The House of Intrigue/Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IF for a moment I was swayed by an impulse to follow Wendy Washburn out of that somewhat bewildering house, I at least had the sense not to succumb to any such impulse.
It was plain enough, in the first place, that I wasn't wanted. In the second place, it was equally plain that I couldn't be of much use to that somewhat compromising Hero-Man of mine. And in the third place, since my sojourn under that particular roof carried every evidence of being rather limited, there was a situation or two which I preferred to investigate in person.
As I stood alone in the morning-room, beside our dismantled breakfast-table, I hesitated for only a moment. Then I made for the silent hallway, slipped up the stairs and hurried quickly to the door of the room where I had slept. My movements, under the circumstances, were as noiseless as I could make them. For I had a few things to settle in my own mind before parting company with those silent and shadowy upper regions.
Once I was assured my own room was empty and would make a convenient port of refuge in case of interruption, I rescued my pearl-handled revolver from under its pillow. Then I tiptoed across the hall to the door that opened on the cream and gold room.
I fitted the key in the lock and turned it slowly, without making a sound. I was equally careful in turning the knob. Then I swung the door back a few inches. And then I stood stock-still.
For I saw that my unknown sleeper was no longer in the bed. And that discovery rather stumped me.
But even as I stood there staring in at the empty bed, with its telltale tumble of white linen, a door on the far side of the room was slowly opened. The next moment a woman stepped through it. I could see her quite plainly. Yet what made me catch my breath was the discovery that this woman was the same white-faced woman I had seen in the city house with the limestone front.
I stood so motionless that she failed to catch sight of me. For she hesitated a moment, with her eyes downcast, apparently in an attitude of listening for something. And that gave me a chance for a more leisurely survey of her figure. She was wearing a peignoir of white corduroy-velvet, with swan's-down at the throat. And as she stood with one hand against the open door she reminded me of a silver birch. She was so thin, in fact, that she looked gaunt. About her downcast eyes was the same expression of fixed melancholy which had so disturbed me when I first saw her staring down over a stair-railing. This, together with her hollow cheeks, made her seem pathetic, pathetic in a way which I found it hard to explain. Yet, I noticed, now that I had a chance to study her at my leisure, that her face was not a dead white. There was a touch of yellow in it, just enough to give it an ivory tone.
I stood there in the doorway, waiting to see what would happen next. I watched her as she crossed the room, lifted a brocaded satin candy-box from the writing-table and took off the cover. I could hear a petulant and quite earthly exclamation of "Pshaw!" as she saw that it was empty and tossed it back on the table. And ghosts, I knew, were not given to eating bon-bons.
I saw her turn and stare studiously about the room. But I had no intention of retreating. So it was not long, naturally, before her eyes fell on me. This time, however, she did not vanish into thin air. She did not even start. She merely stared at me in a petulantly bewildered sort of way.
"So you're here too?" she finally said. She said it in an amazingly matter-of-fact tone, more as though she were thinking aloud, indeed, than addressing a stranger.
"Yes, I'm here," I announced, following her cue as to matter-of-factness, "and until I find out certain things, I think I'm going to stay here!"
She merely stared at me with her rebelliously reckless and mournful eyes. Then she sank into a chair that stood beside her. She succeeded in making the movement an altogether listless one. It seemed to signify that although boring her I would probably have to be put up with.
"In the first place, I want to know how you got out here?" I demanded, realizing that I had to do something more than dally at the heels of that languid-eyed young lady in the peignoir.
She looked up at me from under her bent brows. It was more the look of a spoiled and wayward child than of a woman.
"You're not going to be disagreeable about this, too, are you?" she petulantly inquired.
"I only want to know the truth," was my retort, as I stood there, with one hand still on the door-knob.
She gave a sigh, half weariness, half relief.
"That's what I'd like to know myself. But I don't seem able to straighten things out. And I hate to think!"
I promptly decided to help her along that line.
"Then suppose we begin by clearing up the point as to just who you are," I calmly suggested.
She stared at me with mild resentment, as though to imply that she had been burdened by little of the mystery of her own identity. I could see that she was by no means the docile and yielding young thing which her artless languor might have led one to expect.
