AN ENCOUNTER
Alan, standing in the darkness of the hall, felt in his pocket for his
matches and struck one on the box. The light showed the hall in front
of him, reaching back into some vague, distant darkness, and great
rooms with wide portiered doorways gaping on both sides. He turned
into the room upon his right, glanced to see that the shades were drawn
on the windows toward the street, then found the switch and turned on
the electric light.
As he looked around, he fought against his excitement and feeling of
expectancy; it was--he told himself--after all, merely a vacant house,
though bigger and more expensively furnished than any he ever had been
in except the Sherrills; and Sherrill's statement to him had implied
that anything there might be in it which could give the reason for his
father's disappearance would be probably only a paper, a record of some
kind. It was unlikely that a thing so easily concealed as that could
be found by him on his first examination of the place; what he had come
here for now--he tried to make himself believe--was merely to obtain
whatever other information it could give him about his father and the
way his father had lived, before Sherrill and he had any other
conversation.
Alan had not noticed, when he stepped into the hall in the morning,
whether the house then had been heated; now he appreciated that it was
quite cold and, probably, had been cold for the three days since his
father had gone, and his servant had left to look for him. Coming from
the street, it was not the chilliness of the house he felt but the
stillness of the dead air; when a house is heated, there is always some
motion of the air, but this air was stagnant. Alan had dropped his hat
on a chair in the hall; he unbuttoned his overcoat but kept it on, and
stuffed his gloves into his pocket.
A light in a single room, he thought, would not excite curiosity or
attract attention from the neighbors or any one passing in the street;
but lights in more than one room might do that. He resolved to turn
off the light in each room as he left it, before lighting the next one.
It had been a pleasant as well as a handsome house, if he could judge
by the little of it he could see, before the change had come over his
father. The rooms were large with high ceilings. The one where he
stood, obviously was a library; bookshelves reached three quarters of
the way to the ceiling on three of its walls except where they were
broken in two places by doorways, and in one place on the south wall by
an open fireplace. There was a big library table-desk in the center of
the room, and a stand with a shaded lamp upon it nearer the fireplace.
A leather-cushioned Morris chair--a lonely, meditative-looking
chair--was by the stand and at an angle toward the hearth; the rug in
front of it was quite worn through and showed the floor underneath. A
sympathy toward his father, which Sherrill had not been able to make
him feel, came to Alan as he reflected how many days and nights
Benjamin Corvet must have passed reading or thinking in that chair
before his restless feet could have worn away the tough, Oriental
fabric of the rug.
There were several magazines on the top of the large desk, some
unwrapped, some still in their wrappers; Alan glanced at them and saw
that they all related to technical and scientific subjects. The desk
evidently had been much used and had many drawers; Alan pulled one open
and saw that it was full of papers; but his sensation as he touched the
top one made him shut the drawer again and postpone prying of that sort
until he had looked more thoroughly about the house.
He went to the door of the connecting room and looked into it. This
room, dusky in spite of the light which shone past him through the wide
doorway, was evidently another library; or rather it appeared to have
been the original library, and the front room had been converted into a
library to supplement it. The bookcases here were built so high that a
little ladder on wheels was required for access to the top shelves.
Alan located the light switch in the room; then he returned, switched
off the light in the front room, crossed in the darkness into the
second room, and pressed the switch.
A weird, uncanny, half wail, half moan, coming from the upper hall,
suddenly filled the house. Its unexpectedness and the nature of the
sound stirred the hair upon his head, and he started back; then he
pressed the switch again, and the noise stopped. He lighted another
match, found the right switch, and turned on the light. Only after
discovering two long tiers of white and black keys against the north
wall did Alan understand that the switch must control the motor working
the bellows of an organ which had pipes in the upper hall; it was the
sort of organ that can be played either with fingers or by means of a
paper roll; a book of music had fallen upon the keys, so that one was
pressed down, causing the note to sound when the bellows pumped.
But having accounted for the sound did not immediately end the start
that it had given Alan. He had the feeling which so often comes to one
in an unfamiliar and vacant house that there was some one in the house
with him. He listened and seemed to hear another sound in the upper
hall, a footstep. He went out quickly to the foot of the stairs and
looked up them.
"Is any one here?" he called. "Is any one here?"
