The Affair Next Door (23 page)

The next day at noon Lena brought me up a card on her tray. It was a
perfectly blank one.

"Miss Van Burnam's maid said you sent for this," was her demure
announcement.

"Miss Van Burnam's maid is right," said I, taking the card and with it a
fresh installment of courage.

Nothing happened for two days, then there came word from the kitchen
that a bushel of potatoes had arrived. Going down to see them, I drew
from their midst a large square envelope, which I immediately carried to
my room. It failed to contain a photograph; but there was a letter in it
couched in these terms:

"DEAR MISS BUTTERWORTH:

"The esteem which you are good enough to express for me is
returned. I regret that I cannot oblige you. There are no
photographs to be found in Mrs. Van Burnam's rooms. Perhaps
this fact may be accounted for by the curiosity shown in those
apartments by a very spruce new boarder we have had from New
York. His taste for that particular quarter of the house was
such that I could not keep him away from it except by lock and
key. If there was a picture there of Mrs. Van Burnam, he took
it, for he departed very suddenly one night. I am glad he took
nothing more with him. The talks he had with my servant-girl
have almost led to my dismissing her.

"Praying your pardon for the disappointment I am forced to give
you, I remain,

"Yours sincerely,

"SUSAN FERGUSON."

So! so! balked by an emissary of Mr. Gryce. Well, well, we would do
without the photograph! Mr. Gryce might need it, but not Amelia
Butterworth.

This was on a Thursday, and on the evening of Saturday the long-desired
clue was given me. It came in the shape of a letter brought me by Mr.
Alvord.

Our interview was not an agreeable one. Mr. Alvord is a clever man and
an adroit one, or I should not persist in employing him as my lawyer;
but he never understood
me
. At this time, and with this letter in his
hand, he understood me less than ever, which naturally called out my
powers of self-assertion and led to some lively conversation between us.
But that is neither here nor there. He had brought me an answer to my
advertisement and I was presently engrossed by it. It was an uneducated
woman's epistle and its chirography and spelling were dreadful; so I
will just mention its contents, which were highly interesting in
themselves, as I think you will acknowledge.

She, that is, the writer, whose name, as nearly as I could make out, was
Bertha Desberger, knew such a person as I described, and could give me
news of her if I would come to her house in West Ninth Street at four
o'clock Sunday afternoon.

If I would! I think my face must have shown my satisfaction, for Mr.
Alvord, who was watching me, sarcastically remarked:

"You don't seem to find any difficulties in that communication. Now,
what do you think of this one?"

He held out another letter which had been directed to him, and which he
had opened. Its contents called up a shade of color to my cheek, for I
did not want to go through the annoyance of explaining myself again:

"DEAR SIR:

"From a strange advertisement which has lately appeared in the
Herald
, I gather that information is wanted of a young woman
who on the morning of the eighteenth inst. entered my store
without any bonnet on her head, and saying she had met with an
accident, bought a hat which she immediately put on. She was
pale as a girl could be and looked so ill that I asked her if
she was well enough to be out alone; but she gave me no reply
and left the store as soon as possible. That is all I can tell
you about her."

With this was enclosed his card:

PHINEAS COX,

Millinery
,

Trimmed and Untrimmed Hats
,

— Sixth Avenue.

"Now, what does this mean?" asked Mr. Alvord. "The morning of the
eighteenth was the morning when the murder was discovered in which you
have shown such interest."

"It means," I retorted with some spirit, for simple dignity was thrown
away on this man, "that I made a mistake in choosing your office as a
medium for my business communications."

This was to the point and he said no more, though he eyed the letter in
my hand very curiously, and seemed more than tempted to renew the
hostilities with which we had opened our interview.

Had it not been Saturday, and late in the day at that, I would have
visited Mr. Cox's store before I slept, but as it was I felt obliged to
wait till Monday. Meanwhile I had before me the still more important
interview with Mrs. Desberger.

As I had no reason to think that my visiting any number in Ninth Street
would arouse suspicion in the police, I rode there quite boldly the next
day, and with Lena at my side, entered the house of Mrs. Bertha
Desberger.

