A BOX OF CROWN DERBY
We got her into the room and on the couch before I knew her. Her fair
hair had fallen loose over her face, and one long, thin hand clutched
still at the bosom of her gown. It was Ellen Butler!
She was living, but not much more. We gathered around and stood looking
down at her in helpless pity. A current of cold night air came up the
staircase from an open door below, and set the hanging light to swaying,
throwing our shadows in a sort of ghastly dance over her quiet face.
I was too much shocked to be surprised. Burton had picked up her hat,
and put it beside her.
"She's got about an hour, I should say," said one of the newspaper men.
"See if Gray is around, will you, Jim? He's mostly here Saturday night."
"Is it--Miss Maitland?" Burton asked, in a strangely subdued voice.
"No; it is Henry Butler's widow," I returned, and the three men were
reporters again, at once.
Gray was there and came immediately. Whatever surprise he may have felt
at seeing a woman there, and dying, he made no comment. He said she
might live six hours, but the end was certain. We got a hospital
ambulance, and with the clang of its bell as it turned the corner and
hurried away, the White Cat drops out of this story, so far as action is
concerned.
Three detectives and as many reporters hunted Schwartz all of that night
and the next day, to get his story. But he remained in hiding. He had a
start of over an hour, from the time he switched off the light and
escaped down the built-in staircase. Even in her agony, Ellen Butler's
hate had carried her through the doorway after him, to collapse on the
stairs.
I got home just as the cab, with Fred and Edith, stopped at the door. I
did not let them get out; a half dozen words, without comment or
explanation, and they were driving madly to the hospital.
Katie let me in, and I gave her some money to stay up and watch the
place while we were away. Then, not finding a cab, I took a car and rode
to the hospital.
The building was appallingly quiet. The elevator cage, without a light,
crept spectrally up and down; my footsteps on the tiled floor echoed and
reechoed above my head. A night watchman, in felt shoes, admitted me,
and took me up-stairs.
There was another long wait while the surgeon finished his examination,
and a nurse with a basin of water and some towels came out of the room,
and another one with dressings went in. And then the surgeon came out,
in a white coat with the sleeves rolled above his elbows, and said I
might go in.
The cover was drawn up to the injured woman's chin, where it was folded
neatly back. Her face was bloodless, and her fair hair had been gathered
up in a shaggy knot. She was breathing slowly, but regularly, and her
expression was relaxed--more restful than I had ever seen it. As I stood
at the foot of the bed and looked down at her, I knew that as surely as
death was coming, it would be welcome.
Edith had been calm, before, but when she saw me she lost her
self-control. She put her head on my shoulder, and sobbed out the shock
and the horror of the thing. As for Fred, his imaginative temperament
made him particularly sensitive to suffering in others. As he sat there
beside the bed I knew by his face that he was repeating and repenting
every unkind word he had said about Ellen Butler.
She was conscious; we realized that after a time. Once she asked for
water, without opening her eyes, and Fred slipped a bit of ice between
her white lips. Later in the night she looked up for an instant, at me.
"He--struck my--hand," she said with difficulty, and closed her eyes
again.
During the long night hours I told the story, as I knew it, in an
undertone, and there was a new kindliness in Fred's face as he looked at
her.
She was still living by morning, and was rallying a little from the
shock. I got Fred to take Edith home, and I took her place by the bed.
Some one brought me coffee about eight, and at nine o'clock I was asked
to leave the room, while four surgeons held a consultation there. The
decision to operate was made shortly after.
"There is only a chance," a gray-haired surgeon told me in brisk,
short-clipped words. "The bullet went down, and has penetrated the
abdomen. Sometimes, taken early enough, we can repair the damage, to a
certain extent, and nature does the rest. The family is willing, I
suppose?"
I knew of no family but Edith, and over the telephone she said, with
something of her natural tone, to do what the surgeons considered best.
I hoped to get some sort of statement before the injured woman was taken
to the operating-room, but she lay in a stupor, and I had to give up the
idea. It was two days before I got her deposition, and in that time I
had learned many things.
On Monday I took Margery to Bellwood. She had received the news about
Mrs. Butler more calmly than I had expected.
"I do not think she was quite sane, poor woman," she said with a
shudder. "She had had a great deal of trouble. But how strange--a murder
and an attempt at murder--at that little club in a week!"
She did not connect the two, and I let the thing rest at that. Once, on
the train, she turned to me suddenly, after she had been plunged in
thought for several minutes.
"Don't you think," she asked, "that she had a sort of homicidal mania,
and that she tried to kill me with chloroform?"
"I hardly think so," I returned evasively. "I am inclined to think some
one actually got in over the porch roof."
"I am afraid," she said, pressing her gloved hands tight together.
"Wherever I go, something happens that I can not understand. I never
wilfully hurt any one, and yet--these terrible things follow me. I am
afraid--to go back to Bellwood, with Aunt Jane still gone, and you--in
the city."
"A lot of help I have been to you," I retorted bitterly. "Can you think
of a single instance where I have been able to save you trouble or
anxiety? Why, I allowed you to be chloroformed within an inch of
eternity, before I found you."
"But you did find me," she cheered me. "And just to know that you are
doing all you can--"
"My poor best," I supplemented.
"It is very comforting to have a friend one can rely on," she finished,
and the little bit of kindness went to my head. If she had not got a
cinder in her eye at that psychological moment, I'm afraid I would
figuratively have trampled Wardrop underfoot, right there. As it was, I
got the cinder, after a great deal of looking into one beautiful
eye--which is not as satisfactory by half as looking into two--and then
we were at Bellwood.
