THIRTEEN BUTTONS
Apparently Miss Austin’s statement that there were no right sort of
people was her own belief, for she made no friends at the Adams house.
Nor was this the fault of her fellow-boarders. They were more than
willing to be friendly, but their overtures were invariably ignored.
Not rudely, for Miss Austin seemed to be a girl of culture and her
manners were correct, but, as one persistent matron expressed it, “you
can’t get anywhere with her.”
She talked to no one at the table, merely answering a direct question if
put to her. She retained the seat next Old Salt, seeming to rely on him
to protect her from the advances of the others. Not that she needed
protection, exactly, for Miss Anita Austin was evidently quite able to
take care of herself.
But she was a mystery—and mysteries provoke inquiry.
The house was not a large one, and the two-score boarders, though they
would have denied an imputation of curiosity, were exceedingly interested
in learning the facts about Miss Mystery, as they had come to call her.
Mrs. Adams was one of the most eager of all to know the truth, but, as he
did on rare occasions, Old Salt Adams had set down his foot that the girl
was not to be annoyed.
“I don’t know who she is or where she hails from,” he told his wife, “but
as long as she stays here, she’s not to be pestered by a lot of gossiping
old hens. When she does anything you don’t like, send her away; but so
long’s she’s under my roof, she’s got to be let alone.”
And let alone she was—not so much because of Adams’ dictum as because
“pestering” did little good.
The girl had a disconcerting way of looking an inquisitor straight in the
eyes, and then, with a monosyllabic reply, turning and walking off as if
the other did not exist.
“Why,” said Miss Bascom, aggrievedly relating her experience, “I just
said, politely, ‘Are you from New York or where, Miss Austin?’ and she
turned those big, black eyes on me, and said, ‘Where.’ Then she turned
her back and looked out of the window, as if she had wiped me off the
face of the earth!”
“She’s too young to act like that,” opined Mrs. Welby.
“Oh, she isn’t so terribly young,” Miss Bascom returned. “She’s too
experienced to be so very young.”
“How do you know she’s experienced? What makes you say that?”
“Why,” Miss Bascom hesitated for words, “she’s—sort of sophisticated—you
can see that from her looks. I mean when anything is discussed at the
table, she doesn’t say a word, but you can tell from her face that she
knows all about it—I mean a matter of general interest, don’t you know. I
don’t mean local matters.”
“She’s an intelligent girl, I know, but that doesn’t make her out old. I
don’t believe she’s twenty.”
“Oh, she is! Why, she’s twenty-five or twenty-seven!”
“Never in the world! I’m going to ask her.”
“Ask her!” Miss Bascom laughed. “You’ll get well snubbed if you do.”
But this prophecy only served to egg Mrs. Welby on, and she took the
first occasion to carry out her promise.
She met Anita in the hall, as the girl was about to go out, and smilingly
detained her.
“Why so aloof, my dear,” she said, playfully. “You rarely give us a
chance to entertain you.”
As Mrs. Welby was between Anita and the door, the girl was forced to
pause. She looked the older woman over, with an appraising glance that
was not rude, but merely disinterested.
“No?” she said, with a curious rising inflection, that somehow seemed
meant to close the incident.
But Mrs. Welby was not so easily baffled.
“No,” she repeated, smilingly. “And we want to know you better. You’re
too young and too pretty not to be a general favorite amongst us. How old
are you, my dear child?”
“Just a hundred,” and Miss Austin’s dark eyes were so grave, and seemed
to hold such a world of wisdom and experience that Mrs. Welby almost
jumped.
Too amazed to reply, she even let the girl get past her, and out of the
street door, before she recovered her poise.
“She’s uncanny,” Mrs. Welby declared, when telling Miss Bascom of the
interview. “I give you my word, when she said that, she looked a
hundred!”
“Looked a hundred! What do you mean?”
“Just that. Her eyes seemed to hold all there is of knowledge, yes—and of
evil—”
“Evil! My goodness!” Miss Bascom rolled this suggestion like a sweet
morsel under her tongue.
“Oh—I don’t say there’s anything wrong about the girl—”
“Well! If her eyes showed depths of evil, I should say there _was_
something wrong!”
The episode was repeated from one to another of the exclusive _clientele_
of the Adams house, until, by exaggeration and imagination it grew into
quite a respectable arraignment of Miss Mystery, and branded her as a
doubtful character if not a dangerous one.
