ENIGMAS
Not until Burke Denby became convinced that Miss Elizabeth Darling was
not his daughter did he realize how deeply the thought that she might be
had taken hold of his very life--how closely entwined in his affections
she had become. From the first minute the electrifying idea of her
possible relationship had come to him, he had (in spite of his
determination to the contrary) reveled in pictures of what his home
would be with a daughter like that to love--and to love him. Helen, too,
was in the pictures--true, a vague, shadowy Helen, yet a Helen idealized
and glorified by the remorseful repentance born of a bunch of worn
little diaries. Then to have the beautiful vision shattered by one word
from the girl's own lips--and just when he had attained the pinnacle of
joyous conviction that she was, indeed, his little girl of the long
ago--it seemed as though he could not bear it.
And, most anguishing of all, there was no chance that there was a
mistake. Even if the incongruity of her description of her father as
applied to himself could be explained away, there was yet the
insurmountable left. With his own ears he had heard her say that her
father was dead--had been dead for many years. That settled it, of
course. There could be no mistake about--death.
After the first stunning force of the disappointment, there came to
Burke Denby the reaction--in the case of Burke Denby a characteristic
reaction. It became evident, to some extent, the very next day. For the
first time in weeks he did not work with his secretary over the
cataloguing at all during the day. He dictated his letters, then left at
once for his office at the Works. At luncheon he relapsed into his old
stern silence; and in the afternoon, beyond giving a few crisp
directions, he showed no interest in Betty's work, absenting himself
most of the time from the room.
Yet not in the least was all this consciously planned on his part. He
felt simply an aversion to being with this girl. Even the sight of her
bright head bent over her work gave him a pang, the sound of her voice
brought bitterness. Above all, he dreaded a glance from her
eyes--Helen's eyes, that had lured him for a brief twenty-four hours
into a fool's paradise of thinking they might, indeed, be--Helen's eyes.
Burke was grievously disappointed, ashamed, and angry; and being
accustomed always to acting exactly as he felt, he acted now--as he
felt. He was grievously disappointed that his brief dream of a daughter
in his home should have come to naught. He was ashamed that he should
have allowed himself to be deluded into such a dream, and angry that the
thing had so stirred him--that he could be so stirred by the failure of
so absurd and preposterous a supposition to materialize into fact.
As the days passed, matters became worse rather than better. Added to
his disappointment and chagrin there came to be an unreasoning wrath
that this girl was not his daughter, together with a rebellion at his
lonely life, and an overmastering self-pity that he should be so abused
of Fate. It was then that he began systematically to avoid, so far as
was possible, being with the girl at all, save for the necessary
dictation and instructions. This was the more easily accomplished, as
the cataloguing now had almost arrived at the stage where it was a mere
matter of copying and tabulating the mass of material already carefully
numbered to correspond with the equally carefully numbered curios in the
cabinets.
In spite of it all, however, Burke Denby knew, in his heart, that he was
becoming more and more fond of this young girl, more and more interested
in her welfare, more and more restless and dissatisfied when not in her
presence, more and more poignantly longing to make her his daughter by
adoption, now that it was settled beyond question that she was not his
by the ties of flesh and blood. Outwardly, however, he remained the
stern, unsmiling man, silent, morose, and anything but delightful as a
daily companion.
To Betty he had become the unsolvable enigma. That this most unhappy
change should have been brought about by the breaking of the Venetian
Tear Vase, she could not believe--valuable and highly treasured as it
was; yet, as she looked back, the change seemed to have dated from the
moment of the vase's shattering on the library floor, the day after
Christmas.
At first she had supposed the man's sudden reversion to gloom and
silence was a mere whim of the mind or a passing distemper of the body.
But when day after day brought no light to his eye, no smile to his lip,
no elasticity to his step, she became seriously disturbed, particularly
as she could not help noticing that he no longer worked with her; that
he no longer, in fact, seemed to want to remain in the library even to
hear her read to him.
She was sorely troubled. Not only did she miss the pleasure and stimulus
of his presence and interest in the work, but she feared lest in some
way she had disappointed or offended him. She began to question herself
and to examine critically her work.
She could find nothing. Her work had been well done. She knew that.
There was absolutely no excuse for this sudden taciturn aloofness on his
part. After all, it was probably nothing more than what might be
expected of him--a going back to his usual self. Without doubt the
strange thing was, not that he was stern and silent and morose now, but
that, for a brief golden period, he had come out of his shell and acted
like a human being. Doubtless it was under the sway of his interest in
his curios, and his first delight at seeing them being brought into
something like order, that he had, for a moment, as it were, stirred
into something really human. And his going back to his original sour
unpleasantness now was merely a reversion to first principles.
That it should be so vexed Betty not a little.
And when they were having such a good time! Surely, for a man that
_could_ be so altogether charming and delightful to be habitually so
extremely undesirable and disagreeable was most exasperating. And he had
been such good company! How kind he had been, too, when she had told him
so much of her own life and home! How interested he had shown himself to
be in every little detail, just as if he really cared. And now--
With a tense biting of her lip Betty reproached herself bitterly for
being so free to tell of her own small affairs. She ought to have known
that any interest a man like that could show was bound to be superficial
and insincere. What a pity she should lose, for once, her reserve! Well,
at least she had learned her lesson. Never again would she be guilty of
making a confidant of Mr. Burke Denby, no matter how suave and
human-like he might elect to become for some other brief week in the
future!
