Claimed (Sci-Fi Classic). Francis Stevens
despite the ghastly lividness of his hawk-like old face, Robinson was alive, though how long he might remain so was another matter. Uneven respiration and a heavy, frantically jumping pulse told their story.
“Is it — a stroke?” asked the young woman’s voice behind him.
“I don’t know,” said Vanaman frankly. “Can’t tell yet. Hot-water bottles for his feet, please, and an ice pack for his head. Have you any alcohol in the house? I’m going to give him a hypodermic.”
He was directing the young woman in exactly the short, crisp sentences he would have used with a nurse, and she obeyed with equal intelligence and dedication. Soon the best treatment possible for the case was being administered, and Miss Robinson herself cleansed the old man’s arm with absorbent cotton dipped in alcohol while Vanaman got his hypodermic ready. He had declined to let the patient be moved till his jumping heart should quiet a little.
“Has he had many attacks like this?” queried Vanaman, as he withdrew the hypodermic needle and pulled down a richly embroidered sleeve over the scrawny arm.
“Not any,” said Miss Robinson.
“No? I should have said — H— m! What happened here to-night?”
In his absorption in the patient Vanaman forgotten that broken window. Now he remembered it, and also observed for the first time that one side of the room, that near the window, was in considerable disarray. A chair had been overset, the rug lay in folds as if plowed up by struggling feet, and scattered over it were many bits of shattered porcelain, remnants of a five hundred dollar Satsuma vase, though Vanaman could not know that.
“We had a thief here — I think,” said Miss Robinson. “At about eleven o’clock I left my uncle seated beside that table. I took a book to my room with me and sat up reading. Frisby, our butler, says that at half past eleven the doorbell rang, and when he went to the door there was a man there.
“He was a rough and common-looking fellow, almost a tramp. He gave Frisby a card and said to tell my uncle he wished to see him about the green box.
“Frisby left him standing outside and carried the card to my uncle. The card is there on the table now. You can see that it is from Jacob Lutz, the curio dealer on Forest Street. I remember that my uncle said something of expecting a man whom Mr. Lutz was sending around. Frisby says that my uncle seemed to hesitate, and grumbled some complaint because the man had, come so late in the evening. Then he told Frisby to let him in.
“My uncle is accustomed to dealing with rough men — in spite of his age he still does a good deal of active superintending at the engine works. I don’t think he was ever afraid of anything or anyone in his life, and Frisby was not surprised when he was sent away with instructions not to hang about listening. He left the stranger and my uncle alone together here in the study.
“It must have been about half an hour later when I heard Uncle Jesse shouting, and then a great smash and crash which I suppose was the window breaking. Of course I ran down-stairs at once. When I came in here —” She paused, seemed to hesitate oddly for a moment, then finished abruptly with: “There was no one here but my uncle, and he was lying senseless on the floor.”
“And his visitor?”
“The man had tried to steal that — that green box on the table, I think. Uncle Jesse had it clasped tight in his arms when I came in. His shouts and the noise they made in struggling over it must have frightened the thief so that he smashed out the window pane and escaped. I— can’t tell you any more than that.”
Vanaman stared at her with an intentness almost rude. He was thinking of two things at once, as a man sometimes does. One thought was of amazement that he could for nearly an hour have worked with and been ably assisted by the most exquisitely beautiful woman he had ever seen, and yet scarcely have been aware of the fact until now.
She was dressed in a gown of dull-blue, with innumerable illusive, filmy folds; her hands and arms were perfectly shaped, but slender and delicate to fragility; her face had a flowerlike loveliness, and her hair was literally wonderful. Though brows and long, thick lashes were dark, her hair was almost snow-white. There was a great quantity of it, soft and fluffy and silvery as moonbeams, and it completed the delicate, exquisite fragility of her whole appearance.
Vanaman’s other thought was that the exquisitely beautiful one had been on the point of telling him something and then changed her mind about it. The intelligence of a good doctor is necessarily not unlike that of a good detective. Both are born to follow obscure clues, seek out hidden meanings, and find absorbing interest in the intricate riddles provoked by the lives of their fellow-beings.
The same instinct which, used for diagnosis had won Vincent’s high praise at the hospital, told Vanaman now that for all her languid manner, rather weary, slate gray eyes, and the perfect self-possession which enabled her to tell the brief story she had related without wasting a word, Miss Robinson was suffering from an excessively high nervous tension.
Anxiety caused by her uncle’s condition? Perhaps. Or it might be — What had Miss Robinson seen happen in this room of which she had started to tell him, decided not to tell him, and the memory of which caused the pupils of those gray eyes to expand so darkly when she thought of it?
“You have sent for the police, I suppose?”
She shook her head.
“My uncle wouldn’t like us to do that, unless he directed it.” Seeing his involuntary look of surprise, she added with a faint smile: “My uncle is an old man, and you know old people are allowed their peculiarities. He may even be displeased because I called you in, Dr. — I beg your pardon, but I really don’t know your name.”
“I am Dr. Vanaman,” he said slowly, “but how did you —”
“I asked central to give me some doctor in this neighborhood, but I only received your phone number, not your name. Our regular physician, Dr. Bruce, was called out of town for an operation early in the evening.”
Vanaman was young, but by no means a fool. Inwardly he laughed at himself for the wild dream that had pictured him chosen as elect by a millionaire patient. Bruce stood at the head of his profession, at least in Tremont. He was substituting for Bruce. He turned back to the patient.
“Heart’s better,” he approved, finger on pulse. “He can be carried up-stairs soon and put to bed.”
“This box —” The young woman had moved over to the table, and indicated by a gesture — not touching it — an oblong, polished, bluish-green object which lay there. “This box,” she said again. “Do you notice anything — peculiar about it?”
Rather wonderingly, Vanaman came to her side and inspected the object at close range. It was about a dozen inches long by six wide and some five in thickness. It had neither hasp nor visible hinges, and a thin hairline around the exact center of the sides was the only sign by which it could be known as a box and not an oblong block of either colored porcelain or some semiprecious stone like the green onyx quarried at La Redrara, in Mexico. The top was a highly polished surface without ornament of any kind.
Not onyx, though, thought Vanaman. Instead of the regularly banded variation of hue peculiar to that stone, this had a curious, unevenly clouded effect; and if one looked long at any part of it the bluegreen color of that part seemed to deepen, grow greener, and at the same time more transparent, so that presently one’s vision penetrated far — far and deep. But, great God, how deep! Down — down — through miles of transparent green.
At a touch on his arm, Vanaman started violently. He blinked his: eyes like a man dazzled, then laughed with a note of apology.
“The stone this is made of does affect one’s vision peculiarly, doesn’t it?”
Miss Robinson was frowning slightly.
“Perhaps. I haven’t noticed. That was not what I meant. I— would you mind turning the box over, doctor?”
More puzzled than ever, Vanaman nevertheless complied. Then he realized