CHAPTER V
AN ENCOUNTER
Alan, standing in the darkness of the hall, felt in his pocket for hismatches and struck one on the box. The light showed the hall in frontof him, reaching back into some vague, distant darkness, and greatrooms with wide portiered doorways gaping on both sides. He turnedinto the room upon his right, glanced to see that the shades were drawnon the windows toward the street, then found the switch and turned onthe electric light.
As he looked around, he fought against his excitement and feeling ofexpectancy; it was--he told himself--after all, merely a vacant house,though bigger and more expensively furnished than any he ever had beenin except the Sherrills; and Sherrill's statement to him had impliedthat anything there might be in it which could give the reason for hisfather's disappearance would be probably only a paper, a record of somekind. It was unlikely that a thing so easily concealed as that couldbe found by him on his first examination of the place; what he had comehere for now--he tried to make himself believe--was merely to obtainwhatever other information it could give him about his father and theway his father had lived, before Sherrill and he had any otherconversation.
Alan had not noticed, when he stepped into the hall in the morning,whether the house then had been heated; now he appreciated that it wasquite cold and, probably, had been cold for the three days since hisfather had gone, and his servant had left to look for him. Coming fromthe street, it was not the chilliness of the house he felt but thestillness of the dead air; when a house is heated, there is always somemotion of the air, but this air was stagnant. Alan had dropped his haton a chair in the hall; he unbuttoned his overcoat but kept it on, andstuffed his gloves into his pocket.
A light in a single room, he thought, would not excite curiosity orattract attention from the neighbors or any one passing in the street;but lights in more than one room might do that. He resolved to turnoff the light in each room as he left it, before lighting the next one.
It had been a pleasant as well as a handsome house, if he could judgeby the little of it he could see, before the change had come over hisfather. The rooms were large with high ceilings. The one where hestood, obviously was a library; bookshelves reached three quarters ofthe way to the ceiling on three of its walls except where they werebroken in two places by doorways, and in one place on the south wall byan open fireplace. There was a big library table-desk in the center ofthe room, and a stand with a shaded lamp upon it nearer the fireplace.A leather-cushioned Morris chair--a lonely, meditative-lookingchair--was by the stand and at an angle toward the hearth; the rug infront of it was quite worn through and showed the floor underneath. Asympathy toward his father, which Sherrill had not been able to makehim feel, came to Alan as he reflected how many days and nightsBenjamin Corvet must have passed reading or thinking in that chairbefore his restless feet could have worn away the tough, Orientalfabric of the rug.
There were several magazines on the top of the large desk, someunwrapped, some still in their wrappers; Alan glanced at them and sawthat they all related to technical and scientific subjects. The deskevidently had been much used and had many drawers; Alan pulled one openand saw that it was full of papers; but his sensation as he touched thetop one made him shut the drawer again and postpone prying of that sortuntil he had looked more thoroughly about the house.
He went to the door of the connecting room and looked into it. Thisroom, dusky in spite of the light which shone past him through the widedoorway, was evidently another library; or rather it appeared to havebeen the original library, and the front room had been converted into alibrary to supplement it. The bookcases here were built so high that alittle ladder on wheels was required for access to the top shelves.Alan located the light switch in the room; then he returned, switchedoff the light in the front room, crossed in the darkness into thesecond room, and pressed the switch.
A weird, uncanny, half wail, half moan, coming from the upper hall,suddenly filled the house. Its unexpectedness and the nature of thesound stirred the hair upon his head, and he started back; then hepressed the switch again, and the noise stopped. He lighted anothermatch, found the right switch, and turned on the light. Only afterdiscovering two long tiers of white and black keys against the northwall did Alan understand that the switch must control the motor workingthe bellows of an organ which had pipes in the upper hall; it was thesort of organ that can be played either with fingers or by means of apaper roll; a book of music had fallen upon the keys, so that one waspressed down, causing the note to sound when the bellows pumped.
But having accounted for the sound did not immediately end the startthat it had given Alan. He had the feeling which so often comes to onein an unfamiliar and vacant house that there was some one in the housewith him. He listened and seemed to hear another sound in the upperhall, a footstep. He went out quickly to the foot of the stairs andlooked up them.