Before Miss Austin had been in the house a week, she had definitely
settled her status from her own point of view.
Uniformly correct and courteous of manner, she rarely spoke, save when
necessary. It was as if she had declared, “I will not talk. If this be
mystery, make the most of it.”
Old Salt, apparently, backed her up in this determination, and allowed
her to sit next him at table, without addressing her at all.
More, he often took it upon himself to answer a remark or question meant
for her and for this he sometimes received a fleeting glance, or a ghost
of a smile of approval and appreciation.
But all this was superficial. The Adamses, between themselves, decided
that Miss Austin was more deeply mysterious than was shown by her
disinclination to make friends. They concluded she was transacting
important business of some sort, and that her sketching of the winter
scenery, which she did every clear day, was merely a blind.
Though Mrs. Adams resented this, and urged her husband to send the girl
packing, Old Salt demurred.
“She’s done no harm as yet,” he said. “She’s a mystery, but not a wrong
one, ’s far’s I can make out. Let her alone, mother. I’ve got my eye on
her.”
“I’ve got my two eyes on her, and I can see more’n you can. Why, Salt,
that girl don’t hardly sleep at all. Night after night, she sits up
looking out of the window, over toward the college buildings—”
“How do you know?”
“I go and listen at her door,” Mrs. Adams admitted, without
embarrassment. “I want to know what she’s up to.”
“You can’t see her.”
“No, but I hear her moving around restlessly, and putting the window up
and down—and Miss Bascom—her room’s cornerways on the ell, she says she
sees her looking out the window late at night ’most every night.”
“Miss Bascom’s a meddling old maid, and I’d put her out of this house
before I would the little girl.”
“Of course _you_ would! You’re all set up because she makes so much of
you—”
“Oh, come now, Esther, you can’t say that child makes much of me! I wish
she would. I’ve taken a fancy to her.”
“Yes, because she’s pretty—in a gipsy, witch-like fashion. What men see
in a pair of big black eyes, and a dark, sallow face, I don’t know!”
“Not sallow,” Old Salt said, reflectively; “olive, rather—but not
sallow.”
“Oh you!” exclaimed Mrs. Adams, and with that cryptic remark the subject
was dropped.
Gordon Lockwood, secretary of John Waring, had a room at the Adams house.
But as he took no meals there save his breakfasts, and as he ate those
early, he had not yet met Anita Austin.
But one Saturday morning, he chanced to be late, and the two sat at table
together.
An astute reader of humanity, Lockwood at once became interested in the
girl, and realized that to win her attention he must not be eager or
insistent.
He spoke only one or two of the merest commonplaces, until almost at the
close of the meal, he said:
“Can I do anything for you, Miss Austin? If you would care to hear any of
the College lectures, I can arrange it.”
“Who are the speakers?”
She turned her eyes fully upon him, and Gordon Lockwood marveled at their
depth and beauty.
“Tonight,” he replied, “Doctor Waring is to lecture on Egyptian
Archaeology. Are you interested in that?”
“Yes,” she said, “very much so. I’d like to go.”
“You certainly may, then. Just use this card.”
He took a card from his pocket, scribbled a line across it, and gave it
to her. Without another word, he finished his breakfast, and with a mere
courteous bow, he left the room.
Miss Austin’s face took on a more scrutable look than ever.
The card still in her hand, she went up to her room. Unheeding the maid,
who was at her duties there, the girl threw herself into a big chair and
sat staring at the card.
“The Egyptian Temples,” she said to herself, “Doctor John Waring.”
The maid looked at her curiously as she murmured the words half aloud,
but Miss Austin paid no heed.
“Go on with your work, Nora, don’t mind me,” she said, at last, as the
chambermaid paused inquiringly in front of her. “I don’t mind your being
here until you finish what you have to do. And I wish you’d bring me a
Corinth paper, please?’ There is one, isn’t there?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am. Twice a week.”
Nora disappeared and returned with a paper.
“Mr. Adams says you may have this to keep. It’s the newest one.”
The girl took it and turned to find the College announcements. The
Egyptian Lecture was mentioned, and in another column was a short article
regarding Doctor Waring and a picture of him.
