“Speak quickly. You’ll never regret it, Huldah. He’s no mate for you, and you ought to know it. You have seen this paper covered with the pink scrolls before?”
The coroner had again drawn aside his coat from the bits of plaster.
“Yes,” she gasped, with quick glances at her lover through the open doorway. “He never shed tears for me!” she exclaimed bitterly. “I didn’t know he could for anybody. Oh, I’ll tell what I’ve kept quiet here,” and she struck her breast violently. “I wouldn’t keep the truth back now if the minister was waiting to marry us. He loves that old woman and he doesn’t love me. Hear him call her ‘mother.’ Are mothers dearer than sweethearts? Oh, I’ll tell! I don’t know anything about the old lady, but I do know that room 3 was repapered the night before last, and secretly, by him. I didn’t see him do it, nobody did, but this is how I know: Some weeks ago I was hunting for something in the attic, when I stumbled upon some rolls of old wall-paper lying in a little cubby-hole under the eaves. The end of one of the rolls was torn and lay across the floor. I couldn’t help seeing it or remembering its colour. It was like this, blue and striped. Exactly like it,” she repeated, “just as shabby and old-looking. The rain had poured in on it, and it was all mouldy and stained. It smelt musty. I didn’t give two thoughts to it then, but when after the old lady’s death I heard one of the girls say something in the kitchen about a room being blue now which only a little while ago was pink, I stole up into the attic to see if those rolls were still there and found them every one gone. Oh, what is happening now?”
“One of the men is trying to take the diamonds from the woman and she won’t let him. Her wits are evidently gone — frightened away by the horrors of the night — or she wouldn’t try to cling to what has branded her at once as a thief.”
The word seemed to pierce the girl. She stared out at her former mistress, who was again being soothed by the clerk, and murmured hoarsely:
“A thief! and he don’t seem to mind, but is just as good to her! Oh, oh, I once served a term myself for — for a smaller thing than that and I thought that was why —— Oh, sir, oh, sir, there’s no mistake about the paper. For I went looking about in the barrels and where they throw the refuse, for bits to prove that this papering had been done in the night. It seemed so wonderful to me that any one, even Jake, who is the smartest man you ever saw, could do such a job as that and no one know. And though I found nothing in the barrels, I did in the laundry stove. It was full of burned paper, and some of it showed colour, and it was just that musty old blue I had seen in the attic.”
She paused with a terrified gasp; Jake was looking at her from the open door.
“Oh, Jake!” she wailed out, “why weren’t you true to me? Why did you pretend to love me when you didn’t?”
He gave her a look, then turned on his heel. He was very much subdued in aspect and did not think to brush away the tear still glistening on his cheek.
“I’ve said my last word to you,” he quietly declared, then stood silent a moment, with slowly labouring chest and an air of deepest gloom. But, as his eye stole outside again, they saw the spirit melt within him and simple human grief take the place of icy resolution. “She was like a mother to me,” he murmured. “And now they say she’ll never be herself again as long as she lives.” Suddenly his head rose and he faced the coroner.
“You’re right,” said he. “It’s all up with me. No home, no sweetheart, no missus. She [there was no doubt as to whom he meant by that tremulous she] was the only one I’ve ever cared for and she’s just shown herself a thief. I’m no better. This is our story.”
I will not give it in his words, but in my own. It will be shorter and possibly more intelligible.
The gang, if you may call it so, consisted of Quimby and these two, with a servant or so in addition. Robbery was its aim; a discreet and none too frequent spoliation of such of their patrons as lent themselves to their schemes. Quimby was the head, his wife the soul of this business, and Jake their devoted tool. The undermining of the latter’s character had been begun early; a very dangerous undermining, because it had for one of its elements good humour and affectionate suggestion. At fourteen he was ready for any crime, but he was mercifully kept out of the worst till he was a full-grown man. Then he did his part. The affair of the old woman was an unpremeditated one. It happened in this wise: Miss Demarest’s story had been true in every particular. Her mother was with her when she came to the house, and he, Jake, was the person sitting far back in the shadows at the time the young lady registered. There was nothing peculiar in the occurrence or in their behaviour except the decided demand which Miss Demarest made for separate rooms. This attracted his attention, for the house was pretty full and only one room was available in the portion reserved for transients. What would Quimby do? He couldn’t send two women away, and he was entirely too conciliatory and smooth to refuse a request made so peremptorily. Quimby did nothing. He hemmed, hawed, and looked about for his wife. She was in the inner office back of him, and, attracted by his uneasy movements, showed herself. A whispered consultation followed, during which she cast a glance Jake’s way. He understood her instantly and lounged carelessly forward. “Let them have Number 3,” he said. “It’s all fixed for the night. I can sleep anywhere, on the settle here or even on the floor of the inner office.”
