The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 13

"My what?"

"Your escape. And it was rather clever."

"I dropped nothing," she protested, with a fine pretense of bewilderment on her face.

"Nor let it roll quietly off a front window-ledge?" I suggested.

"I was near no window--it would be impossible for me to open a window,"

she protested. Her words in themselves were a confession.

"You seem to know this house pretty well," I remarked.

"_I ought to--it's my own_," was her quick retort.

"It's your own?" I repeated, amazed at the woman's mendacity.

"It _was_ my own," she corrected.

I peered quickly about the room. It held three doors, one behind the woman, opening into the bathroom, a second opening into the hallway, and a third to the rear, which plainly opened into a clothes-closet.

There had been too much of this useless and foolish argument.

"Since your claim to proprietors.h.i.+p is so strong," I said as I crossed to the hall door, and, after locking it, pocketed the key, "there are certain features of it I want you to explain to me."

"What do you mean?" she asked, once more on her feet.

"I want to know," I said, moving toward the curtained door beside her, "just who or what is in that front room?"

The look of terror came back to her white face. She even stood with her back against the door, as though to keep me from opening it, making an instinctive gesture for silence as I stood facing her.

"I'm going to find out what is in that room," I proclaimed, unmoved by the agony I saw written on her guilty face.

"Oh, believe me," she said, in supplicatory tones, a little above a whisper, "it will do no good. It will only make you sorry you interfered in this."

"But you've made it my duty to interfere."

"No; no; you're only blundering into something where you can do no good, where you have no right."

"Then I intend to blunder into that room!" And I tore the portiere from her grasp and flung it to one side.

"Wait," she whispered, white-faced and panting close beside me. "I'll tell you everything. I'll explain it--everything."

The tragic solemnity of that low-toned relinquishment brought me up short. It was my turn to be bewildered by an opponent I could not understand.

"Sit down," she said, with a weary and almost imperious movement of the hand as she advanced into the room and again sank into the chair beside the writing-desk.

"Now what is it you want to know?" she asked, with only too obvious equivocation. Her trick to gain time exasperated me.

"Don't quibble and temporize that way," I cried. "Say what you've got to, and say it quick."

She directed at me a look which I resented, a look of scorn, of superiority, of resignation in the face of brutalities which I should never have subjected her to. Yet, when she spoke again her voice was so calm as to seem almost colorless.

"I said this was my home--and it's true. This was once my room.

Several weeks ago I left it."

"Why?" I inquired, resenting the pause which was plainly giving her a chance to phrase ahead of her words.

"I quarreled with my husband. I went away. I was angry. I--I-- There's no use explaining what it was about."

"You've got to explain what it was about," I insisted.

"You couldn't possibly understand. It's impossible to explain," she went quietly on. "I discharged a servant who was not honest. Then he tried to blackmail me. He lied about me. I had been foolish, indiscreet, anything you care to call it. But the lie he told was awful, unbelievable. That my husband should ask me to disprove it was more than I could endure. We quarreled, miserably, hopelessly. I went away. I felt it would be humiliating to stay under the same roof with him."

"Wait," I interposed, knowing the weak link was sure to present itself in time. "Where is your husband now?"

She glanced toward the curtained door.

"He's in that room asleep," she quietly replied.

"And knowing him to be asleep you came to clean out the house?" I promoted.

"No," she answered without anger. "But when service was begun for an interlocutory decree I knew I could never come back openly. There were certain things of my own I wanted very much."

"And just how did you get into the house?"

"The one servant I could trust agreed to throw off the latch after midnight, to leave the door unlocked for me when I knew I would never be seen."

"Then why couldn't that trusted servant have secured the things, these things you came after? Without all this foolish risk of your forcing your way into a house at midnight?"

Her head drooped a little.

"I wanted to see my husband," was the quiet-toned response. Just how, she did not explain. I had to admit to myself that it was very good acting. But it was not quite convincing; and the case against her was too palpably clear.

"This is a fine c.o.c.k-and-bull story," I calmly declared. "But just how are you going to make me believe it?"

"You don't have to believe it," was her impa.s.sive answer. "I'm only telling you what you demanded to know."

"To know, yes--but how am I to know?"

She raised her hand with a movement of listless resignation.

"If you go to the top drawer of that dresser you will see my photograph in a silver frame next to one of my husband. That will show you at a glance."

For just a moment it flashed through me as I crossed the room that this might be a move to give her time for some attempted escape. But I felt, on second thought, that I was master enough of the situation to run the risk. And here, at least, was a point to which she could be most definitely pinned down.

"The other drawer," she murmured as my hand closed on the fragile ivory-tinted k.n.o.b. I moved on to the second drawer and opened it. I had thrust an interrogative finger down into its haphazard clutter of knick-knacks, apparently thrown together by a hurried and careless hand, when from the other end of the room came a quick movement which seemed to curdle the blood in my veins. It brought me wheeling about, with a jump that was both grotesque and galvanic.

I was just in time to see the figure that darted out through the suddenly opened door of the clothes-closet.

I found myself confronted by a man, a thin-lipped, heavy-jawed man of about thirty-five, with black pinpoint pupils to his eyes. He wore a small-rimmed derby hat and a double-breasted coat of blue cheviot. But it was not his clothes that especially interested me. What caught and held my attention was the ugly, short-barreled revolver which was gripped in the fingers of his right hand. This revolver, I noticed, was unmistakably directed at me as he advanced into the room. I could not decide which was uglier, the blue-metaled gun or the face of the man behind it.