The Thrill Book/Volume 1/Issue 5/Down the Coast of Shadows
Synopsis of preceding chapters.
Wycherly, the well-known millionaire, visits his office late at night contrary to all custom. He surprises the night watchman by his sudden change into a gentle person who wishes to help others. He acts more like his dead brother than himself. He tells the night watchman to visit his poor niece, whom he had previously ignored. The night watchman does so, and learns that the dead brother wrote a book called “Down the Coast of Shadows,” and indulged in occult phenomena. The next morning Wycherly enters and seems to have reverted to his cold character. He curses his secretary, Grierson. The butler tells him he just came in the house; Wycherly denies this, refusing to believe even his housekeeper, Mrs. Shattuck.
CHAPTER X.
“Thou art the man.”
It was one of those odd little combinations of circumstance which are afterward easily explained, and yet, even when explained, leave none the less a lingering souvenir of strangeness, a flavor of mystery—as if, after all, there might have been something there that was unexplainable—unexplainable in the ordinary way.
Grant that Grierson himself had turned merely because he had heard the butler, Jonas, coming back with the wine. Grant that it was Jonas himself who swayed the curtains just then, and that Mrs. Shattuck, the housekeeper, was a little nervous, a little wrought up over this dispute between her employer and Grierson over an odd question of fact, and that therefore the return of Jonas, soft-footed as always, startled her. All these things were granted. It was by them, or through them, that Mrs. Shattuck explained that screech of hers.
It was she who drank the wine. She retreated in confusion.
Still, there was no denying it, she had left a little shudder behind her—something very subtle, something in the nature of a mental shudder.
“Bah!” said Wycherly when Mrs. Shattuck was gone. “I'm in a house filled with idiots.”
But that was the end of the scene that had culminated in the cry. Wycherly looked at Grierson, and Grierson looked at Wycherly. At least there was some sort of an understanding between them, such as existed between Wycherly and no other man, even if it was some such understanding as may exist between a master and a misused spaniel.
“Did I leave this house last night or didn't I?” Wycherly demanded.
“I was mistaken,” said Grierson.
“I'm glad you have some glimmer of sanity.”
“So am I,” smiled Grierson, trying to lighten the situation.
“So you've taken to seeing ghosts!”
“Shall I call the stenographer”
“Hold on! Why did you look like that just now when I spoke of your seeing ghosts?”
“I'm nervous, sir.”
“By gad, Grierson! You'll have me addled as well if you keep on. I begin to believe you're taking your nonsense seriously. Speak up! What are you twisting around for?”
“Mr. Wycherly, it was because of”
“Say it!”
“your brother.”
“What about him?”
“I shouldn't have spoken. Forgive me. I”
“Go on and say what you started to say, you puppy!”
“If I hadn't known that Mr. Joseph was dead, I should have sworn that it was he There, forgive me. I knew that you would be angry again.”
“I'm not angry with you, Grierson. But be good enough to go on—if you don't want me to brain you with this inkwell.”
“It wasn't only last night and again this morning. It's been a dozen times—ever since you started to make trouble for Miss Mary. I must speak to you about this, chief. I've seen—I thought I saw—Mr. Joseph standing near you—here in this room—and down-town in the offices. I thought I saw him standing just back of you yesterday when you were at the safe. Hear me, chief?”
“I hear. Continue.”
“And when this morning they sent up word that your safe was open and rifled, and nothing else disturbed, I was ready to believe that—I don't know how to express it—that some influence had led you to go down there in the middle of the night.”
“What do you mean, 'some influence?'”
“It was something that your brother Joseph said in that manuscript of his.”
“What do you know about that manuscript of his?”
“I transcribed much of it for him.”
“And absorbed a lot of his crazy views about ghosts.”
“Ghosts have been seen.”
“Nonsense! I suppose you will have a ghost working the combination of my safe!”
“It would be more likely than that Swansen should have done so. He has been with us twenty years.”
“Long enough to learn the combination.”
“We changed it last week. And there was upward of a thousand dollars in cash left in the lower drawer. He maintains that you were there, that you opened the safe, that you gave him the money, and that there was a witness.”
“Who?”
“The policeman, Cavanaugh, to whom. Swan says, you also gave some money, a bank book—you know the one—and a letter”
“He's a liar!”
“It may be hard to prove him such.”
“Well, have they brought in the policeman? What does he say?”
“I thought that perhaps you'd like to speak to him first—refresh his memory. We don't know yet what has passed down there. But there would be no use in letting Cavanaugh share in this fellow Swan's delusions.”
“You don't think that I'd tamper with a possible witness, do you?”
“Oh, no, sir!”
“Of course not.”
“Of course not.”
“Merkle, of the detective branch—one of our men—telephoned in that he had just found Cavanaugh and that they were headed this way.”
“And the girl?”
“That is a queer feature of the case, sir. As soon as I saw what was missing from the safe I sent over to 13 Segur Place, where we had last located Miss Wycherly and the Carson woman”
“Why?”
“On account of the bank book, I suppose, if there was any reason at all. I argued that any one who had taken that must have been a friend of this Carson person”
“Did you tell the detectives that?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“Go on.”
“And there Merkle found Cavanaugh, who had already returned the book to the woman. Merkle tried to take the book, but this man Cavanaugh started to rough things—said that you had given him the book yourself—offered to come up here to prove it.”
