CHAPTER II
It was raining when I left my apartment at the Marathon that night—a cold and disagreeable drizzle—and the thought occurred to me as I turned up my coat collar and stepped into the cab I had summoned, that it was a somewhat foolhardy thing to be driving about the streets of New York with fifty thousand dollars in my hand bag. I glanced at the lights of the Tenderloin police station, just across the street, and thought for an instant of going over and asking for an escort. Then I sank back into the seat with a little laugh at my own nervousness.
"One-twenty West Twenty-third," I said, as the cabman slammed the apron shut.
He nodded, spoke to his horse, and we were off.
The asphalt was gleaming with the rain, and a thin fog was in the air, which formed a nimbus around the street lamps and drew a veil before the shop windows. Far away I heard the rattle of the elevated and the never-ceasing hum of Sixth Avenue and Broadway, but, save for these reminders of the city's life, the silence of the street was broken only by the click-clack of our horse's hoofs.
We swung sharply around a corner, and then another. A moment later the cab drew up at the curb, and the driver sprang from his box.
"Here we are, sir," he said, and as I stepped to the pavement, I saw the old Magnus house frowning down upon me.
I had never before seen it at night, and for the first time I really appreciated its gloomy situation. In its day it had been part of a fashionable residential district, of which it was now the only survival. It was of brownstone, with a flight of steps mounting steeply to the door, and stood back from the street at the bottom of a cañon formed by the towering walls of the adjacent office buildings. Why any woman who could afford to live where she chose should choose to live here was a riddle past my solving.
Musing over this, I mounted the steps and rang the bell.
"I am Mr. Lester," I said, to the maid who opened the door. "Mrs.
Magnus is expecting me."
She stood aside for me to enter, and as I passed I happened to glance at her face. It was that of a woman no longer young, and yet scarcely middle-aged; not a repulsive face; indeed, rather attractive in a way, except for a certain hardness of expression which told of lost illusions. And as she took my coat and hat, I noticed that the little finger of her left hand was missing.
"This way, sir," she said, and motioned me into a room at the right.
"Mrs. Magnus will be down in a minute."
I heard her step recede along the hall, and then somewhere a clock struck eight. As the sound died away the rustle of skirts came down the stair, and Mrs. Magnus appeared in the doorway. Her panic of the morning had passed, and she was perfectly self-controlled.
"Ah, Mr. Lester," she said, "you are prompt. You have the money?" she added in a lower tone.
"Yes," I answered, and then stopped, for I fancied I heard a stealthy footstep at the door.
"Let us go up to the study. We will be more comfortable there," and she led the way out into the hall.
I was close at her heels, and looked quickly to right and left. But there was no one in sight.
Mrs. Magnus went before me up the stair, turned toward the front of the house in the hall above, and ushered me into a small room which seemed to have been fitted up as an office. Its principal piece of furniture was a massive, roll-top desk. The top was up at the moment, and disclosed rows of pigeon-holes, some full of papers and some empty. Below them were the usual small drawers. The desk was one of the largest I have ever seen, and I wondered how it had been got into the room. An office chair of the usual swing type stood in front of it.
Something told me that this was the desk. It stood in one corner of the room; not closely in the corner, but at an angle to it, its back touching the wall on either side and leaving a little triangle of space behind it. The reason of this was evident enough, for, placed in this way, the person sitting at the desk got the advantage of the light from the window at his right, and also the heat from the fireplace at his left.
The thought flashed through my mind that, before I placed the money on the desk, I would take occasion to glance over into the space back of it.
"Sit down, Mr. Lester," said Mrs. Magnus, and herself drew up a chair to one side of the fireplace, where a wood fire crackled cheerily, throwing out a warmth just strong enough to be grateful on this damp evening. "The money is in that bag?"
"Yes," I said. "I have it in hundred-dollar bills—five packets of one hundred each. I thought perhaps you—your husband would prefer it in that form."
She nodded, and sat for a moment staring absently into the fire.
"This was Mr. Magnus' workroom, I suppose?" I said at last.
