"You are far too fair-minded not to." Presently: "Sophy?"
"Uh-huh."
"We aren"t ever going to be sorry we came here--together--are we, Sophy? And we won"t ever let anybody come between us. Not anybody.
Not The Author--nor his secretary--nor whatever guests come--nor Mr.
Nicholas Jelnik--nor--nor Doctor Richard Geddes." Her head pressed closer to my knees.
"We came first, you and I," said Alicia, in a m.u.f.fled whisper. "We are more to each other than any of them can be to us. You"ll remember that, won"t you?"
"I will remember, you absurd Alicia!" But I did not ask my dear girl what her incoherent words might mean. I did not ask why the soft cheek against my hand was wet.
As I have said before, Hynds House is but two stories high, with deep cellars under it, and an immense attic overhead; an attic all cut up into nooks and corners, and twists and turns, and sloping roofs and dormer windows, and two or three shallow steps going up here, and two or three more going down there, and pa.s.sages and doors where you"d never look for them. We had never been able fully to explore our attic. It was Ali Baba"s cave to us, with half its treasures unguessed and every trunk and box whispering, "Say "Open, Sesame," to me, and see what you"ll find!"
While I was sitting with Alicia"s head against my knee, a light, swift footstep sounded overhead in the attic, followed by a sort of stumble, as if somebody had slipped on one of those unexpected steps. Alicia rose quickly.
"Sophy," she breathed, "I have thought, once or twice, that I heard somebody walking in the attic."
"We will soon find out who it is, then," said I. Noiselessly we stole out into the hall, past the sleeping Westmacotes, and Miss Emmeline Phelps-Parsons who so longed to come in closer contact with the occult and unknown. We moved like ghosts, ourselves, our felt-soled mules making no sound.
The Author opened his door just as we approached it, and held up an imperious finger.
"Did you hear it, too?" he whispered. And walking ahead of us, he stole up the cork-screw stairway at the end of the side hall, lifted the latch of the attic door, and stepped inside.
It was frightfully dark up there. If you peered through the uncurtained windows you could see tree-tops tossing like black waves against the dark sky, and in between them rolling clouds, and little bright patchwork s.p.a.ces of stars. And it was so quiet you could hear your heart beat, and your breathing seemed to rattle in your ears.
We strained our eyes, seeking to pierce the gloom, stealing forward step by step. A board creaked, noisily; and then--I could have sworn it--then something seemed to move across one of the dormer windows.
It was so vague, so shadowy, that one could not distinguish its outline; one could only think that something moved.
The Author gave an exclamation and switched on his electric torch, trying to focus the circle of light upon that particular window.
There was nothing there. Only, it seemed to me that something, incredibly swift and silent, flashed down one of the bewildering turns to which our attic is addicted. But when we ran forward, the pa.s.sage was empty. We brought up at the red brick square of one of the chimney stacks.
Almost savagely The Author flashed his light over every inch of wall and floor. Nothing. But on the close and musty air stole, not a sound, but a scent.
The Author swung around and trotted back. The window across which we thought we had seen something move was fastened from the inside, and there were one or two wooden boxes and a leather-covered trunk in the dormer recess. He sniffed hound-like around these, and with an exclamation leaned over. Behind the trunk crouched--Potty Black, with a mouse clamped in her jaws.
"For heaven"s sake!" cried Alicia. "The cat! Sophy, what we heard was the cat!"
"Let us go," said The Author. And feeling rather silly, we trailed after him.
"You see," said I, "there is nothing. There never is anything."
"Come in my room for a minute," The Author whispered, and there was that in his voice which made us obey.
Inside his door, he opened his hand. In his palm was a soiled and crumpled sc.r.a.p of tough, parchment-like paper about the size of an ordinary playing-card, so frayed and creased that one had difficulty in deciphering the writing on it. There clung to it a faint and unforgetable scent.