He had whispered these words, for the offer meant more than appeared. Number 3 was never given to guests. It was little more than a closet and was not even furnished. A cot had been put in that very afternoon, but only to meet a special emergency. A long-impending conference was going to be held between him and his employers subsequent to closing up time, and he had planned this impromptu refuge to save himself a late walk to the stable. At his offer to pass the same over to the Demarests, the difficulty of the moment vanished. Miss Demarest was shown to the one empty room in front, and the mother — as being the one less likely to be governed by superstitious fears if it so happened that some rumour of the undesirability of the haunted Number 3 should have reached them — to the small closet so hastily prepared for the clerk. Mrs. Quimby accompanied her, and afterward visited her again for the purpose of carrying her a bowl and some water. It was then she encountered Miss Demarest, who, anxious for a second and more affectionate good-night from her mother, had been wandering the halls in a search for her room. There was nothing to note in this simple occurrence, and Mrs. Quimby might have forgotten all about it if Miss Demarest had not made a certain remark on leaving the room. The bareness and inhospitable aspect of the place may have struck her, for she stopped in the doorway and, looking back, exclaimed: “What ugly paper! Magenta, too, the one colour my mother hates.” This Mrs. Quimby remembered, for she also hated magenta, and never went into this room if she could help it.
The business which kept them all up that night was one totally disconnected with the Demarests or any one else in the house. A large outstanding obligation was coming due which Quimby lacked the money to meet. Something must be done with the stolen notes and jewelry which they had accumulated in times past and had never found the will or courage to dispose of. A choice must be made of what was salable. But what choice? It was a question that opened the door to endless controversy and possibly to a great difference of opinion; for in his way Quimby was a miser of the worst type and cared less for what money would do than for the sight and feeling of the money itself, while Mrs. Quimby was even more tenacious in her passion for the trinkets and gems which she looked upon as her part of the booty. Jake, on the contrary, cared little for anything but the good of the couple to whom he had attached himself. He wished Quimby to be satisfied, but not at Mrs. Quimby’s expense. He was really fond of the woman and he was resolved that she should have no cause to grieve, even if he had to break with the old man. Little did any of them foresee what the night really held for them, or on what a jagged and unsuspected rock their frail bark was about to split.
Shutting-up time came, and with it the usual midnight quiet. All the doors had been locked and the curtains drawn over the windows and across the glass doors of the office. They were determined to do what they had never done before, lay out the loot and make a division. Quimby was resolved to see the diamonds which his wife had kept hidden for so long, and she, the securities, concerning the value of which he had contradicted himself so often. Jake’s presence would keep the peace; they had no reason to fear any undue urging of his claims. All this he knew, and he was not therefore surprised, only greatly excited, when, after a last quiet look and some listening at the foot of the stairs, Mr. Quimby beckoned him into the office and, telling him to lock the door behind him, stepped around the bar to summon his wife. Jake never knew how it happened. He flung the door to and locked it, as he thought, but he must have turned the key too quickly, for the bolt of the lock did not enter the jamb, as they afterward found. Meanwhile they felt perfectly secure. The jewels were brought out of Mrs. Quimby’s bedroom and laid on the desk. The securities were soon laid beside them. They had been concealed behind a movable brick at the side of the fireplace. Then the discussion began, involving more or less heat and excitement.
