Lord John in New York Part 8

I had flung the s.h.i.+rt over a low screen, and had forgotten, in the rush of crowding thoughts, to copy the number in my journal. There hung the s.h.i.+rt as I had left it, but the number, which I had written clearly and distinctly, had become a black blur on the glazed linen.

I sprang out of bed, and switched on more lights. Surely I had not smudged the number by any clumsy accident. The noise I had heard--that sound like the "click" of a lock? One swift look at the s.h.i.+rt cuff came near to convincing me that a bit of rubber eraser had been used, and then I remembered Roger's doc.u.ments. The one I had slipped under my pillow was gone. Fortunately it was useless to the uninitiated without the other!

I got to the door almost as quickly as if I'd never been wounded, but found the key still turned in the lock. To have slipped out and locked the door on the _inside_, meant a clever thief, a skilled _rat d'hotel_, provided with a special instrument; but that the trick could be done I knew from hearsay. I threw open the door and looked into the dimly lit corridor. No one was visible, except the flitting figure of a very small child, in a sort of red-riding-hood, cloak, with a hood.

The little creature seemed startled at the noise I made, and ran to a door which it had nearly reached. Someone must have been waiting for its return, for it was let in and the door closed.

"If anyone's been in my rooms, he's probably there still," I said, and began to search in the obvious way--looking under the bed. What I found sent me to the door again; for a curious, collapsible box, just big enough to hold a small child, turned the innocent, flitting figure I'd seen into something sinister. Quicker than light, thoughts shot through my head; the arrival of a "big box," my failure to find it in my room, the click of the lock, some knowledge of me by the man with the scar, and a fear of my vaunted "detective skill." Slipping on a dressing-gown as I went, I stalked down the corridor to the door which opened to admit the child; and the k.n.o.b was in my grasp when a voice spoke sharply at my back. "Haven't you mistaken the room, sir?" the night watchman warned me.

I had met the man before, when coming in late, and he knew my number.

He was a big Irishman, twice my size. I foresaw trouble, but went to meet it. "I've reason to believe a thief's been in my rooms, and taken refuge here," I explained. "I want this door opened." With that I rattled the k.n.o.b and knocked threateningly. Almost at once the door was unlocked, and the sweet face of a young woman in a neat, plain dressing-gown peeped out. "Oh, what's the matter?" she faltered. "Is it fire? We have a child here."

"I _thought_ yuh was mistaken, sir!" cut in the watchman. "Two ladies and a little midget came in late. I saw 'em. No, madam, there's no fire. This gentleman thought a thief had slipped into one of your rooms."

"Indeed, he is mistaken," the young woman a.s.sured us. "We haven't finished undressing yet. I'm the child's nurse. If necessary, I can call my mistress, but she's very nervous." As she glanced back into the room I caught a glimpse of a woman in grey who hadn't taken off her hat. A sort of motor bonnet it seemed to be, with a long veil attached. I got no sight of her face, for the nurse hastily shut the door, all but a crack which scarcely showed her rather piquant nose.

"That's enough, I guess, sir?" suggested the watchman. "These ladies mustn't be disturbed. All the rooms along here are occupied by old clients. You go back to your suite and if there's any thief we'll find him. But maybe you was dreamin'?"

I heard the key turn again in the lock; but I realised that unless I wanted to risk a row and perhaps arrest for "disorderly conduct," I must bow to circ.u.mstances. For a moment I was tempted to persist, but I thought how much more important than anything it was to be free from entanglements, and able to reach Jamaica before seven o'clock. "Spilt milk," I said to myself, and took the watchman's advice. But outside the forbidden door, I picked up a tiny rosetted slipper.

In my own rooms, I searched again for traces of a hostile presence.

The collapsible box was a strange thing to find under a bed, but I couldn't prove that Little Red Riding Hood had been in it. Neither could I prove that a small pile of silver that I had poured out of my pockets on to the dressing-table had diminished, or that two letters which I had received--one from my brother Haslemere, one from Grace Odell--had been stolen. Nevertheless, while putting off my princ.i.p.al researches, I did telephone down to inquire who occupied rooms 212, 214. The man who answered from the office had "come on" since the people arrived, but, the name in the hotel register was "Mrs. W. Smith, nurse and child, Sayville, Long Island." Nothing could sound less offensive; but next morning when I descended at an unearthly hour it seemed that "the party" had already gone, by motor; and the man at the door "hadn't noticed no child." All I could do then was to reserve those rooms for myself, for two days, with orders that they should not be touched until investigated by me.

