Agatha Webb by Anna Katharine Green (best ebook reader under 100 txt) 📖

steps of a certain house and rang the bell. A gentleman with a face not entirely unknown to us came to the door.

The detective did not pause for preliminaries.

“Are you Mr. Crane?” he asked,—“the gentleman who ran against a man coming out of Mrs. Webb’s house last night?”

“I am Mr. Crane,” was the slightly surprised rejoinder, “and I was run against by a man there, yes.”

“Very well,” remarked the detective, quietly, “my name is Knapp. I have been sent from Boston to look into this matter, and I have an idea that you can help me more than any other man here in Sutherlandtown. Who was this person who came in contact with you so violently? You know, even if you have been careful not to mention any names.”

“You are mistaken. I don’t know; I can’t know. He wore a sweeping beard, and walked and acted like a man no longer young, but beyond that–”

“Mr. Crane, excuse me, but I know men. If you had no suspicion as to whom that person was you would not look so embarrassed. You suspect, or, at least, associate in your own mind a name with the man you met. Was it either of these you see written here?”

Mr. Crane glanced at the card on which the other had scribbled a couple of names, and started perceptibly.

“You have me,” said he; “you must be a man of remarkable perspicacity.”

The detective smiled and pocketed his card. The names he thus concealed were John Zabel, James Zabel.

“You have not said which of the two it was,” Knapp quietly suggested.

“No,” returned the minister, “and I have not even thought. Indeed, I am not sure that I have not made a dreadful mistake in thinking it was either. A glimpse such as I had is far from satisfactory; and they are both such excellent men–”

“Eight! You did make a mistake, of course, I have not the least doubt of it. So don’t think of the matter again. I will find out who the real man was; rest easy.”

And with the lightest of bows, Knapp drew off and passed as quickly as he could, without attracting attention, round the corner to the confectioner’s.

Here his attack was warier. Sally Loton was behind the counter with her husband, and they had evidently been talking the matter over very confidentially. But Knapp was not to be awed by her small, keen eye or strident voice, and presently succeeded in surprising a knowing look on the lady’s face, which convinced him that in the confidences between husband and wife a name had been used which she appeared to be less unwilling to impart than he. Knapp, consequently, turned his full attention towards her, using in his attack that oldest and subtlest weapon against the sex— flattery.

“My dear madam,” said he, “your good heart is apparent; your husband has confided to you a name which you, out of fear of some mistake, hesitate to repeat. A neighbourly spirit, ma’am, a very neighbourly spirit; but you should not allow your goodness to defeat the ends of justice. If you simply told us whom this man resembled we would be able to get some idea of his appearance.”

“He didn’t resemble anyone I know,” growled Loton. “It was too dark for me to see how he looked.”

“His voice, then? People are traced by their voices.”

“I didn’t recognise his voice.”

Knapp smiled, his eye still on the woman.

“Yet you have thought of someone he reminded you of?”

The man was silent, but the wife tossed her head ever so lightly.

“Now, you must have had your reasons for that. No one thinks of a good and respectable neighbour in connection with the buying of a loaf of bread at midnight with a twenty-dollar bill, without some positive reason.”

“The man wore a beard. I felt it brush my hand as he took the loaf.”

“Good! That is a point.”

“Which made me think of other men who wore beards.”

“As, for instance–”

The detective had taken from his pocket the card which he had used with such effect at the minister’s, and as he said these words twirled it so that the two names written upon it fell under Sally Loton’s inquisitive eyes. The look with which she read them was enough. John Zabel, James Zabel.

“Who told you it was either of these men?” she asked.

“You did,” he retorted, pocketing the card with a smile.

“La, now! Samuel, I never spoke a word,” she insisted, in anxious protest to her husband, as the detective slid quietly from the store.

XII WATTLES COMES

The Hallidays lived but a few rods from the Sutherlands. Yet as it was dusk when Miss Halliday rose to depart, Frederick naturally offered his services as her escort.

She accepted them with a slight blush, the first he had ever seen on her face, or at least had ever noted there. It caused him such surprise that he forgot Amabel’s presence in the garden till they came upon her at the gate.

“A pleasant evening,” observed that young girl in her high, unmusical voice.

“Very,” was Miss Halliday’s short reply; and for a moment the two faces were in line as he held open the gate before his departing guest.

They were very different faces in feature and expression, and till that night he had never thought of comparing them. Indeed, the fascination which beamed from Amabel Page’s far from regular features had put all others out of his mind, but now, as he surveyed the two girls, the candour and purity which marked Agnes’s countenance came out so strongly under his glance that Amabel lost all attraction for him, and he drew his young neighbour hastily away.

