“I hope I am not to be fastened in!” I said.
He looked back squarely enough, but somehow I knew he lied.
“Certainly not,” he replied, and opened the door.
If there had been mystery outside, and bareness, the nursery was
charming—a corner room with many windows, hung with the simplest of
nursery papers and full of glass-doored closets filled with orderly rows
of toys. In one corner a small single bed had been added without
spoiling the room. The window-sills were full of flowering plants. There
was a bowl of goldfish on a stand, and a tiny dwarf parrot in a cage was
covered against the night air by a bright afghan. A white-tiled bathroom
connected with this room and also with the night nursery beyond.
Mr. Reed did not come in, I had an uneasy feeling, however, that he was
just beyond the door. The children were not asleep. Mrs. Reed left me to
let me put on my uniform. When she came back her face was troubled.
“They are not sleeping well,” she complained. “I suppose it comes from
having no exercise. They are always excited.”
“I’ll take their temperatures,” I said. “Sometimes a tepid bath and a
cup of hot milk will make them sleep.”
The two little boys were wide awake. They sat up to look at me and both
spoke at once.
“Can you tell fairy tales out of your head?”
“Did you see Chang?”
They were small, sleek-headed, fair-skinned youngsters, adorably clean
and rumpled.
“Chang is their dog, a Pekingese,” explained the mother. “He has been
lost for several days.”
“But he isn’t lost, mother. I can hear him crying every now and then.
You’ll look again, mother, won’t you?”
“We heard him through the furnace pipe,” shrilled the smaller of the
two. “You said you would look.”
“I did look, darlings. He isn’t there. And you promised not to cry about
him, Freddie.”
Freddie, thus put on his honor, protested he was not crying for the dog.
“I want to go out and take a walk, that’s why I’m crying,” he wailed.
“And I want Mademoiselle, and my buttons are all off. And my ear aches
when I lie on it.”
The room was close. I threw up the windows, and turned to find Mrs. Reed
at my elbows. She was glancing out apprehensively.
“I suppose the air is necessary,” she said, “and these windows are all
right. But—I have a reason for asking it—please do not open the others.”
She went very soon, and I listened as she went out. I had promised to
lock the door behind her, and I did so. The bolt outside was not shot.
After I had quieted the children with my mildest fairy story I made a
quiet inventory of my new quarters. The rough diagram of the second
floor is the one I gave Mr. Patton later. That night, of course, I
investigated only the two nurseries. But, so strangely had the fear that
hung over the house infected me, I confess that I made my little tour of
bathroom and clothes-closet with my revolver in my hand!
I found nothing, of course. The disorder of the house had not extended
itself here. The bathroom was spotless with white tile, the large
clothes-closet which opened off the passage between the two rooms was
full of neatly folded clothing for the children. The closet was to play
its part later, a darkish little room faintly lighted by a ground glass
transom opening into the center hall, but dependent mostly on electric
light.
Outside the windows Mrs. Reed had asked me not to open was a
porte-cochère roof almost level with the sills. Then was it an outside
intruder she feared? And in that case, why the bolts on the outside of
the two nursery doors? For the night nursery, I found, must have one
also. I turned the key, but the door would not open.
I decided not to try to sleep that night, but to keep on watch. So
powerfully had the mother’s anxiety about her children and their
mysterious danger impressed me that I made frequent excursions into the
back room. Up to midnight there was nothing whatever to alarm me. I
darkened both rooms and sat, waiting for I know not what; for some sound
to show that the house stirred, perhaps. At a few minutes after twelve
faint noises penetrated to my room from the hall, Mr. Reed’s nervous
voice and a piece of furniture scraping over the floor. Then silence
again for half an hour or so.
Then—I was quite certain that the bolt on my door had been shot. I did
not hear it, I think. Perhaps I felt it. Perhaps I only feared it. I
unlocked the door; it was fastened outside.
There is a hideous feeling of helplessness about being locked in. I
pretended to myself at first that I was only interested and curious. But
I was frightened; I know that now. I sat there in the dark and wondered
what I would do if the house took fire, or if some hideous tragedy
enacted itself outside that locked door and I were helpless.
By two o’clock I had worked myself into a panic. The house was no longer
silent. Some one was moving about downstairs, and not stealthily. The
sounds came up through the heavy joists and flooring of the old house.
I determined to make at least a struggle to free myself. There was no
way to get at the bolts, of course. The porte-cochère roof remained and
the transom in the clothes-closet. True, I might have raised an alarm
and been freed at once, but naturally I rejected this method. The roof
of the porte-cochère proved impracticable. The tin bent and cracked
under my first step. The transom then.
I carried a chair into the closet and found the transom easy to lower.
But it threatened to creak. I put liquid soap on the hinges—it was all I
had, and it worked very well—and lowered the transom inch by inch. Even
then I could not see over it. I had worked so far without a sound, but
in climbing to a shelf my foot slipped and I thought I heard a sharp
movement outside. It was five minutes before I stirred. I hung there,
every muscle cramped, listening and waiting. Then I lifted myself by
sheer force of muscle and looked out. The upper landing of the
staircase, brilliantly lighted, was to my right. Across the head of the
stairs had been pushed a cotbed, made up for the night, but it was
unoccupied.
Mrs. Reed, in a long, dark ulster, was standing beside it, staring with
fixed and glassy eyes at something in the lower hall.