It lacked twenty minutes of train time when my chauffeur got me to Jamaica. This made me feel almost cheerful, but my heart sank as I reached the arrival platform. There were not many pa.s.sengers, and even if there had been a crowd one figure would have stood out conspicuously--that of a tall woman in a grey dress, a long grey cloak, and a close-fitting grey bonnet with a thick grey veil falling over the face and breast. There was not a doubt in my mind but this was the formidable directress of the Grey Sisterhood, come in person to meet--I had almost said "her victim." If the woman had known of my plan she could hardly have found a better way of thwarting it.

As I glowered at the figure stalking up and down, I hated it. And I wondered if there were more than a coincidence in the fact that this was the third grey-veiled woman I had seen since last night. In the car at the theatre there had been too brief a glimpse to be sure of a resemblance, and the woman in 212 had left on my mind an impression of comparative shortness. But then, it is easy to stoop and disguise one's height, I told myself viciously, eager to find a connection between this woman and the others.

I could see nothing of her face, as we pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed on the platform; but she was hovering not far off when I learned that the train from New York would be late. It was "hung up," a few miles away, owing to the breakdown of a "freighter." Instead of regret at this news, I felt joy. It gave me--with luck--a way out of my difficulty.

Here was the Head Sister, waiting for Maida Odell; but if my car could get me to the delayed train before it was restarted only Maida herself could keep me from saying what I had come to say.

There wasn't a moment to waste, and I didn't waste one. Thinking I had won the first point in the game, I hurried to my car without glancing back at the veiled woman. I gave directions to West and was about to get into the auto, when a look in the chauffeur's eye made me turn.

Close behind stood the grey lady. There was no doubt that her purpose was to speak to me. I took off my hat and faced her; but it was like trying to look at the moon through a thick London fog.

"You are Lord John Hasle, I believe?" she said, in a resonant contralto voice, with a slight suggestion of foreign accent. "I have heard of you," she went on. "You have been pointed out to me, and I know of your acquaintance with the Odells. You are going to motor back along the line. Your inquiries told me that. I would thank you, and so would Miss Odell, for taking me to her in your car."

Here was a situation! Rudely to refuse a favour asked by a lady, or--to lose, for ever, perhaps, my one hope? I chose to be rude. I stammered that I meant to go at such a pace it would be risking her life to grant the request. Very sorry; more lifting of the hat; a sheepish look of feigned regret; and then West, thoroughly ashamed of me, started the car. The next moment we had shot away, but not without a startling impression.

"The worst turn you can possibly do Miss Odell will be to prevent her coming into the Sisterhood House. It is the one place where she can be safe." Those were the words I heard over the noise of the starting motor; and as we left the tall statue of a woman, the high wind blew her thick veil partly aside. Instantly she pulled it into place; but I had time to see that the face underneath was covered with a grey mask.

The effect on my mind of this revelation was of something so sinister that I felt physically sick. What could be the motive for such double precautions of concealment? Was it merely to hide a disfigurement, I wondered, or was there a more powerful reason? I determined to tell Miss Odell what I had seen.

Fortunately there was little traffic on the country road at that hour, and we did the eight miles in about eight minutes. I thanked my lucky stars that the hold-up train had not moved; and my heart bounded when I saw Maida among a number of pa.s.sengers who had descended to wander about during the delay. She in a grey travelling dress and small winged toque, walked alone at a distance from the others. Here back was turned to me, but she was unmistakable, with the morning sun ringing her hair with a saint's halo. I tried not to frighten her by appearing too abruptly, but she gave a start, and there was pain rather than pleasure in her eyes.

"Do forgive me!" I pleaded. "I _had_ to finish what I couldn't say last night. I wouldn't intrude by travelling in your train from New York without permission, but I thought if I came to Jamaica, maybe you'd grant me a few minutes. Won't you let me atone--won't you let me help? I feel that I can. Roger has hinted of trouble. If you would trust me, I'd put my whole soul into the fight to save you from it."

So I ran on, with a torrent of arguments and all the force of love behind them. Something of that force the girl must have felt, for slowly she yielded and told me this strange story.

Roger Odell's father--Roger senior--had fallen in love with a girl who afterwards became Maida's mother. He was a widower, and young Roger was a boy of eight or nine at the time. Old Roger--he was not old then--had acted as the girl's guardian, and she had promised to marry him, when suddenly she disappeared, leaving behind a letter saying that she was going with the only man she could ever love.

