I
"A Lady to see you, sir."
I looked up and was at once impressed by the grace and beauty of the
person thus introduced to me.
"Is there anything I can do to serve you?" I asked, rising.
She cast me a childlike look full of trust and candour as she seated
herself in the chair I had pointed out.
"I believe so; I hope so," she earnestly assured me. "I--I am in great
trouble. I have just lost my husband--but it is not that. It is the slip
of paper I found on my dresser, and which--which----"
She was trembling violently and her words were fast becoming incoherent.
I calmed her and asked her to relate her story just as it had happened;
and after a few minutes of silent struggle she succeeded in collecting
herself sufficiently to respond with some degree of connection and
self-possession.
"I have been married six months. My name is Lucy Holmes. For the last
few weeks my husband and I have been living in an apartment house on
Fifty-ninth Street, and, as we had not a care in the world, we were very
happy till Mr. Holmes was called away on business to Philadelphia. This
was two weeks ago. Five days later I received an affectionate letter
from him, in which he promised to come back the next day; and the news
so delighted me that I accepted an invitation to the theatre from some
intimate friends of ours. The next morning I naturally felt fatigued and
rose late; but I was very cheerful, for I expected my husband at noon.
And now comes the perplexing mystery. In the course of dressing myself I
stepped to my bureau, and seeing a small newspaper slip attached to the
cushion by a pin, I drew it off and read it. It was a death notice, and
my hair rose and my limbs failed me as I took in its fatal and
incredible words.
"'Died this day at the Colonnade, James Forsythe De Witt Holmes. New
York papers please copy.'
"James Forsythe De Witt Holmes was my husband, and his last letter,
which was at that very moment lying beside the cushion, had been dated
from the Colonnade. Was I dreaming or under the spell of some frightful
hallucination which led me to misread the name on the slip of paper
before me? I could not determine. My head, throat, and chest seemed
bound about with iron, so that I could neither speak nor breathe with
freedom, and, suffering thus, I stood staring at this demoniacal bit of
paper which in an instant had brought the shadow of death upon my happy
life. Nor was I at all relieved when a little later I flew with the
notice into a neighbour's apartment, and praying her to read it to me,
found that my eyes had not deceived me and that the name was indeed my
husband's and the notice one of death.
"Not from my own mind but from hers came the first suggestion of
comfort.
"'It cannot be your husband who is meant,' said she; 'but some one of
the same name. Your husband wrote to you yesterday, and this person must
have been dead at least two days for the printed notice of his decease
to have reached New York. Some one has remarked the striking similarity
of names, and wishing to startle you, cut the slip out and pinned it on
your cushion.'
"I certainly knew of no one inconsiderate enough to do this, but the
explanation was so plausible, I at once embraced it and sobbed aloud in
my relief. But in the midst of my rejoicing I heard the bell ring in my
apartment, and, running thither, encountered a telegraph boy holding in
his outstretched hand the yellow envelope which so often bespeaks death
or disaster. The sight took my breath away. Summoning my maid, whom I
saw hastening toward me from an inner room, I begged her to open the
telegram for me. Sir, I saw in her face, before she had read the first
line, a confirmation of my very worst fears. My husband was----"
The young widow, choked with her emotions, paused, recovered herself for
the second time, and then went on.
"I had better show you the telegram."
Taking it from her pocketbook, she held it toward me. I read it at a
glance. It was short, simple, and direct:
"Come at once. Your husband found dead in his room this morning. Doctors
say heart disease. Please telegraph."
"You see it says this morning," she explained, placing her delicate
finger on the word she so eagerly quoted. "That means a week ago
Wednesday, the same day on which the printed slip recording his death
was found on my cushion. Do you not see something very strange in this?"
I did; but, before I ventured to express myself on this subject, I
desired her to tell me what she had learned in her visit to
Philadelphia.
Her answer was simple and straightforward.
"But little more than you find in this telegram. He died in his room. He
was found lying on the floor near the bell-button, which he had
evidently risen to touch. One hand was clenched on his chest, but his
face wore a peaceful look, as if death had come too suddenly to cause
him much suffering. His bed was undisturbed; he had died before
retiring, possibly in the act of packing his trunk, for it was found
nearly ready for the expressman. Indeed, there was every evidence of his
intention to leave on an early morning train. He had even desired to be
awakened at six o'clock; and it was his failure to respond to the
summons of the bellboy which led to so early a discovery of his death.