How long this lasted no one ever knew. At half-past eleven no change of attitude had taken place either in Quimby or his wife. At twelve the only difference marked by Jake was the removal of the securities to Quimby’s breast pocket, and of the diamond-studded chain to Mrs. Quimby’s neck. The former were too large for the pocket, the latter too brilliant for the dark calico background they blazed against. Jake, who was no fool, noted both facts, but had no words for the situation. He was absorbed, and he saw that Quimby was absorbed, in watching her broad hand creeping over those diamonds and huddling them up in a burning heap against her heart. There was fear in the action, fierce and overmastering fear, and so there was in her eyes which, fixed and glassy, stared over their shoulders at the wall behind, as though something had reached out from that wall and struck at the very root of her being. What did it mean? There was nothing in the room to affright her. Had she gone daft? Or ——
Suddenly they both felt the blood congeal in their own veins; each turned to each a horrified face, then slowly and as if drawn by a power supernatural and quite outside of their own will, their two heads turned in the direction she was looking, and they beheld standing in their midst a spectre — no, it was the figure of a living, breathing woman, with eyes fastened on those jewels — those well-known, much-advertised jewels! So much they saw in that instant flash, then nothing! For Quimby, in a frenzy of unreasoning fear, had taken the chair from under him and had swung it at the figure. A lamp had stood on the bar top. It was caught by the backward swing of the chair, overturned and quenched. The splintering of glass mingled its small sound with an ominous thud in the thick darkness. It was the end of all things; the falling of an impenetrable curtain over a horror half sensed, yet all the greater for its mystery.
The silence — the terror — the unspeakable sense of doom which gripped them all was not broken by a heart-beat. All listened for a stir, a movement where they could see nothing. But the stillness remained unbroken. The silence was absolute. The figure which they had believed themselves to have seen had been a dream, an imagination of their overwrought minds. It could not be otherwise. The door had been locked, entrance was impossible; yet doubt held them powerless. The moments were making years of themselves. To each came in a flash a review of every earthly incident they had experienced, every wicked deed, every unholy aspiration. Quimby gritted his teeth. It was the first sound which had followed that thud and, slight as it was, it released them somewhat from their awful tension. Jake felt that he could move now, and was about to let forth his imprisoned breath when he felt the touch of icy fingers trailing over his cheek, and started back with a curse. It was Mrs. Quimby feeling about for him in the impenetrable darkness, and in another moment he could hear her smothered whisper:
“Are you there, Jake?”
“Yes; where are you?”
“Here,” said the woman, with an effort to keep her teeth from striking together.
“For God’s sake, a light!” came from the hollow darkness beyond.
It was Quimby’s voice at last. Jake answered:
“No light for me. I’ll stay where I am till daybreak.”
“Get a light, you fool!” commanded Quimby, but not without a tremble in his usually mild tone.
Hard breathing from Jake, but no other response, Quimby seemed to take a step nearer, for his voice was almost at their ears now.
“Jake, you can have anything I’ve got so as you get a light now.”
“There ain’t nothing to light here. You broke the lamp.”
Quiet for a moment, then Quimby muttered hoarsely:
“If you ain’t scared out of your seven senses, you can go down cellar and bring up that bit of candle ‘longside the ale-barrels.”
Into the cellar! Not Jake. The moving of the rickety table which his fat hand had found and rested on spoke for him.
Another curse from Quimby. Then the woman, though with some hesitation, said with more self-control than could be expected:
“I’ll get it,” and they heard her move away from it toward the trap-door behind the bar.
The two men made no objection. To her that cold, black cellar might seem a refuge from the unseen horror centred here. It had not struck them so. It had its own possibilities, and Jake wondered at her courage, as he caught the sound of her groping advance and the sudden clatter and clink of bottles as the door came up and struck the edge of the bar. There was life and a suggestion of home in that clatter and clink, and all breathed easier for a moment, but only for a moment. The something lying there behind them, or was it almost under their feet, soon got its hold again upon their fears, and Jake found himself standing stock-still, listening both ways for that dreaded, or would it be welcome, movement on the floor behind, and to the dragging sound of Mrs. Quimby’s skirt and petticoat as she made her first step down those cellar-stairs. What an endless time it took! He could rush down there in a minute, but she — she could not have reached the third step yet, for that always creaked. Now it did creak. Then there was no sound for some time, unless it was the panting of Quimby’s breath somewhere over by the bar. Then the stair creaked again. She must be nearly up.
“Here’s matches and the candle,” came in a hollow voice from the trap-stairs.
A faint streak appeared for an instant against the dark, then disappeared. Another; but no lasting light. The matches were too damp to burn.
“Jake, ain’t you got a match?” appealed the voice of Quimby in half-choked accents.
