The Ransom E-Book

Grace Livingston Hill

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

It was their stepmother's death that brought Christobel Kershaw and her younger brother Randall home at last. But the large elaborate mansion chosen by their deceased stepmother didn't really seem like home. And their father seemed different too--so tired, so weighed down. Christobel wondered if there was any way they could help him. Could they start over again and become a close, loving family?

Leseprobe

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

About the Author

Chapter 1

New York

Christobel got out of the car and went into the house alone. She had asked them to let her out. She did not want to go to the station with her stepmother’s parents and was glad that her father had not insisted upon it.

It had been all she could stand to drive from the cemetery with them. It had made her feel like screaming. They were a pair of incompetent, weak-faced jellyfish, she reflected as she slowly mounted the marble steps to her father’s pretentious home. It was all wrong, people like that being mixed up in any relationship with her wonderful father! How did it ever happen that he had got into such a mess? She tried to think back to the days when her father first met her stepmother, but it was all very vague, an indefinite part of her childhood, although she distinctly remembered her own mother, and the soft feel of her kisses, and her arms hugging her close.

These aliens, her stepmother’s parents, angered her. What right had they to come into a family affair and demand to be thought about and planned for and taken to the station just when the dreadful, ostentatious funeral service was at an end?

Of course, they were Charmian’s parents. That had to be considered. And as one looked at their shallow old faces, one could see resemblances to the vivid beauty that had been Charmian. Charmian! What a name to give a woman who had to at least pretend to be a mother. Yet that old woman’s face made it perfectly natural that her daughter should have been named Charmian. Just a silly, weak woman with a pouting bottom lip and a slightly retreating chin; she had never grown up, though her body was withering like an old garden hose that was turning brown at the edges. Light hair, bleached to a yellow gray. Weak blue eyes that took in everything, even from behind her impressive black veil.

She didn’t miss a thing, even with tears in her eyes, thought Christobel grimly. I suppose she did feel bad, maybe. Charmian was her own daughter, after all. Still, she hadn’t seen much of her for several years. Charmian’s death couldn’t weigh on her very heavily. I don’t believe anything ever weighed on her but herself anyway. She looks selfish!

Would Charmian have looked like her mother if she had lived to be an old wrinkled woman like that? Christobel went on idly meditating as she hunted in her handbag for her key.

Charmian had been very vivid, gorgeous, even in her coffin. It had seemed as if she were playing a part. There was that affected smile she always wore when in company, her lips delicately pursed, her eyebrows placid, the long lashes lying on rose-petal cheeks. Christobel could vaguely understand why her father had married her.

Yet looking at her as she lay there, almost smothered in those heaps of flowers, Christobel had not been able to forget the look of those coral lips when they had told her that she was to go away to school; the lifting of those exquisite eyebrows in haughty disapproval at Randall, her young brother, when he made a noise; the unloving, prideful expression of the spoiled beauty who had become her mother in the early days of her sorrow over the loss of her own precious mother.

Seated in the car opposite this Charmian-mother’s mother, Christobel had found herself tracing the same selfish lines exposed in the old face that she had never been able to forget in the face of the daughter. Oh, it was plain to be seen why the dead woman had grown up silly and petted and spoiled.

And the old father. He had a weak chin and watery eyes that had looked around on the strange city streets with an indifferent air. If he had any character of his own, he had long ago taken the easiest way out and given it to his peevish wife. Yes, it was easy to see Charmian in the two of them.

Christobel drew a long breath and tried to wipe them out of her memory. They were not her grandparents, anyway. She had always been eager for grandparents and had looked forward with some interest and not a little curiosity to their coming to the funeral. But these shallow old people had merely explained her stepmother, set her into her true background, and confirmed the feeling that Christobel had always secretly had about her, even at the first when she was trying to obey her father’s earnest request to love this strange, too-giddy mother that he had found to fill the empty place.

Oh, well, that was that, she reflected as she fitted her key into the lock and opened the huge door with its bronze fittings.

