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THE LATE TENANT
by
GORDON HOLMES
Author of "A Mysterious Disappearance,"
"The Arncliffe Puzzle."
New York
Edward J. Clode
156 Fifth Avenue
1906
Copyright, 1906, by
Edward J. Clode
Entered at Stationers Hall
The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I PAGE
A WHIFF OF VIOLETS 1
CHAPTER II
A SIGNATURE WITH A FLOURISH 15
CHAPTER III
VIOLET 27
CHAPTER IV
"JOHANN STRAUSS" 36
CHAPTER V
VON OR VAN? 45
CHAPTER VI
THE WORD OF JOY 60
CHAPTER VII
VIOLET'S CONDITIONS 70
CHAPTER VIII
AT DEAD OF NIGHT 83
CHAPTER IX
COMING NEAR 96
CHAPTER X
THE MARRIAGE-LINES 106
CHAPTER XI
SWORDS DRAWN 117
CHAPTER XII
THE NIGHT-WATCHES 133
CHAPTER XIII
NO MORE VIOLET 144
CHAPTER XIV
THE DIARY 163
CHAPTER XV
IN PAIN 173
CHAPTER XVI
HAND TO HAND 180
CHAPTER XVII
DAVID MORE THAN REGAINS LOST GROUND 197
CHAPTER XVIII
FROM THE DEPTHS 213
CHAPTER XIX
VIOLET DECIDES 227
CHAPTER XX
DAVID HAS ONE VISITOR, AND EXPECTS OTHERS 242
CHAPTER XXI
THE MIDNIGHT GATHERING 257
CHAPTER XXII
VAN HUPFELDT MAKES AMENDS 271
_The Late Tenant_
CHAPTER I
A WHIFF OF VIOLETS
"I suppose one becomes used to this sort of thing in time," thought
David Harcourt, as he peered through the dusty plate-glass windows of
his third-floor flat. "At present I can appreciate the feelings of a
Wyoming steer when he first experiences the restraint of a cattle-truck.
Or am I a caged bird? or a menagerie ape? or a mere ass? There is
something in the evolution theory, after all. Obviously, one of my
respected ancestors is kicking."
Then, being a cheerful soul, he laughed, and turned from the outer
prospect to face the coziness of his new abode. He did not understand
yet that in No. 7, Eddystone Mansions, picked almost at haphazard from
a house-agent's list, he had hit upon a residence singularly free from
the sort of thing which induced this present fit of the blues. In the
first place, owing to a suit in chancery, the "eligible" building-site
opposite was vacant, and most of the windows of No. 7 commanded an
open space. Secondly, the street itself did not connect two main
thoroughfares; hence its quietude was seldom disturbed by vehicles.
Thirdly, and, perhaps, most important of all, his neighbors, above,
below, and on three sides, were people who had achieved by design what
he had done by accident--they had taken up their abode in Eddystone
Mansions on account of the peace thus secured in the heart of London.
For London has a stony heart with wooden arteries, through which the
stream of life rushes noisily. To ears tuned by the far-flung silence of
the prairie this din of traffic was thunderous. To eyes trained by the
smooth horizon it was bewildering to see a clear sky overhead and a sun
sinking slowly, like a dim Chinese fire-balloon, into a compound of
smoke and chimneys. In fact, David Harcourt came to the conclusion that
Londoners, as a race, must be purblind and somewhat deaf.
"I wonder if I can stand it?" he commented. "I saw a map of South
Africa in a shop window to-day. It looked wonderfully attractive. Yes,
I am beginning to believe there is neither claw nor feather in my
composition. 'Kicking' is the right word--hoof--ass! Oh! the line of
descent is clear." Then he laughed again, taking a box of cigars off the
top of a bookcase, and any one who heard him laugh would have grasped
the reason why men soon called him "Davie," and women smiled when he
looked at them.
Dame Nature, aided by his less remote ancestors in the evolutionary
tree, had been good to him. It would have needed the worst
"environment" ever dreamed of by sociology to make him a degenerate.
