“They can’t be dead, old chap.” I was feeling about for my kimono, but I
remembered that when I had found my way back to the nursery after my
fright on the back stairs I had lain down in my uniform. I crawled out,
hardly able to stand. “We gave them fresh water yesterday, and——”
I had got to the aquarium. Harry was right. The little darting flames of
pink and gold were still. They floated about, rolling gently as Freddie
prodded them with a forefinger, dull eyed, pale bellies upturned. In his
cage above the little parrot watched out of a crooked eye.
I ran to the medicine closet in the bathroom. Freddie had a weakness for
administering medicine. I had only just rescued the parrot from the
result of his curiosity and a headache tablet the day before.
“What did you give them?” I demanded.
“Bread,” said Freddie stoutly.
“Only bread?”
“Dirty bread,” Harry put in. “I told him it was dirty.”
“Where did you get it?”
“On the roof of the porte-cochère!”
Shade of Montessori! The rascals had been out on that sloping tin roof.
It turned me rather sick to think of it.
Accused, they admitted it frankly.
“I unlocked the window,” Harry said, “and Freddie got the bread. It was
out in the gutter. He slipped once.”
“Almost went over and made a squash on the pavement,” added Freddie. “We
gave the little fishes the bread for breakfast, and now they’re gone to
God.”
The bread had contained poison, of course. Even the two little snails
that crawled over the sand in the aquarium were motionless. I sniffed
the water. It had a slightly foreign odor. I did not recognize it.
Panic seized me then. I wanted to get away and take the children with
me. The situation was too hideous. But it was still early. I could only
wait until the family roused. In the meantime, however, I made a
nerve-racking excursion out on to the tin roof and down to the gutter.
There was no more of the bread there. The porte-cochère was at the side
of the house. As I stood balancing myself perilously on the edge,
summoning my courage to climb back to the window above, I suddenly
remembered the guard Mr. Patton had promised and glanced toward the
square.
The guard was still there. More than that, he was running across the
street toward me. It was Mr. Patton himself. He brought up between the
two houses with absolute fury in his face.
“Go back!” he waved. “What are you doing out there anyhow? That roof’s
as slippery as the devil!”
I turned meekly and crawled back with as much dignity as I could. I did
not say anything. There was nothing I could bawl from the roof. I could
only close and lock the window and hope that the people in the next
house still slept. Mr. Patton must have gone shortly after, for I did
not see him again.
I wondered if he had relieved the night watch, or if he could possibly
have been on guard himself all that chilly April night.
Mr. Reed did not breakfast with us. I made a point of being cheerful
before the children, and their mother was rested and brighter than I had
seen her. But more than once I found her staring at me in a puzzled way.
She asked me if I had slept.
“I wakened only once,” she said. “I thought I heard a crash of some
sort. Did you hear it?”
“What sort of a crash?” I evaded.
The children had forgotten the goldfish for a time. Now they remembered
and clamored their news to her.
“Dead?” she said, and looked at me.
“Poisoned,” I explained. “I shall nail the windows over the
porte-cochère shut, Mrs. Reed. The boys got out there early this morning
and picked up something—bread, I believe. They fed it to the fish
and—they are dead.”
All the light went out of her face. She looked tired and harassed as she
got up.
“I wanted to nail the window,” she said vaguely, “but Mr. Reed—— Suppose
they had eaten that bread, Miss Adams, instead of giving it to the
fish!”
The same thought had chilled me with horror. We gazed at each other over
the unconscious heads of the children and my heart ached for her. I made
a sudden resolution.
“When I first came,” I said to her, “I told you I wanted to help. That’s
what I’m here for. But how am I to help either you or the children when
I do not know what danger it is that threatens? It isn’t fair to you, or
to them, or even to me.”
She was much shaken by the poison incident. I thought she wavered.
“Are you afraid the children will be stolen?”
“Oh, no.”
“Or hurt in any way?” I was thinking of the bread on the roof.
“No.”
“But you are afraid of something?”
Harry looked up suddenly.
“Mother’s never afraid,” he said stoutly.