The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton

In a short time, he returned. He told her she was to wait on the table and instructed her how to serve the courses.

“The master will look surprised when he sees you instead of me. If he asks who you are, say the new page. But he will be too much afraid of exciting the wonder of his guests to ask you any questions. I feel certain that he will accept your presence without question, being desirous his guests shall not think him a tyro in the management of an establishment like this. I feel certain that after dinner, his guests will ask to see his collection of arms. Indeed, Miss Bording told him in my hearing last Monday that she accepted his invitation here on condition that she be allowed to see the famous collection. You are to follow them into the drawing-room after dinner. The master will not know whether that is usual or not. If they do start to go to look at the arms, you are to say, ‘The collection of your former weapons, sir, has been placed in the first room to the left at the head of the stairs. The paper-hangers and decorators have been busy.’ Then you are to lead the way into that room, which you will find dimly lighted. After that, I will attend to everything myself.”

Although Clarissa could not but wonder at the strangeness of her instructions and to be somewhat alarmed at the evidences of a plot in which she was to be an agent, she agreed, for though her regard for Asbury Fuller would have been sufficient to cause such acquiescence, so great was her curiosity to have solved the mysteries which surrounded that individual, that this alone would have gained her consent.

There were but two guests at the table of Mr. William Leadbury – Judge Volney Bording, and his daughter, Eulalia Bording. Mr. Leadbury cast a look of surprise and displeasure as he saw Clarissa serving the first course, but he quickly concealed these emotions and proceeded to plunge into an animated conversation with his guests. Indeed, it assumed the character of a monologue in which he frequently adverted to the weather, to be off on a tangent the next moment on a discussion of finance, politics, sociology, on which subjects, however, he was far from showing the positiveness and fixed opinion that he did while descanting upon the weather. In all the subjects he touched upon, he exhibited a certain skill in so framing his remarks that they would not run counter to any prejudices or opposite opinions of his auditors, but the feelings of the auditors having been elicited, served as a preamble from which he could go on, warmly agreeing with their views in the further and more complete unfolding of his own. He was between twenty-seven and thirty years of age, of a somewhat spare figure, and in the well-proportioned features of his face there was no one that would attract attention beyond the others and easily remain fixed in memory. He was not without an appearance of intelligence and his chest was thrown out and the small of his back drawn in after the manner of the Prussian ex-sergeants who give instruction in athletics and the cultivation of a proper carriage to the elite of this city, and withal he had the appearance of a person of substance and of consequence in his community. In the midst of a pause where he was occupied in putting his soup-spoon into his mouth, Miss Bording remarked:

“Please do not talk about commonplace American subjects, Mr. Leadbury. Tell us of your foreign life. Tell us of Algeria. What sort of a country is Algeria?”

Turning his eyes toward the chandelier about him and with an elegance of enunciation that did much to relieve the undeniably monotonous evenness of his discourse, he began:

“Algeria, the largest and most important of the French colonial possessions, is a country of northern Africa, bounded on the north by the Mediterranean, west by Morocco, south by the desert of Sahara, and east by Tunis. It extends for about five hundred and fifty miles along the coast and inland from three hundred to four hundred miles. Physiographically it may be roughly divided into three zones,” and so on for a considerable length until by an accident which Clarissa could attribute to nothing but inconceivable awkwardness, Judge Bording dropped a glass of water, crash! Having ceased his disquisition at this accident, so disconcerting to the judge, Miss Bording very prettily and promptly thanked him for his information and saying that she now had a clear understanding of the principal facts pertaining to Algeria, abruptly changed the subject by asking him if he had heard anything more concerning his second cousin, the barber.

