At One-Thirty - Isabel Ostrander (book reader for pc .txt) 📗

and rose. I tried to speak; but somehow I couldn’t. I hadn’t uttered a word since he had started. Now, all I could think of was to get away, to escape from him forever, from the sight of him and the sound of his voice. I glanced instinctively at the open door of the den—and I saw, or fancied I saw, on the wall opposite, in the hall, the faint shadow of a crouching figure, listening.”

“You are not sure of it, then?” asked Gaunt, eagerly. “You are not sure that there actually was someone there?”

“No, I may have fancied it, as I say; but, somehow, I felt that there was someone out there, listening, even before I caught a glimpse of the shadow. While I watched it, it wavered, and suddenly disappeared, and then—then I turned to him. We had no quarrel; he did not accuse me of flirting with him, and leading him on, as I told you he did. Instead, it was I who told him the truth, and why I had done so. Then I told him just how I felt about his vile, contemptible proposition, and how I loathed him for entertaining such a thought. I blamed myself, frankly, for what I had done; but I had meant it only for a mild, discreet flirtation, and intended that my departure for Europe should end it all for all time. And he had been planning this infamous thing against that poor little woman upstairs, who had never done me any intentional harm, as I had her! I told him how low, how terrible, I thought his plan, and how I detested it—how I hoped I should never see his face again. He fell back against the table, white and speechless, and I walked straight out of his den and back to my father.”

“Did you see anyone in the hall, or on the stairs, as you went?”

“No, Mr. Gaunt; no one. Garret followed me in a few minutes, and I knew him well enough to know that he was in one of his silent, white-hot rages. I could not bear to remain in the same room where he was; I felt that I could not breathe! I was unspeakably glad when the time came for us to return home.”

“You felt nothing for him then but a passionate loathing?”

“Nothing…. But what I suffered during the long hours of that night, no one can ever know. When morning came, I realized that, without being conscious of it, I must still have cared for him, in spite of his marriage, in spite of everything, without being conscious of it myself. I must have gone on loving him, up to the moment in the den, the night before, when he had disclosed to me the depth of his depravity, when I learned for the first time how dishonorable he was. Had he lived, I would never, never have seen him, have entered his presence again.”

She was silent, and, for a few minutes, there was no sound.

Then he prompted her, gently.

“And in the morning, when Marie telephoned to you?”

“At first, I couldn’t realize if, any more than I could realize the night before that I had heard him aright. Then, when I knew that he was dead—” She faltered, and suddenly buried her face in her hands. Then, after a moment, she lifted her head, and went on, in a low, stifled voice. “My love for him seemed to come back—not love for the man I had grown to know in the last three years, the hard, cynical, coarsened man of the world, the husband of another woman—but my love for the boy I had first known, the boy I had given my heart to when I was a little girl.”

She abruptly ceased speaking, and rose, drawing her furs about her with a little, self-contemptuous laugh, which was half a shudder.

“That is all,” she said. “And now, Mr. Gaunt, if you don’t mind, I think I will go. I have told you everything; I have talked to you as I would talk to no other living person. I am glad that we sail on Wednesday. I feel very tired, and very— old. I’m not even interested in knowing who killed him, or why. I don’t even care. Isn’t it funny? I seem to be numb, and dead—as dead as he is!”

“I understand, and, believe me, I am sorry. Miss Carhart.” Gaunt’s tone was, indeed, deeply moved. She was a thoughtless, rather selfish, spoiled child, nothing more. And he prayed that she might nev6r know what she had done; might never be brought to a realization of the havoc and tragedy she had wrought.

She held out a little hand, which he could not see, and then, with a pathetic shrug of her shoulders, she dropped her arm limply to her side, and turned to the door. At the threshold, he halted her.

“I wish you could tell me more about that shadow you saw, or fancied you saw, in the hall. Miss Carhart. You say it looked like a crouching figure. A woman’s or a man’s?”

“A woman’s, I think,” she answered, hesitatingly. “At least, the head appeared to be abnormally large and irregular, as if it was a woman, with her hair puffed out, and she seemed to have on a loose flowing gown of some sort; but it was all very faint and indistinct.”

“If there was actually a woman listening there in the hall, have you any idea in your own mind�� Miss Carhart, as to who she might have been?” he asked gravely, coming slowly toward her.

She shrank, and, for an instant, made no reply. Then she burst out passionately:

“Oh, don’t ask me that, Mr. Gaunt 1 In mercy, don’t ask me! I have endured all I canl Please, please, let me go.”

“I won’t ask you. Miss Carhart. I am grateful to you for having come to me as you did. Thank you, and—good-by.”

