The snow had stopped some time before; a strong and increasing wind had sprung up, which Alan, with knowledge of the wind across his prairies, recognized as an aftermath of the greater storm that had produced it; for now the wind was from the opposite direction—from the west. He could see from the Sherrills' door step, when he looked toward the lighthouse at the harbor mouth winking red, white, red, white, at him, that this offshore wind was causing some new commotion and upheaval among the ice-floes; they groaned and labored and fought against the opposing pressure of the waves, under its urging.
He went down the steps and to the corner and turned west to Astor Street. When he reached the house of his father, he stopped under a street-lamp, looking up at the big, stern old mansion questioningly. It had taken on a different look for him since he had heard Sherrill's account of his father; there was an appeal to him that made his throat grow tight, in its look of being unoccupied, in the blank stare of its unlighted windows which contrasted with the lighted windows in the houses on both sides, and in the slight evidences of disrepair about it. He waited many minutes, his hand upon the key in his pocket; yet he could not go in, but instead walked on down the street, his thoughts and feelings in a turmoil.
He could not call up any sense that the house was his, any more than he had been able to when Sherrill had told him of it. He own a house on that street! Yet was that in itself any more remarkable than that he should be the guest, the friend of such people as the Sherrills? No one as yet, since Sherrill had told him he was Corvet's son, had called him by name; when they did, what would they call him? Alan Conrad still? Or Alan Corvet?
He noticed, up a street to the west, the lighted sign of a drug store and turned up that way; he had promised, he had recollected now, to write to ... those in Kansas—he could not call them "father" and "mother" any more—and tell them what he had discovered as soon as he arrived. He could not tell them that, but he could write them at least that he had arrived safely and was well. He bought a postcard in the drug store, and wrote just, "Arrived safely; am well" to John Welton in Kansas. There was a little vending machine upon the counter, and he dropped in a penny and got a box of matches and put them in his pocket.
He mailed the card and turned back to Astor Street; and he walked more swiftly now, having come to his decision, and only shot one quick look up at the house as he approached it. With what had his father shut himself up within that house for twenty years? And was it there still? And was it from that that Benjamin Corvet had fled? He saw no one in the street, and was certain no one was observing him as, taking the key from his pocket, he ran up the steps and unlocked the outer door. Holding this door open to get the light from the street lamp, he fitted the key into the inner door; then he closed the outer door. For fully a minute, with fast beating heart and a sense of expectation of he knew not what, he kept his hand upon the key before he turned it; then he opened the door and stepped into the dark and silent house.
CHAPTER V
AN ENCOUNTER
Alan, standing in the darkness of the hall, felt in his pocket for his matches and struck one on the box. The light showed the hall in front of him, reaching back into some vague, distant darkness, and great rooms with wide portièred doorways gaping on both sides. He turned into the room upon his right, glanced to see that the shades were drawn on the windows toward the street, then found the switch and turned on the electric light.
As he looked around, he fought against his excitement and feeling of expectancy; it was—he told himself—after all, merely a vacant house, though bigger and more expensively furnished than any he ever had been in except the Sherrills; and Sherrill's statement to him had implied that anything there might be in it which could give the reason for his father's disappearance would be probably only a paper, a record of some kind. It was unlikely that a thing so easily concealed as that could be found by him on his first examination of the place; what he had come here for now—he tried to make himself believe—was merely to obtain whatever other information it could give him about his father and the way his father had lived, before Sherrill and he had any other conversation.