“All this, Grierson, is some damnable, outrageous plot.”
“It looks so, sir.”
“But I'll be eternally cursed if I let them put it over on me.”
“No one has ever been able to, Mr. Wycherly.”
“I'll show 'em!”
“You always have.”
“As for this miserable policeman”
The hallman came silently into the room, crossed over to the table desk, where the millionaire sat.
“It's Mr. Merkle, sir, and a gentleman as says he's Mr. Cavanaugh.”
“Gentleman! Bah! Tell them to come in.”
Merkle was an aggressive-looking man, dark and slender, but with an obvious punch in either shoulder, despite his natty attire and Charlie Chaplin mustache. But he gave way to Cavanaugh at the door. It was Cavanaugh who entered first, fair and pink, confident and perfectly content.
Cavanaugh gave a look across at Wycherly. Cavanaugh smiled. He spoke over his shoulder to the following Merkle.
“Sure, that's him,” he said.
Then he turned again to the master of the house, saluted him in a hearty voice:
“Hello, there, Mr. Wycherly.”
CHAPTER XI.
Joseph's daughter.
There followed about thirty seconds of an almost perfect silence. And yet it was as if, through this silence, there came the small sounds of a situation settling down. It was like the silence that follows the crash of a falling tree or a demolished smokestack. During this silence the policeman and the millionaire looked at each other.
There was no change of Wycherly's expression, except perhaps a slight darkening of it. Also perhaps there was a slight increase of the squint in one of his eyes. But all this was very slight. The change was greater in Cavanaugh's face.
“So, my man,” sneered Wycherly, “you have seen me before?”
“I thought I had.”
“Thought we were acquainted, too, evidently.”
It was never Wycherly's way to soft-soap those he wanted to use. To terrorize them, goad them, make them miserable—that was his way. And, generally speaking, it must be confessed that he had both the will and the power.
“You are Mr. Wycherly, aren't you?” asked Cavanaugh, with a slight increase of his pinkness. And there kept drubbing in Cavanaugh's mind the things that old Miss Carson and Swan had told him about Wycherly, things he had refused to believe.
“So you're not so sure!”
“No, sir!”
“I hope you'll remember that when you're called upon to testify in court—if you're that lucky.”
“What do you mean—'that lucky?'”
“I understand that you've already confessed to being mixed up in this safe robbery of last night.”
“What?”
“Keep a civil tongue in your head, fellow.”
“And I'll bid you to do the same, sir,” said Cavanaugh, who was as good as any man. “I wouldn't have thought it last night that a man could change so much.”
Wycherly contributed a sneering laugh.
“So I've changed so much that he doesn't recognize me!”
“That I don't, and it's none to your credit,” said Cavanaugh, with increasing warmth. After all, this was the Wycherly of tradition, the Wycherly of Miss Carson's tales. “You can take back your money.”
“Explain yourself.”
“The five hundred you gave me.”
“Ho-ho! I gave you!”
“Sure! You haven't forgotten it, have you?”
“The effrontery of the fellow,” said Wycherly. He gave Grierson a mocking smile. “He would intimate, Grierson, that I run about at night giving presents of five hundred dollars to policemen!”
Grierson laughed. Merkle, the dark detective, grinned. Cavanaugh, himself fighting mad, hunched his shoulders slightly, looked about him.
“What's the plant?” he hissed. “What's so funny?” He reached for his hip pocket, and Merkle made a movement to intercept him. But Cavanaugh gave him a contemptuous look. “Git back, you stiff,” he whispered, “or I'll soak you one.” It wasn't a revolver that Cavanaugh drew, but a wallet. The wallet contained a slim brick of bills, which Cavanaugh extracted. “They're all there,” he said. “Count them!” He spat on them and threw them on the floor. “And that's what I think,” he said, “of the money of any man that's not my friend.”
“Pick up the money, Grierson,” said Wycherly, “and count it.” To Cavanaugh he said: “So you don't consider me your friend, huh? In that case, I don't see why I should hesitate any longer in having you thrown into a cell.”
“Into a cell! What for?”
“You ought to know. Burglary, and then the separate crime of grand larceny.”
“Forget it! I don't like this brand of wit.”
“You're not denying it, are you, that that money came from my safe?”
“Ah, what are you talking about? You give it to me yourself.”
“You're a trifle mixed. You said that you didn't recognize me. You'll have to think up a better story, my man.”
“Do you mean to say you wasn't there?”
“Most absolutely.”
“Last night?”
“Last night I never left this house.”
Cavanaugh was a brave man, but he was beginning to reel a trifle. In his heart he was. There was where he kept his image of his wife and the children. He was thinking of their joy a few hours ago, when he told them about the five hundred dollars and the trip to the country. What was it going to be like if they found that he had been arrested? The worst of it was the whole affair had a fog of mystery about it. It no longer looked good to him. There was something the matter with it—something to recall the old stories his father used to tell in the Gaelic—stories to frighten you even when you couldn't understand a word of what was being said.
“This is all a bad joke,” said Cavanaugh. “It can't be. I'll ask somebody kindly to wake me up.”
“And, after all,” said Wycherly, “I don't see why you should be treated any better than that thieving night watchman.”
“In what way?”