His voice brought no response. He went half way up the curve of the
wide stairway, and called again, and listened; then he fought down the
feeling he had had; Sherrill had said there would be no one in the
house, and Alan was certain there was no one. So he went back to the
room where he had left the light.
The center of this room, like the room next to it, was occupied by a
library table-desk. He pulled open some of the drawers in it; one or
two had blue prints and technical drawings in them; the others had only
the miscellany which accumulates in a room much used. There were
drawers also under the bookcases all around the room; they appeared,
when Alan opened some of them, to contain pamphlets of various
societies, and the scientific correspondence of which Sherrill had told
him. He looked over the titles of some of the books on the shelves--a
multitude of subjects, anthropology, exploration, deep-sea fishing,
ship-building, astronomy. The books in each section of the shelves
seemed to correspond in subject with the pamphlets and correspondence
in the drawer beneath, and these, by their dates, to divide themselves
into different periods during the twenty years that Benjamin Corvet had
lived alone here.
Alan felt that seeing these things was bringing his father closer to
him; they gave him a little of the feeling he had been unable to get
when he looked at his father's picture. He could realize better now
the lonely, restless man, pursued by some ghost he could not kill,
taking up for distraction one subject of study after another,
exhausting each in turn until he could no longer make it engross him,
and then absorbing himself in the next.
These two rooms evidently had been the ones most used by his father;
the other rooms on this floor, as Alan went into them one by one, he
found spoke far less intimately of Benjamin Corvet. A dining-room was
in the front of the house to the north side of the hall; a service room
opened from it, and on the other side of the service room was what
appeared to be a smaller dining-room. The service room communicated
both by dumb waiter and stairway with rooms below; Alan went down the
stairway only far enough to see that the rooms below were servants'
quarters; then he came back, turned out the light on the first floor,
struck another match, and went up the stairs to the second story.
The rooms opening on to the upper hall, it was plain to him, though
their doors were closed, were mostly bedrooms. He put his hand at
hazard on the nearest door and opened it. As he caught the taste and
smell of the air in the room--heavy, colder, and deader even than the
air in the rest of the house--he hesitated; then with his match he
found the light switch.
The room and the next one which communicated with it evidently were--or
had been--a woman's bedroom and boudoir. The hangings, which were
still swaying from the opening of the door, had taken permanently the
folds in which they had hung for many years; there were the scores of
long-time idleness, not of use, in the rugs and upholstery of the
chairs. The bed, however, was freshly made up, as though the bed
clothing had been changed occasionally. Alan went through the bedroom
to the door of the boudoir, and saw that that too had the same look of
unoccupancy and disuse. On the low dressing table were scattered such
articles as a woman starting on a journey might think it not worth
while to take with her. There was no doubt that these were the rooms
of his father's wife.
Had his father preserved them thus, as she had left them, in the hope
that she might come back, permitting himself to fix no time when he
abandoned that hope, or even to change them after he had learned that
she was dead? Alan thought not; Sherrill had said that Corvet had
known from the first that his separation from his wife was permanent.
The bed made up, the other things neglected, and evidently looked after
or dusted only at long separated periods, looked more as though Corvet
had shrunk from seeing them or even thinking of them, and had left them
to be looked after wholly by the servant, without ever being able to
bring himself to give instructions that they should be changed. Alan
felt that he would not be surprised to learn that his father never had
entered these ghostlike rooms since the day his wife had left him.
On the top of a chest of high drawers in a corner near the dressing
table were some papers. Alan went over to look at them; they were
invitations, notices of concerts and of plays twenty years old--the
mail, probably, of the morning she had gone away, left where her maid
or she herself had laid them, and only picked up and put back there at
the times since when the room was dusted. As Alan touched them, he saw
that his fingers left marks in the dust on the smooth top of the chest;
he noticed that some one else had touched the things and made marks of
the same sort as he had made. The freshness of these other marks
startled him; they had been made within a day or so. They could not
have been made by Sherrill, for Alan had noticed that Sherrill's hands
were slender and delicately formed; Corvet, too, was not a large man;
Alan's own hand was of good size and powerful, but when he put his
fingers over the marks the other man had made, he found that the other
hand must have been larger and more powerful than his own. Had it been
Corvet's servant? It might have been, though the marks seemed too
fresh for that; for the servant, Sherrill had said, had left the day
Corvet's disappearance was discovered.
