The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart (mini ebook reader txt) đź“•
The property was owned by Paul Armstrong, the president of the Traders' Bank, who at the time we took the house was in the west with his wife and daughter, and a Doctor Walker, the Armstrong family physician. Halsey knew Louise Armstrong,--had been rather attentive to her the winter before, but as Halsey was always attentive to somebody, I had not thought of it seriously, although she was a charming girl. I knew of Mr. Armstrong only through his connection with the bank, where the children's money was largely invested, and through an ugly story about the son, Arnold Armstrong, who was reported to have forged his father's name, for a considerable amo
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That was how things stood that Tuesday evening. The Traders’ Bank had suspended payment, and John Bailey was under arrest, charged with wrecking it; Paul Armstrong lay very ill in California, and his only son had been murdered two days before. I sat dazed and bewildered. The children’s money was gone: that was bad enough, though I had plenty, if they would let me share. But Gertrude’s grief was beyond any power of mine to comfort; the man she had chosen stood accused of a colossal embezzlement—and even worse. For in the instant that I sat there I seemed to see the coils closing around John Bailey as the murderer of Arnold Armstrong.
Gertrude lifted her head at last and stared across the table at Halsey.
“Why did he do it?” she wailed. “Couldn’t you stop him, Halsey? It was suicidal to go back!”
Halsey was looking steadily through the windows of the breakfast-room, but it was evident he saw nothing.
“It was the only thing he could do, Trude,” he said at last. “Aunt Ray, when I found Jack at the Greenwood Club last Saturday night, he was frantic. I can not talk until Jack tells me I may, but—he is absolutely innocent of all this, believe me. I thought, Trude and I thought, we were helping him, but it was the wrong way. He came back. Isn’t that the act of an innocent man?”
“Then why did he leave at all?” I asked, unconvinced. “What innocent man would run away from here at three o’clock in the morning? Doesn’t it look rather as though he thought it impossible to escape?”
Gertrude rose angrily. “You are not even just!” she flamed. “You don’t know anything about it, and you condemn him!”
“I know that we have all lost a great deal of money,” I said. “I shall believe Mr. Bailey innocent the moment he is shown to be. You profess to know the truth, but you can not tell me! What am I to think?”
Halsey leaned over and patted my hand.
“You must take us on faith,” he said. “Jack Bailey hasn’t a penny that doesn’t belong to him; the guilty man will be known in a day or so.”
“I shall believe that when it is proved,” I said grimly. “In the meantime, I take no one on faith. The Inneses never do.”
Gertrude, who had been standing aloof at a window, turned suddenly. “But when the bonds are offered for sale, Halsey, won’t the thief be detected at once?”
Halsey turned with a superior smile.
“It wouldn’t be done that way,” he said. “They would be taken out of the vault by some one who had access to it, and used as collateral for a loan in another bank. It would be possible to realize eighty per cent. of their face value.”
“In cash?”
“In cash.”
“But the man who did it—he would be known?”
“Yes. I tell you both, as sure as I stand here, I believe that Paul Armstrong looted his own bank. I believe he has a million at least, as the result, and that he will never come back. I’m worse than a pauper now. I can’t ask Louise to share nothing a year with me and when I think of this disgrace for her, I’m crazy.”
The most ordinary events of life seemed pregnant with possibilities that day, and when Halsey was called to the telephone, I ceased all pretense at eating. When he came back from the telephone his face showed that something had occurred. He waited, however, until Thomas left the dining-room: then he told us.
“Paul Armstrong is dead,” he announced gravely. “He died this morning in California. Whatever he did, he is beyond the law now.”
Gertrude turned pale.
“And the only man who could have cleared Jack can never do it!” she said despairingly.
“Also,” I replied coldly, “Mr. Armstrong is for ever beyond the power of defending himself. When your Jack comes to me, with some two hundred thousand dollars in his hands, which is about what you have lost, I shall believe him innocent.”
Halsey threw his cigarette away and turned on me.
“There you go!” he exclaimed. “If he was the thief, he could return the money, of course. If he is innocent, he probably hasn’t a tenth of that amount in the world. In his hands! That’s like a woman.”
Gertrude, who had been pale and despairing during the early part of the conversation, had flushed an indignant red. She got up and drew herself to her slender height, looking down at me with the scorn of the young and positive.
“You are the only mother I ever had,” she said tensely. “I have given you all I would have given my mother, had she lived—my love, my trust. And now, when I need you most, you fail me. I tell you, John Bailey is a good man, an honest man. If you say he is not, you—you—”
“Gertrude,” Halsey broke in sharply. She dropped beside the table and, burying her face in her arms broke into a storm of tears.
“I love him—love him,” she sobbed, in a surrender that was totally unlike her. “Oh, I never thought it would be like this. I can’t bear it. I can’t.”
