A LINK CUFF-BUTTON
Liddy’s knees seemed to give away under her. Without a sound she sank
down, leaving me staring at the window in petrified amazement. Liddy
began to moan under her breath, and in my excitement I reached down and
shook her.
“Stop it,” I whispered. “It’s only a woman—maybe a maid of the
Armstrongs’. Get up and help me find the door.” She groaned again.
“Very well,” I said, “then I’ll have to leave you here. I’m going.”
She moved at that, and, holding to my sleeve, we felt our way, with
numerous collisions, to the billiard-room, and from there to the
drawing-room. The lights came on then, and, with the long French
windows unshuttered, I had a creepy feeling that each one sheltered a
peering face. In fact, in the light of what happened afterward, I am
pretty certain we were under surveillance during the entire ghostly
evening. We hurried over the rest of the locking-up and got upstairs as
quickly as we could. I left the lights all on, and our footsteps echoed
cavernously. Liddy had a stiff neck the next morning, from looking back
over her shoulder, and she refused to go to bed.
“Let me stay in your dressing-room, Miss Rachel,” she begged. “If you
don’t, I’ll sit in the hall outside the door. I’m not going to be
murdered with my eyes shut.”
“If you’re going to be murdered,” I retorted, “it won’t make any
difference whether they are shut or open. But you may stay in the
dressing-room, if you will lie on the couch: when you sleep in a chair
you snore.”
She was too far gone to be indignant, but after a while she came to the
door and looked in to where I was composing myself for sleep with
Drummond’s _Spiritual Life_.
“That wasn’t a woman, Miss Rachel,” she said, with her shoes in her
hand. “It was a man in a long coat.”
“What woman was a man?” I discouraged her without looking up, and she
went back to the couch.
It was eleven o’clock when I finally prepared for bed. In spite of my
assumption of indifference, I locked the door into the hall, and
finding the transom did not catch, I put a chair cautiously before the
door—it was not necessary to rouse Liddy—and climbing up put on the
ledge of the transom a small dressing-mirror, so that any movement of
the frame would send it crashing down. Then, secure in my precautions,
I went to bed.
I did not go to sleep at once. Liddy disturbed me just as I was growing
drowsy, by coming in and peering under the bed. She was afraid to
speak, however, because of her previous snubbing, and went back,
stopping in the doorway to sigh dismally.
Somewhere down-stairs a clock with a chime sang away the
hours—eleven-thirty, forty-five, twelve. And then the lights went out
to stay. The Casanova Electric Company shuts up shop and goes home to
bed at midnight: when one has a party, I believe it is customary to fee
the company, which will drink hot coffee and keep awake a couple of
hours longer. But the lights were gone for good that night. Liddy had
gone to sleep, as I knew she would. She was a very unreliable person:
always awake and ready to talk when she wasn’t wanted and dozing off to
sleep when she was. I called her once or twice, the only result being
an explosive snore that threatened her very windpipe—then I got up and
lighted a bedroom candle.
My bedroom and dressing room were above the big living-room on the
first floor. On the second floor a long corridor ran the length of the
house, with rooms opening from both sides. In the wings were small
corridors crossing the main one—the plan was simplicity itself. And
just as I got back into bed, I heard a sound from the east wing,
apparently, that made me stop, frozen, with one bedroom slipper half
off, and listen. It was a rattling metallic sound, and it reverberated
along the empty halls like the crash of doom. It was for all the world
as if something heavy, perhaps a piece of steel, had rolled clattering
and jangling down the hard-wood stairs leading to the card-room.
In the silence that followed Liddy stirred and snored again. I was
exasperated: first she kept me awake by silly alarms, then when she was
needed she slept like Joe Jefferson, or Rip,—they are always the same
to me. I went in and aroused her, and I give her credit for being wide
awake the minute I spoke.
“Get up,” I said, “if you don’t want to be murdered in your bed.”
“Where? How?” she yelled vociferously, and jumped up.
“There’s somebody in the house,” I said. “Get up. We’ll have to get to
the telephone.”
“Not out in the hall!” she gasped; “Oh, Miss Rachel, not out in the
hall!” trying to hold me back. But I am a large woman and Liddy is
small. We got to the door, somehow, and Liddy held a brass andiron,
which it was all she could do to lift, let alone brain anybody with. I
listened, and, hearing nothing, opened the door a little and peered
into the hall. It was a black void, full of terrible suggestion, and my
candle only emphasized the gloom. Liddy squealed and drew me back
again, and as the door slammed, the mirror I had put on the transom
came down and hit her on the head. That completed our demoralization.
It was some time before I could persuade her she had not been attacked
from behind by a burglar, and when she found the mirror smashed on the
floor she wasn’t much better.
“There’s going to be a death!” she wailed. “Oh, Miss Rachel, there’s
going to be a death!”
“There will be,” I said grimly, “if you don’t keep quiet, Liddy Allen.”
And so we sat there until morning, wondering if the candle would last
until dawn, and arranging what trains we could take back to town. If we
had only stuck to that decision and gone back before it was too late!
The sun came finally, and from my window I watched the trees along the
drive take shadowy form, gradually lose their ghostlike appearance,
become gray and then green. The Greenwood Club showed itself a dab of
white against the hill across the valley, and an early robin or two
hopped around in the dew. Not until the milk-boy and the sun came,
about the same time, did I dare to open the door into the hall and look
around. Everything was as we had left it. Trunks were heaped here and
there, ready for the trunk-room, and through an end window of stained
glass came a streak of red and yellow daylight that was eminently
cheerful. The milk-boy was pounding somewhere below, and the day had
begun.
