The jade Joss had the room to himself. There was little enough light and
no fire. Gray shadows hung thick in the place, palpable and dreary. The
blinds were down and the curtains all drawn. It was late afternoon in
January—a cold, forbidding day; and the room itself, once the heart of
the house, was even colder, more ghoul-like. Only one or two thin shafts
of sickly light crept in, penetrating the gloom—but not lifting it,
intensifying it rather.
Joss looked cold, neglected and alien. The rose-colored lotus looked
pinched, gray and frozen—poor exiled pair, and here and so they had
been since a few days after Richard Bransby’s death, when Helen had left
the room, locking it behind her, and pronounced it taboo to all others.
But now a key turned in the door, creaking and stiffly, as if long
unused to its office.
In the hall, Mrs. Leavitt drew back with a shiver and motioned
imperatively to Stephen to precede her. “How dark it is,” she said, and
not very bravely, following him in not ungingerly.
“Yes,” he answered crisply. He had not come there to talk. And, like
her, he was intensely nervous; but from a very different cause. Dead
men, and the places of their last earthly resting, meant nothing to him.
“And cold. Stephen, light the fire while I draw the curtains. Have you
matches?”
“Of course.” He knelt at the fireplace and set a match to the gas logs.
Mrs. Leavitt drew the curtain aside and raised the blinds. The winter
sunlight came streaming through the windows, a chilled unfriendly
sunshine, but it flooded the room. Pryde looked about quickly, and the
woman did too.
She was much affected. “Oh, Stephen, how this room does bring it all
back to me! It seems as if it were only yesterday that Richard was
here—poor Richard.” Then her eyes caught their old prey—dust—and
dust—dust everywhere. She pulled open a drawer under the bookshelves
and caught up a little feather duster that had always been kept there.
But Stephen checked her abruptly. “Don’t touch that table—don’t touch
anything on any of the tables,” he said sharply.
“Well, I’m sure——”
“No—you must not. I—I promised Helen——”
“Promised Helen?”
“That no one should lay hand on even one thing, no one but myself, and
that I would touch as little as possible—just to find the papers.”
“Well, I’m sure——”
His eye fell upon the bit of jade and he pointed to it, laughing
nervously. “Especially, I had to promise her that I’d not lay a finger
on that. You remember how Uncle Dick used absent-mindedly to play with
it. And Helen declares that no one shall ever touch it again but
herself, and she only to dust it.”
“Well, it needs dusting now, right enough,” Mrs. Leavitt remarked
resentfully.
“Are you quite sure that everything here is exactly as Uncle Dick left
it?” In spite of himself he could not keep his hideous anxiety out of
his voice.
But Mrs. Leavitt did not notice. She was looking furtively about the
unkempt room with disapproving eyes. She answered mechanically,
“Oh—yes—everything. The day Richard’s coffin was carried out of it,
Helen locked it up herself, just as it was. It has never been opened
since.”
“She didn’t disturb any of the papers on this table?”
“No.”
“And no one has been here since, you are sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” she replied acidly. “If I refused you, my own
nephew, admission twenty times at least, I wouldn’t allow any one else
in, would I? Helen said, before she went up to town to live because she
couldn’t bear to stay here, poor child—it’s very lonely without
her—well, she said that she did not want any one to come in here until
she returned. Naturally I respected her wishes—orders, you might call
them, since this is her house now—not that I grudge that. Well, now you
come with this letter from her, saying that you are to do what you like
in the library, and are to have her father’s keys—so of course I opened
it for you—and glad enough to get it opened at last—and here are the
keys; it’s only recently I’ve had them. Helen kept them herself for a
long time.”
Stephen took them from her quickly—almost too quickly, had she been a
woman observant of anything but dust and disorder. “I persuaded her to
write it,” he said. “It is time her father’s papers were looked over,
and it would be too heavy a task for her—too sad.”
“Stephen, is she still grieving over Hugh’s disappearance?”
Pryde shrugged his shoulders. “H’m, yes.”
“Poor child—poor child! It seems as if everything were taken from her
at once. And to think that a nephew of mine—well, nearly a
nephew—should desert from the army, and in war time, too—that there
should be a warrant out for his arrest! Just do look at that dust!”
Stephen’s patience was wearing thin. “If you’ll excuse me now, Aunt
Caroline——”
“Of course—you have a great deal to do, and I have too; the servants
get worse and worse. Servants! They’re not servants; war impostures, I
call them. Well, I’ll leave you now.” But at the door she turned again.
“Stephen!”
“Yes.” He tried not to say it too impatiently.
“There isn’t anything of great value in this room, is there?”
“Why, no,” he said nervously.
“That’s odd.”
“Why—odd?” His voice was tense, and he did not look at her.
“Three times since Richard died, burglars have tried to force their way
through the windows in this room.”
“Oh!” Pryde managed to say, and it was all he could manage to say.
“Always the same windows, you understand. Each time, fortunately, we
frightened them away.”
“You have reported the matter to the police?” The anxiety made his voice
husky.
“Yes, but all they ever did was to make notes.”
“You have no idea who the burglar was? Burglars, I mean,” correcting
himself awkwardly. “You never caught sight of him—them?”
“No—not a glimpse.”
“No—oh, just some tramp, I dare say.”
He was easier now, but his voice was a little unsteady from strain and
with relief. “And now please——”
“Yes, I’ll hurry away now. Barker is dusting the best dinner service—if
I’m not there to watch, she’s sure to break something. Call me, if you
want me.”
“I shan’t want you, Aunt Caroline.”