The old man whose handwriting I had now positively identified was a
former employer of mine. I had worked in his office when a lad. He was a
doctor of very fair reputation in Westchester County, and I recognized
every characteristic of his as mentioned by Miss Graham, save the frenzy
which she described as accompanying his address.
In those days he was calm and cold and, while outwardly scrupulous,
capable of forgetting his honor as a physician under a sufficiently
strong temptation. I had left him when new prospects opened, and in the
years which had elapsed had contented myself with the knowledge that his
shingle still hung out in Yonkers, though his practice was nothing to
what it used to be when I was in his employ. Now I was going to see him
again.
That his was the hand which had stolen Gwendolen seemed no longer open
to doubt. That she was under his care in the curious old house I
remembered in the heart of Yonkers, seemed equally probable; but why so
sordid a man--one who loved money above everything else in the
world--should retain the child one minute after the publication of the
bountiful reward offered by Mr. Ocumpaugh, was what I could not at first
understand. Miss Graham's theory of hate had made no impression on me.
He was heartless and not likely to be turned aside from any project he
had formed, but he was not what I considered vindictive where nothing
was to be gained. Yet my comprehension of him had been but a boy's
comprehension, and I was now prepared to put a very different estimate
on one whose character had never struck me as being an open one, even
when my own had been most credulous.
That my enterprise, even with the knowledge I possessed of this man,
promised well or held out any prospects of easy fulfilment, I no longer
allowed myself to think. If money was his object--and what other could
influence a man of his temperament?--the sum offered by Mr. Ocumpaugh,
large though it was, had apparently not sufficed to satisfy his greed.
He was holding back the child, or so I now believed, in order to wring
a larger, possibly a double, amount from the wretched mother. Fifty
thousand was a goodly sum, but one hundred thousand was better; and this
man had gigantic ideas where his cupidity was concerned. I remember how
firmly he had once stood out for ten thousand dollars when he had been
offered five; and I began to see, though in an obscure way as yet, how
it might very easily be a part of his plan to work Mrs. Ocumpaugh up to
a positive belief in the child's death before he came down upon her for
the immense reward he had fixed his heart upon. The date he had written
all over the place might thus find some explanation in a plan to weaken
her nerve before pressing his exorbitant claims upon her.
Nothing was clear, yet everything was possible in such a nature; and
anxious to enter upon the struggle both for my own sake and that of the
child of whose condition under that terrible eye I scarcely dared to
think, I left Homewood in haste and took the first train for Yonkers.
Though the distance was not great, I had fully arranged my plans before
entering the town where so many of my boyish years had been spent. I
knew the old fox well enough, or thought I did, to be certain that I
should have anything but an easy entrance into his house, in case it
still harbored the child whom my partner had seen carried in there. I
anticipated difficulties, but was concerned about none but the
possibility of not being able to bring myself face to face with him.
Once in his presence, the knowledge which I secretly possessed of an old
but doubtful transaction of his, would serve to make him mine even to
the point of yielding up the child he had forcibly abducted. But would
he accord me an interview? Could I, without appeal to the police--and
you can readily believe I was not anxious to allow them to put their
fingers in my pie--force him to open his door and let me into his house,
which, as I well recalled, he locked up at nine--after which he would
receive no one, not even a patient?
It was not nine yet, but it was very near that hour. I had but twenty
minutes in which to mount the hill to the old house marked by the
doctor's sign and by another peculiarity of so distinct a nature that it
would serve to characterize a dwelling in a city as large as New
York--though I doubt if New York can show its like from the Battery to
the Bronx. The particulars of this I will mention later. I have first to
relate the relief I felt when, on entering the old neighborhood, I heard
in response to a few notes of a certain popular melody which I had
allowed to leave my lips, an added note or two which warned me that my
partner was somewhere hidden among the alleys of this very
unaristocratic quarter. Indeed, from the sound, I judged him to be in
the rear of the doctor's house and, being anxious to hear what he had to
say before advancing upon the door which might open my way to easy
fortune or complete defeat, I paused a few steps off and waited for his
appearance.
He was at my elbow before I had either seen or heard him. He was always
light of foot, but this time he seemed to have no tread at all.
"Still here," was his comforting assurance.
"Both?" I whispered back.
"Both."
"Any one else?"
"No. A boy drove away the buggy and has not come back. Sawbones keeps no
girl."
"Is the child quiet? Has there been no alarm?"
"Not a breath."
"No cops in the neighborhood? No spies around?"
"Not one. We've got it all this time. But--"
"Hush!"
"There's nobody."
"Yes, the doctor; he's fastening up his house. I must hasten; nothing
would induce me to let that innocent remain under his roof all night."
"It's not the windows he is at."
"What then?"
"The door, the big front door."
"The--"
"Yes."
I gave my partner a surprised look, undoubtedly lost in the darkness,
and drew a step nearer the house.
