America!”
“I shouldn’t be afraid of him,” she answered, quietly.
“The whole thing comes too late in the game, anyway,” broke in Durkin, with a second gesture of disgust. Then he added, more gently: “Good heavens, Frank, I don’t want to see you mixed up with that kind of cur! It wouldn’t be right and fair! It’s infinitely worse than the thing I’m suggesting!”
“After all, we are not so different, he and I,” she responded, with acidulated mildness.
Durkin took her hand in his, with real pain written on his face.
“Don’t talk that way,” he pleaded; “it hurts!”
She smoothed his hair with her free hand, quietly, maternally.
“Then you had rather that I—I borrowed this money from the Van Schaick house?” she asked him.
“It’s the choice of two evils,” he answered her, out of his unhappiness, all his older enthusiasm now burnt down into the ashes of indifferency.
“If only I was sure you could keep your promise,” she said, dreamily, as she studied his face.
“It will go back!” he responded determinedly, shrugging off his momentary diffidence. “Even though I have to make it, dollar by dollar, and though it takes me twenty years! But I tell you, Frank, that it will not be needed. Here we have the chance of a life time. If we only had the money to start with, the whole business could be carried on openly and decently—barring, of course,” he added, with his sudden shamefaced smile, “the little bit of cutting-in I’ll have to do down-town on the Curry wires!”
“One minute—before we go any farther with this. Supposing we successfully get this glove-box, and successfully watch Curry, and on the strength of our knowledge invest this money, and get our returns, and find ourselves with enough—well, with enough not to starve on—will you promise me this: that it will be the last?”
“But why should it be the last?”
“You know as well as I do! You know that I want to be honest, to live straight and aboveboard; but a hundred times more, that I want to see you honest and aboveboard!”
He studied the tense and passionate mood that flitted across her face, that seemed to deepen the shadows about her brooding violet eyes.
“I would do anything for you, Frank!” he said, with an inadequate and yet eloquent little outthrust of the arms.
“Then do this for me! Let us get back to the daylight world again!”
“But would it satisfy us? Would we—?”
“Would we—?” she echoed forlornly. Then she turned suddenly away, to hide a trace of inconsequential tears.
“We have got to!” she cried out passionately over her shoulder, as she stooped to the suit-case and deftly opened it. A moment later she was rummaging hurriedly through its neatly packed contents.
“And I am Mrs. Van Schaick’s trained nurse?” she asked, ruminatively.
“Yes, Miss Annie Seabrooke, remember!”
“But the others—the servants—won’t they know me?”
“You were engaged in Mamaroneck; not one of the city servants has seen your face.”
“But it will be eleven and after—was my train delayed?”
“No, not delayed; but you took a later train.”
She was silent for a minute or two, as she probed deeper into the suit-case.
“You haven’t promised!” she murmured, her face still low over the womanly white linen, and the little cap and apron and uniform which she was gently shaking out before her.
She rose to her feet and turned to him.
“I promise you—anything!” he cried, in the teeth of all his inner misgivings. He followed her to the open window.
“Then kiss me!” she said, with a little exhausted sigh of ultimate surrender, as she sank into his arms and her lonely and hungry body felt the solace of his strength about and above it. And in that minute they lost all count of time and place, and for them, with the great glimmering granite city stretching away at their feet, there was neither past nor future.
Frances Candler waited until complete quiet reigned over the house. Then she noiselessly opened her door and peered up and down the darkened hallway.
A sudden thought came to her, as she stood there in the silence, and, slipping back to her room, she took first a hot-water bottle out of her nurse’s bag, and then a hypodermic syringe from its neat little morocco case. Miss Annie Seabrooke, she decided, had been making melancholy use of her knowledge of drugs. That enlightened young lady was, obviously, addicted to the use of morphine, for beside the syringe-case Frances found a little bottle bearing its telltale chemical formula: C17 H19 NO3.
She removed the screw-top from the graduated “barrel,” and in its place adjusted the glistening little hollow needle. Then she carefully filled the graduated tube with its innocent-looking liquid, and, wrapping the syringe in her pocket-handkerchief, thrust it into the bosom of her bodice. Many things lay ahead of her, and before the night was out even this might be of use. She devoutly hoped not—yet the present moment, she warned herself, was no time for hesitations and compunctious half-measures.
The hot-water bottle she carried openly in her hand, as she once more softly opened the door and crept out into the half-lighted hallway.
They had given her a room on the third floor, a concession, she imagined, to the established dignity of her profession. Most of the servants slept on the fourth floor. It had, accordingly, been by way of the front stairs that the bibulous English butler, with more than one sidelong blink of admiration had brought her up to her quarters for the night.
She felt that she would like to find the back stairway, the stairway by which the household servants came and went.
