Five Fatal Words (25 page)

She expressed a decision briefly. "There is nothing for us to do but go to father's house.

Although Theodore was too much involved with his own worries to invite us to stay here, I presume that is what he expected us to do. However, I will call Mr. Reese this morning and we will move up on the Hudson immediately. That is, if it suits you, Lydia."

"Anything for the present," Lydia replied.

"You won't be going immediately to Egypt?"

"Not while you need me."

The conference broke up. Ahdi Vado wheeled Lydia away; Theodore hastened to his packing in his own room; and Hannah once more sought the refuge of her own quarters. Melicent knew that she ought to follow her; but Donald delayed in the living-room.

And Donald was going away on that wild, sudden journey of his uncle's which was ordered by Priscilla Loring.

Melicent lingered too.

"Do you know where you're going, Donald?"

"Wherever he goes; that's all."

"She might be sending him to death."

"That's the exact reason I'm going along. But I'll tell you this for your comfort--if you're concerned about either him or me--I think any place is as safe as here."

"Donald, who's doing these things?"

"Come to the phone with me, and maybe I can describe him to you."

"Somebody will tell you?"

"Somebody will be able to tell me, by this time, one thing I want to know--that is, whether that was actually a bit of a star which struck in uncle's room or--"

"Or what?"

"A bit of very worldly iron which somebody heated and fired in here from the opposite roof."

"Oh!"

"Didn't that possibility occur to you?"

"Yes; that occurred to me."

"Well, let's find out." He led her to the phone and dialed a number. "Hello; this is Donald Cornwall. . . . You've made the test. . . . All right. Give it to me." Then he listened and, while listening, whistled low and softly. "All right. Thanks; thanks tremendously. You're absolutely certain. No mistake! Thanks again. That's all."

"What was it?" whispered Melicent, almost shaking him. "What did he say?"

"He said that metal did not originate and could not have been made in this world.

It came, unquestionably, from the sky. It is meteoric iron which traveled into Uncle Theodore's room."

Melicent felt a queer hollowness. "Then nobody did it. He was struck at from the stars."

"Hold that thought," said Donald grimly. "It will help us to escape, perhaps, from the most devilish plan ever born in the brain of man."

THEODORE and Donald departed in the manner ordained; and, as promptly as possible, Mr. Reese arranged for the reopening of the original Cornwall homestead for occupancy by Hannah and Lydia.

The lawyer was altogether too deliberate and dilatory in his preparations, Hannah thought; and she said so. But at last the refuge was ready.

The house of Silas Cornwall was, in fact, a castle. In every external detail it had been copied from Alcazar which Henry IV of Castile built at Segovia in the fifteenth century. It rose on a peninsula of cliff over the Hudson so that on all sides except one the vertical drop of the lofty stone walls merged into the line of actual cliff. It was a huge building girt with battlements and topped with the spires of numerous round towers. The walls, battlements, windows, watch towers and other architectural features were carefully copied. The result, while architecturally impressive and very beautiful from a distance, was extremely grim on close inspection. It sat upon the cliffs, a mysterious, impregnable fortress, as fantastic in the twentieth century as a parade of knights in armor on Fifth Avenue.

Melicent's approach to the castle with Hannah reminded her of her trip with Mr. Reese to Blackcroft, and even more of her journey across France to Alice's château on the Domrey River. Apparently the Cornwalls had inherited from their father a taste for massive and sinister architecture. But certainly their father had exemplified that taste more completely than either Hannah or Alice.

The inside of the castle was always dim and shadowy, although its huge rooms and echoing corridors were amply provided with massive chandeliers. Silas' father had called the castle "Alcazar." On three sides the cliff and the walls were almost one. But on the fourth, from which one approached, there was a tongue of land that led into extensive grounds in which a wilderness, unchecked by human cultivation, had grown so thick as to make its own secrets undiscoverable to itself.

Melicent had had a slight indication of what the Cornwall house would be, but no words could have conveyed the majesty of it or the secret potency for evil it possessed.

Her other approaches to Cornwall residences had been under unique circumstances and she had been somewhat uneasy each time. But when the automobile emerged from the forest and her eyes fell on the stone house of "Alcazar," she could not conquer the feeling that this birthplace of the Cornwalls was destined to be their tomb. There was something more than medieval darkness surrounding it--a fresh and more sinister cloud belonging to the present day.