“There is nothing more to be heard. He is dead. You know he came here about a week before I did. By the terms of my uncle’s will, the five years to be allowed to elapse before I was to be considered dead or disappeared would have come to an end in a week after the time of my arrival, and the property have passed to him, my uncle’s cousin. By the greatest luck in the world, I had become homesick and throwing up my commission in the Foreign Legion, or Battalion D’Etranger, as we have it in French, which is, as you may know, a corps of foreigners serving under the French flag, mainly in Algeria, but occasionally in other French possessions – throwing up my commission, I came home, bringing with me my famous collection of weapons and the fauteuil of Ab del Kader, the armchair, you understand, of the great Arab prince who led the last revolt against France. It was not all homesickness, either. Among the men of all nationalities serving in the Foreign Legion, are many adventurous Americans, and a young Chicagoan, remarking my name, apprised me of the fact that perhaps I was heir to a fortune in Chicago. I came,” continued Leadbury, looking down toward his lap, where Clarissa saw he held a clipping from a newspaper, “and took apartments at the Bennington Hotel, where, when seen by the representatives of the ‘Commercial Advertiser,’ the following interesting facts were brought out in the interview: ‘William Leadbury’ – your humble servant – ” he interjected, “‘is the only son of the late Charles Leadbury, only brother of the late millionaire iron merchant, James Leadbury. Upon his death, James Leadbury left his entire property’ – but,” said Leadbury, looking up, “I have previously covered that point.”

“But tell us of your weapons,” interposed Miss Bording.

“Oh, yes, that seems to interest you,” and deftly sliding the clipping along in his fingers, he resumed: “‘The collection of weapons is one of the most interesting and remarkable collections in the United States, for, though not large, its owner can say, with pardonable pride, “every bit of steel in that collection has been used by me in my trade.”’”

“Ah, how proud you must be,” mused Miss Bording. “I read something like that in the papers, myself. Just to think of it! Every bit of steel in that collection has been used by you in your trade. What a strange affectation you military men have in calling your profession a trade! But, Captain Leadbury, tell me of your cousin, who disappeared two days after your arrival, and why you shaved your moustache which the papers described you as having.”

“A moustache is a bother,” said Leadbury. “As to my cousin, why, overcome by disappointment, he took to drink. He disappeared from his lodgings on Rush Street two days after my arrival, at the close of a twenty-four hours’ debauch. It was found he had shipped as a sailor on the Ingar Gulbrandson, lumber hooker for Marinette, and the Gulbrandson was found sunk up by Death’s Door, at the entrance to Green Bay, her masts sticking above water. Her crew had utterly disappeared. That was three months ago and neither hide nor hair of any of them has been seen since. Poor Anderson Walkley is dead! Were he alive, I would be glad to assist him. But he was a rover, never long in one place – a few months here, a few months there – and now he is at rest and I believe he is glad, I believe he is glad.”

The second course consisted of turkey, and Clarissa was astounded, as she deposited the dishes of the course, to see Asbury Fuller swiftly enter the door upon all-fours and with extreme celerity and cat-like lightness, flit across the room and esconce himself behind a huge armchair upholstered in velvet, and her astonishment increased and was tinged with no small degree of terror, as she observed the chair, noiselessly and almost imperceptibly, progress across the floor, propelled by some hidden force, until it reached a station behind the master of the house. Captain Leadbury began to carve the turkey and Clarissa was astonished more than ever to hear, in the Captain’s voice, though she was sure his lips were shut,

“Would you like a close shave, Miss Bording?”

The sound of the carving-knife dropping upon the platter as Leadbury started in some sudden spasm of pain, was drowned by the silvery laughter of Miss Bording, saying,

“Oh, don’t make fun of the profession of your poor cousin, Captain,” and the look of disquiet upon Leadbury’s face was quickly relieved and he joined heartily and almost boisterously in the merriment. A moment later, Clarissa was alarmed to find him bending upon herself a look in which suspicion, distrust, fear, and hatred all were blended.

Judge Volney Bording, ornament to the legal profession, was a hearty eater, and it was not long before he sent his plate for a second helping, and again Clarissa heard from the closed lips of Leadbury, in a voice that seemed to float up from his very feet:

“Next. Next. You’re next, Miss Bording. What’ll it be?”

