At One-Thirty, Isabel Ostrander [ebook reader with highlight function .TXT] 📗

a burglar, and you’ve seemed to prove that it wasn’t, isn’t there a chance that he might have committed suicide?”

“In that case, who would have prepared the burglary evidence, and what became of his jewelry and money?” asked Gaunt.

The other was silent.

“No, Mr. Appleton,” the detective remarked conclusively, “your brother was murdered, and for a motive other than that of paltry robbery. We may be sure of that. I must be off now. You will give me your word to be on hand when I need you again?”

“My word of honor, Mr. Gaunt, and please believe that I appreciate what you have done for me. You might have had me placed under arrest, I know, on the evidence you have, and, although I should have been cleared, of course, in time, I should never have been able to live it down, and the disgrace and notoriety would have about killed my mother. If my brother did not commit suicide, I’m as anxious as you, and more, to know who killed him.”

Gaunt found Saunders waiting faithfully in the hall, and went swiftly home, for a quick bite. It was after two o’clock in the afternoon, and he still had much to do that day. He saw to it that the chauffeur, too, had some lunch, and immediately afterward motored to the Appletons’.

The butler grew pale on seeing him; but the detective brusquely ignored their interview of the morning, and asked to see Miss Ellerslie.

She came to him almost at once, in the library. Her low voice was faint and quivering with anxiety, and the hand she extended to him was cold.

“Your sister, Mrs. Appleton?” he asked. “I trust that she is better, that she has rallied a little from the shock of yesterday?”

“On the contrary, Mr. Gaunt, she is ill, very dangerously ill.” She seemed scarcely to breathe the words.

He murmured a conventional regret, [scarcely knowing the words he uttered. The strange spell her mere presence had exercised over him on the previous day, seemed intensified. She held herself less in reserve, as if her anxiety had beaten down a tithe of her supreme self-control.

“Can you tell me,” he added, “about how soon Mrs. Appleton will be able to see me? I’ll promise faithfully not to shock her, or annoy her. It is something entirely impersonal about which I wish to consult her.”

“Not for many days. She is so ill that perhaps her very life is in danger—perhaps her reason. The doctor is with her now, and has called in a specialist.”

“I did not realize it was as serious as that. Believe me, Miss Ellerslie, I am deeply sorry for her, and for you, too, in your anxiety. May I ask you just a few questions? I won’t keep you long from your sister.”

“Certainly, Mr. Gaunt.” But, as she spoke, he heard a slight tinkling, drumming sound. She had reached over unconsciously, and picked up one of the small silver or bronze ornaments from the writingtable, and was playing with it idly between her trembling fingers.

“Miss Ellerslie, you said yesterday that, when you returned from the wedding the night before, your old nurse. Mammy Lu, told you that your sister was awake and nervous, and you went in just as you were, in the costume you had worn at the wedding reception, and remained with her until she was quiet.”

The tinkling rattle stopped suddenly.

“Yes, Mr. Gaunt, I did.”

“You did not, before you went upstairs and encountered the maid, go near the den?”

“No.”

“And, after your sister was quiet, did you go immediately to your room and retire, or did you descend to the room where your brother-in-law was?”

There was a sudden, loud snap. The paperknife, which Miss Ellerslie had held, had broken in two in her sudden, convulsive grasp. She laid the pieces mechanically on the table before she answered quietly:

“I went directly to my room, and retired.”

“Directly after leaving your sister, you mean?”

“Directly after leaving my sister.” Her voice had lost the low, thrilling timbre, and held the curious, sad, controlled note of the previous day.

“And the next thing you heard was the housemaid’s screams, when she went to the den, the following morning?”

“That is so, Mr. Gaunt.”

“Yet you did not sleep well; you were, in fact, awake most of the night, were you not?”

“Why—I think not; I am not sure. I am usually a light sleeper, and I was worried by my sister’s nervous condition; but I believe that I slept rather well.”

“Marie, the maid of the elder Mrs. Appleton, heard you walking the floor a great deal during the night. Her room is directly above yours, you know.”