For this trip I had dressed myself plainly, and drawn over my eyes—and
the puffs which I still think it becoming in a woman of my age to
wear—a dotted veil, thick enough to conceal my features, without
robbing me of that aspect of benignity necessary to the success of my
mission. Lena wore her usual neat gray dress, and looked the picture of
all the virtues.

A large brass door-plate, well rubbed, was the first sign vouchsafed us
of the respectability of the house we were about to enter; and the
parlor, when we were ushered into it, fully carried out the promise thus
held forth on the door-step. It was respectable, but in wretched taste
as regards colors. I, who have the nicest taste in such matters, looked
about me in dismay as I encountered the greens and blues, the crimsons
and the purples which everywhere surrounded me.

But I was not on a visit to a temple of art, and resolutely shutting my
eyes to the offending splendor about me—worsted splendor, you
understand,—I waited with subdued expectation for the lady of the
house.

She came in presently, bedecked in a flowered gown that was an epitome
of the blaze of colors everywhere surrounding us; but her face was a
good one, and I saw that I had neither guile nor over-much shrewdness to
contend with.

She had seen the coach at the door, and she was all smiles and flutter.

"You have come for the poor girl who stopped here a few days ago," she
began, glancing from my face to Lena's with an equally inquiring air,
which in itself would have shown her utter ignorance of social
distinctions if I had not bidden Lena to keep at my side and hold her
head up as if she had business there as well as myself.

"Yes," returned I, "we have. Lena here, has lost a relative (which was
true), and knowing no other way of finding her, I suggested the
insertion of an advertisement in the paper. You read the description
given, of course. Has the person answering it been in this house?"

"Yes; she came on the morning of the eighteenth. I remember it because
that was the very day my cook left, and I have not got another one yet."
She sighed and went on. "I took a great interest in that unhappy young
woman—Was she your sister?" This, somewhat doubtfully, to Lena, who
perhaps had too few colors on to suit her.

"No," answered Lena, "she wasn't my sister, but—"

I immediately took the words out of her mouth.

"At what time did she come here, and how long did she stay? We want to
find her very much. Did she give you any name, or tell where she was
going?"

"She said her name was Oliver." (I thought of the O. R. on the clothes
at the laundry.) "But I knew this wasn't so; and if she had not looked
so very modest, I might have hesitated to take her in. But, lor! I can't
resist a girl in trouble, and she was in trouble, if ever a girl was.
And then she had money—Do you know what her trouble was?" This again to
Lena, and with an air at once suspicious and curious. But Lena has a
good face, too, and her frank eyes at once disarmed the weak and
good-natured woman before us.

"I thought"—she went on before Lena could answer—"that whatever it
was,
you
had nothing to do with it, nor this lady either."

"No," answered Lena, seeing that I wished her to do the talking. "And we
don't know" (which was true enough so far as Lena went) "just what her
trouble was. Didn't she tell you?"

"She told nothing. When she came she said she wanted to stay with me a
little while. I sometimes take boarders—" She had twenty in the house
at that minute, if she had one. Did she think I couldn't see the length
of her dining-room table through the crack of the parlor door? "'I can
pay,' she said, which I had not doubted, for her blouse was a very
expensive one; though I thought her skirt looked queer, and her hat—Did
I say she had a hat on? You seemed to doubt that fact in your
advertisement. Goodness me! if she had had no hat on, she wouldn't have
got as far as my parlor mat. But her blouse showed her to be a
lady—and then her face—it was as white as your handkerchief there,
madam, but so sweet—I thought of the Madonna faces I had seen in
Catholic churches."

I started; inwardly commenting: "Madonna-like,
that
woman!" But a
glance at the room about me reassured me. The owner of such hideous
sofas and chairs and of the many pictures effacing or rather defacing
the paper on the walls, could not be a judge of Madonna faces.

"You admire everything that is good and lovely," I suggested, for Mrs.
Desberger had paused at the movement I made.

