The Indian Drum by William MacHarg (classic english novels txt) 📕

A weird, uncanny, half wail, half moan, coming from the upper hall, suddenly filled the house. Its unexpectedness and the nature of the sound stirred the hair upon his head, and he started back; then he pressed the switch again, and the noise stopped. He lighted another match, found the right switch, and turned on the light. Only after discovering two long tiers of white and black keys against the north wall did Alan understand that the switch must control the motor working the bellows of an organ which had pipes in the upper hall; it was the sort of organ that can be played either with fingers or by means of a paper roll; a book of music had fallen upon the keys, so that one was pressed down, causing the note to sound when the bellows pumped.

But having accounted for the sound did not immediately end the start that it had given Alan. He had the feeling which so often comes to one in an unfamiliar and vacant house that there was some one in the house with him. He listened and seemed to hear another sound in the upper hall, a footstep. He went out quickly to the foot of the stairs and looked up them.

"Is any one here?" he called. "Is any one here?"

His voice brought no response. He went half way up the curve of the wide stairway, and called again, and listened; then he fought down the feeling he had had; Sherrill had said there would be no one in the house, and Alan was certain there was no one. So he went back to the room where he had left the light.

The center of this room, like the room next to it, was occupied by a library table-desk. He pulled open some of the drawers in it; one or two had blue prints and technical drawings in them; the others had only the miscellany which accumulates in a room much used. There were drawers also under the bookcases all around the room; they appeared, when Alan opened some of them, to contain pamphlets of various societies, and the scientific correspondence of which Sherrill had told him. He looked over the titles of some of the books on the shelves—a multitude of subjects, anthropology, exploration, deep-sea fishing, ship-building, astronomy. The books in each section of the shelves seemed to correspond in subject with the pamphlets and correspondence in the drawer beneath, and these, by their dates, to divide themselves into different periods during the twenty years that Benjamin Corvet had lived alone here.

Alan felt that seeing these things was bringing his father closer to him; they gave him a little of the feeling he had been unable to get when he looked at his father's picture. He could realize better now the lonely, restless man, pursued by some ghost he could not kill, taking up for distraction one subject of study after another, exhausting each in turn until he could no longer make it engross him, and then absorbing himself in the next.

These two rooms evidently had been the ones most used by his father; the other rooms on this floor, as Alan went into them one by one, he found spoke far less intimately of Benjamin Corvet. A dining-room was in the front of the house to the north side of the hall; a service room opened from it, and on the other side of the service room was what appeared to be a smaller dining-room. The service room communicated both by dumb waiter and stairway with rooms below; Alan went down the stairway only far enough to see that the rooms below were servants' quarters; then he came back, turned out the light on the first floor, struck another match, and went up the stairs to the second story.

The rooms opening on to the upper hall, it was plain to him, though their doors were closed, were mostly bedrooms. He put his hand at hazard on the nearest door and opened it. As he caught the taste and smell of the air in the room—heavy, colder, and deader even than the air in the rest of the house—he hesitated; then with his match he found the light switch.

The room and the next one which communicated with it evidently were—or had been—a woman's bedroom and boudoir. The hangings, which were still swaying from the opening of the door, had taken permanently the folds in which they had hung for many years; there were the scores of long-time idleness, not of use, in the rugs and upholstery of the chairs. The bed, however, was freshly made up, as though the bed clothing had been changed occasionally. Alan went through the bedroom to the door of the boudoir, and saw that that too had the same look of unoccupancy and disuse. On the low dressing table were scattered such articles as a woman starting on a journey might think it not worth while to take with her. There was no doubt that these were the rooms of his father's wife.

Had his father preserved them thus, as she had left them, in the hope that she might come back, permitting himself to fix no time when he abandoned that hope, or even to change them after he had learned that she was dead? Alan thought not; Sherrill had said that Corvet had known from the first that his separation from his wife was permanent. The bed made up, the other things neglected, and evidently looked after or dusted only at long separated periods, looked more as though Corvet had shrunk from seeing them or even thinking of them, and had left them to be looked after wholly by the servant, without ever being able to bring himself to give instructions that they should be changed. Alan felt that he would not be surprised to learn that his father never had entered these ghostlike rooms since the day his wife had left him.

