Of course, one knows that there are people who in a different grade of
society would be shoplifters and pickpockets. When they are restrained
by obligation or environment they become a little overkeen at bridge,
or take the wrong sables, or stuff a gold-backed brush into a muff at
a reception. You remember the ivory dressing set that Theodora Bucknell
had, fastened with fine gold chains? And the sensation it caused at the
Bucknell cotillion when Mrs. Van Zire went sweeping to her carriage with
two feet of gold chain hanging from the front of her wrap?
But Anne’s pearl collar was different. In the first place, instead of
three or four hundred people, the suspicion had to be divided among ten.
And of those ten, at least eight of us were friends, and the other two
had been vouched for by the Browns and Jimmy. It was a horrible mix-up.
For the necklace was gone--there couldn’t be any doubt of that--and
although, as Dallas said, it couldn’t get out of the house, still, there
were plenty of places to hide the thing.
The worst of our trouble really originated with Max Reed, after all.
For it was Max who made the silly wager over the telephone, with Dick
Bagley. He bet five hundred even that one of us, at least, would break
quarantine within the next twenty-four hours, and, of course, that
settled it. Dick told it around the club as a joke, and a man who owns
a newspaper heard him and called up the paper. Then the paper called up
the health office, after setting up a flaming scare-head, “Will Money
Free Them? Board of Health versus Millionaire.”
It was almost three when the house settled down--nobody had any night
clothes, although finally, through Dallas, who gave them to Anne, who
gave them to the rest, we got some things of Jimmy’s--and I was still
dressed. The house was perfectly quiet, and, after listening carefully,
I went slowly down the stairs. There was a light in the hall, and
another back in the dining room, and I got along without any trouble.
But the pantry, where the stairs led down, was dark, and the wretched
swinging door would not stay open.
I caught my skirt in the door as I went through, and I had to stop to
loosen it. And in that awful minute I heard some one breathing just
beside me. I had stooped to my gown, and I turned my head without
straightening--I couldn’t have raised myself to an erect posture, for
my knees were giving way under me--and just at my feet lay the still
glowing end of a match!
I had to swallow twice before I could speak. Then I said sharply:
“Who’s there?”
The man was so close it is a wonder I had not walked into him; his voice
was right at my ear.
“I am sorry I startled you,” he said quietly. “I was afraid to speak
suddenly, or move, for fear I would do--what I have done.”
It was Mr. Harbison.
“I--I thought you were--it is very late,” I managed to say, with dry
lips. “Do you know where the electric switch is?”
“Mrs. Wilson!” It was clear he had not known me before. “Why, no; don’t
you?”
“I am all confused,” I muttered, and beat a retreat into the dining
room. There, in the friendly light, we could at least see each other,
and I think he was as much impressed by the fact that I had not
undressed as I was by the fact that he HAD, partly. He wore a hideous
dressing gown of Jimmy’s, much too small, and his hair, parted and
plastered down in the early evening, stood up in a sort of brown brush
all over his head. He was trying to flatten it with his hands.
“It must be three o’clock,” he said, with polite surprise, “and the
house is like a barn. You ought not to be running around with your arms
uncovered, Mrs. Wilson. Surely you could have called some of us.”
“I didn’t wish to disturb any one,” I said, with distinct truth.
“I suppose you are like me,” he said. “The novelty of the situation--and
everything. I got to thinking things over, and then I realized the
studio was getting cold, so I thought I would come down and take a look
at the furnace. I didn’t suppose any one else would think of it. But
I lost myself in that pantry, stumbled against a half-open drawer, and
nearly went down the dumb-waiter.” And, as if in judgment on me, at
that instant came two rather terrific thumps from somewhere below,
and inarticulate words, shouted rather than spoken. It was uncanny, of
course, coming as it did through the register at our feet. Mr. Harbison
looked startled.
“Oh, by the way,” I said, as carelessly as I could. “In the excitement,
I forgot to mention it. There is a policeman asleep in the furnace room.
I--I suppose we will have to keep him now,” I finished as airily as
possible.
“Oh, a policeman--in the cellar,” he repeated, staring at me, and he
moved toward the pantry door.
“You needn’t go down,” I said feverishly, with visions of Bella Knowles
sitting on the kitchen table, surrounded by soiled dishes and all the
cheerless aftermath of a dinner party. “Please don’t go down. I--it’s
one of my rules--never to let a stranger go down to the kitchen. I--I’m
peculiar--that way--and besides, it’s--it’s mussy.”
