The two girls let themselves into
the house noiselessly, and, turning out the hall-light,
left for them by their mother, crept upstairs on tiptoe;
and went through the upper hall directly to Laura’s
room Cora’s being nearer the sick-room.
At their age it is proper that a gayety be used three
times: in anticipation, and actually, and in
after-rehearsal. The last was of course now in
order: they went to Laura’s room to “talk
it over.” There was no gas-fixture in this
small chamber; but they found Laura’s oil-lamp
burning brightly upon her writing-table.
“How queer!” said Laura
with some surprise, as she closed the door. “Mother
never leaves the lamp lit for me; she’s always
so afraid of lamps exploding.”
“Perhaps Miss Peirce came in
here to read, and forgot to turn it out,” suggested
Cora, seating herself on the edge of the bed and letting
her silk wrap fall from her shoulders. “Oh,
Laura, wasn’t he gorgeous. . . .”
She referred to the gallant defender
of our seas, it appeared, and while Laura undressed
and got into a wrapper, Cora recounted in detail the
history of the impetuous sailor’s enthrallment; a
resume predicted three hours earlier by a gleeful whisper
hissed across the maritime shoulder as the sisters
swung near each other during a waltz: “proposed!”
“I’ve always heard they’re
horribly inconstant,” she said, regretfully.
“But, oh, Laura, wasn’t he beautiful to
look at! Do you think he’s more beautiful
than Val? No don’t tell me if
you do. I don’t want to hear it! Val
was so provoking: he didn’t seem to mind
it at all. He’s nothing but a big brute
sometimes: he wouldn’t even admit that
he minded, when I asked him. I was idiot enough
to ask; I couldn’t help it; he was so tantalizing
and exasperating laughing at me. I
never knew anybody like him; he’s so sure of
himself and he can be so cold. Sometimes I wonder
if he really cares about anything, deep down in his
heart anything except himself. He
seems so selfish: there are times when he almost
makes me hate him; but just when I get to thinking
I do, I find I don’t he’s so
deliciously strong, and there’s such a big
luxury in being understood: I always feel he knows
me clear to the bone, somehow! But, oh,”
she sighed regretfully, “doesn’t a uniform
become a man? They ought to all wear ’em.
It would look silly on such a little goat as that
Wade Trumble, though: nothing could make him
look like a whole man. Did you see him glaring
at me? Beast! I was going to be so nice
and kittenish and do all my prettiest tricks for him,
to help Val with his oil company. Val thinks
Wade would come in yet, if I’D only get him in
the mood to have another talk with Val about it; but
the spiteful little rat wouldn’t come near me.
I believe that was one of the reasons Val laughed
at me and pretended not to mind my getting proposed
to. He must have minded; he couldn’t
have helped minding it, really. That’s
his way; he’s so mean he won’t
show things. He knows me. I can’t
keep anything from him; he reads me like a
signboard; and then about himself he keeps me guessing,
and I can’t tell when I’ve guessed right.
Ray Vilas behaved disgustingly, of course; he was
horrid and awful. I might have expected it.
I suppose Richard was wailing his tiresome sorrows
on your poor shoulder ”
“No,” said Laura.
“He was very cheerful. He seemed glad you
were having a good time.”
“He didn’t look particularly
cheerful at me. I never saw so slow a man:
I wonder when he’s going to find out about that
pendant. Val would have seen it the instant I
put it on. And, oh, Laura! isn’t George
Wattling funny? He’s just soft!
He’s good-looking though,” she continued
pensively, adding, “I promised to motor out
to the Country Club with him to-morrow for tea.”
“Oh, Cora,” protested Laura, “no!
Please don’t!”
“I’ve promised; so I’ll
have to, now.” Cora laughed. “It’ll
do Mary Kane good. Oh, I’m not going to
bother much with him he makes me
tired. I never saw anything so complacent as that
girl when she came in to-night, as if her little Georgie
was the greatest capture the world had ever seen.
. . .”
She chattered on. Laura, passive,
listened with a thoughtful expression, somewhat preoccupied.
The talker yawned at last.
“It must be after three,”
she said, listlessly, having gone over her evening
so often that the colours were beginning to fade.
She yawned again. “Laura,” she remarked
absently, “I don’t see how you can sleep
in this bed; it sags so.”
“I’ve never noticed it,”
said her sister. “It’s a very comfortable
old bed.”
Cora went to her to be unfastened,
reverting to the lieutenant during the operation,
and kissing the tire-woman warmly at its conclusion.
