THE YELLOW HOUSE AND WHAT THEY FOUND AT IT
It was after midnight when Stanley Ingham stopped his car and yielded up
the steering-wheel to Herrick. Besides themselves their car carried
three of Kane's detectives and they were followed by the sheriff and a
roadster full of armed men.
The detectives had a secondary mission. At the last minute Kane had
received a message from a much concerned elderly cousin of Joe
Patrick's. This cousin was a waiter at "Riley's," a roadhouse which was
not only a cheap edition of the aristocratic Palisades, whence Christina
had disappeared, but was kept by a brother-in-law and erstwhile partner
of the Palisades' proprietor. The waiter at Riley's declared that a
drunken taxi-driver had just turned up with a note from the Palisades
urging Riley's to keep him over night. This man was quite drunk enough
to talk about having lost his place through obliging the Palisades and
Joe's cousin volunteered to keep an eye on him till the arrival of the
detectives. These were to return to New York with their prisoners of the
yellow house not from Waybridge, but from Benning's Point, stopping on
the way to that station at Riley's and telephoning thence all news to
Kane.
At Waybridge they had been fortunate in finding the sheriff up and
starting forth after some marauders who were reported to have robbed a
still burning post-office at Benning's Point; the station agent whom
they found with him had seen Nicola, that morning, meet a lady with that
old car of his that he had painted black when there was so much talk
about those New York Guinees having a gray one; the agent was sure the
lady had taken no return train.
From both him and the sheriff it was evident that the Pascoes as
foreigners, had been contemptible, but not disliked. The unpopular
person was a boarder they had; a woman with red hair who stayed out
there to write novels and thought she was so much too good for other
people that she never so much as passed the time of day with anybody.
Friends of hers did come out from the city to see her sometimes. Going
or coming from the city herself she was tied up in one o' those
automobile veils--might 'uv been her come back this morning, only she
looked kind of shabby-dressed. The sheriff added that there was old Mrs.
Pascoe, Nicola's mother, as nice a little woman as you'd want to see;
real neat, trim, gray-haired lady, an American lady. Herrick suddenly
turned and stared.
But now they were within half a mile of the Pascoe house. Stanley and
the detectives crowded into the sheriff's car. They had been instructed
to send Herrick on alone; he was to attempt an entrance by a message of
urgent and friendly warning, endeavoring to get the lay of the land and
to make his presence known to any watchful captive, but otherwise
awaiting reinforcements. One of the detectives said to Herrick, "If they
won't let you in, just leave your message. And let them hear you drive
off. Then we'll get together."
Herrick ran the car slowly along the unfamiliar road. This was still
clogged and rutted with mud, which had begun to stiffen since the rain
had stopped; a high wind shouldered the clouds in driving masses. His
destination was the second house on his left; and, as he peered along
the roadside, the deep excitement, the terrible questions which glowed
in that dark night, worked in him with a fearful gladness. Certainty was
at hand! A bitter exultation rode within him nearer and nearer to
whatever stroke Fate stood to deal him in the yellow house. A hundred
visions of Christina shone and darkened before him, leaping along his
pulse, and his blood sang in him with a kind of madness.--The second
house on the left! There it rose, a blot on the blackness! Dark as a
stone, it somehow struck cold on his hot hopes.
He brought up the car before the gate and flung a falsely cheerful
halloo upon the wind. Nothing answered. The gate yielded to his hand; as
he went up the path a fragrance greeted him like Christina's
presence--the cold, moist air was filled with the sweetness of
old-fashioned, garden flowers. His fingers missed the bell; but,
lighting on the brass knocker, sent loud reverberations through the
house. Nothing within it seemed to stir. But the silence echoed horribly
and swung, quaking, in his breast. Of a sudden he knew that house was
empty.
Nothing else mattered. Discretion ceased to exist. He drew back and
scanned the vacant, shuttered windows; he ran round the house; there was
still no light; he tried the kitchen door and drew back to listen; it
was as though within the house he could hear silence walking and her
step was ominous. He put his shoulder to the kitchen door and burst it
in.
