TESTS
Dorothy came down the wide staircase a few minutes before eleven-thirty.
She wore a dark blue morning frock of her cousin’s, its simplicity
relieved only by the soft white collar and deep cuffs. Except for being
rather tight across the shoulders it fitted her as though she had been
poured into it. She had selected this dress because she knew it was just
the sort of thing a new secretary would be expected to wear.
She crossed the broad hall to the open door of the library, and there
found Mrs. Lawson standing before a window staring into the storm.
Although Dorothy’s footsteps made practically no sound on the thick pile
of the handsome Bokhara rug, the woman turned like a flash at her
entrance.
“Oh, good morning, Janet.” The frown on her face gave way to a pleasant
smile. “I hope you were comfortable last night. Did you sleep well?”
“I dropped off as soon as my head touched the pillow,” she answered,
taking Mrs. Lawson’s outstretched hand. Dorothy did not believe in
telling a lie unless it was in a good cause; but when necessary, she
invariably made the lie a good one.
“I hope the storm didn’t wake you,” smiled Laura, holding Dorothy’s
hand.
Dorothy did not reply at once. Two long fingers were lightly pressing
her wrist, and she saw that Mrs. Lawson’s eyes had strayed to the
grandfather’s clock in the corner of the room. “Test number one,” she
said to herself. “Mrs. du Val, alias Lawson is counting my pulse. Well,
I’ve got a clear conscience, perhaps I can give her a shock.” She drew
her hand away and answered the woman’s question in her normal voice.
“Oh, the storm! No, I never heard it, Mrs. Lawson. If that hot lemonade
had been drugged, I couldn’t have slept any sounder!”
“What makes you say that?” snapped her employer, and beneath the velvet
tone, Dorothy sensed the ring of steel.
She dropped her eyes, and turning toward the open hearth, held out her
hands to the crackling blaze. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said sweetly and
like the clever little strategist that she was, opened her own offensive
in the enemy’s territory. “I have the bad habit of occasionally walking
in my sleep, Mrs. Lawson—and especially when I spend the night in a
strange bed. Perhaps it’s nervousness—I don’t know.”
Mrs. Lawson threw her a sharp glance. “Sit down, Janet,” she suggested,
pointing to a chair near the fire, and taking one herself across the
hearth. “You’re—I mean, you don’t seem to be at all nervous this
morning.”
“Good old pulse!” thought Dorothy. Then aloud—“No, I feel splendidly,
thank you. But, you see, I didn’t walk in my sleep last night.”
“But surely you can’t tell when you do it!”
“Oh, yes, I can.” Dorothy’s manner and tone were those of the simple
schoolgirl proud of an unusual accomplishment.
“You don’t expect me to believe that you know what you’re doing when you
walk in your sleep, Janet. That’s impossible!”
“Not while I’m sleepwalking, Mrs. Lawson. That wasn’t what I said—but
when I have been sleepwalking—there’s a difference, you see?”
“Well?” The lady of the house objected to being contradicted and took no
trouble to hide it.
“It’s really very simple,” explained Dorothy, painstakingly, as though
she were speaking to a rather stupid child. “I found out how to do it.
You see, I’ve been walking in my sleep ever since I was a little thing.
When I get in bed at night I leave my slippers on the floor beside it
pointed outward—away from the bed. We all leave them that way, I guess.
It’s the natural thing to do.”
“But what have slippers got to do with it?” Laura was becoming
impatient.
“Everything, so far as I’m concerned, Mrs. Lawson. When I’ve been
walking at night, I always find them in the morning beside the bed, but
pointing _toward_ it. I evidently slip them off before I get back into
bed, and—”
“I’m beginning to think you are quite a clever girl, Janet.”
“Oh, thank you,” said Dorothy with a guilelessness that was sheer
camouflage. “Has anybody been saying I’m stupid? I’ve always stood high
in my classes at school.”
“Oh, not stupid, child—but nervous—perhaps a little unbalanced,
especially this past week.”
Dorothy raised her heavy lashes and looked Mrs. Lawson squarely in the
face. This might be a test she was undergoing and it probably was; but
here was a heaven sent chance to stir up discord in the enemy’s camp.
She must work up to it gradually.
“I know that I was nervous and upset past all endurance.” She leaned
forward, her hands on the arms of the chair. “How would you like your
father to lock you in your bedroom for a week, without ever coming to
see you, or giving you any explanation for such outrageous treatment? Am
I a child to be handled like that? To be shipped up here to strangers,
whether I wanted to go or not? How would you feel about it, Mrs. Lawson,
if you were me? Don’t say you would submit to it sitting down.”
“But I am taking you on as my secretary,” the lady hedged. “Offering you
a good position for which you’ll be paid twenty dollars a week. That’s
not to be thought of lightly, especially in these times.”