“You’re always so sweet to me, Laura,”
she said affectionately. “I don’t
know how you manage it. You’re so good” she
laughed “sometimes I wonder how you
stand me. If I were you, I’m positive I
couldn’t stand me at all!” Another kiss
and a hearty embrace, and she picked up her wrap and
skurried silently through the hall to her own room.
It was very late, but Laura wrote
for almost an hour in her book (which was undisturbed)
before she felt drowsy. Then she extinguished
the lamp, put the book away and got into bed.
It was almost as if she had attempted
to lie upon the empty air: the mattress sagged
under her weight as if it had been a hammock; and
something tore with a ripping sound. There was
a crash, and a choked yell from a muffled voice somewhere,
as the bed gave way. For an instant, Laura fought
wildly in an entanglement of what she insufficiently
perceived to be springs, slats and bedclothes with
something alive squirming underneath. She cleared
herself and sprang free, screaming, but even in her
fright she remembered her father and clapped her hand
over her mouth that she might keep from screaming
again. She dove at the door, opened it, and fled
through the hall to Cora’s room, still holding
her hand over her mouth.
“Cora! Oh, Cora!”
she panted, and flung herself upon her sister’s
bed.
Cora was up instantly; and had lit
the gas in a trice. “There’s a burglar!”
Laura contrived to gasp. “In my room!
Under the bed!”
“What!”
“I fell on him! Something’s
the matter with the bed. It broke. I fell
on him!”
Cora stared at her wide-eyed.
“Why, it can’t be. Think how long
I was in there. Your bed broke, and you just
thought there was some one there. You imagined
it.”
“No, no, no!” wailed Laura.
“I heard him: he gave a kind of
dreadful grunt.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure? He wriggled oh!
I could feel him!”
Cora seized a box of matches again.
“I’m going to find out.” “Oh,
no, no!” protested Laura, cowering.
“Yes, I am. If there’s
a burglar in the house I’m going to find him!”
“We mustn’t wake papa.”
“No, nor mamma either. You stay here if
you want to ”
“Let’s call Hedrick,”
suggested the pallid Laura; “or put our heads
out of the window and scream for ”
Cora laughed; she was not in the least
frightened. “That wouldn’t wake papa,
of course! If we had a telephone I’d send
for the police; but we haven’t. I’m
going to see if there’s any one there.
A burglar’s a man, I guess, and I can’t
imagine myself being afraid of any man!”
Laura clung to her, but Cora shook
her off and went through the hall undaunted, Laura
faltering behind her. Cora lighted matches with
a perfectly steady hand; she hesitated on the threshold
of Laura’s room no more than a moment, then
lit the lamp.
Laura stifled a shriek at sight of
the bed. “Look, look!” she gasped.
“There’s no one under
it now, that’s certain,” said Cora, and
boldly lifted a corner of it. “Why, it’s
been cut all to pieces from underneath! You’re
right; there was some one here. It’s practically
dismembered. Don’t you remember my telling
you how it sagged? And I was only sitting on
the edge of it! The slats have all been moved
out of place, and as for the mattress, it’s just
a mess of springs and that stuffing stuff. He
must have thought the silver was hidden there.”
“Oh, oh, oh!” moaned Laura. “He
wriggled ugh!”
Cora picked up the lamp. “Well,
we’ve got to go over the house ”
“No, no!”
“Hush! I’ll go alone then.”
“You can’t.”
“I will, though!”
The two girls had changed places in
this emergency. In her fright Laura was dependent,
clinging: actual contact with the intruder had
unnerved her. It took all her will to accompany
her sister upon the tour of inspection, and throughout
she cowered behind the dauntless Cora. It was
the first time in their lives that their positions
had been reversed. From the days of Cora’s
babyhood, Laura had formed the habit of petting and
shielding the little sister, but now that the possibility
became imminent of confronting an unknown and dangerous
man, Laura was so shaken that, overcome by fear, she
let Cora go first. Cora had not boasted in vain
of her bravery; in truth, she was not afraid of any
man.
They found the fastenings of the doors
secure and likewise those of all the windows, until
they came to the kitchen. There, the cook had
left a window up, which plausibly explained the marauder’s
mode of ingress. Then, at Cora’s insistence,
and to Laura’s shivering horror, they searched
both cellar and garret, and concluded that he had
escaped by the same means. Except Laura’s
bed, nothing in the house had been disturbed; but this
eccentricity on the part of a burglar, though it indeed
struck the two girls as peculiar, was not so pointedly
mysterious to them as it might have been had they
possessed a somewhat greater familiarity with the
habits of criminals whose crimes are professional.