He had never complained of any distress in breathing, and we had always
considered him a perfectly healthy man; but there was no reason for
assigning any other cause than heart failure to his sudden death, and so
the burial certificate was made out to that effect, and I was allowed to
bring him home and bury him in our vault at Woodlawn. But"--and here her
earnestness dried up the tears which had been flowing freely during this
recital of her husband's lonely death and sad burial--"do you not think
an investigation should be made into a death preceded by a false
obituary notice? For I found when I was in Philadelphia that no
paragraph such as I had found pinned to my cushion had been inserted in
any paper there, nor had any other man of the same name ever registered
at the Colonnade, much less died there."
"Have you this notice with you?" I asked.
She immediately produced it, and while I was glancing it over remarked:
"Some persons would give a superstitious explanation to the whole
matter; think I had received a supernatural warning and been satisfied
with what they would call a spiritual manifestation. But I have not a
bit of such folly in my composition. Living hands set up the type and
printed the words which gave me so deathly a shock; and hands, with a
real purpose in them, cut it from the paper and pinned it to my cushion
for me to see when I woke on that fatal morning. But whose hands? That
is what I want you to discover."
I had caught the fever of her suspicions long before this and now felt
justified in showing my interest.
"First, let me ask," said I, "who has access to your rooms besides your
maid?"
"No one; absolutely no one."
"And what of her?"
"She is innocence herself. She is no common housemaid, but a girl my
mother brought up, who for love of me consents to do such work in the
household as my simple needs require."
"I should like to see her."
"There is no objection to your doing so; but you will gain nothing by
it. I have already talked the subject over with her a dozen times and
she is as much puzzled by it as I am myself. She says she cannot see how
any one could have found an entrance to my room during my sleep, as the
doors were all locked. Yet, as she very naturally observes, some one
must have done so, for she was in my bedroom herself just before I
returned from the theatre, and can swear, if necessary, that no such
slip of paper was to be seen on my cushion at that time, for her duties
led her directly to my bureau and kept her there for full five minutes."
"And you believed her?" I suggested.
"Implicitly."
"In what direction, then, do your suspicions turn?"
"Alas! in no direction. That is the trouble. I don't know whom to
mistrust. It was because I was told that you had the credit of seeing
light where others can see nothing but darkness that I have sought your
aid in this emergency. For the uncertainty surrounding this matter is
killing me and will make my sorrow quite unendurable if I cannot obtain
relief from it."
"I do not wonder," I began, struck by the note of truth in her tones.
"And I shall certainly do what I can for you. But before we go any
further, let us examine this scrap of newspaper and see what we can make
out of it."
I had already noted two or three points in connection with it to which I
now proceeded to direct her attention.
"Have you compared this notice," I pursued, "with such others as you
find every day in the papers?"
"No," was her eager answer. "Is it not like them all----"
"Read," was my quiet interruption. "'On this day at the Colonnade'--on
what day? The date is usually given in all the bona fide notices I have
seen."
"Is it?" she asked, her eyes, moist with unshed tears, opening widely in
her astonishment.
"Look in the papers on your return home and see. Then the print. Observe
that the type is identical on both sides of this make-believe clipping,
while in fact there is always a perceptible difference between that used
in the obituary column and that to be found in the columns devoted to
other matter. Notice also," I continued, holding up the scrap of paper
between her and the light, "that the alignment on one side is not
exactly parallel with that on the other; a discrepancy which would not
exist if both sides had been printed on a newspaper press. These facts
lead me to conclude, first, that the effort to match the type exactly
was the mistake of a man who tried to do too much; and, secondly, that
one of the sides at least, presumably that containing the obituary
notice, was printed on a hand-press, on the blank side of a piece of
galley proof picked up in some newspaper office."
"Let me see." And stretching out her hand with the utmost eagerness, she
took the slip and turned it over. Instantly a change took place in her
countenance. She sank back in her seat and a blush of manifest confusion
suffused her cheeks. "Oh!" she exclaimed; "what will you think of me! I
brought this scrap of print into the house _myself_, and it was I who
pinned it on the cushion with my own hands! I remember it now. The sight
of those words recalls the whole occurrence."
"Then there is one mystery less for us to solve," I remarked, somewhat
drily.
"Do you think so?" she protested, with a deprecatory look. "For me the
mystery deepens, and becomes every minute more serious. It is true that
I brought this scrap of newspaper into the house, and that it had, then
as now, the notice of my husband's death upon it, but the time of my
bringing it in was Tuesday night, and he was not found dead till
Wednesday morning."
"A discrepancy worth noting," I remarked.
"Involving a mystery of some importance," she concluded.