The Golden Slipper (3 page)

“But some one took the sapphires, and I owe that person a scolding, as well as myself. Was it you, Miss Hughson? You, Miss Yates? or—” and here she paused before Miss West, “Oh, you have your gloves on! You are the guilty one!” and her laugh rang out like a peal of bells, robbing her next sentence of even a suggestion of sarcasm. “Oh, what a sly-boots!” she cried. “How you have deceived me! Whoever would have thought you to be the one to play the mischief!”

Who indeed! Of all the five, she was the one who was considered absolutely immune from suspicion ever since the night Mrs. Barnum’s handkerchief had been taken, and she not in the box. Eyes which had surveyed Miss Driscoll askance now rose in wonder toward hers, and failed to fall again because of the stoniness into which her delicately-carved features had settled.

“Miss West, I know you will be glad to remove your gloves; Miss Strange certainly has a right to know her special tormentor,” spoke up her host in as natural a voice as his great relief would allow.

But the cold, half-frozen woman remained without a movement. She was not deceived by the banter of the moment. She knew that to all of the others, if not to Peter Strange’s odd little daughter, it was the thief who was being spotted and brought thus hilariously to light. And her eyes grew hard, and her lips grey, and she failed to unglove the hands upon which all glances were concentrated.

“You do not need to see my hands; I confess to taking the pendant.”

“Caroline!”

A heart overcome by shock had thrown up this cry. Miss West eyed her bosom-friend disdainfully.

“Miss Strange has called it a jest,” she coldly commented. “Why should you suggest anything of a graver character?”

Alicia brought thus to bay, and by one she had trusted most, stepped quickly forward, and quivering with vague doubts, aghast before unheard-of possibilities, she tremulously remarked:

“We did not sleep together last night. You had to come into my room to get my slippers. Why did you do this? What was in your mind, Caroline?”

A steady look, a low laugh choked with many emotions answered her.

“Do you want me to reply, Alicia? Or shall we let it pass?”

“Answer!”

It was Mr. Driscoll who spoke. Alicia had shrunk back, almost to where a little figure was cowering with wide eyes fixed in something like terror on the aroused father’s face.

“Then hear me,” murmured the girl, entrapped and suddenly desperate. “I wore Alicia’s slippers and I took the jewels, because it was time that an end should come to your mutual dissimulation. The love I once felt for her she has herself deliberately killed. I had a lover—she took him. I had faith in life, in honour, and in friendship. She destroyed all. A thief—she has dared to aspire to him! And you condoned her fault. You, with your craven restoration of her booty, thought the matter cleared and her a fit mate for a man of highest honour.”

“Miss West,”—no one had ever heard that tone in Mr. Driscoll’s voice before, “before you say another word calculated to mislead these ladies, let me say that this hand never returned any one’s booty or had anything to do with the restoration of any abstracted article. You have been caught in a net, Miss West, from which you cannot escape by slandering my innocent daughter.”

“Innocent!” All the tragedy latent in this peculiar girl’s nature blazed forth in the word. “Alicia, face me. Are you innocent? Who took the Dempsey corals, and that diamond from the Tiffany tray?”

“It is not necessary for Alicia to answer,” the father interposed with not unnatural heat. “Miss West stands self-convicted.”

“How about Lady Paget’s scarf? I was not there that night.”

“You are a woman of wiles. That could be managed by one bent on an elaborate scheme of revenge.”

“And so could the abstraction of Mrs. Barnum’s five-hundred-dollar handkerchief by one who sat in the next box,” chimed in Miss Hughson, edging away from the friend to whose honour she would have pinned her faith an hour before. “I remember now seeing her lean over the railing to adjust the old lady’s shawl.”

With a start, Caroline West turned a tragic gaze upon the speaker.

“You think me guilty of all because of what I did last night?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“And you, Anna?”

“Alicia has my sympathy,” murmured Miss Benedict.

Yet the wild girl persisted.

“But I have told you my provocation. You cannot believe that I am guilty of her sin; not if you look at her as I am looking now.”

