"I wasn"t aware that I had reached an age when I couldn"t tell the difference between a reflection and a reality," he growled, and hurried out.
The town was a small one; and Perry would see that she didn"t escape from the station. Besides, she had fled without her hat. Surely, with all this in his favor, he would soon be able to lay his hand upon her, if not to-night, certainly before another day was at an end.
XXIV.
FLIGHT.
In leaving the building Mr. Gryce almost ran into the arms of Perry. In his anxiety to be within call, the young detective had seated himself on the steps outside and now stood ready for any emergency.
Mr. Gryce"s spirits rose as he saw him there. The great door leading to the elevator opened not twenty feet to the left of him. Perhaps Perry had seen the woman and could tell which way she ran. Questions followed, rapid and to the purpose. Perry had seen a woman flash by. But she seemed to be in company with a man. He had not been able to see either clearly.
"Which way were they heading?" asked Mr. Gryce.
Perry told him.
It would look as though they were making for the station. Alarmed at the idea, Mr. Gryce stepped down into the road and endeavored to pierce the darkness in that direction. All he could see were the station lights. Everything else was in shadow. The night hung over all, and had it not been for the grinding of machinery in their rear, the silence would have been just as marked.
"Perry, is the way rough between here and the station--I mean, rough for me?"
"Not very, if you keep in the road."
"Run ahead, then, and learn how soon the next train is due--any train, going north or going south--I don"t care which. If it is soon, look for a middle-aged woman in a striped dress, and if you can"t prevent her getting on, without a fracas, follow her yourself and never quit her--telegraphing me at the first opportunity. Run."
Perry gave a leap and was soon swallowed up in the darkness which was intense as soon as he had pa.s.sed beyond the glare from the factory. Mr. Gryce followed after, moving as quickly as he dared. It was not far to the station platform, but in his anxiety it seemed a mile; nor did he breathe with ease till he saw a flying shadow come between him and the station lights and knew that Perry had reached the platform.
It was just at the hour when the fewest trains pa.s.s, and Mr. Gryce was himself across the tracks and on the platform before a far-off whistle warned him that one was approaching. Looking hastily around, he saw Perry hurrying up behind him.
"No one," said he. "No such person around."
They waited. The train came in, stopped, took on two unimportant pa.s.sengers and rushed away north.
"I"m afraid I shall have to ask you to stay here, Perry. It would be so easy for her to board one of these night trains and buy a ticket from the conductor."
But as he spoke he paused, and gripping Perry"s arm, turned his ear to listen.
"A boat," said he. "A small boat leaving sh.o.r.e."
It was so. They could hear the dip of the oars distinctly in the quiet which had followed the departure of the train. No other sound but that was in the air, and it struck cold upon one old heart.
"It is she! I"m sure of it," muttered Gryce.
"The man across the river has warned her--sent a boat for her, perhaps. Run down to the point and see if there is anyone there who saw her go."
Perry slid into the night, and Mr. Gryce stood listening. The quiet dip of the oars was growing fainter every instant. The boat was rapidly withdrawing, carrying with it all hope of securing off-hand this desirable witness.
To be sure, there was nothing very serious in this. He had only to telephone across the river to have the woman detained till he could reach her himself in the early morning. Yet he felt unaccountably disturbed and anxious. For all his many experiences and a record which should have made him immune from the ordinary disappointments of life, he had never, or so it seemed to him, felt more thoroughly depressed or weary of the work which had given him occupation for more years than he liked to number, than in the few minutes of solitary waiting, with his face toward the river and the sense of some impending doom settling slowly over his aged heart.
But he was still too much the successful detective to allow his disheartenment to be seen by his admiring subordinate. As the latter approached, the old man"s countenance brightened, and nothing could have been more deceptive than the calmness he displayed when the fellow reported that he had just been talking to a man who had recognized the boat and the oarsman. It was the same boat and the same oarsman that had brought them over earlier in the day. He had made an extra trip at this most unusual hour, for the express purpose of taking this woman back.
"I suppose there is no possibility of your drumming up anyone to row us over in time to catch them?"
"None in the least. I have inquired."
"Then follow me into the station. I have a few messages to send."
Among these messages was a peremptory one to Sweet.w.a.ter.