"It was behind the trunk, partly under the cat"s black paw. I smelled it when I leaned over, and I thought we might as well have a look at it." said The Author.
And on the following page is what The Author had found.
""Shades of E.A. Poe, and Robert Louis the Beloved! What have we here?" cried The Author, joyously, and stood on one leg like a stork. "Was there a Hynds woman named Helen? "Turn h.e.l.len"s Key three tens and three?" Some keyhole! I say, Miss Smith, let me keep this for a while, will you?"
"Do, Sophy, let him keep it!" pleaded Alicia.
{~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~} { _Turne h.e.l.lens Keye_ } { _Three Tennes & Three_ } { _Ye Watcher in ye Darke Thoult See_ } { } { (*B*) } { } { . . . . . } { . . . . . } { . . . . . } { . . . . . } { . . . . . } { . . . . . } { . . . . . } { . . . . . } { . . . . . } { . . . . . } { . . . . . } { . . . . . } { . . . . . } { } { _As Neede Shall Rise_ } { _So Mote It Bee_ } { } "~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~"
"I"ll take the best care of it, Miss Smith; indeed I will!" The Author promised. "Look here: I"ll lock it in the clothes-closet, in the breast pocket of my coat." As he spoke, he opened the cedar-lined closet, that was almost as big as a modern hall bedroom, and put the paper in the breast pocket of his coat. Locking the door, he placed the key under his pillow, and beside it a new and businesslike Colt automatic.
"There!" said The Author, confidently. "n.o.body can get into that closet without first tackling _me_. Now you girls go to bed.
To-morrow we"ll tackle the unraveling."
And we, remembering of a sudden that we were pig-tailed and kimonoed, and that The Author himself resembled a step-ladder with a shawl draped around it, departed hurriedly.
He was late at the breakfast-table next morning. Gloom and abstraction sat visibly upon him. He left his secretary to bear the brunt of conversation with the Westmacotes and Miss Emmeline. For once he failed to do justice to Mary Magdalen"s hot biscuit, and ignored Fernolia"s astonished and concerned stare; even a whispered, "Honey, is you-all got a misery anywheres?" failed to rouse him. I found him, after a while, waiting for me in the library.
"Miss Smith,"--The Author strode restlessly up and down--"this house has a peculiar effect upon people; a very peculiar effect. Since I came here, I have learned to walk in my sleep." And seeing my look of astonishment, "I walked in my sleep last night. And I took that bit of doggerel out of my coat pocket, locked the closet door, and replaced the key under my pillow."
"How strange! And where did you put it?" I wondered.
"Exactly: where did I put it?" repeated The Author, rumpling his hair with both hands. "That"s what I want to know, myself. I"ve looked everywhere in my room, and in Johnson"s, and I can"t find the thing. It"s gone," and he stalked out, with his shoulders hunched to his ears.
I sat still, staring out at the window. There was a thing I hadn"t told The Author, or even Alicia. I had no idea what the "bit of doggerel" meant, if, indeed, it meant anything. But when I had held Freeman Hynds"s old diary in my hands, between the two pages following the last entry had been a creased and soiled piece of paper. I had seen it out of the tail of my eye, as the saying is. It was only a glimpse, but one trained to handle many papers, as I had been, has a quick and an accurate eye. And I knew that the paper found by The Author in the attic, and now lost again, was the paper I had seen in Freeman Hynds"s diary.
CHAPTER IX
THE JUDGMENT OF SPRING
Judge Gatch.e.l.l"s nephews and nieces, brought by that punctilious gentleman to call upon Miss Alicia Gaines, found her enchanting and cried it to the circ.u.mambient air. It was as if the voice of April had summoned the cohorts of Spring. For fresh-faced boys of a sudden appeared in increasing numbers; and flower-faced girls came fluttering into Hynds House like b.u.t.terflies. They cared for its history and its hatreds not a fig: what has April to do with last November? The faith of Youth has a clearer-eyed wisdom, a sweeter, sounder justice than the sourer verdict of the mature. For theirs is the judgment of Spring. By this sign they conquer.