To her mother Betty said very little of all this. True, at the first, in
her surprise at the remarkable change in her employer's attitude, she
had told her mother of his reversion to gloom and sternness; but it had
seemed to worry and disturb her mother so much that Betty had stopped at
once. And always since then she had avoided speaking of his continued
disagreeableness, and skillfully evaded answering pertinent questions.
She told herself that she realized, of course, it was because her mother
was so fearful that something would happen that this fine position, with
the generous pay, should be lost. Dear mother--who thought she was
hiding so shrewdly the fact of how poor they were!
There was something else that Betty did not tell her mother, also, and
that was of her first peculiar and annoying experience with the woman at
the newsstand at the station. It was about two weeks after Christmas
that Betty had first seen the woman. Mr. Denby had asked her to go
around by the station on her way home and purchase for him the December
issue of "Research." He said it was not a very popular magazine, and
that the woman was one of the few agents in town who kept it for sale.
There was an article on Babylonian tablets in the December number, and
he wished to see it.
The station was not very far from her home, and Betty was glad to do the
errand, of course; but when she arrived at the newsstand she found a
most offensive person who annoyed her with questions--a large woman with
unpleasantly prominent eyes and a wart on her chin.
"Yes, Miss, I've got the magazine right here," she said with alacrity,
in reply to Betty's request. "But, say, hain't I seen you before
somewheres?"
Betty shook her head.
"I don't think so," she smiled. "At least, I do not remember seeing you
anywhere."
"Well, don't you come here often, to the station, or somethin'?"
persisted the woman.
"No, I have never been here before--except the day I arrived in town
last September."
"H-m; funny!" frowned the woman musingly. "I'm a great case fur faces,
an' I don't very often make a mistake. I could swear I'd seen you
somewheres."
Betty smiled and shook her head again, as she turned away with her
magazine.
Twice after that Mr. Denby had sent her to this same newsstand for a
desired periodical; and on both occasions the woman had been cheerfully
insistent in her questions, and in her reiterations that somewhere she
certainly had seen her, as she never made mistakes in faces.
"An' yer workin' fur Burke Denby on the hill, ain't ye?" she asked at
last.
Betty colored.
"I am working for Mr. Denby--yes."
"H-m; like him?"
"If you'll give me my change, please," requested Betty then, the flush
deepening on her cheeks. "I am in some haste."
The woman laughed none too pleasantly.
"You don't want ter answer, an' I ain't sayin' I wonder," she chuckled.
"He's a queer bug, an' no mistake, an' I don't wonder ye don't like
him."
"On the contrary, I like him very much," flashed Betty, hurriedly
catching up her magazine, and almost snatching the coins from the
woman's hand, in her haste to be away.
Betty had not told her mother of these encounters. More and more plainly
Betty was seeing how keenly averse to meeting people her mother was, and
how evasive she was in her answers to the questions the market-men
sometimes put to her. Instinctively Betty felt that these questions of
the newsstand woman would distress her mother very much; so Betty kept
them carefully to herself.
The conviction that her mother was fearful of meeting old friends in
Dalton was growing on Betty these days, and it disturbed her greatly.
Moreover she did not like a certain growing restless nervousness in her
mother's manner, nor did she like the increasing pallor of her mother's
cheek. Something, somewhere, was wrong. Of this Betty became more and
more strongly convinced. Nor did a little episode that took place late
in January tend to weaken this belief.
They had gone to market--Betty and her mother. Lured by an attractive
"ad," they had gone farther from home than usual, and were in a store
not often visited by them. They had given their order and turned to go,
when suddenly Betty found herself whisked about by her mother's frantic
clutch on her arm and led swiftly quite across the store to the opposite
door. There, still impelled by that unyielding clutch on her arm, she
found herself dodging in and out of the throngs of customers on their
way to the street outside. Even there their pace did not slacken until
they were well around the corner of the block.
"Why, mother," panted Betty then, laughing, "I should think you were
running away from all the plagues of Egypt."
"I--I was--worse than the plagues of Egypt," laughed her mother, a bit
hysterically.
"Why, mother!" cried Betty, growing suddenly alert and anxious.
"There, there, dear, it was nothing. Never mind!" declared her mother.
But even as she spoke she looked back fearfully over her shoulder.
"But, mother, what _was_ it?"
"Nothing. Just a--a woman I didn't want to see. I used to know her years
ago, and she was--such a talker! We wouldn't have got home to-night."
"But we shan't now--if we keep on this way," laughed Betty uneasily, her
troubled eyes on her mother's face. "We're going in quite the opposite
direction from home."
"Dear, dear, so we are! We must have turned the wrong way when we came
out from the store."
"Yes, we--did," agreed Betty. Her words were light--but the troubled
look had not left her eyes.