Morning! and an early crossing to the other side. Here a surprise awaited them. They found, on inquiry, that the man responsible for Madame"s flitting was not, as they had supposed, the hotel proprietor, but Phil himself, the good-natured, easily-imposed-upon ferryman, on whose sympathies she had worked during their first short pa.s.sage from one sh.o.r.e to the other. Perhaps a little money had helped to deepen this impression; one never knows.
But this was not all. The woman was gone. She had fled the town on foot before they were able to locate Phil, who had not made sh.o.r.e at his usual place but at some point up the river about which they knew nothing. When he finally showed up, it was almost daybreak.
"Where is he now?"
"At home, or ought to be."
"Show me the house."
In ten minutes the two were face to face.
The result was not altogether satisfactory to the detective. Though he used all his skill in his manipulation of this kind-hearted ferryman, he got very little from him but the plain fact that the woman insisted upon taking to the road when she heard that the train-service had stopped; that he could not persuade her to wait till daylight or to listen for a moment to what he had to say of the danger and terrors awaiting her in the darkness, and the awful loneliness of the hills. She didn"t fear nature even at its worst, and she knew these hills better than many who had lived among them for years. She was bound to go, and she went.
This was six hours ago. Asked to explain the interest he had shown in her, it soon became evident that he was in complete ignorance of her ident.i.ty. He had simply, on their first trip over, seen that she was middle-aged, suffering and much too good and kind to be followed up by enemies and wicked police officials. True, he had rowed them over in her pursuit in the early part of the day, but that was because he had not known their business. When on returning he had learned it, he made up his mind to help her out with a warning even if it kept him up all night. He had not expected to bring her back with him, but she had insisted upon his doing so, saying that she had friends in the mountains who would look after her. He saw that she was dreadfully in earnest, for she had not stopped to get her hat and would not have had so much as an extra st.i.tch with her if she had not taken the precaution to hide a bag of things somewhere in the bushes near the factory, in antic.i.p.ation of some such emergency. And he couldn"t resist her. She made him think of a sister of his who had had a dreadful time of it in the world and was now well out of it, thank G.o.d!
When the ferryman heard that a reward of hundreds of dollars was waiting for the man who succeeded in bringing her before the police officials in New York, he betrayed some chagrin, but even this did not last. He was soon declaring with heartfelt earnestness that he didn"t care anything about that. It was peace of mind he wanted, and not money.
When Mr. Gryce left him, it was with an even slower step than usual. Peace of mind! How about his own peace of mind? Was he trailing this poor unfortunate from pillar to post, for the reward it would bring him? No. With his advancing years money had lost much of its attraction. Nor, if he knew himself, was he particularly affected by the glory which attends success. Duty, and duty only, drove him on--to elucidate his problem and merit the confidence put in him by his superiors. If suffering followed, that was not his fault; his business was to go ahead.
It was in this frame of mind that he prepared himself for the automobile trip he saw before him.
There was no question in Mr. Gryce"s mind now, as to this woman"s destination or whither he should be obliged to go in order to find her. As he now saw into her mind, she had left New York with the intention of hiding herself in the remote village to which she had ordered her mail sent under the name of Elvira Brown, whom she evidently knew; but hearing, either on the car or in the hotel, where she was detained, the plea which was being made for workers in the factory on the east side of the river, she had modified her plans to the extent already known, only to return to her original intention as soon as the attempt to provide for herself in this independent way had proved a failure.
He would proceed then in her wake, conscious of the fresh disappointment which awaited her in the loss, through Miss Brown"s sudden death, of the asylum she counted upon. Could he have gone on foot like herself, he might have been tempted to do so, for a trail is best followed slowly and with ear and eye very close to the ground. But as this was beyond his strength, he must wait till an automobile could be procured, and possibly till Sweet.w.a.ter should arrive--for Perry was no man for this job. There were no automobiles in this small town, and it might be necessary to send up or down the river some distance before one could be found capable of carrying them over the precipitous road they would be obliged to take in order to avoid the washout which had driven them to this extremity.
But all would come right in time; and with Sweet.w.a.ter at his elbow, the journey would be made and the woman caught, soon enough for him no doubt, hard as he felt it to wait. Why so hard, he might have found it difficult to say, since hitherto he had found it easy enough when the goal seemed sure and it was only with time he had to reckon!
XXV.
TERROR.
A woman fleeing from publicity as one flies from death--a refined woman, too, whose life had hitherto been pa.s.sed in the open!