She laid her hand hesitatingly in his for a moment, and them slipped quietly away, and from his window he heard the diminishing hum of her motor car.

He turned away with a sigh. What she had told him was parallel with what he had himself deduced; only he had not believed that Garret Appleton would have gone to such lengths, would have seriously suggested besmirching his wife’s character, in order to secure what he felt to be his own happiness.

Doris Carhart’s testimony had, in the main, but substantiated the theory against which he had struggled, only to be compelled to allow it to possess him, in the end. He shrank from it, and, for the first time in his career, his duty seemed a hard and cruel thing. But he knew that for him there could be no turning from it. He must discover the truth.

When he presented himself at the Appleton house, in the early afternoon, Barbara Ellerslie met him in the drawing-room.

“I am glad you have come,” she said quietly, giving him her hand. “My sister has been impatient all day to see you.”

“She is better? She is able to stand the strain of even a most commonplace interview?” he asked, and found himself listening eagerly for her reply, not for the words themselves, but for the madden-‘ ing sweetness of her throbbing tones.

“Yes. She is very weak still, of course; but I think her mind is quite clear, and she has promised me to try to control herself. But you will be very careful, Mr. Gaunt? You will remember that we have only just succeeded in snatching her back from death—or what would be infinitely worse, the loss of her reason?”

“I will remember,” he replied, gravely.

Turning, she led the way to young Mrs. Appleton’s room—the room where, on that day, almost on that very hour, a week ago, he had left her with that agonized betrayal upon her lips.

He found her, as before, bolstered up among the soft cushions of her chaise longuty and with an eager cry she gave him her hand.

“Oh, Mr. Gaunt! You have come, at last! They wouldn’t let me see you before, and there is so much I must talk over with you!” Her voice was very faint and weak; but the high-pitched, drawling notes reminded him somehow, even more than before, of his sister’s richer, more mellow tones, and his heart contracted suddenly within him.

“I am glad that you are better, Mrs. Appleton,” he replied, with grave gentleness. There was a portentousnessy almost a solemnity, in his voice which made her gaze up quickly, fearfully, into his face. She looked long, and what she read there evidently decided her upon some paramount question, which had troubled or vexed her. For such an instant, her pale, pretty Ups trembled childishly, and her gaze wandered wistfully to the sunlight streaming in at the window. She could, from where she lay, just see the tops of the leafless trees in the park, and the broad expanse of the blue sky above them. Then, her trembling ceased, and a sublime look, almost of exaltation, settled upon her delicate Httle face, maturing and ennobling it.

“You have come to tell me something, Mr. Gaunt?” she asked; and he started involuntarily at the subtle change in her voice. Weak it still was, but trembling no longer, and in poise, in perfect control, it equaled her sister’s. “You have discovered who killed my husband?”

“I think so.” The gravity, the gentleness, increased in Gaunt’s tone. “Mrs. Appleton, I have a duty to perform, and, difficult and repugnant as my task may be, I must accomplish it. Are you strong enough yet to bear the truth? Will you try to be very brave?”

“You need not fear for me, I shall be strong— now. Will you tell me, please, what you have learned?”

“You have already told me, Mrs. Appleton, that you left the drawing-room and your guests, on the last night of your husband’s life, and went to your room, pleading indisposition, because you could not endure witnessing the—let us say, the open flirtation of your husband and another woman. That is true, is it not?”

“Perfectly true.”

“At what time did you leave the others?”

“At ten o’clock. I know, because, when I reached my room, I looked at the time to count how long I should have to wait before—before my sister returned. I was wretchedly lonely and unhappy, and I wanted her.”

“You could not remain in your room, though, could you? Perhaps you fancied your guests had gone, and that your husband was alone in the den. That I do not know; but I do know that you went down nearly to the door of the den, and overheard your husband talking to Miss Carhart. At what time was that, Mrs. Appleton?”

“At eleven,” she returned, composedly. There was in her voice no surprise, no shade of wonderment, at his knowledge. She was as one who had thrown aside all artifice, all subterfuge; one who stoically, fatalistically awaited an inevitable eventuality. “As you surmised, I supposed our guests had gone, and I went down to the den to talk to my husband about a private matter. I knew that otherwise I should see him no more that night, and he was always quite unapproachable in the morning; so I desired to have it over with, there and then. I had almost reached the door of the den, when I heard his voice, and I—stopped. Do you know what I heard? He, my husband, and the girl who was a guest beneath my roof, were conspiring together, to sully my own good name, that my husband might cast me aside, dishonored, and make her his wife, in my stead!”

“I think you wrong her,” remarked Gaunt, quietly.

“I—wrong her?” Her voice held a