The second floor was empty. A table lay overturned at the top of the
stairs, and a broken flower vase was weltering in its own ooze. Part way
down Betty stepped on something sharp, that proved to be the Japanese
paper knife from the den. I left her on the stairs examining her foot
and hurried to the lower floor.
Here everything was in the utmost confusion. Aunt Selina had fainted,
and was sitting in a hall chair with her head rolled over sidewise and
the poker from the library fireplace across her knees. No one was paying
any attention to her. And Jim was holding the front door open, while
three of the guards hesitated in the vestibule. The noises continued
from the back of the house, and as I stood on the lowest stair Bella
came out from the dining room, with her face streaked with soot, and
carrying a kettle of hot water.
“Jim,” she called wildly. “While Max and Dal are below, you can pour
this down from the top. It’s boiling.”
Jim glanced back over his shoulder. “Carry out your own murderous
designs,” he said. And then, as she started back with it, “Bella, for
Heaven’s sake,” he called, “have you gone stark mad? Put that kettle
down.”
She did it sulkily and Jim turned to the policeman.
“Yes, I know it was a false alarm before,” he explained patiently, “but
this is genuine. It is just as I tell you. Yes, Flannigan is in the
house somewhere, but he’s hiding, I guess. We could manage the thing
very well ourselves, but we have no cartridges for our revolvers.” Then
as the noise from the rear redoubled, “If you don’t come in and help, I
will telephone for the fire department,” he concluded emphatically.
I ran to Aunt Selina and tried to straighten her head. In a moment she
opened her eyes, sat up and stared around her. She saw the kettle at
once.
“What are you doing with boiling water on the floor?” she said to me,
with her returning voice. “Don’t you know you will spoil the floor?” The
ruling passion was strong with Aunt Selina, as usual.
I could not find out the trouble from any one; people appeared and
disappeared, carrying strange articles. Anne with a rope, Dal with his
hatchet, Bella and the kettle, but I could get a coherent explanation
from no one. When the guards finally decided that Jim was in earnest,
and that the rest of us were not crawling out a rear window while he
held them at the door, they came in, three of them and two reporters,
and Jim led them to the butler’s pantry.
Here we found Anne, very white and shaky, with the pantry table and two
chairs piled against the door of the kitchen slide, and clutching the
chamois-skin bag that held her jewels. She had a bottle of burgundy open
beside her, and was pouring herself a glass with shaking hands when we
appeared. She was furious at Jim.
“I very nearly fainted,” she said hysterically. “I might have been
murdered, and no one would have cared. I wish they would stop that
chopping, I’m so nervous I could scream.”
Jim took the Burgundy from her with one hand and pointed the police to
the barricaded door with the other.
“That is the door to the dumb-waiter shaft,” he said. “The lower one
is fastened on the inside, in some manner. The noises commenced about
eleven o’clock, while Mr. Brown was on guard. There were scraping sounds
first, and later the sound of a falling body. He roused Mr. Reed and
myself, but when we examined the shaft everything was quiet, and dark.
We tried lowering a candle on a string, but--it was extinguished from
below.”
The reporters were busily removing the table and chairs from the door.
“If you have a rope handy,” one of them said, “I will go down the
shaft.”
(Dal says that all reporters should have been policemen, and that all
policemen are natural newsgatherers.)
“The cage appears to be stuck, half-way between the floors,” Jim said.
“They are cutting through the door in the kitchen below.”
They opened the door then and cautiously peered down, but there was
nothing to be seen. I touched Jim gingerly on the arm.
“Is it--is it Flannigan,” I asked, “shut in there?”
“No--yes--I don’t know,” he returned absently. “Run along and don’t
bother, Kit. He may take to shooting any minute.”
Anne and I went out then and shut the door, and went into the dining
room and sat on our feet, for of course the bullets might come up
through the floor. Aunt Selina joined us there, and Bella, and the
Mercer girls, and we sat around and talked in whispers, and Leila Mercer
told of the time her grandfather had had a struggle with an escaped
lunatic.
In the midst of the excitement Tom appeared in a bathrobe, looking
very pale, with a bandage around his head, and the nurse at his heels
threatening to leave and carrying a bottle of medicine and a spoon. He
went immediately to the pantry, and soon we could hear him giving orders
and the rest hurrying around to obey them. The hammering ceased, and the
silence was even worse. It was more suggestive.
In about fifteen minutes there was a thud, as if the cage had fallen,
and the sound of feet rushing down the cellar stairs. Then there were
groans and loud oaths, and everybody talking at once, below, and the
sound of a struggle. In the dining room we all sat bent forward, with
straining ears and quickened breath, until we distinctly heard someone
laugh. Then we knew that, whatever it was, it was over, and nobody was
killed.
The sounds came closer, were coming up the stairs and into the pantry.
Then the door swung open, and Tom and a policeman appeared in the
doorway, with the others crowding behind. Between them they supported
a grimy, unshaven object, covered with whitewash from the wall of the
shaft, an object that had its hands fastened together with handcuffs,
and that leered at us with a pair of the most villainously crossed eyes
I have ever seen.
