“Yes. It’s—it’s not the first time I have walked in my sleep. Last night—but she will tell you. It’s a painful subject to me. I will send for her to meet us in the library.”
“Where you believe this document to lie hidden?”
“Yes.”
“I am anxious to see the room. It is upstairs, I believe.”
“Yes.”
She had risen and was moving rapidly toward the door. Violet eagerly followed her.
Let us accompany her in her passage up the palatial stairway, and realize the effect upon her of a splendour whose future ownership possibly depended entirely upon herself.
It was a cold splendour. The merry voices of children were lacking in these great halls. Death past and to come infused the air with solemnity and mocked the pomp which yet appeared so much a part of the life here that one could hardly imagine the huge pillared spaces without it.
To Violet, more or less accustomed to fine interiors, the chief interest of this one lay in its connection with the mystery then occupying her. Stopping for a moment on the stair, she inquired of Mrs. Quintard if the loss she so deplored had been made known to the servants, and was much relieved to find that, with the exception of Mr. Delahunt, she had not spoken of it to any one but Clement. “And he will never mention it,” she declared, “not even to his wife. She has troubles enough to bear without knowing how near she stood to a fortune.”
“Oh, she will have her fortune!” Violet confidently replied. “In time, the lawyer who drew up the will will appear. But what you want is an immediate triumph over the cold Carlos, and I hope you may have it. Ah!”
This expletive was a sigh of sheer surprise.
Mrs. Quintard had unlocked the library door and Violet had been given her first glimpse of this, the finest room in New York.
She remembered now that she had often heard it so characterized, and, indeed, had it been taken bodily from some historic abbey of the old world, it could not have expressed more fully, in structure and ornamentation, the Gothic idea at its best. All that it lacked were the associations of vanished centuries, and these, in a measure, were supplied to the imagination by the studied mellowness of its tints and the suggestion of age in its carvings.
So much for the room itself, which was but a shell for holding the great treasure of valuable books ranged along every shelf. As Violet’s eyes sped over their ranks and thence to the five windows of deeply stained glass which faced her from the southern end, Mrs. Quintard indignantly exclaimed:
“And Carlos would turn this into a billiard room!”
“I do not like Carlos,” Violet returned hotly; then remembering herself, hastened to ask whether Mrs. Quintard was quite positive as to this room being the one in which she had hidden the precious document.
“You had better talk to Hetty,” said that lady, as a stout woman of most prepossessing appearance entered their presence and paused respectfully just inside the doorway. “Hetty, you will answer any questions this young lady may put. If anyone can help us, she can. But first, what news from the sick-room?”
“Nothing good. The doctor has just come for the third time today. Mrs. Brooks is crying and even the children are dumb with fear.”
“I will go. I must see the doctor. I must tell him to keep Clement alive by any means till—”
She did not wait to say what; but Violet understood and felt her heart grow heavy. Could it be that her employer considered this the gay and easy task she had asked for?
The next minute she was putting her first question:
“Hetty, what did you see in Mrs. Quintard’s action last night, to make you infer that she left the missing document in this room?”
The woman’s eyes, which had been respectfully studying her face, brightened with a relief which made her communicative. With the self-possession of a perfectly candid nature, she inquiringly remarked:
“My mistress has spoken of her infirmity?”
“Yes, and very frankly.”
“She walks in her sleep.”
“So she said.”
“And sometimes when others are asleep, and she is not.”
“She did not tell me that.”
“She is a very nervous woman and cannot always keep still when she rouses up at night. When I hear her rise, I get up too; but, never being quite sure whether she is sleeping or not, I am careful to follow her at a certain distance. Last night I was so far behind her that she had been to her brother’s room and left it before I saw her face.”
“Where is his room and where is hers?”
“Hers is in front on this same floor. Mr. Brooks’s is in the rear, and can be reached either by the hall or by passing through this room into a small one beyond, which we called his den.”
“Describe your encounter. Where were you standing when you saw her first?”
“In the den I have just mentioned. There was a bright light in the hall behind me and I could see her figure quite plainly. She was holding a folded paper clenched against her breast, and her movement was so mechanical that I was sure she was asleep. She was coming this way, and in another moment she entered this room. The door, which had been open, remained so, and in my anxiety I crept to it and looked in after her. There was no light burning here at that hour, but the moon was shining in in long rays of variously coloured light. If I had followed her—but I did not. I just stood and watched her long enough to see her pass through a blue ray, then through a green one, and then into, if not through, a red one. Expecting her to walk straight on, and having some fears of the staircase once she got into the hall, I hurried around to the door behind you there to head her off. But she had not yet left this room. I waited and waited and still she did not come. Fearing some accident, I finally ventured to approach the door and try it. It was locked. This alarmed me. She had never locked herself in anywhere before and I did not know what to make of it. Some persons would have shouted her name, but I had been warned against doing that, so I simply stood where I was, and eventually I heard the key turn in the lock and saw her come out. She was still walking stiffly, but her hands were empty and hanging at her side.”
“And then?”
“She went straight to her room and I after her. I was sure she was dead asleep by this time.”
“And she was?”
“Yes, Miss; but still full of what was on her mind. I know this because she stopped when she reached the bedside and began fumbling with the waist of her wrapper. It was for the key she was searching, and when her fingers encountered it hanging on the outside, she opened her wrapper and thrust it in on her bare skin.”
“You saw her do all that?”
“As plainly as I see you now. The light in her room was burning brightly.”
“And after that?”
“She got into bed. It was I who turned off the light.”
“Has that wrapper of hers a pocket?”
“No, Miss.”
“Nor her gown?”
“No, Miss.”
“So she could not have brought the paper into her room concealed about her person?”
“No, Miss; she left it here. It never passed beyond this doorway.”
“But might she not have carried it back to some place of concealment in the rooms she had left?”
The woman’s face changed and a slight flush showed through the natural brown of her cheeks.
“No,” she disclaimed; “she could not have done that. I was careful to lock the library door behind her before I ran out into the hall.”
“Then,” concluded Violet, with all the emphasis of conviction, “it is here, and nowhere else we must look for that document till we find it.”
Thus assured of the first step in the task she had before her, Miss Strange settled down to business.
The room, which towered to the height of two stories, was in the shape of a huge oval. This oval, separated into narrow divisions for the purpose of accommodating the shelves with which it was lined, narrowed as it rose above the great Gothic chimney-piece and the five gorgeous windows looking towards the south, till it met and was lost in the tracery of the ceiling, which was of that exquisite and soul-satisfying order which we see in the Henry VII chapel in Westminster Abbey. What break otherwise occurred in the circling round of books reaching thus thirty feet or more above the head was made by the two doors already spoken of and a narrow strip of wall at either end of the space occupied by the windows. No furniture was to be seen there except a couple of stalls taken from some old cathedral, which stood in the two bare places just mentioned.