She moved forward softly, listening a second at doorways as she passed. It crept through her mind at that moment, incongruously enough, how like her own future lay this silent and unknown house, with its dark entanglement of possibilities, its network of unknown dangers and surprises, its staid and unbetraying doors behind which so much or so little might anywhere dwell.
Then she suddenly stood transfixed, panting a little. For the sound of approaching footsteps fell on her startled ear.
To turn and run was out of the question, for she had no knowledge of where or into what she might flee. To hesitate longer would be equally fatal. Instant action only could save her. As quick as thought she opened the door on her left, and stepped inside.
“Is it you, Adolph?” a whispered voice asked quietly, out of the gloom. It was a woman’s voice—she must have been a young woman, Frances commiseratively felt—a voice that was neither startled nor unhappy.
She stood, then, in one of the servants’ rooms. She pictured to herself the different faces she had seen below stairs, though in none of them could she remember any sign or hint of what she had now stumbled upon. But the pregnancy of that muffled question gave her a flashing consciousness of the wheels within even those inner wheels in the dark and complicated mills of life.
“Hsssssh!” said the intruder softly, as she quickly swung to the door, padding it with her hand.
She stood there, waiting until the steps passed by. They were brisk, businesslike steps, those of a woman, mingled with the tinkling of a chain of keys. She surmised that it was the housekeeper, on her last rounds for the night.
She realized the peril of another minute in the room. The wiring of the house, she had already noticed, with the quickness of an expert, was both thorough and modern. Any moment the turning of a bedside button might flood the room with brilliant light and leave her there, betrayed beyond redemption.
“Sssssssh!” she said again sharply, as though in warning, and a moment later dodged out through the door, going as noiselessly as she had come.
But the ground was now dangerous, she felt; and she was glad to escape to the comparative freedom of a wider hallway, running at right angles to the one she had just left. This surely led to the back stairs, she argued, as she groped her way steadily forward. She was even debating whether it would not be better to risk the fully-lighted front stairs, rather than lose time as she was doing, when her groping hands came in contact with the cool wood of the polished balustrade.
Her foot was on the carpeted second step, when she drew back, with a terrified catch of the breath.
The familiar click of the light-button had thrown the entire hall and stairway into dazzling light. A man stood at the foot of the stairs, in his slippered feet, with his hand still on the button. He had not yet seen her; but it was too late to escape.
It was the bibulous English butler who had shown her to her room. In a crook of his arm he carried a Sauterne bottle and a nearly empty champagne magnum, carefully recorked. It was plain, Frances argued, that he was pilfering a nightcap for himself. That gave her at least a shred of courage.
She hesitated only the fraction of a second. Then she coldly and briskly descended the stairs, with her hot-water bottle in her hand.
The butler fell back a step or two at the sudden apparition, blinked at her unsteadily in the strong light, and made a gigantic effort to draw himself up.
Her first intention had been to march disdainfully past him; but this, she remembered, was out of the question. It was already midnight, or more, and for all his unsteadiness of limb he was, she knew, a shrewd and capable servant, well trained in his duties.
“Well, miss, what is it?” She could see him putting on his official attitude, just as he might draw on his serving-coat. The new nurse, apparently, took cold easily, for she still wore her galoshes.
“Which way do I go to the kitchen?” she demanded curtly.
“The kitchen, miss, is closed.” He was looking at her with his pale and beady little eyes. “What were you wanting?”
“I must have some hot water,” she answered, swaying her instruments of deliverance before her.
“There is a bathroom on your floor, miss, two doors to the right of your own door.” He spoke thickly but peremptorily. Frances could plainly see that he was not to be juggled with.
“I said hot water, not warm,” she retorted, almost angrily.
“You’ll find an electric heater in the bathroom, miss,” he added, more respectfully. She tried to wither him with a look, but it was unavailing. He even preceded her to her own door, turning the lights on and off as they went.
A moment later, as she stood biting the end of her fingers in mingled vexation and anxiety, she could hear the sound of running water. She wondered, dreadingly, if she was never to get rid of the man. As she waited she let down her hair.
The butler appeared with a steaming pitcher. He entered unsteadily, to her preoccupied “Come!” He looked at her over his shoulder as he put the steaming pitcher down, on her dresser.
“A damned fine girl!” he said to himself, as he looked at her for a second time, and seemed loath to leave. In fact, months afterward, he dilated to the second cook on the wonder of that chestnut hair, which now fairly blanketed the girl’s head and shoulders.
“Are you in pain, miss?” he asked anxiously, coming nearer to her. His attitude was cogent, and yet non-committal.
“No,” she said icily, and then she added, more discreetly, “No—not much.”
“Just—er—where does it seem to be?” he ventured, brazenly.
She was silent now, distraught with mingled revulsion and anxiety.
