The Gray Mask

Garth slipped along the hall, clinging to the shadow of a tapestry. He knew from the black patch at the end of the corridor that the door was wide. In that dark patch he suddenly saw the silhouette of a man. The hands were stretched out as if to meet the hands which Nora appeared to offer for the bomb. But the man carried no bomb. In the dim light Garth thought at first that he carried nothing. Then he understood his mistake, and he cried out, drawing his own revolver, darting forward:

"Nora! Look out!"

He had seen that the man's fingers fondled an automatic, raised it, aimed it at the confident, expectant figure.

"For police spies!" the man called.

Before Garth could reach the door the harsh, tearing report of the automatic came, and was repeated twice. There was no question. At that short range each sound from the stubby cylinder was the voice of death. Garth saw the form that he loved sway, clutch at nothing, without a cry crumple and lie motionless across the threshold.

Before the other could turn his gun on him the detective had grappled with the murderer. He bore him to the porch floor and struck him across the temple with the butt of his revolver. Garth arose then, and, scarcely aware of what he did, placed his police whistle at his lips, and blew shrilly through the night.

While he waited for the help that he knew would be too late for Nora or for him, he gazed at the silent, slender form. The veil alone moved, trembling from time to time in the wind which came gently from the woods. That reached the candle also, which flickered, making the light ghastly, unbearable.

Garth shook. He covered his face with his hands, for the dim, unreal illumination had shown him that the figure was no longer completely white. The reason for its stillness exposed a scarlet testimony.

That which Garth had feared but had forgotten in the rush of his more personal terror rent the silence with a chaotic turmoil. A terrific detonation was followed by the shattering of glass. Shouts and curses arose from the house. Someone hurried across the drive and up the steps. Garth was aware of a heavy hand on his shoulder. He glanced up at the inspector's startled face. Suddenly the detective realized that the old man had no misgivings for Nora. At this moment, with the white form at his feet, he must picture her quietly, safely at home. Garth moved away, but the inspector grasped him again.

"What's the matter with you? You've let them use their infernal bomb. You're responsible for Alsop and his people."

"They're safe," Garth answered.

The candle still burned. In its wan and flickering light he indicated the still, white figure.

"The veiled woman!" the inspector said. "Dead!"

He stooped swiftly.

"You've done well here anyway, Garth. Let's have a look."

Frantically Garth snatched at his arm and tried to pull him away.

"Don't look! Not you!"

The inspector glanced up amazed. Garth knelt with a gesture of despair.

"What's that?" the inspector whispered, and his voice was suddenly afraid. Garth followed his glance. From the black shadows of the woods a white figure glided. Its face was hidden beneath a white cloth.

Garth's shaking fingers reached out and lifted the stained veil from the silent form. He drew back. His cry was like a sob. For a long time the inspector and Garth stared at the features, apprehensive even in death, of the secretary, Marvin.

Nora, who ran up the steps crying out her fear for those in the house, gave Garth no opportunity for questions or for the expression of that relief which shook him with a power nearly physical. Even the inspector, after his first shock of surprise, had no time to demand the particulars of her share in the night's work.

The four prisoners were brought to the hall. They knew they must stand trial for Brown's death as well as for this attempt. The one who had shot Marvin and who had gone down before Garth's attack was still dazed. Garth identified him as the man who had disguised himself as an Oriental in the shop. The sharp face of the Levantine twitched with hatred and fright. The other two, although he knew the type, the detective had never seen before. They boasted openly that the shop had been only an outpost for this affair. Through a dictaphone and the telegraphy of the pipe, instructions had been sent to and from their headquarters. To-night, they declared, the shop had ceased to be useful. No trail would lead from it to the central force that worked in New York.

As they drove home in a taxicab the inspector bitterly lamented the fact to Garth and Nora.

"We'll get to it later," Garth said.

"If only things hadn't gone wrong at the last minute!" Nora cried. "If only I might have taken the bomb and talked to the man who brought it! Even with the others! For it's clear those fellows will give nothing away now. We can blame poor Marvin that I never had a chance."

