Читать книгу Double Trouble; Or, Every Hero His Own Villain - Quick Herbert - Страница 12

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Cosimo: Join us, Ludovico! Our plans are ripe, Our enterprise as fairly lamped with promise As yon steep headland, based, 'tis true, with cliff, But crowned with waving palms, and holding high Its beaconing light, as holds its jewel up, Your lady's tolling finger! Come, the stage Is set, your cue is spoke.

Ludovico: And all the lines Are stranger to my lips, and alien quite To car and eye and mind. I tell thee, Cosimo, This play of thine is one in which no man Should swagger on, trusting the prompter's voice; For mountains tipped with fire back up the scene, Out of the coppice roars the tiger's voice: The lightning's touch is death; the thunder rends The very rocks whereon its anger lights, The paths are mined with gins; and giants wait To slay me should I speak with faltering tongue Their crafty shibboleth! Most dearest coz, This part you offer bids me play with death! I'll none of it. —Vision of Cosimo.

"Comin' round all right, now, suh?" said the learned-looking porter. "Will you go to the Calumet House, as usual, suh? Ca'iage waitin', if you feel well enough to move, suh."

"I'm quite well," said Mr. Amidon, though he did not look it, "and will go to the—what hotel did you say?"

"Calumet, suh; I know you make it yo' headquahtahs thah."

"Quite right," said Mr. Amidon; "of course. Where's the carriage and my grips?"

He had never heard of the Calumet; but he wanted, more than anything else then, privacy in which he might collect his faculties and get himself in hand, for his whole being was in something like chaos. On the way, he stopped the cab several times to buy papers. All showed the fatal date. He arrived at the palatial hotel in a cab filled with papers, from which his bewildered countenance peered forth like that of a canary-bird in the nesting-season. He was scarcely within the door, when obsequious servants seized his luggage, and vied with one another for the privilege of waiting on him.

"Why, how do you do?" said the clerk, in a manner eloquent of delighted recognition. "Your old room, I suppose?"

"Yes, I think so," said Mr. Amidon.

The clerk whirled the register around, and pointing with his pen, said:

"Right there, Mr. Brassfield."

Mr. Amidon's pen stopped midway in the downward stroke of a capital F.

"I think," said he, "that I'll not register at present. Let me have checks for my luggage, please—I may not stay more than an hour or so."

"As you please," said the clerk. "But the room is entirely at your service, always, you know. Here are some telegrams, sir. Came this morning."

He took and eyed the yellow envelopes with "E. Brassfield" scrawled on them, as if they had been infernal machines; but he made no movement toward opening them. Something in the clerk's look admonished him that his own was extraordinary. He felt that he must seek solitude. To be called by this new and strange name; to have thrust on him the acting of a part in which he knew none of the lines and dared not refuse the character; and all these circumstances made dark and sinister by the mysterious maladjustment of time and place; the possession of another man's property; the haunting fear that in it somewhere were crime and peril—these things, he thought, would drive him out of his senses, unless he could be alone.

"I think I'll take the room," said he.

"If any one calls?" queried the clerk.

"I'm not in," said Amidon, gathering up the telegrams. "I do not wish to be disturbed on any account."

Five years! What did it mean? There must be some mistake. But the break in the endless chain of time, the change from summer to winter, and from the dropping to sleep at Elm Springs Junction to the awakening in the car—there could be no mistake about these. He sat in the room to which he had been shown, buried in the immense pile in the strange city, as quiet as a heron in a pool, perhaps the most solitary man on earth, these thoughts running in a bewildering circle through his mind. The dates of the papers—might they not have been changed by some silly trick of new journalism, some straining for effect, like the agreement of all the people in the world (as fancied by Doctor Holmes) to say "Boo!" all at once to the moon? He ran his eyes over the news columns and found them full of matter which was real news, indeed, to him. President Kruger was reported as about to visit President McKinley for the purpose of securing mediation in some South African war; and Senator Lodge had made a speech asking for an army of one hundred thousand men in, of all places, the Philippine Islands. The twentieth century, and with it some wonderful events, had stolen on him as he slept—if, indeed, he had slept—there could be no doubt of that.

