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

broke, and rose again with the rush of the surf; spray flew up between the floes; geysers spurted high into the air as the pressure of the water, bearing up against the ice, burst between two great ice-cakes before the waves cracked them and tumbled them over. And all was without wind; over the lake, as over the land, the soft snowflakes lazily floated down, scarcely stirred by the slightest breeze; that roar was the voice of the water, that awful power its own.

Alan choked and gasped for breath, his pulses pounding in his throat; he had snatched off his hat and, leaning out of the window sucked the lake air into his lungs. There had been nothing to make him expect this overwhelming crush of feeling. The lake—he had thought of it, of course, as a great body of water, an interesting sight for a prairie boy to see; that was all. No physical experience in all his memory had affected him like this; and it was without warning; the strange thing that had stirred within him as the car brought him to the drive down-town was strengthened now a thousand-fold; it amazed, half frightened, half dizzied him. Now, as the motor suddenly swung around a corner and shut the sight of the lake from him, Alan sat back breathless.

"Astor Street," he read the marker on the corner a block back from the lake, and he bent quickly forward to look, as the car swung to the right into Astor Street. It was—as in this neighborhood it must be—a residence street of handsome mansions built close together. The car swerved to the east curb about the middle of the block and came to a stop. The house before which it had halted was a large stone house of quiet, good design; it was some generation older, apparently, than the houses on each side of it which were brick and terra cotta of recent, fashionable architecture; Alan only glanced at them long enough to get that impression before he opened the cab door and got out; but as the cab drove away, he stood beside his suitcase looking up at the old house which bore the number given in Benjamin Corvet's letter, then around at the other houses and back to that again.

The neighborhood obviously precluded the probability of Corvet's being merely a lawyer—a go-between. He must be some relative; the question ever present in Alan's thought since the receipt of the letter, but held in abeyance, as to the possibility and nearness of Corvet's relation to him, took sharper and more exact form now than he had dared to let it take before. Was his relationship to Corvet, perhaps, the closest of all relationships? Was Corvet his ... father? He checked the question within himself, for the time had passed for mere speculation upon it now. Alan was trembling excitedly; for—whoever Corvet might be—the enigma of Alan's existence was going to be answered when he had entered that house. He was going to know who he was. All the possibilities, the responsibilities, the attachments, the opportunities, perhaps, of that person whom he was—but whom, as yet, he did not know—were before him.

He half expected the heavy, glassless door at the top of the stone steps to be opened by some one coming out to greet him, as he took up his suitcase; but the gray house, like the brighter mansions on both sides of it, remained impassive. If any one in that house had observed his coming, no sign was given. He went up the steps and, with fingers excitedly unsteady, he pushed the bell beside the door.

The door opened almost instantly—so quickly after the ring, indeed, that Alan, with leaping throb of his heart, knew that some one must have been awaiting him. But the door opened only halfway, and the man who stood within, gazing out at Alan questioningly, was obviously a servant.

"What is it?" he asked, as Alan stood looking at him and past him to the narrow section of darkened hall which was in sight.

Alan put his hand over the letter in his pocket. "I've come to see Mr. Corvet," he said—"Mr. Benjamin Corvet."

"What is your name?"

Alan gave his name; the man repeated it after him, in the manner of a trained servant, quite without inflection. Alan, not familiar with such tones, waited uncertainly. So far as he could tell, the name was entirely strange to the servant, awaking neither welcome nor opposition, but indifference. The man stepped back, but not in such a manner as to invite Alan in; on the contrary, he half closed the door as he stepped back, leaving it open only an inch or two; but it was enough so that Alan heard him say to some one within:

"He says he's him."

"Ask him in; I will speak to him." It was a girl's voice—this second one, a voice such as Alan never had heard before. It was low and soft but quite clear and distinct, with youthful, impulsive modulations and the manner of accent which Alan knew must go with the sort of people who lived in houses like those on this street.

The servant, obeying the voice, returned and opened wide the door.

"Will you come in, sir?"

Alan put down his suitcase on the stone porch; the man made no move to pick it up and bring it in. Then Alan stepped into the hall face to face with the girl who had come from the big room on the right.