Christobel didn’t like that door, nor the big stone lions that crouched on either side of the entrance. They seemed too ostentatious. She didn’t like the big house with its high ceilings and modernistic furniture. It had nothing of home about it. It had been her stepmother’s choice. Christobel wondered if her father helped pick it out, whether he liked it.

Every vacation when she had come home for a few days to receive a new outfit and be hustled off to some girls’ camp, or get ready to go back to school again, the house had seemed less and less like a home, and more like a furniture display in a huge department store. There wasn’t a thing in it that one could feel like loving and keeping.

Christobel closed the door softly, as one should a door whose mistress had gone out of it, never to return, and went and stood in the great doorway of the reception room on the right.

She stepped softly, within the heavy hangings of the silver cloth backed with velvety black and took in the whole barbaric effect of silver and black and startling splashes of scarlet that made the room look like some strange, alien, fantastic world. Weird lights in odd places; angular, pyramid-shaped mirrors like flashes of bright sabers; boxlike furniture that gave one the odd sense of being in a dream and finding the world upside down. It was not like a home at all, this great uncanny room.

This was the place that Charmian had created herself, a world of unrealities, and now she was gone out of it all! Here were the things she had brought together, but she had had to leave them all and lie in a bed of roses and be put away under the ground.

Where was she now? Was this all that was left of her?

Some of the teachers at school had openly said that there was no other life than this. But Christobel had never been willing to accept that theory. She had always thought of her own mother as being somewhere, in some definite place, watching her perhaps, and surely waiting for her to come someday when she was an old woman.

But now, this other woman, who was not in any sense a mother, who had insisted upon being called Charmian by the children of her husband, who had packed them off to a school in almost babyhood and made a strange alien world of home, where was she now that she was gone out of life?

Was there anyone for her to be with? Or was she all alone? Did she have to wait somewhere for that unpleasant old weak-chinned father and mother whom she had never noticed much on earth? Oh, life was an odd tangle! A problem that could never be solved till one went out of it.

Of course, there were people who could throw all that off and just not think about it. Eat, drink, and be merry. Most of her classmates were like that. They laughed at her when she asked serious questions. They said, “Why worry? You can only be alive once!” and danced merrily on.

But Christobel had never been able to do that. She had made merry with the rest, had been fairly feverish in trying to have every minute filled with something bright and cheerful so that she would not have time to think. But underneath there had always been that question, that wonder, that hope that would not be stilled; yes, and that fear, too, that this life was not all that she ought to be doing about it, though she had not an idea in the world what it was that she might do. Nobody else seemed to be worrying about it. Not even death seemed to stir many of them seriously. They hurried to get the funeral over with and get back to life, merry, bright, breath-taking life! Charmian had been that way, too. She had hated funerals. She had hated even the very mention of funerals.

Though Christobel had spent very little time with her stepmother in the ten or eleven years Charmian had been married to her father, she knew a great deal about Charmian’s likes and dislikes, her fears and contempts. Every contact with the handsome stepmother seemed graven deep into her sensitive heart. For instance, she would never forget the bored drawl of Charmian’s voice the night she crept from her lonely little bed, put to sleep unkissed. Christobel had come weeping to find her father, who had always remembered the good-nights before, only to discover he and Charmian in the midst of the discussion about sending Christobel and her brother Randall off to school.

“But they are only babies yet,” she heard her father say in a shocked voice.

“That’s it,” Charmian had drawled insolently. “I can’t be bored with babies, certainly not some other woman’s babies. That wasn’t what I married you for.”

In the midst of the awful silence that had followed those words, Christobel had crept trembling to her little bed and wept herself to sleep. But she had never forgotten Charmian’s voice, nor the white angry look on her father’s face.

Another time later, when Christobel was at home for a few days, Charmian had revealed a great fear. The cook had been sick, terribly sick, and the doctor had sent for Charmian, telling her the servant was dying. Charmian had looked at Christobel, then only about thirteen, and wrung her hands together and cried out:

“Oh, I can’t go, Chrissie! It would make me ill. I never could bear sickness, and I’m afraid of death. You go, that’s a good girl.”

