The Golden Slipper, Page 2

  Its aspect made her shudder. A low fog was rising from the meadows in the far distance, and its ghostliness under the moon woke all sorts of uncanny images in her excited mind. To escape them she crept into bed where she lay with her eyes on the end of her dresser. She had closed that half of the French window over which she had drawn the shade; but she had left ajar the one giving free access to the jewels; and when she was not watching the scintillation of her sapphires in the moonlight, she was dwelling in fixed attention on this narrow opening.

  But nothing happened, and two o’clock, then three o’clock struck, without a dimming of the blue scintillations on the end of her dresser. Then she suddenly sat up. Not that she heard anything new, but that a thought had come to her. “If an attempt is made,” so she murmured softly to herself, “it will be by—” She did not finish. Something—she could not call it sound—set her heart beating tumultuously, and listening—listening—watching—watching—she followed in her imagination the approach down the balcony of an almost inaudible step, not daring to move herself, it seemed so near, but waiting with eyes fixed, for the shadow which must fall across the shade she had failed to raise over that half of the swinging window she had so carefully left shut.

  At length she saw it projecting slowly across the slightly illuminated surface. Formless, save for the outreaching hand, it passed the casement’s edge, nearing with pauses and hesitations the open gap beyond through which the neglected sapphires beamed with steady lustre. Would she ever see the hand itself appear between the dresser and the window frame? Yes, there it comes,—small, delicate, and startlingly white, threading that gap—darting with the suddenness of a serpent’s tongue toward the dresser and disappearing again with the pendant in its clutch.

  As she realizes this,—she is but young, you know,—as she sees her bait taken and the hardly expected event fulfilled, her pent-up breath sped forth in a sigh which sent the intruder flying, and so startled herself that she sank back in terror on her pillow.

  The breakfast-call had sounded its musical chimes through the halls. The Ambassador and his wife had responded, so had most of the young gentlemen and ladies, but the daughter of the house was not amongst them, nor Miss Strange, whom one would naturally expect to see down first of all.

  These two absences puzzled Mr. Driscoll. What might they not portend? But his suspense, at least in one regard, was short. Before his guests were well seated, Miss Driscoll entered from the terrace in company with Captain Holliday. In her arms she carried a huge bunch of roses and was looking very beautiful. Her father’s heart warmed at the sight. No shadow from the night rested upon her.

  But Miss Strange!—where was she? He could not feel quite easy till he knew.

  “Have any of you seen Miss Strange?” he asked, as they sat down at table. And his eyes sought the Inseparables.

  Five lovely heads were shaken, some carelessly, some wonderingly, and one, with a quick, forced smile. But he was in no mood to discriminate, and he had beckoned one of the servants to him, when a step was heard at the door and the delinquent slid in and took her place, in a shamefaced manner suggestive of a cause deeper than mere tardiness. In fact, she had what might be called a frightened air, and stared into her plate, avoiding every eye, which was certainly not natural to her. What did it mean? and why, as she made a poor attempt at eating, did four of the Inseparables exchange glances of doubt and dismay and then concentrate their looks upon his daughter? That Alicia failed to notice this, but sat abloom above her roses now fastened in a great bunch upon her breast, offered him some comfort, yet, for all the volubility of his chief guests, the meal was a great trial to his patience, as well as a poor preparation for the hour when, the noble pair gone, he stepped into the library to find Miss Strange awaiting him with one hand behind her back and a piteous look on her infantile features.

  “O, Mr. Driscoll,” she began,—and then he saw that a group of anxious girls hovered in her rear—“my pendant! my beautiful pendant! It is gone! Somebody reached in from the balcony and took it from my dresser in the night. Of course, it was to frighten me; all of the girls told me not to leave it there. But I—I cannot make them give it back, and papa is so particular about this jewel that I’m afraid to go home. Won’t you tell them it’s no joke, and see that I get it again. I won’t be so careless another time.”