"What do you mean?" Garth asked. "You haven't told us what happened when I left you by the west door."

"You remember we had got Marvin on a sofa in the hall," Nora answered. "He must have seen you close the door when you went in the library to warn Alsop and the others, because from my hiding place I saw him get up, and, with no appearance of an injured man, sneak along the wall to the stairs. I followed him up, and, Jim, I found him on the floor in his room again, but this time he didn't hear me, and he was talking. Then I saw his whole game. There was a dictaphone hidden beneath the bed with which he had probably communicated with those outside the house for days. We had stopped him the first time when he had just learned of my intended masquerade. Don't you see? He had to tell them that. We caught him, and he scratched himself to throw us off the track with the details of another case like Brown's. Now I heard him tell everything – just what I was to do, and that Alsop and the others were in the library. I ran downstairs, but when I reached the lower hall I saw him coming after me. So I said I had changed my mind, that I was afraid, that I wanted only to leave the house. I went to the kitchen and slipped out, intending to get to you, Jim, with my information. But I knew these men were in the grounds, and I had to go carefully. When I crept up to the library window I thought I saw you. Then the telephone bell rang, and I couldn't make you hear."

"Of course," Garth said, "Marvin, coming down, had seen that the library door was open, and that there was no longer a light there. It was too late to use the dictaphone again, but he knew he must change his instructions and tell them not to waste the bomb in the library. So he threw on his disguise and rushed to the west door as he had originally planned, in too much of a hurry to dream such a mistake could happen. I suppose he got past while I was at the window."

"Marvin," the inspector mused, "was just the man for them. Probably full of wild-eyed ideas, and feeling a divine call to help smash Alsop. I hold no brief for that millionaire. I understand he had to work, like most everybody else, for what he's got, and maybe that's the reason he can't understand these new social notions. And far be it from me to say anything about Marvin's grand thoughts, although it may be his share in this affair was made worth his while. My part in life is to see that the law's kept, and I guess without the law there wouldn't be anything much worth while for anybody to fight over. These rough boys had certainly fixed Marvin to help them break the law into little bits of pieces. So maybe he deserves just what he got. Alsop tells me he didn't trust any of his employés with his schemes for putting a stop to socialistic movements in his concerns, and that's where the big hitch came. Marvin, whenever he knew there were private papers in the house, was always searching. He had a key to Alsop's door. He used that old ghost story, and dressed himself up in case any of the servants should see him. Their fright would give him time to cover himself. When Alsop did catch him he came across with the terrible experiences he had had himself with the veiled woman. Ought to have got on to him before."

"It wasn't easy to suspect him," Nora said, "particularly after we had seen the housekeeper's curiosity, and had found him, apparently unconscious, in his room. He was really too frightened at the flat, and we might have suspected when Jim heard those directions at the shop. Such luck as that doesn't often happen. It's easily explained now. The time it took you, Jim, to go to the hospital and to visit the shop was just the time he needed to return to Wall Street with Mr. Alsop, make some excuse, and get into the shop by a back way to receive his new orders. It was simple enough."

The inspector grunted.

"If we saw all the simple things there'd be no need for detectives."

He commenced to cough with a persistent vehemence.

"Take me home, Nora," he groaned. "Back to the fireplace and the flannel for the old man. You're always right, Nora. Isn't she always right, Garth?"

But Garth, recalling that moment before Nora and he had entered the Alsop house, shook his head. Nora must have seen and understood, for she laughed lightly.

"Maybe she is," Garth said thoughtfully, "but sometimes I wonder."

CHAPTER XVI

A NOTE FROM THE DEAD

Alsop was around the next day, loud with generosity, and anxious to give Garth the only form of reward he could understand – large sums of money. Garth, however, didn't care for the man. He preferred to keep their relations on a purely business basis.

"I only did my duty, Mr. Alsop," he said. "Some day I may break away from here and start an office of my own. In that case, if you cared to mention me to your friends I would feel I had been well repaid."

"Maybe you were a little too proud, Garth," the inspector grunted afterwards.

Nora, however, when she heard of it, said simply, "Jim, you did perfectly right. If you had taken money from that man he'd have believed he owned you body and soul."