"Yes; when he was first really succeeding in business, he used always to bring some work home with him in the evening. But he outgrew that"—a shade of bitterness crept into her voice—"and during the last ten years of his life he used the room hardly at all. But he is using it again now," she added, in another tone. "Every night."
I stared across at her, wondering if she could be in earnest.
Certainly her countenance gave every impression of earnestness.
"He will be here to-night," she went on. "It is a little early yet. He usually comes at eight-thirty."
"You mean he is here in the spirit," I said, trying to speak lightly.
"In the spirit, of course."
I breathed a sigh of relief. I fancied that I began to understand.
"Many people believe that their dead watch over them," I said.
"Oh, Mr. Magnus isn't watching over me," said my companion quickly. "There is a certain thing he desires me to do. Once that is done, I don't believe he will bother me any more. I left his note with you this morning. Did you bring it with you?"
"Yes," I said, and got it out of my pocket and handed it to her. "But really, Mrs. Magnus," I continued, "you don't mean to tell me seriously that you saw him write this?"
"I certainly did. He wrote it under my eyes, sitting at that desk three nights ago."
Again I looked at her to see if she was speaking seriously.
"I see you do not believe me," she added.
"Pardon me, Mrs. Magnus," I corrected; "of course I believe you—that is, I believe that you believe. But I cannot but think you are being imposed upon in some way."
A flush of anger crept into her cheeks.
"Do you think I am a woman easily imposed upon?" she asked. "Let me tell you the story, Mr. Lester."
"That is what I have been hoping you would do," I said. "I am very anxious to hear it."
"After my husband's death," she began, "I decided to use this room as my office or workroom. I went through his desk and cleared it out. There were no papers of importance there; but I found one thing which gave me a shock. That was a letter, pushed back and I suppose forgotten in one of the drawers, which proved to me that my husband had been unfaithful."
I was not surprised, of course, after what Godfrey had told me, but I managed to murmur some polite incredulity.
"Oh, it was true," she went on bitterly. "I knew he had grown away from me, but I never suspected that—that he could be so vulgar!" That, of course, was the way in which it would appeal to her—as vulgar.
"It is that which is worrying him now," she added.
"You mean—"
"No matter. He shall have the money to-night, and that will be ended. Let me go on with my story. As I said, I began to use this room. I kept my papers in the desk yonder, and worked there regularly every day. But one morning, when I came in, I noticed something unusual—an odor of tobacco. You know Mr. Magnus was a great smoker."
"Yes," I said.
"You may have noticed that he always smoked a heavy black cigar which he had made for him especially in Cuba. It had a quite distinctive odor."
"Yes," I said again. I had noticed more than once the sweet, heavy aroma of Magnus' cigars.
"I recognized the odor at once," went on Mrs. Magnus. "It was from one of his cigars. When I opened the desk, I found a little heap of ashes on his ash tray, which I had been using to keep pins in, and the remnant of the cigar he had been smoking."
"He?" I repeated. "But why should you think—"
"Wait," she interrupted, "till you hear the rest. I cleaned off the tray and went through my day's work as usual. The next morning I found the same thing—and something more. Some one had been trying to write on the pad of paper on the desk."
"Trying to write?" I echoed.
"Yes, trying—as though some force were holding him back."
She went over to the desk, unlocked a little drawer, and took out several sheets of paper.
"Here is what I found that morning," she said, and handed me a sheet from an ordinary writing pad.
I saw scrawled across it an indecipherable jumble of words. She had expressed it exactly—it seemed as though some one had been trying to write with a weight clogging his hand. And there was something about this scrap of paper—something convincing and authentic—which struck heavily at my skepticism. Here was what a lawyer would call evidence.
"It kept on from day to day," continued Mrs. Magnus, sitting down again. "Every morning the little heap of ashes and fragment of cigar, and a scrawl like that—until finally, one morning, I understood what was happening in this room, for three words were legible."
She handed me another sheet of paper. At the top were the words, "My dear wife," and under them again an indecipherable scrawl.
"Did you tell any one of all this?" I asked.
"Not a word to any one. But I decided to investigate."
"How?"
"By staying in this room at night."
