The Pascoes were in desperate straits, and Nicola was alone. He drew his knife from the capacious foldings of his coat, and stepped a little behind the door as he flung it open. There stumbled out, and sank, gasping, at his feet, the figure of a woman. She brought with her, out of the reeking closet, a strong odor of ammonia. Nicola gave a grunt of amazement. Then, like Herrick afterward, he lifted his lamp, and stared about the closet. On the floor lay an empty quart bottle which had recently been full of household ammonia, a still soaking towel, and a large silk umbrella, the rod broken and the handle missing. With the point of this umbrella a pane of the little window overhead had been broken and a slant of the outside shutter forced open for air. Nicola could make nothing of it; he turned at length, and grouchily pulled the gasping woman to her feet. This woman was the gray-haired housekeeper, Mrs. Pascoe.
At ten o'clock she said she had gone to get something from the closet and, as she opened the door, she had smelled ammonia. Then a towel, soaking with it, had been pressed on her face. Before she could do more than struggle with that, she had been pushed into the closet and the door had clicked upon her. That was all she knew. She must have been unconscious part of the time.—At ten o'clock! What an eternity of despair, then, had Christina not lived through before she thus ruthlessly freed herself! And what, now, had become of her; under a dawn some seven hours later than when, leaving Nancy behind, she had rushed out of that house and sped away, along the storm-tossed road?
CHAPTER IX
A SIGN IN THE SKY
At the end of four days Christina's friends gave up their private search for the retreat of the Arm of Justice.
During those days Herrick and the faithful Stanley, sometimes accompanied by Wheeler's stalwart hopefulness, had persistently attempted to take up the trail where it had broken—in the fields at one end of the Hoover estate. The beautiful old place, one of the great show places of the Hudson, stretched three miles deep to the river bank and a mile and a half along the road; remembering the theory of an escape through the grounds they presented themselves as richly tipping tourists to the little old, old couple at the lodge. These aged folk accustomed, during the Hoovers' prolonged absence abroad, to curious sightseers, welcomed them beneath the winged marble lions of the entrance-gates and made them free of the grounds with a host-like courtesy. But no broken shrubbery, no footstep save of that of a stray gardener or of their rival searchers the police, rewarded them; from the Hudson Club's boathouse, which had rented a strip of the beach, no boat was missing; the shores of unbroken woodland for a league on either side yielded no sign; when a hanging shutter at the great house led to a belief that the refugees had sheltered there the friends watched anxiously the disappointed ransacking of privileged authorities, and their only gain came from the gossip of the old lodge-keepers which informed them that the body of Nicola Pascoe had never been found. He could, then, have been only stunned. Thus it was still he they were most alert for during the next three days when the whole district—inns and post-offices, country-stores and stable-yards as well as every grove and by-lane—yielded them by day or night no scrap of news.
During their search, indeed, what clues existed had crumbled away. The cabman, for instance, had most truly driven Christina to the Amsterdam hotel, where she had simply given him so large a tip as to upset his sobriety and earn his discharge. Meeting in with the manager of The Palisades and applying fuddleheadedly for relief he had conveyed to that gentleman the idea of "knowing something," and had been sent to sober up at Riley's in order to keep the reward in the family. Then the day-clerk of the Amsterdam brought forth Christina's registered signature, engaging a suite on Thursday afternoon for Thursday night; she had claimed this suite from the night-clerk and occupied it; early in the morning she had sent for the housekeeper and hired some clothes of hers, saying she couldn't wait for her maid to bring her any. The frightened housekeeper had at length displayed the white and silver dress. Last and worst, to Herrick, when, on Saturday, he had sought out the table d'hôte, the dogs, the cats, the babies were unchanged, the Italian proprietress greeted him with a smile of welcome, but no gray-haired woman played solitaire behind the desk.
It was a curious enough blight without being heightened by the fact that Kane's patience with Herrick had plainly given out. Ever since the young man's return from Waybridge he had been aware of a change in the official attitude which rendered it suddenly impossible for him to see any one whom he asked to see and stretched like a fine wire excluding him from the whole affair. It increased his sense of outlawry, but a private preoccupation kept it from striking home.
This preoccupation ran parallel with, but, alas! could never be brought to meet that old story of the Hopes' love-affair which he could not help feeling to be the key to the true, the hidden, situation. That little pitted speck—and his novel! His novel of the Italian impostor! On the morrow of his chase after Nicola the table d'hôte had scarcely failed him before he was knocking at the door of Mrs. Deutch.