Susy Gatch.e.l.l enlisted Mary Meade and Helen Fenwick, and these three held all younger Hyndsville in the hollow of their pink palms. After which, as Doctor Richard Geddes told me wrathfully, you "couldn"t put your foot down without running the risk of stepping on some little c.o.c.kerel trying to crow around Hynds House."
The tide was turning in our direction. Also, we were in daily contact with really worth-while people, people that otherwise we should have met only in books, magazines, and newspapers. And they liked us. The amazing miracle was that we, also we, were their sort of folk!
I knew I was being given unbuyable things. One could not live under the same roof with thin dark Luis Morenas and view what magic his pencil worked, without learning somewhat of the holiness of creative work. One couldn"t listen to The Author without being somewhat brightened by his daring wit, his glowing genius; nor live face to face with big Westmacote without revering the broadness of the American master spirit, to which Big Business is only a part of the Great Game. As for Miss Emmeline Phelps-Parsons, it didn"t take Alicia and me long to discover what real depths underlay that Boston-spinster mind of hers.
And you simply couldn"t breathe the same air with The Suffragist--who appeared with two trunks, three valises, and a type-writer, all covered with "Votes for Women!" stickers--without an expansion of the chest. She gave you the impression of having been dressed by machinery out of gear, and of then having been whacked flat with a shovel. When she clapped on what she called a hat, you wondered whether a heron hadn"t built its nest on her head. But when she began to speak, you listened with the ears of your immortal soul stretched wide. Women worshiped her, though Mr.
Jelnik"s eyes danced, and Westmacote"s military mustache bristled a bit, and she all but drove Doctor Richard Geddes, who had notions of his own, out of his senses.
"Stop trying to argue with me, my dear man," she"d say in her rich voice, "but come and let us reason together. I haven"t heard one word of reason from you yet!" And she"d let loose one of her rollicking laughs that set the doctor"s teeth on edge and made The Author shudder. The Author snarled to me that she laughed like a rolling-mill and reasoned like a head-on collision. He put her in his new book, clothes and all. Just as Luis Morenas, with an edged smile on his thin lips, made rapid-fire sketches of her. _He_ called her "The Future-Maker."
Now, shouldn"t Alicia and I have been happy? And yet we weren"t.
Alicia"s laugh wasn"t so frequent. I would catch her watching me, with an odd, troubled, anxious speculation in her eyes. She had a habit of blushing suddenly, and as quickly paling. And quietly, but none the less surely and definitely, she had begun to avoid Doctor Richard Geddes. It wasn"t that she ceased to be friendly; but she placed between herself and him one of those women-built, impalpable, impa.s.sable barriers which baffled, puzzled men are unable to tear down. It was impossible, I thought, that she should remain blind to his open pa.s.sion for herself: he was anything but subtle, was Richard of the Lionheart. A blind man could have told, from the mere sound of his voice, a deaf man from the mere expression of his eyes, that Alicia had the big doctor"s whole heart.
On his side, he was in deep waters. His ruddy color faded; his face took on a fixed, grim intensity. And when he watched the girl flirting now with this boy, now with that, after the innocent fashion of natural girls, but always reserving a friendlier smile, a more eager greeting, for Mr. Nicholas Jelnik, I was so sorry for Doctor Richard that I couldn"t help trying, covertly, to console him.
It so happened that Miss Emmeline Phelps-Parsons, daughter of the Puritans though she was, nevertheless had a distinct liking for what she termed Episcopacy. She was pleased with old St. Polycarp"s. She liked Mrs. Haile, to whom she happened to mention that her opportunities for studying the life of native women and children in the East had been rather unusually good, since she had visited many missionary stations in China and India. Things were languishing just then, and Mrs. Haile looked at Miss Emmeline almost imploringly: would she, could she, give the ladies a little lecture?--tell us things first-hand, so to speak?