“Jail.”
“You mean—you've let them—arrest the Swede?”
“What else?”
“Why, you dirty scoundrel,” said Cavanaugh, yet overpowering his ire and speaking softly. He had a flash of recollection. It amounted to a flash of inspiration. “And I suppose,” he said, “that you're going to deny that you wrote—this!” He pulled from the inside pocket of his coat the paper that Wycherly had written and had had him and Swan attest.
“What's that?”
“You well may ask.”
“What is it?”
“So you don't know? May the time come when you'll dom well find out!”
“So now you're to try a little bluff!”
“Bluff, is it? Bluff! When you wrote it with your own hand and signed it in the presence of Swan and myself—Jacob—Corlears—Wycherly! How many men in New York know your middle name? And had Swan and me witness your signature.”
“Let me see the paper.”
“I'll not.”
“Why not?”
“Because it belongs to the girl—your brother Joseph's daughter. Yourself said it: 'Let no one else see it—not even myself!' Man”—and now Cavanaugh whispered, as his thought took a new turn—“man, do you believe in ghosts—like your brother Joseph did?”
Wycherly said: “Get me that paper!”
At the same time he may have once more pushed those electric calls on his desk. In any case, Merkle made a grab for the envelope—and got Cavanaugh's elbow under his chin for his pains. Blond and curly, Grierson snapped about the front of Cavanaugh, creating a diversion like a toy spaniel, until Jonas, the butler, and Brock, the hallman, could make an attack from the rear. But this was just fun for Cavanaugh.
“Rough-house, is it? Oh my, oh my!”
And he was just beginning to slam the hallman properly into Jonas and Merkle when there was a slight cry—very soft, very feminine—and there was a girl whom Cavanaugh was recognizing by mere intuition even before he heard the secretary, Grierson, call her by name:
“Miss Wycherly!”
Dark and fine, placid even in the midst of this shindy, she paused just inside the door and looked about her. Perhaps she was poorly dressed. As a matter of fact, she must have been. But, at that, she looked like a high-born lady in disguise.
The fight was over. No one had any interest in it any more whatsoever.
“Well, Mary!” snarled Wycherly from his table desk.
But Cavanaugh intervened.
“You're Miss Mary Wycherly?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Then,” said Cavanaugh, “have the goodness to read this letter—now—before you do anything else. I have a feeling it's important.”
She took the envelope with a touch of wonder, slipped the message from it, started to read. Her wonder grew. Her face went white.
CHAPTER XII.
“Whoso confesseth.”
Cavanaugh had noticed that change in the girl, and he was struck by it, not to say absorbed; but he was not so absorbed as to have forgotten that struggle of a minute ago. He was at her side. No one was going to disturb her.
“Where'd you get this?” she asked him softly. There was a stress of emotion in her voice, but it was the stress revealed by an apparent absence of emotion. She had spoken to Cavanaugh, but her eyes were still held by the paper. “How did it come to be written?”
She wavered a little, like a young tree that shivers to the ax.
“It's a long story,” said Cavanaugh.
Miss Wycherly slowly raised her eyes, as if they came unwillingly, and looked across at her uncle.
“I knew it,” she said. “I knew it.”
“Knew what?” snarled Wycherly.
“It was in your heart.”
She smiled. It was a strange smile. She closed her eyes, and straightway her smile disappeared and her face became a perfect mask of grief.
It hurt Cavanaugh to see all these others there looking at the girl. He spoke to Jacob Wycherly:
“Why don't you chase all these flunkies and other hounds out of the room? Can't you see that the young lady wants to be alone for a moment?”
“Everybody get out!” stormed Wycherly, glad to ease the tension of his own nerves by a gust of brutality. “Grierson, summon the police.”
“For you?” Miss Wycherly asked in her small voice.
And there she was looking at her uncle again. The effect wouldn't have been more sensational had she thrown a hand grenade. There was a shuffling delay in the general exit.
“Don't leave me,” the girl said to Cavanaugh.
Jacob Wycherly must have been doing some heavy thinking back of his own mask of a face. It was a mask that showed nothing but bitterness and evil hued over with a shade of contempt. He had done many things in his life that wouldn't have looked well in writing—like most men, perhaps, but he more than others. And what was this thing set down in the paper that the girl held—that had blanched her cheek, that had made her look at him so accusingly?
“Shall I summon the police?” Grierson whispered.
“Shut up and get out!” said Wycherly. “Take the damned crowd with you. Can't I have a little privacy in my own house?”
They filed away. But Cavanaugh lingered. After that appeal of Joseph's daughter, he wouldn't have deserted her before a legion of devils. Wycherly nervously poked at the fire, crouched, furtive.
“Now,” said Wycherly, when the others were gone, “what is the meaning of this play acting?”
“Play acting!” cried Miss Wycherly.
“Take your time and steady down,” said Cavanaugh to the girl, ignoring the master of the house. “I'm with you. You can count on me. I talked with Miss Carson this morning, and she let me know some of the things that you've been through.”
Cavanaugh placed a chair for the girl, but she wouldn't do more than lean against it. She kept her eyes on her uncle with what the poets call “a dread fascination.” She did, except when she closed her eyes, and her face again became like a marble carving—a beautiful carving—of a grief-stricken angel. It was to give the girl time to recover herself that Cavanaugh turned on the rich man.