Leadbury half rose, looking toward Clarissa with a glance of most violent anger, but whatever he would have said, was again interrupted by the silvery laugh of Miss Bording, and again Leadbury joined heartily, almost boisterously. But though he regained his self-possession and his brow became serene, Clarissa saw in his eye that which told he had a reckoning in store for her when once the guests were out of the house, but that in the meantime he would dissemble the various unpleasant emotions with which his mind was filled. The rest of the dinner passed without untoward event. The huge armchair by imperceptible degrees retired to its former position, and as Clarissa set down the dessert, she saw Asbury Fuller, with a grace unusual and not to be expected of one in such a posture, proceeding quickly and silently out of the room upon all-fours.

Mindful of her instructions, Clarissa accompanied the party when, rising from the table, they withdrew to the drawing-room. It was manifest that her presence caused Leadbury some uneasiness and he looked now at her and now at his guests with an inquiring and perturbed countenance, but in the calm faces of the judge and his daughter he could detect nothing to indicate that they thought the presence of the page at all strange, and little by little he recovered his good spirits and related some interesting anecdotes of a bulldog he once owned and of a colored person who stole a guitar from him. But though Miss Bording gave a courteous and interested attention and laughed at the anecdotes of the dog, she irked at the necessity of silence, which the garrulity of her host placed her under and was desirous of having the conversation become general and of a more entertaining, elevated and instructive character. As the narration of the episode of the colored person came to an end, she hastily exclaimed:

“Captain, you promised to show us your collection. It is nearing the time when we must go home, for father has had to-day to listen to an unparalleled amount of gabble and is very tired.”

“I will show the collection to you with great pleasure,” said Leadbury, and at this juncture, Clarissa, remembering her instructions, said:

“The collection of your former weapons, sir, has been placed in the first room at the left at the head of the stairs. The paperhangers and decorators have been busy.” And then she proceeded to lead the way into the hall and up the broad funereal staircase that led above. Dimly burned the lights in the hall. Dimly burned a gas jet in the room whose door stood open at the left.

“Oh, yes,” said Leadbury, gaily, responding to a remark of Miss Bording, as they entered the room and saw the uncertain shape of a large chair vaguely looming in the gloom; “I secured the fauteuil of Ab del Kader after we had stormed the last stronghold of that unfortunate prince. But interesting as this relic is, I put no value upon it in comparison with the weapons, for every bit of steel in the collection has been used by me in my trade.”

As he said these words, he turned on the gas at full head and the light blazed forth to be shot back from an array of polished steel festooned upon the wall, a glittering rosette, but not of sabres and scimetars, yataghans, rapiers, broadswords, dirks and poniards, pistols, fusils and rifles. No! Razors and scissors! Before this array sat a great red velvet barber’s chair, and near them on the wall was a board, bearing little brass hooks, upon each of which hung a green ticket.

In the unexpected revelation that had followed the flare of light, all eyes were turned upon William Leadbury, swaying back and forward with one hand clinging to the big chair, as if ready to swoon. A sickly, cringing grin played over his face, suddenly come all a-yellow, and his long tongue was flickering over his pale lips. But all at once his muscles sprang tense and a malignant anger tightened his quivering features and turning upon Clarissa, he hissed:

“You did this. You exposed me, you exposed me,” and he was about to leap at the terrified girl, when a ringing voice cried, “Stop!” and there was Asbury Fuller standing in the doorway with the broad red cordon of a Commander of the Legion of Honor across his breast and a glittering rapier in his hand. Clarissa could have fallen at his feet, he looked so handsome and grand, and she could have scratched out the eyes of Eulalia Bording, whose gaze betrayed an admiration equal to her own. Asbury Fuller, yet not wearing quite his wonted appearance, for the luxuriant locks of auburn had gone and his head was covered with a short, though thick crop of chestnut.

“You exposed yourself. Harmless would all this have been, powerless to hurt you, if you had kept your self-possession and turned it off as a joke – your own. But your abashed mien, your complete confusion, your utter disconcertment, betrayed you, even if you had no longer left any question by crying out that you have been exposed. Yes, exposed, Anderson Walkley, by the sudden confronting of you with the implements of your craft, the weapons you had used in your trade, and the belief thus aroused in your guilty mind that your secret was known, that your identity had been detected.”

“Asbury Fuller, what business is it of yours?” and Leadbury snatched up a large pair of hair clippers and waved them with a menacing gesture.