Amabel noted the movement and smiled. Her contempt for Agnes Halliday’s charms amounted to disdain.

She might have felt less confidence in her own had she been in a position to note the frequent glances Frederick cast at his old playmate as they proceeded slowly up the road. Not that there was any passion in them—he was too full of care for that; but the curiosity which could prompt him to turn his head a dozen times in the course of so short a walk, to see why Agnes Halliday held her face so persistently away from him, had an element of feeling in it that was more or less significant. As for Agnes, she was so unlike her accustomed self as to astonish even herself. Whereas she had never before walked a dozen steps with him without indulging in some sharp saying, she found herself disinclined to speak at all, much less to speak lightly. In mutual silence, then, they reached the gateway leading into the Halliday grounds. But Agnes having passed in, they both stopped and for the first time looked squarely at each other. Her eyes fell first, perhaps because his had changed in his contemplation of her. He smiled as he saw this, and in a half-careless, half-wistful tone, said quietly:

“Agnes, what would you think of a man who, after having committed little else but folly all his life, suddenly made up his mind to turn absolutely toward the right and to pursue it in face of every obstacle and every discouragement?”

“I should think,” she slowly replied, with one quick lift of her eyes toward his face, “that he had entered upon the noblest effort of which man is capable, and the hardest. I should have great sympathy for that man, Frederick.”

“Would you?” he said, recalling Amabel’s face with bitter aversion as he gazed into the womanly countenance he had hitherto slighted as uninteresting. “It is the first kind word you have ever given me, Agnes. Possibly it is the first I have ever deserved.”

And without another word he doffed his hat, saluted her, and vanished down the hillside.

She remained; remained so long that it was nearly nine when she entered the family parlour. As she came in her mother looked up and was startled at her unaccustomed pallor.

“Why, Agnes,” cried her mother, “what is the matter?”

Her answer was inaudible. What was the matter? She dreaded, even feared, to ask herself.

Meantime a strange scene was taking place in the woods toward which she had seen Frederick go. The moon, which was particularly bright that night, shone upon a certain hollow where a huge tree lay. Around it the underbrush was thick and the shadow dark, but in this especial place the opening was large enough for the rays to enter freely. Into this circlet of light Frederick Sutherland had come. Alone and without the restraint imposed upon him by watching eyes, he showed a countenance so wan and full of trouble that it was well it could not be seen by either of the two women whose thoughts were at that moment fixed upon him. To Amabel it would have given a throb of selfish hope, while to Agnes it would have brought a pang of despair which might have somewhat too suddenly interpreted to her the mystery of her own sensations.

He had bent at once to the hollow space made by the outspreading roots just mentioned, and was feeling with an air of confidence along the ground for something he had every reason to expect to find, when the shock of a sudden distrust seized him, and he flung himself down in terror, feeling and feeling again among the fallen leaves and broken twigs, till a full realisation of his misfortune reached him, and he was obliged to acknowledge that the place was empty.

Overwhelmed at his loss, aghast at the consequences it must entail upon him, he rose in a trembling sweat, crying out in his anger and dismay:

“She has been here! She has taken it!” And realising for the first time the subtlety and strength of the antagonist pitted against him, he forgot his new resolutions and even that old promise made in his childhood to Agatha Webb, and uttered oath after oath, cursing himself, the woman, and what she had done, till a casual glance at the heavens overhead, in which the liquid moon hung calm and beautiful, recalled him to himself. With a sense of shame, the keener that it was a new sensation in his breast, he ceased his vain repinings, and turning from the unhallowed spot, made his way with deeper and deeper misgivings toward a home made hateful to him now by the presence of the woman who was thus bent upon his ruin.

He understood her now. He rated at its full value both her determination and her power, and had she been so unfortunate as to have carried her imprudence to the point of surprising him by her presence, it would have taken more than the memory of that day’s solemn resolves to have kept him from using his strength against her. But she was wise, and did not intrude upon him in his hour of anger, though who could say she was not near enough to hear the sigh which broke irresistibly from his lips as he emerged from the wood and approached his father’s house?

A lamp was still burning in Mr. Sutherland’s study over the front door, and the sight of it seemed to change for a moment the current of Frederick’s thoughts. Pausing at the gate, he considered with himself, and then with a freer countenance and a lighter step was about to proceed inward, when he heard the sound of a heavy breather coming up the hill, and hesitated—why he hardly knew, except that every advancing step occasioned him more or less apprehension.

The person, whoever it was, stopped before reaching the brow of the hill, and, panting heavily, muttered an oath which Frederick heard. Though it was no more profane than those which had just