Part 7 (2/2)
The Colonel suggested business at once, saying:
”I'll leave you with Margaret while I go up to Hermann and learn if he's well enough to receive us; I dare say you can amuse yourselves. I shan't be gone five minutes.”
He was really away for twenty minutes; but I did not count the time. The whole situation seemed so curious--on the one hand a London detective playing footman in the house, on the other a delightful host, and a girl whose every word fascinated and whose every motion drew you instinctively to her--that I gave up any attempt to solve it; and beyond the knowledge that I had reason to be watchful, I put no restraint upon myself; but sat at her side while she played the lightest of music; or occasionally leant back to speak to me, so that her hair brushed my face and her eyes almost looked into mine.
”It was good of you to come,” she almost whispered in one of these pauses, glancing up timorously, and speaking altogether in the sympathetic tone.
”Do you miss the excitement of London?” I asked, letting my hand rest for a moment on hers.
”I guess not,” she replied; ”but I miss some one who can talk to me as you talk; you're going to stop awhile, aren't you?”
”I'll stop as long as you ask me to.”
When he was gone she went on playing for some minutes, turning away at last impatiently from the piano, and facing round with a serious, almost alarmed look. What she meant to say or do I cannot tell, for at that moment the Colonel came back and told us that his partner was in the dressing-room upstairs, and would be glad to see me at once.
”Margaret may come too?” he asked me. ”She would like to see the great stone.”
”Of course,” I replied; ”it will be a pleasure to show it to her.”
I cannot tell you why it was, but as we rose together to leave the room I seemed in a moment to realize that the affair had come to a crisis. In that instant, notwithstanding guarantees, references, Margaret Klein's fascinations, and the hundred arguments I had so often used to convince myself of the folly of suspicion, there came to me as distinct and clear a warning as though some human voice had given speech to it. The very silence of the others--for they said no word, and a curious hesitation seemed to come upon them--impressed the conviction of the monition. Once in the hall, my uneasiness became stronger, for there at a table was the footman I had recognized, and as he glanced at me when I pa.s.sed him his face was knit up as the face of a man thinking; and he let a gla.s.s fall at the very moment we reached the stairs. What he wished to convey I do not know; but although I felt there was danger in leaving the ground floor, another force dragged me on behind the Colonel, and kept me advancing unhesitatingly until I had reached the end of the long picture-gallery with him, and he had knocked upon a door in the eastern wing of the rambling mansion. What this force was I do not pretend to explain. It may have been merely the influence of the woman; it may have been my inherent obstinacy and belief in myself; or simple lack of conviction which forbade any public expression of the fears I had fomented. I know only that we waited for some seconds in the pa.s.sage until a hospital nurse opened the door, and that I found myself at last in a very pretty boudoir, where a pale and sickly-looking man was lying upon a couch, but propped up to greet us. The formalities of introduction were accomplished by the Colonel with great suavity and grace; and the nurse having set chairs at the side of the sick man's couch, and placed a table there, she withdrew, and we were ready for the business.
That you should understand what happened in the next few minutes it is necessary for me to say a word upon the construction of the boudoir. It was a room hung in pink silk and white, and it had two doors in it, giving off to other rooms, whose size I could not see since they were in darkness. For light, we had a lamp with a white shade upon the invalid's table, and two others upon the mantelshelf; while we were seated in a fas.h.i.+on that allayed any fears I might have had of personal and sudden attack. The Colonel lounged in an American rocking-chair, he being nearest to the head of the couch; his daughter leant back against a buhl-work cabinet, she being a little way from the sick man's feet; I had a library-chair, and was alone in an att.i.tude which would allow me to spring to my defence--if that were necessary--without delay. I looked, too, at Hermann Rudisic, the Colonel's partner, and I confess that contempt for his physical powers was my first thought. I was convinced that if it were a question of fight, I could hold the two men until Abel, who was in the servants' hall, came to my a.s.sistance; and while the others were present I had no fear of any of those wild machinations which are chiefly the property of imaginative fiction-makers. This knowledge gave to me my nerve again, and without more ado I took the case from my pocket and showed the stone.
The vision of the glorious gem, rippling on its surface with a myriad lights, white, and golden, and many-colored, in the play of radiating fire, was one that compelled the silence of amazed admiration for many minutes. Margaret Klein first spoke, her face bent to the diamond so that its waves of color seemed to float up to her ravished eyes; and with a little cry wrung from her satisfaction she said,--
”Oh, Mr. Sutton, it's too beautiful to look at!”
”I am glad that it does not disappoint,” said I.
”It could disappoint no one,” the invalid said, stretching out a hand which trembled to draw the treasure closer to his eyes.
”It's the whitest stone I've seen for three years,” the Colonel remarked coolly, and then, as with a new thought, he added,--
”I believe it's whiter than the Brazilian stone in my old ring. I should like to compare them, if you'll let me? The other stuff is in my dressing-room there; Margaret, will you get it?”
