“Carrying a baby about with a loaded pistol in his hand?” came back in stern retort.
She had no answer for this. She admitted when informed that the bullet extracted from her husband’s body had been found to correspond exactly with those remaining in the five chambers of the pistol taken from his hand, that he was not only the owner of this pistol but was in the habit of sleeping with it under his pillow; but, beyond that, nothing; and this reticence, as well as her manner which was cold and repellent, told against her.
A verdict of suicide was rendered by the coroner’s jury, and the life-insurance company, in which Mr. Hammond had but lately insured himself for a large sum, taking advantage of the suicide clause embodied in the policy, announced its determination of not paying the same.
Such was the situation, as known to Violet Strange and the general public, on the day she was asked to see Mrs. Hammond and learn what might alter her opinion as to the justice of this verdict and the stand taken by the Shuler Life Insurance Company.
* * * *
The clock on the mantel in Miss Strange’s rose-coloured boudoir had struck three, and Violet was gazing in some impatience at the door, when there came a gentle knock upon it, and the maid (one of the elderly, not youthful, kind) ushered in her expected visitor.
“You are Mrs. Hammond?” she asked, in natural awe of the too black figure outlined so sharply against the deep pink of the sea-shell room.
The answer was a slow lifting of the veil which shadowed the features she knew only from the cuts she had seen in newspapers.
“You are—Miss Strange?” stammered her visitor; “the young lady who—”
“I am,” chimed in a voice as ringing as it was sweet. “I am the person you have come here to see. And this is my home. But that does not make me less interested in the unhappy, or less desirous of serving them. Certainly you have met with the two greatest losses which can come to a woman—I know your story well enough to say that—; but what have you to tell me in proof that you should not lose your anticipated income as well? Something vital, I hope, else I cannot help you; something which you should have told the coroner’s jury—and did not.”
The flush which was the sole answer these words called forth did not take from the refinement of the young widow’s expression, but rather added to it; Violet watched it in its ebb and flow and, seriously affected by it (why, she did not know, for Mrs. Hammond had made no other appeal either by look or gesture), pushed forward a chair and begged her visitor to be seated.
“We can converse in perfect safety here,” she said. “When you feel quite equal to it, let me hear what you have to communicate. It will never go any further. I could not do the work I do if I felt it necessary to have a confidant.”
“But you are so young and so—so—”
“So inexperienced you would say and so evidently a member of what New Yorkers call ‘society.’ Do not let that trouble you. My inexperience is not likely to last long and my social pleasures are more apt to add to my efficiency than to detract from it.”
With this Violet’s face broke into a smile. It was not the brilliant one so often seen upon her lips, but there was something in its quality which carried encouragement to the widow and led her to say with obvious eagerness:
“You know the facts?”
“I have read all the papers.”
“I was not believed on the stand.”
“It was your manner—”
“I could not help my manner. I was keeping something back, and, being unused to deceit, I could not act quite naturally.”
“Why did you keep something back? When you saw the unfavourable impression made by your reticence, why did you not speak up and frankly tell your story?”
“Because I was ashamed. Because I thought it would hurt me more to speak than to keep silent. I do not think so now; but I did then—and so made my great mistake. You must remember not only the awful shock of my double loss, but the sense of guilt accompanying it; for my husband and I had quarreled that night, quarreled bitterly—that was why I had run away into another room and not because I was feeling ill and impatient of the baby’s fretful cries.”
“So people have thought.” In saying this, Miss Strange was perhaps cruelly emphatic. “You wish to explain that quarrel? You think it will be doing any good to your cause to go into that matter with me now?”
“I cannot say; but I must first clear my conscience and then try to convince you that quarrel or no quarrel, he never took his own life. He was not that kind. He had an abnormal fear of death. I do not like to say it but he was a physical coward. I have seen him turn pale at the least hint of danger. He could no more have turned that muzzle upon his own breast than he could have turned it upon his baby. Some other hand shot him, Miss Strange. Remember the open window, the shattered mirror; and I think I know that hand.”
Her head had fallen forward on her breast. The emotion she showed was not so eloquent of grief as of deep personal shame.
“You think you know the man?” In saying this, Violet’s voice sunk to a whisper. It was an accusation of murder she had just heard.
“To my great distress, yes. When Mr. Hammond and I were married,” the widow now proceeded in a more determined tone, “there was another man—a very violent one—who vowed even at the church door that George and I should never live out two full years together. We have not. Our second anniversary would have been in November.”
“But—”
“Let me say this: the quarrel of which I speak was not serious enough to occasion any such act of despair on his part. A man would be mad to end his life on account of so slight a disagreement. It was not even on account of the person of whom I’ve just spoken, though that person had been mentioned between us earlier in the evening, Mr. Hammond having come across him face to face that very afternoon in the subway. Up to this time neither of us had seen or heard of him since our wedding-day.”
