Читать книгу The Thing Beyond Reason - Elisabeth Sanxay Holding - Страница 3

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The house was very quiet to-night. There was nothing to disturb Miss Alexandra Moran but the placid ticking of the clock and the faint stir of the curtains at the open window. For that matter, a considerable amount of noise would not have troubled her just then. As she sat at the library table, the light of the shaded lamp shone upon her bright, ruffled head bent over her work in fiercest concentration. She was chewing the end of a badly damaged lead pencil, and she was scowling.

“No!” she said, half aloud. “Won’t do! It can’t be ‘fix’; but, by jiminy, I’ll get it if it takes all night!”

She laid down the pencil and sat back in the chair, with her arms folded. Though her present difficulty concerned nothing more serious than a crossword puzzle, an observer might have learned a good deal of Miss Moran’s character from her manner of dealing with it. The puzzle itself, with its neat, clear little letters printed in the squares, would have been a revelation that whatever she undertook she did carefully and intelligently—and obstinately.

She was a young little thing, only twenty-three, and quite alone in the world, but not at all dismayed by that. Her father had died some three years ago, and, instead of leaving the snug little fortune she had been taught to expect, he had left nothing at all; so that at twenty she had had her first puzzle to solve—how to keep alive without eating the bread of charity.

It was no easy matter for a girl who was still in boarding school, but she had done it. She had come to New York and had found a post as nursery governess, and later as waitress in a tea room, and then in the art department of an enormous store. She had gained no tangible profit from these three years, she had no balance in the bank, but that did not trouble her. She had learned that she could stand on her own feet, that she could trust herself; and with this knowledge and the experience she had had, and her quick wits and splendid health, she felt herself fully armed against the world. Indeed, she had not a care on earth this evening except the crossword puzzle.

“It must be ‘tocsin,’” she said to herself. “There’s something wrong with the verticals. It can’t be ‘fix,’ and yet—”

The telephone bell rang. Still pondering her problem, Lexy went across the room.

“Is Miss Enderby there?” asked a man’s voice.

“She’s out,” answered Lexy cheerfully.

“No!” said the man’s voice. “She can’t—I—for God’s sake, where’s Miss Enderby?”

“She’s out,” Lexy repeated, startled. “She went to the opera with her mother and father.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Mrs. Enderby’s secretary.”

“Look here! Didn’t Miss Enderby say anything? Isn’t there any sort of message for me?”

“Nothing that I know of. The servants have gone to bed, but I’ll ask them, if it’s anything important.”

“No!” said the voice. “Don’t! No, never mind! Good-by!”

“That’s queer!” said Lexy to herself, as she walked away from the instrument, and then she dismissed the matter from her mind. “None of my business!” she thought, and returned to her puzzle.

Suddenly an inspiration came.

“It is ‘fix’!” she cried. “And it’s not ‘tocsin,’ but ‘toxins’! Hurrah!”

This practically completed the puzzle, and she began to fill in the empty squares with the peculiar satisfaction of the crossword enthusiast. It was perfect, now, and she liked things to be perfect.

As she leaned back, with a contented sigh, the clock struck twelve.

“Golly! I didn’t realize it was so late!” she reflected. “Queer time for any one to ring up!”

She frowned again. Her special problem solved, she began to take more interest in other affairs; and the more she thought of the telephone incident, the more it amazed her. Caroline Enderby wasn’t like other girls. The mere fact of a man’s telephoning to her at all was strange and indeed unprecedented.

“And he was badly upset, too,” thought Lexy. “He asked if she left a message for him. Think of Caroline Enderby leaving a message for a man!”

She began to feel impatient for Caroline’s return.

“I’ll tell her when we’re alone,” she thought; “and she’ll have to explain—a little, anyhow.”

Lexy wanted an explanation very much, because she was fond of Caroline, and very sorry for her.