"Is any one here?" he called. "Is any one here?"
His voice brought no response. He went half way up the curve of thewide stairway, and called again, and listened; then he fought down thefeeling he had had; Sherrill had said there would be no one in thehouse, and Alan was certain there was no one. So he went back to theroom where he had left the light.
The center of this room, like the room next to it, was occupied by alibrary table-desk. He pulled open some of the drawers in it; one ortwo had blue prints and technical drawings in them; the others had onlythe miscellany which accumulates in a room much used. There weredrawers also under the bookcases all around the room; they appeared,when Alan opened some of them, to contain pamphlets of varioussocieties, and the scientific correspondence of which Sherrill had toldhim. He looked over the titles of some of the books on the shelves--amultitude of subjects, anthropology, exploration, deep-sea fishing,ship-building, astronomy. The books in each section of the shelvesseemed to correspond in subject with the pamphlets and correspondencein the drawer beneath, and these, by their dates, to divide themselvesinto different periods during the twenty years that Benjamin Corvet hadlived alone here.
Alan felt that seeing these things was bringing his father closer tohim; they gave him a little of the feeling he had been unable to getwhen he looked at his father's picture. He could realize better nowthe lonely, restless man, pursued by some ghost he could not kill,taking up for distraction one subject of study after another,exhausting each in turn until he could no longer make it engross him,and then absorbing himself in the next.
These two rooms evidently had been the ones most used by his father;the other rooms on this floor, as Alan went into them one by one, hefound spoke far less intimately of Benjamin Corvet. A dining-room wasin the front of the house to the north side of the hall; a service roomopened from it, and on the other side of the service room was whatappeared to be a smaller dining-room. The service room communicatedboth by dumb waiter and stairway with rooms below; Alan went down thestairway only far enough to see that the rooms below were servants'quarters; then he came back, turned out the light on the first floor,struck another match, and went up the stairs to the second story.
The rooms opening on to the upper hall, it was plain to him, thoughtheir doors were closed, were mostly bedrooms. He put his hand athazard on the nearest door and opened it. As he caught the taste andsmell of the air in the room--heavy, colder, and deader even than theair in the rest of the house--he hesitated; then with his match hefound the light switch.
The room and the next one which communicated with it evidently were--orhad been--a woman's bedroom and boudoir. The hangings, which werestill swaying from the opening of the door, had taken permanently thefolds in which they had hung for many years; there were the scores oflong-time idleness, not of use, in the rugs and upholstery of thechairs. The bed, however, was freshly made up, as though the bedclothing had been changed occasionally. Alan went through the bedroomto the door of the boudoir, and saw that that too had the same look ofunoccupancy and disuse. On the low dressing table were scattered suchartic
les as a woman starting on a journey might think it not worthwhile to take with her. There was no doubt that these were the roomsof his father's wife.
Had his father preserved them thus, as she had left them, in the hopethat she might come back, permitting himself to fix no time when heabandoned that hope, or even to change them after he had learned thatshe was dead? Alan thought not; Sherrill had said that Corvet hadknown from the first that his separation from his wife was permanent.The bed made up, the other things neglected, and evidently looked afteror dusted only at long separated periods, looked more as though Corvethad shrunk from seeing them or even thinking of them, and had left themto be looked after wholly by the servant, without ever being able tobring himself to give instructions that they should be changed. Alanfelt that he would not be surprised to learn that his father never hadentered these ghostlike rooms since the day his wife had left him.
On the top of a chest of high drawers in a corner near the dressingtable were some papers. Alan went over to look at them; they wereinvitations, notices of concerts and of plays twenty years old--themail, probably, of the morning she had gone away, left where her maidor she herself had laid them, and only picked up and put back there atthe times since when the room was dusted. As Alan touched them, he sawthat his fingers left marks in the dust on the smooth top of the chest;he noticed that some one else had touched the things and made marks ofthe same sort as he had made. The freshness of these other marksstartled him; they had been made within a day or so. They could nothave been made by Sherrill, for Alan had noticed that Sherrill's handswere slender and delicately formed; Corvet, too, was not a large man;Alan's own hand was of good size and powerful, but when he put hisfingers over the marks the other man had made, he found that the otherhand must have been larger and more powerful than his own. Had it beenCorvet's servant? It might have been, though the marks seemed toofresh for that; for the servant, Sherrill had said, had left the dayCorvet's disappearance was discovered.