"Yes, it is my nature to do so, ma'am. I love the beautiful," and she
cast a half-apologetic, half-proud look about her. "So I listened to the
girl and let her sit down in my parlor. She had had nothing to eat that
morning, and though she didn't ask for it, I went to order her a cup of
tea, for I knew she couldn't get up-stairs without it. Her eyes followed
me when I went out of the room in a way that haunted me, and when I came
back—I shall never forget it, ma'am—there she lay stretched out on the
floor with her face on the ground and her hands thrown out. Wasn't it
horrible, ma'am? I don't wonder you shudder."

Did I shudder? If I did, it was because I was thinking of that other
woman, the victim of this one, whom I had seen, with her face turned
upward and her arms outstretched, in the gloom of Mr. Van Burnam's
half-closed parlor.

"She looked as if she was dead," the good woman continued, "but just as
I was about to call for help, her fingers moved and I rushed to lift
her. She was neither dead nor had she fainted; she was simply dumb with
misery. What could have happened to her? I have asked myself a hundred
times."

My mouth was shut very tight, but I shut it still tighter, for the
temptation was great to cry: "She had just committed murder!" As it was,
no sound whatever left my lips, and the good woman doubtless thought me
no better than a stone, for she turned with a shrug to Lena, repeating
still more wistfully than before:

"
Don't
you know what her trouble was?"

But, of course, poor Lena had nothing to say, and the woman went on with
a sigh:

"Well, I suppose I shall never know what had used that poor creature up
so completely. But whatever it was, it gave me enough trouble, though I
do not want to complain of it, for why are we here, if not to help and
comfort the miserable. It was an hour, ma'am; it was an hour, miss,
before I could get that poor girl to speak; but when I did succeed, and
had got her to drink the tea and eat a bit of toast, then I felt quite
repaid by the look of gratitude she gave me and the way she clung to my
sleeve when I tried to leave her for a minute. It was this sleeve,
ma'am," she explained, lifting a cluster of rainbow flounces and ribbons
which but a minute before had looked little short of ridiculous in my
eyes, but which in the light of the wearer's kind-heartedness had lost
some of their offensive appearance.

"Poor Mary!" murmured Lena, with what I considered most admirable
presence of mind.

"What name did you say?" cried Mrs. Desberger, eager enough to learn all
she could of her late mysterious lodger.

"I had rather not tell her name," protested Lena, with a timid air that
admirably fitted her rather doll-like prettiness. "
She
didn't tell you
what it was, and
I
don't think I ought to."

Good for little Lena! And she did not even know for whom or what she was
playing the
rôle
I had set her.

"I thought you said Mary. But I won't be inquisitive with you. I wasn't
so with her. But where was I in my story? Oh, I got her so she could
speak, and afterwards I helped her up-stairs; but she didn't stay there
long. When I came back at lunch time—I have to do my marketing no
matter what happens—I found her sitting before a table with her head on
her hands. She had been weeping, but her face was quite composed now and
almost hard.

"'O you good woman!' she cried as I came in. 'I want to thank you.' But
I wouldn't let her go on wasting words like that, and presently she was
saying quite wildly: 'I want to begin a new life. I want to act as if I
had never had a yesterday. I have had trouble, overwhelming trouble, but
I will get something out of existence yet. I
will
live, and in order
to do so, I will work. Have you a paper, Mrs. Desberger, I want to look
at the advertisements?' I brought her a
Herald
and went to preside at
my lunch table. When I saw her again she looked almost cheerful. 'I have
found just what I want,' she cried, 'a companion's place. But I cannot
apply in this dress,' and she looked at the great puffs of her silk
blouse as if they gave her the horrors, though why, I cannot imagine,
for they were in the latest style and rich enough for a millionaire's
daughter, though as to colors I like brighter ones myself. 'Would
you'—she was very timid about it—'buy me some things if I gave you the
money?'

"If there is one thing more than another that I like, it is to shop, so
I expressed my willingness to oblige her, and that afternoon I set out
with a nice little sum of money to buy her some clothes. I should have
enjoyed it more if she had let me do my own choosing—I saw the
loveliest pink and green blouse—but she was very set about what she
wanted, and so I just got her some plain things which I think even you,
ma'am, would have approved of. I brought them home myself, for she
wanted to apply immediately for the place she had seen advertised, but,
O dear, when I went up to her room—"