"When you two combine against me I've nothing more to say," the inspector grinned.

Garth knew that the old man watched, with something like anxiety himself, the progress of his and Nora's friendship. The detective had long since made up his mind not to speak to the inspector on that subject until he had received some definite encouragement from the girl. The inspector himself brought up the matter about this time. Probably the impulse came from the trial of Slim and George which began and threatened, in spite of its clear evidence, to drag through several weeks.

It would be necessary, of course, for both Garth and Nora to testify sooner or later. So they rehearsed all the incidents of that night when Garth had worn the grey mask. After this exercise one evening the inspector followed Garth to the hall.

"I don't want my girl to become morbid, Jim."

Garth nodded.

"You mean Kridel?"

"You've said it," the big man answered with an attempt at a whisper. "I've thought that maybe you and Nora – See here, Jim, I wouldn't mind a bit. You see Nora's mother was Italian. I don't altogether understand her, but I know it isn't natural for her to mourn for this fellow forever, and I mean, if you and she ever hit it off, I won't forbid the banns. Only maybe you'll let me live with you now and then. You don't know what that girl means to me, Jim; but I want to make her happy, and I believe you're the one, for a blind, deaf, and dumb man could see you are in love with her."

Garth laughed, not altogether comfortably.

"It's up to Nora, chief, but I don't see how I can ever get along without her."

It wasn't often that the inspector had used Garth's first name. It seemed to bring the detective closer to his goal. During the daytime at headquarters, however, their relations were scarcely altered. Garth often suffered from lack of work there, probably because the inspector didn't care to send him out on unimportant matters that the least imaginative of his men could handle. When he had to assign him to an unpromising task, either to spare him too prolonged idleness, or because no other detective was available, the big man always assumed an apologetic air. It was so when he started him on the mystifying Taylor case.

"Nothing doing these days," he grumbled. "City must be turning pure, Garth. Anyway I got to give it something for its money. Run up and take a look at this suicide. Seems Taylor was a recluse. Alone with his mother-in-law and the servants. Wife's in California. Suppose you had other plans, but I don't see why the city should pay you to talk moonshine to Nora."

He grinned understandingly, encouragingly.

So the detective nodded, strolled up town, and with a bored air stepped into that curious house.

Garth for a long time stared at the pallid features of the dead man. Abruptly his interest quickened. Between the thumb and forefinger of the clenched left hand, which drooped from the side of the bed, a speck of white protruded. The detective stooped swiftly. The hand, he saw, secreted a rough sheet of paper. He drew it free, smoothed the crumpled surface, and with a vast incredulity read the line scrawled across it in pencil.

"Don't think it's suicide. I've been killed – "

There was no more. Until that moment Garth had conceived no doubt of the man's self-destruction. The bullet had entered the left side of the breast. The revolver lay on the counterpane within an inch of the right hand whose fingers remained crooked. The position of the body did not suggest the reception or the resistance of an attack. In the room no souvenir of struggle survived.

Here was this amazing message from the dead man. Its wording, indeed, offered the irrational impression of having been written after death.

Garth thought rapidly. Granted its accusation, the note must have been scrawled between the firing of the shot and the moment of Taylor's death. But a murderer, arranging this appearance of suicide, would have given Taylor no opportunity. On the other hand, the theory that Taylor had written the note before killing himself, perhaps to direct suspicion to some innocent person, broke down before the brief wording, its patent incompleteness. One possibility remained. Garth could imagine no motive, but another person might have prepared the strange message.

A number of books littered the reading table at the side of the bed. Garth examined them eagerly. He found a blank page torn from one – the sheet which Taylor had clenched in his fingers. In another was Taylor's signature. When Garth had compared it with the message on the crumpled paper no doubt remained. Taylor himself had written those obscure and provocative words.

Garth found the pencil on the floor beneath the bed, as if it had rolled there when Taylor had dropped it. The place at the moment had nothing else to offer him beyond an abnormally large array in the bath room of bottles containing for the most part stimulants and sedatives. They merely strengthened, by suggesting that Taylor was an invalid, his appearance of suicide.