We found Miss Letitia in the lower hall, and Heppie on her knees with a
hatchet. Between them sat a packing box, and they were having a spirited
discussion as to how it should be opened.
"Here, give it to me," Miss Letitia demanded, as we stopped in the
doorway. "You've got stove lengths there for two days if you don't chop
'em up into splinters."
With the hatchet poised in mid air she saw us, but she let it descend
with considerable accuracy nevertheless, and our greeting was made
between thumps.
"Come in"--thump--"like as not it's a mistake"--bang--"but the
expressage was prepaid. If it's mineral water--" crash. Something broke
inside.
"If it's mineral water," I said, "you'd better let me open it. Mineral
water is meant for internal use, and not for hall carpets." I got the
hatchet from her gradually. "I knew a case once where a bottle of hair
tonic was spilled on a rag carpet, and in a year they had it dyed with
spots over it and called it a tiger skin."
She watched me suspiciously while I straightened the nails she had bent,
and lifted the boards. In the matter of curiosity, Miss Letitia was
truly feminine; great handfuls of excelsior she dragged out herself, and
heaped on Heppie's blue apron, stretched out on the floor.
The article that had smashed under the vigor of Miss Letitia's seventy
years lay on the top. It had been a tea-pot, of some very beautiful
ware. I have called just now from my study, to ask what sort of ware it
was, and the lady who sets me right says it was Crown Derby. Then there
were rows of cups and saucers, and heterogeneous articles in the same
material that the women folk seemed to understand. At the last, when the
excitement seemed over, they found a toast rack in a lower corner of the
box and the "Ohs" and "Ahs" had to be done all over again.
Not until Miss Letitia had arranged it all on the dining-room table, and
Margery had taken off her wraps and admired from all four corners, did
Miss Letitia begin to ask where they had come from. And by that time
Heppie had the crate in the wood-box, and the excelsior was a black and
smoking mass at the kitchen end of the grounds.
There was not the slightest clue to the sender, but while Miss Letitia
rated Heppie loudly in the kitchen, and Bella swept up the hall, Margery
voiced the same idea that had occurred to me.
"If--if Aunt Jane were--all right," she said tremulously, "it would be
just the sort of thing she loves to do."
I had intended to go back to the city at once, but Miss Letitia's box
had put her in an almost cheerful humor, and she insisted that I go with
her to Miss Jane's room, and see how it was prepared for its owner's
return.
"I'm not pretending to know what took Jane Maitland away from this house
in the middle of the night," she said. "She was a good bit of a fool,
Jane was; she never grew up. But if I know Jane Maitland, she will come
back and be buried with her people, if it's only to put Mary's husband
out of the end of the lot.
"And another thing, Knox," she went on, and I saw her old hands were
shaking. "I told you the last time you were here that I hadn't been
robbed of any of the pearls, after all. Half of those pearls were Jane's
and--she had a perfect right to take forty-nine of them if she wanted.
She--she told me she was going to take some, and it--slipped my mind."
I believe it was the first lie she had ever told in her hard,
conscientious old life. Was she right? I wondered. Had Miss Jane taken
the pearls, and if she had, why?
Wardrop had been taking a long walk; he got back about five, and as Miss
Letitia was in the middle of a diatribe against white undergarments for
colored children, Margery and he had a half-hour alone together. I had
known, of course, that it must come, but under the circumstances, with
my whole future existence at stake, I was vague as to whether it was
colored undergarments on white orphans or the other way round.
When I got away at last, I found Bella waiting for me in the hall. Her
eyes were red with crying, and she had a crumpled newspaper in her hand.
She broke down when she tried to speak, but I got the newspaper from
her, and she pointed with one work-hardened finger to a column on the
first page. It was the announcement of Mrs. Butler's tragic accident,
and the mystery that surrounded it. There was no mention of Schwartz.
"Is she--dead?" Bella choked out at last.
"Not yet, but there is very little hope."
Amid fresh tears and shakings of her heavy shoulders, as she sat in her
favorite place, on the stairs, Bella told me, briefly, that she had
lived with Mrs. Butler since she was sixteen, and had only left when the
husband's suicide had broken up the home. I could get nothing else out
of her, but gradually Bella's share in the mystery was coming to light.
Slowly, too--it was a new business for me--I was forming a theory of my
own. It was a strange one, but it seemed to fit the facts as I knew
them. With the story Wardrop told that afternoon came my first glimmer
of light.
He was looking better than he had when I saw him before, but the news of
Mrs. Butler's approaching death and the manner of her injury affected
him strangely. He had seen the paper, like Bella, and he turned on me
almost fiercely when I entered the library. Margery was in her old
position at the window, looking out, and I knew the despondent droop of
her shoulders.
"Is she conscious?" Wardrop asked eagerly, indicating the article in the
paper.
"No, not now--at least, it is not likely."
He looked relieved at that, but only for a moment. Then he began to pace
the room nervously, evidently debating some move. His next action showed
the development of a resolution, for he pushed forward two chairs for
Margery and myself.
"Sit down, both of you," he directed. "I've got a lot to say, and I want
you both to listen. When Margery has heard the whole story, she will
probably despise me for the rest of her life. I can't help it. I've got
to tell all I know, and it isn't so much after all. You didn't fool me
yesterday, Knox; I knew what that doctor was after. But he couldn't make
me tell who killed Mr. Fleming, because, before God, I didn't know."