This time I could not restrain myself.
“Did they drop her out of the window?” I inquired.
“O,” said she, “we are building an extension, and there is a ladder running up to the third floor, and it was by means of that they took her.”
“Indeed! she seems at least to have been a willing victim,” I remarked.
The woman clutched my arm with a grip like iron. “Don’t you believe it,” gasped she, stopping me in the street where we were. “I tell you if what I say is true, and these burglars or whatever they were, did carry her off, it was an agony to her, an awful, awful thing that will kill her if it has not done so already. You don’t know what you are talking about, you never saw her—”
“Was she pretty,” I asked, hurrying the woman along, for more than one passer-by had turned their heads to look at us. The question seemed in some way to give her a shock.
“Ah, I don’t know,” she muttered; “some might not think so, I always did; it depended upon the way you looked at her.”
For the first time I felt a thrill of anticipation shoot through my veins. Why, I could not say. Her tone was peculiar, and she spoke in a sort of brooding way as though she were weighing something in her own mind; but then her manner had been peculiar throughout. Whatever it was that aroused my suspicion, I determined henceforth to keep a very sharp eye upon her ladyship. Levelling a straight glance at her face, I asked her how it was that she came to be the one to inform the authorities of the girl’s disappearance.
“Doesn’t Mr. Blake know anything about it?”
The faintest shadow of a change came into her manner. “Yes,” said she, “I told him at breakfast time; but Mr. Blake doesn’t take much interest in his servants; he leaves all such matters to me.”
“Then he does not know you have come for the police?”
“No, sir, and O, if you would be so good as to keep it from him. It is not necessary he should know. I shall let you in the back way. Mr. Blake is a man who never meddles with anything, and—”
“What did Mr. Blake say this morning when you told him that this girl—By the way, what is her name?”
“Emily.”
“That this girl, Emily, had disappeared during the night?”
“Not much of anything, sir. He was sitting at the breakfast table reading his paper, he merely looked up, frowned a little in an absent-minded way, and told me I must manage the servants’ affairs without troubling him.”
“And you let it drop?”
“Yes sir; Mr. Blake is not a man to speak twice to.”
I could easily believe that from what I had seen of him in public, for though by no means a harsh looking man, he had a reserved air which if maintained in private must have made him very difficult of approach.
We were now within a half block or so of the old-fashioned mansion regarded by this scion of New York’s aristocracy as one of the most desirable residences in the city; so motioning to the man who had accompanied me to take his stand in a doorway near by and watch for the signal I would give him in case I wanted Mr. Gryce, I turned to the woman, who was now all in a flutter, and asked her how she proposed to get me into the house without the knowledge of Mr. Blake.
“O sir, all you have got to do is to follow me right up the back stairs; he won’t notice, or if he does will not ask any questions.”
And having by this time reached the basement door, she took out a key from her pocket and inserting it in the lock, at once admitted us into the dwelling.
CHAPTER II
A FEW POINTS
Mrs. Daniels, for that was her name, took me at once up stairs to the third story back room. As we passed through the halls, I could not but notice how rich, though sombre were the old fashioned walls and heavily frescoed ceilings, so different in style and coloring from what we see now-a-days in our secret penetrations into Fifth Avenue mansions. Many as are the wealthy houses I have been called upon to enter in the line of my profession, I had never crossed the threshold of such an one as this before, and impervious as I am to any foolish sentimentalities, I felt a certain degree of awe at the thought of invading with police investigation, this home of ancient Knicker-bocker respectability. But once in the room of the missing girl, every consideration fled save that of professional pride and curiosity. For almost at first blush, I saw that whether Mrs. Daniels was correct or not in her surmises as to the manner of the girl’s disappearance, the fact that she had disappeared was likely to prove an affair of some importance. For, let me state the facts in the order in which I noticed them. The first thing that impressed me was, that whatever Mrs. Daniels called her, this was no sewing girl’s room into which I now stepped. Plain as was the furniture in comparison with the elaborate richness of the walls and ceiling, there were still scattered through the room, which was large even for a thirty foot house, articles of sufficient elegance to make the supposition that it was the abode of an ordinary seamstress open to suspicion, if no more.
Mrs. Daniels, seeing my look of surprise, hastened to provide some explanation. “It is the room which has always been devoted to sewing,” said she; “and when Emily came, I thought it would be easier to put up a bed here than to send her upstairs. She was a very nice girl and disarranged nothing.”
I glanced around on the writing-case lying open on a small table in the centre of the room, on the vase half full of partly withered roses, on the mantel-piece, the Shakspeare, and Macaulay’s History lying on the stand at my right, thought my own thoughts, but said nothing.
“You found the door locked this morning?” asked I, after a moment’s scrutiny of the room in which three facts had become manifest: first, that the girl had not occupied the bed the night before; second, that there had been some sort of struggle or surprise,—one of the curtains being violently torn as if grasped by an agitated hand, to say nothing of a chair lying upset on the floor with one of its legs broken; third, that the departure, strange as it may seem, had been by the window.
“Yes,” returned she; “but there is a passageway leading from my room to hers and it was by that means we entered. There was a chair placed against the door on this side but we easily pushed it away.”
I stepped to the window and looked out. Ah, it would not be so very difficult for a man to gain the street from that spot in a dark night, for the roof of the newly-erected extension was almost on a level with the window.”
“Well,” said she anxiously, “couldn’t she have been got out that way?”
“More difficult things have been done,” said I; and was about to step out upon the roof when I bethought to inquire of Mrs. Daniels if any of the girl’s clothing was missing.
She immediately flew to the closets and thence to bureau drawers which she turned hastily over. “No, nothing is missing but a hat and cloak and—” She paused confusedly.
“And what?” I asked.
“Nothing,” returned she, hurriedly closing the bureau drawer; “only some little knick-knacks.”
“Knick-knacks!” quoth I. “If she stopped for knick-knacks, she couldn’t have gone in any very unwilling frame of mind.” And somewhat disgusted, I was about to throw up the whole affair and leave the room. But the indecision in Mrs. Daniels’ own face deterred me.