As it was, a healthy upbringing, a fair public-school education, and
the chance that a relation of his owned a Wyoming ranch, joined in
fashioning an excellent specimen of lusty and clean-souled young
manhood. But that same general wet-nurse, who had intended David to lord
it over herds and vast pastures, had complicated matters by throwing a
literary kink into the deftly coiled strands of his composition. Thus,
at the age of twenty-five, he took more interest in scribbling stories
and searching for rimes than in toting up the proceeds of sales at
Chicago stock-yards. Worse than that, having oft imagined and striven
to depict various ethereal creatures typical of the Spirit of the Dawn,
the Fairy of the Dell, or the Goddess of the Mist, he had refused, most
emphatically, to wed the elderly rancher's daughter, his relative, a
lady blessed with more wealth and weight than was necessary for any one
woman in the world.
So, like many another youngster in the far lands, he heard the voice of
London calling through every book and newspaper he read. It was a siren
voice, devoid of accent. The Wyoming wooing, too, became a serious
matter; hence, like one of the dove-eyed oxen he knew so well, he
stampeded in sudden panic, realized his personal possessions, and, in
the vernacular of Sioux Pass, "lit out for the nearest depot, an'
boarded an east-bound train."
He had now been in England a month, in London a week. From the
landing-stage at Liverpool he had gone to visit the country cousins who
superintended his childhood and education after the death of his mother,
that lady having been stricken down by the hand which killed her soldier
husband at Dargai. He found the cousins snug in their Bedfordshire nest.
The squire-like head of the household wondered dully why any man should
quit a place where he could "get on" to seek a precarious livelihood in
a land which was "rapidly going to the dogs." David certainly received
more encouragement from the younger members of the family, especially
from a bright-eyed maiden of eighteen, who thought London "awfully
jolly," and vowed a literary career to be "quite too devey for
anything."
But David was level-headed enough to see that the verdict of squire and
maid were equally unfavorable.
Then followed a few days in a big hotel. He paid a round of useless
calls at the offices of magazines that, to his certain knowledge,
printed all sorts of rubbishy articles about cow-boy life, but opposed
a phalanx of commissionaires against a man who could not only round up
an infuriated herd, but could also describe the feat deftly with a pen.
Ultimately, he resolved to lay siege to the citadel which he was unable
to storm, and pitch his camp over against the tents of the enemy. He
took a furnished flat, "with plate and linen, gas-stove, electric
light, bath H. and C.," for six months.
In thus becoming a Londoner, he encountered the first quaint anomaly of
London life. When he drove up to the door of the most fashionable hotel
in the West End, and deposited a couple of portmanteaus in a bed-room
after signing the register, he was permitted to run a bill for a week,
at least, without let or hindrance; but when he offered to pay cash in
advance for the flat, he met with a demand for "references."
The agent was firm but explanatory. "It is not my client, but the
over-landlord, who makes that stipulation," he said. "In fact, the
letting is wholly in my hands, as the late tenant is dead; but, for
certain reasons, the residuary legatees wish to keep the place in its
present condition until the lease expires a year hence."
"Did the late tenant die there?" asked David.
"Well--yes--fully five months since; there have been other occupants
subsequently, and the terms are so reasonable--"
"What did he, or she, die of?" persisted David. He was accustomed to
reading men's faces, and he had caught a certain fluttering of the
agent's eyelids.
"Nothing to cause any alarm, nothing infectious, I assure you.
People--er--die in flats just the same as--er--in private houses." This,
being a joke, had its chuckle.
But the agent also knew men in his own way, and he felt it was unwise
to wriggle. David had a steadfast glance. He gave others the impression
that he heard and treasured each word they uttered. He was really
wondering then why the speaker's neck was so long and thin--nothing more
serious, but, with a disagreeable disclosure lurking in the other's
mind, David's scrutiny compelled candor.
"The thing is bound to come to your ears sooner or later, Mr. Harcourt;
so I may as well tell you now," said the Londoner. "The late tenant
was a lady, a singer of much promise, it was said. For an unknown
reason--probably some love affair was disturbing her rest--she--er--took
an overdose of a sleeping-draft. She was a very charming woman, quite
young, of highest character. It is inconceivable that she should have
committed suicide. The affair was an accident, of course, but--er--"
"A sceptical coroner thought it a murder?"
"Oh, dear, no, nothing of the kind, not a hint of such a thing. Fact
is--well, it sounds ridiculous to say with reference to a popular block
of flats in the middle of London, but two foolish women--an excitable
actress and her servant, your predecessors in the flat--have spread
reports as to queer noises. Well, you know, don't you? the sort of
nonsense women will talk."
"In plain English, they say the place is haunted."
"Ha, ha! Something in that nature. You have hit it! Something in that
nature. Absurd thing!"