Alan pulled open the drawers to see what the other man might have been
after. It had not been the servant; for the contents of the
drawers--old brittle lace and woman's clothing--were tumbled as though
they had been pulled out and roughly and inexpertly pushed back; they
still showed the folds in which they had lain for years and which
recently had been disarranged.
This proof that some one had been prying about in the house before
himself and since Corvet had gone, startled Alan and angered him. It
brought him suddenly a sense of possession which he had not been able
to feel when Sherrill had told him the house was his; it brought an
impulse of protection of these things about him. Who had been
searching in Benjamin Corvet's--in Alan's house? He pushed the drawers
shut hastily and hurried across the hall to the room opposite. In this
room--plainly Benjamin Corvet's bedroom--were no signs of intrusion.
He went to the door of the room connecting with it, turned on the
light, and looked in. It was a smaller room than the others and
contained a roll-top desk and a cabinet. The cover of the desk was
closed, and the drawers of the cabinet were shut and apparently
undisturbed. Alan recognized that probably in this room he would find
the most intimate and personal things relating to his father; but
before examining it, he turned back to inspect the bedroom.
It was a carefully arranged and well-cared-for room, plainly in
constant use. A reading stand, with a lamp, was beside the bed with a
book marked about the middle. On the dresser were hair-brushes and a
comb, and a box of razors, none of which were missing. When Benjamin
Corvet had gone away, he had not taken anything with him, even toilet
articles. With the other things on the dresser, was a silver frame for
a photograph with a cover closed and fastened over the portrait; as
Alan took it up and opened it, the stiffness of the hinges and the
edges of the lid gummed to the frame by disuse, showed that it was long
since it had been opened. The picture was of a woman of perhaps
thirty--a beautiful woman, dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a refined,
sensitive, spiritual-looking face. The dress she wore was the same,
Alan suddenly recognized, which he had seen and touched among the
things in the chest of drawers; it gave him a queer feeling now to have
touched her things. He felt instinctively, as he held the picture and
studied it, that it could have been no vulgar bickering between wife
and husband, nor any caprice of a dissatisfied woman, that had made her
separate herself from her husband. The photographer's name was stamped
in one corner, and the date--1894, the year after Alan had been born.
But Alan felt that the picture and the condition of her rooms across
the hall did not shed any light on the relations between her and
Benjamin Corvet; rather they obscured them; for his father neither had
put the picture away from him and devoted her rooms to other uses, nor
had he kept the rooms arranged and ready for her return and her picture
so that he would see it. He would have done one or the other of these
things, Alan thought, if it were she his father had wronged--or, at
least, if it were only she.
Alan reclosed the case, and put the picture down; then he went into the
room with the desk. He tried the cover of the desk, but it appeared to
be locked; after looking around vainly for a key, he tried again,
exerting a little more force, and this time the top went up easily,
tearing away the metal plate into which the claws of the lock clasped
and the two long screws which had held it. He examined the lock,
surprised, and saw that the screws must have been merely set into the
holes; scars showed where a chisel or some metal implement had been
thrust in under the top to force it up. The pigeonholes and little
drawers in the upper part of the desk, as he swiftly opened them, he
found entirely empty. He hurried to the cabinet; the drawers of the
cabinet too had been forced, and very recently; for the scars and the
splinters of wood were clean and fresh. These drawers and the drawers
in the lower part of the desk either were empty, or the papers in them
had been disarranged and tumbled in confusion, as though some one had
examined them hastily and tossed them back.
Sherrill had not done that, nor any one who had a business to be there.
If Benjamin Corvet had emptied some of those drawers before he went
away, he would not have relocked empty drawers. To Alan, the marks of
violence and roughness were unmistakably the work of the man with the
big hands who had left marks upon the top of the chest of drawers; and
the feeling that he had been in the house very recently was stronger
than ever.