Alan pulled open the drawers to see what the other man might have beenafter. It had not been the servant; for the contents of thedrawers--old brittle lace and woman's clothing--were tumbled as thoughthey had been pulled out and roughly and inexpertly pushed back; theystill showed the folds in which they had lain for years and whichrecently had been disarranged.
This proof that some one had been prying about in the house beforehimself and since Corvet had gone, startled Alan and angered him. Itbrought him suddenly a sense of possession which he had not been ableto feel when Sherrill had told him the house was his; it brought animpulse of protection of these things about him. Who had beensearching in Benjamin Corvet's--in Alan's house? He pushed the drawersshut hastily and hurried across the hall to the room opposite. In thisroom--plainly Benjamin Corvet's bedroom--were no signs of intrusion.He went to the door of the room connecting with it, turned on thelight, and looked in. It was a smaller room than the others andcontained a roll-top desk and a cabinet. The cover of the desk wasclosed, and the drawers of the cabinet were shut and apparentlyundisturbed. Alan recognized that probably in this room he would findthe most intimate and personal things relating to his father; butbefore examining it, he turned back to inspect the bedroom.
It was a carefully arranged and well-cared-for room, plainly inconstant use. A reading stand, with a lamp, was beside the bed with abook marked about the middle. On the dresser were hair-brushes and acomb, and a box of razors, none of which were missing. When BenjaminCorvet had gone away, he had not taken anything with him, even toiletarticles. With the other things on the dresser, was a silver frame fora photograph with a cover closed and fastened over the portrait; asAlan took it up and opened it, the stiffness of the hinges and theedges of the lid gummed to the frame by disuse, showed that it was longsince it had been opened. The picture was of a woman of perhapsthirty--a beautiful woman, dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a refined,sensitive, spiritual-looking face. The dress she wore was the same,Alan suddenly recognized, which he had seen and touched among thethings in the chest of drawers; it gave him a queer feeling now to havetouched her things. He felt instinctively, as he held the picture andstudied it, that it could have been no vulgar bickering between wifeand husband, nor any caprice of a dissatisfied woman, that had made herseparate herself from her husband. The photographer's name was stampedin one corner, and the date--1894, the year after Alan had been born.
But Alan felt that the picture and the condition of her rooms acrossthe hall did not shed any light on the relations between her andBenjamin Corvet; rather they obscured them; for his father neither hadput the picture away from him and devoted her rooms to other uses, norhad he kept the rooms arranged and ready for her return and her pictureso that he would see it. He would have done one or the other of thesethings, Alan thought, if it were she his father had wronged--or, atleast, if it were only she.
Alan reclosed the case, and put the picture down; then he went into theroom with the desk. He tried the cover of the desk, but it appeared tobe locked; after looking around vainly for a key, he tried again,exerting a little more force, and this time the top went up easily,tearing away the metal plate into which the claws of the lock claspedand the two long screws which had held it. He examined the lock,surprised, and saw that the screws must have been merely set into theholes; scars showed where a chisel or some metal implement had beenthrust in under the top to force it up. The pigeonholes and littledrawers in the upper part of the desk, as he swiftly opened them, hefound entirely empty. He hurried to the cabinet; the drawers of thecabinet too had been forced, and very recently; for the scars and thesplinters of wood were clean and fresh. These drawers and the drawersin the lower part of the desk either were empty, or the papers in themhad been disarranged and tumbled in confusion, as though some one hadexamined them hastily and tossed them back.
Sherrill had not done that, nor any one who had a business to be there.If Benjamin Corvet had emptied some of those drawers before he wentaway, he would not have relocked empty drawers. To Alan, the marks ofviolence and roughness were unmistakably the work of the man with thebig hands who had left marks upon the top of the chest of drawers; andthe feeling that he had been in the house very recently was strongerthan ever.