And Christobel, with a great wonder and a growing contempt and a secret dread, went. Out of shame for Charmian, Christobel had gone and held the hand of the dying cook, patting her cold wet brow, holding up the hand that had tried to make the sign of the cross at the last moment.

Now, as Christobel looked about the great grotesque room, forcing herself to walk softly, as if still in the presence of the dead, entering the little inner room that had been Charmian’s special sanctum, she was summing up all her impressions of her stepmother and wondering what there could be for her in that other life to which she had gone—if there really was another life.

White velvet here in this inner room, white velvet lining to the silver draperies, white velvet rug, marble and onyx in the floor and tables; white-shaded, white-pedestaled lamps of alabaster, wildly lovely, with a glow like hidden fire in their white, white depths; white velvet draperies at the windows about a frostwork of handmade lace. Could anything be more exquisite, pure, simple, lovely, like driven snow? Crystal flowers in great costly sprays of well-placed mirrors, voluptuous bits of statuary, modern to the last degree, the only bit of color a lank slim devil of a doll in sumptuous taffeta of palest green and rose, lolling with abandoned air over a white velvet chair. The room might have been a lone iceberg at the North Pole, with a faint tinge of sunset in the sky, so white and lonesome it looked.

Yet in all that whiteness there was not a suggestion of purity or holiness. It rather seemed like something lovely gone astray, dishonored, put to wrong use.

Christobel shivered and wondered at her vague thoughts. She could not reason out all these things—she was too young and inexperienced, yet she felt them, like balls of ice against her young consciousness, and tears stung her eyes and made a lump in her throat.

Charmian had surrounded herself with all this, for herself to enjoy. And suddenly, without warning, just a sharp pain in the night, some power rushed her out of it all, rushed her to the hospital in terror, through a frantic operation that was too late, and herself, her little petted self, had been snatched away from the white velvet life she had planned. Planned, not because she liked things white and pure and sweet, but because she delighted to take a precious costly thing and desecrate it for herself. This was the great thought that hovered crushingly over Christobel’s overstrained consciousness. Where, where, where had Charmian gone? Almost she felt a passing pity for the woman she knew had hated her.

Sudden distant voices in the other part of the house brought Christobel back to the present. She turned swiftly and moved noiselessly over the deep priceless rugs, back to shelter of the heavy draperies and into the wide hall. Those were the servants’ voices, and she did not wish to get caught here looking into Charmian’s personal sanctum as if she were curious.

The voices came from the dining room, diagonally across the wide hall, but the silent, empty house carried words clearly. Indeed, the voices were not hushed. It was evident from the clinking sounds that silver and crystal were being placed upon the table and sideboard. Probably the dinner table was being prepared for the evening meal.

Christobel was not very well acquainted with the servants in the house. She had arrived only the day before, and all were new since her last homecoming. Charmian had a way of changing her minions often.

“Well, and now I wonder what’ll be next?” said a voice with a decided Irish accent. Christobel wondered if it might be the cook, only what would a cook be doing in the dining room? Her province was the kitchen. It must be the parlormaid.

Then it sounded as if the someone else entered and put something down on the sideboard.

“Oh, now,” giggled the parlormaid, “I suppose we’ll have to have a spell of Mrs. Romayne.”

“What’s Mrs. Romayne got to do with it?” asked the lofty voice of the butler, who was new in the house and had not gotten the way of things yet.

“Oh, you don’t know Mrs. Romayne yet, do you, Hawkins?” giggled the parlormaid knowingly. “Wait till you see. She’ll have very much to do. She’s come back from Florida especially to look after things. She called up this morning when they were all out and said she’d be in this afternoon after the service. Oh, you’ll find out. She’ll meddle in every blessed thing. She’s that kind. You ought to have heard her nosy questions this morning.”

“But who is she?” demanded the butler.

“Oh, she’s a pretty widow lady that’s crazy about the master,” responded the parlormaid. “Wait till you see. Honey on her tongue, and a laugh like a young bird.”

“Is the master fond of her?” asked the butler.

“Who can tell?” chirped the parlormaid. “What difference would that make, anyway?”

“All the difference in the world,” said the butler wisely.

