i find that my notes of that last night in the house on beauregard square are rather confused, some written 51 at the time, some just before. for instance, on the edge of a newspaper clipping i find this:
“evidently this is the item. r—— went pale on reading it. did not allow wife to see paper.”
the clipping is an account of the sudden death of an elderly gentleman named smythe, one of the beauregard families.
the next clipping is less hasty and is on a yellow symptom record. it has been much folded—i believe i tucked it in my apron belt:
“if the rear staircase is bolted everywhere from the inside, how did the person who locked it, either mr. or mrs. reed, get back into the body of the house again? or did mademoiselle do it? in that case she is no longer a prisoner and the bolts outside her room are not fastened.
“at eleven o’clock tonight harry wakened with earache. i went to the kitchen to heat some mullein oil and laudanum. mrs. reed was with the boy and mr. reed was not in sight. i slipped into the library and used my skeleton keys on the locked door to the rear room. it was empty even of furniture, but there is a huge box there, with a lid that fastens down with steel hooks. the lid is full of small airholes. i had no time to examine further.
“it is one o’clock. harry is asleep and his mother is dozing across the foot of his bed. i have found the way to get to the rear staircase. there are outside steps from the basement to the garden. the staircase goes down all the way to the cellar evidently. then the lower door in the cellar must be only locked, not bolted from the inside. i shall try to get to the cellar.”
the next is a scrawl:
52
“cannot get to the outside basement steps. mr. reed is wandering round lower floor. i reported harry’s condition and came up again. i must get to the back staircase.”
i wonder if i have been able to convey, even faintly, the situation in that highly respectable old house that night: the fear that hung over it, a fear so great that even i, an outsider and stout of nerve, felt it and grew cold; the unnatural brilliancy of light that bespoke dread of the dark; the hushed voices, the locked doors and staring, peering eyes; the babbling frenchwoman on an upper floor, the dead fish, the dead dog. and, always in my mind, that vision of dread on the back staircase and the thing that slid over my foot.
at two o’clock i saw mr. patton, or whoever was on guard in the park across the street, walk quickly toward the house and disappear round the corner toward the gardens in the rear. there had been no signal, but i felt sure that mr. reed had left the house. his wife was still asleep across harry’s bed. as i went out i locked the door behind me, and i took also the key to the night nursery. i thought that something disagreeable, to say the least, was inevitable, and why let her in for it?
the lower hall was lighted as usual and empty. i listened, but there were no restless footsteps. i did not like the lower hall. only a thin wooden door stood between me and the rear staircase, and any one who thinks about the matter will realize that a door is no barrier to a head that can move about without a body. i am afraid i looked over my shoulder while i unlocked the front door, and i know i breathed better when i was out in the air.
53
i wore my dark ulster over my uniform and i had my revolver and keys. my flash, of course, was useless. i missed it horribly. but to get to the staircase was an obsession by that time, in spite of my fear of it, to find what it guarded, to solve its mystery. i worked round the house, keeping close to the wall, until i reached the garden. the night was the city night, never absolutely dark. as i hesitated at the top of the basement steps it seemed to me that figures were moving about among the trees.
the basement door was unlocked and open. i was not prepared for that, and it made me, if anything, more uneasy. i had a box of matches with me, and i wanted light as a starving man wants food. but i dared not light them. i could only keep a tight grip on my courage and go on. a small passage first, with whitewashed stone walls, cold and scaly under my hand; then a large room, and still darkness. worse than darkness, something crawling and scratching round the floor.
i struck my match, then, and it seemed to me that something white flashed into a corner and disappeared. my hands were shaking, but i managed to light a gas jet and to see that i was in the laundry. the staircase came down here, narrower than above, and closed off with a door.
the door was closed and there was a heavy bolt on it but no lock.
and now, with the staircase accessible and a gaslight to keep up my courage, i grew brave, almost reckless. i would tell mr. patton all about this cellar, which his best men had not been able to enter. i would make a sketch for him—coal-bins, laundry tubs, everything. foolish, 54 of course, but hold the gas jet responsible—the reckless bravery of light after hideous darkness.
