IN THE DARK.
The impulse that had moved Billie to run ahead of her friends and dash into the library for her father"s pistol carried her so fast, indeed, that she was in the room with the door closed behind her before she realized what she was doing. It was perfectly dark there. Not even the brilliant moonlight outside penetrated through the heavy curtains drawn for the night.
"There are always matches on the desk," she thought, remembering that her father usually smoked while he worked over his papers.
With her hand still on the doork.n.o.b she turned and faced the desk without moving a step. Why was she so frightened? It was absurd. Her father would be ashamed of her for being afraid of the dark. Giving herself a little impatient shake, she took two steps in front of her, groping with her hands like a blind person for obstacles in the way.
She stopped short and listened. Every nerve in her body was tingling and she felt she was trembling. For half a minute she hardly breathed. Then she resolutely began her march in the dark. At last the desk was reached and her hand was on the green china match holder. She stood for a moment irresolute. The pistol was in the lower left-hand desk drawer. She knew exactly where it was. Her father had shown it to her only the other day.
"I think you had better know where I keep it," he had said, "not that you will ever need to use it, I hope, because either Komatsu or I shall always be here to protect you, but just as a matter of precaution."
Again she reached for the match holder, but it was empty. Softly opening the drawer, she felt in the back until her fingers grasped the pistol.
Carefully she drew it out and transferred it from her right hand to her left. There was an unacknowledged relief in Billie"s heart that there were no matches. She felt she would rather get out of the library in the dark than make any investigations with a match. Once in the hall she would decide what to do.
She was morally certain now that someone else was in the room. She could see nothing, hear nothing, but in the dark she felt the presence of another human being. She recalled Nancy"s experience.
"Perhaps it wasn"t her imagination, after all," she thought.
The thing was to get back to the door and out of it. Billie wished with all her soul she had never come in at all. It had been a reckless, silly notion. Why should her father need a pistol? After all, it was just some roisterer on his way home from the festival. She had heard that _sake_, the j.a.panese brandy, made the men who drank it wild, no doubt wild enough to shoot off a pistol in the suburbs where there were no policemen about to interfere.
And all because she had heard this pistol shot, she had obeyed a foolish impulse to find her father"s pistol. How reckless! How foolhardy! How stupid! Because, to come right down to a fine point, here she was shut up in a perfectly huge room, as black as the pit, with--someone else!
Never in all her experience had Billie been so frightened. Her knees knocked together and her head was quite giddy as she made her way unsteadily toward the door, still with the pistol in her left hand.
But she seemed to have lost all sense of direction. Groping with her right hand, she encountered a chair. There had been no chairs in the way before,--was it an hour ago or only a minute?
It would be better to get to the wall and feel her way along the shelves until she reached the door.
Why was she so panic-stricken? After all was she so sure about that other person crouching somewhere--anywhere?
Then the thing happened that she had known was going to happen all the time.
Reaching out in the dark, she encountered an arm. Instantly her right hand was seized in a grip of steel. There was a struggle. She was thrown to the floor; a shot; a cry--was it her own or another person"s voice? Then absolute silence.
When Billie came back to consciousness, she was lying on a couch in the library. Miss Helen was kneeling beside her with the smelling salts.
Mary was bathing her forehead with cold water and her father was chafing her wrists and saying in a low voice:
"You are not hurt, are you, Billie-girl? There, speak to father. Are you all right?"
There seemed to be a great many other people scattered about the room, the guests and the servants and her own particular friends leaning over her anxiously.
"I hope I didn"t kill him?" she said weakly.
Mr. Campbell could not refrain from smiling.
"You are just a little girl after all, Billie," he said. "No, you didn"t kill him, but you hit him. Look at that." He pointed to some blood spots on the rug. "You certainly winged him, whoever he was. In some way, he escaped. I don"t know how, because we were in the hall when the shot was fired and the windows are still locked. He may have got out through the servants" quarters but that would have been difficult, too, without being seen."
Billie sat up.
"I"m all right now," she said. "It was only fright because I lost my way in the dark and couldn"t find the door, and it was so ghastly running into another person in the blackness like that. Father, I wish you would tell them not to put out the lights in this room so early. It"s the second time it"s happened now."
"O"Haru, you hear what the lady says," said Mr. Campbell half humorously.
Billie, knowing her father as she did, was suddenly aware that he was trying to make light of the affair for the benefit of the others in the room. That the episode was far more serious than he cared to admit, she knew perfectly well.
O"Haru left the doorway where she had been standing and came over to the group by the couch.
"What was the honorable wish of the young lady?"
"Not to have the lights in the library put out so early in the evening.
To wait until bedtime at least."
O"Haru disliked to contradict, but the august young lady was honorably mistaken. The lights had never been put out by any servant attached to the household. She herself, or her daughter, attended to that after the honorable family had retired for the night.
"Never mind," said Mr. Campbell in a soothing voice, indicating to Billie by a slight shake of the head that he would be glad if she would let the matter drop. Billie nodded. There was perfect understanding between the father and the daughter.
"How do you feel now, Miss Billie?" asked Nicholas Grimm coming to the foot of the couch.
"I"m all right again. I am ashamed of having been such a coward. If it had been daylight I shouldn"t have been half so frightened."
"I feel that it was all my fault for running off and leaving you alone. I should have seen you to the house at least."
"Nonsense," said Billie. "That wouldn"t have altered matters in the least. I would have come back here just the same for the pistol. You see I had a feeling that Papa might need it. Besides, we were all alone here.
There were no men--"
"I am only glad it was someone else that was shot and not you, my darling child," broke in Miss Campbell tremulously. "Duncan, I do wish you wouldn"t keep pistols lying around the house. They are so dangerous."
"But I don"t, Cousin. It was carefully stored in the back compartment of a bottom desk drawer. If this reckless young relative of ours would go and dig it out, I"m sure it"s not my fault."
"I"m sure I can"t imagine why you treat the matter as such a joke," Miss Campbell was saying, when Mme. Fontaine swept into the room.
Her face was whiter than the long white wrap that enveloped her.
"I am so glad you were not injured," she said standing beside Billie.
"You must thank Mme. Fontaine, Billie. It was she who found you first.
The rest of us were not certain in which room the shot was fired. I thought it was in the kitchen."
"Oh," said Billie, turning to the widow. "Were you the first person on the scene? You couldn"t have seen much, it was so dark. How did you know I was here? I don"t suppose the robber made any noise."
"It was very dark. I should not have known, if--if I had not smelt the smoke of the powder."
"I thought perhaps you were going to say you heard the robber groan,"
went on Billie. "You see I hit him. I think I must have a pretty good natural aim to shoot with the left hand in the dark and not fire wide of the mark. But I don"t think he was very badly hurt. He got away so fast.
I just winged him, I suppose."
"How do you know you shot him?" asked Mme. Fontaine.