“Ah, but you don’t know the lady, Hawkins,” giggled the girl. “She’s clever, that woman is. She knows what she wants and she gets it. I’ve seen her work before.”

“Well, it’s not likely I’ve met her before. I’ll look her over. If I don’t like her, I’m leaving,” announced the butler.

“Shh! There’s Marie comin’ in from the funeral,” warned the cook. “Better not talk in front of her. She’s a sneak. She’d likely tell the master, if what she heard served her own interests. They certainly had a long service. I hope the proud lady is well buried and deep.”

Christobel, in her shelter of the silver draperies, shivered. There was something uncannily harsh in the tone of the woman. She felt as if she ought to rebuke her, yet what would she say? She shrank from having anything to do with them. She could wait a moment until they all went back to the kitchen. They evidently did not know she had come in. She had no position in her father’s house yet. The spirit of Charmian still lingered in those grotesque rooms.

“Hi, there, Marie!” challenged the parlormaid. “Have a pleasant funeral? What was she like? Was there a lot of flowers?”

“Oh, sure,” said the lady’s maid loftily, “a grand funeral. And she looked as lovely as life.”

“Say, Marie,” asked the furtive voice of the cook. “What come o’ them fur coats she bought the day she was took sick? Did she keep ’em?”

“Sure she kept ’em. She was just crazy about ’em. I’m goin’ up now an’ try on that sable wrap. If there’s time before the family gets back, I’ll come down an’ show ya.”

There was a sound of the swinging door into the butler’s pantry.

“Do that,” encouraged the cook. Evidently the butler and parlormaid had gone out. “An’ say, Marie, if ya happen ta come across that there string of purple beads she useta wear, just bring ’em along. I’d like ’em as a souvenir! You do that fer me, an’ I’ll say nothin’ about what I know! See?”

“All right,” agreed Charmian’s maid. “I s’pose you know those beads are real amethyst. They’re worth a lot. But I ain’t goin’ ta do a thing till after Miss Christobel goes back ta school. She’s got eyes like a cat, that girl. She’ll likely go back tanight ur tamorra, and then I got clear sailin’. The master’ll leave it ta me to put things in order. He doesn’t know what she had. He’ll never miss anything.”

“But there’ll be the bills!”

“Naw, he won’t pay any attention now. He’ll just pay ’em and be done. It’s only women would know. An’ if Miss Christobel is gone, who’s goin’ ta know?”

“There’s another woman hankerin’ ta get in our missis’ shoes,” warned the cook. “That Romayne lady is come up from Palm Beach. She called this mornin’. What you do you better do quick.”

“My land!” said Marie in dismay. “Has she come? Well I’ll stay in tanight and get things well outta site. Then let her snoop!”

“Well, if you’re goin’ ta show us that fur wrap, you better get a hustle on. They’ll likely be comin’ back from the funeral right soon an’ you don’t want ta be masqueradin’ round in no dead lady’s clothes.”

“All right! I’ll hurry!” said Marie and turned toward the back stairs.

But Christobel had flown, stealthy as a cat, up the velvet-shod front stairs, up the hall away from her own room, to the spacious apartment that had belonged to Charmian.

She opened the door and slipped her hand inside, taking the key out and fitting it into the outside lock of the door. While she did so she cast one frightened glance into the rooms that had been her stepmother’s. All soft pinks and blues in satin and luxury, a bedroom beyond in lettuce green, and the door wide open into the strange weird bathroom, where all the fixtures, even the bathtub, were done in black, with the floor in black and crimson tiles.

Christobel shut the door softly and after locking it, removed the key and fled swiftly to her own room, just in time to escape Marie as she came from the back stairs.

She heard Marie go forward to her mistress’s apartment, try the door, even rattle it, stand in wonder a moment, and then turn away and go swiftly past her door and down the back stairs again. She could hear suppressed excited voices downstairs when she opened her own door, but that was all.