“Is it here, miss?” he persisted, with easy and masterful solicitude, reaching out as though to touch her with his intrepid and insolent hand. The woman drew back with a shudder, white to the very lips. This was the penalty, she told herself, for the ways she had fallen into! This was the possible degradation that even Durkin had been willing to lead her into!
She fell back from him, and stood against the wall, struggling to calm herself. For the feeling swept over her that she must scream aloud, to rend and scatter what seemed the choking mists of a nightmare. Yet her masterful tormentor, misjudging the source of her emotion, still stood blinking at her soulfully.
“Isn’t there anything I can do for you?” he wheedled, meltingly, yet militantly.
It would have been laughable, under other circumstances, Frances tried to make herself believe—this solicitous tenderness of an unmannerly English butler, placidly extending to her the gallantries of the servants’ quarters. Now, she saw only the perils of the situation.
“You can leave this room,” she said, steadily, in answer to his question. She saw the look of stolid revolt that swept over his face, and she could have wrung her hands, in the extremity of her fear.
“Won’t you want anything fetched, later?” he still persecuted her.
“Yes, yes,” she cried, desperately; “but not now!”
“When?” he demanded, wagging his head, sagely.
“The later the better!” she answered, slowly, with a final and desperate craftiness, pointing to the door.
A sudden flame of audacious heat crept into the bloated face before her. He would still have tarried an admiring moment or two, but she returned his gaze, unfalteringly, for thirty resolute seconds. He wavered, mumbled something in his throat, flung one final melting leer at her, and then turned and crept from the room, nursing his two bottles in the crook of his arm as he went.
“Oh, thank God, thank God!” she cried, with a throaty little sob.
Then a second shudder, as momentarily benumbing as a chill, swept over her from head to foot. A sudden passion to get out where she could breathe and move took its place—at whatever ultimate loss—only to get away from that house of engulfing horrors.
The mood passed, with the passing of her fright, and she shook her tired nerves together with an effort. Then still once more she groped her way out through the darkness. Now, however, there was neither trepidation nor hesitancy in her silent movements, as she flitted through the hallway and passed like a shadow down the dark stairs.
She paused only once—at the door which she knew was Lydia Van Schaick’s bedroom. In an oriel window, opposite this door, was a little alcove fitted up with bookshelves, a highly polished writing-table, and two low-seated rattan lounging-chairs. On one end of the writing-table stood a flat silver vase holding a spray of roses; on the other end stood a desk-telephone transmitter and an oblong folio of green morocco, with “Telephone Addresses” stamped in gold on its richly tooled cover. All this Frances noticed with one quick glance, as, nursing the knob in her cautious fingers, she turned it slowly.
The door was securely locked, from the inside.
One chance remained to her—by way of the little white-tiled bathroom, which she had caught a glimpse of on her first journey up through the house. This bathroom, she knew, would open into the girl’s boudoir itself.
This door was unlocked. A moment later she was inside, and the door was closed behind her. She groped carefully across the tiled flooring until her finger-tips came in contact with the second door, which creaked a little at her touch, for it stood a few inches ajar.
This door she opened, inch by inch, in terror of that tiny hinge-creak. It was a sleeping-room, she knew, the moment she had crept inside; and it held a sleeper, for the air seemed laden with its subtle yet quite immaterial fragrance of warmth—vivified, as it were, with some intangible exhalation of its sleeping life.
She listened with strained attention, hoping to overhear the quiet and regular breathing of the sleeper. But no sound reached her ears.
Through the muffled darkness she could dimly make out the open doorway leading into what must be the girl’s sitting-room. In that room, Frances felt, would stand the chiffonier.
She felt her way to the foot of the bed. There she stood, strained second after second, still listening. No sound came from the sleeper. But, awed, for reasons that lay beyond the reach of her restless thought, she could feel the presence of the other life there, as distinctly as though the room had been steeped in noon-day light; and as she waited and listened there came to her a sense of the mystery of sleep, a feeling that, after all, this briefest midnight slumber was only a lighter and younger sister to that endless sleep of death itself.
Step by step, then, she crawled and edged her way into the second vault of black silence, feeling with outstretched fingers for each piece of furniture. The mirror-laden chiffonier, some womanly intuition told her, would stand between the two heavily curtained windows.
Her feelings had not misled her. It was a well-made piece of furniture, and the top drawer opened noiselessly. This was explored with light and feverish fingers, as a blind woman might explore it. But it held nothing but laces and scattered bits of jewelry, and filmy things she could not name and place.
The second drawer opened less readily, and a key had been left in the lock. She touched the little leather boxes, deciding that they must be jewel-cases, and methodic little layers of silk and linen, and a package or two of papers. Then her fingers fell on something cold, and hard, and purposeful. It was a woman’s little revolver, obviously, with a jeweled handle. She explored the trigger-guard and the safety-latch with studious fingers, and decided that it was a 32-calibre hammerless.