The car rolled toward the house and Melicent felt as if she and Hananh Cornwall were being sucked into its majestic gloom, and if the driver had applied the brakes the car would still have rolled forward. They crossed a drawbridge that for decades had stretched over a dry moat. They bumped onto a flagstone courtyard. The servants, who had been supplied by Mr. Reese, were already in the house and had been instructed in their duties.

A moment later a car in which Lydia and Ahdi Vado rode together entered the stone archway and stopped opposite them in the courtyard.

Hannah and Lydia both accepted the castle. They had lived in it when they were children. Its mysteries were all familiar. It was home. But to Melicent it could never be anything but unnatural. The fact that one room contained a piano and a radio, the presence of a telephone, the ordinariness of the voices and the conversation of the servants that had been hired to open and operate "Alcazar," the electric lights, the huge electric refrigerator in the kitchen--none of those things could ever teach her to ignore the ancient pattern of the edifice, or to forget the black era in man's history from which it had been copied.

They had passed ten days in Theodore's apartment, while the castle was being opened and the staff obtained. In those ten days, not a word had been received from Hannah's brother and her nephew. Each morning, with the arrival of the newspapers, Melicent had scanned the headlines with dread. The telephone seldom rang but when it did each tinkling enlivened alarm. But no message came.

"No news is always good news," Melicent repeated to herself and occasionally ventured a discussion of the matter with Hannah. But Miss Cornwall had become even less communicative than usual; she occupied herself almost furiously with details of instructions for the preparation of her father's house. She seemed obsessed with it; and Melicent guessed that she employed this obsession to shut out other fears.

Nothing more occurred to threaten or menace her. The sign on the opposite roof, having served its purpose, was removed; and no one raised an objection. Nothing more was discovered about the person who paid for it.

Lydia and Ahdi Vado continued their devoted contemplations. The Hindu argued, even, that tranquility was restored; that peace might have been made successfully with those influences in the macrocosm which men call fate; but he interposed no argument against the move to the castle.

The arrival was accomplished in mid-afternoon, when a winter's sun afforded a cold, lumar illumination to the mighty pile of "Alcazar." Hannah's first step was to take Melicent to the rooms she had retained for herself. Two vast rooms, side by side, the narrow windows of which overlooked a sweeping stretch of the river. In one corner of Hannah's room was a round tower with a wider window from which one could look back toward a profile of New York City, dim and blue in the distance. The ceilings were enormously high and cobwebbed with beams which appeared to be fragile only because they were so far from the eyes of one on the floor below. When they reached those rooms, Hannah seemed satisfied.

"Those oak doors," she said, "are four inches thick. They have huge iron locks on them and if you look out of the windows you will see that nobody on earth could reach us from the outside!'

When Melicent looked, she saw that it was true. The walls were one with the cliff and the drop was sheer for three hundred feet to the river. She drew her head back into the room after a moment of alarmed inspection. The place was indeed a fortress; yet, in Melicent's mind, was the fog which killed Alice and the meteoric iron which had come into Theodore's room.

Hannah Cornwall read her thoughts. "You are saying to yourself that walls twice as thick could not have saved Alice; and that Theodore could have been killed from the sky. Something different may be prepared for me; but I will cheat it. You see, if anything happens to Theodore, I'll just stay here in these rooms. Now I've thought, during these days, of everything--everything that can possibly happen to me here; and I will forestall it. I will not follow my brothers and sisters. . . . I used to love this place when I was a child."

Melicent shivered slightly. There was only one place in the entire building in which she could be at home. In what must have been designed for a closet, a gigantic closet, had been made a modern bathroom with tiled walls, and a relatively low ceiling.

When she was in that room with the electric lights turned on and no barred windows to cast suggestive shadows on the floor, she could almost imagine that she was, living in a normal world. But she had very little time in which to contemplate the future of her mental peace of mind at "Alcazar."

Lydia and Ahdi Vado had rooms lost somewhere in the vast interior of the castle.

The afternoon was spent in unpacking. The whole routine of flight and fresh settling for a little while in a new place, soon to be made untenantable, was so familiar to Melicent that it was almost a habit. At six o'clock a ship's gong boomed and they walked on stone flag corridors through the baronial rooms of the first floor to the dining salon. They were joined by Lydia, and there, in a chamber suitable for organizing a crusade, or the last banquet before a search for the Holy Grail, they had their supper. It was no fit place for two old women and a girl.