Alan ran out into the hall and listened; he heard no sound; but he wentback to the little room more excited than before. For what had theother man been searching? For the same things which Alan was lookingfor? And had the other man got them? Who might the other be, and whatmight be his connection with Benjamin Corvet? Alan had no doubt thateverything of importance must have been taken away, but he would makesure of that. He took some of the papers from the drawers and began toexamine them; after nearly an hour of this, he had found only onearticle which appeared connected in any way with what Sherrill had toldhim or with Alan himself. In one of the little drawers of the desk hefound several books, much worn as though from being carried in apocket, and one of these contained a series of entries stretching overseveral years. These listed an amount--$150.--opposite a series ofdates with only the year and the month given, and there was an entryfor every second month.
Alan felt his fingers trembling as he turned the pages of the littlebook and found at the end of the list a blank, and below, in the samehand but in writing which had changed slightly with the passage ofyears, another date and the confirming entry of $1,500. The otherpapers and books were only such things as might accumulate during alifetime on the water and in business--government certificates,manifests, boat schedules of times long gone by, and similar papers.Alan looked through the little book again and put it in his pocket. Itwas, beyond doubt, his father's memorandum of the sums sent to BlueRapids for Alan; it told him that here he had been in his father'sthoughts; in this little room, within a few steps from those desertedapartments of his wife, Benjamin Corvet had sent "Alan's dollar"--thatdollar which had been such a subject of speculation in his childhoodfor himself and for all the other children. He grew warm at thethought as he began putting the other
things back into the drawers.
He started and straightened suddenly; then he listened attentively, andhis skin, warm an instant before, turned cold and prickled. Somewherewithin the house, unmistakably on the floor below him, a door hadslammed. The wind, which had grown much stronger in the last hour, wasbattering the windows and whining round the corners of the building;but the house was tightly closed; it could not be the wind that hadblown the door shut. Some one--it was beyond question now, for therealization was quite different from the feeling he had had about thatbefore--was in the house with him. Had his father's servant come back?That was impossible; Sherrill had received a wire from the man thatday, and he could not get back to Chicago before the following morningat the earliest. But the servant, Sherrill had said, was the onlyother one besides his father who had a key. Was it ... his father whohad come back? That, though not impossible, seemed improbable.
Alan stooped quickly, unlaced and stripped off his shoes, and ran outinto the hall to the head of the stairs where he looked down andlistened. From here the sound of some one moving about came to himdistinctly; he could see no light below, but when he ran down to theturn of the stairs, it became plain that there was a very dim andflickering light in the library. He crept on farther down thestaircase. His hands were cold and moist from his excitement, and hisbody was hot and trembling.
Whoever it was that was moving about down-stairs, even if he was notone who had a right to be there, at least felt secure frominterruption. He was going with heavy step from window to window;where he found a shade up, he pulled it down brusquely and with aviolence which suggested great strength under a nervous strain; ashade, which had been pulled down, flew up, and the man damned it asthough it had startled him; then, after an instant, he pulled it downagain.
Alan crept still farther down and at last caught sight of him. The manwas not his father; he was not a servant; it was equally sure at thesame time that he was not any one who had any business to be in thehouse and that he was not any common house-breaker.
He was a big, young-looking man, with broad shoulders and very evidentvigor; Alan guessed his age at thirty-five; he was handsome--he had astraight forehead over daring, deep-set eyes; his nose, lips, and chinwere powerfully formed; and he was expensively and very carefullydressed. The light by which Alan saw these things came from a flatlittle pocket searchlight that the man carried in one hand, which threwa little brilliant circle of light as he directed it; and now, as thelight chanced to fall on his other hand--powerful and heavilymuscled--Alan recollected the look and size of the finger prints on thechest of drawers upstairs. He did not doubt that this was the same manwho had gone through the desk; but since he had already rifled thedesks, what did he want here now? As the man moved out of sight, Alancrept on down as far as the door to the library; the man had gone oninto the rear room, and Alan went far enough into the library so hecould see him.
He had pulled open one of the drawers in the big table in the rearroom--the room where the organ was and where the bookshelves reached tothe ceiling--and with his light held so as to show what was in it, hewas tumbling over its contents and examining them. He went through oneafter another of the drawers of the table like this; after examiningthem, he rose and kicked the last one shut disgustedly; he stoodlooking about the room questioningly, then he started toward the frontroom.