so i went on, forward. the glow from the laundry followed me. i struck matches, found potatoes and cases of mineral water, bruised my knees on a discarded bicycle, stumbled over a box of soap. twice out of the corner of my eye and never there when i looked i caught the white flash that had frightened me before. then at last i brought up before a door and stopped. it was a curiously barricaded door, nailed against disturbance by a plank fastened across, and, as if to make intrusion without discovery impossible, pasted round every crack and over the keyhole with strips of strong yellow paper. it was an ominous door. i wanted to run away from it, and i wanted also desperately to stand and look at it and imagine what might lie beyond. here again was the strange, spicy odor that i had noticed in the back staircase.
i think it is indicative of my state of mind that i backed away from the door. i did not turn and run. nothing in the world would have made me turn my back to it.
somehow or other i got back into the laundry and jerked myself together.
it was ten minutes after two. i had been just ten minutes in the basement!
the staircase daunted me in my shaken condition. i made excuses for delaying my venture, looked for another box of matches, listened at the end of the passage, finally slid the bolts and opened the door. the silence was impressive. in the laundry there were small, familiar sounds—the dripping of water from a faucet, the muffled 55 measure of a gas meter, the ticking of a clock on the shelf. to leave it all, to climb into that silence——
lying on the lower step was a curious instrument. it was a sort of tongs made of steel, about two feet long, and fastened together like a pair of scissors, the joint about five inches from the flattened ends. i carried it to the light and examined it. one end was smeared with blood and short, brownish hairs. it made me shudder, but—from that time on i think i knew. not the whole story, of course, but somewhere in the back of my head, as i climbed in that hideous quiet, the explanation was developing itself. i did not think it out. it worked itself out as, step after step, match after match, i climbed the staircase.
up to the first floor there was nothing. the landing was bare of carpet. i was on the first floor now. on each side, doors, carefully bolted, led into the house. i opened the one into the hall and listened. i had been gone from the children fifteen minutes and they were on my mind. but everything was quiet.
the sight of the lights and the familiar hall gave me courage. after all, if i was right, what could the head on the staircase have been but an optical delusion? and i was right. the evidence—the tongs—was in my hand. i closed and bolted the door and felt my way back to the stairs. i lighted no matches this time. i had only a few, and on this landing there was a little light from the grated window, although the staircase above was in black shadow.
i had one foot on the lowest stair, when suddenly overhead came the thudding of hands on a closed door. it broke the silence like an explosion. it sent chills up and 56 down my spine. i could not move for a moment. it was the frenchwoman!
i believe i thought of fire. the idea had obsessed me in that house of locked doors. i remember a strangling weight of fright on my chest and of trying to breathe. then i started up the staircase, running as fast as i could lift my weighted feet, i remember that, and getting up perhaps a third of the way. then there came a plunging forward into space, my hands out, a shriek frozen on my lips, and——quiet.
i do not think i fainted. i know i was always conscious of my arm doubled under me, a pain and darkness. i could hear myself moaning, but almost as if it were some one else. there were other sounds, but they did not concern me much. i was not even curious about my location. i seemed to be a very small consciousness surrounded by a great deal of pain.
several centuries later a light came and leaned over me from somewhere above. then the light said:
“here she is!”
“alive?” i knew that voice, but i could not think whose it was.
“i’m not—— yes, she’s moaning.”
they got me out somewhere and i believe i still clung to the tongs. i had fallen on them and had a cut on my chin. i could stand, i found, although i swayed. there was plenty of light now in the back hallway, and a man i had never seen was investigating the staircase.
“four steps off,” he said. “risers and treads gone and the supports sawed away. it’s a trap of some sort.”
mr. patton was examining my broken arm and paid no attention. the man let himself down into the pit 57 under the staircase. when he straightened, only his head rose above the steps. although i was white with pain to the very lips i laughed hysterically.