When Antoinette Duclos, after a night and morning of unprecedented fatigue and extraordinary fears, with little to upbear her in the way of food, stepped from the train which brought a few local pa.s.sengers into the quiet village of Rexam, she hardly would have been recognized by her best friend, such marks may a few hours leave upon one battling with untoward Fate in one supreme effort.
She seemed to realize this, for meeting more than one eye fixed inquiringly upon her she drew down the veil wound about a sort of cap she wore till it concealed not only her features but her throat which a restless pulse had tightened almost to the exclusion of her breath. Ready to drop, she yet made use of the little energy left her, to approach with faltering steps a lumbering old vehicle waiting in the dust and smoke for such pa.s.sengers as might wish to be taken up Long Hill.
There was no driver in sight, but she did not hesitate to take her seat inside. There was extra business at the station, for this was the first train to come in for two days; and if anyone noticed her in the shadowy recesses of the c.u.mbrous old coach, n.o.body approached her; nor was she in any way disturbed. When the driver did show himself, she was almost asleep, but she woke up quickly enough when his good-natured face peered in at her and she heard him ask where she wanted to go and whether she had any baggage.
"I want to go up Long Hill and be set down at the first cross-road," she said. "My baggage is here." And she pointed to the s.p.a.ce at her feet. But that s.p.a.ce was empty; she had no baggage. She had dropped both bag and umbrella at the side of the road after one of her long climbs under a fitful moon and had not so much as thought of them since.
Now she remembered and flushed as she met the eyes of the man looking in at her with his hand on his whiskers, smoothing them thoughtfully down but saying nothing, though his countenance and expression showed him to be one of the loquacious sort. If any smiles remained to her from the old days, now was the time for one; but before she could twist her dry lips into any such attempt, he had uttered a cheerful "All right" and turned away to clamber up into his seat.
The relief was great, and she settled back, rejoicing in the fact that they would soon be moving and that she was likely to be the sole pa.s.senger. But she soon came to rue this fact, for the driver wanted to talk and even made many abortive attempts that way. But she could not fall in with his mood, and seeing this, he soon withheld all remarks and bent his full energies to the task of urging his horses up the interminable incline.
Houses, at which she scarcely looked, disappeared gradually from view, and groups of spreading trees and patches of upland took their places, deepening into the forest as they advanced. When halfway up, the farther mountains, which had hitherto been hidden by nearer hills, burst into view. Behind them the sun was setting, and the scene was glorious. If she saw it at all, she gave no sign of pleasure or even of admiration. Her head, which she had held straight up for the first quarter of a mile, sank lower and lower as they clambered on; yet she gave no signs of drowsiness--only of a mortal weariness which seemed to attack the very springs of life. The pomp and pageantry of the heavens, burning with all the pigments of the rainbow, failed to appeal to a soul shut within dungeon bars. Rocks and mighty gorges darkling to the eye and stirring to the imagination held no story for her; she looked neither to the right nor to the left while the beauty lasted, much less when the last gleam had faded from the mountain tops and a troop of leaden clouds, coming up from the east, added their shadows to those of premature night.
The driver, who had been eying these clouds for some little time, felt that he ought to speak if she did not. Pulling up his horses as though to give them a breathing spell, he remarked over his shoulder with a strain of anxiety in his voice: "I hope your friends live near the top of the hill, missus. A storm is coming up, and it"s getting very dark. Will you have to walk far?"
"No, no," she a.s.sured him with a quick glance up and around her. "A little way, a very little way!" Then she became quiet and absorbed again.
"I"ve got to go on," he broke in again as the top of the hill came in sight. "I"ve a pa.s.senger for the eight-fifty train waiting for me more than a mile along the road. I shall have to leave you after I set you down."
"That"s right; I expect that. I can take care of myself--don"t worry. Not but what you"re very kind," she added after a moment, in her cultured voice, with just enough trace of accent to make it linger sweetly in the ear.
"Then here we are," he called back a moment later, jerking his horses to a standstill and jumping down into the road. "Goin" east or goin" west?" he asked as he took another glance at her frail and poorly protected figure.
"This way," she answered, pointing east.
He stopped and stared at her.
"n.o.body lives that way," he said, "--that is, n.o.body near enough for you to reach shelter before the storm bursts."
