The Gray Mask by Charles Wadsworth Camp (children's ebooks online .txt) 📕

The head jerked back and forth.

"Fortunately you did a rotten job with McDonald," Garth said. "Where's his daughter? I don't get that."

Reed shrank farther into the chair.

"I won't answer. You can't make me say any more."

Garth stooped, lifted the black cloth, and drew it clear of the bed beneath the mattress of which it had patently been hidden. As he held it up it fell in folds to the floor, and he saw it had sleeves and was a long garment without shape. But it recalled the black figure that had vanished from the attic. He ran his lamp over the gown. In spite of the coarse, tough material it was torn here and there, and on the right hand sleeve there were blood stains. That was why the gown had been hidden in the easiest place, the first place at hand. That undoubtedly explained Reed's daring intention to get the gown and destroy it before the body should be moved and the evidence discovered. Garth glanced at the man, who still shook, a picture of broken nerves, at the side of the bed. And Garth's hand, holding the tell-tale gown, commenced to tremble too, for it had offered him a solution of everything. He had no time for analysis. Already there were stirrings outside. Their voices and Nora's cry had aroused the others in the house.

"Don't you see it, Nora?" he cried, "and it wasn't intuition. The truth has stared at us from the first, but we wouldn't open our eyes."

"I see nothing," Nora said, "except that his motive was common enough, cheap enough."

"You don't understand," Garth smiled.

He stepped to the hall where he met Mrs. Taylor coming from her room.

"What is it?" she asked.

Garth shrank from telling her the truth.

"I know who murdered your husband," he answered gently.

"Who—"

But the opening of her mother's door interrupted her. The old woman appeared, her eyes wild, her hands shaking.

"What's the matter out here? Helen! What's happened?"

"I want to examine your room a little closer," he said. "I wondered at the start that there was so much furniture in it, and I'll wager there are things hidden beneath the bed and back of that large screen. I know now, too, that it wasn't you who washed your hands this afternoon. I know that you fooled me with a clean towel while the person who had tried to kill McDonald slipped through the communicating door from your bathroom—"

She screamed to stop him. She placed her slender body against the panels of the door. She stretched her arms to either side, forming a barrier he didn't care to pass. She commenced to laugh again, but there were tears in her eyes, and he saw that all along her laughter had been grief. Still without time to analyze, he received from the old lady a perfect corroboration. He whispered to Nora, instructing her to bring the policeman from the front door.

"We may have difficult violence on our hands," he warned her.

Without waiting to argue, Nora ran down the stairs. Mrs. Taylor came closer, asking the question her mother had interrupted.

"Who is it? Why do you speak to my mother like this? Not she—"

"He caught me, Helen," Reed said with dry lips.

She flung up her hands.

"What do you mean? Oh, my God! What do you mean?"

The policeman came briskly up. Nora followed him, her eyes wide and uncertain.

"Everything is accounted for," Garth said to the policeman. "Make your arrest."

Reed stepped forward, offering himself.

"I admire you, Reed," Garth said, "but your devotion can't do any more for her. Mrs. Taylor! I don't want you to get excited. This man must take you—just a form, you know—for the murder of your husband and for the attack on McDonald."

The violent rage Garth had feared flamed in her eyes.

"I did kill him. He kept me locked up for more than two months, because I didn't love him."

She commenced to struggle in the grasp of the policeman. Abruptly she went limp and her efforts ceased. Garth nodded with satisfaction.

"That's better. She's fainted. Carry her to her room. We'll have a doctor right away to go down town with her."

Reed touched his arm timidly. His husky voice was scarcely audible.

"I understand now. Once or twice this afternoon I've wondered, but she told me that Taylor had lied, that she had never been to California, that he had kept her a prisoner here because in his sick, morbid way he was jealous of me. In any case I would have done anything to help her over the next day or two, for you must understand I've loved her very deeply and for a long time—"

Garth turned away, because he didn't care to see the man's tears.

Later the humility of Nora's interest amused Garth. He told her frankly how the pivotal pieces of the puzzle had been within reach long before Reed had tried in Mrs. Taylor's service to recover and destroy the tell-tale black gown.

"Those sedatives in Taylor's bathroom," he said. "The man's perpetual questioning of his doctor about the symptoms and the treatment of insanity, the moans which frightened the other servants without affecting McDonald or his daughter, the old lady's exaggeration of her eccentricities to draw my attention from Mrs. Taylor—any of these clues ought to have reminded us, Nora, of the hundreds of similar cases in New York of fond relatives who, through a mistaken pride, hide and treat in their own homes such cases of mental disorder."

