The Gray Mask by Charles Wadsworth Camp (best reads txt) 📖

silence had clutched about her throat! The sullen and sepulchral air of the room seemed to vibrate with the wraiths of those efforts.

Was the door open to the next room where she had struggled and died?

Garth stirred uneasily.

Nora spoke.

“How long?”

“Not long,” Garth whispered, “or I’ll turn the lights on. I’ll look.”

His thoughts swung back to the next room and the despair it had harbored. Could such passionate resistance to circumstance perish utterly? Could the violent will behind it accept silence and pass with the body into nothingness?

What had she wanted to say?

A movement, scarcely audible, reached him from the next room.

Nora’s hand touched his arm. He was aware of the trembling of her fingers. He leant forward, listening. He scarcely caught Nora’s voice.

“You heard that?”

The movement was repeated—somebody—something stirred in the dark room where the woman had died.

Nora swayed against him. Her other hand touched his shoulder. His heart leapt, but he realized that this contact was only an impersonal appeal for protection. So he drew his arms back, but his brain was clearer. He no longer answered to the fancy that the echoes of those screams tortured his ears.

“Stay here quietly,” he whispered.

“Don’t go in there, Jim.”

He pushed her hands gently away. His movements as he crossed the floor were stealthier than those which still persisted in the bedroom. He paused in the doorway. The darkness was complete, yet he could locate the movements now against the farther wall.

He drew out his revolver and his flashlight. He pressed the button. The glare splintered the blackness and centered on the figure of a man who bent over the open drawer of a desk.

“Throw your hands up!” Garth said.

In the dressing-room Nora cried out.

The man at the desk swung around, lifting his hands and exposing the white and contorted face of the butler, Thompson.

Garth laughed nervously.

“I’ve got him, Nora.”

“Wh—what do you mean?” the man asked. “I came back—Who are you? What do you want of me?”

Garth stepped forward aggressively. His conscience troubled him not at all.

“I want you for the murder of Frederick Treving—there in the next room.”

The fellow’s jaw dropped.

“No—no. I had nothing to do with it. I swear.”

Garth raised his hand to the lapel of the butler’s coat.

“I thought so,” he said. “No question about you, my man. You wore the rose I found where Treving’s body lay. Got it at the wedding, didn’t you?”

The man sank on the unmade bed.

“What are you talking about? I had nothing to do with it.”

“Tell that to the judge who’ll send you to the chair,” he said.

The butler shook. He raised his uncertain hands to his face. He shuddered.

“No, no. I tell you I had nothing to do with it. It was Mrs. Randall. He attacked her, and she shot him.”

Garth relaxed.

“You heard that, Nora?”

Nora came to the door.

“Yes.”

“Then,” Garth said, “I am about through with the case.”

He turned back to Thompson.

“But you’re not clear yet. How did you happen to be here? I know you went to the wedding with the rest.”

“Yes, but Mrs. Randall got me on the telephone—said the doctor had been called back to town and she was nervous and I’d have to come home. As I let myself in the back way I heard her scream. I ran up and through this room. I got to the door just in time to see her shoot him. But when I rushed in and tried to lift her up she screamed. I couldn’t do anything with her. And I got frightened. When I heard the motorcycle and guessed it was a policeman who had heard her screaming, I ran out the servants’ entrance and went back to the wedding and came home with the rest. I was afraid they would take me, and she couldn’t say anything to clear me. That’s the truth.”

Garth looked him over contemptuously.

“And, knowing the truth, you’d have let Dr. Randall go to trial.”

Thompson uncovered his face. Through his tears his eyes glowed with an exceptional devotion.

“I worked for her, sir. I had been with her family ever since she was born. Besides, if he didn’t want to give her away, what business was it of mine? He sent for me to-day, and when I told him I had seen her shoot him, he made me promise to keep my mouth shut.”

“I know he sent for you,” Garth said. “That’s why I hoped to find you here tonight. He suspected you were a go-between and that there might be letters or something here to incriminate her with Treving.”

Thompson nodded.

“I told the doctor, a few letters and trinkets. He said I must get them as soon as the detectives had left and the house was clear. But I can say, sir, there was never anything really out of the way. She wasn’t quite happy with the doctor. It would be a kindness to the dead—”. Garth smiled, turning to Nora.

“You wouldn’t give me away, would you? All right, Thompson. Do what you came to do.”

Thompson shot him a grateful glance and returned to his obliterating task at the desk. Garth snapped on the light.

“But, Jim,” Nora asked, “how did you know that man had been a witness? Was it a guess?”

Garth shook his head.

“Simple enough,” he said.

He took a short, slender, silvery thread from his pocket. With a shame-faced look he handed it to Nora.

“You’d know more about such things than I. It’s a wire that made a broken, worn-out rose look a whole lot better than it was. I found it and the rose in the next room. I recognized it, because, Nora, when I came to dinner the other night I stopped at a sidewalk stand and bought a rose for my buttonhole. Silly, wasn’t it? But it was a good thing, because I got stung with one of those. That’s why I knew what the broken stem and the wire meant. I learned that Randall didn’t wear flowers, and I made sure this afternoon what kind of a rose Treving would have worn. Therefore, somebody else had been in that room, wearing a cheap rose which he had almost certainly got at that cheap wedding. When I heard Randall had sent for this man I decided to hold over my subpoenas for the servants until tomorrow, and run out here myself as soon as the detectives were called in—maybe get my man when he wouldn’t lie.”

Her eyes sparkled.

“And you guessed Randall didn’t know about the murder when you caught him?”

“After I had landed him in jail, his manner, taken with the rest of it, worried me. If he wasn’t guilty, why had he hidden all night and day? What we found in the stone house answered that, and almost certainly put it up to Mrs. Randall. Of course he guessed she had done it, and that cleared her in his eyes. It’s why he’s been so sentimental about protecting her memory. He didn’t want it stained with murder, and he’s probably figured he could tell some story on the stand that would clear her of the scandal, provided Thompson gathered up these little souvenirs of her indiscretion.”

“Jim, I’m proud of you,” Nora said. “But will Dr. Randall thank you for interfering?”

“I think so, when he’s got over this first mistaken idea of what he owes her for protecting his honor and her own even to the point of murder. He’ll soon be clear-headed enough to weigh both sides. He’ll appreciate then that there isn’t much disgrace about such a crime for her, particularly since it’s the strongest proof the world could have that Thompson’s opinion is right.”

He turned to the butler.

“Surely, Thompson, there isn’t as much evidence as all that. Come. We ought to get back to town.”

As they went down the stairs Garth wondered that his success borrowed its chief value from its effect on Nora. As large as the satisfaction of clearing an innocent and harassed man, loomed the fact that he had, indeed, provoked her praise.

At the turn their hands met in the darkness. He rejoiced that the warmth of her fingers lingered momentarily in his.