He cast the light of his torch ahead of him; but Alan had time toanticipate his action and to retreat to the hall. He held the hangingsa little way from the door jamb so he could see into the room. If thisman were the same who had looted the desk up-stairs, it was plain thathe had not procured there what he wanted or all of what he wanted; andnow he did not know where next to look.
He had, as yet, neither seen nor heard anything to alarm him, and as hewent to the desk in the front room and peered impatiently into thedrawers, he slammed them shut, one after another. He straightened andstared about. "Damn Ben! Damn Ben!" he ejaculated violently andreturned to the rear room. Alan, again following him, found him on hisknees in front of one of the drawers under the bookcases. As hecontinued searching through the drawers, his irritation became greaterand greater. He jerked one drawer entirely out of its case, and thecontents flew in every direction; swearing at it, and damning "Ben"again, he gathered up the letters. One suddenly caught his attention;he began reading it closely, then snapped it back into the drawer,crammed the rest on top of it, and went on to the next of the files.He searched in this manner through half a dozen drawers, plainlyfinding nothing at all he wanted; he dragged some of the books fromtheir cases, felt behind them and shoved back some of the books butdropped others on the floor and blasphemy burst from him.
He cursed "Ben" again and again, and himself, and God; he damned men byname, but so violently and incoherently that Alan could not make outthe names; terribly he swore at men living and men "rotting in Hell."The beam of light from the torch in his hand swayed aside and back andforth. Without warning, suddenly it caught Alan as he stood in thedark of the front room; and as the dim white circle of light gleamedinto Alan's face, the man looked that way and saw him.
The effect of this upon the man was so strange and so bewildering toAlan that Alan could only stare at him. The big man seemed to shrinkinto himself and to shrink back and away from Alan. He roared outsomething in a bellow thick with fear and horror; he seemed to chokewith terror. There was nothing in his look akin to mere surprise oralarm at realizing that another was there and had been seeing andoverhearing him. The light which he still gripped swayed back andforth and showed him Alan again, and he raised his arm before his faceas he recoiled.
The consternation of the man was so complete that it checked Alan'srush toward him; he halted, then advanced silently and watchfully. Ashe went forward, and the light shone upon his face again, the big mancried out hoarsely:
"Damn you--damn you, with the hole above your eye! The bullet got you!And now you've got Ben! But you can't get me! Go back to Hell! Youcan't get me! I'll get you--I'll get you! You--can't save the_Miwaka_!"
He drew back his arm and with all his might hurled the flashlight atAlan. It missed and crashed somewhere behind him, but did not go out;the beam of light shot back and wavered and flickered over both ofthem, as the torch rolled on the floor. Alan rushed forward and,thrusting through the dark, his hand struck the man's chest and seizedhis coat.
The man caught at and seized Alan's arm; he seemed to feel of it andassure himself of its reality.
"Flesh! Flesh!" he roared in relief; and his big arms grappled Alan.As they struggled, they stumbled and fell to the floor, the big manunderneath. His hand shifted its hold and caught Alan's throat; Alangot an arm free and, with all his force, struck the man's face. Theman struck back--a heavy blow on the side of Alan's head which dizziedhim but left him strength to strike again, and his knuckles reached theman's face once more, but he got another heavy blow in return. The manwas grappling no longer; he swung Alan to one side and off of him, androlled himself away. He scrambled to his feet and dashed out throughthe library, across the hall, and into the service room. Alan heardhis feet clattering down the stairway to the floor beneath. Alan gotto his feet; dizzied and not yet familiar with the house, he blunderedagainst a wall and had to feel his way along it to the service room; ashe slipped and stumbled down the stairway, a door closed loudly at theend of the corridor he had seen at the foot of the stairs. He ranalong the corridor to the door; it had closed with a spring lock, andseconds passed while he felt in the dark for the catch; he found it andtore the door open, and came out suddenly into the cold air of thenight in a paved passageway beside the house which led in one directionto the street and in the other to a gate opening on the alley. He ranforward to the street and looked up and down, but found it empty; thenhe ran back to the alley. At the end of the alley, where itintersected the cross street, the figure of the man running awayappeared suddenly out of the shadows, then disappeared; Alan, followingas far as the street, could see no
thing more of him; this street toowas empty.