“the head!” i cried. mr. patton swore under his breath.
they half led, half carried me into the library. mr. reed was there, with a detective on guard over him. he was sitting in his old position, bent forward, chin in palms. in the blaze of light he was a pitiable figure, smeared with dust, disheveled from what had evidently been a struggle. mr. patton put me in a chair and dispatched one of the two men for the nearest doctor.
“this young lady,” he said curtly to mr. reed, “fell into that damnable trap you made in the rear staircase.”
“i locked off the staircase—but i am sorry she is hurt. my—my wife will be shocked. only i wish you’d tell me what all this is about. you can’t arrest me for going into a friend’s house.”
“if i send for some member of the smythe family will they acquit you?”
“certainly they will,” he said. “i—i’ve been raised with the smythes. you can send for any one you like.” but his tone lacked conviction.
mr. patton made me as comfortable as possible, and then, sending the remaining detective out into the hall, he turned to his prisoner.
“now, mr. reed,” he said. “i want you to be sensible. for some days a figure has been seen in the basements of the various beauregard houses. your friends, the smythes, reported it. tonight we are on watch, and we see you breaking into the basement of the smythe house. 58 we already know some curious things about you, such as dismissing all the servants on half an hour’s notice and the disappearance of the french governess.”
“mademoiselle! why, she——” he checked himself.
“when we bring you here tonight, and you ask to be allowed to go upstairs and prepare your wife, she is locked in. the nurse is missing. we find her at last, also locked away and badly hurt, lying in a staircase trap, where some one, probably yourself, has removed the steps. i do not want to arrest you, but, now i’ve started, i’m going to get to the bottom of all this.”
mr. reed was ghastly, but he straightened in his chair.
“the smythes reported this thing, did they?” he asked. “well, tell me one thing. what killed the old gentleman—old smythe?”
“i don’t know.”
“well, go a little further.” his cunning was boyish, pitiful. “how did he die? or don’t you know that either?”
up to this point i had been rather a detached part of the scene, but now my eyes fell on the tongs beside me.
“mr. reed,” i said, “isn’t this thing too big for you to handle by yourself?”
“what thing?”
“you know what i mean. you’ve protected yourself well enough, but even if the—the thing you know of did not kill old mr. smythe you cannot tell what will happen next.”
“i’ve got almost all of them,” he muttered sullenly. “another night or two and i’d have had the lot.”
“but even then the mischief may go on. it means a 59 crusade; it means rousing the city. isn’t it the square thing now to spread the alarm?”
mr. patton could stand the suspense no longer.
“perhaps, miss adams,” he said, “you will be good enough to let me know what you are talking about.”
mr. reed looked up at him with heavy eyes.
“rats,” he said. “they got away, twenty of them, loaded with bubonic plague.”
i went to the hospital the next morning. mr. patton thought it best. there was no one in my little flat to look after me, and although the pain in my arm subsided after the fracture was set i was still shaken.
he came the next afternoon to see me. i was propped up in bed, with my hair braided down in two pigtails and great hollows under my eyes.
“i’m comfortable enough,” i said, in response to his inquiry; “but i’m feeling all of my years. this is my birthday. i am thirty today.”
“i wonder,” he said reflectively, “if i ever reach the mature age of one hundred, if i will carry in my head as many odds and ends of information as you have at thirty!”
“i?”
“you. how in the world did you know, for instance, about those tongs?”
“it was quite simple. i’d seen something like them in the laboratory here. of course i didn’t know what animals he’d used, but the grayish brown hair looked like rats. the laboratory must be the cellar room. i knew it had been fumigated—it was sealed with paper, even over the keyhole.”
60
so, sitting there beside me, mr. patton told me the story as he had got it from mr. reed—a tale of the offer in an english scientific journal of a large reward from some plague-ridden country of the east for an anti-plague serum. mr. reed had been working along bacteriological lines in his basement laboratory, mostly with guinea pigs and tuberculosis. he was in debt; the offer loomed large.
