THE ODDS AND ENDS
Of Doctor Walker’s sensational escape that night to South America, of
the recovery of over a million dollars in cash and securities in the
safe from the chimney room—the papers have kept the public well
informed. Of my share in discovering the secret chamber they have been
singularly silent. The inner history has never been told. Mr. Jamieson
got all kinds of credit, and some of it he deserved, but if Jack
Bailey, as Alex, had not traced Halsey and insisted on the disinterring
of Paul Armstrong’s casket, if he had not suspected the truth from the
start, where would the detective have been?
When Halsey learned the truth, he insisted on going the next morning,
weak as he was, to Louise, and by night she was at Sunnyside, under
Gertrude’s particular care, while her mother had gone to Barbara
Fitzhugh’s.
What Halsey said to Mrs. Armstrong I never knew, but that he was
considerate and chivalrous I feel confident. It was Halsey’s way always
with women.
He and Louise had no conversation together until that night. Gertrude
and Alex—I mean Jack—had gone for a walk, although it was nine o’clock,
and anybody but a pair of young geese would have known that dew was
falling, and that it is next to impossible to get rid of a summer cold.
At half after nine, growing weary of my own company, I went downstairs
to find the young people. At the door of the living-room I paused.
Gertrude and Jack had returned and were there, sitting together on a
divan, with only one lamp lighted. They did not see or hear me, and I
beat a hasty retreat to the library. But here again I was driven back.
Louise was sitting in a deep chair, looking the happiest I had ever
seen her, with Halsey on the arm of the chair, holding her close.
It was no place for an elderly spinster. I retired to my upstairs
sitting-room and got out Eliza Klinefelter’s lavender slippers. Ah,
well, the foster motherhood would soon have to be put away in camphor
again.
The next day, by degrees, I got the whole story.
Paul Armstrong had a besetting evil—the love of money. Common enough,
but he loved money, not for what it would buy, but for its own sake. An
examination of the books showed no irregularities in the past year
since John had been cashier, but before that, in the time of Anderson,
the old cashier, who had died, much strange juggling had been done with
the records. The railroad in New Mexico had apparently drained the
banker’s private fortune, and he determined to retrieve it by one
stroke. This was nothing less than the looting of the bank’s
securities, turning them into money, and making his escape.
But the law has long arms. Paul Armstrong evidently studied the
situation carefully. Just as the only good Indian is a dead Indian, so
the only safe defaulter is a dead defaulter. He decided to die, to all
appearances, and when the hue and cry subsided, he would be able to
enjoy his money almost anywhere he wished.
The first necessity was an accomplice. The connivance of Doctor Walker
was suggested by his love for Louise. The man was unscrupulous, and
with the girl as a bait, Paul Armstrong soon had him fast. The plan was
apparently the acme of simplicity: a small town in the west, an attack
of heart disease, a body from a medical college dissecting-room shipped
in a trunk to Doctor Walker by a colleague in San Francisco, and palmed
off for the supposed dead banker. What was simpler?
The woman, Nina Carrington, was the cog that slipped. What she only
suspected, what she really knew, we never learned. She was a
chambermaid in the hotel at C—, and it was evidently her intention to
blackmail Doctor Walker. His position at that time was uncomfortable:
to pay the woman to keep quiet would be confession. He denied the whole
thing, and she went to Halsey.
It was this that had taken Halsey to the doctor the night he
disappeared. He accused the doctor of the deception, and, crossing the
lawn, had said something cruel to Louise. Then, furious at her apparent
connivance, he had started for the station. Doctor Walker and Paul
Armstrong—the latter still lame where I had shot him—hurried across to
the embankment, certain only of one thing. Halsey must not tell the
detective what he suspected until the money had been removed from the
chimney-room. They stepped into the road in front of the car to stop
it, and fate played into their hands. The car struck the train, and
they had only to dispose of the unconscious figure in the road. This
they did as I have told. For three days Halsey lay in the box car, tied
hand and foot, suffering tortures of thirst, delirious at times, and
discovered by a tramp at Johnsville only in time to save his life.
To go back to Paul Armstrong. At the last moment his plans had been
frustrated. Sunnyside, with its hoard in the chimney-room, had been
rented without his knowledge! Attempts to dislodge me having failed, he
was driven to breaking into his own house. The ladder in the chute, the
burning of the stable and the entrance through the card-room window—all
were in the course of a desperate attempt to get into the chimney-room.
Louise and her mother had, from the first, been the great
stumbling-blocks. The plan had been to send Louise away until it was
too late for her to interfere, but she came back to the hotel at C—
just at the wrong time. There was a terrible scene. The girl was told
that something of the kind was necessary, that the bank was about to
close and her stepfather would either avoid arrest and disgrace in this
way, or kill himself. Fanny Armstrong was a weakling, but Louise was
more difficult to manage. She had no love for her stepfather, but her
devotion to her mother was entire, self-sacrificing. Forced into
acquiescence by her mother’s appeals, overwhelmed by the situation, the
girl consented and fled.
From somewhere in Colorado she sent an anonymous telegram to Jack
Bailey at the Traders’ Bank. Trapped as she was, she did not want to
see an innocent man arrested. The telegram, received on Thursday, had
sent the cashier to the bank that night in a frenzy.