He ran a little farther and looked, then he went back to the house.The side door had swung shut again and latched. He felt in his pocketfor his key and went around to the front door. The snow upon the stepshad been swept away, probably by the servant who had come to the houseearlier in the day with Constance Sherrill, but some had fallen since;the footsteps made in the early afternoon had been obliterated by it,but Alan could see those he had made that evening, and the marks wheresome one else had gone into the house and not come out again. In partit was plain, therefore, what had happened: the man had come from thesouth, for he had not seen the light Alan had had in the north and rearpart of the house; believing no one was in the house, the man had gonein through the front door with a key. He had been some one familiarwith the house; for he had known about the side door and how to reachit and that he could get out that way. This might mean no more thanthat he was the same who had searched through the house before; but atleast it made his identity with the former intruder more certain.
Alan let himself in at the front door and turned on the light in thereading lamp in the library. The electric torch still was burning onthe floor and he picked it up and extinguished it; he went up-stairsand brought down his shoes. He had seen a wood fire set ready forlighting in the library, and now he lighted it and sat before it dryinghis wet socks before he put on his shoes. He was still shaking andbreathing fast from his struggle with the man and his chase after him,and by the strangeness of what had taken place.
When the shaft of light from the torch had flashed across Alan's facein the dark library, the man had not taken him for what he was--aliving person; he had taken him for a specter. His terror and thethings he had cried out could mean only that. The specter of whom?Not of Benjamin Corvet; for one of the things Alan had remarked when hesaw Benjamin Corvet's picture was that he himself did not look at alllike his father. Besides, what the man had said made it certain thathe did not think the specter was "Ben"; for the specter had "got Ben."Did Alan look like some one else, then? Like whom? Evidently like theman--now dead for he had a ghost--who had "got" Ben, in the big man'sopinion. Who could that be?
No answer, as yet, was possible to that. But if he did look like someone, then that some one was--or had been--dreaded not only by the bigman who had entered the house, but by Benjamin Corvet as well. "Yougot Ben!" the man had cried out. Got him? How? "But you can't getme!" he had said. "You--with the bullet hole above your eye!" Whatdid that mean?
Alan got up and went to look at himself in the mirror he had seen inthe hall. He was white, now that the flush of the fighting was going;he probably had been pale before with excitement, and over his righteye there was a round, black mark. Alan looked down at his hands; alittle skin was off one knuckle, where he had struck the man, and hisfingers were smudged with a black and sooty dust. He had smudged themon the papers up-stairs or else in feeling his way about the darkhouse, and at some time he had touched his forehead and left the blackmark. That had been the "bullet hole."
The rest that the man had said had been a reference to some name; Alanhad no trouble to recollect the name and, while he did not understandit at all, it stirred him queerly--"the _Miwaka_." What was that? Thequeer excitement and questioning that the name brought, when herepeated it to himself, was not recollection; for he could not recallever having heard the name before; but it was not completely strange tohim. He could define the excitement it stirred only in that way.
He went back to the Morris chair; his socks were nearly dry, and he puton his shoes. He got up and paced about. Sherrill had believed thathere in this house Benjamin Corvet had left--or might have left--amemorandum, a record, or an account of some sort which would explain toAlan, his son, the blight which had hung over his life. Sherrill hadsaid that it could have been no mere intrigue, no vulgar personal sin;and the events of the night had made that very certain; for, plainly,whatever was hidden in that house involved some one else seriously,desperately. There was no other way to explain the intrusion of thesort of man whom Alan had surprised there an hour ago.
The fact that this other man searched also did not prove that BenjaminCorvet had left a record in the house, as Sherrill believed; but itcertainly showed that another person believed--or feared--it. Whetheror not guilt had sent Benjamin Corvet away four days ago, whether ornot there had been guilt behind the ghost which had "got Ben," therewas guilt in the big man's superstitious terror when he had seen Alan.A bold, powerful man like that one, when his conscience is clear, doesnot see a ghost. And the ghost which he had seen had a bullet holeabove the brows!
Alan did not flatter himself that in any physical sense he hadtriumphed over that man; so far as it had gone, his adversary had hadrather the better of the battle; he had endeavored to stun Alan, orperhaps do worse than stun; but after the first grapple, his purposehad been to get away. But he had not fled from Alan; he had fled fromdiscovery of who he was. Sherrill had told Alan of no one whom hecould identify with this man; but Alan could describe him to Sherrill.