After supper Miss Cornwall asked Melicent to come up to her room at nine and excused herself. A little later Lydia withdrew. Except for the servants moving vaguely in various portions of the house, Melicent was left alone and to her own devices, as she had been at Blackcroft. For a little while she checked her sense of oppression sufficiently to take an intelligent interest in the house. She inspected the front hall and the rooms on both sides. Silas Cornwall had evidently been something of a collector and among his medieval trophies were several possessions not calculated to reassure their observer.

Melicent came upon one which she particularly disliked--a helmet, no longer bright and in some places rusty, its unused vizor pulled down with a sword thrust through the metal on both sides. She wondered, if she had the courage to lift that vizor, what still more literal relic of forgotten combat she might find behind it. It was impossible for her to divide the house into living rooms, libraries, and music rooms. There were many chambers, all lofty, some sixty or seventy feet long, and all of them were furnished with huge chairs of carved wood and leather, gigantic tables, chests, cases, bookshelves, and in all of them were fireplaces.

The farther she carried her investigation, the less comfortable she became, and at last in self-defense she went to the circular room in which she had noticed a radio and switched it on. The light over the dial reassured her. Presently the long dead past represented by "Alcazar" was disturbed and driven a little back by the voice of an announcer. The voice became jazz. Jazz reminded Melicent that she could look out of windows that had been designed for archers and see the lights of Manhattan and Hoboken and Jersey City and the Bronx and Staten Island. By and by the jazz stopped, the broadcast station played its chimes and a new program was announced. Melicent realized how early their dinner had been, how early in the evening it still was, for the new program was Lawrence Bartlett reciting the news of the day. She settled beside the instrument and listened with concentration. It was her only hold on civilization and almost her only hold on sanity.

"Hello, everybody!" the big, rapid voice of Lawrence Bartlett boomed cheerfully.

"The news bag is full of presents to-night and I'm going to distribute as many of them as I can in the fifteen minutes allowed. They're having a big time in Paris to-night. An American aviator recently broke all the European records between the largest cities, but to-night a Frenchman, Gaspard Vormeil, has put the American in his place and as much as said to him, 'You better go home, Uncle Sam, because we can do things on our own grounds.' He flew a mystery ship that has been in the making for the last twelve months.

He had his breakfast in Paris at eight o'clock this morning. A little later he dropped in on London for gasoline, but he didn't stay in London for lunch. Not Gaspard! He had his lunch in Berlin and he had his lunch right on time, too. One o'clock. Well, he must have said, 'The food in Berlin is not too good and I better go somewhere else for tea.' He went down to Rome. He had tea in Rome a little bit early and then he must have thought of his friends waiting for him back there in Paris, because no sooner had he finished his cup of tea--at least we will assume that it was tea he drank--when he started back for Le Bourget. He got there at nine-fifteen and found his friends still waiting dinner for him.

The mystery ship is certainly a wow! Experts are trying to figure out just how fast it flew, but nobody seems to have seen it long enough to be sure. Not all the news is good news, but a good deal of the news is aviation news. Here's some bad news. Early this afternoon two men, who were in a hurry to get from Chicago to New York, chartered a passenger plane. The plane was a big one and a fast one and carried two pilots. But the two men apparently were nervous about flying, or else they believed in taking no chances, because they carried parachutes with them, which is about like a passenger on a steamship liner bringing his own life preserver. They left Chicago at half-past one. When they got over Pennsylvania they ran into a little fog. A little fog doesn't mean anything to you and to me and all the rest of us aeronauts, but it did to those two men. They got frightened. Then one of the motors began to kick up and their fright increased. The extra pilot went out on the cat-walk to see what he could do about that motor and meanwhile the two passengers became more and more alarmed. Neither of the pilots paid much attention to them. They were too busy. When they looked around both their passengers were about to get off--to get off with their parachutes. They did. Both of them were pretty cool. The pilots saw them jump. But their altitude was considerable and the fog was pretty dense. They didn't see what happened to the two parachute jumpers after they were swallowed by the murk below and nobody else had seen them since. The pilots got their plane down all right and made a forced landing on an emergency field twenty miles from the place where their passengers had leaped. It is assumed that both men were killed. Searching parties have found no traces of them up to the present moment and a dispatch says that the country below was full of many lakes and ponds, into which they may have fallen. It is possible, too, that since they were inexperienced in handling their parachutes, they did not get them open and dropped to the earth like plummets. The two men who probably lost their lives by taking a foolhardy chance, when commercial flying offered greater safety, were Theodore and Donald Cornwall, members of that famous old Yankee family which is one of the richest in America.