"You are mistaken," she said, cringing involuntarily as the first big clap of thunder rolled in endless echoes among the mountains. And turning about, she started hurriedly into the shadows of the narrow cross-road.
He gave one glance back at his horses, the twitching of whose ears showed nervousness, uttered some familiar word and launched out after the woman. "Pardon me, missus," he cried, "but is it Miss Brown"s you mean?"
The widow stopped, glanced back at him over her shoulder, made a quick, protesting gesture and dashed on.
With a shake of his head and a muttered, "Well, women do beat the devil!" he retraced his steps; and she proceeded on alone.
As the last sound of his horses" hoof-beats died out on the road, a second clap of thunder seemed to bring heaven and earth together. She scarcely looked up. She was approaching a little weather-beaten house nestled among trees on the edge of a deep gorge. As her eyes fell on it, her footsteps quickened, and lifting a hasty hand, she pulled off her veil. A change quite indescribable, but real for all that, had taken place in her worn and waxen features. Not joy, but a soft expectancy relieved them from their extreme tension. If a friend awaited her, that friend would have no difficulty in recognizing her now. But alas!
A few steps more, and she stood before the door. It had a desolate look; the whole house had a desolate look, possibly because every shade was drawn. But she did not notice this; she was too sure of her welcome. Raising her hand to the knocker, she gave two sharp raps. Then she waited. No answer from within--no sound of hurrying steps--only another rumble in the sky and a quick rustling of the trees on either side of her as if the wind which made the horizon black had sent an avant-courieur over the hilltops.
"Elvira is out--gone to some church meeting or social gathering down in the village. She will be back. But I won"t wait. I will try and get in in the old way. The storm may delay her indefinitely."
Leaving the door, which was raised only two steps above the road, she walked to the corner of the house and stooping down, felt behind a projecting stone for what she had certainly expected to find there--a key to the front door.
But her hand came away empty.
Surprised, for this was not her first visit to this house (she had once spent weeks there and knew the habits of its mistress well), she felt again in the place where the key should be, and where she had so often found it when her friend was out. But all to no avail. It was not there, and presently she was in the road again staring at the closed-up front.
As she did so, these words left her lips: "And she knew I might come at any minute!"
Tottering from fatigue, she caught at the trunk of a great tree which held roof and wall in its embrace.
Why did it quiver? Why did the ground beneath her feet seem to rock and all nature darken as with the falling of a pall. The storm was upon her. It had rolled up with incredible swiftness and was about to break over her head. With a shock she realized her position. No shelter, and the storm of the season upon her! What should she do? There was no way of getting into the house at the rear, for the bushes were too thick. She must accept her fate, be drenched to the skin, perhaps smitten by the next thunderbolt. But Antoinette Duclos was no coward, so far as physical ills were concerned. She drew herself up straight against the trunk of the tree, thinking that this, bad as it was, was better than shelter with the enemy at the door. She would be calm, and she was fast growing so when she suddenly became aware of a man standing very near and hunting her out through the dusk.
She never knew why the scream which rose in her throat did not pa.s.s her lips. Her terror was unspeakable, for she had heard no advance; indeed, there was too much noise about her for that. But it was the silent terror of despair, for she thought it was the man from whom she had made this great effort at escape. But he soon proved to her he was not. It was just the driver of the stagecoach, returned to see what had become of her. He had feared to find her stricken down in the road, and when he saw her clinging alone and in a maddened way to this tree, he made no bones of speaking to her with all necessary plainness.
"I asked you if it was Missus Brown you had come to see," he called to her through the din. "And you wouldn"t answer."
"Why should I?" she shouted back. "Why do you speak like that? Has anything happened to her?"
"Don"t you know?"
"No, no--she was well when I heard from her last, and expecting me, or so she wrote. Is she--she--"
"Dead, missus. We buried her last Tuesday. I"m sorry, but--"
Why finish? She was lying out before him, straight and stark in the road. A bolt of lightning which at that moment tore its way through the heavens brought into startling view her face, white with distraction, framed in a ma.s.s of iron-gray locks released by her fall.
"Good heaven!" burst from the lips of the frightened man as he stooped to lift her. "What am I going to do now?"
The thunder answered him, or rather it robbed him for the moment of all thought. Peal after peal rattled over the neighboring peaks, rocking the air on the uplands and filling his soul with dismay. But when quiet had come again, hope returned with it. She was not only standing upright but was crying in his ear: "Can I get into the house? If I could stay there to-night, I could go back to-morrow."