Alan ran out into the hall and listened; he heard no sound; but he went
back to the little room more excited than before. For what had the
other man been searching? For the same things which Alan was looking
for? And had the other man got them? Who might the other be, and what
might be his connection with Benjamin Corvet? Alan had no doubt that
everything of importance must have been taken away, but he would make
sure of that. He took some of the papers from the drawers and began to
examine them; after nearly an hour of this, he had found only one
article which appeared connected in any way with what Sherrill had told
him or with Alan himself. In one of the little drawers of the desk he
found several books, much worn as though from being carried in a
pocket, and one of these contained a series of entries stretching over
several years. These listed an amount--$150.--opposite a series of
dates with only the year and the month given, and there was an entry
for every second month.
Alan felt his fingers trembling as he turned the pages of the little
book and found at the end of the list a blank, and below, in the same
hand but in writing which had changed slightly with the passage of
years, another date and the confirming entry of $1,500. The other
papers and books were only such things as might accumulate during a
lifetime on the water and in business--government certificates,
manifests, boat schedules of times long gone by, and similar papers.
Alan looked through the little book again and put it in his pocket. It
was, beyond doubt, his father's memorandum of the sums sent to Blue
Rapids for Alan; it told him that here he had been in his father's
thoughts; in this little room, within a few steps from those deserted
apartments of his wife, Benjamin Corvet had sent "Alan's dollar"--that
dollar which had been such a subject of speculation in his childhood
for himself and for all the other children. He grew warm at the
thought as he began putting the other things back into the drawers.
He started and straightened suddenly; then he listened attentively, and
his skin, warm an instant before, turned cold and prickled. Somewhere
within the house, unmistakably on the floor below him, a door had
slammed. The wind, which had grown much stronger in the last hour, was
battering the windows and whining round the corners of the building;
but the house was tightly closed; it could not be the wind that had
blown the door shut. Some one--it was beyond question now, for the
realization was quite different from the feeling he had had about that
before--was in the house with him. Had his father's servant come back?
That was impossible; Sherrill had received a wire from the man that
day, and he could not get back to Chicago before the following morning
at the earliest. But the servant, Sherrill had said, was the only
other one besides his father who had a key. Was it ... his father who
had come back? That, though not impossible, seemed improbable.
Alan stooped quickly, unlaced and stripped off his shoes, and ran out
into the hall to the head of the stairs where he looked down and
listened. From here the sound of some one moving about came to him
distinctly; he could see no light below, but when he ran down to the
turn of the stairs, it became plain that there was a very dim and
flickering light in the library. He crept on farther down the
staircase. His hands were cold and moist from his excitement, and his
body was hot and trembling.
Whoever it was that was moving about down-stairs, even if he was not
one who had a right to be there, at least felt secure from
interruption. He was going with heavy step from window to window;
where he found a shade up, he pulled it down brusquely and with a
violence which suggested great strength under a nervous strain; a
shade, which had been pulled down, flew up, and the man damned it as
though it had startled him; then, after an instant, he pulled it down
again.
Alan crept still farther down and at last caught sight of him. The man
was not his father; he was not a servant; it was equally sure at the
same time that he was not any one who had any business to be in the
house and that he was not any common house-breaker.
He was a big, young-looking man, with broad shoulders and very evident
vigor; Alan guessed his age at thirty-five; he was handsome--he had a
straight forehead over daring, deep-set eyes; his nose, lips, and chin
were powerfully formed; and he was expensively and very carefully
dressed. The light by which Alan saw these things came from a flat
little pocket searchlight that the man carried in one hand, which threw
a little brilliant circle of light as he directed it; and now, as the
light chanced to fall on his other hand--powerful and heavily
muscled--Alan recollected the look and size of the finger prints on the
chest of drawers upstairs. He did not doubt that this was the same man
who had gone through the desk; but since he had already rifled the
desks, what did he want here now? As the man moved out of sight, Alan
crept on down as far as the door to the library; the man had gone on
into the rear room, and Alan went far enough into the library so he
could see him.
He had pulled open one of the drawers in the big table in the rear
room--the room where the organ was and where the bookshelves reached to
the ceiling--and with his light held so as to show what was in it, he
was tumbling over its contents and examining them. He went through one
after another of the drawers of the table like this; after examining
them, he rose and kicked the last one shut disgustedly; he stood
looking about the room questioningly, then he started toward the front
room.