I could guess from her tone what the resolution had cost her.
"And you did?"
"Yes. I came up right after dinner, leaving word that I was not to be disturbed. I went first to the desk to assure myself that the tray was empty and that there was no writing on the top sheet of paper. Then I switched off the light and sat down here by the fire and waited."
"That was brave," I said. "What happened?"
"For an hour, nothing. Then I was suddenly conscious of an odor of tobacco, as though some one smoking a cigar had entered the room, and an instant later I heard that chair before the desk creak as though it had been swung around. I switched on the light at once. The chair had turned. It had been facing away from the desk, and it was now faced toward it."
She stopped a moment, and I saw that her excitement of the morning was returning. Indeed, my own heart was beating with a quickened rhythm as I glanced around at the desk. I saw that the chair was facing away from it.
"The odor of tobacco grew stronger," went on Mrs. Magnus, "and, even as I watched, a little mass of ashes fell into the tray."
"From nowhere?"
"Apparently from nowhere, but of course it was from the cigar that he was smoking."
"Did you see the smoke?"
"No; how could I?"
Really, I didn't know. I wished that I had given more study to the details of spirit manifestation. I didn't remember that I had ever heard of a ghost smoking a cigar, but doubtless such cases existed. The point was this: Why, if the ashes from the ghost's cigar became visible when knocked off, shouldn't the smoke become visible when expired? Or did the fact that it had been inside an invisible object render it permanently invisible? I fancied this was what Mrs. Magnus had meant by her question. Perhaps she had studied the subject. At any rate, it was too deep for me.
"A moment later," she went on, "another mass of ashes fell; then perhaps five minutes passed, and I saw the remnant of the cigar placed on the tray. I confess that my nerves gave way at that point, and I fled from the room."
"Locking the door after you?"
"No; but I came back and locked it ten or fifteen minutes later."
"Did you enter the room?"
"Yes; I had left the light burning and entered to turn it off. I found on the desk another note beginning, 'My dear wife.'"
"And then what?"
"I was here the next night and the next. There was something about it that fascinated me, and I saw that there was no reason for fear. In the end it came to seem almost natural—almost as if he were here in the flesh."
"And always the same things happened?"
"Yes, or nearly so, the writing growing more legible all the time."
"And then?"
"Then, three nights ago, I grew brave enough to go and stand by the desk, and look over his shoulder, as it were, while he wrote the note which I showed you this morning."
"You mean that he actually did write it while you were looking over his shoulder?"
"I mean that the words formed themselves on the sheet of paper under my eyes, precisely as they flowed off his pen."
"And there wasn't any pen?"
"There wasn't anything. Only the ashes and the odor of tobacco."
I glanced across at Mrs. Magnus sharply. Could it be possible that she was inventing all of this incredible tale?
"No," she said, answering my thought; "it happened precisely as I tell it. I am hoping that you will see for yourself before long. It is almost time for him to come."
I felt the hair crawling up my scalp as I glanced around again at the desk. Like everybody else, I had always professed a lively interest in ghosts and a desire to meet one; but now that it seemed about to be gratified, the desire weakened perceptibly.
"I didn't at first intend to give him the money," she went on. "I didn't see why I should. He was dead. It was mine. He had never, in his life, given me fifty thousand dollars. But when, the next night, the money wasn't there, he expackets over to Mrs. Magnus.
"In writing?"
She nodded and held another sheet of paper out to me. On it, in Peter
Magnus' hand, was written:
MY DEAR WIFE: Do not delay. I must right a great wrong before either of us can rest in peace.
"And from this you judge that he wants the money to—to—"
"Yes," she said, not waiting for me to finish. "Even then I hesitated. I did not see that I had any concern in his misdeeds. But last night—"
She stopped, and I saw sweep across her face the sudden, pallor I had noted in the morning.
"Yes," I encouraged, "last night—"
She was clutching the chair arms convulsively, trying to force her trembling lips to form the words. What horrible thing was it had happened last night? What—
And at that instant I was conscious of the odor of tobacco in the air, and distinctly heard the low grating of the office chair as it swung around.