Then her startled hand went up to her lips, and she wheeled noiselessly about where she stood. It could not have been a sound that she heard. It was only a presence that had made itself felt, to some sixth sense in her.
No; it was nothing that she had heard or seen, but she leaned forward and studied the surrounding gloom intently, from side to side.
Acting under some quick subliminal impulse, she picked the little hammerless weapon up out of the drawer, with one hand, while her other hand explored its farther end. This exploring hand felt feverishly along the edges of what seemed a mother-of-pearl writing-portfolio, and rummaged quickly and deftly down among laces and silk, until her fingers came in contact with the glazed surface of a little oblong box.
There could be no two thoughts as to what that box was. It was the glove-box which held that particular package for which she had already dared so much.
An awakened and alert sixth sense still warned her of something ominous and imminent; but there was neither fear nor hesitation in her actions as she drew out the little oblong box and with quick fingers thrust it, along with the toy-like hammerless, into the bosom of her dress.
Then she took three stealthy steps forward—and once again caught her breath sharply.
“Somebody is in this room!”
The intruder and thief fell back, step by step, gropingly, until she touched the chiffonier once more.
“Somebody is in this room!”
It was a woman’s voice that broke in on the black silence, a quiet but sternly challenging voice, tremulous with agitation, yet strident with the triumph of conviction, and with resolute courage.
“Who is here?”
Frances Candler did not move. She stood there, breathing a little heavily, watching. For now that sudden challenge neither thrilled nor agitated her. Consciousness, in some way, refused to react. Her tired nerves had already been strained to their uttermost; nothing now could stir her dormant senses.
Then she felt the sudden patter of bare feet on the floor.
Still she waited, wondering what this movement could mean. And, as she had felt at other times, in moments of dire peril, a sense of detached and disembodied personality seized her—a feeling that the mind had slipped its sheath of the body and was standing on watch beyond and above her. She suddenly heard the sound of a key being withdrawn. It was from the door leading into the hallway. Then, almost before she realized what it meant, the bedroom door had been slammed shut, a second key had rattled and clicked decisively in its lock—and she was a prisoner!
A moment later she caught the sound of the signal-bell in the alcove.
“Central, quickly, give me the Sixty-Seventh Street police station!” It was the same clear and determined young voice that had spoken from the doorway.
There was a silence of only a few seconds. Then Frances heard the girl give her name and house number. This she had to repeat twice, apparently, to the sleepy sergeant.
“There is a burglar in this house. Send an officer here, please, at once!”
A chill douche of apprehension seemed to restore Frances to her senses. She ran across the room and groped feverishly along the wall for the electric-light button. She could find none. But on the chiffonier was a drop-globe, and with one quick turn of the wrist the room was flooded with tinted light.
The prisoner first verified her fears; there was no possible avenue of escape by way of the windows. These, she saw at once, were out of the question.
So she stopped in front of the mirror, thinking quickly and lucidly; and for the second time that night she decided to let down her hair. She could twist the bank-notes up into a little rope, and pin her thick braids closely over them, and no one might think to search for them there. It was a slender thread, but on that thread still hung her only hope.
She tore open her dress and flung the cover from the precious glove-box, scattering the gloves about in her feverish search.
The box held nothing. The money was not there. It had been taken and hidden elsewhere. And she might never have known, until it was too late!
Then methodically and more coolly she made a second search throughout the now lighted room. But nowhere could she find the package she needed. And, after all it was too late! And in a sort of tidal wave of deluging apprehension, she suddenly understood what life from that hour forward was worth to her.
She set to work to rearrange the chiffonier, inappositely and vacuously. She even did what she could to put the room once more in order. This accomplished, she took up her hot-water bottle, and still told herself that she must not give up. Then she seated herself in a little white-and-gold rocker, and waited, quietly blazing out through her jungle of danger each different narrow avenue of expediency.
“Poor Jim!” she murmured, under her breath, with one dry sob.
The hum of voices came to her from the hallway—the servants, obviously, had been awakened. She could hear the footsteps come to a stop without, and the shuffling of slippered feet on the hardwood floor. Then came the drone of excited whisperings, the creak and jar of the doors opening and closing.
Then, remote and muffled and far-away, sounded the sharp ringing of a bell. Somebody out in the hallway gasped a relieved, “Thank heaven!”
Frances looked at herself in the mirror, adjusting her hair, and taking note of the two little circles of scarlet that had deepened and spread across her feverish cheeks.
Then she sat down once more, and swung the hot-water bottle from her forefinger, and waited.
She heard the dull thud of the front door closing and a moment later the sound of quick footsteps on the stairs.
She looked about the comfortable, rose-tinted room, with its gilded Louis clock, with its womanish signs and tokens, with its nest-like warmth and softness; she looked about her slowly and comprehensively, as though she had been taking her last view of life.
Then she rose and went to the door, for the police had arrived.