He cast the light of his torch ahead of him; but Alan had time to
anticipate his action and to retreat to the hall. He held the hangings
a little way from the door jamb so he could see into the room. If this
man were the same who had looted the desk up-stairs, it was plain that
he had not procured there what he wanted or all of what he wanted; and
now he did not know where next to look.
He had, as yet, neither seen nor heard anything to alarm him, and as he
went to the desk in the front room and peered impatiently into the
drawers, he slammed them shut, one after another. He straightened and
stared about. "Damn Ben! Damn Ben!" he ejaculated violently and
returned to the rear room. Alan, again following him, found him on his
knees in front of one of the drawers under the bookcases. As he
continued searching through the drawers, his irritation became greater
and greater. He jerked one drawer entirely out of its case, and the
contents flew in every direction; swearing at it, and damning "Ben"
again, he gathered up the letters. One suddenly caught his attention;
he began reading it closely, then snapped it back into the drawer,
crammed the rest on top of it, and went on to the next of the files.
He searched in this manner through half a dozen drawers, plainly
finding nothing at all he wanted; he dragged some of the books from
their cases, felt behind them and shoved back some of the books but
dropped others on the floor and blasphemy burst from him.
He cursed "Ben" again and again, and himself, and God; he damned men by
name, but so violently and incoherently that Alan could not make out
the names; terribly he swore at men living and men "rotting in Hell."
The beam of light from the torch in his hand swayed aside and back and
forth. Without warning, suddenly it caught Alan as he stood in the
dark of the front room; and as the dim white circle of light gleamed
into Alan's face, the man looked that way and saw him.
The effect of this upon the man was so strange and so bewildering to
Alan that Alan could only stare at him. The big man seemed to shrink
into himself and to shrink back and away from Alan. He roared out
something in a bellow thick with fear and horror; he seemed to choke
with terror. There was nothing in his look akin to mere surprise or
alarm at realizing that another was there and had been seeing and
overhearing him. The light which he still gripped swayed back and
forth and showed him Alan again, and he raised his arm before his face
as he recoiled.
The consternation of the man was so complete that it checked Alan's
rush toward him; he halted, then advanced silently and watchfully. As
he went forward, and the light shone upon his face again, the big man
cried out hoarsely:
"Damn you--damn you, with the hole above your eye! The bullet got you!
And now you've got Ben! But you can't get me! Go back to Hell! You
can't get me! I'll get you--I'll get you! You--can't save the
_Miwaka_!"
He drew back his arm and with all his might hurled the flashlight at
Alan. It missed and crashed somewhere behind him, but did not go out;
the beam of light shot back and wavered and flickered over both of
them, as the torch rolled on the floor. Alan rushed forward and,
thrusting through the dark, his hand struck the man's chest and seized
his coat.
The man caught at and seized Alan's arm; he seemed to feel of it and
assure himself of its reality.
"Flesh! Flesh!" he roared in relief; and his big arms grappled Alan.
As they struggled, they stumbled and fell to the floor, the big man
underneath. His hand shifted its hold and caught Alan's throat; Alan
got an arm free and, with all his force, struck the man's face. The
man struck back--a heavy blow on the side of Alan's head which dizzied
him but left him strength to strike again, and his knuckles reached the
man's face once more, but he got another heavy blow in return. The man
was grappling no longer; he swung Alan to one side and off of him, and
rolled himself away. He scrambled to his feet and dashed out through
the library, across the hall, and into the service room. Alan heard
his feet clattering down the stairway to the floor beneath. Alan got
to his feet; dizzied and not yet familiar with the house, he blundered
against a wall and had to feel his way along it to the service room; as
he slipped and stumbled down the stairway, a door closed loudly at the
end of the corridor he had seen at the foot of the stairs. He ran
along the corridor to the door; it had closed with a spring lock, and
seconds passed while he felt in the dark for the catch; he found it and
tore the door open, and came out suddenly into the cold air of the
night in a paved passageway beside the house which led in one direction
to the street and in the other to a gate opening on the alley. He ran
forward to the street and looked up and down, but found it empty; then
he ran back to the alley. At the end of the alley, where it
intersected the cross street, the figure of the man running away
appeared suddenly out of the shadows, then disappeared; Alan, following
as far as the street, could see nothing more of him; this street too
was empty.
He ran a little farther and looked, then he went back to the house.