He scarcely needed to outline for her the picture, filled in by the old lady, of that black hour last night in the melancholy house, when Mrs. Taylor had tricked McDonald's daughter—a competent trained nurse—had escaped from the attic sick-room, and had got the revolver. Garth saw that Nora, too, could fancy Taylor's panic and self-reproach as he lay sick and helpless in bed, knowing his wife was free, foreseeing inevitably much the sort of thing that had happened, trying when it was too late to confess his mistake, to warn the authorities that his wife was at large and, possibly, dangerous.

"But she didn't give him time to write enough," Garth said. "She followed too quickly her ruling impulse to punish the man she blamed for her tragic situation. Moreover, the realization of what she had done, as is common in such cases, returned her to approximate sanity, suggested, even without her mother's prompting, Taylor's California blind as a road from her dreadful dilemma. And McDonald's daughter, through her fright and a promise of money, could be persuaded to avoid arousing her father or Clara, to throw on one of Mrs. Taylor's dresses, to hurry with her to Albany. Evidently the girl lost her nerve, for she was to have come back as if nothing had happened. She was to have taken care of Mrs. Taylor. Eventually she was to have placed her in a sanitarium, explaining her breakdown, as well as any present peculiarities, naturally enough through the shock of her husband's suicide. It was McDonald's demands to know what had happened to his daughter that made Mrs. Taylor turn on him finally. If he had been able to speak then I think he would have broken faith with his dead master and told us the truth about her condition."

"Is there any hope for her?" Nora asked.

"I've asked the doctor," Garth answered. "He says that the studied manner in which she threw us off the track when we caught her crying over McDonald, and her failure to lose complete control of herself when she was arrested indicate that her trouble is curable. It seems to have been brought on by her intolerable life in this gloomy house with an invalid whom she didn't love, while her affection for Reed increased hopelessly. Her illness was broken by such periods of apparent sanity as she had last night and to-day. I rather think Reed and she may be happy yet."

Nora smiled wistfully.

"Then," she said slowly, "I almost wish we had kept Taylor's secret better than he did himself."

The approach of the moment when she must testify against Slim and George; must tell in public the details of that tragedy which had played such havoc with her, drove Nora into a morbid humor which neither Garth nor the inspector could alter. She followed Garth on the stand. She was dressed in black. The appeal of her personality was irresistible. It was clear that if the two criminals had ever had a chance Nora would destroy it.

Slim and George sat by their counsel. George could not quite hide the animal character of his face, but he had managed to soften it somewhat. Evidently he endeavoured to impress the jurors with the idea that he was a good-natured fellow who had been involved in the case through some curious mischance. At Nora's appearance, Garth noticed, there came into his eyes a survival of the passion he had so recklessly declared in the steel-lined room.

Slim, on the other hand, let slip nothing of the criminal. His quiet clothing gave him an air almost clerical. His sharp features expressed a polite interest. He could not, a casual spectator would have said, be capable of the evil with which he was charged.

Garth watched the men perpetually. He saw the hatred slip through while he quietly told the story that would condemn them to death. During Nora's recital, too, both men exposed something of their powerful desire for revenge against these two who quietly droned away their lives.

Garth took Nora from the courtroom well aware that, given the opportunity, Slim and George would not let them move a foot without exacting full payment.

Garth respected Nora's mood. He put her in a cab and sent her home, then wandered restlessly about the down town streets.

Perhaps Nora's attitude was partly responsible for his feeling of oppression, of imminence. Nothing could happen, he told himself again. Slim and George would start for the death house to-morrow. They would have no chance. If they delegated such work to their subordinates still at large, Garth fancied that he could take care of himself and Nora, too. It was the exceptional cunning of Slim and George that he shrank from, had feared ever since the night Nora and he had trapped them.

Angry with himself he went to headquarters. The inspector admitted that he, too, would breathe easier when the two were in the chair.

The next day Garth managed to dismiss his premonition. He chatted with two or three detectives in the outside office. The inspector sent for him. The moment he answered the summons he knew something disastrous had occurred. He felt that the exceptional, almost with the effect of a physical violence, had entered the room ahead of him.

The inspector held the telephone. The receiver was at his ear. His huge figure projected to Garth an uncontrolled fear. His voice, customarily rumbling and authoritative, was no more than a groping whisper.

"Why the devil doesn't Nora answer? Do you know, Garth, that Slim and George are loose on the town?"

Garth started back. He would have responded just so to a blow in the face.

"They are on their way to the death house," he countered.

"You mean they were," the inspector said, "condemned by your testimony and Nora's."

His voice rose and thickened.

"I've just got the word. An explosion was planted in front of their van on the way to the Grand Central. There was a crowd of rats from the slums. Those birds were torn from the sheriff's men, and their bracelets knocked off. They were spirited away. But don't you suppose Slim and George would gamble I'll never let them out of this town? Every exit's barred now. They know their liberty's only good to pay old debts. What'll they do at the start?"

Garth braced himself against the desk.

"They'll go for Nora first. Then they'll get me. I've been afraid of it all along."

"I'm trying to warn her,"