Long the girl looked at the picture, and when the maid, her tasks
completed, left the room, she noticed Miss Austin still staring at the
fine face of the President-elect of the University of Corinth.
After a time, she reached for a pair of scissors, and cut out the
portrait and the article which it illustrated.
She put the clipping in a portfolio, which she then locked in her trunk,
and the picture she placed on her dresser.
That night she went to the lecture. She went alone, for Gordon Lockwood
did not reappear and no one else knew of her going.
“Shall I have a key, or will you be up?” she asked of Mrs. Adams, as she
left the house.
“Oh, we’ll be up.” The round, shrewd eyes looked at her kindly. “You’re
lucky to get a ticket. Doctor Waring’s lectures are crowded.”
“Good night,” said Miss Austin, and went away.
The lecture room was partly filled when she arrived, and her ticket
entitled her to a seat near the front.
Being seated, she fell into a brown study, or, at least, sat motionless
and apparently in deep thought.
Gordon Lockwood, already there, saw her come in, and after she was in her
place, he quietly arose and went across the room, taking a seat directly
behind her.
Of this she was quite unaware, and the student of human nature gave
himself up to a scrutiny of the stranger.
He saw a little head, its mass of dark, almost black hair surmounted by a
small turban shaped hat, of taupe colored velvet, with a curly ostrich
tip nestling over one ear.
Not that her ears were visible, for Miss Austin was smartly groomed and
her whole effect modish.
She had removed her coat, which she held in her lap. Her frock was taupe
colored, of a soft woolen material, ornamented with many small buttons.
These tiny buttons formed two rows down her back, from either shoulder to
the waist line, and they also formed a border round the sailor collar.
They were, perhaps, Lockwood decided, little balls, rather than buttons,
and he idly counted them as he sat watching her.
He hoped she would turn her head a trifle, but she sat as motionless as a
human being may.
He marveled at her stillness, and impatiently waited for the lecture to
begin that he might note her interest.
At last Doctor Waring appeared on the platform, and as the applause
resounded all over the room, Lockwood was almost startled to observe Miss
Austin’s actions.
She clasped her hands together as if she had received a sudden shock.
She—if it hadn’t seemed too absurd,—he would have said that she trembled.
At any rate she was a little agitated, and it was with an effort that she
preserved her calm. No one else noticed her, and Lockwood would not have
done so, save for his close watching.
Throughout the lecture, Miss Austin’s gaze seemed never to leave the face
of the speaker, and Lockwood marveled that Waring himself was not drawn
to notice her.
But Waring’s calm gaze, though it traveled over the audience, never
rested definitely on any one face, and Lockwood concluded he recognized
nobody.
“Miss Mystery!” Gordon Lockwood said to himself. “I wonder who and what
you are. Probably a complex nature, psychic and imaginative. You think it
interesting to come up here and pretend to be a mystery. But you’re too
young and too innocent to be—I’m not so sure of the innocent, though,—and
as to youth,—well, I don’t believe you’re much older than you look any
way. And you’re confoundedly pretty—beautiful, rather. You’ve too much in
your face to call it merely pretty. I’ve never seen such possibilities of
character. You’re either a deep one or your looks belie you.”
Lockwood heard no word of the lecture, nor did he wish to; he had helped
in the writing of it, and almost knew it by heart anyway. But he was
really intrigued by this mysterious girl, and he determined to get to
know her.
He had been told, of course, of the futile attempts of the other boarders
to make friends with her, but he had faith in his own attractiveness and
in his methods of procedure.
Pinky Payne, too, had told of the interview he had on the bridge. His
account of the girl’s beauty and charm had first roused Lockwood’s
interest, and now he was making a study of the whole situation.
Idly he counted the buttons again. There were thirteen across the collar.
The vertical rows he could not be sure of as the back of the seat cut off
their view.
“Thirteen,” he mused; “an unlucky number. And the poor child looks
unlucky. There’s a sadness in her eyes that must mean something. Yet
there’s more than sadness,—there’s a hint of cruelty,—a possibility of
desperate deeds.”
And then Lockwood laughed at himself. To romance thus about a girl to
whom he had not said half a dozen sentences in his life! Yet he knew he
was not mistaken. All that he had read in Anita Austin’s face, he was
sure was there. He knew physiognomy, and rarely, if ever, was mistaken in
his reading thereof.
After the lecture was over, Miss Austin went home as quickly as possible.