The side door had swung shut again and latched. He felt in his pocket
for his key and went around to the front door. The snow upon the steps
had been swept away, probably by the servant who had come to the house
earlier in the day with Constance Sherrill, but some had fallen since;
the footsteps made in the early afternoon had been obliterated by it,
but Alan could see those he had made that evening, and the marks where
some one else had gone into the house and not come out again. In part
it was plain, therefore, what had happened: the man had come from the
south, for he had not seen the light Alan had had in the north and rear
part of the house; believing no one was in the house, the man had gone
in through the front door with a key. He had been some one familiar
with the house; for he had known about the side door and how to reach
it and that he could get out that way. This might mean no more than
that he was the same who had searched through the house before; but at
least it made his identity with the former intruder more certain.
Alan let himself in at the front door and turned on the light in the
reading lamp in the library. The electric torch still was burning on
the floor and he picked it up and extinguished it; he went up-stairs
and brought down his shoes. He had seen a wood fire set ready for
lighting in the library, and now he lighted it and sat before it drying
his wet socks before he put on his shoes. He was still shaking and
breathing fast from his struggle with the man and his chase after him,
and by the strangeness of what had taken place.
When the shaft of light from the torch had flashed across Alan's face
in the dark library, the man had not taken him for what he was--a
living person; he had taken him for a specter. His terror and the
things he had cried out could mean only that. The specter of whom?
Not of Benjamin Corvet; for one of the things Alan had remarked when he
saw Benjamin Corvet's picture was that he himself did not look at all
like his father. Besides, what the man had said made it certain that
he did not think the specter was "Ben"; for the specter had "got Ben."
Did Alan look like some one else, then? Like whom? Evidently like the
man--now dead for he had a ghost--who had "got" Ben, in the big man's
opinion. Who could that be?
No answer, as yet, was possible to that. But if he did look like some
one, then that some one was--or had been--dreaded not only by the big
man who had entered the house, but by Benjamin Corvet as well. "You
got Ben!" the man had cried out. Got him? How? "But you can't get
me!" he had said. "You--with the bullet hole above your eye!" What
did that mean?
Alan got up and went to look at himself in the mirror he had seen in
the hall. He was white, now that the flush of the fighting was going;
he probably had been pale before with excitement, and over his right
eye there was a round, black mark. Alan looked down at his hands; a
little skin was off one knuckle, where he had struck the man, and his
fingers were smudged with a black and sooty dust. He had smudged them
on the papers up-stairs or else in feeling his way about the dark
house, and at some time he had touched his forehead and left the black
mark. That had been the "bullet hole."
The rest that the man had said had been a reference to some name; Alan
had no trouble to recollect the name and, while he did not understand
it at all, it stirred him queerly--"the _Miwaka_." What was that? The
queer excitement and questioning that the name brought, when he
repeated it to himself, was not recollection; for he could not recall
ever having heard the name before; but it was not completely strange to
him. He could define the excitement it stirred only in that way.
He went back to the Morris chair; his socks were nearly dry, and he put
on his shoes. He got up and paced about. Sherrill had believed that
here in this house Benjamin Corvet had left--or might have left--a
memorandum, a record, or an account of some sort which would explain to
Alan, his son, the blight which had hung over his life. Sherrill had
said that it could have been no mere intrigue, no vulgar personal sin;
and the events of the night had made that very certain; for, plainly,
whatever was hidden in that house involved some one else seriously,
desperately. There was no other way to explain the intrusion of the
sort of man whom Alan had surprised there an hour ago.
The fact that this other man searched also did not prove that Benjamin
Corvet had left a record in the house, as Sherrill believed; but it
certainly showed that another person believed--or feared--it. Whether
or not guilt had sent Benjamin Corvet away four days ago, whether or
not there had been guilt behind the ghost which had "got Ben," there
was guilt in the big man's superstitious terror when he had seen Alan.
A bold, powerful man like that one, when his conscience is clear, does
not see a ghost. And the ghost which he had seen had a bullet hole
above the brows!
Alan did not flatter himself that in any physical sense he had
triumphed over that man; so far as it had gone, his adversary had had
rather the better of the battle; he had endeavored to stun Alan, or
perhaps do worse than stun; but after the first grapple, his purpose
had been to get away. But he had not fled from Alan; he had fled from
discovery of who he was. Sherrill had told Alan of no one whom he
could identify with this man; but Alan could describe him to Sherrill.