Christobel stood an instant trembling in her room, wondering what she should do next. She did not feel at home anywhere in that house. She did not even feel at home with her own father, for always, even when he had come to the school to visit her in these later years, she had seemed to feel the presence of Charmian with him, as if she were so much a part of him that she would somehow know just what had passed between father and daughter. She had long ago sensed that Charmian was jealous of every word, every kiss, every look even that passed between her husband and his children. And now as she stood clasping that key in her cold hand, she could not be sure whether she had done right or not, whether perhaps she had not been meddling in something where her father would want her to interfere. Still, it had been all too evident that those servants were planning to steal her stepmother’s possessions, and surely she had been right in stopping everything by a locked door until her father came to say what should be done.

Softly she stole to her door again and tried to listen, but the voices that had been rather loud and startled, as if the four downstairs had been accusing one another, suddenly hushed as another sound broke, the rattle of a key in the front door. There was a soft scuttling back into the kitchen, replaced by the quiet of a gentlemen’s well-ordered household as someone entered the front hall.

Christobel slipped out into the hall and looked cautiously over the banister, hoping her father had come, but a sudden rush of heavy young feet brought the knowledge that it was only Randall, her younger brother. She drew back into her own doorway till he reached the upper floor and then met him face-to-face on the way to his own room, which was at the back end of the hall and next to her own.

“Oh, hello, Chris, is that you? Where’s Dad? In his own room? I’ve gotta see him right away. I gotta take the next train back ta school. We got a big game tamorra an’ I gotta be there. I’m cheerleader.”

Christobel was aware of the soft opening of a door at the foot of the back stairs, for the door squeaked a little on its hinges. She drew her brother cautiously into her own room and closed the door.

“Rand, you can’t do that! You can’t go right away, without taking time to see Father. That wouldn’t be decent.”

“Aw, whaddaya mean decent? Dad couldn’t expect me ta stay. I got my school duties, see?”

“No, Rand, you can’t go off like that. We’ve got to be here when Father gets back. You can’t go off! I tell you, you can’t! Somebody else can take your duties. Tomorrow is Saturday. They wouldn’t expect you to be back yet. It would be only respectable to wait until Monday.”

“Aw—Chris! Whadda you havta say about it anyway? The funeral’s over, isn’t it? Gosh, I’m glad it’s over. I don’t see what they have such terrible things for anyway. All that bunk, reading and praying and yammering, and all keeping still so long. When you’re dead, you’re dead, aren’t ya? What good did that funeral do Charmian? A lot she ever cared about such bunk! I don’t want any yammering over me when I die.”

“Don’t, Rannie!” said Christobel, putting her hands over her eyes and shuddering. “Don’t talk about dying.”

“Aw, well, I’m not goin’ ta croak yet awhile. Say, kid, got any money? Lend me ten or fifteen? I’m dead broke, and I been over my allowance so many times lately, I don’t like ta ask Dad fer any just now.”

“What do you do with all your money, Rand? Dad gives you a much bigger allowance than most boys get. I know, because the girls at school tell me what their brothers get, and it’s rarely half as much as yours.”

“Aw, well, that’s my business, isn’t it? If yer goin’ ta preach, I’m done. I havta take it from Dad, but not from you. Are ya goin’ ta lend me twenty-five or not? I ask ya.”

“I haven’t got it, Rand, honestly,” said Christobel, looking even more troubled at the increased demand. “I had to get a present for our principal on her birthday. All the girls were in it, and they wanted to get something really nice. It took all I had. I had to ask the office to lend me money for my carfare here.”

“Good night!” said Randall. “Then I’ll havta pawn my watch, and I hate like the dickens to do it. Dad’s been awfully nice about getting me a new one when I smashed the last one, and I don’t want him ta notice it’s gone.”

“Look here, Rand, you’d better tell Father everything. You’ll just get into a mess if you don’t. Dad would rather have you come across with the truth, I’m sure. And you oughtn’t to trouble him with this just now, when he is going through all this.”

“All this?” said the boy wonderingly. “You don’t think he cares, do ya? Why, she never cared anything about him! She just bled him fer money all the time. I know fer a fact. I saw a few things that time I was home with a broken leg. You can’t tell me!”

“Rand, for pity’s sake, stop talking like that, and be decent. If you think that, keep it to yourself, at least for a while. Listen! There’s Father coming in now, and there’s someone with him. We’ll have to go down, Rand. Father will expect it.”