They finally retired, Laura sleeping
with her sister, and Cora had begun to talk of the
lieutenant again, instead of the burglar, before Laura
fell asleep.
In spite of the short hours for sleep,
both girls appeared at the breakfast-table before
the meal was over, and were naturally pleased with
the staccato of excitement evoked by their news.
Mrs. Madison and Miss Peirce were warm in admiration
of their bravery, but in the same breath condemned
it as foolhardy.
“I never knew such wonderful
girls!” exclaimed the mother, almost tearfully.
“You crazy little lions! To think of your
not even waking Hedrick! And you didn’t
have even a poker and were in your bare feet and
went down in the cellar ”
“It was all Cora,” protested
Laura. “I’m a hopeless, disgusting
coward. I never knew what a coward I was before.
Cora carried the lamp and went ahead like a drum-major.
I just trailed along behind her, ready to shriek and
run or faint!”
“Could you tell anything about
him when you fell on him?” inquired Miss Peirce.
“What was his voice like when he shouted?”
“Choked. It was a horrible,
jolted kind of cry. It hardly sounded human.”
“Could you tell anything about
whether he was a large man, or small, or ”
“Only that he seemed very active.
He seemed to be kicking. He wriggled ugh!”
They evolved a plausible theory of
the burglar’s motives and line of reasoning.
“You see,” said Miss Peirce, much stirred,
in summing up the adventure, “he either jimmies
the window, or finds it open already, and Sarah’s
mistaken and she did leave it open! Then
he searched the downstairs first, and didn’t
find anything. Then he came upstairs, and was
afraid to come into any of the rooms where we were.
He could tell which rooms had people in them by hearing
us breathing through the keyholes. He finds two
rooms empty, and probably he made a thorough search
of Miss Cora’s first. But he isn’t
after silver toilet articles and pretty little things
like that. He wants really big booty or none,
so he decides that an out-of-the-way, unimportant
room like Miss Laura’s is where the family would
be most apt to hide valuables, jewellery and silver,
and he knows that mattresses have often been selected
as hiding-places; so he gets under the bed and goes
to work. Then Miss Cora and Miss Laura come in
so quietly not wanting to wake anybody that
he doesn’t hear them, and he gets caught there.
That’s the way it must have been.”
“But why,” Mrs. Madison
inquired of this authority, “why do you suppose
he lit the lamp?”
“To see by,” answered
the ready Miss Peirce. It was accepted as final.
Further discussion was temporarily
interrupted by the discovery that Hedrick had fallen
asleep in his chair.
“Don’t bother him, Cora,”
said his mother. “He’s finished eating let
him sleep a few minutes, if he wants to, before he
goes to school. He’s not at all well.
He played too hard, yesterday afternoon, and hurt
his knee, he said. He came down limping this
morning and looking very badly. He oughtn’t
to run and climb about the stable so much after school.
See how utterly exhausted he looks! Not
even this excitement can keep him awake.”
“I think we must be careful
not to let Mr. Madison suspect anything about the
burglar,” said Miss Peirce. “It would
be bad for him.”
Laura began: “But we ought to notify the
police ”
“Police!” Hedrick woke
so abruptly, and uttered the word with such passionate
and vehement protest, that everybody started.
“I suppose you want to kill your father,
Laura Madison!”
“How?”
“Do you suppose he wouldn’t
know something had happened with a squad of big, heavy
policemen tromping all over the house? The first
thing they’d do would be to search the whole
place ”
“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Madison
quickly. “It wouldn’t do at all.”
“I should think not! I’m
glad,” continued Hedrick, truthfully, “that
idea’s out of your head! I believe Laura
imagined the whole thing anyway.”
“Have you looked at her mattress,”
inquired Cora, “darling little boy?”
He gave her a concentrated look, and
rose to leave. “Nothin’ on earth
but imagina ” He stopped with
a grunt as he forgetfully put his weight on his left
leg. He rubbed his knee, swallowed painfully,
and, leaving the word unfinished, limped haughtily
from the room.
He left the house, gloomily swinging
his books from a spare length of strap, and walking
with care to ease his strains and bruises as much
as possible. He was very low in his mind, that
boy. His fortunes had reached the ebb-tide, but
he had no hope of a rise. He had no hope of anything.
It was not even a consolation that, through his talent
for surprise in waylayings, it had lately been thought
necessary, by the Villard family, to have Egerton
accompanied to and from school by a man-servant.
Nor was Hedrick more deeply depressed by the certainty
that both public and domestic scandal must soon arise
from the inevitable revelation of his discontinuing
his attendance at school without mentioning this important
change of career at home. He had been truant a
full fortnight, under brighter circumstances a matter
for a lawless pride now he had neither
fear nor vainglory. There was no room in him
for anything but dejection.
