THE YELLOW HOUSE AND WHAT THEY FOUND AT IT
It was after midnight when Stanley Ingham stopped his car and yielded up the steering-wheel to Herrick. Besides themselves their car carried three of Kane's detectives and they were followed by the sheriff and a roadster full of armed men.
The detectives had a secondary mission. At the last minute Kane had received a message from a much concerned elderly cousin of Joe Patrick's. This cousin was a waiter at "Riley's," a roadhouse which was not only a cheap edition of the aristocratic Palisades, whence Christina had disappeared, but was kept by a brother-in-law and erstwhile partner of the Palisades' proprietor. The waiter at Riley's declared that a drunken taxi-driver had just turned up with a note from the Palisades urging Riley's to keep him over night. This man was quite drunk enough to talk about having lost his place through obliging the Palisades and Joe's cousin volunteered to keep an eye on him till the arrival of the detectives. These were to return to New York with their prisoners of the yellow house not from Waybridge, but from Benning's Point, stopping on the way to that station at Riley's and telephoning thence all news to Kane.
At Waybridge they had been fortunate in finding the sheriff up and starting forth after some marauders who were reported to have robbed a still burning post-office at Benning's Point; the station agent whom they found with him had seen Nicola, that morning, meet a lady with that old car of his that he had painted black when there was so much talk about those New York Guinees having a gray one; the agent was sure the lady had taken no return train.
From both him and the sheriff it was evident that the Pascoes as foreigners, had been contemptible, but not disliked. The unpopular person was a boarder they had; a woman with red hair who stayed out there to write novels and thought she was so much too good for other people that she never so much as passed the time of day with anybody. Friends of hers did come out from the city to see her sometimes. Going or coming from the city herself she was tied up in one o' those automobile veils—might 'uv been her come back this morning, only she looked kind of shabby-dressed. The sheriff added that there was old Mrs. Pascoe, Nicola's mother, as nice a little woman as you'd want to see; real neat, trim, gray-haired lady, an American lady. Herrick suddenly turned and stared.
But now they were within half a mile of the Pascoe house. Stanley and the detectives crowded into the sheriff's car. They had been instructed to send Herrick on alone; he was to attempt an entrance by a message of urgent and friendly warning, endeavoring to get the lay of the land and to make his presence known to any watchful captive, but otherwise awaiting reinforcements. One of the detectives said to Herrick, "If they won't let you in, just leave your message. And let them hear you drive off. Then we'll get together."
Herrick ran the car slowly along the unfamiliar road. This was still clogged and rutted with mud, which had begun to stiffen since the rain had stopped; a high wind shouldered the clouds in driving masses. His destination was the second house on his left; and, as he peered along the roadside, the deep excitement, the terrible questions which glowed in that dark night, worked in him with a fearful gladness. Certainty was at hand! A bitter exultation rode within him nearer and nearer to whatever stroke Fate stood to deal him in the yellow house. A hundred visions of Christina shone and darkened before him, leaping along his pulse, and his blood sang in him with a kind of madness.—The second house on the left! There it rose, a blot on the blackness! Dark as a stone, it somehow struck cold on his hot hopes.
He brought up the car before the gate and flung a falsely cheerful halloo upon the wind. Nothing answered. The gate yielded to his hand; as he went up the path a fragrance greeted him like Christina's presence—the cold, moist air was filled with the sweetness of old-fashioned, garden flowers. His fingers missed the bell; but, lighting on the brass knocker, sent loud reverberations through the house. Nothing within it seemed to stir. But the silence echoed horribly and swung, quaking, in his breast. Of a sudden he knew that house was empty.
Nothing else mattered. Discretion ceased to exist. He drew back and scanned the vacant, shuttered windows; he ran round the house; there was still no light; he tried the kitchen door and drew back to listen; it was as though within the house he could hear silence walking and her step was ominous. He put his shoulder to the kitchen door and burst it in.
Once again, as on that night in August, a dark room lay waiting; the darkness seemed to breathe. He had matches in his pocket and once again the light discovered only emptiness. But he remembered what, that other time, the inner chamber had revealed. He found a candle and then a lamp, and, lighting that, crossed the dining-room and then the hall into the living-room. All prettily upholstered, all in order, and vacant as the eye of idiotcy. His soul knew there was nothing living in that house; and yet it seemed to him there would surely be a step upon the stair, that a voice behind him or an opening door would certainly reveal some fateful presence. There in the hall, under the stairs, a door was open and he paused to look into a closet.
It contained a sink with running water, gardening tools, wraps hanging upon nails, and, on the floor, a big silk umbrella without a handle, the rod recently broken. There were also some old flower-pots, two of them half full of earth. Nothing else.
At the foot of the stairs he called out, "Christina!" and stood and listened while his voice went dying about the empty house. "Christina—it's I—Bryce!" and then "Nancy Cornish! Can you hear me, Nancy Cornish?" But no face leaned over the balusters to him. He went upstairs. But his step was heavy, and up there the silence weighed on him, like silence in a vault. Two rooms on the left told him nothing. But in a room on his right he found a small forgotten slipper. That slipper had fitted the slim foot of some littler maid than Christina! Holding the lamp high, he was struck to see the transom covered with poultry-wire. He went at once to the windows. Yes, there were the holes in the woodwork; even, here and there, a nail. There had been poultry wire over the windows, too. In this room some one had been held a prisoner. They had taken her away; and in such haste that they had forgotten to strip the transom and they had forgotten her slipper. At one side of the room a desk lay open, all its drawers pulled out and empty; he snatched at the waste basket; there was a crumpled sheet of paper in it and a handful of torn-up scraps. He shook the scraps into his handkerchief and, setting the lamp on the desk, he bent above the crumpled sheet. There leaped before him, in an illiterate, but very firm hand, an opening of such unimpeachable decorum as to stagger his prying eyes.
Mrs. Hope,
Honored Madam,
There was no date or other heading. The note ran:
Mrs. Hope,
Honored Madam,
Would say don't come here or send. You can tell where by knowing my handwriting. She is not here. Where she is now I got no idee on earth. I surmise she will be heard from.
There was no signature. Why had the letter not been sent? It had evidently been volunteered upon some early intimation of Christina's disappearance. "Perhaps they found out, later, that Mrs. Hope had gone away—" Then he heard Stanley hailing him from the road.
The sheriff's party, taking advantage of his house breaking, were with him immediately. They examined the place from the small, bare, air-chamber into which Stanley, mounting on Herrick's shoulders, stuck his head, to the cellar; where only a coal-bin, almost empty beneath their flinching quest, an ice-box, and an admirable array of preserves confronted them.
Upstairs, clothes had been found in all the closets—the clothes of working people for the most part; but in one, the long, slim, sophisticatedly simple gowns of a pretty woman. In that room they had forced another desk, which kept them busy for a while with tradesmen's bills, all made out, regularly enough, to Nicola Pascoe. Nowhere was there a letter, no significant writing nor any other name. In the barn a couple of trunks disgorged only some winter coats and a smell of camphor; the tools in the shed were in empty order, and when, considerably soiled and stuck about with lint and hay, they met again in the composed and pretty living-room, there on the mantelshelf the face of Christina Hope smiled mockingly at them from a silver frame. Indifferent to prayer or scrutiny, it had nothing to tell them. And it seemed to ask if they, on their part, had anything to say.