After a bit of fumbling a small blaze shot up from where Jake stood. Its sulphurous smell may have suggested to all, as it did to one, the immeasurable distance of heaven at that moment, and the awful nearness of hell. They could see now, but not one of them looked in the direction where all their thoughts lay. Instead of that, they rolled their eyes on each other, while the match burned slowly out: Mrs. Quimby from the trap, her husband from the bar, and Jake. Suddenly he found words, and his cry rang through the room:
“The candle! the candle! this is my only match. Where is the candle?”
Quimby leaped forward and with shaking hand held the worn bit of candle to the flame. It failed to ignite. The horrible, dreaded darkness was about to close upon them again before — before —— But another hand had seized the candle. Mrs. Quimby has come forward, and as the match sends up its last flicker, thrusts the wick against the flame and the candle flares up. It is lighted.
Over it they give each other one final appealing stare. There’s no help for it now; they must look. Jake’s head turned first, then Mrs. Quimby, and then that of the real aggressor.
A simultaneous gasp from them all betrays the worst. It had been no phantom called into being by their overtaxed nerves. A woman lay before them, face downward on the hard floor. A woman dressed in black, with hat on head and a little satchel clutched in one stiff, outstretched hand. Miss Demarest’s mother! The little old lady who had come into the place four hours before!
With a muttered execration, Jake stepped over to her side and endeavoured to raise her; but he instantly desisted, and looking up at Quimby and his wife, moved his lips with the one fatal word which ends all hope:
“Dead!”
They listened appalled, “Dead?” echoed the now terrified Quimby.
“Dead?” repeated his no less agitated wife.
Jake was the least overcome of the three. With another glance at the motionless figure, he rose, and walking around the body, crossed to the door and seeing what he had done to make entrance possible, cursed himself and locked it properly. Meanwhile, Mrs. Quimby, with her eyes on her husband, had backed slowly away till she had reached the desk, against which she now stood with fierce and furious eyes, still clutching at her chain.
Quimby watched her fascinated. He had never seen her look like this before. What did it portend? They were soon to know.
“Coward!” fell from her lips, as she stared with unrelenting hate at her husband. “An old woman who was not even conscious of what she saw! I’ll not stand for this killing, Jacob. You may count me out of this and the chain, too. If you don’t ——” a threatening gesture finished the sentence and the two men looking at her knew that they had come up against a wall.
“Susan!” Was that Quimby speaking? “Susan, are you going back on me now?”
She pointed at the motionless figure lying in its shrouding black like an ineffaceable blot on the office floor, then at the securities showing above the edge of his pocket.
“Were we not close enough to discovery, without drawing the attention of the police by such an unnecessary murder? She was walking in her sleep. I remember her eyes as she advanced toward me; there was no sight in them.”
“You lie!” It was the only word which Quimby found to ease the shock which this simple statement caused him. But Jake saw from the nature of the glance he shot at his poor old victim that her words had struck home. His wife saw it, too, but it did not disturb the set line of her determined mouth.
“You’ll let me keep the chain,” she said, “and you’ll use your wits, now that you have used your hand, to save yourself and myself from the charge of murder.”
Quimby, who was a man of great intelligence when his faculties were undisturbed by anger or shock, knelt and turned his victim carefully over so that her face was uppermost.
“It was not murder,” he uttered in an indescribable tone after a few minutes of cautious scrutiny. “The old lady fell and struck her forehead. See! the bruise is scarcely perceptible. Had she been younger ——”
“A sudden death from any cause in this house at just this time is full of danger for us,” coldly broke in his wife.
The landlord rose to his feet, walked away to the window, dropped his head, thought for a minute, and then slowly came back, glanced at the woman again, at her dress, her gloved hands, and her little satchel.
“She didn’t die in this house,” fell from his lips in his most oily accents. “She fell in the woods; the path is full of bared roots, and there she must be found to-morrow morning. Jake, are you up to the little game?”
Jake, who was drawing his first full breath, answered with a calm enough nod, whereupon Quimby bade his wife to take a look outside and see if the way was clear for them to carry the body out.
She did not move. He fell into a rage; an unusual thing for him.
“Bestir yourself! do as I bid you,” he muttered.
Her eyes held his; her face took on the look he had learned to dread. Finally she spoke:
“And the daughter! What about the daughter?”
Quimby stood silent; then with a sidelong leer, and in a tone smooth as oil, but freighted with purpose, “The mother first; we’ll look after the daughter later.”