  Hardly believing his eyes, hardly believing his ears,—she was so perfectly the spoiled child detected in a fault—he looked sternly about upon the girls and bade them end the jest and produce the gems at once.

  But not one of them spoke, and not one of them moved; only his daughter grew pale until the roses seemed a mockery, and the steady stare of her large eyes was almost too much for him to bear.

  The anguish of this gave asperity to his manner, and in a strange, hoarse tone he loudly cried:

  “One of you did this. Which? If it was you, Alicia, speak. I am in no mood for nonsense. I want to know whose foot traversed the balcony and whose hand abstracted these jewels.”

  A continued silence, deepening into painful embarrassment for all. Mr. Driscoll eyed them in ill-concealed anguish, then turning to Miss Strange was still further thrown off his balance by seeing her pretty head droop and her gaze fall in confusion.

  “Oh! it’s easy enough to tell whose foot traversed the balcony,” she murmured. “It left this behind.” And drawing forward her hand, she held out to view a small gold-coloured slipper. “I found it outside my window,” she explained. “I hoped I should not have to show it.”

  A gasp of uncontrollable feeling from the surrounding group of girls, then absolute stillness.

  “I fail to recognize it,” observed Mr. Driscoll, taking it in his hand. “Whose slipper is this?” he asked in a manner not to be gainsaid.

  Still no reply, then as he continued to eye the girls one after another a voice—the last he expected to hear—spoke and his daughter cried:

  “It is mine. But it was not I who walked in it down the balcony.”

  “Alicia!”

  A month’s apprehension was in that cry. The silence, the pent-up emotion brooding in the air was intolerable. A fresh young laugh broke it.

  “Oh,” exclaimed a roguish voice, “I knew that you were all in it! But the especial one who wore the slipper and grabbed the pendant cannot hope to hide herself. Her finger-tips will give her away.”

  Amazement on every face and a convulsive movement in one half-hidden hand.

  “You see,” the airy little being went on, in her light way, “I have some awfully funny tricks. I am always being scolded for them, but somehow I don’t improve. One is to keep my jewelry bright with a strange foreign paste an old Frenchwoman once gave me in Paris. It’s of a vivid red, and stains the fingers dreadfully if you don’t take care. Not even water will take it off, see mine. I used that paste on my pendant last night just after you left me, and being awfully sleepy I didn’t stop to rub it off. If your finger-tips are not red, you never touched the pendant, Miss Driscoll. Oh, see! They are as white as milk.

  “But some one took the sapphires, and I owe that person a scolding, as well as myself. Was it you, Miss Hughson? You, Miss Yates? or—” and here she paused before Miss West, “Oh, you have your gloves on! You are the guilty one!” and her laugh rang out like a peal of bells, robbing her next sentence of even a suggestion of sarcasm. “Oh, what a sly-boots!” she cried. “How you have deceived me! Whoever would have thought you to be the one to play the mischief!”

  Who indeed! Of all the five, she was the one who was considered absolutely immune from suspicion ever since the night Mrs. Barnum’s handkerchief had been taken, and she not in the box. Eyes which had surveyed Miss Driscoll askance now rose in wonder toward hers, and failed to fall again because of the stoniness into which her delicately-carved features had settled.

  “Miss West, I know you will be glad to remove your gloves; Miss Strange certainly has a right to know her special tormentor,” spoke up her host i
n as natural a voice as his great relief would allow.

  But the cold, half-frozen woman remained without a movement. She was not deceived by the banter of the moment. She knew that to all of the others, if not to Peter Strange’s odd little daughter, it was the thief who was being spotted and brought thus hilariously to light. And her eyes grew hard, and her lips grey, and she failed to unglove the hands upon which all glances were concentrated.

  “You do not need to see my hands; I confess to taking the pendant.”

  “Caroline!”

  A heart overcome by shock had thrown up this cry. Miss West eyed her bosom-friend disdainfully.