He walked two blocks in the direction
of his school; turned a corner; walked half a block;
turned north in the alley which ran parallel to Corliss
Street, and a few moments later had cautiously climbed
into an old, disused refuse box which stood against
the rear wall of the empty stable at his own home.
He pried up some loose boards at the bottom of the
box, and entered a tunnel which had often and often
served in happier days when he had friends for
the escape of Union officers from Libby Prison and
Andersonville. Emerging, wholly soiled, into a
box-stall, he crossed the musty carriage house and
ascended some rickety steps to a long vacant coachman’s-room,
next to the hayloft. He closed the door, bolted
it, and sank moodily upon a broken, old horsehair
sofa.
This apartment was his studio.
In addition to the sofa, it contained an ex-bureau,
three chair-like shapes, a once marble-topped table,
now covered with a sheet of zinc, two empty bird cages,
and a condemned whatnot. The walls were rather
over-decorated in coloured chalks, the man-headed-snake
motive predominating; they were also loopholed for
firing into the hayloft. Upon the table lay a
battered spy-glass, minus lenses, and, nearby, two
boxes, one containing dried corn-silk, the other hayseed,
convenient for the making of amateur cigarettes; the
smoker’s outfit being completed by a neat pile
of rectangular clippings from newspapers. On
the shelves of the whatnot were some fragments of
a dead pie, the relics of a “Fifteen-Puzzle,”
a pink Easter-egg, four seashells, a tambourine with
part of a girl’s face still visible in aged
colours, about two thirds of a hot-water bag, a tintype
of Hedrick, and a number of books: several by
Henty, “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,”
“100 Practical Jokes, Easy to Perform,”
“The Jungle Book,” “My Lady Rotha,”
a “Family Atlas,” “Three Weeks,”
“Pilgrim’s Progress,” “A Boy’s
Life in Camp,” and “The Mystery of the
Count’s Bedroom.”
The gloomy eye of Hedrick wandered
to “The Mystery of the Count’s Bedroom,”
and remained fixed upon it moodily and contemptuously.
His own mystery made that one seem tame and easy:
Laura’s bedroom laid it all over the Count’s,
in his conviction; and with a soul too weary of pain
to shudder, he reviewed the bafflements and final
catastrophe of the preceding night.
He had not essayed the attempt upon
the mattress until assured that the house was wrapped
in slumber. Then, with hope in his heart, he
had stolen to Laura’s room, lit the lamp, feeling
safe from intrusion, and set to work. His implement
at first was a long hatpin of Cora’s. Lying
on his back beneath the bed, and, moving the slats
as it became necessary, he sounded every cubic inch
of the mysterious mattress without encountering any
obstruction which could reasonably be supposed to
be the ledger. This was not more puzzling than
it was infuriating, since by all processes of induction,
deduction, and pure logic, the thing was necessarily
there. It was nowhere else. Therefore it
was there. It had to be there! With
the great blade of his Boy Scout’s knife he began
to disembowel the mattress.
For a time he had worked furiously
and effectively, but the position was awkward, the
search laborious, and he was obliged to rest frequently.
Besides, he had waited to a later hour than he knew,
for his mother to go to bed, and during one of his
rests he incautiously permitted his eyes to close.
When he woke, his sisters were in the room, and he
thought it advisable to remain where he was, though
he little realized how he had weakened his shelter.
When Cora left the room, he heard Laura open the window,
sigh, and presently a tiny clinking and a click set
him a-tingle from head to foot: she was opening
the padlocked book. The scratching sound of a
pen followed. And yet she had not come near the
bed. The mattress, then, was a living lie.
With infinite caution he had moved
so that he could see her, arriving at a coign of vantage
just as she closed the book. She locked it, wrapped
it in an oilskin cover which lay beside it on the
table, hung the key-chain round her neck, rose, yawned,
and, to his violent chagrin, put out the light.
He heard her moving but could not tell where, except
that it was not in his part of the room. Then
a faint shuffling warned him that she was approaching
the bed, and he withdrew his head to avoid being stepped
upon. The next moment the world seemed to cave
in upon him.
Laura’s flight had given him
opportunity to escape to his own room unobserved;
there to examine, bathe and bind his wounds, and to
rectify his first hasty impression that he had been
fatally mangled.
Hedrick glared at “The Mystery
of the Count’s Bedroom.”
By and by he got up, brought the book
to the sofa and began to read it over.