Alan found a lavatory and washed and straightened his collar and tie
and brushed his clothes. There was a bruise on the side of his head;
but though it throbbed painfully, it did not leave any visible mark.
He could return now to the Sherrills'. It was not quite midnight but
he believed by this time Sherrill was probably home; perhaps already he
had gone to bed. Alan took up his hat and looked about the house; he
was going to return and sleep here, of course; he was not going to
leave the house unguarded for any long time after this; but, after what
had just happened, he felt he could leave it safely for half an hour,
particularly if he left a light burning within.
He did this and stepped out. The wind from the west was blowing hard,
and the night had become bitter cold; yet, as Alan reached the drive,
he could see far out the tossing lights of a ship and, as he went
toward the Sherrills', he gazed out over the roaring water. Often on
nights like this, he knew, his father must have been battling such
water.
The man who answered his ring at the Sherrills' recognized him at once
and admitted him; in reply to Alan's question, the servant said that
Mr. Sherrill had not yet returned. When Alan went to his room, the
valet appeared and, finding that Alan was packing, the man offered his
service. Alan let him pack and went down-stairs; a motor had just
driven up to the house.
It proved to have brought Constance and her mother; Mrs. Sherrill,
after informing Alan that Mr. Sherrill might not return until some time
later, went up-stairs and did not appear again. Constance followed her
mother but, ten minutes later came downstairs.
"You're not staying here to-night?" she said.
"I wanted to say to your father," Alan explained, "that I believe I had
better go over to the other house."
She came a little closer to him in her concern. "Nothing has happened
here?"
"Here? You mean in this house?" Alan smiled. "No; nothing."
She seemed relieved. Alan, remembering her mother's manner, thought he
understood; she knew that remarks had been made, possibly, which
repeated by a servant might have offended him.
"I'm afraid it's been a hard day for you," she said.
"It's certainly been unusual," Alan admitted.
It had been a hard day for her, too, he observed; or probably the
recent days, since her father's and her own good friend had gone, had
been trying. She was tired now and nervously excited; but she was so
young that the little signs of strain and worry, instead of making her
seem older, only made her youth more apparent. The curves of her neck
and her pretty, rounded shoulders were as soft as before; her lustrous,
brown hair was more beautiful, and a slight flush colored her clear
skin.
It had seemed to Alan, when Mrs. Sherrill had spoken to him a few
minutes before, that her manner toward him had been more reserved and
constrained than earlier in the evening; and he had put that down to
the lateness of the hour; but now he realized that she probably had
been discussing him with Constance, and that it was somewhat in
defiance of her mother that Constance had come down to speak with him
again.
"Are you taking any one over to the other house with you?" she inquired.
"Any one?"
"A servant, I mean."
"No."
"Then you'll let us lend you a man from here."
"You're awfully good; but I don't think I'll need any one to-night.
Mr. Corvet's--my father's man--is coming back to-morrow, I understand.
I'll get along very well until then."
She was silent a moment as she looked away. Her shoulders suddenly
jerked a little. "I wish you'd take some one with you," she persisted.
"I don't like to think of you alone over there."
"My father must have been often alone there."
"Yes," she said. "Yes." She looked at him quickly, then away,
checking a question. She wanted to ask, he knew, what he had
discovered in that lonely house which had so agitated him; for of
course she had noticed agitation in him. And he had intended to tell
her or, rather, her father. He had been rehearsing to himself the
description of the man he had met there in order to ask Sherrill about
him; but now Alan knew that he was not going to refer the matter even
to Sherrill just yet.
Sherrill had believed that Benjamin Corvet's disappearance was from
circumstances too personal and intimate to be made a subject of public
inquiry; and what Alan had encountered in Corvet's house had confirmed
that belief. Sherrill further had said that Benjamin Corvet, if he had
wished Sherrill to know those circumstances, would have told them to
him; but Corvet had not done that; instead, he had sent for Alan, his
son. He had given his son his confidence.