Lockwood would have liked to escort her, but he had to remain to report
to Doctor Waring, who might have some orders for him.
There were none, however, and after a short interview with his employer,
Gordon Lockwood went home.
As he went softly upstairs to his room in the Adams house, he passed the
door of what he knew to be Miss Austin’s room. He fancied he heard a
stifled sob come from behind that closed door, and instinctively paused
to listen a moment.
Yes, he was not mistaken. Another sob followed, quickly suppressed, but
he could have no doubt the girl was crying.
For a moment Lockwood was tempted to go back and ask Mrs. Adams to come
and tap at the girl’s door.
Then he realized that it was not his affair. If the girl was in sorrow or
if she wanted to cry for any reason, it was not his place to send someone
to intrude upon her. He went on to his own room, but he sat up for a long
time thinking over the strange young woman in the house.
He remembered that she had paid undeviating attention to the lecture,
quite evidently following the speaker with attention and interest. He
remembered every detail of her appearance, her pretty dark hair showing
beneath her little velvet toque,—the absurd buttons on the back of her
frock.
“That will do, Gordon, old man,” he told himself at last. Better let her
alone. She’s a siren all right, but you know nothing about her, and
you’ve no reason to try to learn more.
And then he heard voices in the hall. Low of tone, but angry of
inflection.
“She threw it away!” Miss Austin was saying; “I tell you she threw it
away!”
“There, there,” came Mrs. Adams’ placating voice, “what if she did? It
was only a newspaper scrap. She didn’t know it was of any value.”
“But I want it! Nora has no business to throw away my things! She had no
reason to touch it; it was on the dresser—standing up against the mirror
frame. What do you suppose she did with it?”
“Never mind it tonight. Tomorrow we will ask her. She’s gone to bed.”
“But I’m afraid she destroyed it!”
“Probably she did. Don’t take on so. What paper was it?”
“The Corinth Gazette.”
“The new one?”
“I don’t know. The one she brought me this afternoon.”
“Well, if she has thrown it away, you can get another copy. What was in
it that you want so much?”
“Oh,—nothing special.”
“Yes, it was.” Mrs. Adams’ curiosity was aroused now. “Come, tell me what
it was.”
“Well, it was only a picture of Doctor Waring, the man who lectured
tonight.”
“Such a fuss about that! My goodness! Why, you can get a picture of him
anywhere.”
“But I want it now.”
An obstinate note rang in the young voice. Perhaps Miss Austin spoke
louder than she meant to, but at any rate, Lockwood heard most of the
conversation, and he now opened his door, and said:
“May I offer a photograph? Would you care to have this, Miss Austin?”
The girl looked at him with a white, angry face.
“How dare you!” she cried; “how dare you eavesdrop and listen to a
conversation not meant for your ears? Don’t speak to me!”
She drew up her slender figure and looked like a wrathful pixie defying a
giant. For Lockwood was a big man, and loomed far above the slight,
dainty figure of Miss Mystery.
He smiled good-naturedly as he said, “Now don’t get wrathy. I don’t mean
any harm. But you wanted a picture of Doctor Waring, and I’ve several of
them. You see, I’m his secretary.”
“Oh,—are you! His private secretary?”
“Yes—his confidential one,—though he has few confidences. He’s a public
man and his life is an open book.”
“Oh, it is!” The girl had recovered her poise, and with it her ability to
be sarcastic. “Known to all men, I suppose?”
“Known to all men,” repeated Lockwood, thinking far more of the girl he
was speaking to than of what he was saying.
For, again he had fallen under the spell of her strange personality. He
watched her, fascinated, as she reached out for the picture and almost
snatched at it in her eagerness.
Mrs. Adams yawned behind her plump hand.
“Now you’ve got your picture, go to bed, child,” she said with a kind,
motherly smile. “I’ll come in and unhook you, shall I?”
Obediently, and without a word of good night to Lockwood, Anita turned
and went into her room, followed by Mrs. Adams. The good lady offered no
disinterested service. She wanted to know why Miss Austin wanted that
picture so much. But she didn’t find out. After being of such help as she
could, the landlady found herself pleasantly but definitely dismissed.
Outside the door, however, she turned and reopened it. Miss Mystery,
unnoticing the intruder, was covering the photograph with many and
passionate kisses.