“Good night!” said the boy under his breath, peering down the stairs into the lighted hall. “It’s that old uncle of Charmian’s. Now he’ll have ta stay ta dinner, and I won’t get ta see Dad at all. Say, Chris, I’ll slip down the back way and snitch a bite in the kitchen and then pawn my watch and get back ta school. You tell Dad I had ta catch that train and that I’ll write him and explain. Say I’m sorry and all that—”

“I’ll do no such thing!” said Christobel angrily. “You’re not going away without Father’s permission! Go on downstairs and behave yourself like a decent son of the house. Yes, Father, Rand and I are here! We’re coming!” she called as she saw her father lift a tired face toward the two as they stood together at the top of the stairs.

“Aw, you!” said Randall as he moved sullenly down the stairs after his sister into the full light of the hall.

As she passed down the stairs, Christobel caught a glimpse of Marie coming furtively from the back hall with an anxious look on her face and a bunch of keys in her hand.

Chapter 2

The dinner table was a stiff affair, the young people scarcely speaking except when necessary, the two men carrying on a rambling conversation about politics and the prospect of a war in Europe, both of which neither seemed much interested in. But finally, when the table was being cleared for the dessert course and the butler had for the moment left the room, the unwelcome guest disclosed the true cause for his coming.

“Hmm!” he said, clearing his throat. “I am wondering when my dear niece’s will is to be read?”

“Will?” said the head of the house, lifting his eyebrows in a question. “My wife left no will.”

“No will?” said the old man, with a swag of his head in disapproval. “That makes it most awkward, doesn’t it? How careless of her. Well then, just when is the estate to be divided?”

“Estate?” The younger man lifted his chin a trifle haughtily and looked at his guest as if he were an old black crow come to pick bones. “There is no estate,” he said coldly. “My wife owned no property whatsoever.”

“Oh, but surely she owned this house. She told me several times that she bought it. She said it was hers.”

“It was hers only in the sense that I bought what she selected. Charmian was absolutely penniless when I married her, and she had nothing except what I gave to her. I did not give her this house, simply because I found that she was utterly unfitted either by character or by education to manage business affairs.”

“Indeed!” said the uncle severely. “I was led to believe quite the contrary. I understood that she had been most successful in her investments. That she had an uncanny way of always knowing where to place her money and that her gains had been phenomenal.”

Mr. Kershaw lifted his head now and looked the old man steadily in the eyes, speaking more severely than Christobel had ever heard him speak to one older than himself. He was by nature a courteous man.

“I am sorry to have to inform you, Mr. Madden,” he said, “that every investment my wife ever made, and every attempt of hers to play the market, turned out to be my loss instead of her gain. My wife lost heavily in several ill-advised ventures and had so involved herself with my money that I was obliged to make good. If you wish to confirm my words, you may consult my lawyer, who is even now trying to straighten out a mess that came from her great desire to roll in wealth. I have nothing further to say in the matter.”

The butler had returned with dessert, and the baffled old man subsided into his coffee and pastry. Christobel and Randall eyed their father speculatively in the light of what he had just said. For the first time in their lives it occurred to them that their father might have had some rough sledding in his career that had always seemed to them a charmed path of success.

Gee! Was Charmian like that? meditated young Randall. He told himself he was glad he hadn’t pawned his watch. Dad might have noticed and felt hurt about it, seeing it was a good one, and his last birthday present.

But Christobel had suddenly remembered the key that was in her possession and the overheard conversation, and she was trying to plan what she should do about it. Ought she to tell her father?

An oppressive silence was beginning to settle over the table when Mr. Kershaw broke it in a businesslike tone.

“By the way, Mr. Madden, what time did you say your train was leaving? Randall and I have an errand downtown presently, and we could drop you at the station.”

“Hmm!” said the old uncle, gathering the last delicious crumb of pastry on his fork. “I didn’t say. I was not altogether sure I should leave tonight. I don’t know but business might detain me—” He paused and gave place for an invitation to remain as a guest of the house. Christobel and Randall exchanged quick glances of apprehension, but as if he read his children’s thoughts, Mr. Kershaw looked up quickly and answered him.