Alan found a lavatory and washed and straightened his collar and tieand brushed his clothes. There was a bruise on the side of his head;but though it throbbed painfully, it did not leave any visible mark.He could return now to the Sherrills'. It was not quite midnight buthe believed by this time Sherrill was probably home; perhaps already hehad gone to bed. Alan took up his hat and looked about the house; hewas going to return and sleep here, of course; he was not going toleave the house unguarded for any long time after this; but, after whathad just happened, he felt he could leave it safely for half an hour,particularly if he left a light burning within.
He did this and stepped out. The wind from the west was blowing hard,and the night had become bitter cold; yet, as Alan reached the drive,he could see far out the tossing lights of a ship and, as he wenttoward the Sherrills', he gazed out over the roaring water. Often onnights like this, he knew, his father must have been battling suchwater.
The man who answered his ring at the Sherrills' recognized him at onceand admitted him; in reply to Alan's question, the servant said thatMr. Sherrill had not yet returned. When Alan went to his room, thevalet appeared and, finding that Alan was packing, the man offered hisservice. Alan let him pack and went down-stairs; a motor had justdriven up to the house.
It proved to have brought Constance and her mother; Mrs. Sherrill,after informing Alan that Mr. Sherrill might not return until some timelater, went up-stairs and did not appear again. Constance followed hermother but, ten minutes later came downstairs.
"You're not staying here to-night?" she said.
"I wanted to say to your father," Alan explained, "that I believe I hadbetter go over to the other house."
She came a little closer to him in her concern. "Nothing has happenedhere?"
"Here? You mean in this house?" Alan smiled. "No; nothing."
She seemed relieved. Alan, remembering her mother's manner, thought heunderstood; she knew that remarks had been made, possibly, whichrepeated by a servant might have offended him.
"I'm afraid it's been a hard day for you," she said.
"It's certainly been unusual," Alan admitted.
It had been a hard day for her, too, he observed; or probably therecent days, since her father's and her own good friend had gone, hadbeen trying. She was tired now and nervously excited; but she was soyoung that the little signs of strain and worry, instead of making herseem older, only made her youth more apparent. The curves of her neckand her pretty, rounded shoulders were as soft as before; her lustrous,brown hair was more beautiful, and a slight flush colored her clearskin.
It had seemed to Alan, when Mrs. Sherrill had spoken to him a fewminutes before, that her manner toward him had been more reserved andconstrained than earlier in the evening; and he had put that down tothe lateness of the hour; but now he realized that she probably hadbeen discussing him with Constance, and that it was somewhat indefiance of her moth
er that Constance had come down to speak with himagain.
"Are you taking any one over to the other house with you?" she inquired.
"Any one?"
"A servant, I mean."
"No."
"Then you'll let us lend you a man from here."
"You're awfully good; but I don't think I'll need any one to-night.Mr. Corvet's--my father's man--is coming back to-morrow, I understand.I'll get along very well until then."
She was silent a moment as she looked away. Her shoulders suddenlyjerked a little. "I wish you'd take some one with you," she persisted."I don't like to think of you alone over there."
"My father must have been often alone there."
"Yes," she said. "Yes." She looked at him quickly, then away,checking a question. She wanted to ask, he knew, what he haddiscovered in that lonely house which had so agitated him; for ofcourse she had noticed agitation in him. And he had intended to tellher or, rather, her father. He had been rehearsing to himself thedescription of the man he had met there in order to ask Sherrill abouthim; but now Alan knew that he was not going to refer the matter evento Sherrill just yet.
Sherrill had believed that Benjamin Corvet's disappearance was fromcircumstances too personal and intimate to be made a subject of publicinquiry; and what Alan had encountered in Corvet's house had confirmedthat belief. Sherrill further had said that Benjamin Corvet, if he hadwished Sherrill to know those circumstances, would have told them tohim; but Corvet had not done that; instead, he had sent for Alan, hisson. He had given his son his confidence.
