The Bartlett Mystery

CHAPTER XX

IN THE TOILS

East Orange seemed to be a long way from New York when Winifred hastened to the appointment at “Gateway House,” traveling thither by way of the Tube and the Lackawanna Railway.

More and more did it seem strange that a theatrical agent should fix on such a rendezvous, until a plausible reason suggested itself: possibly, some noted impresario had chosen this secluded retreat, and the agent had arranged a meeting there between his client and the great man whose Olympian nod gave success or failure to aspirants for the stage.

The letter itself was reassuringly explicit as to the route she should follow.

“On leaving the station,” it said, “turn to the right and walk a mile along the only road that presents itself until you see, on the left, a large green gate bearing the name ‘Gateway House.’ Walk in. The house itself is hidden by trees, and stands in spacious grounds. If you follow these directions, you will have no need to ask the way.”

The description of the place betokened that it was of some local importance, and hope revived somewhat in her sorrowing heart at the impression that perhaps, after all, it was better she had failed in finding work at the bindery.

Notwithstanding the charming simplicity of her nature, Winifred would not be a woman if she did not know she was good-looking. The stage offered a career; work in the factory only yielded existence. Recent events had added a certain strength of character to her sweet face; and Miss Goodman, who happened to be an expert dressmaker, had used the girl’s leisure in her lodgings to turn her nimble fingers to account. Hence, Winifred was dressed with neat elegance, and the touch of winter keenness in the air gave her a splendid color as she hurried out of the station many minutes late for her appointment.

Would she be asked to sing, she wondered? She had no music with her, and had never touched a piano since her music-master’s anxiety to train her voice had been so suddenly frustrated by Rachel Craik. But she knew many of the solos from “Faust,” “Rigoletto,” and “Carmen”; surely, among musical people, there would be some appreciation of her skill if tested by this class of composition, as compared with the latest rag-time melody or gushing cabaret ballad.

Busy with such thoughts, she hastened along the road, until she awoke with a start to the knowledge that she was opposite Gateway House. Certainly the retreat was admirable from the point of view of a man surfeited with life on the Great White Way. Indeed, it looked very like a private lunatic asylum or home for inebriates, with its lofty walls studded with broken glass, and its solid gate crowned with iron spikes.

Winifred tried the door. It opened readily. She was surprised that so pretentious an abode had no lodge-keeper’s cottage. There were signs of few vehicles passing over the weed-grown gravel drive, and such marks as existed were quite recent.

She was so late, however, that her confused mind did not trouble about these things, and she sped on gracefully, soon coming in full view of the house itself. It was now almost dark, and the grounds seemed very lonely; but the presence of lights in the secluded mansion gave earnest of some one awaiting her there. She fancied she heard a noise, like the snapping of a latch or lock behind her. She turned her head, but saw no one. Fowle, hiding among the evergreens, had run with nimble feet and sardonic smile to bolt the gate as soon as she was out of sight.

And now Winifred was at the front door, timidly pulling a bell. A man strolled with a marked limp around the house from a conservatory. He was a tall, strongly built person, and something in the dimly seen outline sent a thrill of apprehension through her.

But the door opened.

“I have come – ” she began.

The words died away in sheer affright. Glowering at her, with a queer look of gratified menace, was Rachel Craik!

“So I see,” was the grim retort. “Come in, Winnie, by all means. Where have you been all these weeks?”

“There is some mistake,” she faltered, white with sudden terror and nameless suspicions. “My agent told me to come here – ”

“Quite right. Be quick, or you’ll miss the last train home,” growled the voice of Voles behind her.

Roughly, though not violently, he pushed her inside, and the door closed.

He snapped at Rachel: “She’d be yelling for help in another second, and you never know who may be passing.”

Now, Winifred was not of the order of women who faint in the presence of danger. Her love had given her a great strength; her suffering had deepened her fine nature; and her very soul rebelled against the cruel subterfuge which had been practised to separate her from her lover. She saw, with the magic intuition of her sex, that the very essence of a deep-laid plot was that Rex and she should be kept apart.

The visit of Mrs. Carshaw, then, was only a part of the same determined scheme? Rex’s mother had been a puppet in the hands of those who carried her to Connecticut, who strove so determinedly to take her away when Carshaw put in an appearance, and who had tricked her into keeping this bogus appointment. She would defy them, face death itself rather than yield.

In the America of to-day, nothing short of desperate crime could long keep her from Rex’s arms. What a weak, silly, romantic girl she had been not to trust in him absolutely! The knowledge nerved her to a fine scorn.

“What right have you to treat me in this way?” she cried vehemently. “You have lied to me; brought me here by a forged letter. Let me go instantly, and perhaps my just indignation may not lead me to tell my agent how you have dared to use his name with false pretense.”