“You needn't scowl like that,” he said. “I've heard how you've been trying to starve this beautiful young lady into doing your will. Fighting a girl! Making her lose her situations when she was trying to earn her own living! Simply because she wouldn't come here and be dependent on you! Simply because she didn't want you for her uncle!”
“Silence!”
“And fighting the fine young lad that wants to marry her!”
“I'll not be insulted by a thief.”
“You can't be. But if you want my opinion”
“I don't!”
“you're a wicked old man.”
Mary Wycherly put a hand on Cavanaugh's arm.
“He has confessed.”
“Confessed, is it?”
Wycherly had again turned to the fire. It would have needed no psychologist to guess that he was thinking—thinking—thinking thoughts of annihilation. He had the look about him. At the girl's word “confessed,” he had slewed around, still crouching, looking over his shoulder.
“Confessed—to what?”—this from Wycherly, with a sort of whining titter, as if he thought it was some sort of a joke.
Until now the girl must have believed that her uncle was as well aware as she was what was written on the paper. She knew his handwriting. This wasn't his handwriting. She knew his signature. This was it, attested by witnesses. But now the whole situation was becoming as much of a mystery to her as it already was to both Wycherly and Cavanaugh. For these latter two the mystery suddenly took on a darker stain.
“Murder!”
The word slipped from her lips, barely audible in one way, louder than thunder in another.
“Murder!” The echo was Cavanaugh's.
Silence from Wycherly, but he was releasing the poker. The poker fell from his hand, and this was as eloquent as a sentence from him might have been as it rang against the brass of the fender.
“I knew it! I knew it!” the girl repeated softly. “In my heart I have known it all along. In my dreams I've seen it. My father was dead, but he lived. He's been my companion. A dozen times I would have denounced you—if it hadn't been for him. But he was your brother. And he loved you still—even if you did—kill him!”
Her voice broke. She was taken with a little tempest of weeping.
“It's a lie!”
Wycherly's declaration had taken a lot of breath, but it wasn't very loud. His mouth had sagged open and remained open.
The girl put her knuckles against her lips. She recovered a measure of self-control. She blazed. It was like a hot sun breaking through the clouds of an August storm. Instead of a counterdenial, she began to read:
“'. . . For the good of my soul, I confess . . .'”
“It's a lie!“”
“'. . . struck him with my cane . . .'”
“Blackmail!” drooled Wycherly.
“'. . . to save me, Joseph said that he had fallen in a fit . . .'”
“Stop! Stop!”
“'. . . smiled at me as he lay dying . . .'”
“Stop it, I tell you!” But Wycherly's voice remained the empty whisper. Not the crack of doom could have made the girl's voice inaudible.
“'. . . and even then I thought in my heart that he was a fool, but I know better now . . .'”
To have judged by his looks, Wycherly just then was at least a hundred and fifty years old and all bad. On his shrunken, gaping mouth there was a rictus of ferocious amusement. Cavanaugh, looking at him, actually felt a qualm of pity—pity none the less if coupled with horror.
So did the girl perhaps. She shrank. She gazed at him. She was tearless.
“I couldn't have written that,” said Wycherly.
“Why not?”
“Because it isn't so.”
His voice was that either of a very little boy or a very old man. He tottered forward a step. He appeared on the point of falling. He put out a shaking hand. The girl understood his gesture. She handed him the accusing document at arm's length. Cavanaugh awoke from his trance a moment too late.
Wycherly, no sooner than he had the paper, had whirled with amazing agility and thrust it into the blaze of the open fireplace. He did more than this. With the same movement he had stooped and seized the fallen poker. With this in his hand he confronted Cavanaugh.
“Stand back,” he panted, “or I'll brain you!”
CHAPTER XIII.
The psychograph.
It was as if some other sort of warning had come to Cavanaugh—something that was neither voice nor visible sign and yet which partook of the nature of these. It was an affair of an instant. But it can't be told in an instant. It was fleeting and subtle, yet he was to remember it always, and the outlines of it were to stand out as boldly as a castle on a crag.
There was the paper crisping in the blaze. There was himself eager to save it from the burning. There was Jacob Wycherly standing there with a weapon in his hand, warning him to stand back under penalty of death.
Was it something that he saw projected by Wycherly's mind? Or was it a picture preserved by these walls? Or was it mere imagination?
At any rate, there for some measureless fraction of a second it was as if time had slipped back to that other day when a scene similar to this must have taken place. Cavanaugh was not Cavanaugh. He was Joseph Wycherly, author of that manuscript entitled “Down the Coast of Shadows.” And that paper in the fire was this manuscript. Here was the assassin standing by the hearth, just as he had stood that other time, ready to repeat now what he had done then.
Cavanaugh stumbled backward. He was sprung from a line of ancestors who had always been responsive to the things unseen by ordinary eyes.
“'Tis a psychograph,” he exclaimed to himself, repeating some word that sounded itself in his brain. “'Tis no photograph—but a psychograph.”
He perceived Mary Wycherly, without precisely looking at her, and saw that she had covered her eyes with her hand, as if she also had seen something to fill her with horror and dread. But most of Cavanaugh's attention had gone to old Jacob Wycherly himself. There was confirmation there of many things.
