"Loathed you," she said with unction. "You are cruel and ungrateful.
Herbert has influenza, and does not count. And Sperry is in love--oh yes, I know it. I know a great many things. But you!"
I could only stare at her.
"The strange thing is," she went on, "that I have known you for years, and never suspected your sense of humor. You"ll forgive me, I know, if I tell you that your lack of humor was to my mind the only flaw in an otherwise perfect character."
"I am not aware--" I began stiffly. "I have always believed that I furnished to the Neighborhood Club its only leaven of humor."
"Don"t spoil it," she begged. "Don"t. If you could know how I have enjoyed it. All afternoon I have been chuckling. The fire-tongs, Horace.
The fire-tongs!"
Then I knew that my wife had been to Mrs. Dane and I drew a long breath.
"I a.s.sure you," I said gravely, "that while doubtless I carried the wretched things home and--er--placed them where they were found, I have not the slightest recollection of it. And it is hardly amusing, is it?"
"Amusing!" she cried. "It"s delicious. It has made me a young woman again. Horace, if I could have seen your wife"s face when she found them, I would give cheerfully almost anything I possess."
But underneath her mirth I knew there was something else. And, after all, she could convince my wife if she were convinced herself. I told the whole story--of the visit Sperry and I had made the night Arthur Wells was shot, and of what we discovered; of the clerk at the pharmacy and his statement, and even of the whiskey and its unfortunate effect--at which, I regret to say, she was vastly amused; and, last of all, of my experience the previous night in the deserted house.
She was very serious when I finished. Tea came, but we forgot to drink it. Her eyes flashed with excitement, her faded face flushed. And, with it all, as I look back, there was an air of suppressed excitement that seemed to have nothing to do with my narrative. I remembered it, however, when the denouement came the following week.
She was a remarkable woman. Even then she knew, or strongly suspected, the thing that the rest of us had missed, the x of the equation. But I think it only fair to record that she was in possession of facts which we did not have, and which she did not divulge until the end.
"You have been so ungenerous with me," she said finally, "that I am tempted not to tell you why I sent for you. Of course, I know I am only a helpless old woman, and you men are people of affairs. But now and then I have a flash of intelligence. I"m going to tell you, but you don"t deserve it."
She went down into the black silk bag at her side which was as much a part of her attire as the false front she wore with such careless abandon, and which, brown in color and indifferently waved, was invariably parting from its mooring. She drew out a newspaper clipping.
"On going over Clara"s notes," she said, "I came to the conclusion, last Tuesday, that the matter of the missing handbag and the letters was important. More important, probably, than the mere record shows. Do you recall the note of distress in Miss Jeremy"s voice? It was almost a wail."
I had noticed it.
"I have plenty of time to think," she added, not without pathos.
"There is only one Monday night in the week, and--the days are long. It occurred to me to try to trace that bag."
"In what way?"
"How does any one trace lost articles?" she demanded. "By advertising, of course. Last Wednesday I advertised for the bag."
I was too astonished to speak.
"I reasoned like this: If there was no such bag, there was no harm done.
As a matter of fact, if there was no such bag, the chances were that we were all wrong, anyhow. If there was such a bag, I wanted it. Here is the advertis.e.m.e.nt as I inserted it."
She gave me a small newspaper cutting
"Lost, a handbag containing private letters, car-tickets, etc. Liberal reward paid for its return. Please write to A 31, the Daily News."
I sat with it on my palm. It was so simple, so direct. And I, a lawyer, and presumably reasonably acute, had not thought of it!
"You are wasted on us, Mrs. Dane," I acknowledged. "Well? I see something has come of it."
"Yes, but I"m not ready for it."
She dived again into the bag, and brought up another clipping.
"On the day that I had that inserted," she said impressively, "this also appeared. They were in the same column." She read the second clipping aloud, slowly, that I might gain all its significance:
"Lost on the night of Monday, November the second, between State Avenue and Park Avenue, possibly on an Eastern Line street car, a black handbag containing keys, car-tickets, private letters, and a small sum of money.
Reward and no questions asked if returned to Daily News office."
She pa.s.sed the clipping to me and I compared the two. It looked strange, and I confess to a tingling feeling that coincidence, that element so much to be feared in any investigation, was not the solution here. But there was such a chance, and I spoke of it.