Bang! Crash! through the register pipe, and some language quite
articulate. Then silence.
“Look here, Mrs. Wilson,” he said resolutely. “What do I care about the
kitchen? I’m going down and arrest that policeman for disturbing the
peace. He will have the pipes down.”
“You must not go,” I said with desperate firmness. “He--he is probably
in a very dangerous state just now. We--I--locked him in.”
The Harbison man grinned and then became serious.
“Why don’t you tell me the whole thing?” he demanded. “You’ve been in
trouble all evening, and--you can trust me, you know, because I am a
stranger; because the minute this crazy quarantine is raised I am off
to the Argentine Republic,” (perhaps he said Chili) “and because I don’t
know anything at all about you. You see, I have to believe what you
tell me, having no personal knowledge of any of you to go on. Now tell
me--whom have you hidden in the cellar, besides the policeman?”
There was no use trying to deceive him; he was looking straight into my
eyes. So I decided to make the best of a bad thing. Anyhow, it was going
to require strength to get Bella through the coal hole with one arm and
restrain the policeman with the other.
“Come,” I said, making a sudden resolution, and led the way down the
stairs.
He said nothing when he saw Bella, for which I was grateful. She was
sitting at the table, with her arms in front of her, and her head buried
in them. And then I saw she was asleep. Her hat and veil were laid
beside her, and she had taken off her coat and draped it around her. She
had rummaged out a cold pheasant and some salad, and had evidently had
a little supper. Supper and a nap, while I worried myself gray-headed
about her!
“She--she came in unexpectedly--something about the butler,” I explained
under my breath. “And--she doesn’t want to stay. She is on bad terms
with--with some of the people upstairs. You can see how impossible the
situation is.”
“I doubt if we can get her out,” he said, as if the situation were quite
ordinary. “However, we can try. She seems very comfortable. It’s a pity
to rouse her.”
Here the prisoner in the furnace room broke out afresh. It sounded
as though he had taken a lump of coal and was attacking the lock. Mr.
Harbison followed the noise, and I could hear him arguing, not gently.
“Another sound,” he finished, “and you won’t get out of here at all,
unless you crawl up the furnace pipe!”
When he came back, Bella was rousing. She lifted her head with her eyes
shut and then opened them one at a time, blinked, and sat up. She didn’t
see him at first.
“You wretch!” she said ungratefully, after she had yawned. “Do you know
what time it is? And that--” Then she saw Mr. Harbison and sat staring
at him.
“This is Mr. Harbison,” I said to her hastily. “He--he came with Anne
and Dal and--he is shut in, too.”
By that time Bella had seen how handsome he was, and she took a hair pin
out of her mouth, and arched her eyebrows, which was always Bella’s best
pose.
“I am Miss Knowles,” she said sweetly (of course, the court had given
her back her name), “and I stopped in tonight, thinking the house
was empty, to see about a--a butler. Unfortunately, the house was
quarantined just at that time, and--here I am. Surely there can not be
any harm in helping me to get out?” (Pleading tone.) “I have not been
exposed to any contagion, and in the exhausted state of my health the
confinement would be positively dangerous.”
She rolled her eyes at him, and I could see she was making an
impression. Of course she was free. She had a perfect right to marry
again, but I will say this: Bella is a lot better looking by electric
light than she is the next morning.
The upshot of it was that the gentleman who built bridges and looked
down on society from a lofty, lonely pinnacle agreed to help one of the
most gleaming members of the aforesaid society to outwit the law.
It took about fifteen minutes to quiet the policeman. Nobody ever knew
what Mr. Harbison did to him, but for twenty-four hours he was quite
tractable. He changed after that, but that comes later in the story.
Anyhow, the Harbison man went upstairs and came down with a Bagdad
curtain and a cushion to match, and took them into the furnace room,
and came out and locked the door behind him, and then we were ready for
Bella’s escape.
But there were four special officers and three reporters watching the
house, as a result of Max Reed’s idiocy. Once, after trying all the
other windows and finding them guarded, we discovered a little bit of a
hole in an out-of-the-way corner that looked like a ventilator and was
covered with a heavy wire screen. No prisoners ever dug their way out of
a dungeon with more energy than that with which we attached that screen,
hacking at it with kitchen knives, whispering like conspirators, being
scratched with the ragged edges of the wire, frozen with the cold air
one minute and boiling with excitement the next. And when the wire was
cut, and Bella had rolled her coat up and thrust it through and was
standing on a chair ready to follow, something outside that had looked
like a barrel moved, and said, “Oh, I wouldn’t do that if I were you.