She was quite a young girl—not over twenty-one or twenty-two, Alan judged; like girls brought up in wealthy families, she seemed to Alan to have gained young womanhood in far greater degree in some respects than the girls he knew, while, at the same time, in other ways, she retained more than they some characteristics of a child. Her slender figure had a woman's assurance and grace; her soft brown hair was dressed like a woman's; her gray eyes had the open directness of the girl. Her face—smoothly oval, with straight brows and a skin so delicate that at the temples the veins showed dimly blue—was at once womanly and youthful; and there was something altogether likable and simple about her, as she studied Alan now. She had on a street dress and hat; whether it was this, or whether it was the contrast of her youth and vitality with this somber, darkened house that told him, Alan could not tell, but he felt instinctively that this house was not her home. More likely, it was some indefinable, yet convincing expression of her manner that gave him that impression. While he hazarded, with fast beating heart, what privilege of acquaintance with her Alan Conrad might have, she moved a little nearer to him. She was slightly pale, he noticed now, and there were lines of strain and trouble about her eyes.

"I am Constance Sherrill," she announced. Her tone implied quite evidently that she expected him to have some knowledge of her, and she seemed surprised to see that her name did not mean more to him.

"Mr. Corvet is not here this morning," she said.

He hesitated, but persisted: "I was to see him here to-day, Miss Sherrill. He wrote me, and I telegraphed him I would be here to-day."

"I know," she answered. "We had your telegram. Mr. Corvet was not here when it came, so my father opened it." Her voice broke oddly, and he studied her in indecision, wondering who that father might be that opened Mr. Corvet's telegrams.

"Mr. Corvet went away very suddenly," she explained. She seemed, he thought, to be trying to make something plain to him which might be a shock to him; yet herself to be uncertain what the nature of that shock might be. Her look was scrutinizing, questioning, anxious, but not unfriendly. "After he had written you and something else had happened—I think—to alarm my father about him, father came here to his house to look after him. He thought something might have ... happened to Mr. Corvet here in his house. But Mr. Corvet was not here."

"You mean he has—disappeared?"

"Yes; he has disappeared."

Alan gazed at her dizzily. Benjamin Corvet—whoever he might be—had disappeared; he had gone. Did any one else, then, know about Alan Conrad?

"No one has seen Mr. Corvet," she said, "since the day he wrote to you. We know that—that he became so disturbed after doing that—writing to you—that we thought you must bring with you information of him."

"Information!"

"So we have been waiting for you to come here and tell us what you know about him or—or your connection with him."

CHAPTER III DISCUSSION OF A SHADOW

Alan, as he looked confusedly and blankly at her, made no attempt to answer the question she had asked, or to explain. For the moment, as he fought to realize what she had said and its meaning for himself, all his thought was lost in mere dismay, in the denial and checking of what he had been feeling as he entered the house. His silence and confusion, he knew, must seem to Constance Sherrill unwillingness to answer her; for she did not suspect that he was unable to answer her. She plainly took it in that way; but she did not seem offended; it was sympathy, rather, that she showed. She seemed to appreciate, without understanding except through her feelings, that—for some reason—answer was difficult and dismaying for him.

"You would rather explain to father than to me," she decided.

He hesitated. What he wanted now was time to think, to learn who she was and who her father was, and to adjust himself to this strange reversal of his expectations.

"Yes; I would rather do that," he said.

"Will you come around to our house, then, please?"

She caught up her fur collar and muff from a chair and spoke a word to the servant. As she went out on to the porch, he followed her and stooped to pick up his suitcase.

"Simons will bring that," she said, "unless you'd rather have it with you. It is only a short walk."

He was recovering from the first shock of her question now, and, reflecting that men who accompanied Constance Sherrill probably did not carry hand baggage, he put the suitcase down and followed her to the walk. As she turned north and he caught step beside her, he studied her with quick interested glances, realizing her difference from all other girls he ever had walked with, but he did not speak to her nor she to him. Turning east at the first corner, they came within sight and hearing again of the turmoil of the lake.

"We go south here," she said at the corner of the Drive. "Our house is almost back to back with Mr. Corvet's."

Alan, looking up after he had made the turn with her, recognized the block as one he had seen pictured sometimes in magazines and illustrated papers as a "row" of the city's most beautiful homes. Larger, handsomer, and finer than the mansions on Astor Street, each had its lawn or terrace in front and on both sides, where snow-mantled shrubs and straw-bound rosebushes suggested the gardens of spring. They turned in at the entrance of a house in the middle of the block and went up the low, wide stone steps; the door opened to them without ring or knock; a servant in the hall within took Alan's hat and coat, and he followed Constance past some great room upon his right to a smaller one farther down the hall.

"Will you wait here, please?" she asked.

He sat down, and she left him; when her footsteps had died away, and he could hear no other sounds except the occasional soft tread of some servant, he twisted himself about in his chair and looked around. A door between the room he was in and the large room which had been upon his right as they came in—a drawing-room—stood open; he could see into the