“And you think this person whom you barely mentioned, so mindful of his old grudge that he sought out your domicile, and, with the intention of murder, climbed the trellis leading to your room and turned his pistol upon the shadowy figure which was all he could see in the semi-obscurity of a much lowered gas-jet?”
“A man in the dark does not need a bright light to see his enemy when he is intent upon revenge.”
Miss Strange altered her tone.
“And your husband? You must acknowledge that he shot off his pistol whether the other did or not.”
“It was in self-defence. He would shoot to save his own life—or the baby’s.”
“Then he must have heard or seen—”
“A man at the window.”
“And would have shot there?”
“Or tried to.”
“Tried to?”
“Yes; the other shot first—oh, I’ve thought it all out—causing my husband’s bullet to go wild. It was his which broke the mirror.”
Violet’s eyes, bright as stars, suddenly narrowed.
“And what happened then?” she asked. “Why cannot they find the bullet?”
“Because it went out of the window—glanced off and went out of the window.”
Mrs. Hammond’s tone was triumphant; her look spirited and intense.
Violet eyed her compassionately.
“Would a bullet glancing off from a mirror, however hung, be apt to reach a window so far on the opposite side?”
“I don’t know; I only know that it did,” was the contradictory, almost absurd, reply.
“What was the cause of the quarrel you speak of between your husband and yourself? You see, I must know the exact truth and all the truth to be of any assistance to you.”
“It was—it was about the care I gave, or didn’t give, the baby. I feel awfully to have to say it, but George did not think I did my full duty by the child. He said there was no need of its crying so; that if I gave it the proper attention it would not keep the neighbours and himself awake half the night. And I—I got a
ngry and insisted that I did the best I could; that the child was naturally fretful and that if he wasn’t satisfied with my way of looking after it, he might try his. All of which was very wrong and unreasonable on my part, as witness the awful punishment which followed.”
“And what made you get up and leave him?”
“The growl he gave me in reply. When I heard that, I bounded out of bed and said I was going to the spare room to sleep; and if the baby cried he might just try what he could do himself to stop it.”
“And he answered?”
“This, just this—I shall never forget his words as long as I live—’If you go, you need not expect me to let you in again no matter what happens.’”
“He said that?”
“And locked the door after me. You see I could not tell all that.”
“It might have been better if you had. It was such a natural quarrel and so unprovocative of actual tragedy.”
Mrs. Hammond was silent. It was not difficult to see that she had no very keen regrets for her husband personally. But then he was not a very estimable man nor in any respect her equal.
“You were not happy with him,” Violet ventured to remark.
“I was not a fully contented woman. But for all that he had no cause to complain of me except for the reason I have mentioned. I was not a very intelligent mother. But if the baby were living now—O, if he were living now—with what devotion I should care for him.”
She was on her feet, her arms were raised, her face impassioned with feeling. Violet, gazing at her, heaved a little sigh. It was perhaps in keeping with the situation, perhaps extraneous to it, but whatever its source, it marked a change in her manner. With no further check upon her sympathy, she said very softly:
“It is well with the child.”
The mother stiffened, swayed, and then burst into wild weeping.
“But not with me,” she cried, “not with me. I am desolate and bereft. I have not even a home in which to hide my grief and no prospect of one.”
“But,” interposed Violet, “surely your husband left you something? You cannot be quite penniless?”
“My husband left nothing,” was the answer, uttered without bitterness, but with all the hardness of fact. “He had debts. I shall pay those debts. When these and other necessary expenses are liquidated, there will be but little left. He made no secret of the fact that he lived close up to his means. That is why he was induced to take on a life insurance. Not a friend of his but knows his improvidence. I—I have not even jewels. I have only my determination and an absolute conviction as to the real nature of my husband’s death.”
“What is the name of the man you secretly believe to have shot your husband from the trellis?”
Mrs. Hammond told her.
It was a new one to Violet. She said so and then asked:
“What else can you tell me about him?”
“Nothing, but that he is a very dark man and has a club-foot.”
“Oh, what a mistake you’ve made.”
“Mistake? Yes, I acknowledge that.”
“I mean in not giving this last bit of information at once to the police. A man can be identified by such a defect. Even his footsteps can be traced. He might have been found that very day. Now, what have we to go upon?”
“You are right, but not expecting to have any difficulty about the insurance money I thought it would be generous in me to keep still. Besides, this is only surmise on my part. I feel certain that my husband was shot by another hand than his own, but I know of no way of proving it. Do you?”
Then Violet talked seriously with her, explaining how their only hope lay in the discovery of a second bullet in the room which had already been ransacked for this very purpose and without the shadow of a result.
* * * *
A tea, a musicale, and an evening dance kept Violet Strange in a whirl for the remainder of the day. No brighter eye nor more contagious wit lent brilliance to these occasions, but with the passing of the midnight hour no one who had seen her in the blaze of electric lights would have recognized this favoured child of fortune in the earnest figure sitting in the obscurity of an up-town apartment, studying the walls, the ceilings, and the floors by the dim light of a lowered gas-jet. Violet Strange in society was a very different person from Violet Strange under the tension of her secret and peculiar work.