"I'd rather like to know who you are," she finally announced.
"Haven't you any idea?" I asked.
"Not the least," she told me.
So I decided to drop a shrapnel-shell into her encampment of unconcern.
"I'm Clarissa Rhinelander Bartlett!" I announced.
This statement quite failed to startle her. She was even able to laugh a little at it.
"Then there are three of us!" she quietly observed.
"Three of us?" I echoed.
She nodded her head. "At least, there were three of us," she amended, "as far as I can make out."
"And how long have you been one of them?" I inquired. I stepped into the room and shut the door behind me. Then I sat down facing her. She was giving me a good deal to think over.
"From the day I was born," she explained, with a perverse enjoyment in my perplexity.
"Are you ever called Claire?" I asked.
"Yes, since it happens to be my name."
"But Clarissa Bartlett, the real Clarissa Bartlett, is supposed to be dead," I tried to tell her.
"I've been as good as dead for the last few weeks," was her somewhat embittered answer.
"But how did you get out here?" I inquired, going back to my first question.
"I got in a car and motored out," she calmly explained.
"But why did you come here? Why did you come to this particular house?" I persisted.
She hesitated. And still again I repeated the question.
"I'd go anywhere to get away from that awful house," was her final acknowledgment.
"Why do you call it awful?"
Her reply was at least a startling one.
"Because Wendy Washburn made it that way for me!"
It took me several seconds to steady myself against the shock of this.
"Then you know Wendy Washburn?" I asked, as calmly as I could.
"I'm at least beginning to find him out," she replied. And still again there was an unmistakable note of bitterness in her voice.
"Find him out in what way?" I insisted.
The girl shifted in her chair.
"That he's everything that's abominable!" was her impassioned reply.
"Why do you say that?" I went on, determined to make hay while the sun shone.
"Because he's cruel and deceitful, as you'll very soon find out, if you haven't done it already."
"Then you—you know the sort of work he's been taking up?" I ventured.
"Yes, I know it—to my sorrow!"
I felt that somewhere at the far end of a long and untraversed tunnel I was at last seeing a little light.
"And Ezra and Enoch Bartlett," I continued, "are they your uncles?"
"I suppose so," she listlessly admitted.
"You suppose so?" I repeated. "Don't you know?"
"I never thought much about it."
"But why should your own uncles think you were dead, when you seem to be so very much alive?"
"I think I would be dead, if a few of those people had their own way about it!" was her morose comment on that question of mine.
"And you include Wendy Washburn in that circle?" I asked.
"He's worse than any of the rest of them!" was her spirited retort.
"Is he—in any way related to you?" I inquired, remembering certain things.
"In more ways than one, unfortunately."
"But how?" I persisted.
"He happens to be my cousin, in the first place."
This gave me still a second shock to digest.
"Go on," I prompted.
"And when mother died in Florence, three years ago, he was made my guardian-at-law."
"Wendy Washburn was?" I incredulously demanded.
"It does seem absurd, doesn't it?" said the morose-eyed girl. "But it's true."
"And you know, you even acknowledge, that he's the worst of the lot?"
"You'd agree with me, if you knew him as I do!" was her retort.
"Why do you say that?"
"Because he's trying to keep me from marrying the man I love," was the reply that came from the smoldering-eyed girl in white.
I sat back and let this sink in. It was a case of three strikes and out. It was a new twist to the tangle that left me more perplexed than ever. I began to feel like a blue-bottle fly in the web of a warrior-spider.
"But why should he do that?" I weakly inquired.
"Because he's thinking of only his own selfish ends," was the other's answer.
"What ends?"
The girl looked up at me.
"You don't seem to know my family," she ejaculated. There was on this occasion both pride and scorn incongruously mixed together in her tone.
"As far as I understand it," was my dignified reply, "I believe the Bartlett estate is valued at about seven million dollars."
"My estate!" corrected the moody-eyed young woman confronting me.
"And you mean to say this man is trying to rob you of this estate?" I demanded.
"It's worse than that!" was the other's reply.
That hint of things too dark to be unearthed gave me a vague sinking feeling in the region where I had so recently pinned Wendy Washburn's bunch of violets.