Louise arrived at Sunnyside and found the house rented. Not knowing
what to do, she sent for Arnold at the Greenwood Club, and told him a
little, not all. She told him that there was something wrong, and that
the bank was about to close. That his father was responsible. Of the
conspiracy she said nothing. To her surprise, Arnold already knew,
through Bailey that night, that things were not right. Moreover, he
suspected what Louise did not, that the money was hidden at Sunnyside.
He had a scrap of paper that indicated a concealed room somewhere.
His inherited cupidity was aroused. Eager to get Halsey and Jack Bailey
out of the house, he went up to the east entry, and in the
billiard-room gave the cashier what he had refused earlier in the
evening—the address of Paul Armstrong in California and a telegram
which had been forwarded to the club for Bailey, from Doctor Walker. It
was in response to one Bailey had sent, and it said that Paul Armstrong
was very ill.
Bailey was almost desperate. He decided to go west and find Paul
Armstrong, and to force him to disgorge. But the catastrophe at the
bank occurred sooner than he had expected. On the moment of starting
west, at Andrews Station, where Mr. Jamieson had located the car, he
read that the bank had closed, and, going back, surrendered himself.
John Bailey had known Paul Armstrong intimately. He did not believe
that the money was gone; in fact, it was hardly possible in the
interval since the securities had been taken. Where was it? And from
some chance remark let fall some months earlier by Arnold Armstrong at
a dinner, Bailey felt sure there was a hidden room at Sunnyside. He
tried to see the architect of the building, but, like the contractor,
if he knew of the room, he refused any information. It was Halsey’s
idea that John Bailey come to the house as a gardener, and pursue his
investigations as he could. His smooth upper lip had been sufficient
disguise, with his change of clothes, and a hair-cut by a country
barber.
So it was Alex, Jack Bailey, who had been our ghost. Not only had he
alarmed Louise—and himself, he admitted—on the circular staircase, but
he had dug the hole in the trunk-room wall, and later sent Eliza into
hysteria. The note Liddy had found in Gertrude’s scrap-basket was from
him, and it was he who had startled me into unconsciousness by the
clothes chute, and, with Gertrude’s help, had carried me to Louise’s
room. Gertrude, I learned, had watched all night beside me, in an
extremity of anxiety about me.
That old Thomas had seen his master, and thought he had seen the
Sunnyside ghost, there could be no doubt. Of that story of Thomas’,
about seeing Jack Bailey in the footpath between the club and
Sunnyside, the night Liddy and I heard the noise on the circular
staircase—that, too, was right. On the night before Arnold Armstrong
was murdered, Jack Bailey had made his first attempt to search for the
secret room. He secured Arnold’s keys from his room at the club and got
into the house, armed with a golf-stick for sounding the walls. He ran
against the hamper at the head of the stairs, caught his cuff-link in
it, and dropped the golf-stick with a crash. He was glad enough to get
away without an alarm being raised, and he took the “owl” train to
town.
The oddest thing to me was that Mr. Jamieson had known for some time
that Alex was Jack Bailey. But the face of the pseudo-gardener was very
queer indeed, when that night, in the card-room, the detective turned
to him and said:
“How long are you and I going to play our little comedy, _Mr. Bailey?_”
Well, it is all over now. Paul Armstrong rests in Casanova churchyard,
and this time there is no mistake. I went to the funeral, because I
wanted to be sure he was really buried, and I looked at the step of the
shaft where I had sat that night, and wondered if it was all real.
Sunnyside is for sale—no, I shall not buy it. Little Lucien Armstrong
is living with his step-grandmother, and she is recovering gradually
from troubles that had extended over the entire period of her second
marriage. Anne Watson lies not far from the man she killed, and who as
surely caused her death. Thomas, the fourth victim of the conspiracy,
is buried on the hill. With Nina Carrington, five lives were sacrificed
in the course of this grim conspiracy.
There will be two weddings before long, and Liddy has asked for my
heliotrope poplin to wear to the church. I knew she would. She has
wanted it for three years, and she was quite ugly the time I spilled
coffee on it. We are very quiet, just the two of us. Liddy still clings
to her ghost theory, and points to my wet and muddy boots in the
trunk-room as proof. I am gray, I admit, but I haven’t felt as well in
a dozen years. Sometimes, when I am bored, I ring for Liddy, and we
talk things over. When Warner married Rosie, Liddy sniffed and said
what I took for faithfulness in Rosie had been nothing but mawkishness.
I have not yet outlived Liddy’s contempt because I gave them silver
knives and forks as a wedding gift.
So we sit and talk, and sometimes Liddy threatens to leave, and often I
discharge her, but we stay together somehow. I am talking of renting a
house next year, and Liddy says to be sure there is no ghost. To be
perfectly frank, I never really lived until that summer. Time has
passed since I began this story. My neighbors are packing up for
another summer. Liddy is having the awnings put up, and the window
boxes filled. Liddy or no Liddy, I shall advertise to-morrow for a
house in the country, and I don’t care if it has a Circular Staircase.