Halsey and I stood helpless before the storm. I would have tried to comfort her, but she had put me away, and there was something aloof in her grief, something new and strange. At last, when her sorrow had subsided to the dry shaking sobs of a tired child, without raising her head she put out one groping hand.
“Aunt Ray!” she whispered. In a moment I was on my knees beside her, her arm around my neck, her cheek against my hair.
“Where am I in this?” Halsey said suddenly and tried to put his arms around us both. It was a welcome distraction, and Gertrude was soon herself again. The little storm had cleared the air. Nevertheless, my opinion remained unchanged. There was much to be cleared up before I would consent to any renewal of my acquaintance with John Bailey. And Halsey and Gertrude knew it, knowing me.
It was about half-past eight when we left the dining-room and still engrossed with one subject, the failure of the bank and its attendant evils Halsey and I went out into the grounds for a stroll Gertrude followed us shortly. “The light was thickening,” to appropriate Shakespeare’s description of twilight, and once again the tree-toads and the crickets were making night throb with their tiny life. It was almost oppressively lonely, in spite of its beauty, and I felt a sickening pang of homesickness for my city at night—for the clatter of horses’ feet on cemented paving, for the lights, the voices, the sound of children playing. The country after dark oppresses me. The stars, quite eclipsed in the city by the electric lights, here become insistent, assertive. Whether I want to or not, I find myself looking for the few I know by name, and feeling ridiculously new and small by contrast—always an unpleasant sensation.
After Gertrude joined us, we avoided any further mention of the murder. To Halsey, as to me, there was ever present, I am sure, the thought of our conversation of the night before. As we strolled back and forth along the drive, Mr. Jamieson emerged from the shadow of the trees.
“Good evening,” he said, managing to include Gertrude in his bow.
Gertrude had never been even ordinarily courteous to him, and she nodded coldly. Halsey, however, was more cordial, although we were all constrained enough. He and Gertrude went on together, leaving the detective to walk with me. As soon as they were out of earshot, he turned to me.
“Do you know, Miss Innes,” he said, “the deeper I go into this thing, the more strange it seems to me. I am very sorry for Miss Gertrude. It looks as if Bailey, whom she has tried so hard to save, is worse than a rascal; and after her plucky fight for him, it seems hard.”
I looked through the dusk to where Gertrude’s light dinner dress gleamed among the trees. She HAD made a plucky fight, poor child. Whatever she might have been driven to do, I could find nothing but a deep sympathy for her. If she had only come to me with the whole truth then!
“Miss Innes,” Mr. Jamieson was saying, “in the last three days, have you seen a—any suspicious figures around the grounds? Any—woman?”
“No,” I replied. “I have a houseful of maids that will bear watching, one and all. But there has been no strange woman near the house or Liddy would have seen her, you may be sure. She has a telescopic eye.”
Mr. Jamieson looked thoughtful.
“It may not amount to anything,” he said slowly. “It is difficult to get any perspective on things around here, because every one down in the village is sure he saw the murderer, either before or since the crime. And half of them will stretch a point or two as to facts, to be obliging. But the man who drives the hack down there tells a story that may possibly prove to be important.”
“I have heard it, I think. Was it the one the parlor maid brought up yesterday, about a ghost wringing its hands on the roof? Or perhaps it’s the one the milk-boy heard: a tramp washing a dirty shirt, presumably bloody, in the creek below the bridge?”
I could see the gleam of Mr. Jamieson’s teeth, as he smiled.
“Neither,” he said. “But Matthew Geist, which is our friend’s name, claims that on Saturday night, at nine-thirty, a veiled lady—”
“I knew it would be a veiled lady,” I broke in.
“A veiled lady,” he persisted, “who was apparently young and beautiful, engaged his hack and asked to be driven to Sunnyside. Near the gate, however, she made him stop, in spite of his remonstrances, saying she preferred to walk to the house. She paid him, and he left her there. Now, Miss Innes, you had no such visitor, I believe?”
“None,” I said decidedly.
“Geist thought it might be a maid, as you had got a supply that day. But he said her getting out near the gate puzzled him. Anyhow, we have now one veiled lady, who, with the ghostly intruder of Friday night, makes two assets that I hardly know what to do with.”
“It is mystifying,” I admitted, “although I can think of one possible explanation. The path from the Greenwood Club to the village enters the road near the lodge gate. A woman who wished to reach the Country Club, unperceived, might choose such a method. There are plenty of women there.”
I think this gave him something to ponder, for in a short time he said good night and left. But I myself was far from satisfied. I was determined, however, on one thing. If my suspicions—for I had suspicions—were true, I would make my own investigations, and Mr. Jamieson should learn only what was good for him to know.
We went back to the house, and Gertrude, who was more like herself since her talk with Halsey, sat down at the mahogany desk in the living-room to write a letter. Halsey prowled up and down the entire east wing, now in the card-room, now in the billiard-room, and now and then blowing his clouds of tobacco smoke among the pink and gold hangings
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