He found his hands trembling again, and, fearing another collapse, threw himself upon the bed. Then, as drowsiness stole on him, he thought of the five years gone since last he had yielded to that feeling, and started up, afraid to sleep. He saw lying on the table the unopened telegrams, and tore them open. Some referred to sales of oil, and other business transactions; one was to inform Brassfield that a man named Alvord would not meet him in New York as promised, and one was in cipher, and signed "Stevens."

He took from his pocket the letters of Brassfield, and read them. One or two were invitations to social functions in Bellevale. One was a bill for dues in a boating-club; another contained the tabulated pedigree of a horse owned in Kentucky. A very brief one was in the same handwriting as the missive he had first read, was signed "E. W.," and merely said that she would be at home in the evening. But most of them related to the business of the Brassfield Oil Company, and referred to transactions in oil.

He lay back on the bed again, and thought, thought, thought, beginning with the furthest stretch of memory, and coming down carefully and consecutively—to the yawning chasm which had opened in his life and swallowed up five years. Time and again, he worked down to this abyss, and was forced to stop. He had heard of loss of memory from illness, but this was nothing of the sort. He had been tired and nervous that night at Elm Springs Junction, but not ill; and now he was in robust health. Perhaps some great fit of passion had torn that obliterating furrow through his mind. Perhaps in those five years he had become changed from the man of strict integrity who had so well managed the Hazelhurst Bank, into the monster who had robbed Eugene Brassfield of—his clothes, his property, the most dearly personal of his possessions—these, certainly (for Amidon knew the rule of evidence which brands as a thief the possessor of stolen goods); and who could tell of what else? Letters, bags, purses, money—these any vulgar criminal might have, and bear no deeper guilt than that of theft; but, the clothes! Mr. Amidon shuddered as his logic carried him on from deduction to reduction—to murder, and the ghastly putting away of murder's fruit. Imagination threw its limelight over the horrid scene—the deep pool or tarn sending up oilily its bubbles of accusation; the shadowy wood with its bulging mound of earth and leaves swept by revealing rains and winds; the moldy vat of corrosive liquid eating away the damning evidence; the box with its accursed stains, shipped anywhere away from the fatal spot, by boat or ship, to be relentlessly traced back—and he shivered in fearful wonder as to how the crime had been committed. In some way, he felt sure, Eugene Brassfield's body must have been removed from those natty clothes of his, before Florian Amidon could have put them on, and with them donned the personality of their former owner.

And here entered a mystery deeper still—the strange deception he seemed to impose on the dead man's acquaintances. And this filled him, somehow, with the most abject dread and fear. Brassfield seemed to have been a well-known man; for porters and clerks in New York do not call the obscure countryman by name. To step out on the street was, perhaps, to run into the very arms of some one who would penetrate the disguise. Yet he could not long remain in this room; his very retirement—any extraordinary behavior (and how did he know Brassfield's ordinary courses?)—would soon advertise his presence. Amidon walked to the window and peered down into the street. His eyes traveled to the opposite windows, and finally in the blind stare of absent-mindedness became fixed on a gold-and-black sign which he began stupidly spelling out, over and over. "Madame le Claire," it read, "Clairvoyant and Occultist." Not an idea was associated in his mind with the sign until the word "mystery," "mystery," began sounding in his ears—naturally enough, one would say, in the circumstances. Then the letters of the word floated before his eyes; and finally he consciously saw the full sign stretching across two windows: "Madame le Claire, Clairvoyant and Occultist. All Mysteries Solved."

Florian stared at this sign, until he became conscious of deep weariness at so long standing on his feet. Then he saw, blossoming, the multiplying lights of an early winter's dusk—so numbly had the time slipped by. And in the gruesome close of this dreadful day, the desperate and perplexed man stole timidly down the stairways—avoiding the elevator—and across the street to the place of the occultist.