Sherrill had admitted that he was withholding from Alan, for the timebeing, something that he knew about Benjamin Corvet; it was nothing, hehad said, which would help Alan to learn about his father, or what hadbecome of him; but perhaps Sherrill, not knowing these other things,could not speak accurately as to that. Alan determined to ask Sherrillwhat he had been withholding before he told him all of what hadhappened in Corvet's house. There was one other circumstance whichSherrill had mentioned but not explained; it occurred to Alan now.
"Miss Sherrill--" he checked himself.
"What is it?"
"This afternoon your father said that you believed that Mr. Corvet'sdisappearance was in some way connected with you; he said that he didnot think that was so; but do you want to tell me why you thought it?"
"Yes; I will tell you." She colored quickly. "One of the last thingsMr. Corvet did--in fact, the last thing we know of his doing before hesent for you--was to come to me and warn me against one of my friends."
"Warn you, Miss Sherrill? How? I mean, warn you against what?"
"Against thinking too much of him." She turned away.
Alan saw in the rear of the hall the man who had been waiting with thesuitcase. It was after midnight now and, for far more than theintended half hour, Alan had left his father's house unwatched, to beentered by the front door whenever the man, who had entered it before,returned with his key.
"I think I'll come to see your father in the morning," Alan said, whenConstance looked back to him.
"You won't borrow Simons?" she asked again.
"Thank you, no."
"But you'll come over here for breakfast in the morning?"
"You want me?"
"Certainly."
"I'd like to come very much."
"Then I'll expect you." She followed him to the door when he had puton his things, and he made no objection when she asked that the man beallowed to carry his bag around to the other house. When he glancedback, after reaching the walk, he saw her standing inside the door,watching through the glass after him.
When he had dismissed Simons and reentered the house on Astor Street,he found no evidences of any disturbance while he had been gone. Onthe second floor, to the east of the room which had been his father's,was a bedroom which evidently had been kept as a guest chamber; Alancarried his suitcase there and made ready for bed.
The sight of Constance Sherrill standing and watching after him inconcern as he started back to this house, came to him again and againand, also, her flush when she had spoken of the friend against whomBenjamin Corvet had warned her. Who was he? It had been impossible atthat moment for Alan to ask her more; besides, if he had asked and shehad told him, he would have learned only a name which he could notplace yet in any connection with her or with Benjamin Corvet. Whoeverhe was, it was plain that Constance Sherrill "thought of him"; luckyman, Alan said to himself. Yet Corvet had warned her not to think ofhim....
Alan turned back his bed. It had been for him a tremendous day.Barely twelve hours before he had come to that house, Alan Conrad fromBlue Rapids, Kansas; now ... phrases from what Lawrence Sherrill hadtold him of his father were running through his mind as he opened thedoor of the room to be able to hear any noise in Benjamin Corvet'shouse, of which he was sole protector. The emotion roused by his firstsight of the lake went through him again as he opened the window to theeast.
Now--he was in bed--he seemed to be standing, a specter before a manblaspheming Benjamin Corvet and the souls of men dead. "And the holeabove the eye! ... The bullet got you! ... So it's you that got Ben!... I'll get you! ... You can't save the _Miwaka_!"
The _Miwaka_! The stir of that name was stronger now even than before;it had been running through his consciousness almost constantly sincehe had heard it. He jumped up and turned on the light and found apencil. He did not know how to spell the name and it was not necessaryto write it down; the name had taken on that definiteness andineffaceableness of a thing which, once heard, can never again beforgotten. But, in panic that he might forget, he wrote it, guessingat the spelling--"_Miwaka_."
It was a name, of course; but the name of what? It repeated andrepeated itself to him, after he got back into bed, until its veryiteration made him drowsy.
Outside the gale whistled and shrieked. The wind, passing its lastresistance after its sweep across the prairies before it leaped uponthe lake, battered and clamored in its assault about the house. But asAlan became sleepier, he heard it no longer as it rattled the windowsand howled under the eaves and over the roof, but as out on the lake,above the roaring and ice-crunching waves, it whipped and circled withits chill the ice-shrouded sides of struggling ships. So, with theroar of surf and gale in his ears, he went to sleep with the soleconscious connection in his mind between himself and these people,among whom Benjamin Corvet's summons had brought him, the one name"_Miwaka_."