Sherrill had admitted that he was withholding from Alan, for the time
being, something that he knew about Benjamin Corvet; it was nothing, he
had said, which would help Alan to learn about his father, or what had
become of him; but perhaps Sherrill, not knowing these other things,
could not speak accurately as to that. Alan determined to ask Sherrill
what he had been withholding before he told him all of what had
happened in Corvet's house. There was one other circumstance which
Sherrill had mentioned but not explained; it occurred to Alan now.
"Miss Sherrill--" he checked himself.
"What is it?"
"This afternoon your father said that you believed that Mr. Corvet's
disappearance was in some way connected with you; he said that he did
not think that was so; but do you want to tell me why you thought it?"
"Yes; I will tell you." She colored quickly. "One of the last things
Mr. Corvet did--in fact, the last thing we know of his doing before he
sent for you--was to come to me and warn me against one of my friends."
"Warn you, Miss Sherrill? How? I mean, warn you against what?"
"Against thinking too much of him." She turned away.
Alan saw in the rear of the hall the man who had been waiting with the
suitcase. It was after midnight now and, for far more than the
intended half hour, Alan had left his father's house unwatched, to be
entered by the front door whenever the man, who had entered it before,
returned with his key.
"I think I'll come to see your father in the morning," Alan said, when
Constance looked back to him.
"You won't borrow Simons?" she asked again.
"Thank you, no."
"But you'll come over here for breakfast in the morning?"
"You want me?"
"Certainly."
"I'd like to come very much."
"Then I'll expect you." She followed him to the door when he had put
on his things, and he made no objection when she asked that the man be
allowed to carry his bag around to the other house. When he glanced
back, after reaching the walk, he saw her standing inside the door,
watching through the glass after him.
When he had dismissed Simons and reentered the house on Astor Street,
he found no evidences of any disturbance while he had been gone. On
the second floor, to the east of the room which had been his father's,
was a bedroom which evidently had been kept as a guest chamber; Alan
carried his suitcase there and made ready for bed.
The sight of Constance Sherrill standing and watching after him in
concern as he started back to this house, came to him again and again
and, also, her flush when she had spoken of the friend against whom
Benjamin Corvet had warned her. Who was he? It had been impossible at
that moment for Alan to ask her more; besides, if he had asked and she
had told him, he would have learned only a name which he could not
place yet in any connection with her or with Benjamin Corvet. Whoever
he was, it was plain that Constance Sherrill "thought of him"; lucky
man, Alan said to himself. Yet Corvet had warned her not to think of
him....
Alan turned back his bed. It had been for him a tremendous day.
Barely twelve hours before he had come to that house, Alan Conrad from
Blue Rapids, Kansas; now ... phrases from what Lawrence Sherrill had
told him of his father were running through his mind as he opened the
door of the room to be able to hear any noise in Benjamin Corvet's
house, of which he was sole protector. The emotion roused by his first
sight of the lake went through him again as he opened the window to the
east.
Now--he was in bed--he seemed to be standing, a specter before a man
blaspheming Benjamin Corvet and the souls of men dead. "And the hole
above the eye! ... The bullet got you! ... So it's you that got Ben!
... I'll get you! ... You can't save the _Miwaka_!"
The _Miwaka_! The stir of that name was stronger now even than before;
it had been running through his consciousness almost constantly since
he had heard it. He jumped up and turned on the light and found a
pencil. He did not know how to spell the name and it was not necessary
to write it down; the name had taken on that definiteness and
ineffaceableness of a thing which, once heard, can never again be
forgotten. But, in panic that he might forget, he wrote it, guessing
at the spelling--"_Miwaka_."
It was a name, of course; but the name of what? It repeated and
repeated itself to him, after he got back into bed, until its very
iteration made him drowsy.
Outside the gale whistled and shrieked. The wind, passing its last
resistance after its sweep across the prairies before it leaped upon
the lake, battered and clamored in its assault about the house. But as
Alan became sleepier, he heard it no longer as it rattled the windows
and howled under the eaves and over the roof, but as out on the lake,
above the roaring and ice-crunching waves, it whipped and circled with
its chill the ice-shrouded sides of struggling ships. So, with the
roar of surf and gale in his ears, he went to sleep with the sole
conscious connection in his mind between himself and these people,
among whom Benjamin Corvet's summons had brought him, the one name
"_Miwaka_."