The Greatest Works of Anna Katharine Green. Анна Грин
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