She had told them at home that she was going to spend the night with a friend; but only her old coachman knew who that friend was. Therefore a very natural sense of guilt mingled with her emotions at finding herself alone on a scene whose gruesome mystery she could solve only by identifying herself with the place and the man who had perished there.
Dismissing from her mind all thought of self, she strove to think as he thought, and act as he acted on the night when he found himself (a man of but little courage) left in this room with an ailing child.
At odds with himself, his wife, and possibly with the child screaming away in its crib, what would he be apt to do in his present emergency? Nothing at first, but as the screaming continued he would remember the old tales of fathers walking the floor at night with crying babies, and hasten to follow suit. Violet, in her anxiety to reach his inmost thought, crossed to where the crib had stood, and, taking that as a start, began pacing the room in search of the spot from which a bullet, if shot, would glance aside from the mirror in the direction of the window. (Not that she was ready to accept this theory of Mrs. Hammond, but that she did not wish to entirely dismiss it without putting it to the test.)
She found it in an unexpected quarter of the room and much nearer the bed-head than where his body was found. This, which might seem to confuse matters, served, on the contrary to remove from the case one of its most serious difficulties. Standing here, he was within reach of the pillow under which his pistol lay hidden, and if startled, as his wife believed him to have been by a noise at the other end of the room, had but to crouch and reach behind him in order to find himself armed and ready for a possible intruder.
Imitating his action in this as in other things, she had herself crouched low at the bedside and was on the point of withdrawing her hand from under the pillow, when a new surprise checked her movement and held her fixed in her position, with eyes staring straight at the adjoining wall. She had seen there what he must have seen in making this same turn—the dark bars of the opposite window-frame outlined in the mirror—and understood at once what had happened. In the nervousness and terror of the moment, George Hammond had mistaken this reflection of the window for the window itself, and shot impulsively at the man he undoubtedly saw covering him from the trellis without. But while this explained the shattering of the mirror, how about the other and still more vital question, of where the bullet went afterward? Was the angle at which it had been fired acute enough to send it out of a window diagonally opposed? No; even if the pistol had been held closer to the man firing it than she had reason to believe, the angle still would be oblique enough to carry it on to the further wall.
But no sign of any such impact had been discovered on this wall. Consequently, the force of the bullet had been expended before reaching it, and when it fell—
Here, her glance, slowly traveling along the floor, impetuously paused. It had reached the spot where the two bodies had been found, and unconsciously her eyes rested there, conjuring up the picture of the bleeding father and the strangled child. How piteous and how dreadful it all was. If she could only understand—Suddenly she rose straight up, staring and immovable in the dim light. Had the idea—the explanation—the only possible explanation covering the whole phenomena come to her at last?
It would seem so, for as she so stood, a look of conviction settled over her features, and with this look, evidences of a horror which for all her fast accumulating knowledge of life and its possibilities made her appear very small and very helpless.
* * * *
A half-hour later, when Mrs. Hammond, in her anxiety at hearing nothing more from Miss Stra
nge, opened the door of her room, it was to find, lying on the edge of the sill, the little detective’s card with these words hastily written across it:
I do not feel as well as I could wish, and so have telephoned to my own coachman to come and take me home. I will either see or write you within a few days. But do not allow yourself to hope. I pray you do not allow yourself the least hope; the outcome is still very problematical.
When Violet’s employer entered his office the next morning it was to find a veiled figure awaiting him which he at once recognized as that of his little deputy. She was slow in lifting her veil and when it finally came free he felt a momentary doubt as to his wisdom in giving her just such a matter as this to investigate. He was quite sure of his mistake when he saw her face, it was so drawn and pitiful.
“You have failed,” said he.
“Of that you must judge,” she answered; and drawing near she whispered in his ear.
“No!” he cried in his amazement.
“Think,” she murmured, “think. Only so can all the facts be accounted for.”
“I will look into it; I will certainly look into it,” was his earnest reply. “If you are right—But never mind that. Go home and take a horseback ride in the Park. When I have news in regard to this I will let you know. Till then forget it all. Hear me, I charge you to forget everything but your balls and your parties.”
And Violet obeyed him.
* * * *
Some few days after this, the following statement appeared in all the papers:
“Owing to some remarkable work done by the firm of —— & ——, the well-known private detective agency, the claim made by Mrs. George Hammond against the Shuler Life Insurance Company is likely to be allowed without further litigation. As our readers will remember, the contestant has insisted from the first that the bullet causing her husband’s death came from another pistol than the one found clutched in his own hand. But while reasons were not lacking to substantiate this assertion, the failure to discover more than the disputed track of a second bullet led to a verdict of suicide, and a refusal of the company to pay.
The Anna Katharine Green Mystery Megapack Page 199