Mrs. Quimby shivered; then as her hand spread itself over the precious chain sparkling with the sinister gleam of serpent’s eyes on her broad bosom, she grimly muttered:
“How? I’m for no more risks, I tell you.”
Jake took a step forward. He thought his master was about to rush upon her. But he was only gathering up his faculties to meet the new problem she had flung at him.
“The girl’s a mere child; we shall have no difficulty with her,” he muttered broodingly. “Who saw these two come in?”
Then it came out that no one but themselves had been present at their arrival. Further consultation developed that the use to which Number 3 had been put was known to but one of the maids, who could easily be silenced. Whereupon Quimby told his scheme. Mrs. Quimby was satisfied, and he and Jake prepared to carry it out.
The sensations of the next half-hour, as told by Jake, would make your flesh creep. They did not dare to carry a lamp to light the gruesome task, and well as they knew the way, the possibilities of a stumble or a fall against some one of the many trees they had to pass filled them with constant terror. They did stumble once, and the low cry Jake uttered caused them new fears. Was that a window they heard flying up? No; but something moved in the bushes. They were sure of this and guiltily shook in their shoes; but nothing advanced out of the shadows, and they went on.
But the worst was when they had to turn their backs upon the body left lying face downward in the cold, damp woods. Men of no compassion, unreached by ordinary sympathies, they felt the furtive skulking back, step by step, along ways commonplace enough in the daytime, but begirt with terrors now and full of demoniac suggestion.
The sight of a single thread of light marking the door left ajar for them by Mrs. Quimby was a beacon of hope which was not even disturbed by the sight of her wild figure walking in a circle round and round the office, the stump of candle dripping unheeded over her fingers, and her eyes almost as sightless as those of the form left in the woods.
“Susan!” exclaimed her husband, laying hand on her.
She paused at once. The presence of the two men had restored her self-possession.
But all was not well yet. Jake drew Quimby’s attention to the register where the two names of mother and daughter could be seen in plain black and white.
“Oh, that’s nothing!” exclaimed the landlord, and, taking out his knife, he ripped the leaf out, together with the corresponding one in the back. “The devil’s on our side all right, or why did she pass over the space at the bottom of the page and write their two names at the top of the next one?”
He started, for his wife had clutched his arm.
“Yes, the devil’s on our side thus far,” said she, “but here he stops. I have just remembered something that will upset our whole plan and possibly hang us. Miss Demarest visited her mother in Number 3 and noticed the room well, and particularly the paper. Now if she is able to describe that paper, it might not be so easy for us to have our story believed.”
For a minute all stood aghast, then Jake quietly remarked: “It is now one by the clock. If you can find me some of that old blue paper I once chucked under the eaves in the front attic, I will engage to have it on those four walls before daylight. Bring the raggedest rolls you can find. If it shouldn’t be dry to the touch when they come to see it to-morrow, it must look so stained and old that no one will think of laying hand on it. I’ll go make the paste.”
As Jake was one of the quickest and most precise of workers at anything he understood, this astonishing offer struck the other two as quite feasible. The paper was procured, the furniture moved back, and a transformation made in the room in question which astonished even those concerned in it. Dawn rose upon the completed work and, the self-possession of all three having been restored with the burning up of such scraps as remained after the four walls were covered, they each went to their several beds for a half-hour of possible rest. Jake’s was in Number 3. He has never said what that half-hour was to him!
The rest we know. The scheme did not fully succeed, owing to the interest awakened in one man’s mind by the beauty and seeming truth of Miss Demarest. Investigation followed which roused the landlord to the danger threatening them from the curiosity of Hammersmith, and it being neck or nothing with him, he planned the deeper crime of burning up room and occupant before further discoveries could be made. What became of him in the turmoil which followed, no one could tell, not even Jake. They had been together in Jake’s room before the latter ran out with his gun, but beyond that the clerk knew nothing. Of Mrs. Quimby he could tell more. She had not been taken into their confidence regarding the fire, some small grains of humanity remaining in her which they feared might upset their scheme. She had only been given some pretext for locking Huldah in her room, and it was undoubtedly her horror at her own deed when she saw to what it had committed her which unsettled her brain and made her a gibbering idiot for life.
Or was it some secret knowledge of her husband’s fate, unknown to others? We cannot tell, for no sign nor word of Jacob Quimby ever came to dispel the mystery of his disappearance.
And this is the story of Three Forks Tavern and the room numbered 3.