"Who knows?" David had a cold disbelief in spooks, but it amused him to
see the agent squirm; and he sat tight. Those eyelids fluttered again,
and Mr. Dibbin banged a ledger with wrathful fist.
"Look here, Mr. Harcourt," cried he finally. "This is a
five-guineas-a-week flat. I'll make you a fair offer; take it for six
months and I give it you at half price."
"I laying the ghost at two and a half guineas weekly?"
"Put it any way you like. If a man of sound common-sense like you lives
there for a considerable period, the wretched affair will be forgotten;
so it is worth the loss to me, and it is a first-class bargain for you."
"Done!" said David.
The agent was so pleased that his annoyance vanished; he promised to
secure a woman whom he knew to look after the new tenant's housekeeping.
She had probably never heard of the Eddystone Mansions tragedy. He would
have her in the flat within four days. Meanwhile a charwoman might
attend to things generally.
The references having proved satisfactory, David was now passing his
first evening in his new abode. He had purchased some books and
stationery; his charwoman had left him; and, when the door had closed
behind her, he turned from the head of the dead girl in chalks over the
mantelpiece to gaze out of the dining-room window, and back again to
the sweet face in chalks, to return presently to the window.
It was a Thursday evening in the last week of January. The housekeeper
was to arrive on Saturday. David fixed Monday as a good day to start
work. In the interim he meant to loaf, dine at noteworthy restaurants,
read, and go to theaters.
A man accustomed to guide his movements by the position of
mountain-ranges or the stars, and count distances by his days on
horseback, is likely to find himself all unhinged within a four-mile
radius. David was in the novice stage of acquaintanceship with the
magnetic life of the world's capital. Not yet did the roar of London
sing in familiar harmonies; the crunch of the omnibuses, the jingle of
the hansoms, made no music in his ears. There was something uncanny in
the silence of the millions eddying through the streets. Where all else
was clamor, mankind was dumb, save for the shouts of the newsboys, the
jabber of bus-conductors, the cries of itinerant venders.
So David, having dressed and gone out, wandered into another restaurant
than that which he was aiming for; dawdled over the meal until the first
act of the play which he meant to see must have been ended; and decided
then upon a music-hall; finally, he strolled back toward Eddystone
Mansions as early as eleven.
The elevator, placed in the center of the building, ran from the
basement floor; those who used it had to descend a few steps from the
entrance and advance along a passage. Harcourt felt unaccountably
tired--there is a strain of life in London as on the tops of
mountains--so he chose the lift in preference to the stairs.
The hall-porter, who sat within the lift, pondering the entries for the
Spring Handicaps, recognized him, and jumped up with a salute.
"Good-evenin', sir! Fine, frosty night, sir," said he. They began to
ascend. A thought occurred to David. "What was the name of the lady
who occupied No. 7?" he asked.
"Miss Ermyn L'Estrange, sir," was the instant answer.
Even in the wilds of Wyoming one grasps the significance of certain
classes of names. For instance, not even the rawest tenderfoot would
expect "One-eyed Pete" to turn out to be a parson.
"I mean the lady who died here," said David.
The porter stopped the lift. "Your floor, sir," he said. "I've only bin
in these 'ere flats a matter o' two months, sir."
"Good egg!" cried David. "Have a cigar, porter. You are a man to be
depended on. But surely there is no harm in telling me the poor girl's
name. It must have appeared in all the newspapers."
The attendant tickled his head underneath his hat. The new tenant of No.
7 seemed a nice gentleman, anyhow. He looked up and down the stairs, of
which two sections were visible from the landing where they stood.
"I 'ave 'eard," said he, "that a young lydy used ter live 'ere of the
nyme of Miss Gwendoline Barnes."
"Ah, that sounds more like it. Good-night."
"Good-night, sir."
Harcourt, fumbling over the intricacies of the lock, heard the rattle
of the lift as it reached the basement. On his landing were two doors,
his own and that of No. 8; and light shone from his neighbor's dwelling.
That was companionable. The stairs, too, were well lighted.
At last he gave the key the right pressure, and the latch yielded.
He passed within and closed the door noiselessly. The electric
switch governing the hall-lamp was on the wall beyond the short
entrance-passage. He removed his overcoat and hat in the semi-darkness;
the sheen coming through the corrugated-glass panels of the outer door
did not so much as cast a shadow.