“Well, whatever you say. If you prefer it, we can drop you off at your hotel instead of the station.”

The old man swallowed his mortification and decided for the station, and with relief to all, the meal was ended at last.

“I want you to get your coat and hat and come with me, Randall,” said his father in a tone that made the boy look at him with sudden apprehension. He wondered anxiously if Dad had had a letter from the school and hurried off to get his coat.

“Anyhow, we’re getting rid of the old geezer,” he whispered to his sister as he passed her on the stairs. “Some sucker he is. I wonder Dad didn’t pitch him out of the house. Some nerve he has, asking about a will!”

Christobel had a chance to speak to her father for just a moment as he came from his room with his coat on and his hat in his hand.

She had checked and knew that the servants were all in the kitchen at their dinner, yet she stood half hesitating, wondering whether she ought to tell him or not.

“What is it, daughter?” he asked kindly as he came into the hall and saw the trouble in her eyes. “Something you want to see me about? I won’t be very long. Is it anything in particular? Will it wait?”

“Why, I guess so,” she said, looking with troubled eyes across the hall to Charmian’s door. “It’s just that I happened to overhear the servants talking. Maybe I was mistaken. They might have been joking, but it didn’t sound like it. It seemed as if they were planning to go through her things, and—I locked her door. Was that right?”

“Certainly, that was right. I should have thought of it before. They are all practically new servants but Marie, and I never did trust her. What did they say?”

‘“I couldn’t hear it all,” said Christobel in a worried tone. “They spoke of two fur coats, new ones, sable and an ermine.”

“She had no fur coats,” said the father, looking puzzled.

“I thought from what they said they had been sent up on approval. They gossiped about what you would say when you saw the bill. And they spoke about a chain of amethysts, ‘purple beads’ the cook called them.”

Christobel noticed a startled look come across her father’s face.

“I should have looked out for things. No telling what she—” he said and then checked himself. “I mean I’m glad you locked the door.”

“But Father,” began Christobel again, “I’m afraid Marie has another key. I saw her coming this way carrying a bunch of keys as we were going downstairs to dinner. Perhaps I ought to have told you right away, but I didn’t like to before Mr. Madden.”

“Well,” said Kershaw looking troubled himself, “never mind. Suppose you just stay near and keep your eyes open while I’m gone. I’ll get back as quickly as possible. I wouldn’t go now, only I must get rid of this old man, and there is a matter of business I must attend to tonight, a telegram or two that will be sent—and I want Randall with me,” he added as if to explain not leaving him behind with his sister. “You sit in this room if you like and read or something. Or downstairs wherever you like, but just keep your eyes and ears open. I don’t imagine they’ll dare do much, not with you in the house, and perhaps not anyway.”

Christobel walked idly up and down the hall for a few minutes after they were gone. She tried to shake off the awful feeling of death that still seemed to hover about her stepmother’s door. She reasoned with herself that it was silly and childish to be afraid of rooms with nobody in them, but somehow the memory of the still house of clay that had been her sharp young stepmother’s would pass continually before her eyes.

Curiously she looked about her. She had seldom been in this particular apartment. She did not know the furnishings. There was a strangeness about the whole atmosphere, as if it were merely a stopping place for a momentary waiting. Not as if there had been any attempt to make it a home where a human soul had comfort and resting. Poor Father! A great pity for him swept over her. What had he had in life, anyway? Those revealing words about property that he had spoken at the table had stirred her deeply. What had he had in any of them except a channel to take his money from him? She and Randall had never been home much. Money and more money they had always been crying out for, and he had always given it freely, with only occasional troubled questions as to how it was spent. He must have been that way with Charmian, too. Charmian had always had luxury after she became Mrs. Kershaw.

Christobel found herself wondering if her father had a great deal of money. She had never thought about it before; she had always taken it for granted that the wealth had been unlimited. Yet there had been a certain oppression, a look of almost fright when she had spoken of those valuable fur coats that he all too evidently had not known about. These were hard times. People everywhere were losing money. Some of the girls had had to drop out of school at Christmas because their parents had failed and had no more money to keep them in such an expensive school. Had the great depression come anywhere near her father? Was that perhaps why her father’s hair had silvered at the edges so much since the last time she had seen him?

