"That is Julia. That is my sister. There. Before you. What you are looking at now. It's an enlargement taken only two or three years ago."
His voice was a whisper that barely reached her. "Then it was-- not she I married."
She hastily put the lamp down, at what it showed her now in the opposite direction. "Mr. Durand!" She half started toward him, as if to support him. "Can I get you something?"
He warded her off with a vague lift of his hand. He could hear his labored breathing sounding in his own ears like a bellows. He sought the chair he had risen from and by his own efforts dropped back into it, half turned to clutch at it and hold it steady as he did so.
He extended his hand and pointed a finger; the finger switching up and down while it waited for his lips to gain speech and catch up to it. "That is the woman whose photograph I received from here. But that is not the woman I was married to in New Orleans on last May the eighteenth."
Her own fright, which was ghastly on her face, was overruled, submerged, by the sight of his, which must have been that much greater to witness.
"I'll get you some wine," she offered hastily.
He raised his hand protestingly. Pulled at his collar to ease it.
"I'll get you some wine," she repeated helplessly.
"No, I'm all right. Don't take the time."
"Have you a photograph, any sort of likeness, of the other person you can show me ?" she asked after a moment.
"I have nothing, not a scrap of anything. She somehow even postponed having our bridal photograph taken. It occurs to me now that this oversight may have been intentional."
He smiled bleakly. "I can tell you what she was like, if that will do. I don't need a photograph to remember that. She was blonde. She was small. She was a good deal--I should say somewhat younger than your sister." He faltered to a stop, as if realizing the uselessness of proceeding.
"But Julia ?" she persisted, as though he were able to give her the answer. "Where's Julia, then? What's become of her? Where is she?" She planted her hands in flat despair on the tabletop, leaned over above them. "I saw her off on that boat."
"I met the boat. It came without her. She wasn't on it."
"You're sure, you're sure ?" Her eyes were bright with questioning tears.
"I watched them get off it. All left it. She wasn't among them. She wasn't on it."
She sank back into the chair beyond the table. She planed the edge of her hand flat across the top of her forehead, held her head thus for a moment or two. She did not weep, but her mouth winced flickeringly once or twice.
They both had to face the thing. It was out in the open between them now. Not to be avoided, not to be shunned. It had come to this. It was a question of which of them would first put it into words.
She did.
She let her hand drop. "She was done away with!" she whispered noarsely. "She met her end on that boat." She shuddered as though some insidious evil presence had come into the room, without need of door or window. "In some way, at someone's hands." She shuddered again, almost as if she had the ague. "Between the time I waved her goodbye that Wednesday afternoon--"
He let his head go down slowly in grim assent. Convinced now at last, understanding the whole thing finally for what it really was. He finished it for her.
"--and the time I stood by the gangplank to greet her that Friday afternoon."
28
He found Bertha Russell, coated, gloved and bonnetted, a spectral figure in the unrelieved black of full mourning, waiting for him in the open doorway of her house, early as it was, when he drove up shortly before nine the following morning to keep their appointment prearranged the night before. Whatever grief or bitterness had been hers during the unseen hours of the night just gone, she had mastered it now, there were only faint traces of it left behind. Her face was cold and stonelike in its fortitude; there were, however, bluish bruises under her eyes, and the transparent pallor of sleeplessness lay livid upon her features. It was the face of a woman bent upon retribution, who would show no more mercy than had been shown her, whatever the cost to herself.
"Have you breakfasted ?" she asked him when he had alighted and come forward to join her.
"I have no wish to," he answered shortly.
She closed the door forthwith and made her way beside him to the carriage; the impression conveyed was that she would have served him food if obliged to, but would have begrudged the time it would have cost them.
"Have you anyone in mind ?" he asked as they drove off. She had given an address, unfamiliar to him as all addresses up here were bound to be, on entering the carriage.
"I made inquiries after you left last evening. I have had someone recommended to me. He was well spoken of."
They were driven downtown into the bustling business section, the strange pair that they made, both so tight-lipped, both sitting so stark and straight, with not a word between them. The carriage stopped at last before a distinctly ugly-looking building, of beefy red brick, honeycombed with countless windows in four parallel rows, all with rounded tops. A veritable hive of small individual offices and businesses. Its appearance did not bespeak a very prosperous class of tenantry.
Durand paid off the carriage and accompanied her in. A rather chill musty air, far cooler than that outside on the street, immediately assailed them, as well as a considerable lessening of light, in no wise ameliorated by the bowls of gaslight bracketed at very sparing intervals along its corridors.
She consulted a populous directory-chart on the wall, but without tracing her finger down it, and had quitted it again before he could gain an inkling of whose name she sought.
They had to climb stairs, the building offered no lift. Following her up, first one flight, then a second, at last a third, he received the impression she would have climbed a mountain, Everest itself, to gain her objective. They were, she had told him, ancestrally of Holland-Dutch stock, she and her sister. He had never seen such silent stubbornness expressed in anyone as he did in every move of her hard-pressed laboring body on those stairs. She was more dreadfully inflexible in her stolid purpose than any passionate, quickgesturing Creole of the Southland could have been. He couldn't help but admire her; and, for a moment, he couldn't help but wonder what sort of wife the other one, Julia, would have made him.
At the third landing stage they turned off down endless reaches of arterial passageway, even more poorly lighted than below, and in sections that were not of one level, some higher than others, some lower.
"It doesn't indicate very much prosperity in business, would you say?" he remarked idly, without thinking.
"It bespeaks honesty," she answered shortly, "and that is what I seek."
He regretted having made the observation.
She stopped at the very last door of all but one.
On a shield of blown glass set into its upper-half was painted in rounded formation, to make two matching arcs:
Walter Downs
Private Investigator.
Durand knocked for the two of them, and a rich baritone, throbbing with its own depth, vibrated "Come in." He opened the doors stood aside for Bertha Russell, and then entered behind her.
The light was greater on the inside, by virtue of the street beyond. It was a single room, and even less affluent in aspect than the building that housed it had promised it would be. A large but extremely worn desk divided it nearly in two, with the occupant on one side of it, the visitors--all visitors--on the other. On this other side there were two chairs, no more, one of them a negligible canebottomed affair. On the first side there was a small iron safe, its corners rusted, its face left ajar. Not accidentally, for several ledgers which protruded, and an unsorted mass of papers which topped them, seemed to have rendered it incapable of closing.