  “Miss Strange has called it a jest,” she coldly commented. “Why should you suggest anything of a graver character?”

  Alicia brought thus to bay, and by one she had trusted most, stepped quickly forward, and quivering with vague doubts, aghast before unheard-of possibilities, she tremulously remarked:

  “We did not sleep together last night. You had to come into my room to get my slippers. Why did you do this? What was in your mind, Caroline?”

  A steady look, a low laugh choked with many emotions answered her.

  “Do you want me to reply, Alicia? Or shall we let it pass?”

  “Answer!”

  It was Mr. Driscoll who spoke. Alicia had shrunk back, almost to where a little figure was cowering with wide eyes fixed in something like terror on the aroused father’s face.

  “Then hear me,” murmured the girl, entrapped and suddenly desperate. “I wore Alicia’s slippers and I took the jewels, because it was time that an end should come to your mutual dissimulation. The love I once felt for her she has herself deliberately killed. I had a lover—she took him. I had faith in life, in honour, and in friendship. She destroyed all. A thief—she has dared to aspire to him! And you condoned her fault. You, with your craven restoration of her booty, thought the matter cleared and her a fit mate for a man of highest honour.”

  “Miss West,”—no one had ever heard that tone in Mr. Driscoll’s voice before, “before you say another word calculated to mislead these ladies, let me say that this hand never returned any one’s booty or had anything to do with the restoration of any abstracted article. You have been caught in a net, Miss West, from which you cannot escape by slandering my innocent daughter.”

  “Innocent!” All the tragedy latent in this peculiar girl’s nature blazed forth in the word. “Alicia, face me. Are you innocent? Who took the Dempsey corals, and that diamond from the Tiffany tray?”

  “It is not necessary for Alicia to answer,” the father interposed with not unnatural heat. “Miss West stands self-convicted.”

  “How about Lady Paget’s scarf? I was not there that night.”

  “You are a woman of wiles. That could be managed by one bent on an elaborate scheme of revenge.”

  “And so could the abstraction of Mrs. Barnum’s five-hundred-dollar handkerchief by one who sat in the next box,” chimed in Miss Hughson, edging away from the friend to whose honour she would have pinned her faith an hour before. “I remember now seeing her lean over the railing to adjust the old lady’s shawl.”

  With a start, Caroline West turned a tragic gaze upon the speaker.

  “You think me guilty of all because of what I did last night?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “And you, Anna?”

  “Alicia has my sympathy,” murmured Miss Benedict.

  Yet the wild girl persisted.

  “But I have told you my provocation. You cannot believe that I am guilty of her sin; not if you look at her as I am looking now.”

  But their glances hardly followed her pointing finger. Her friends—the comrades of her youth, the Inseparables with their secret oath—one and all held themselves aloof, struck by the perfidy they were only just beginning to take in. Smitten with despair, for these girls were her life, she gave one wild leap and sank on her knees before Alicia.

  “O speak!” she began. “Forgive me, and—”

  A tremble seized her throat; she ceased to speak and let fall her partially uplifted hands. The cheery sound of men’s voices had drifted in from the terrace, and the figure of Captain Holliday could be seen passing by. The shudder which shook Caroline West communicated itself to Alicia Driscoll, and the former rising quickly, the two women surveyed each other, possibly for the first time, with open soul and a complete understanding.

  “Caroline!” murmured the one.

  “Alicia!” pleaded the other.

  “Caroline, trust me,” said Alicia Driscoll in that moving voice of hers, which more than her beauty caught and retained all hearts. “You have served me ill, but it was not all undeserved. Girls,” she went on, eyeing both them and her father with the wistfulness of a breaking heart, “neither Caroline nor myself are worthy of Captain Holliday’s love. Caroline has told you her fault, but mine is perhaps a worse one. The ring—the scarf—the diamond pins—I took them all—took them if I did not retain them. A curse has been over my life—the curse of a longing I could not combat. But love was working a change in me. Since I have known Captain Holliday—but that’s all over. I was mad to think I could be happy with such memories in my life. I shall never marry now—or touch jewels again—my own or another’s. Father, father, you won’t go back on your girl! I couldn’t see Caroline suffer for what I have done. You will pardon me and help—help—”

  Her voice choked. She flung herself into her father’s arms; his head bent over hers, and for an instant not a soul in the room moved. Then Miss Hughson gave a spring and caught her by the hand. “We are inseparable,” said she, and kissed the hand, murmuring, “Now is our time to show it.”