Five years pa.s.sed, and then one day she came back bringing a little daughter four years old. Both the Rogers were away when she called at the house in Fifth Avenue; one at his office, the other at school. A housekeeper received the pair, realising that the mother was desperately ill. She would say nothing of herself, except that they had come from England; could not even tell her married name. She had lived through the voyage, she said, to put her daughter under the protection of her only friend. Some strange luggage she had brought, on which were London labels. She forbade the servant to telephone the master of the house. She would write a letter, and then she would go.

The letter was begun, but before it could be finished the writer fell into unconsciousness. For a few days she lingered, but never spoke again, and died in the arms of the man she had jilted.

"If you ever loved me, keep my child as if she were your own," began the written appeal. "She is Madeleine, named after me. Don't try to find out her other name. Give her yours, which might have been mine.

Make no inquiries. If you do, the same fate may fall on her which has fallen on her father and others of his family. It is killing me now.

Save my little Maida. The one legacy I can leave her is a jewel which I want her to keep; a miniature of myself taken for someone I loved, and an Egyptian relic which, for a reason I don't know, is immensely important. I promised her father that this child should never part with it. The one reward I can offer you is my grat----"

There the letter broke off.

Roger Odell, Senior, had obeyed every one of his dead love's requests.

The "Egyptian relic" was a mummy case, with the human contents marvellously preserved; the jewel, an opal and crystal eye of Horus.

In taking out the miniature from its frame, to be copied in a large portrait, Maida found the miniature of a man she supposed to be her father, and had ordered that enlarged also, to hang in her shrine. Her memories of the past before coming to America were vague; but her childhood, happy as it had been in other ways, was cursed by the dream of a terrible, dark face--a face appearing as a mere brown spot in the distance, then growing large as it drew nearer, coming close to her eyes at last in giant size, shutting out all the rest of the world.

Whether she had ever seen this face in reality, before it obsessed her dreams, she could not be sure; but the impression was that she had. As she grew older, the dream came less frequently; but once or twice she had seen a face in a crowd which reminded her--perhaps morbidly--of the dream. Such a face had looked up from the audience last night.

This mystery was one of two which had clouded Maida's life. From the second had come her great trouble; and she did not see that between the two could exist any connection. When I heard the rest of the history, however, I differed from her. Some link there might be, I thought; and if I were to help, it must be my business to find it.

One day, on leaving school for the holidays, when she was seventeen, Maida, and a woman servant sent to fetch her from Milbrook to New York, had met with a slight railway accident, much like that of to-day. It was this coincidence, maybe, which inclined her to confide in me, for she had been thinking of it, she said, when I came. A young man had been "kind" to Miss Odell and her maid; had brought them water and food. Later he had introduced himself. He was Lieutenant Granville, of the Navy. Also he was an inventor, who believed he could make a fortune for himself and his mother, if he could patent and get taken up by some great firm an idea of his, in which he had vainly tried to interest the heads of the Navy. This concerned a secret means of throwing a powerful light under water, for the protection of wars.h.i.+ps or others threatened by submerged submarines. Granville believed that experiments would demonstrate immense usefulness for his invention and so interested was Maida that she tried to induce Roger to finance it.

He refused, and did not like Granville when the girl brought them together.

This seeming injustice roused Maida's sympathy. She met Granville occasionally at his mother's house, without Roger's knowledge. It was the child's first adventure, and appealed to her love of romance. The natural consequences followed. Granville proposed. She asked to remain his friend. Then to give her "friend" a glorious surprise, she worked to interest a great financier, a friend of the Odell family, in Granville's undersea light.

Unfortunately for her unselfish plan, millionaire Orrin Adriance had a son, Jim, who had been in love with Maida since she was in the "flapper" stage. This fact complicated matters. When Granville's chemical formula, in a sealed envelope, was stolen from a safe in the Adriance house, before business was completed between financier and inventor, George Granville--already jealous of Jim Adriance--was mad enough to believe that Maida had joined in a plot to trick him. He accused the Adriances of wis.h.i.+ng to get his secret without paying for it, prophesying that a tool of theirs would presently "invent"

something of the kind, after they had refused to take up his proposition. Pretending illness, he had induced his mother to send for Maida, and she, only too anxious to defend herself, had gone to the Granville house. After a cruel scene between her and the sailor, he had locked the door, put the key in his pocket, and shot himself through the heart. Mrs. Granville, who had heard a scream from the girl, before the shot, swore to the belief that Maida had killed the young man to defend herself against his love-making.