But their glances hardly followed her pointing finger. Her friends—the comrades of her youth, the Inseparables with their secret oath—one and all held themselves aloof, struck by the perfidy they were only just beginning to take in. Smitten with despair, for these girls were her life, she gave one wild leap and sank on her knees before Alicia.

“O speak!” she began. “Forgive me, and—”

A tremble seized her throat; she ceased to speak and let fall her partially uplifted hands. The cheery sound of men’s voices had drifted in from the terrace, and the figure of Captain Holliday could be seen passing by. The shudder which shook Caroline West communicated itself to Alicia Driscoll, and the former rising quickly, the two women surveyed each other, possibly for the first time, with open soul and a complete understanding.

“Caroline!” murmured the one.

“Alicia!” pleaded the other.

“Caroline, trust me,” said Alicia Driscoll in that moving voice of hers, which more than her beauty caught and retained all hearts. “You have served me ill, but it was not all undeserved. Girls,” she went on, eyeing both them and her father with the wistfulness of a breaking heart, “neither Caroline nor myself are worthy of Captain Holliday’s love. Caroline has told you her fault, but mine is perhaps a worse one. The ring—the scarf—the diamond pins—I took them all—took them if I did not retain them. A curse has been over my life—the curse of a longing I could not combat. But love was working a change in me. Since I have known Captain Holliday—but that’s all over. I was mad to think I could be happy with such memories in my life. I shall never marry now—or touch jewels again—my own or another’s. Father, father, you won’t go back on your girl! I couldn’t see Caroline suffer for what I have done. You will pardon me and help—help—”

Her voice choked. She flung herself into her father’s arms; his head bent over hers, and for an instant not a soul in the room moved. Then Miss Hughson gave a spring and caught her by the hand. “We are inseparable,” said she, and kissed the hand, murmuring, “Now is our time to show it.”

Then other lips fell upon those cold and trembling fingers, which seemed to warm under these embraces. And then a tear. It came from the hard eye of Caroline, and remained a sacred secret between the two.

“You have your pendant?”

Mr. Driscoll’s suffering eye shone down on Violet Strange’s uplifted face as she advanced to say good-bye preparatory to departure.

“Yes,” she acknowledged, “but hardly, I fear, your gratitude.”

And the answer astonished her.

“I am not sure that the real Alicia will not make her father happier than the unreal one has ever done.”

“And Captain Holliday?”

“He may come to feel the same.”

“Then I do not quit in disgrace?”

“You depart with my thanks.”

When a certain personage was told of the success of Miss Strange’s latest manoeuvre, he remarked: “The little one progresses. We shall have to give her a case of prime importance next.”

PROBLEM II. THE SECOND BULLET

“You must see her.”

“No. No.”

“She’s a most unhappy woman. Husband and child both taken from her in a moment; and now, all means of living as well, unless some happy thought of yours—some inspiration of your genius—shows us a way of re-establishing her claims to the policy voided by this cry of suicide.”

But the small wise head of Violet Strange continued its slow shake of decided refusal.

“I’m sorry,” she protested, “but it’s quite out of my province. I’m too young to meddle with so serious a matter.”

“Not when you can save a bereaved woman the only possible compensation left her by untoward fate?”

“Let the police try their hand at that.”

“They have had no success with the case.”

“Or you?”

“Nor I either.”

“And you expect—”

“Yes, Miss Strange. I expect you to find the missing bullet which will settle the fact that murder and not suicide ended George Hammond’s life. If you cannot, then a long litigation awaits this poor widow, ending, as such litigation usually does, in favour of the stronger party. There’s the alternative. If you once saw her—”

“But that’s what I’m not willing to do. If I once saw her I should yield to her importunities and attempt the seemingly impossible. My instincts bid me say no. Give me something easier.”

“Easier things are not so remunerative. There’s money in this affair, if the insurance company is forced to pay up. I can offer you—”

“What?”

There was eagerness in the tone despite her effort at nonchalance. The other smiled imperceptibly, and briefly named the sum.

It was larger than she had expected. This her visitor saw by the way her eyelids fell and the peculiar stillness which, for an instant, held her vivacity in check.

“And you think I can earn that?”

Her eyes were fixed on his in an eagerness as honest as it was unrestrained.