Thomas Johnson came ambling up the drive about half-past six, and we
could hear him clattering around on the lower floor, opening shutters.
I had to take Liddy to her room up-stairs, however,—she was quite sure
she would find something uncanny. In fact, when she did not, having now
the courage of daylight, she was actually disappointed.
Well, we did not go back to town that day.
The discovery of a small picture fallen from the wall of the
drawing-room was quite sufficient to satisfy Liddy that the alarm had
been a false one, but I was anything but convinced. Allowing for my
nerves and the fact that small noises magnify themselves at night,
there was still no possibility that the picture had made the series of
sounds I heard. To prove it, however, I dropped it again. It fell with
a single muffled crash of its wooden frame, and incidentally ruined
itself beyond repair. I justified myself by reflecting that if the
Armstrongs chose to leave pictures in unsafe positions, and to rent a
house with a family ghost, the destruction of property was their
responsibility, not mine.
I warned Liddy not to mention what had happened to anybody, and
telephoned to town for servants. Then after a breakfast which did more
credit to Thomas’ heart than his head, I went on a short tour of
investigation. The sounds had come from the east wing, and not without
some qualms I began there. At first I found nothing. Since then I have
developed my powers of observation, but at that time I was a novice.
The small card-room seemed undisturbed. I looked for footprints, which
is, I believe, the conventional thing to do, although my experience has
been that as clues both footprints and thumb-marks are more useful in
fiction than in fact. But the stairs in that wing offered something.
At the top of the flight had been placed a tall wicker hamper, packed,
with linen that had come from town. It stood at the edge of the top
step, almost barring passage, and on the step below it was a long fresh
scratch. For three steps the scratch was repeated, gradually
diminishing, as if some object had fallen, striking each one. Then for
four steps nothing. On the fifth step below was a round dent in the
hard wood. That was all, and it seemed little enough, except that I was
positive the marks had not been there the day before.
It bore out my theory of the sound, which had been for all the world
like the bumping of a metallic object down a flight of steps. The four
steps had been skipped. I reasoned that an iron bar, for instance,
would do something of the sort,—strike two or three steps, end down,
then turn over, jumping a few stairs, and landing with a thud.
Iron bars, however, do not fall down-stairs in the middle of the night
alone. Coupled with the figure on the veranda the agency by which it
climbed might be assumed. But—and here was the thing that puzzled me
most—the doors were all fastened that morning, the windows unmolested,
and the particular door from the card-room to the veranda had a
combination lock of which I held the key, and which had not been
tampered with.
I fixed on an attempt at burglary, as the most natural explanation—an
attempt frustrated by the falling of the object, whatever it was, that
had roused me. Two things I could not understand: how the intruder had
escaped with everything locked, and why he had left the small silver,
which, in the absence of a butler, had remained down-stairs over night.
Under pretext of learning more about the place, Thomas Johnson led me
through the house and the cellars, without result. Everything was in
good order and repair; money had been spent lavishly on construction
and plumbing. The house was full of conveniences, and I had no reason
to repent my bargain, save the fact that, in the nature of things,
night must come again. And other nights must follow—and we were a long
way from a police-station.
In the afternoon a hack came up from Casanova, with a fresh relay of
servants. The driver took them with a flourish to the servants’
entrance, and drove around to the front of the house, where I was
awaiting him.
“Two dollars,” he said in reply to my question. “I don’t charge full
rates, because, bringin’ ’em up all summer as I do, it pays to make a
special price. When they got off the train, I sez, sez I, ‘There’s
another bunch for Sunnyside, cook, parlor maid and all.’ Yes’m—six
summers, and a new lot never less than once a month. They won’t stand
for the country and the lonesomeness, I reckon.”
But with the presence of the “bunch” of servants my courage revived,
and late in the afternoon came a message from Gertrude that she and
Halsey would arrive that night at about eleven o’clock, coming in the
car from Richfield. Things were looking up; and when Beulah, my cat, a
most intelligent animal, found some early catnip on a bank near the
house and rolled in it in a feline ecstasy, I decided that getting back
to nature was the thing to do.
While I was dressing for dinner, Liddy rapped at the door. She was
hardly herself yet, but privately I think she was worrying about the
broken mirror and its augury, more than anything else. When she came in
she was holding something in her hand, and she laid it on the
dressing-table carefully.
“I found it in the linen hamper,” she said. “It must be Mr. Halsey’s,
but it seems queer how it got there.”
It was the half of a link cuff-button of unique design, and I looked at
it carefully.
“Where was it? In the bottom of the hamper?” I asked.
“On the very top,” she replied. “It’s a mercy it didn’t fall out on the
way.”
When Liddy had gone I examined the fragment attentively. I had never
seen it before, and I was certain it was not Halsey’s. It was of
Italian workmanship, and consisted of a mother-of-pearl foundation,
encrusted with tiny seed-pearls, strung on horsehair to hold them. In
the center was a small ruby. The trinket was odd enough, but not
intrinsically of great value. Its interest for me lay in this: Liddy
had found it lying in the top of the hamper which had blocked the
east-wing stairs.
That afternoon the Armstrongs’ housekeeper, a youngish good-looking
woman, applied for Mrs. Ralston’s place, and I was glad enough to take
her. She looked as though she might be equal to a dozen of Liddy, with
her snapping black eyes and heavy jaw. Her name was Anne Watson, and I
dined that evening for the first time in three days.