None of us had ever seen him before.
“Mr. Lawrence McGuirk, better known as Tubby,’” Tom said cheerfully.
“A celebrity in his particular line, which is second-story man and
all-round rascal. A victim of the quarantine, like ourselves.”
“We’ve missed him for a week,” one of the guards said with a grin.
“We’ve been real anxious about you, Tubby. Ain’t a week goes by, when
you’re in health, that we don’t hear something of you.”
Mr. McGuirk muttered something under his breath, and the men chuckled.
“It seems,” Tom said, interpreting, “that he doesn’t like us much. He
doesn’t like the food, and he doesn’t like the beds. He says just when
he got a good place fixed up in the coal cellar, Flannigan found it, and
is asleep there now, this minute.”
Aunt Selina rose suddenly and cleared her throat.
“Am I to understand,” she asked severely, “that from now on we will have
to add two newspaper reporters, three policemen and a burglar to the
occupants of this quarantined house? Because, if that is the case, I
absolutely refuse to feed them.”
But one of the reporters stepped forward and bowed ceremoniously.
“Madam,” he said, “I thank you for your kind invitation, but--it will
be impossible for us to accept. I had intended to break the good news
earlier, but this little game of burglar-in-a-corner prevented me. The
fact is, your Jap has been discovered to have nothing more serious than
chicken-pox, and--if you will forgive a poultry yard joke, there is no
longer any necessity for your being cooped up.”
Then he retired, quite pleased with himself.
One would have thought we had exhausted our capacity for emotion, but
Jim said a joyful emotion was so new that we hardly knew how to receive
it. Every one shook hands with every one else, and even the nurse shared
in the excitement and gave Jim the medicine she had prepared for Tom.
Then we all sat down and had some champagne, and while they were waiting
for the police wagon, they gave some to poor McGuirk. He was still quite
shaken from his experience when the dumb-waiter stuck. The wine cheered
him a little, and he told his story, in a voice that was creaky from
disuse, while Tom held my hand under the table.
He had had a dreadful week, he said; he spent his days in a closet in
one of the maids’ rooms--the one where we had put Jim. It was Jim waking
out of a nap and declaring that the closet door had moved by itself and
that something had crawled under his bed and out of the door, that had
roused the suspicions of the men in the house--and he slept at night on
the coal in the cellar. He was actually tearful when he rubbed his hand
over his scrubby chin, and said he hadn’t had a shave for a week. He
took somebody’s razor, he said, but he couldn’t get hold of a portable
mirror, and every time he lathered up and stood in front of the glass in
the dining room sideboard, some one came and he had had to run and hide.
He told, too, of his attempts to escape, of the board on the roof, of
the home-made rope, and the hole in the cellar, and he spoke feelingly
of the pearl collar and the struggle he had made to hide it. He said
that for three days it was concealed in the pocket of Jim’s old smoking
coat in the studio.
We were all rather sorry for him, but if we had made him uncomfortable,
think of what he had done to us. And for him to tell, as he did later in
court, that if that was high society he would rather be a burglar, and
that we starved him, and that the women had to dress each other because
they had no lady’s maids, and that the whole lot of us were in love with
one man, it was downright malicious.
The wagon came for him just as he finished his story, and we all went
to the door. In the vestibule Aunt Selina suddenly remembered something,
and she stepped forward and caught the poor fellow by the arm.
“Young man,” she said grimly. “I’ll thank you to return what you took
from ME last Tuesday night.”
McGuirk stared, then shuddered and turned suddenly pale.
“Good Lord!” he ejaculated. “On the stairs to the roof! YOU?”
They led him away then, quite broken, with Aunt Selina staring after
him. She never did understand. I could have explained, but it was too
awful.
On the steps McGuirk turned and took a farewell glance at us. Then he
waved his hand to the policemen and reporters who had gathered around.
“Goodby, fellows,” he called feebly. “I ain’t sorry, I ain’t. Jail’ll be
a paradise after this.”
And then we went to pack our trunks.
NOTE FROM MAX WHICH CAME THE NEXT DAY WITH ITS ENCLOSURE.
My Dear Kit--The enclosed trunk tag was used on my trunk, evidently by
mistake. Higgins discovered it when he was unpacking and returned it
to me under the misapprehension that I had written it. I wish I had. I
suppose there must be something attractive about a fellow who has the
courage to write a love letter on the back of a trunk tag, and who
doesn’t give a tinker’s damn who finds it. But for my peace of mind, ask
him not to leave another one around where I will come across it. Max.
WRITTEN ON THE BACK OF THE TRUNK TAG.
Don’t you know that I won’t see you until tomorrow? For Heaven’s sake,
get away from this crowd and come into the den. If you don’t I will kiss
you before everybody. Are you coming? T.
WRITTEN BELOW.
No indeed. K.
THIS WAS SCRATCHED OUT AND BENEATH.
Coming.
End of Project Gutenberg’s When a Man Marries, by Mary Roberts Rinehart