The coroner and Taylor's doctor, who came together, only added to the puzzle. The coroner declared unreservedly for suicide, and, in reply to Garth's anxious question, swore that no measurable time could have elapsed between the firing of the shot, which had pierced the heart, and Taylor's death. The physician was satisfied even after Garth confidentially had shown him the note.

"Mr. Taylor," he said then, "understood he had an incurable trouble. Every one knows that his wife, whom he worshipped, had practically left him by going to California for so long. It may have appealed to a grim sense of humour, not unusual with chronic invalids, to puzzle us with that absurdly worded note. I might tell you, too, that Mr. Taylor for some time had had a fear that he might go out of his head. Perpetually he questioned me about insanity, and wanted to know what treatment I would give him if his mind went."

Garth, however, when they had left, went to the library on the lower floor and telephoned headquarters. The inspector agreed that the case held a mystery which must be solved.

Garth walked to the embrasure of a high colonial window. The early winter night was already thick above the world. The huge room was too dark. There was a morbid feeling about the house. He had noticed that coming in, for the place had offered him one of those contrasts familiar to New York, where some antique street cars still rattle over sonorous subways. The Taylor home was a large, colonial frame farmhouse which had eventually been crowded by the modern and extravagant dwellings of a fashionable up-town district. In spite of its generous furnishings it projected even to this successful and materialistic detective a heavy air of the past, melancholy and disturbing.

Garth sighed. He had made up his mind. The best way to get at the truth was to accept for the present the dead man's message at its face value. He turned on the single light above the desk in the center of the room. He arranged a chair so that the glare would search its occupant. He sat opposite in the shadow and pressed a button. Almost at once he heard dragging footsteps in the hall, then a timid rapping at the door. The door opened slowly. A bent old man in livery shuffled across the threshold. It was the servant who had admitted Garth on his arrival a few minutes earlier. The detective indicated the chair on which the light fell.

"Sit down there, please."

As the old man obeyed his limbs shook with a sort of palsy. From his sallow and sunken face, restless, bloodshot eyes gleamed.

"I understand from the doctor," Garth began, "that you are McDonald, Mr. Taylor's trusted servant. The coroner says death occurred last night or early this morning. Tell me why you didn't find the body until nearly four o'clock this afternoon."

The old servant bent forward, placing the palm of his hand against his ear.

"Eh? Eh?"

On a higher key Garth repeated his question. McDonald answered in tremulous tones, clearing his throat from time to time as he explained that because of his master's bad health his orders had been never to disturb him except in cases of emergency. He drew a telegram from his pocket, passing it across to Garth.

"Mrs. Taylor is on her way home from California. I don't think Mr. Taylor knew just what connection she would make at Chicago, but he expected her to-morrow. That telegram sent from the train at Albany says she will be in this afternoon on the Western express. I thought it my duty to disturb him and get him up to welcome her, for he was very fond of her, sir. It will be cruel hard for her to find such a welcome as this."

"Then," Garth said, "you heard no shot?"

McDonald indicated his ears. Garth tugged at his watch chain.

"I must know," he said, "more about the conditions in this house last night."

He had spoken softly, musingly, yet the man, who had displayed the symptoms of a radical deafness, glanced up, asking without hesitation:

"You don't suspect anything out of the way, sir?"

Garth studied him narrowly.

"I want to know why the shot wasn't heard. You were here and Mr. Taylor's mother-in-law. Who else?"

The bony hand snapped to McDonald's ear again.

"Eh? Eh?"

"Speak up," Garth said impatiently. "Who was in the house besides yourself and Mrs. Taylor's mother?"

"The cook, Clara, sir – only the cook, Clara."

"You're sure?"

"Absolutely, sir. Who else should there be? We've been short of servants lately."

Garth dismissed him, instructing him to send Mrs. Taylor's mother. While he waited he stared from the window again, jerking savagely at his watch ribbon. From McDonald he had received a sharp impression of secretiveness. He hadn't cared to arouse the servant's suspicions. Through strategy he might more surely learn whatever the old man had held back.

