11:01 p. m.—Banked Fires
The corridor was deserted.
Lieutenant Valcour walked along it to the top of the stair well and
looked down into the entrance hall. He could see the broad athletic
back of Officer O’Brian on guard at the door. O’Brian’s snub nose was
pressed against the plate glass, and his eyes, one presumed, were
staring out through the door’s bronze grille upon the street.
As Lieutenant Valcour went down he wondered at the complete stillness
of the house. There was no sound of any nature at all. There was a
waiting quality about the stillness: a definite waiting for something
that would shatter the hush into bedlam.
“What are you pressing your nose against the glass for, O’Brian?” he
said.
The young policeman turned and grinned at him broadly.
“Sure, it’s them boys from the papers, sir,” he said. “They’re all
stirred up over what the medical examiner has just told them.”
Lieutenant Valcour groaned faintly. “When was this, O’Brian?”
“Not two whisks of a lamb’s tail ago, sir—out there in the vestibule.”
“Did the medical examiner go out into the vestibule?”
“He did that, Lieutenant, and the last mother’s son of them has just
beaten it off down the street like a jumping jack rabbit. They were
crazy after photographs, but he drew the line at that now.”
“Really?” Lieutenant Valcour was politely astounded.
“Sure and he did—with the exception of a flash or two he let them take
of himself.”
“And were you the little birdie, O’Brian?”
“Was I the which, Lieutenant?”
“Did you say ‘peet-tweet’ over his left shoulder as the flashlights
went off?”
“Ah, sure now, sir, and I did have the door open a wee bit. I was just
explaining to the boys that they couldn’t come in without your
permission nohow, and it was then that the medical examiner came along
and, hearing the talking, went outside to pacify them.”
“A modern martyr throwing himself to the lions. Except for the tea
party, O’Brian, has anything happened down here?”
“Not a thing, sir.”
“Any of the servants been drifting around?”
“Only one old dame in black, and seven foot tall if she’s one inch.
She came halfway down the stairs, took one dirty look at me, and then
stalked back up as stiff as a poker. Her bonnet was on her head.”
“You don’t know who she was, I suppose?”
“That and I don’t, sir. She looked like she might be a housekeeper.”
“She probably was. By the way, O’Brian, just what was it the medical
examiner told the boys?”
“Lieutenant, I could make neither the head nor the tail out of it. I’d
been telling them myself that the boss upstairs was dead and that foul
play was suspected, and they were hot after the medical examiner for a
further word, and I’m damned if he didn’t give it to them.”
“What was the word, O’Brian?”
“Indeed and it sounded like crinoline, sir—the stuff the missus do be
talking about in old dresses.”
“Was that all he said?”
“It was enough, sir. ‘Crinoline,’ said he, and looked very wise at
that. Then he added, ‘For the present, boys, no more,’ and off they
scampered like the devil in person was after them.”
“All right, O’Brian. Just stick where you are.”
Lieutenant Valcour wandered around the entrance hall but encountered,
beyond his own and the medical examiner’s, no hat. He knew that Dr.
Worth’s was still upstairs where the doctor had left it in Endicott’s
bedroom. He found the cupboard Mrs. Endicott had referred to. There
was no hat. The subject was becoming a fixed idea. It was growing
increasingly believable that the attacker had taken the hat and worn
it out of the house. But why should the attacker leave the house? And
what was the matter with the attacker’s own hat? Time, if not Endicott
himself, would have to tell.
From a reception room opening off the entrance hall he caught the
murmur of Dr. Worth’s and the medical examiner’s voices in
consultation. He passed the door indifferently and went upstairs.
. . . an old dame in black, seven foot tall if she was an inch. Her
bonnet was on her head.
. . . and her bonnet, Lieutenant Valcour repeated softly to himself,
was on her head.
He continued on up a second flight of stairs to the third floor. A
door toward the end of the hall was open, and light flooded out
through the doorway. He walked to it and looked in.
A tall, thin woman sat on a chair before a grate in which some coals
burned bleakly. She was unbelievably gaunt—her silhouette a pencil,
rigidly supporting an austere face beneath a smooth inverted cup of
steel gray hair. Black taffeta sheathed her, tightly pressing against
flat narrow planes, and smoothly surfacing two pipelike arms that
ended in the tapering, sensitive hands of an emotional ascetic.