Mrs. Enderby was a Frenchwoman of the old-fashioned, conservative type, with the most rigid ideas about the bringing up of a young girl, and her husband—Lexy had often wondered what Mr. Enderby had been before his marriage, for now he was nothing but a grave and dignified echo of his wife. Between them, they had educated Caroline in a disastrous fashion. She had never even been to school. She had had governesses at home, and when a male teacher came in, for music or painting lessons, Mrs. Enderby had always sat in the room with her child. Caroline never went out of the house alone. She was utterly cut off from the normal life of other girls. She was a gentle, lovely creature—a little unreal, Lexy had thought her, at first; and she, at first, had been afraid of Lexy.

Mrs. Enderby had advertised for a secretary, and Lexy had answered the advertisement. Mrs. Enderby had wanted personal references, and Lexy had supplied them, some five or six, of the highest quality. Mrs. Enderby had investigated them with remarkable thoroughness, and had asked Lexy many questions. Indeed, it had taken ten days to satisfy her that Miss Moran was a fit person to come into her house, and Lexy had lived under her roof and under her eagle eye for a month before she was allowed to be alone with Caroline. After that first month, however, Mrs. Enderby had made up her mind that Lexy was to be trusted, and the thin pretext of “secretary” was dropped.

Mrs. Enderby suffered from a not uncommon form of insomnia. She could not sleep at convenient hours—at night, for instance—but could and did sleep at very inconvenient hours during the day; and what she wanted was not a secretary, but a companion for her daughter during these hours.

She realized, too, that even the most strictly brought up jeune fille needed some sort of youthful society, and in Lexy she had found pretty well what she wanted—a well mannered, well bred young woman of unimpeachable honesty. So she had permitted Lexy and Caroline to go shopping alone, and sometimes to a matinée or to a tea room. She asked them shrewd questions when they came home, and their answers satisfied her perfectly. They had never even spoken to a man!

“And yet,” thought Miss Moran, “somehow Caroline has been carrying on with some one, without even me finding out! I didn’t know she had it in her!”

Lexy yawned mightily. She was growing very sleepy, but not for worlds would she go to bed until she had seen Caroline. She lay down on the divan, her hands clasped under her head, and let all sorts of little idle thoughts drift through her mind. Now and then a taxi went by, but this street in the East Sixties was a very quiet one. The house was so very still, and there was nothing in her own young heart to trouble her. Her eyes closed.

She was half asleep when the sound of Mrs. Enderby’s voice in the hall brought her to her feet. It was a penetrating voice, with a trace of foreign accent, and it was not a voice that Lexy loved. She went out of the library into the hall.

“Did you enjoy—” she began politely, and then stopped short. “But where’s Caroline?” she cried.

“Caroline? But at home, of course,” answered Mrs. Enderby.

“At home? Here?”

“But certainly! She had a headache. At the last moment she decided not to go with us. You were not here when we left, Miss Moran.”

“I know,” murmured Lexy. “I had just run out to the drug store; but—”

“She went directly to bed,” Mrs. Enderby continued. “I thought, however, that she would have sent for you during the course of the evening.”

“Oh, I see!” said Lexy casually.

At heart, however, she was curiously uneasy. Mr. Enderby stopped for a moment, to give her some kindly information about the opera they had heard. Then he and his wife ascended the stairs, followed by Lexy; and with every step her uneasiness grew. She was sure that Caroline would have sent for her if she had been in the house.

Mrs. Enderby paused outside her child’s door.

“The light is out,” she said. “She will be asleep. I shall not disturb her. Good night, Miss Moran!”

“Good night, Mrs. Enderby!” Lexy answered, and went into her own room.

She gave Mrs. Enderby twenty minutes to get safely stowed away; then she went out quietly into the hall, to Caroline’s room. She knocked softly; there was no answer. She turned the handle and went in; the room was dark and very still. She switched on the light.

It was as she had expected—the room was empty. Caroline was not there.