Roger, learning of the tragedy, had stifled the lie as he would have crushed a snake. How he had done this, Maida was not sure. He had refused to tell. But her name had not been connected with Granville's at the inquest. Mrs. Granville, who had been poor and lived poorly, migrated to France and was reported to have "come into money through a legacy." In any case she seemed to have been silenced. No word of scandal could be traced to her, though detectives had been employed by Roger. Nevertheless, the story had risen from time to time like the phoenix from its own ashes. Maida's fellow school-mates had whispered; her debut in society had been blighted by a paragraph in a notorious paper, afterwards gagged by Roger. Then, last and worse, had come the cancelling of the girl's presentation to the King and Queen of England.

"You see now," she said, "why I shall be happier out of the world, in a Sisterhood where I can try to help others even sadder than I have been."

"But," I threw out the bold suggestion, "what if there's a plot to get you into the Sisterhood--into this old house!"

"Oh, but that's impossible!" she cried. "You wouldn't dream of such a thing if you could meet the Head Sister and see what a splendid woman she is!"

There was my opportunity to tell about the mask, and I took it. But it availed me nothing. The mask, Miss Odell said, was no secret. She understood that the Head Sister, in saving a child from fire, had so injured her face that for the sake of others she kept it hidden.

Another version had it that the motive for wearing the mask was some "sacred vow." In any case, Maida a.s.sured me, it was an honour to the good and charitable woman; and no arguments would break her resolution to give the next year to work with the Sisterhood. After that year--if I could solve the mystery of the stolen formula, and put an end for ever to scandal--she would come back and face the world again. But how could I, a stranger, do what Roger had failed to do?

That was the question. Yet I made up my mind that it must be answered in _one way_, or my life would be a failure. Not only would I solve that mystery, I told myself--though I dared not boast to the girl--but I would link together the old one with the new. The way to do this, I told myself, was to learn whether an enemy of Maida Odell's father had found her under her borrowed name, and had made the Granvilles and Adriances his conscious or unconscious tools.

This talk we had while the train stood still. We were sitting on a log together, out of earshot from the other pa.s.sengers, when--with the name of the Grey Sisterhood on our lips--we looked up to see its veiled directress. She had, she said, been put to much trouble in securing an automobile to come for Madeleine, and see that she was not persuaded to break a promise. Maida, embarra.s.sed and protesting, a.s.sured her friend that there was no thought of such disloyalty. Lord John--timidly the girl introduced us--had come only to try and help her throw off an old sorrow, as I had helped Roger and Grace. So she tried to "explain" me; and the Head Sister, having triumphed, could afford to heap coals of fire on my head by being coldly civil. Her one open revenge she took by requesting me not to follow them to their automobile. The chauffeur would fetch Miss Odell's hand luggage out of the train, and my "kindness would no longer be needed." I was dismissed by the conqueror; and left by the wayside with but one consolation: Maida had said "au revoir," not good-bye.

For a moment I stood crushed. Then a thought jumped into my mind: "What if this woman is the one I saw in the auto outside the theatre?"

I felt that I had been a fool to obey Maida, and took steps to retrieve my mistake. But the veiled lady had been too clever for me. The car was gone past recall. If it hadn't been for that viper-thought--and the thought of what had happened in my rooms last night--I might not have had the "cheek" to make my next move in the game. But things being as they were I couldn't stand still and take a rebuff.

Instead of motoring back to New York, I went to Salthaven, and breakfasted at a small inn there. Of the Sisterhood I could learn nothing, for it had but lately taken up its quarters near by. Of those quarters, however, I was able to pick up some queer stories. The place had been bought, it seemed, for a song, because of its ghostly reputation, which had frightened tenant after tenant away.

"What a good pitch to choose if any 'accident' were planned, and lay it to the ghosts!" I thought. And I knew that I couldn't go without learning more about the Sisterhood House than the landlord at Salthaven could tell me. I must see for myself if it were the sort of place where "anything could happen."

I meant to wait until late, when all the Grey Sisters and their protegees were safely asleep. Then, with a present of meat for a possible watch dog, I would try a prowl of inspection. I made a vague excuse of fancying the inn, and of wanting to rest till time to meet a friend who would motor back with me to New York. I engaged a room in order to take the alleged rest; but spent long hours in striving to piece together bits of the most intricate puzzle my wits had ever worked upon.

"In an hour more now I can start," I said at ten, and composed myself to forget the slow ticking of my watch. But suddenly it was as if Maida called. Actually I seemed to hear her voice. I sprang up, and in five minutes had paid the bill and was off in my car for Pine Cliff.

I left West sitting in the auto at a little distance from the high wall, which shut the old garden in from the rocks above the Sound.