Garth swung around with a quick intake of breath. He had heard no one enter. Through the obscurity, accented rather than diminished by the circular patch of light around the chair, he could see no one. Yet almost with a sense of vibration there had reached him through the heavy atmosphere of the old house an assurance that he was watched from the shadows. Impulsively he called out:

"Who's that?"

He stepped to the desk so that he could see the portion of the room beyond the light. It was empty. Garth, as such things go, had no nerves, but through his bewilderment a vague uneasiness crept.

He sprang back, turning. A clear, girlish laugh had rippled through the dusk. A high, girlish voice had challenged him.

"Here I am! Hide and seek with the policeman!"

He saw, half hidden in the folds of the curtain at the side of the embrasure in which he had stood, a figure, indistinct, clothed evidently in black. He took it for granted McDonald had sent the girl, Clara, first.

"I wanted Mr. Taylor's mother-in-law," he said. "No matter. Come here, and let me remind you that humor is out of place in a house of death."

Nevertheless the pleasant laugh rippled again. Slowly the dark figure detached itself from the shadows and settled in the chair while Garth watched, his uneasiness drifting into a blank unbelief. He couldn't accept the girlish laughter, the high, coquettish voice as having come from the grey, witch-like hag whom the light now exposed mercilessly.

"I am Mr. Taylor's mother-in-law," she said laughingly. "Everybody's surprised because I'm so youthful. My daughter's coming home this afternoon. That's why I'm so happy. They wouldn't let me go west with her, but when one's as advanced as I young people don't bother much."

Garth experienced a quick sympathy, yet behind the mental deterioration of extreme old age something useful might lurk.

"You slept in the front part of the house last night," he tried. "You probably heard the shot."

She shook her head. Her sunken mouth twitched in a smile a trifle sly.

"Once I drop off it would take a cannonade to wake me up."

For no apparent reason her youthful and atrocious laugh rippled again.

"Please," Garth said gently. "Mr. Taylor – "

"At my age," she broke in, "you say when a younger person dies: 'Ha, ha! I stole a march on that one.'"

She arose and with a curious absence of sound moved towards the door.

"I must go now. I am knitting a sweater. It was for my son-in-law. Now that he's put himself out of the way it might fit you."

The door closed behind her slender figure, and Garth tugged at his watch ribbon, wondering. Her actions had been too determined, her last words too studied. They had seemed to hold a threat. Was she as senile as she appeared, or had she tried to throw sand in his eyes?

He rang and sent for the cook Clara, unaware that a new and significant surprise awaited him in this dreary room. The girl, when she came, was young, and, in a coarse mold, pretty. When she sat down the light disclosed a tremulousness as pronounced as McDonald's. Before Garth could question her she burst out hysterically:

"I am going to leave this house. I was going to leave to-day, anyway."

Garth pitched his voice on a cold, even note.

"For the present you'll stay. Mr. Taylor didn't kill himself. He was murdered."

She covered her face with her hands, shivering.

"I didn't kill him. I didn't – "

"But," Garth snapped, "you know who did."

She shook her head with stubborn vehemence.

"I don't know anything," she answered, "except that I must leave this house."

"Why? Because you think the old lady's crazy, and she frightens you? I want to know about that."

As Clara lowered her hands the increased fear, rather than the tears in her eyes, held Garth. She shook her head again.

"I've only been here a week. I haven't seen much of her. She's only been to meals once or twice, and then she's scarcely said a word."

She glanced about the room with its small paned windows, its deep embrasures, its shallow ceiling.

"It isn't that," she whispered. "It's because the house is full of queer things. The servants all felt it. They talked about spirits and left. Five have come and gone in the week I've been here. But I've never been superstitious, and I didn't hear anything until last night."

Garth stirred.

"What did you hear? When was it?"

"About midnight," she answered tensely. "I had had company in the kitchen until then, so I was alone downstairs. McDonald had told me before he went to bed to make sure the last thing that the library fire was all right. I had looked at it and had put the fender up and was just leaving the room when I heard this sound – like moans, sir. I – I've never heard such suffering."