This considerably narrowed my field of inquiry, and made me immediately anxious to find that creaking board which promised to narrow it further yet.
Where should I seek it? In these rear halls, of course, but I hated to be caught pacing them at this hour. Nixon’s step had not roused it or I should have noticed it, for I was, in a way, listening for this very sound. It was not in the direct path then from the front door to the kitchen. Was it on one side or in the space about the dining-room door or where the transverse corridor met the main hall? All these floors were covered in the old-fashioned way with carpet, which would seem to show that no new boards had been laid and that the creaking one should still be here.
I ventured to go as far as the transverse hall,—I was at full liberty to enter the library. But no result followed this experiment; my footsteps had never fallen more noiselessly. Where could the board be? In aimless uncertainty I stepped into the corridor and instantly a creak woke under my foot. I had located the direction in which one of the so-called phantoms had fled. It was down this transverse hall.
Flushed with apparent success, I looked up at the walls on either side of me. They were gray with paint and presented one unbroken surface from base-board to ceiling, save where the two doorways opened, one into the library, the other into the dining-room. Had the flying presence escaped by either of these two rooms? I knew the dining-room well. I had had several opportunities for studying its details. I thought I knew the library; besides, Mr. Searles had been in the library when the shape advanced upon him from the hall,—a fact eliminating that room as a possible source of approach! What then was left? The recess which had once served as an old-time entrance. Ah, that gave promise of something. It projected directly toward where the adjacent walls had once held two doors, between which any sort of mischief might take place. Say that the Misses Quinlan had retained certain keys. What easier than for one of them to enter the outer door, strike a light, open the inner one and flash this light up through the house till steps or voices warned her of an aroused family, when she had only to reclose the inside door, put out the light and escape by the outer one.
But alas! at this point I remembered that this, as well as all other outside doors, had invariably been protected by bolt, and that these bolts had never been found disturbed. Veritably I was busying myself for nothing over this old vestibule. Yet before I left it I gave it another glance; satisfied myself that its walls were solid; in fact, built of brick like the house. This on two sides; the door occupied the third and showed the same unbroken coat of thick, old paint, its surface barely hidden by the cabinet placed at right angles to it. Enough of it, however, remained exposed to view to give me an opportunity of admiring its sturdy panels and its old-fashioned lock. The door was further secured by heavy pivoted bars extending from jamb to jamb. An egg-and-dart molding extended all around the casing, where the inner door had once hung. All solid, all very old-fashioned, but totally unsuggestive of any reasonable solution of the mystery I had vaguely hoped it to explain. Was I mistaken in my theory, and must I look elsewhere for what I still honestly expected to find? Undoubtedly; and with this decision I turned to leave the recess, when a sensation, of too peculiar a nature for me readily to understand it, caused me to stop short, and look down at my feet in an inquiring way and afterward to lift the rug on which I had been standing and take a look at the floor underneath. It was covered with carpet, like the rest of the hall, but this did not disguise the fact that it sloped a trifle toward the outside wall. Had not the idea been preposterous, I should have said that the weight of the cabinet had been too much for it, causing it to sag quite perceptibly at the base-board. But this seemed too improbable to consider. Old as the house was, it was not old enough for its beams to have rolled. Yet the floor was certainly uneven, and, what was stranger yet, had, in sagging, failed to carry the base-board with it. This I could see by peering around the side of the cabinet. Was it an important enough fact to call for explanation? Possibly not; yet when I had taken a short leap up and come down on what was certainly an unstable floor, I decided that I should never be satisfied till I had seen that cabinet removed and the floor under it rigidly examined.
Yet when I came to take a look at this projection from the library window and saw that this floor, like that of the many entrances, was only the height of one step from the ground, I felt the folly into which my inquiring spirit had led me, and would have dismissed the whole subject from my mind if my eyes had not detected at that moment on one of the tables an unusually thin paper-knife. This gave me an idea. Carrying it back with me into the recess, I got down on my knees, and first taking the precaution to toss a little stick-pin of mine under the cabinet to be reached after in case I was detected there by Nixon, I insinuated the cutter between the base-board and the floor and found that I could not only push it in an inch or more before striking the brick, but run it quite freely around from one corner of the recess to the other. This was surely surprising. The exterior of this vestibule must be considerably larger than the interior would denote. What occupied the space between? I went upstairs full of thought. Sometime, and that before long, I would have that cabinet removed.
CHAPTER XIII. A DISCOVERY
Mrs. Packard came in very soon after this. She was accompanied by two friends and I could hear them talking and laughing in her room upstairs all the afternoon. It gave me leisure, but leisure was not what I stood in need of, just now. I desired much more an opportunity to pursue my inquiries, for I knew why she had brought these friends home with her and lent herself to a merriment that was not natural to her. She wished to forestall thought; to keep down dread; to fill the house so full of cheer that no whisper should reach her from that spirit-world she had come to fear. She had seen—or believed that she had seen—a specter, and she had certainly heard a laugh that had come from no explicable human source.
The brightness of the sunshiny day aided her unconsciously in this endeavor. But I foresaw the moment when this brightness would disappear and her friends say good-by. Then the shadows must fall again more heavily than ever, because of their transient lifting. I almost wished she had indeed gone with her husband, and found myself wondering why he had not asked her to do so when he found what it was that depressed her. Perhaps he had, and it was she who had held back. She may have made up her mind to conquer this weakness, and to conquer it where it had originated and necessarily held the strongest sway. At all events, he was gone and she was here, and I had done nothing as yet to relieve that insidious dread with which she must anticipate a night in this house without his presence.
I wondered if it would be any relief to her to have Mr. Steele remain upon the premises. I had heard him come in about three o’clock and go into the study, and when the time came for her friends to take their leave, and their voices in merry chatter came up to my ear from the open boudoir door, I stole down to ask her if I could suggest it to him. But I was too late. Just as I reached the head of the stairs on the second floor he came out of the study below and passed, hat in hand, toward the front door.
“What a handsome man!” came in an audible whisper from one of the ladies, who now stood in the lower hall.