"You don't mean he's—he's trying to make you marry him?" I asked, with a sort of in-this-way-madness-lies clutch at my bosom.
That morose-eyed young woman sat studying my face for a moment or two. The incredulity which she must have beheld on it seemed to do away with her hesitation.
"Yes," she finally admitted.
I don't know whether I had really expected that or not, but when it came it made me blink a little, the same as you blink when a forty-candle power bulb is suddenly turned on in front of you. Then, thin and sweet, above all the tumult of the discoveries that were roaring like machinery about my dusty brain, a voice of relief kept repeating that Wendy Washburn was still an unmarried man, kept repeating it insistently, foolishly, like a song-sparrow on the eaves of a busy cotton-mill.
"And everything that's been happening in that awful house in town," I limply inquired, "has all that happened just because of this?"
"Wendy," she declared, "was at the bottom of everything!"
"But what good is it doing him?" I asked, wondering what moment the subject of our talk might step up into that room in person and add to my perplexities.
"No good whatever," declared my stubborn-eyed young friend, "for he'll never, never, be able to do what he intends to do!"
"Of course he won't," I concurred. "But tell me about this other man, the man you want to marry."
"He's everything that is brave and strong!"
"They always are," I promptly agreed. "But tell me something more definite. Where is he? And what is he?"
I could see a smile of disdain on her moody young lips, at that practical American question, as she sat there, apparently weighing in her own mind what she ought to tell me and what she ought to keep to herself. I suddenly remembered the unwelcome visitor who had forced his way into the room of the four-poster. And the possibility of the coincidence almost took my breath away.
"That young man's name doesn't happen to be McClone, does it?" I asked.
"No," was the girl's decisive reply.
"Then what is it?"
"It's O'Toole—Michael O'Toole," she admitted. But the admission seemed to cost her an effort. It was plainly not an easy name to say.
I could place no Michael O'Toole, I felt sure, among the starry names that dotted the Social Register which Bud and I had once so carefully studied. But I kept my nose to the ground, like a beagle after a cotton-tail.
"That's a grand old Irish name—O'Toole," I admitted.
"Yes," agreed the girl. "One of his ancestors was a king in Ireland, he told me."
"There must have been an awful bunch of kings in that country at one time, if all I hear is true," I remarked.
"Michael is as much a king as any of them," she proudly protested.
"They—they don't ever call him Mike, do they?" I had the impertinence to inquire. For I was beginning to realize that this pathetic little cabinet-piece, whom I'd thought of as a Dresden china rarity, housed up from all the ways of the world, was not without a mind of her own.
"Yes, I think they do! But what about it?" was the reply from my suddenly sullen-eyed antagonist. There was revolt, black revolt, in her smoldering eyes as she put the question to me.
"There's nothing about it, I suppose, if you can only get used to the prospect of some day being called Mrs. Mike!"
Her face colored with a flush of anger.
"That sounds as contemptible as some of the things Wendy Washburn said," she announced with considerable heat.
"Such as?" I prompted.
"That he'd break his neck the first time he tried to walk across a waxed floor! And that he'd probably have to be taught the difference between asparagus-tongs and an oyster fork!"
I realized that I was beginning to find out things about Michael O'Toole. And they were throwing not a little light on the problem confronting me.
"But surely the man's not a boiler-maker?" I inquired.
"Of course he's not!" was the indignant response.
"Then what is he?"
The heavy look went out of her thin young face.
"It doesn't matter with me what he is. All I know is that last summer at Long Beach he saved my life!"
"At Long Beach?" I said, with a gulp. For lightning, after all, was again striking twice in the same place.
"Yes; he swam out and saved me, at the risk of his own life!" was the reply that rapt-eyed young woman made to me.
"But surely he doesn't make a profession of that sort of thing?" I calmly inquired.
"Oh, yes, he does!" the girl just as calmly retorted.
"How do you mean?" I weakly inquired.
"He's a life guard at the beach there. And from the moment I felt him take me in his arms, and carry me up to the hotel, I knew that I could never love anybody but him! I knew it from the first! And nothing will ever change me!"