"It's just the same old gloom-box," I exclaimed, and paused for an
instant to mark the changes which had taken place in the surroundings.
They were very few and I turned back to fix my eye on the front door
where a rattling sound could be heard, as of some one fingering the
latch. It was this door which formed the peculiarity of the house. In
itself it was like any other that was well-fashioned and solid, but it
opened upon space--that is, if it was ever opened, which I doubted. The
stoop and even the railing which had once guarded it, had all been
removed, leaving a bare front, with this inhospitable entrance shut
against every one who had not the convenience for mounting to it by a
ladder. There was another way in, but this was round on one side, and
did not present itself to the eye unless one approached from the west
end of the street; so that to half the passers-by the house looked like
a deserted one till they came abreast of the flagged path which led to
the office door. As the windows had never been unclosed in my day and
were not now, I took it for granted that they had remained thus
inhospitably shut during all the years of my absence, which certainly
offered but little encouragement to a man bent on an errand which would
soon take him into those dismal precincts.
"What goes on behind those shuttered windows?" thought I. "I know of one
thing, but what else?" The one thing was the counting of money and the
arranging of innumerable gold pieces on the great top of a baize-covered
table in what I should now describe as the back parlor. I remembered how
he used to do it. I caught him at it once, having crept up one windy
night from my little room off the office to see what kept the doctor up
so late.
As I now stood listening in the dark street to those strange touches on
a door disused for years, I recalled the tremor with which I rounded the
top of the stair that night of long ago and the mingled fear and awe
with which I recognized, not only such a mint of money as I had never
seen out of the bank before, but the greedy and devouring passion with
which he pushed the glittering coins about and handled the bank-notes
and gloated over the pile it all made when drawn together by his hooked
fingers, till the sound, perhaps, of my breathing in the dark hall
startled him with a thought of discovery, and his two hands came
together over that pile with a gesture more eloquent even than the look
with which he seemed to penetrate the very shadows in the silent space
wherein I stood. It was a vision short, but inexpressibly vivid, of the
miser incarnate, and having seen it and escaped detection, as was my
undeserved luck that night, I needed never to ask again why he had been
willing to accept risks from which most men shrink from fear if not from
conscience. He loved money, not as the spender loves it, openly and
with luxurious instincts, but secretly and with a knavish dread of
discovery which spoke of treasure ill acquired.
And now he was seeking to add to his gains, and I stood on the outside
of his house listening to sounds I did not understand, instead of
attempting to draw him to the office-door by ringing the bell he never
used to disconnect till nine.
"Do you know that I don't quite like the noises which are being made up
there?" came in a sudden whisper to my ear. "Supposing it was the child
trying to get out! She does not know there is no stoop; she seemed
sleeping or half-dead when he carried her in, and if by any chance she
has got hold of the key and the door should open--"
"Hush!" I cried, starting forward in horror of the thought he had
suggested. "It is opening. I see a thread of light. What does it mean,
Jupp? The child? No; there is more than a child's strength in that push.
Hist!" Here I drew him flat against the wall. The door above had swung
back and some one was stamping on the threshold over our heads in what
appeared to be an outburst of ungovernable fury.
That it was the doctor I could not doubt. But why this anger; why this
mad gasping after breath and the half-growl, half-cry, with which he
faced the night and the quiet of a street which to his glance, passing
as it did over our heads, must have appeared altogether deserted? We
were consulting each other's faces for some explanation of this
unlooked-for outbreak, when the door above us suddenly slammed to and we
heard a renewal of that fumbling with lock and key which had first drawn
our attention. But the hand was not sure or the hall was dark, for the
key did not turn in the lock. Suddenly awake to my opportunity, I
wheeled Jupp about and, making use of his knee and back, climbed up till
I was enabled to reach the knob and turn it just as the man within had
stepped back, probably to procure more light.
The result was that the door swung open and I stumbled in, falling
almost face downward on the marble floor faintly checkered off to my
sight in the dim light of a lamp set far back in a bare and dismal hall.
I was on my feet again in an instant and it was in this manner, and with
all the disadvantages of a hatless head and a disordered countenance,
that I encountered again my old employer after five years of absence.
He did not recognize me. I saw it by the look of alarm which crossed his
features and the involuntary opening of his lips in what would certainly
have been a loud cry if I had not smiled and cried out with false
gaiety:
"Excuse me, doctor, I never came in by that door before. Pardon my
awkwardness. The step is somewhat high from the street."
My smile is my own, they say; at all events it served to enlighten him.
"Bob Trevitt," he exclaimed, but with a growl of displeasure I could
hardly condemn under the circumstances.
I hastened to push my advantage, for he was looking very threateningly
toward the door which was swaying gently and in an inviting way to a man
who if old, had more power in his arms than I had in my whole body.
"_Mr._ Trevitt," I corrected; "and on a very important errand. I am here
on behalf of Mrs. Ocumpaugh, whose child you have at this moment under
your roof."