"Coincidence rubbish!" she retorted. "I am not through, my friend."
She went down into the bag again, and I expected nothing less than the pocketbook, letters and all, to appear. But she dragged up, among a miscellany of handkerchiefs, a bottle of smelling-salts, and a few almonds, of which she was inordinately fond, an envelope.
"Yesterday," she said, "I took a taxicab ride. You know my chair gets tiresome, occasionally. I stopped at the newspaper office, and found the bag had not been turned in, but that there was a letter for A 31." She held out the envelope to me.
"Read it," she observed. "It is a curious human doc.u.ment. You"ll probably be no wiser for reading it, but it shows one thing: We are on the track of something."
I have the letter before me now. It is written on glazed paper, ruled with blue lines. The writing is of the flowing style we used to call Spencerian, and if it lacks character I am inclined to believe that its weakness is merely the result of infrequent use of a pen.
You know who this is from. I have the bag and the letters. In a safe place. If you would treat me like a human being, you could have them. I know where the walking-stick is, also. I will tell you this. I have no wish to do her any harm. She will have to pay up in the next world, even if she gets off in this. The way I reason is this: As long as I have the things, I"ve got the whiphand. I"ve got you, too, although you may think I haven"t.
About the other matter I was innocent. I swear it again. I never did it.
You are the only one in all the world. I would rather be dead than go on like this.
It is unsigned.
I stared from the letter to Mrs. Dane. She was watching me, her face grave and rather sad.
"You and I, Horace," she said, "live our orderly lives. We eat, and sleep, and talk, and even labor. We think we are living. But for the last day or two I have been seeing visions--you and I and the rest of us, living on the surface, and underneath, carefully kept down so it will not make us uncomfortable, a world of pa.s.sion and crime and violence and suffering. That letter is a tragedy."
But if she had any suspicion then as to the writer, and I think she had not, she said nothing, and soon after I started for home. I knew that one of two things would have happened there: either my wife would have put away the fire-tongs, which would indicate a truce, or they would remain as they had been, which would indicate that she still waited for the explanation I could not give. It was with a certain tension, therefore, that I opened my front door.
The fire-tongs still stood in the stand.
In one way, however, Mrs. Johnson"s refusal to speak to me that evening had a certain value, for it enabled me to leave the house without explanation, and thus to discover that, if an overcoat had been left in place of my own, it had been taken away. It also gave me an opportunity to return the fire-tongs, a proceeding which I had considered would a.s.sist in a return of the entente cordiale at home, but which most unjustly appeared to have exactly the opposite effect. It has been my experience that the most innocent action may, under certain circ.u.mstances, a.s.sume an appearance of extreme guilt.
By Sat.u.r.day the condition of affairs between my wife and myself remained in statu quo, and I had decided on a bold step. This was to call a special meeting of the Neighborhood Club, without Miss Jeremy, and put before them the situation as it stood at that time, with a view to formulating a future course of action, and also of publicly vindicating myself before my wife.
In deference to Herbert Robinson"s recent attack of influenza, we met at the Robinson house. Sperry himself wheeled Mrs. Dane over, and made a speech.
"We have called this meeting," he said, "because a rather singular situation has developed. What was commenced purely as an interesting experiment has gone beyond that stage. We find ourselves in the curious position of taking what comes very close to being a part in a domestic tragedy. The affair is made more delicate by the fact that this tragedy involves people who, if not our friends, at least are very well known to us. The purpose of this meeting, to be brief, is to determine whether the Neighborhood Club, as a body, wishes to go on with the investigation, or to stop where we are."
He paused, but, as no one spoke, he went on again. "It is really not as simple as that," he said. "To stop now, in view of the evidence we intend to place before the Club, is to leave in all our minds certain suspicions that may be entirely unjust. On the other hand, to go on is very possible to place us all in a position where to keep silent is to be an accessory after a crime."
He then proceeded, in orderly fashion, to review the first sitting and its results. He read from notes, elaborating them as he went along, for the benefit of the women, who had not been fully informed. As all the data of the Club is now in my possession, I copy these notes.
"I shall review briefly the first sitting, and what followed it." He read the notes of the sitting first. "You will notice that I have made no comment on the physical phenomena which occurred early in the seance.