LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

situation, if he ever came to learn the secret of his daughter’s fits of abstraction and the sly bank account she was slowly accumulating, the personage holding out this dangerous lure had no doubt at all. Yet he only smiled at her words and remarked in casual suggestion:

      “It’s out of town this time—way out. Your health certainly demands a change of air.”

      “My health is good. Fortunately, or unfortunately, as one may choose to look at it, it furnishes me with no excuse for an outing,” she steadily retorted, turning her back on the table.

      “Ah, excuse me!” the insidious voice apologized, “your paleness misled me. Surely a night or two’s change might be beneficial.”

      She gave him a quick side look, and began to adjust her boa.

      To this hint he paid no attention.

      “The affair is quite out of the ordinary,” he pursued in the tone of one rehearsing a part. But there he stopped. For some reason, not altogether apparent to the masculine mind, the pin of flashing stones (real stones) which held her hat in place had to be taken out and thrust back again, not once, but twice. It was to watch this performance he had paused. When he was ready to proceed, he took the musing tone of one marshalling facts for another’s enlightenment:

      “A woman of unknown instincts—”

      “Pshaw!” The end of the pin would strike against the comb holding Violet’s chestnut-coloured locks.

      “Living in a house as mysterious as the secret it contains. But—” here he allowed his patience apparently to forsake him, “I will bore you no longer. Go to your teas and balls; I will struggle with my dark affairs alone.”

      His hand went to the packet of papers she affected so ostentatiously to despise. He could be as nonchalant as she. But he did not lift them; he let them lie. Yet the young heiress had not made a movement or even turned the slightest glance his way.

      “A woman difficult to understand! A mysterious house—possibly a mysterious crime!”

      Thus Violet kept repeating in silent self-communion, as flushed with dancing she sat that evening in a highly-scented conservatory, dividing her attention between the compliments of her partner and the splash of a fountain bubbling in the heart of this mass of tropical foliage; and when some hours later she sat down in her chintz-furnished bedroom for a few minutes’ thought before retiring, it was to draw from a little oak box at her elbow the half-dozen or so folded sheets of closely written paper which had been left for her perusal by her persistent employer.

      Glancing first at the signature and finding it to be one already favourably known at the bar, she read with avidity the statement of events thus vouched for, finding them curious enough in all conscience to keep her awake for another full hour.

      We here subscribe it:

      I am a lawyer with an office in the Times Square Building. My business is mainly local, but sometimes I am called out of town, as witness the following summons received by me on the fifth of last October.

      DEAR SIR,—

      I wish to make my will. I am an invalid and cannot leave my room. Will you come to me? The enclosed reference will answer for my respectability. If it satisfies you and you decide to accommodate me, please hasten your visit; I have not many days to live. A carriage will meet you at Highland Station at any hour you designate. Telegraph reply.

      A. Postlethwaite, Gloom Cottage, ——, N. J.

      The reference given was a Mr. Weed of Eighty-sixth Street—a well-known man of unimpeachable reputation.

      Calling him up at his business office, I asked him what he could tell me about Mr. Postlethwaite of Gloom Cottage, ——, N. J. The answer astonished me:

      “There is no Mr. Postlethwaite to be found at that address. He died years ago. There is a Mrs. Postlethwaite—a confirmed paralytic. Do you mean her?”

      I glanced at the letter still lying open at the side of the telephone:

      “The signature reads A. Postlethwaite.”

      “Then it’s she. Her name is Arabella. She hates the name, being a woman of no sentiment. Uses her initials even on her cheques. What does she want of you?”

      “To draw her will.”

      “Oblige her. It’ll be experience for you.” And he slammed home the receiver.

      I decided to follow the suggestion so forcibly emphasized; and the next day saw me at Highland Station. A superannuated horse and a still more superannuated carriage awaited me—both too old to serve a busy man in these days of swift conveyance. Could this be a sample of the establishment I was about to enter? Then I remembered that the woman who had sent for me was a helpless invalid, and probably had no use for any sort of turnout.

      The driver was in keeping with the vehicle, and as noncommittal as the plodding beast he drove. If I ventured upon a remark, he gave me a long and curious look; if I went so far as to attack him with a direct question, he responded with a hitch of the shoulder or a dubious smile which conveyed nothing. Was he deaf or just unpleasant? I soon learned that he was not deaf; for suddenly, after a jog-trot of a mile or so through a wooded road which we had entered from the main highway, he drew in his horse, and, without glancing my way, spoke his first word:

      “This is where you get out. The house is back there in the bushes.”

      As no house was visible and the bushes rose in an unbroken barrier along the road, I stared at him in some doubt of his sanity.

      “But—” I began; a protest into which he at once broke, with the sharp direction:

      “Take the path. It’ll lead you straight to the front door.”

      “I don’t see any path.”

      For this he had no answer; and confident from his expression that it would be useless to expect anything further from him, I dropped a coin into his hand, and jumped to the ground. He was off before I could turn myself about.

      “‘Something is rotten in the State of Denmark,’” I quoted in startled comment to myself; and not knowing what else to do, stared down at the turf at my feet.

      A bit of flagging met my eye, protruding from a layer of thick moss. Farther on I espied another—the second, probably, of many. This, no doubt, was the path I had been bidden to follow, and without further thought on the subject, I plunged into the bushes which with difficulty I made give way before me.

      For a moment all further advance looked hopeless. A more tangled, uninviting approach to a so-called home, I had never seen outside of the tropics; and the complete neglect thus displayed should have prepared me for the appearance of the house I unexpectedly came upon, just as, the way seemed on the point of closing up before me.

      But nothing could well prepare one for a first view of Gloom Cottage. Its location in a hollow which had gradually filled itself up with trees and some kind of prickly brush, its deeply stained walls, once picturesque enough in their grouping but too deeply hidden now amid rotting boughs to produce any other effect than that of shrouded desolation, the sough of these same boughs as they rapped a devil’s tattoo against each other, and the absence of even the rising column of smoke which bespeaks domestic life wherever seen—all gave to one who remembered the cognomen Cottage and forgot the pre-cognomen of Gloom, a sense of buried life as sepulchral as that which emanates from the mouth of some freshly opened tomb.

      But these impressions, natural enough to my youth, were necessarily transient, and soon gave way to others more business-like. Perceiving the curve of an arch rising above the undergrowth still blocking my approach, I pushed my way resolutely through, and presently found myself stumbling upon the steps of an unexpectedly spacious domicile, built not of wood, as its name of Cottage had led me to expect, but of carefully cut stone which, while showing every mark of time, proclaimed itself one of those early, carefully erected Colonial residences which it takes more than a century to destroy, or even to wear to the point of dilapidation.

      Somewhat

Скачать книгу