He could hardly conceal his amazement, her desire was so evident and the cause of it so difficult to understand. He knew she wanted money—that was her avowed reason for entering into this uncongenial work. But to want it so much! He glanced at her person; it was simply clad but very expensively—how expensively it was his business to know. Then he took in the room in which they sat. Simplicity again, but the simplicity of high art—the drawing-room of one rich enough to indulge in the final luxury of a highly cultivated taste, viz.: unostentatious elegance and the subjection of each carefully chosen ornament to the general effect.

What did this favoured child of fortune lack that she could be reached by such a plea, when her whole being revolted from the nature of the task he offered her? It was a question not new to him; but one he had never heard answered and was not likely to hear answered now. But the fact remained that the consent he had thought dependent upon sympathetic interest could be reached much more readily by the promise of large emolument,—and he owned to a feeling of secret disappointment even while he recognized the value of the discovery.

But his satisfaction in the latter, if satisfaction it were, was of very short duration. Almost immediately he observed a change in her. The sparkle which had shone in the eye whose depths he had never been able to penetrate, had dissipated itself in something like a tear and she spoke up in that vigorous tone no one but himself had ever heard, as she said:

“No. The sum is a good one and I could use it; but I will not waste my energy on a case I do not believe in. The man shot himself. He was a speculator, and probably had good reason for his act. Even his wife acknowledges that he has lately had more losses than gains.”

“See her. She has something to tell you which never got into the papers.”

“You say that? You know that?”

“On my honour, Miss Strange.”

Violet pondered; then suddenly succumbed.

“Let her come, then. Prompt to the hour. I will receive her at three. Later I have a tea and two party calls to make.”

Her visitor rose to leave. He had been able to subdue all evidence of his extreme gratification, and now took on a formal air. In dismissing a guest, Miss Strange was invariably the society belle and that only. This he had come to recognize.

The case (well known at the time) was, in the fewest possible words, as follows:

On a sultry night in September, a young couple living in one of the large apartment houses in the extreme upper portion of Manhattan were so annoyed by the incessant crying of a child in the adjoining suite, that they got up, he to smoke, and she to sit in the window for a possible breath of cool air. They were congratulating themselves upon the wisdom they had shown in thus giving up all thought of sleep—for the child’s crying had not ceased—when (it may have been two o’clock and it may have been a little later) there came from somewhere near, the sharp and somewhat peculiar detonation of a pistol-shot.

He thought it came from above; she, from the rear, and they were staring at each other in the helpless wonder of the moment, when they were struck by the silence. The baby had ceased to cry. All was as still in the adjoining apartment as in their own—too still—much too still. Their mutual stare turned to one of horror. “It came from there!” whispered the wife. “Some accident has occurred to Mr. or Mrs. Hammond—we ought to go—”

Her words—very tremulous ones—were broken by a shout from below. They were standing in their window and had evidently been seen by a passing policeman. “Anything wrong up there?” they heard him cry. Mr. Saunders immediately looked out. “Nothing wrong here,” he called down. (They were but two stories from the pavement.) “But I’m not so sure about the rear apartment. We thought we heard a shot. Hadn’t you better come up, officer? My wife is nervous about it. I’ll meet you at the stair-head and show you the way.”

The officer nodded and stepped in. The young couple hastily donned some wraps, and, by the time he appeared on their floor, they were ready to accompany him.

Meanwhile, no disturbance was apparent anywhere else in the house, until the policeman rang the bell of the Hammond apartment. Then, voices began to be heard, and doors to open above and below, but not the one before which the policeman stood.

Another ring, and this time an insistent one;—and still no response. The officer’s hand was rising for the third time when there came a sound of fluttering from behind the panels against which he had laid his ear, and finally a choked voice uttering unintelligible words. Then a hand began to struggle with the lock, and the door, slowly opening, disclosed a woman clad in a hastily donned wrapper and giving every evidence of extreme fright.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, seeing only the compassionate faces of her neighbours. “You heard it, too! a pistol-shot from there—there—my husband’s room. I have not dared to go—I—I—O, have mercy and see if anything is wrong! It is so still—so still, and only a moment ago the baby was crying. Mrs. Saunders, Mrs. Saunders, why is it so still?”