One would have said that the old man had already struck a blow, that he was looking at his victim, now lying there on the hearth at his feet. Not even the doctors of the universities have yet exhausted the possibilities of that thing they call “suggestion”—the suggestion of the hypnotists, the suggestion of the alienists, the suggestion of the healers. What suggestion could it have been that now spread a film of awe over Jacob Wycherly's face? The look was there. It was gone.
Then Wycherly, as if recovering himself, cast a glance down at the hand holding the poker.
“It should have been your gold-headed cane,” said Cavanaugh.
“What do you mean?”
“The Swede told me what you said to him. You told him that you did it with your gold-headed cane. He told me. We wondered what you meant. Now I know. I'll tell him. It'll help get him out of prison and help put you there.”
Wycherly recovered himself entirely.
“You're a vulgar blackmailer as well as thief,” he said out of his throat.
“Your own soul has just told you otherwise,” said Cavanaugh.
Mary Wycherly spoke up, without much life in her voice:
“You destroyed the paper, but you can't destroy the truth of it. Where did the paper come from?”
Said Cavanaugh: “He wrote it himself last night in his office; but it's possible that he doesn't know it. I have heard of cases like this. The old world is full of stories like this. Have you never heard the wise ones say that 'murder will out?'”
Wycherly listened to them with the air of one who, while listening, follows his own line of thought.
“How did he come to write it?” the girl asked.
“That I do not know. He was like a different person. He was smiling and kind. Look at him now.”
“What time was it?”
“It was midnight, or just about, and he came and wrote and went away all like a man who can see in the dark.”
“Somnambulism.”
“I've heard the word.”
They spoke with only a sidelong interest for Wycherly, but now he interrupted:
“You'll have a chance to tell this nonsense to the judges”
Mary spoke to Cavanaugh:
“I am going.”
“I'll go with you.”
“You'll both stay here until I say you may go,” said Wycherly.
Cavanaugh ignored him.
“We'll go straight to my captain,” he said. “We'll tell him all we know.”
“Move and I'll have warrants out for the two of you within half an hour.” Wycherly knew what would hold Cavanaugh. It was the threat against the girl. He was right. He sneered as Cavanaugh hesitated. “There are a dozen witnesses in this house,” he said, “who will swear that I was here all last night, nowhere else.”
“The Swede and I will swear otherwise.”
“You both had stolen money in your possession.”
“And you,” said Mary Wycherly, speaking with strained gentleness, “had poor old Miss Carson's stolen bank book in your safe.”
“That—that—was Joseph's work.”
“You killed him—and now”
“What's this talk of killing? Where's your proof? When I called you here it was to offer you once more a home under my roof. I wanted a secretary. I'm getting rid of that ape, Grierson. But listen, young woman! I will! I will! I will put you in a cell, too, for complicity in this blackmailing scheme.”
“What blackmailing scheme?” asked Cavanaugh.
“Yours!”
“Was it for that you wanted to see me?”
“It was to save you from yourself—to give you a chance to clear yourself of the criminal and insane invention of that cursed Swede”
“Come away with me,” Mary Wycherly interrupted, speaking rapidly to Cavanaugh. “We'll do as you said. I have a feeling—something tells me”
She was a little incoherent, as well she might be, considering the strain she was under, the things she had seen both with the eyes of the flesh and the eyes of her mind. She again put her hand on Cavanaugh's arm. He turned to obey her, the while Wycherly watched them with an ugly smile.
Unobserved by either of them, he had rung a signal that Grierson would understand.
Grierson came in.
“Two men are on their way from headquarters,” he announced, as if no one was present but his employer.
“I've decided,” said Wycherly coldly, “to put this whole business in the hands of the police, after all. I'll tell my story. This precious pair can tell theirs.” He snickered. “You'll have me to thank if those blabbing reporters don't hear of it for a while.”
Wycherly turned slowly and looked at the hearth.
He snatched his attention back again. He rubbed his hands.
CHAPTER XIV.
From the beyond.
Whycherly was in this same room that evening when he had consented to see Miss Amanda Carson. Why he had consented to see her he himself could scarcely have told. But almost for the first time in his life Wycherly was invaded by an unrest, an uncanniness, even a fear, that he could not understand. His was the logical type of mind. Two plus two meant four, so far as he was concerned, and in the arithmetic of human life there was no X, no unknown quantity. Strange fancies, none the less, had crept into his consciousness this day. Was it because that silly ass of a Grierson had talked of ghosts? Was it because there were certain features about the robbery of his safe that could not yet be explained? Was it because of that alleged confession? Was it because of some taint in his blood or in his mind—some taint of that virus that had made of his brother Joseph a believer in outlandish things?
“Spirits? Faugh!”
The big room was brilliantly lighted. Wycherly was in his dinner clothes, with a black stock about his neck, for he was expecting a number of callers this night. This moment only had Grierson left him to conduct Miss Carson into his presence.
Wycherly, seated in his easy-chair near the fire, suddenly sat up and looked in the direction of the door.
“Good evening,” he said.
That was strange. No one had entered. Still, he thought that he had seen some one. He wasn't alarmed. He wasn't disquieted even. On the contrary, he felt uncommonly well. He felt a little giddy perhaps. Odd that his single glass of wine should make him feel like this. Yes, he felt as he had once felt in the dentist's chair, just after the dentist's assistant had slipped the gas cone over his face—a sleepiness, a low buzzing in one corner of his brain.