Lieutenant Valcour rapped on the door jamb.
The woman did not start. Her head alone turned and faced him, and her
eyes were a contradiction of nature—black planets glowing coldly in a
sky of white.
“Pardon me, I am Lieutenant Valcour of the police. Are you, by any
chance, the housekeeper?”
Her voice was of New England—low almost to huskiness, a trifle harsh,
and completely stripped of all nuances.
“Yes, Lieutenant. I am Mrs. Siddons.”
“May I come in? Thank you—please don’t get up. I’ll only stay a minute
or two, if you don’t mind.”
He took a chair and placed it before the fireplace beside her own. He
sat down and did nothing beyond observing obliquely for a moment the
curiously artificial placidity of Mrs. Siddons’s clasped hands.
“There is no use in questioning me, Lieutenant, because I have nothing
to say.”
Her tone was the chill clear winds that sweep the rigorous mountains
of Vermont.
Lieutenant Valcour warmed his hands before the lazy coals and smiled
amiably. “And I,” he said, “have absolutely nothing to ask.”
“That is a lie.”
There was nothing abusive in the remark. It was simply a statement of
fact, coldly, dispassionately pronounced by the remarkable pencil
dressed in black who spired beside him. Lieutenant Valcour was shocked
into a nervous laugh. He discarded his mask of indifference and stared
at Mrs. Siddons openly and with complete interest. Not planets, her
eyes—rather were they banked fires beneath whose ash hot coals
smouldered deeply.
“I shouldn’t wonder,” he said, “but that your forbears came from
Salem.”
A look of interest stirred sleepily in the coals.
“Why so, sir?”
“Because there’s a look of witch-burning in your eyes.”
Mrs. Siddons gestured a slow negation.
“I would never abrogate the rights of God.”
“But you would approve, Mrs. Siddons.”
“I would _rejoice_, sir, in the crushing out of any evil or”—her tone
became implacably stern—“of any evil thing.”
“Or even of a human being?”
Her look did not waver.
“Yes, Lieutenant—or even of a human being.” She went on steadily and
unemotionally. Her words were fragments of stone chipped from some
elemental quarry of granitelike conviction and harsh purpose. “That is
why you find me dry-eyed, sir, in spite of the tragedy which has been
visited upon this house.”
Lieutenant Valcour felt that there was a catch in it somewhere. If she
held Endicott’s condition in the light of a tragedy then she scarcely
regarded his death as an act of vengeance on the part of her
unquestionably inflexible god.
“Tragedy?” he repeated softly.
“A tragedy, sir, for blinded eyes.”
He hoped that she wasn’t going to be allegorical. He endeavoured to
interpret. “It is hard on Mrs. Endicott,” he said.
For a moment he thought she was going to melt. “That poor young
thing,” she said, and her voice fringed on unaccustomed softnesses.
“That sweet young child of beauty—what a bitter ending for the journey
of her tormented heart.”
He stepped delicately out upon the fragile ice. “But she’s really
better off, don’t you think?”
“She will never know to the full the fortune of her release.” Mrs.
Siddons’s incredibly thin body was suddenly shaken with passion as she
added, “From that hateful—that filthy beast.”
“Oh, come, Mrs. Siddons—no man is quite as bad as all that.”
Her eyes blazed with the heat of a strange malevolence. “You didn’t
know him, Lieutenant, as we did.”
“‘We,’ Mrs. Siddons?”
“Myself, sir, and the servants under my charge.”
“You found him disagreeable—overbearing?”
Mrs. Siddons stared fixedly at the coals, as if finding in their
vibrant reds some adequate illustration of her angered thoughts. “I
found him such a man, Lieutenant, that I am glad to know that he is
dead.”
“But you see, Mrs. Siddons, he isn’t dead.”
He thought for a minute that she was going to faint and instinctively
leaned forward to support her. She stood up unsteadily but refused the
offer of his hands.
“If you will pardon me, sir, I believe I will lie down. There has
naturally been a certain strain—a——”
She bowed and found her way to a door that led into an inner room.
Lieutenant Valcour listened for a moment at its panels after she had
closed it.
He could not determine whether the muffled sound he heard was of
peculiar laughter or a sob.