It would be certain to be undignified, and probably it would be
unpleasant--later.”
We coaxed and pleaded and tried to bribe, and that happened, as it
turned out, to be one of the worst things we had to endure. For the
whole conversation came out the next afternoon in the paper, with the
most awful drawings, and the reporter said it was the flashing of the
jewels we wore that first attracted his attention. And that brings me
back to the robbery.
For when we had crept back to the kitchen, and Bella was fumbling
for her handkerchief to cry into and the Harbison man was trying to
apologize for the language he had used to the reporter, and I was on the
verge of a nervous chill--well, it was then that Bella forgot all about
crying and jumped and held out her arm.
“My diamond bracelet!” she screeched. “Look, I’ve lost it.”
Well, we went over every inch of that basement, until I knew every crack
in the flooring, every spot on the cement. And Bella was nasty, and said
that she had never seen that part of the house in such condition, and
that if I had acted like a sane person and put her out, when she had no
business there at all, she would have had her freedom and her bracelet,
and that if we were playing a joke on her (as if we felt like joking!)
we would please give her the bracelet and let her go and die in a
corner; she felt very queer.
At half-past four o’clock we gave up.
“It’s gone,” I said. “I don’t believe you wore it here. No one could
have taken it. There wasn’t a soul in this part of the house, except the
policeman and he’s locked in.”
At five o’clock we put her to sleep in the den. She was in a fearful
temper, and I was glad enough to be able to shut the door on her. Tom
Harbison--that was his name--helped me to creep upstairs, and wanted
to get me a glass of ale to make me sleep. But I said it would be of no
use, as I had to get up and get the breakfast. The last thing he said
was that the policeman seemed above the average in intelligence, and
perhaps we could train him to do plain cooking and dishwashing.
I did not go to sleep at once. I lay on the chintz-covered divan in
Bella’s dressing room and stared at the picture of her with the violets
underneath. I couldn’t see what there was about Bella to inspire such
undying devotion, but I had to admit that she had looked handsome that
night, and that the Harbison man had certainly been impressed.
At seven o’clock Jimmy Wilson pounded at my door, and I could have
choked him joyfully. I dragged myself to the door and opened it, and
then I heard excited voices. Everybody seemed to be up but Aunt Selina,
and they were all talking at once.
Anne Brown was in the corner of the group, waving her hands, while
Dallas was trying to hook the back of her gown with one hand and hold a
blanket around himself with the other. No one was dressed except Anne,
and she had been up for an hour, looking in shoes and under the corners
of rugs and around the bed clothing for her jeweled collar. When she saw
me she began all over again.
“I had it on when I went into my room,” she declared, “and I put it on
the dressing table when I undressed. I meant to put it under my pillow,
but I forgot. And I didn’t sleep well; I was awake half the night.
Wasn’t I, Dal? Then, when the clock downstairs in the hall was chiming
five, something roused me, and I sat up in bed. It was still dark, but I
pinched Dal and said there was somebody in the room. You remember that,
don’t you, Dal?”
“I thought you had nightmare,” he said sheepishly.
“I lay still for ages, it seemed to me, and then--the door into the
hall closed. I heard the catch click. I turned on the light over the bed
then, and the room was empty. I thought of my collar, and although it
seemed ridiculous, with the house sealed as it is, and all of us friends
for years--well, I got up and looked, and it was gone!”
No one spoke for an instant. It WAS a queer situation, for the collar
was gone; Anne’s red eyes showed it was true. And there we stood, every
one of us a miserable picture of guilt, and tried to look innocent and
debonair and unsuspicious. Finally Jim held up his hand and signified
that he wanted to say something.
“It’s like this,” he said, “until this thing is cleared up, for Heaven’s
sake, let’s try to be sane! If every fellow thinks the other fellow
did it, this house will be a nice little hell to live in. And if
anybody”--here he glared around--“if anybody has got funny and is hiding
those jewels, I want to say that he’d better speak up now. Later, it
won’t be so easy for him. It’s a mighty poor joke.”
But nobody spoke.