He plucked at his collar. He ran a hand across his forehead. The pleasant drowsiness increased. Why not snatch a moment's sleep? Often just a moment was enough.
His face went forward as his shoulders slumped back. It was just as Grierson and Miss Carson came into the room.
“He's asleep,” Grierson whispered.
“He must be a devil,” said Miss Carson, “to be able to sleep with a conscience like his.” She was small and dressed in black, but there was something of the fighting giant about her. “Wake him up!”
“I don't dare.”
“Don't dare!” Before Grierson himself could awaken to her purpose, she came up to the table and wrapped on it with a paper knife.
“Ye gods!” hissed Grierson, and stood ready to flee or to apologize. But there was a surprise in store for him.
Wycherly had opened his eyes. He remained motionless as he had been sitting. Over his features there came a look of dreamy contentment. He spoke:
“You may go, Grierson. Miss Carson and I would have a few words in private.”
Grierson gave one look at his master, another at the caller, and yet a third at the ceiling. He hurried away with the air of one who goes, as the saying is, while the going is good.
Wycherly hadn't moved. He was still as one absorbed in thought or is still under the spell of a recent dream. He hadn't given so much as a glance at his visitor. It might easily have been some one else. But he called her by name.
“Come around and sit down, Amanda. I am glad to see you.”
There was a chair opposite the one Wycherly occupied. Miss Carson walked primly around and seated herself on the edge of this. She looked across at Wycherly—glared at him, had that been possible to her gentle old eyes. Wycherly, meditative and contented, to judge by his expression, still had not given her so much as a glance.
“You fiend!” she muttered.
“Now, now, Amanda,” drawled Wycherly, “hard words butter no parsnips.”
She gave a slight start.
“I should think those words would strangle you.”
“Why?”
“Because they recall—your brother Joseph.”
“Perhaps I wanted to recall him.”
“Recall him? You? After what you've done?”
“There's a mystery of human conduct.”
“There's no mystery about yours. What do you mean by all this persecution? I've just seen her—Joseph's daughter—my Mary—held in prison like a criminal”
“Don't cry, Amanda. You always did have a tender heart.”
“My heart is flint.”
“Impossible!”
“Accuse her of blackmail, will you? I've come—as God is my judge—to blackmail you indeed.”
“Blackmail me, Amanda?”
“You know—what I know. The promise I gave”
“To Joseph?”
“You do know.”
“Yes, I know. You promised him that you wouldn't tell.”
Miss Carson was agitated. There was no agitation on Wycherly's part. He sat there talking like one who is pleasantly reminiscent. He had raised neither his eyes nor his voice.
“I promised that I wouldn't tell unless it was necessary to save some one else. Now I'll tell. I'll tell the whole world that you”
Wycherly had his first movement. He lifted his hand in an appeal for silence.
“Don't distress yourself. If it's necessary, I myself will confess that I killed Joseph. Aye, but I did confess it. I remember now. I went last night to my office. There—there I wrote out a confession to be sent to Mary. She was in some trouble. I wanted to protect her. And I sent you that old bank book that Joseph had used in accumulating your little fortune”
As Wycherly became more interested and as if more awake, he raised his eyes for the first time and looked at his caller. She had leaned forward with a growing trouble in her face. It might have been a mere passing trouble—an explicable trouble, at any rate. Like most women of her age, Miss Carson was familiar with many of the human phenomena rated as tragic—death, loss of mind. But as Wycherly raised his eyes, Miss Carson was transfixed.
“Are you—Jacob?” she asked.
“Why do you ask?”
“You were speaking with Joseph's voice.”
“Perhaps Joseph's spirit has returned to dominate my own.”
“Joseph—it is you.”
“The body is merely a ship in charge of a spirit captain”
“Sailing”
“down that coast of shadows”
“Joseph's words. Joseph! You are here”
Things most abysmally strange—stranger than anything that would be seen through the windows o£ a Jules Verne submarine—pass in the most ordinary row of houses, the most respectable of houses. Here was a respectable house, so far as appearances went, on that most respectable of avenues—a house built at great expense of stone and glass, steel and copper. And yet, in the drawing-room of it
Miss Carson, tremulous, had slipped forward to her knees before the man who had murdered his brother and was whispering that brother's name as she saw—or thought she saw—that brother looking out at her from the fratricide's eyes.
CHAPTER XV.
The reprieve.
To explain a little of what was passing in Amanda Carson's mind just then, and something of what was palpitating in her heart, it is only necessary to remember that for years she had been the amanuensis of Joseph Wycherly, that as such she had read books without number, had been present at interviews and had taken cognizance of and cruised far into that sea of Joseph Wycherly's shadow coast
Doctor Hodgson, Professor Hyslop, W. T. Stead, Flornoy, the gifted Frenchman; Sir Oliver Lodge, Doctor Joseph Maxwell—they were as shadowy witnesses here now, confirming her guess or her intuition; not mocking at her, but bidding her to persevere.
She remembered certain words of Maeterlinck: “A spiritual epoch is perhaps upon us . . . as though humanity were on the point of struggling from beneath the burden of matter that weighs it down.”
There was the whole vast literature of dual and multiple personality, of somnambulism, spiritism, psychism.”