There was a slight pause, and then the girl’s voice sounded upon his ear with its natural soft drawl intensified, almost as if with studied effect:

“Did she? Shie must have exaggerated—she is very excitable. I occasionally pace up and down the floor of my room, when sleep will not come to me; but I fancy I did so no more on the night before last than at any other time—I am subject to insomnia.”

“When you entered the house. Miss Ellerslie, on your return from the wedding, did you hear any sound from the direction of the den? A sound, for instance, of two voices—men’s voices—raised in an altercation?”

“Oh, no!” The genuine surprise in her voice made it rise a tone or two with the thrilling sweetness of a bird’s note. “There was no sound whatever.”

“Was there no light on the lower floor?”

“Only the hall light, which is always left burning all night, unti| the maids or butler come down in the morning, and a faint radiance, which seemed to come from the direction of the den, quite as if my brother-in-law was sitting in there as usual, and the door was open—the door of the den, I mean.”

Gaunt pondered a moment. The housemaid, Katie, had stated to him on the previous day that, when she entered the den in the early morning and found a cufflink, and later the body of her master, there had been no light whatever in the den, save that from the one opened window. Whoever, then, had changed the appearance of the room after the tragedy, had put out the light.

“And during the night you heard no sound whatever. Miss Ellerslie? Forgive me for repeating my questions to you, but I am trying to recall any sound which may have reached your ears during your wakeful hours, but which you dismissed from your thoughts as of no significance.”

There was silence for a moment, and then she answered with the air of finality:

“No, Mr. Gaunt; not the slightest sound whatever.”

“Very well, Miss Ellerslie. I won’t keep you from your sister any longer. My chauffeur is waiting in the vestibule,”

But even as she opened the Ubrary-door, Dakers appeared upon the threshold.

“Mr. Force and Mr. Witherspoon are in the drawing-room. Miss Ellerslie. They wish to know if they can see you for a moment.”

After a slight, but obvious, hesitation, the girl said:

“Yes, Dakers, tell them I will come at once.” Then, as the butler disappeared down the hall, she turned again to the detective. “Mr. Gaunt, I told you yesterday of my engagement to Mr. Randolph Force, and that I meant to break that engagement, and remain with my sister. I have reconsidered.” Then, with a little smile: “That is supposed to be a woman’s prerogative, isn’t it? I mean that I shall stay with my sister, but permit the engagement to go on, for a time at least. I trust that you will hold what I told you yesterday in the strictest confidence.”

“Certainly, Miss Ellerslie. I wonder if Mr. Force would call on me this evening, in my rooms? I will perhaps be able to obtain from him some data concerning the Appleton family which others have been unable to give me. It was for this reason I wished an interview with your sister.”

“I can tell you all you wish to know about the Appleton family, Mr. Gaunt; as much as my sister or Mr. Force could.” There was an unconscious note of anxiety in her voice.

“No; the data I wish go further back into history, things that only an old New Yorker and contemporary of theirs, a man of their set, could tell me.” His voice was very gentle, but there was a graver note in It, almost a command, as he added: “Please, tell Mr. Force I will be at home at nine.”

She sighed a little, and her voice, as she replied, was so low as to be almost inaudible. “I will tell him, Mr. Gaunt.”

“Thank you. May I trouble you with one more question—this time an irrelevant one? Why is your hair all wet about your forehead?”

“My hair?” she repeated in surprise, putting her hands quickly to her head. Her hair was lying in flat, damp tendrils about her face. “Oh, yes! They—they were bathing my forehead.”

“Ah! You, too, were—ill, Miss Ellerslie?”

“I—I fainted, just a few minutes before you came,” she confessed. “It was silly of me, of course. I don’t remember ever having done such a thing before. I have been quite unnerved by my anxiety over my sister.”

“I understand. I am deeply sorry for you both.”

As they moved away from the library door together, she asked, in a strange tone, as if something impelled her to voice the question, quite without her own volition:

“Mr. Gaunt, how—how did you know my hair was wet?”

“Oh, that?” he smiled. “There is a peculiar odor about moistened hair, which is distinctly noticeable, and like nothing else in the world. Good-afternoon, Miss Ellerslie.”