  Then other lips fell upon those cold and trembling fingers, which seemed to warm under these embraces. And then a tear. It came from the hard eye of Caroline, and remained a sacred secret between the two.

  “You have your pendant?”

  Mr. Driscoll’s suffering eye shone down on Violet Strange’s uplifted face as she advanced to say good-bye preparatory to departure.

  “Yes,” she acknowledged, “but hardly, I fear, your gratitude.”

  And the answer astonished her.

  “I am not sure that the real Alicia will not make her father happier than the unreal one has ever done.”

  “And Captain Holliday?”

  “He may come to feel the same.”

  “Then I do not quit in disgrace?”

  “You depart with my thanks.”

  When a certain personage was told of the success of Miss Strange’s latest manoeuvre, he remarked: “The little one progresses. We shall have to give her a case of prime importance next.”

  PROBLEM II. THE SECOND BULLET

  “You must see her.”

  “No. No.”

  “She’s a most unhappy woman. Husband and child both taken from her in a moment; and now, all means of living as well, unless some happy thought of yours—some inspiration of your genius—shows us a way of re-establishing her claims to the policy voided by this cry of suicide.”

  But the small wise head of Violet Strange continued its slow shake of decided refusal.

  “I’m sorry,” she protested, “but it’s quite out of my province. I’m too young to meddle with so serious a matter.”

  “Not when you can save a bereaved woman the only possible compensation left her by untoward fate?”

  “Let the police try their hand at that.”

  “They have had no success with the case.”

  “Or you?”

  “Nor I either.”

  “And you expect—”

  “Yes, Miss Strange. I expect you to find the missing bullet which will settle the fact that murder and not suicide ended George Hammond’s life. If you cannot, then a long litigation awaits this poor widow, ending, as such litigation usually does, in favour of the stronger party. There’s the alternative. If you once saw her—”

  “But th
at’s what I’m not willing to do. If I once saw her I should yield to her importunities and attempt the seemingly impossible. My instincts bid me say no. Give me something easier.”

  “Easier things are not so remunerative. There’s money in this affair, if the insurance company is forced to pay up. I can offer you—”

  “What?”

  There was eagerness in the tone despite her effort at nonchalance. The other smiled imperceptibly, and briefly named the sum.

  It was larger than she had expected. This her visitor saw by the way her eyelids fell and the peculiar stillness which, for an instant, held her vivacity in check.

  “And you think I can earn that?”

  Her eyes were fixed on his in an eagerness as honest as it was unrestrained.

  He could hardly conceal his amazement, her desire was so evident and the cause of it so difficult to understand. He knew she wanted money—that was her avowed reason for entering into this uncongenial work. But to want it so much! He glanced at her person; it was simply clad but very expensively—how expensively it was his business to know. Then he took in the room in which they sat. Simplicity again, but the simplicity of high art—the drawing-room of one rich enough to indulge in the final luxury of a highly cultivated taste, viz.: unostentatious elegance and the subjection of each carefully chosen ornament to the general effect.

  What did this favoured child of fortune lack that she could be reached by such a plea, when her whole being revolted from the nature of the task he offered her? It was a question not new to him; but one he had never heard answered and was not likely to hear answered now. But the fact remained that the consent he had thought dependent upon sympathetic interest could be reached much more readily by the promise of large emolument,—and he owned to a feeling of secret disappointment even while he recognized the value of the discovery.