He gave her his keys, and taking a lamp from the shelf, she pa.s.sed into the chamber which was behind me. In the same moment Rudisic asked his host to prop him up higher upon the couch, and the Colonel had just begun to place the pillows when I heard Margaret's voice crying,--
”Father, I can't open the drawer--it's stuck; do come and help.”
It was an act of consummate folly--that I concede you; but I was so completely unaware of any signs of trickery here, and had so forgotten my fears, that I found it the most natural thing in the world to step into the room, and to enjoy helping the girl in her difficulty. I discovered her before an open door--the door of a wardrobe I thought it was for a moment, but I saw at the second look that it gave access to a tiny chamber, whereof the walls were all drawers. Margaret Klein herself stood within this curiously fas.h.i.+oned safe, built as part of the house, and was still struggling with the refractory drawer; so that I had no hesitation--nor, indeed, thought suspiciously--in going to her side. She laughed slyly as we stood in the semi-dark together, and my hand falling by chance on hers, she pressed it, and put her face very close to mine--so close, that to have resisted kissing her would have been a crime for which a man would have repented until his last day. I cannot tell accurately how long I held her in a pa.s.sionate embrace, feeling her lips glued upon my own; but suddenly and quickly she pushed me from her with a surprising strength of arm, and before I could regain my balance she had sprung into the room, and the door of the small chamber in which I was left swung to with a clang, striking me backwards as it pressed upon me, and coming nigh to stunning me. So thick was this door, so impenetrable, that its closing was succeeded by the stillness of vault or catacomb. I had scarce realized the whole trick, or the terrible predicament sheer folly had placed me in, when I was plunged into the abyss of utter darkness, shut as it were into the coffin that had been prepared for me. A frightful panic, a hideous terror, an indescribable anger, came upon me from the very first moment of that fearful trial.
For some minutes--the first minutes of imprisonment in a room where I could stand my height with difficulty, but whose iron sides my elbows touched as I turned--I think my reason must have been paralyzed. Rage, shame of my folly, yet, above all, unsurpa.s.sable fear, drove me to beat with my fists upon the door, which gave me back the touch of solid steel; to cry out aloud as a man in the throes of painful death; to grind my teeth until pain shot into my brain; to forget, in fact, that I was from that time helpless, and that others alone could give to me life.
When the first great terror had pa.s.sed, and a mental struggle had left me with some sense, I leant against the steel door, and thought again of my fate. I had little science, yet I knew that the hours of any man, shut in an air-tight chamber such as that room of steel was, could be few. I had heard that asphyxiation was a peaceful death, and think I could have had courage to face it if a little light had been given to me. But I was in utter weighty darkness; I could not even see that dull red light as of one's own soul s.h.i.+ning, which may come in the gentler dark of night. There was only upon me that sense of impenetrable blackness, the grim feeling that I had come to my coffin, had slept in it, and arisen to this unspeakable terror. My whole being then seemed to cry aloud for sight, one moment in which living light should again s.h.i.+ne upon me. A great craving for air; a sense of terrible effort in the lungs, a rus.h.i.+ng of blood to the head--these things succeeded, and as I suffered them flashes of thought came and pa.s.sed, hope extended a hand to me, processes of reasoning told me that I should be saved, only to convince me the more that I should die.
If I could have reasoned sanely I should have seen that my hope was all bound up in Abel and the detective in the house. Klein, and the invalid, and the girl--they had been gone long since, unless others had put hands upon them. My own servant, I knew, would seek for me first; but even if he came to the safe, how would he open it, how cut through these inches of steel before death had ended it all? It was even possible that the door of the strong room was a concealed door--and so afterwards I proved it to be. In that case, how would they know even of my necessity? These torturing reflections threw at last a glimmer of necessary activity upon my despair. I raised my voice, though I had then the strangest sensation in my veins, and my heart was pumping audibly; and for many minutes I shouted with all my strength. Once I thought that I heard, even through the door, some sound from the other room; yet when I cried louder, and beat again upon the steel, there was no signal. I remained unheeded; my voice gradually failed me; I could cry no longer, but began to sink almost into a coma.
How long this coma lasted I cannot tell. I was roused from it, after a hideous dream of waiting, by sounds of knocking upon some wall near me; and with a new strength I shouted again, and beat again upon the door of steel. Yet, I knew that I was not heard, for the sound of the blows grew fainter and were pa.s.sing away and life, which had come near again, seemed to pa.s.s with them. Then was my supreme moment of misery, yet one giving an inspiration which brought me here to write this record.
Recoiling from the door as the knocks without grew fainter, I struck my back against the iron wall, and my pistol, which I had forgotten, pressed into my flesh. Regardless of all thought of consequences, of the path of the bullet, or the effect upon me of the stifling smoke, I fired three rounds from the revolver into the room--and instantly was breathing the densest smoke. Then a sudden faintness took me; and I recollect only that I fell forward into a world of light, and there slept.
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