"I"ll see that you get in, if I have to break in a window," he answered. "But you"re sure that you will not be afraid to stay out this terrible storm in a house with no neighbors within half a mile?"
"I know the house. I have been here before, and if Elvira Brown could face the storms of forty years from her solitary home, I can surely face a single one, without losing my courage."
He said no more, but approaching the house, began to test such windows as he could reach. He finally broke in a pane and released the latch; after that, entrance was easy.
Yet after he had opened the way for her and she had stepped into the dim interior, he felt loth to leave her. Duty called him away. The pa.s.senger awaiting him up the road was a man he could not afford to disappoint; yet he stood there longer than the occasion warranted, with the k.n.o.b of the door in hand, watching her struggle with the lamp, which she at last succeeded in lighting. As the walls of the hall and her anxiously bending figure burst into view, he uttered a quick "Good-by!"
She turned, smiled and tried to thank him, but the words failed to leave her lips. A nearer and fiercer bolt had shot to earth at that instant, striking a tree so near that the noise of its fall mingled with the crash of the heavens. When it had ceased, he had gone. He could not face the look with which she met this new catastrophe.
That look never again left her. When she saw herself in a gla.s.s, as she presently did, on entering one of the rooms lamp in hand, she was startled and muttered: "My own mother would pa.s.s me by if she saw me now. I could go anywhere I wished without fear or dread. Why did I leave New York?" And setting the lamp down, she covered her face and wept.
The storm abated; a few minutes of fiercely pouring rain, and all was over. She was left in ghastly quiet--a quiet which was almost worse than the turmoil which had preceded it--to face her memories and accustom herself to the thought that the solitary woman with whose life everything she looked upon was so intimately connected was gone, never to pa.s.s through these doors again or touch with deft and careful fingers the infinite number of little belongings with which the house was filled.
For as yet nothing had been changed, nothing had been moved. How fitting this was, Antoinette knew better than anybody else, perhaps, for she was the only person whom Elvira Brown had ever allowed to spend any length of time with her, and she could remember--alas! how vividly, in spite of the one great fear forever gnawing at her heart--that an article, no matter how small, when once given place in this house, held that place always till broken or in some other way robbed of its usefulness. She looked at her friend"s pet chair standing just in the one spot where she had seen it eight years before, and her heart swelled, and a tear rose in her eye. But there was not time for another. A sense of the straits in which she found herself placed by the death of this dependable friend returned upon her in full force; the past retired into its old place, and the present, with its maddening problems, seized upon her nerve and quelled her once indomitable spirit.
The fate which had pursued her ever since she had left her happy home in France had not spared her at this crisis. The storm, of so little consequence to her, had roused the driver"s sympathy. This had not only fixed her image in his mind but given away her destination. All hope of hiding herself among the mountains was therefore gone. She would have to move on; but where? If she were but able to leave now, she might before morning find some covert from which help might be given her for further escape. But the condition of the roads, as well as her own weakness, forbade that. She needed food: she needed sleep. Of food she would find plenty, she was sure; but sleep! How could she sleep, with the promise of the morrow before her? Yet she must; everything depended upon her strength. How could she win that rest which alone would secure it.
Pausing in the midst of the hall whither her restless thought had driven her, she stared in a fruitless inquiry at the wall confronting her. Her mind, like her feet, was at a standstill. She could neither think nor act. In fact, she was at the point of a nervous collapse, when slowly from out the void there rose to her view and pierced its way into her mind the outline of the door upon which she had been steadily looking but without seeing it till now. Why did she start as it thus took on shape before her? There was nothing strange or mysterious about it. It led nowhere; it hid nothing, unless it was the yard upon which it directly opened.
But that yard! She remembered it well. It was unlike any other she had ever seen in this country or her own. It was small and semicircular; it was shut in by a high board fence except at the extreme end, where it was met by a swinging bridge topping a forty-foot chasm. That bridge led through a spa.r.s.ely wooded forest to a road running in a quite different direction from the one by which the house was approached. As she strove to recall her memories of it, she became more and more a.s.sured that her one and only opportunity for a successful flight lay that way. Moved to joy at the thought, she bowed her head for one wild moment in heartfelt thankfulness and then quickly drew the bolts of the door which offered her this happy deliverance.