She had not loved these studies. She had always regarded them, if the truth be told, with a certain degree of aversion. But she had loved Joseph Wycherly, loved him as she had loved his daughter. And she was suddenly and tremulously aware that all these years of blind but devoted study had prepared her—for this!
“You must telephone,” she said.
“To whom?”
“Fleming, your lawyer.”
“Quite true.”
Wycherly reached out a hand without looking, drew a telephone from its niche at the side of the fireplace. Grierson's voice sounded faintly.
“Get me Fleming.”
There was a slight babble of sound. Wycherly lowered the instrument. His eyes were bright and warm, his voice was gentle.
“Fleming is here, waiting to speak to me now. Shall I call him in?” He spoke into the telephone: “Just a moment, Grierson.”
“Tell him you can't receive him. Tell him to speak to you over Grierson's phone.”
Miss Carson was whispering. She was still on her knees, tense.
“Oh, Joseph! Joseph! Don't go!”
“Odd,” said Wycherly, “that you should call me Joseph, when my name is Jacob. It is odder yet that it should seem so natural that you should Hello; Fleming?”
“Tell him to hurry to police headquarters”
Miss Carson, seventy at least, folded her hands on her breast as if she were a child again and saying her prayers. Perhaps she was. Joseph Wycherly had always loved to dwell on the eternal youth of that which Doctor Geley calls the superior subconsciousness, and which Maeterlinck calls “the Unknown Guest,” but which he himself had simply called the soul. And what else Miss Carson had to say just then she said silently, by telepathy.
“You are to hurry to police headquarters, Fleming, and there give bail No, no! Immediately. Disregard all previous orders”
There was a straining lull. Wycherly looked at Miss Carson.
“He insists on seeing me.”
She set her lips. She shook her head.
“Later, Fleming. Not now! Not now! Damn”
Wycherly was seized with a slight tremor. He spoke to neither Fleming, at the other end of the wire, nor to Miss Carson, kneeling there in front of him. His voice was a mere murmur:
“Not yet! Not yet!”
Thereupon Wycherly closed his eyes. Miss Carson as if flung herself forward, reached out a hand.
“For Mary's sake!” she cried in her whisper.
Wycherly opened his eyes, spoke with a new energy:
“You will do what I say, sir, immediately. A misapprehension—explain it as you will—rouse out a magistrate. You've done it before. Do it now. Get Miss Wycherly out of there”
“Praise God!” breathed Miss Carson.
“And the policeman, Cavanaugh”
Wycherly had read her thought.
“and that other, the night watchman. Hurry! Turn heaven and earth”
There must have been another sort of consternation and excitement in the room that Grierson used as an office when he and his employer were here in the house. Grierson was there now, with the lawyer, Fleming—Fleming fat and material; Fleming with the hard lawyer mind that had schemed and lurked through dark and crooked legal byways for years at Jacob Wycherly's bidding. Fleming himself was up against something that he couldn't understand. Never had he heard Jacob Wycherly speak so softly; never had he known Jacob Wycherly to be so eager to perform a deed of kindness. And, besides, hadn't Wycherly, earlier in the day, rasped and snarled about what he wanted done to these very persons he was now insisting should be released?
“There's something the matter with him,” Fleming whispered to Grierson.
“There must be.”
Grierson didn't dare communicate all of his misgivings. Grierson had been sure that he had seen Wycherly leave the house the night before. What had happened when he mentioned it? He had been browbeaten and insulted. He wasn't going to be browbeaten and insulted again. Grierson had had the creepy sensation of having seen some one or something that no one else had seen. A phantom! A specter! A ghost! A fine thing to mention to a man of Fleming's constitution!
But Grierson had a fad, or a hobby, or call it an avocation—a secret garden, so to speak, into which he escaped whenever he could from the torture chamber of his daily work. It was a secret garden which had first been revealed to him when he read that manuscript of Joseph Wycherly's—the one that Jacob Wycherly had subsequently burned.
In that manuscript Joseph Wycherly had written much on the riddle of personality. Persons passed but a fragment of their time in the so-called physical body. Independent of this body that wanted ham and eggs for breakfast, there were other bodies that came and went—in sleep, in trance, in so-called death. One personality might relinquish his body, as a captain the command of his ship, and another captain came aboard; or some hitherto inconspicuous passenger aboard that ship might suddenly manifest himself
Fleming was sweating at the telephone.
“He talks like he's hypnotized or something. Who's with him now?”
“Old Amanda Carson, who was”
“Joseph Wycherly's secretary! Wasn't she some sort of a damned trance medium?”
“Do you believe”
“Bah! Sneak in! House the old man up.”
Miss Carson heard Grierson come in. Every faculty she possessed was straining to the breaking point. She was on her feet in an instant. She faced the secretary.
CHAPTER XVI.
Defiance.
What do you want?” she asked.
“Mr. Fleming wanted me to speak to Mr. Wycherly.”
“What about?”
“He—wanted a word with him”
“They've talked over the telephone.”
“But Mr. Fleming thought”
Miss Carson, with the delicate perceptions of her intuition, was aware that there was a change coming over the Wycherly just back of her. There wasn't an instant to lose. Indeed, there was that in the presence of Grierson to recall as no one else could have done the personality that had been in abeyance—the personality of Jacob Wycherly. She turned.