All at once he detected a fragrance of violets, faintly, but distinctly.
This was puzzling! He knew that it was almost impossible for that scent
to have been there earlier in the evening when he was at home, without
being marked by him. Even now not one man in a thousand in London that
night would have caught the subtle perfume; but David retained the
hunter's senses. As he stood in suspense, a feeling peeped and grew up
within him that the odor carried with it a suggestion of death; his
muscles grew taut, ready to fight, to defend himself against this world
or the next.
The next instant he smiled, thinking: "Nonsense! It must have been here
before. Each time I came in I was smoking; the air is frosty, too."
He groped inward for the switch, turned on the light, and, without
deigning to give another thought to the smell of violets, turned
to the left along the main corridor, which was rectangular to
the entrance-hall. Passing the drawing-room door, he entered the
dining-room. Opposite the latter was the kitchen and servants'
apartments. Around the other end of the main corridor were disposed
three bed-rooms and a bath-room. The light he had turned on illuminated
entrance and corridor alike.
In the dining-room he found the fire still burning. That was good. The
coal-scuttle was not by the fireplace, but in a corner. He went to get
a shovelful of coal; and as he stooped, again came to him the fragrance,
thrilling, bringing with it a picture of a girl whom he had once seen
lying in funereal state, surrounded by flowers, and clothed in the last
white robes of earth.
David stabbed the coals with the shovel. "What's wrong with me?" he half
laughed. Yet his eyes sought the crayon drawing of Gwendoline Barnes.
Presently he lit a cigar, unfolded an evening paper which he had bought
in the streets, and tried to take an interest in the news of this
new-old world into which he was new-born.
But his mind wandered. Without he heard the distant rumble of traffic;
hansoms were beginning to arrive in the street beneath; he heard doors
slam; the jingling of bells on head-stalls; feet pattering across the
pavement; a driver's tongue-click, and away would jog a horse, to be
stirred, perhaps, into sudden frenzy by two shrills of a far-off
whistle.
A contrast, these sounds, to the twig-snapping and grass-rustling of
a night on the plains! There, lying by the camp-fire embers, he had
heard the coyote slinking past in the dark, while the tethered horses
suspended their cropping to hearken. Here men and streets made a yet
stranger wilderness. He sat over the hearth absorbed by it, already
yielding his tribute to the greatness of the outer ocean of life.
But prairie or city, man must sleep. David rose and went to the
sideboard for a decanter. A certain graceful slowness characterized his
movements. Town-bred men might have been deceived thereby, might reason
that he was lethargic, of strapping physique, certainly, yet a man who
could be hit three times before he countered once. It is this error
of judgment which leads to accidents when town-dwellers encounter
the denizens of the jungle. Harcourt's hand was outstretched for the
decanter when he became aware that he was not alone in the flat. The
knowledge was derived from neither sight nor sound. It was intuitive, a
species of feeling through space, an imperative consciousness that he
shared his suite of apartments with another distinct, if intangible,
being. Many men might not have had it, but Harcourt had it clearly.
Instantly he was rigid. This time he was weaving no fantasy round a
whiff of violets. The sense of nearness to other presences is really
inherent in man. Residence in settled communities dulls it, but in David
Harcourt it was a living faculty. He stood motionless, waiting for some
simple proof of his belief.
The door, veiled by a portiere, was not closed, but sufficiently closed
to prevent any view of the corridor, which, otherwise, it commanded
throughout. The flat was carpeted so thickly that movement was silenced.
But David fancied that a woman's dress did brush somewhere against wall
or floor. That was enough. He was about to spring forward and pull the
door open to see, when he heard, or thought that he heard, the switch of
the light outside click, as if it had been carefully raised. And on the
instant, without hesitation, he pushed up the switch in the dining-room,
and hid himself in darkness. There are wolves, too, in the London
desert.
Now, like a bush-cat, he crept to the door, opened it, and peeped out.
Certainly the light which he had left burning had been extinguished by
some hand; the corridor was in darkness.
Nerves, as commonly understood, did not much enter into Harcourt's
scheme of things. But his heart beat quicker. The speed of thought
cannot be measured. Many questions, and one doubt, one question, flitted
through his brain. He stood in deep gloom; near him, he was convinced,
was something in the guise of woman. The face in chalks on the
mantelpiece seemed to crowd the dark, the face of the woman who had been
hovering on the verge of his consciousness ever since the agent had
mentioned her to him.