“Ho, ho!” sang out Voles. “The little bird pipes an angry note. Be pacified, my sweet linnet. You were getting into bad company. It was the duty of your relatives to rescue you.”

“My relatives! Who are they who claim kinship? I see here one who posed as my aunt for many years – ”

“Posed, Winnie?”

Miss Craik affected a croak of regretful protest.

Winifred’s eyes shot lightnings.

“Yes. I am sure you are not my aunt. Many things I can recall prove it to me. Why do you never mention my father and mother? What wrong have I done to any living soul that, ever since you were mixed up in the attack on Mr. Ronald Tower, you should deal with me as if I were a criminal or a lunatic, and seek to part me from those who would befriend me?”

“Hush, little girl,” interposed Voles, with mock severity. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You are hurting your dear aunt’s feelings. She is your aunt. I ought to know, considering that you are my daughter!”

“Your daughter!”

Now, indeed, she felt ready to dare dragons. This coarse, brutal giant of a man her father! Her gorge rose at the suggestion. Almost fiercely she resolved to hold her own against these persecutors who scrupled not to use any lying device that would suit their purpose.

“Yes,” he cried truculently. “Don’t I come up to your expectations?”

“If you are my father,” she said, with a strange self-possession that came to her aid in this trying moment, “where is my mother?”

“Sorry to say she died long since.”

“Did you murder her as you tried to murder Mr. Tower?”

The chance shot went home, though it hit her callous hearer in a way she could not then appreciate. He swore violently.

“You’re my daughter, I tell you,” he vociferated, “and the first thing you have to learn is obedience. Your head has been turned, young lady, by your pretty Rex and his nice ways. I’ll have to teach you not to address me in that fashion. Take her to her room, Rachel.”

Driven to frenzy by a dreadful and wholly unexpected predicament, Winifred cast off the hand her “aunt” laid on her shoulder.

“Let me go!” she screamed. “I will not accompany you. I do not believe a word you say. If you touch me, I shall defend myself.”

“Spit-fire, eh?” she heard Voles say. There was something of a struggle. She never knew exactly what happened. She found herself clasped in his giant arms and heard his half jesting protest:

“Now, my butterfly, don’t beat your little wings so furiously, or you’ll hurt yourself.”

He carried her, screaming, up-stairs, and pushed her into a large room. Rachel Craik followed, with set face and angry words.

“Ungrateful girl!” was her cry. “After all I’ve done for you!”

“You stole me from my mother,” sobbed Winifred despairingly. “I am sure you did. You are afraid now lest some one should recognize me. I am ‘the image of my mother’ that horrible man said, and I am to be taken away because I resemble her. It is you who are frightened, not I. I defy you. Even Mrs. Carshaw knew my face. I scorn you, I say, and if you think your devices can deceive me or keep Rex from me, you are mistaken. Before it is too late, let me go!”

Rachel Craik was, indeed, alarmed by the girl’s hysterical outpouring. But Winifred’s taunts worked harm in one way. They revealed most surely that the danger dreaded by both Voles and Meiklejohn did truly exist. From that instant Rachel Craik, who felt beneath her rough exterior some real tenderness for the girl she had reared, became her implacable foe.

“You had better calm yourself,” she said quietly. “If you care to eat, food will soon be brought for you and Mr. Grey. He is your fellow-boarder for a few days!”

Then Winifred saw, for the first time, that the spacious room held another occupant. Reclining in a big chair, and scowling at her, was Mick the Wolf, whose arm Carshaw had broken recently.

“Yes,” growled that worthy, “I’m not the most cheerful company, missy, but my other arm is strong enough to put that fellow of yours out o’ gear if he butts in on me ag’in. So just cool your pretty lil head, will you? I’m boss here, and if you rile me it’ll be sort o’ awkward for you.”

How Winifred passed the next few hours she could scarcely remember afterward. She noted, in dull agony, that the windows of the sitting-room she shared with Mick the Wolf were barred with iron. So, too, was the window of her bedroom. The key and handle of the bedroom lock had been taken away. Rachel Craik was her jailer, a maimed scoundrel her companion and assistant-warder.

But, when the first paroxysms of helpless pain and rage had passed, her faith returned. She prayed long and earnestly, and help was vouchsafed. Appeal to her captors was vain, she knew, so she sought the consolation that is never denied to all who are afflicted.

Neither Rachel Craik, nor the sullen bandit, nor the loud-voiced rascal who had dared to say he was her father, could understand the cheerful patience with which she met them next day.