“But it doesn’t seem to strike you that I might like to have something
to say about it,” Dorothy replied calmly. “As for the salary—that’s no
inducement. My mother left me five thousand a year. I came into the
income on my last birthday, so you see I have nearly a hundred dollars a
week, whether I work or not.”
“I didn’t know that, of course,” Mrs. Lawson admitted and none too
graciously. “Your father wants you to be here while he’s away. I hope
you aren’t going to be difficult, Janet.”
“I hope not, Mrs. Lawson. I shall be glad to stay here for a while and
do the work you’d planned for me; but if I do, it must be as a guest and
not as a paid dependant.”
“But you are a guest, Janet.”
“I shall not accept a salary, Mrs. Lawson.”
“Very well, my dear, if you wish it that way.”
“Thank you very much.”
“To get back to our former topic,” Mrs. Lawson said, and lit a
cigarette. “I can understand that your father’s conduct in confining you
to your room might be exasperating—but why should it make you nervous?
And my husband tells me that when he visited you in your room you acted
as though you were in deadly fear of something or somebody every time he
saw you. What was the trouble, Janet? Was anything worrying you?”
“Yes, there was, Mrs. Lawson.”
Dorothy looked down at the andirons, and her hands on the chair arms
twisted embarrassedly. From the corner of her eye she saw a smile of
satisfaction light up the older woman’s face. She knew she was playing
with fire and that Mrs. Lawson was watching her as a hawk watches its
defenseless prey before it strikes. But all unknown to her inquisitor,
Dorothy had been leading her into this trap as a move forward in her own
game. Genuine dislike for the woman as well as a mischievous impulse on
her part drew her to make the scene as dramatic and convincing as
possible.
“Yes—I—I—was afraid,” she went on, dragging out the words slowly.
“Then don’t you think you’d better tell me about it, Janet? I’m nearly
old enough to be your mother. Let me take your mother’s place, dear.
Give me your confidence. I feel sure I’ll be able to help you, child.”
This reference to Janet’s dead mother by a woman who was the vilest kind
of a hypocrite swept away Dorothy’s last compunction. She herself was
going to commit justifiable libel. Mrs. Lawson, on the other hand, was
attempting to lead Janet Jordan into a confession of shamming sleep at
the fateful meeting a week ago. And such a confession meant a sentence
of death from this beautiful siren who gazed at her so winningly, who
puffed a cigarette so nonchalantly while she waited for an unsuspecting
girl to commit herself.
“Well, I don’t know—I can’t help hesitating to tell _you_, Mrs.
Lawson,” Dorothy began timidly.
“There’s no need to be afraid of anything,” replied the woman, only half
veiling the sneer that went with the words.
“Oh, but you see, there is, Mrs. Lawson!” Dorothy’s manner was still
indecisive. “I don’t want—in fact, I hate awfully to hurt you this
way.”
“Hurt me!” Mrs. Lawson’s cigarette snapped into the fireplace like a
miniature comet. “Hurt me, child? What in the wide world are you talking
about?”
“Just what I say, Mrs. Lawson.”
Mrs. Lawson sniffed. “Don’t be ridiculous, Janet. Out with it now. What
did you fear when you were locked in your room?”
“Your husband, Mrs. Lawson.”
“My husband!”
“Yes.”
“But—why—I don’t believe you.”
“Oh, very well. You asked the question, I was trying to answer it,
that’s all.”
Mrs. Lawson bit her lip. She was furious. “As long as you’ve said what
you have, you’d better go on with it,” she said acidly.
“There isn’t any more,” returned Dorothy. “That’s all there is.”
“But surely he must have given you reasons for your assertion.” Mrs.
Lawson had walked beautifully into Dorothy’s trap. Her own plan to snare
an unsuspecting girl had been blotted out by the shadow of the Green
Goddess, Jealousy. “Tell me what my husband did or said to make you fear
him, and tell me at once.”
“It wasn’t what he did, Mrs. Lawson—it was the way he looked.”
“What do you mean—the way he looked?”
Dorothy had thrust a painful knife into the mental cosmos of her
adversary. Now she deliberately turned it in the wound. “Very probably,”
she said quietly, looking her straight in the eyes, “you can remember
how Mr. Lawson looked when he first made love to you. I don’t want to be
made love to, and I don’t like _him_, Mrs. Lawson.”
“What did you do?”
“I told him to leave me—and when he would not go, I simply walked into
my bathroom and locked the door.”
“But what happened the next time he came? Martin went in to see you
every day, didn’t he?”
“He did. But he talked to me through the bathroom door. Just as soon as
I heard the key turn in the lock I’d hop in there.”
The man she had been talking about must have been listening just outside
in the hall, for now he strode into the room and up to Dorothy. “That,”
he said menacingly, “is a deliberate lie, Miss Janet Jordan!”