On the top of a chest of high drawers in a corner near the dressing table were some papers. Alan went over to look at them; they were invitations, notices of concerts and of plays twenty years old—the mail, probably, of the morning she had gone away, left where her maid or she herself had laid them, and only picked up and put back there at the times since when the room was dusted. As Alan touched them, he saw that his fingers left marks in the dust on the smooth top of the chest; he noticed that some one else had touched the things and made marks of the same sort as he had made. The freshness of these other marks startled him; they had been made within a day or so. They could not have been made by Sherrill, for Alan had noticed that Sherrill's hands were slender and delicately formed; Corvet, too, was not a large man; Alan's own hand was of good size and powerful, but when he put his fingers over the marks the other man had made, he found that the other hand must have been larger and more powerful than his own. Had it been Corvet's servant? It might have been, though the marks seemed too fresh for that; for the servant, Sherrill had said, had left the day Corvet's disappearance was discovered.

Alan pulled open the drawers to see what the other man might have been after. It had not been the servant; for the contents of the drawers—old brittle lace and woman's clothing—were tumbled as though they had been pulled out and roughly and inexpertly pushed back; they still showed the folds in which they had lain for years and which recently had been disarranged.

This proof that some one had been prying about in the house before himself and since Corvet had gone, startled Alan and angered him. It brought him suddenly a sense of possession which he had not been able to feel when Sherrill had told him the house was his; it brought an impulse of protection of these things about him. Who had been searching in Benjamin Corvet's—in Alan's house? He pushed the drawers shut hastily and hurried across the hall to the room opposite. In this room—plainly Benjamin Corvet's bedroom—were no signs of intrusion. He went to the door of the room connecting with it, turned on the light, and looked in. It was a smaller room than the others and contained a roll-top desk and a cabinet. The cover of the desk was closed, and the drawers of the cabinet were shut and apparently undisturbed. Alan recognized that probably in this room he would find the most intimate and personal things relating to his father; but before examining it, he turned back to inspect the bedroom.

It was a carefully arranged and well-cared-for room, plainly in constant use. A reading stand, with a lamp, was beside the bed with a book marked about the middle. On the dresser were hair-brushes and a comb, and a box of razors, none of which were missing. When Benjamin Corvet had gone away, he had not taken anything with him, even toilet articles. With the other things on the dresser, was a silver frame for a photograph with a cover closed and fastened over the portrait; as Alan took it up and opened it, the stiffness of the hinges and the edges of the lid gummed to the frame by disuse, showed that it was long since it had been opened. The picture was of a woman of perhaps thirty—a beautiful woman, dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a refined, sensitive, spiritual-looking face. The dress she wore was the same, Alan suddenly recognized, which he had seen and touched among the things in the chest of drawers; it gave him a queer feeling now to have touched her things. He felt instinctively, as he held the picture and studied it, that it could have been no vulgar bickering between wife and husband, nor any caprice of a dissatisfied woman, that had made her separate herself from her husband. The photographer's name was stamped in one corner, and the date—1894, the year after Alan had been born.

But Alan felt that the picture and the condition of her rooms across the hall did not shed any light on the relations between her and Benjamin Corvet; rather they obscured them; for his father neither had put the picture away from him and devoted her rooms to other uses, nor had he kept the rooms arranged and ready for her return and her picture so that he would see it. He would have done one or the other of these things, Alan thought, if it were she his father had wronged—or, at least, if it were only she.

Alan reclosed the case, and put the picture down; then he went into the room with the desk. He tried the cover of the desk, but it appeared to be locked; after looking around vainly for a key, he tried again, exerting a little more force, and this time the top went up easily, tearing away the metal plate into which the claws of the lock clasped and the two long screws which had held it. He examined the lock, surprised, and saw that the screws must have been merely set into the holes; scars showed where a chisel or some metal implement had been thrust in under the top to force it up. The pigeonholes and little drawers in the upper part of the desk, as he swiftly opened them, he found entirely empty. He hurried to the cabinet; the drawers of the cabinet too had been forced, and very recently; for the scars and the splinters of wood were clean and fresh. These drawers and the drawers in the lower part of the desk either were empty, or the papers in them had been disarranged and tumbled in confusion, as though some one had