Once again, as on that night in August, a dark room lay waiting; the
darkness seemed to breathe. He had matches in his pocket and once again
the light discovered only emptiness. But he remembered what, that other
time, the inner chamber had revealed. He found a candle and then a lamp,
and, lighting that, crossed the dining-room and then the hall into the
living-room. All prettily upholstered, all in order, and vacant as the
eye of idiotcy. His soul knew there was nothing living in that house;
and yet it seemed to him there would surely be a step upon the stair,
that a voice behind him or an opening door would certainly reveal some
fateful presence. There in the hall, under the stairs, a door was open
and he paused to look into a closet.
It contained a sink with running water, gardening tools, wraps hanging
upon nails, and, on the floor, a big silk umbrella without a handle, the
rod recently broken. There were also some old flower-pots, two of them
half full of earth. Nothing else.
At the foot of the stairs he called out, "Christina!" and stood and
listened while his voice went dying about the empty house.
"Christina--it's I--Bryce!" and then "Nancy Cornish! Can you hear me,
Nancy Cornish?" But no face leaned over the balusters to him. He went
upstairs. But his step was heavy, and up there the silence weighed on
him, like silence in a vault. Two rooms on the left told him nothing.
But in a room on his right he found a small forgotten slipper. That
slipper had fitted the slim foot of some littler maid than Christina!
Holding the lamp high, he was struck to see the transom covered with
poultry-wire. He went at once to the windows. Yes, there were the holes
in the woodwork; even, here and there, a nail. There had been poultry
wire over the windows, too. In this room some one had been held a
prisoner. They had taken her away; and in such haste that they had
forgotten to strip the transom and they had forgotten her slipper. At
one side of the room a desk lay open, all its drawers pulled out and
empty; he snatched at the waste basket; there was a crumpled sheet of
paper in it and a handful of torn-up scraps. He shook the scraps into
his handkerchief and, setting the lamp on the desk, he bent above the
crumpled sheet. There leaped before him, in an illiterate, but very firm
hand, an opening of such unimpeachable decorum as to stagger his prying
eyes.
Mrs. Hope,
Honored Madam,
There was no date or other heading. The note ran:
Mrs. Hope,
Honored Madam,
Would say don't come here or send. You can tell where by knowing my
handwriting. She is not here. Where she is now I got no idee on
earth. I surmise she will be heard from.
There was no signature. Why had the letter not been sent? It had
evidently been volunteered upon some early intimation of Christina's
disappearance. "Perhaps they found out, later, that Mrs. Hope had gone
away--" Then he heard Stanley hailing him from the road.
The sheriff's party, taking advantage of his house breaking, were with
him immediately. They examined the place from the small, bare,
air-chamber into which Stanley, mounting on Herrick's shoulders, stuck
his head, to the cellar; where only a coal-bin, almost empty beneath
their flinching quest, an ice-box, and an admirable array of preserves
confronted them.
Upstairs, clothes had been found in all the closets--the clothes of
working people for the most part; but in one, the long, slim,
sophisticatedly simple gowns of a pretty woman. In that room they had
forced another desk, which kept them busy for a while with tradesmen's
bills, all made out, regularly enough, to Nicola Pascoe. Nowhere was
there a letter, no significant writing nor any other name. In the barn a
couple of trunks disgorged only some winter coats and a smell of
camphor; the tools in the shed were in empty order, and when,
considerably soiled and stuck about with lint and hay, they met again in
the composed and pretty living-room, there on the mantelshelf the face
of Christina Hope smiled mockingly at them from a silver frame.
Indifferent to prayer or scrutiny, it had nothing to tell them. And
it seemed to ask if they, on their part, had anything to say.
[Illustration: Nowhere was there a letter, no significant writing nor
any other name.]
Herrick never knew what instinct took him back to the closet under the
stairs. He could not bear to leave it; there was a little broken glass
on the floor and a sudden wavering in his lamp suggested that this came
from a break in one of the minute panes in a small window over head. He
tried to reach this window to see if it were fastened and found it
nailed down, with outside shutters that were closed. But in getting near
enough for this he knocked over one of the flower-pots. "Find anything?"
Stanley cried, bounding forward.
The smashed flower-pot lay at their feet. "No, only broken something!"
Herrick instinctively picked it up and the loosened earth parted in his
hand. "Yes, after all," he said, "I think I have." There had been
buried, smooth and deep in the flower-pot, the diamond necklace.