She switched on the lights and looked around her. There was no evidence of failing fortune in the furnishings of the room, but Charmian would have seen to that. The house must come up to her standard of luxury in every detail. The handsome leather chairs and davenport, the curious tables of metal and tile, the extremely modern lamps and triangular ornaments. They did not speak of a restful, homelike atmosphere for a tired man when he came home from business.

But Christobel was young to think of such things. She merely felt them vaguely. The room did not rest her. It somehow repelled her. She turned away and was going to her own room, when a guarded thought came to her and drew her to the door of the inner room, her father’s sleeping apartment. Ah! All was different here. The furniture was old and plain: a walnut bed and bureau, a wardrobe of indifferent pattern, a carpet on the floor that looked as if it had seen wear, and yet somehow spoke to the girl dimly of the past.

Where had she once traced her finger over the pattern of autumn leaves on a gray ground and thought it lovely? Could it have been when she was a little, little girl?

And then a picture in a cheap frame caught her eye. Why, that was her mother’s picture up there on the wardrobe. Could this be her father’s refuge from the world? Did he still cherish her mother’s memory?

Christobel went and stood in front of the picture. It was not the photograph of her mother with which she was familiar, the one her father had put in a little locket long ago when she first went off to school. And it wasn’t the miniature he had given her later on her sixteenth birthday. That had been sweet, but unreal. This old, faded photograph had about it a simple air of reality that went deep into her heart. The faint smile in the shadowy picture recalled the dearest thing that life had ever held for her, and drew her so, that she took the picture and pressed it to her lips again and again, and found a tear upon the glass that she had to wipe off. Ah! This is the mother that she had almost forgotten, yet for whom her hungry young heart had been crying out through the years.

At last she put the picture back in its place and turned away, reverently, as if the room were sacred. Somehow she felt that she would be nearer to her father now because she had caught this glimpse of the place in the house where he truly lived.

Suddenly she wondered if she ought to have come in, and stepping out, closed the door carefully. What did that outer richly furnished library matter, since there was this inner shrine? What mattered the whole house? She could breathe more freely since discovering this plain quiet spot where her father really lived.

She came out of her father’s apartment, went down the hall to her own room, and stood at the window, looking out with unseeing eyes at the roofs and chimneys of the square. A moment later someone tapped at her door.

“There is a lady downstairs who wants to see you, Miss Christobel,” said Marie, handing her a card.

“To see me?” said Christobel wonderingly. “Oh, it must be for Father, I’m sure. I know so few people in the city.”

“You are the lady of the house now,” snapped Marie coldly, critically, as if with a kind of ill-hidden contempt that she did not know it herself without being told.

“Just a child!” said Marie contemptuously a moment later down in the kitchen. “She notices nothing. She couldn’t have locked that door. It wouldn’t occur to her. I must have locked it myself and mislaid the key. But where I could have put it I do not understand. But come, now is the time. Mrs. Romayne is here. She will keep Miss Christobel quite a time with her busybody ways and her flattering talk. Butting in, that is what she is here for! Come on. The butler has gone on an errand for the master.”

With a sinking heart, Christobel looked at the card. Mrs. J. Rivington Romayne. Wasn’t that the name of the woman the servants had been talking about? Romayne? The woman who had called on the telephone? The woman they had said would get her father? She gave a little shiver of dislike and hesitated. Should she go down? Did she have to?

But of course, as no alternative offered, she was forced to go. There was, however, a hostile look in her eyes as she entered the smaller reception room to the right of the hall and stood for an instant between the draperies, looking into the dimness of the rich furnishings of the room.

A soft movement sounded from the dimmest corner, like the rustling of silken garments, and a breath of exquisite violet perfume stirred the air. Then Mrs. Romayne stood before her, pausing just an instant under the light of a tall alabaster floor lamp that drew a mellow flood of amber about her head.