“he seems to think he was on the right track,” mr. patton said. “he had twenty of the creatures in deep zinc cans with perforated lids. he says the disease is spread by fleas that infest the rats. so he had muslin as well over the lids. one can had infected rats, six of them. then one day the frenchwoman tried to give the dog a bath in a laundry tub and the dog bolted. the laboratory door was open in some way and he ran between the cans, upsetting them. every rat was out in an instant. the frenchwoman was frantic. she shut the door and tried to drive the things back. one bit her on the foot. the dog was not bitten, but there was the question of fleas.
“well, the rats got away, and mademoiselle retired to her room to die of plague. she was a loyal old soul; she wouldn’t let them call a doctor. it would mean exposure, and after all what could the doctors do? reed used his serum and she’s alive.
“reed was frantic. his wife would not leave. there was the frenchwoman to look after, and i think she was afraid he would do something desperate. they did the best they could, under the circumstances, for the children. they burned most of the carpets for fear of fleas, and put poison everywhere. of course he had traps too.
61
“he had brass tags on the necks of the rats, and he got back a few—the uninfected ones. the other ones were probably dead. but he couldn’t stop at that. he had to be sure that the trouble had not spread. and to add to their horror the sewer along the street was being relaid, and they had an influx of rats into the house. they found them everywhere in the lower floor. they even climbed the stairs. he says that the night you came he caught a big fellow on the front staircase. there was always the danger that the fleas that carry the trouble had deserted the dead creatures for new fields. they took up all the rest of the carpets and burned them. to add to the general misery the dog chang developed unmistakable symptoms and had to be killed.”
“but the broken staircase?” i asked. “and what was it that mademoiselle said was coming up?”
“the steps were up for two reasons: the rats could not climb up, and beneath the steps reed says he caught in a trap two of the tagged ones. as for mademoiselle the thing that was coming up was her temperature—pure fright. the head you saw was poor reed himself, wrapped in gauze against trouble and baiting his traps. he caught a lot in the neighbors’ cellars and some in the garden.”
“but why,” i demanded, “why didn’t he make it all known?”
mr. patton laughed while he shrugged his shoulders.
“a man hardly cares to announce that he has menaced the health of a city.”
“but that night when i fell—was it only last night?—some one was pounding above. i thought there was a fire.”
62
“the frenchwoman had seen us waylay reed from her window. she was crazy.”
“and the trouble is over now?”
“not at all,” he replied cheerfully. “the trouble may be only beginning. we’re keeping reed’s name out, but the board of health has issued a general warning. personally i think his six pets died without passing anything along.”
“but there was a big box with a lid——”
“ferrets,” he assured me. “nice white ferrets with pink eyes and a taste for rats.” he held out a thumb, carefully bandaged. “reed had a couple under his coat when we took him in the garden. probably one ran over your foot that night when you surprised him on the back staircase.”
i went pale. “but if they are infected!” i cried; “and you are bitten——”
“the first thing a nurse should learn,” he bent forward smiling, “is not to alarm her patient.”
“but you don’t understand the danger,” i said despairingly. “oh, if only men had a little bit of sense!”
“i must do something desperate then? have the thumb cut off, perhaps?”
i did not answer. i lay back on my pillows with my eyes shut. i had given him the plague, had seen him die and be buried, before he spoke again.
“the chin,” he said, “is not so firm as i had thought. the outlines are savage, but the dimple—— you poor little thing; are you really frightened?”
“i don’t like you,” i said furiously. “but i’d hate to see any one with—with that trouble.”
“then i’ll confess. i was trying to take your mind 63 off your troubles. the bite is there, but harmless. those were new ferrets; had never been out.”
i did not speak to him again. i was seething with indignation. he stood for a time looking down at me; then, unexpectedly, he bent over and touched his lips to my bandaged arm.
“poor arm!” he said. “poor, brave little arm!” then he tiptoed out of the room. his very back was sheepish.