“Everyman to the weapons of his trade,” exclaimed Asbury Fuller, and the hair clippers seemed suddenly enveloped in a mass of white flame, as the rapier played about them. Cling, clang, across the room flew the clippers, twisted from Leadbury’s hand as neatly as you please.

“Asbury Fuller?” cried the Commander of the Legion of Honor. “Asbury Fuller?” and he deftly fastened beneath his nose an elegant false moustache with waxed ends.

With his hands before his eyes as if to forefend his view from some dreadful apparition, the man in the corner sank upon his knees, gibbering, “William Leadbury, come back from the dead!”

“William Leadbury, alive and well, here to claim his own from you, Anderson Walkley, outlaw and felon. Your plans were well-laid, but I am not dead. You signed the papers of the Ingar Gulbrandson in your proper person. Then as she was about to sail, I was brought aboard ostensibly drunk, but really drugged, under the name of Anderson Walkley. The Gulbrandson was found sunk. Her crew of four had utterly disappeared. Dead, of course. The records gave their names. I had become Anderson Walkley and was dead. You had seized my property and my identity. I had been in Chicago but two days and no one had become familiar enough with my appearance to make any question when you with your clean-shaven face came down on the morning after my kidnaping and told the people at the hotel that you were William Leadbury and had shaved your moustache off over night. Whatever difference they might have thought they saw, was easily explained by the change occasioned by the removal of your moustache. Had your minions been as intelligent as they were villainous, your scheme would have succeeded. It was necessary to drug me anew on the voyage, as the effects were wearing off. They did not drug me enough, and when they scuttled the old hulk and rowed ashore to flee with their blood money, the cold water rising in the sinking vessel awoke me, brought me to full consciousness, and I easily got ashore on some planking. I saw at once what the plot had been. I realized I had a desperate man to deal with. I had no money and it would take me some time to get from northern Wisconsin to Chicago. In the meantime, every one would have come to believe you William Leadbury, and who would believe me, the ragged tramp, suddenly appearing from nowhere and claiming to be the heir? You would be coached by your lawyers, have time to concoct lies, to manufacture conditions that would color your claim, and in court you would be self-possessed and on your guard. Therefore I felt that I must await the psychological moment when you could be taken off your guard, when, surprised and in confusion, you would betray yourself. I secured employment as your butler, the psychological moment came, and you stand, self-convicted, thief and would-be murderer.”

“Send for the police at once,” said Judge Bording.

“No,” said the late captain in the Foreign Legion. “He may reform. I wish him to have another chance. That he may have the wherewithal to earn a livelihood, I present him with the contents of this room, the means of his undoing. In my uncle’s library are many excellent theological works of a controversial nature, and these, too, I present to him, as a means of turning his thoughts toward better things. I will not send for the police. I will send for a dray. Judge Bording, by the recent concatenation of events, I am become the host. Let us leave Walkley here to pack his effects, and return to the drawing-room.”

Clarissa preceded the others as they slowly descended, with all her ears open to hear whatsoever William Leadbury might say to Eulalia Bording, and it was so that she noted a strange little creaking above them, and looking up, saw poised upon the edge of the balustrade in the upper hall, impending over the head of William Leadbury and ready to fall, the great barber chair! With a swift leap, she pushed him to the wall, causing him to just escape the chair as it fell with a dreadful crash. But she herself was not so fortunate, for with a wicked tunk the cushioned back of the chair struck her a glancing blow that felled her senseless upon the stairs.

Judge Bording flew after the dastardly barber, who swifter still, was down the backstairs and out of the house into the darkness before the Judge could lay hands upon him.

The judge, his daughter, and William Leadbury, bent over the unconscious form of the page.

“He saved your life,” said the judge. “The wood and iron part would have hit your head.”

“His breath is knocked out of him,” said Miss Bording.

“He saved my life. I cannot understand his strange devotion. I cannot understand it,” said William Leadbury, the while opening the page’s vest, tearing away his collar, and straining at his shirt, that the stunned lungs might have play and get to work again. The stiffly starched shirt resisted his efforts and he reached in under it to detach the fastenings of the studs that held the bosom together. Back came his hand as if it had encountered a serpent beneath that shirt front.