“She’s a puzzle,” said Voles in the privacy of the apartment beneath. “I must dope out some way of fixin’ things. She’ll never come to heel again, Rachel. That fool Carshaw has turned her head.”

He tramped to and fro impatiently. His ankle had not yet forgotten the wrench it received on the Boston Post Road. Suddenly he banged a huge fist on a sideboard.

“Gee!” he cried, “that should turn the trick! I’ll marry her off to Fowle. If it wasn’t for other considerations I’d be almost tempted – ”

He paused. Even his fierce spirit quailed at the venom that gleamed from Rachel Craik’s eyes.

CHAPTER XXI

MOTHER AND SON

A telegram reached Carshaw before he left Burlington with Clancy. He hoped it contained news of Winifred, but it was of a nature that imposed one more difficulty in his path.

“Not later than the twentieth,” wired the manager of the Carshaw Mills in Massachusetts. Carshaw himself had inquired the latest date on which he would be expected to start work.

The offer was his own, and he could not in honor begin the new era by breaking his pledge. The day was Saturday, November 11. On the following Monday week he must begin to learn the rudiments of cotton-spinning.

“What’s up?” demanded Clancy, eying the telegram, for Carshaw’s face had hardened at the thought that, perhaps, in the limited time at his disposal his quest might fail. He passed the typed slip to the detective.

“Meaning?” said the latter, after a quick glance.

Carshaw explained. “I’ll find her,” he added, with a catch of the breath. “I must find her. God in Heaven, man, I’ll go mad if I don’t!”

“Cut out the stage stuff,” said Clancy. “By this day week the Bureau will find a bunch of girls who’re not lost yet – only planning it.”

Touched by the misery in Carshaw’s eyes, he added:

“What you really want is a marriage license. The minute you set eyes on Winifred rush her to the City Hall.”

“Once we meet we’ll not part again,” came the earnest vow. Somehow, the pert little man’s overweening egotism was soothing, and Carshaw allowed his mind to dwell on the happiness of holding Winifred in his arms once more rather than the uncertain prospect of attaining such bliss.

Indeed, he was almost surprised by the ardor of his love for her. When he could see her each day, and amuse himself by playing at the pretense that she was to earn her own living, there was a definite satisfaction in the thought that soon they would be married, when all this pleasant make-believe would vanish. But now that she was lost to him, and probably enduring no common misery, the complacency of life had suddenly given place to a fierce longing for a glimpse of her, for the sound of her voice, for the shy glance of her beautiful eyes.

“Now, let’s play ball,” said Clancy when they were in a train speeding south. “Has any complete search of Winifred’s rooms been made?”

“How do you mean?”

“Did you look in every hole and corner for a torn envelope, a twisted scrap of paper, a car transfer, any mortal thing that might reveal why she went out and did not return?”

“I told you of the bookbinder’s note – ”

“You sure did,” broke in Clancy. “You also went to the bookbinder s’teen times. Are you certain there was nothing else?”

“No – I didn’t like – how could I peer and pry – ”

“You’d make a bum detective. Imagine that poor girl crying her eyes out in a cold dark cell all because you were too squeamish to give her belongings the once over!”

Carshaw was not misled by Clancy’s manner. He knew that his friend was only consumed by impatience to be on the trail.

“You’ve fired plenty of questions at me,” he said quietly. “Now it’s my turn. I understand why you came to Burlington, but where is Steingall all this time?”

“That big stiff! How do I know?”

In a word, Clancy was uncommunicative during a whole hour. When the mood passed he spoke of other things, but, although it was ten at night when they reached New York, he raced Carshaw straight to East Twenty-seventh Street and Miss Goodman.

There, in a few seconds, he was reading the agent’s genuine note to Winifred – that containing the assurance that no appointment had been made for “East Orange.”

The letter concluded:

“At first I assumed that a message intended for some other correspondent had been sent to me by error. Now, on reperusal, I am almost convinced that you wrote me under some misapprehension. Will you kindly explain how it arose?”

Clancy, great as ever on such occasions, refrained from saying: “I told you so.”

“We’ll call up the agent Monday, just for the sake of thoroughness,” he said. “Meanwhile, be ready to come with me to East Orange to-morrow at 8 A.M.”

“Why not to-night?” urged Carshaw, afire with a rage to be up and doing.

“What? To sleep there? Young man, you don’t know East Orange. Run away home to your ma!”

“Where have you been?” inquired Mrs. Carshaw when her son entered. Her air was subdued. She had suffered a good deal these later days.

“To Vermont.”

“Still pursuing that girl?”

“Yes, mother.”

“Have you found her?”

“No, mother.”

“Rex, have you driven me wholly from your heart?”

“No; that would be impossible. Winifred would not wish it, callous as you were to her.”