“Tell Fleming to hurry,” she commanded.
“Hurry, Fleming. You may see me later.”
Miss Carson took the telephone from the millionaire's hand, thrust it back into its niche. She saw a wavering of that familiar and beloved presence that had been visible in Jacob Wycherly's eyes.
“Mr. Wycherly,” said Grierson.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Fleming”
Wycherly straightened up in his chair.
“What—what's that?”
His voice had finished with a rasp. He sat there glaring about him for a moment or so. He saw Miss Carson as if for the first time. He scowled.
“If you've come to speak to me about that ingrate niece,” he began.'
“Joseph's daughter,” Miss Carson put in. “Joseph, who was just here—who may be here still”
“What!” roared Wycherly. “You dare begin again on that blasphemous folderol that embittered my life while Joseph was still alive? I shan't have it. State your message.”
“Mr. Wycherly,” said Grierson. “I beg pardon, sir”
“Curse you, Grierson, can't you come to the point without all this 'beg-your-pardon' stuff? What do you want?”
“Mr. Fleming thought”
“Fleming! Where is he?”
“In my office, sir. You were just talking to him.”
“So I was! With twenty-six people all harping at me at the same time, no wonder I lose my wits. Tell Fleming”
“Stop!” said Miss Carson. She knew that her only chance now was to play for a little delay. She also knew something about Fleming, knew that he would not tarry long after what had been told him over the telephone “You forget that I also am in a hurry.”
“He's waiting,” said Grierson.
Miss Carson turned again to confront him. “Mr. Grierson,” she said, with a sort of meek rage, “surely you will not wish to interrupt me when I have a few moments with Mr. Wycherly.”
Grierson looked from his master to Miss Carson. He noted Wycherly's scowl. He was aware of Miss Carson's tension. He wondered what had been passing here. There flitted through his mind a flock of little souvenirs—stories of spirits, of haunts, of possession.
“Tell Fleming to come here,” growled Wycherly. He spoke to Miss Carson. “You show a most amazing readiness to make yourself at home.”
Grierson turned.
But Miss Carson seized upon a weapon that she understood. She had seen it used a hundred times, at least, in all sorts of conflicts. She had seen it used to the end that trickery might triumph. She had seen it in the strange and sometimes terrifying conflicts between the spiritual and the physical. She had seen it used not as a weapon but as a tool—at sittings with famous mediums. And this weapon, or tool, was one that Jacob Wycherly feared more than any other.
It was darkness.
As Miss Carson's hand went out to the electric switch, there swept in upon her also a flock of souvenirs. She knew all the tricks of the fakes and charlatans who dealt in necromancy. Also she knew what real powers lurked unsuspected in the dark—powers that would come obedient to the will of any one who understood.
From Wycherly, as the darkness swamped the room, there came a strangled gasp. From Grierson nothing much but an exclamation of vexation. There was a momentary silence. Then, very quickly:
“Take your hands off! Take your hands off!”
It was a strange voice. It might have been Wycherly's. It might have been Grierson's. It was a chatter.
“Agh!”
That was from Wycherly—the ugly sound that any man might make who felt cold fingers on his throat in the dark. It was followed by a silly, senseless laugh—from Grierson unmistakably.
Again that silence. It was broken by a childish, birdlike voice:
“This way, Joseph! This way, Joseph! Can't you see me, see me—fluttering white—white and fluttering?”
The retina of the eye is itself a mystery—mirror of the most solid fact and the most shadowy hallucination. There floated into view that fluttering whiteness the child's voice mentioned. It was like a nebulous drift, a luminous small cloud, out of nowhere, that came to an unstable rest between the table and the flickering glow of the fireplace.
“Don't be afraid, Joseph,” came the childish voice out of this whiteness. “Bruvver hasn't got his bad old cane any more.”
Grierson had taken to attending spiritualist meetings. Himself he had, ever since that time he had read the late Joseph Wycherly's unpublished work. He didn't have the scientific spirit, Grierson didn't He was only half convinced that much that passes for phenomena at such places are but snares fabricated for the taking of the credulous. On the other hand, there was something that he did know—that, year after year, down through the centuries, there had assembled a mass of incontestable evidence that life was but a passage down a coast of shadows, where misty continent touched misty ocean.
Grierson, overcoming his first shock of fear, had drawn a little closer. He saw the whiteness waver. Then he saw something else—or thought he saw it.
Lying there on the hearth where Joseph Wycherly had dial there was stretched a dark form now. It was from this apparently that the voice of Joseph Wycherly himself now came:
“My God, Jake! No, no! I'll tell them that I fell.”
There was one of those changes, as swift and in consequential as the change in a dream. It was caused perhaps by the cry that came from Jacob Wycherly, who sat there in the darkness, prey the Lord only knows to what emotions:
“Lights! Lights! Turn on the lights!”
“Don't be frightened, Jake,” came the voice of Joseph Wycherly. “You're not alone. Don't you remember how you always feared to be alone? I've come back. You'll never—be alone again.”
“Lights!” And Wycherly's voice was the voice of a man being strangled.
Grierson saw him stiffen suddenly, grow violently rigid. He stepped down. The eyes had set and there were red marks on Wycherly's throat. He was dead.
THE END.