“I begin to understand,” he exclaimed, and bending an enigmatical look upon the startled judge and his daughter, he picked the page up in his arms with the utmost tenderness, and bore him away.

The pains in Clarissa’s body had left her. Indeed, they had all but gone when on Sunday morning, after a night which had been one of formless dreams where she had not known whether she slept or waked or where she was, a frowsy maid had called her from the bed where she lay beneath a blanket, fully dressed, and told her it was time she was getting back to the city. Not a sign of William Leadbury as she passed out of the great silent house. Not a word from him, no inquiry for the welfare of the little page who had come so nigh dying for him. Clarissa was too proud to do or say anything to let the frowsy maid guess that she wondered at this or cared aught for the ungrateful captain. She steeled her heart against him, but though as the days went by she succeeded in ceasing to care for one who was so unworthy of her regard, she could not stifle the poignant regret that he was thus unworthy.

It had come Friday evening, almost closing time in the great store. Slowly and heavily, Clarissa was setting her counter in order, preparing to go to her lodgings and nurse her sick heart until slumber should give respite from her pain, when there came a messenger from the dress-making department asking her presence there.

“We’ve just got an order for a ready-made ball-dress for a lady that is unexpectedly going to the Charity Ball to-night,” said Mrs. McGuffin, head of the department. “The message says the lady is just your height and build and color – she noticed you sometime, it seems – and that we are to fit one of the dresses to you, making such alterations as would make it fit you, choosing one suitable to your complexion. When it’s done, to save time, you are to go right to the person who ordered it, without stopping to change your clothes. You can do that there. It will make her late to the ball, at best. A carriage and a person to conduct you will be waiting.”

It was a magnificent dress that was gradually built upon the figure of Clarissa, and when at last it was completed and she stood before the great pier glass flushed with the radiance of a pleasure she could not but feel despite her late sorrow and the fact she was but the lay figure for a more fortunate woman, one would have to search far to find a more beautiful creature.

“Whyee!” exclaimed Mrs. McGuffin. “Why, I had no idea you had such a figure. Why, I must have you in my department to show off dresses on. You will work at the cutlery counter not a day after to-morrow. But there, I am keeping you. The ball must almost have begun. Here’s a bag with your things in it. I was going to say, ‘your other things.’” And throwing a splendid cloak about the lovely shoulders of Miss Clarissa, Mrs. McGuffin turned her over to the messenger.

There was already somebody in the carriage into which Clarissa stepped, but as the curtain was drawn across the opposite window, she was unable to even conjecture the sex of the individual who was to be her conductor to her destination, and steeped in dreams which from pleasant ones quickly passed to bitter, she speedily forgot all about the person at her side. But presently she perceived their carriage had come into the midst of a squadron of other carriages charging down upon a brilliantly lighted entrance where men and women, brave in evening dress, were moving in.

“Why, we are going to the ball-room itself,” and as she said this and realized that here on the very threshold of the entrancing gayeties she was to put off her fine plumage and see the other woman pass out of the dressing-room into the delights beyond, while she crept away in her own simple garb amid the questioning, amused, and contemptuous stares of the haughty dames who had witnessed the exchange, she broke into a piteous sob.

“Why, of course to the ball-room, my darling,” breathed a voice, which low though it was, thrilled her more than the voice of an archangel, and she felt herself strained to a man’s heart and her bare shoulders, which peeped from the cloak at the thrust of a pair of strong arms beneath it, came in contact with the cool, smooth surface of the bosom of a dress shirt. “Don’t you remember that I engaged the second two-step at the Charity Ball?”

Clarissa, almost swooning with joy as she reclined palpitating upon the manly breast of Captain William Leadbury, said never a word, for the power of speech was not in her; the power of song, of uttering peans of joy, perhaps, but not the power of speech.

“Have I assumed too much,” said Leadbury, gravely, relaxing somewhat the tightness of his embrace. “Have I, arguing from the fact that you both served me in the crisis of my career and saved my life, assumed too much in believing you love me? If so, I beg your pardon for arranging this surprise. I will release you. I – ”