“Don’t bother him, Cora,” said his mother. “He’s finished eating—let him sleep a few minutes, if he wants to, before he goes to school. He’s not at all well. He played too hard, yesterday afternoon, and hurt his knee, he said. He came down limping this morning and looking very badly. He oughtn’t to run and climb about the stable so much after school. See how utterly exhausted he looks!—Not even this excitement can keep him awake.”
“I think we must be careful not to let Mr. Madison suspect anything about the burglar,” said Miss Peirce. “It would be bad for him.”
Laura began: “But we ought to notify the police–-“
“Police!” Hedrick woke so abruptly, and uttered the word with such passionate and vehement protest, that everybody started. “I suppose you want to KILL your father, Laura Madison!”
“How?”
“Do you suppose he wouldn’t know something had happened with a squad of big, heavy policemen tromping all over the house? The first thing they’d do would be to search the whole place–-“
“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Madison quickly. “It wouldn’t do at all.”
“I should think not! I’m glad,” continued Hedrick, truthfully, “THAT idea’s out of your head! I believe Laura imagined the whole thing anyway.”
“Have you looked at her mattress,” inquired Cora, “darling little boy?”
He gave her a concentrated look, and rose to leave. “Nothin’ on earth but imagina–-” He stopped with a grunt as he forgetfully put his weight on his left leg. He rubbed his knee, swallowed painfully, and, leaving the word unfinished, limped haughtily from the room.
He left the house, gloomily swinging his books from a spare length of strap, and walking with care to ease his strains and bruises as much as possible. He was very low in his mind, that boy. His fortunes had reached the ebb- tide, but he had no hope of a rise. He had no hope of anything. It was not even a consolation that, through his talent for surprise in waylayings, it had lately been thought necessary, by the Villard family, to have Egerton accompanied to and from school by a man-servant. Nor was Hedrick more deeply depressed by the certainty that both public and domestic scandal must soon arise from the inevitable revelation of his discontinuing his attendance at school without mentioning this important change of career at home. He had been truant a full fortnight, under brighter circumstances a matter for a lawless pride—now he had neither fear nor vainglory. There was no room in him for anything but dejection.
He walked two blocks in the direction of his school; turned a corner; walked half a block; turned north in the alley which ran parallel to Corliss Street, and a few moments later had cautiously climbed into an old, disused refuse box which stood against the rear wall of the empty stable at his own home. He pried up some loose boards at the bottom of the box, and entered a tunnel which had often and often served in happier days—when he had friends—for the escape of Union officers from Libby Prison and Andersonville. Emerging, wholly soiled, into a box- stall, he crossed the musty carriage house and ascended some rickety steps to a long vacant coachman’s-room, next to the hayloft. He closed the door, bolted it, and sank moodily upon a broken, old horsehair sofa.
This apartment was his studio. In addition to the sofa, it contained an ex-bureau, three chair-like shapes, a once marble-topped table, now covered with a sheet of zinc, two empty bird cages, and a condemned whatnot. The walls were rather over-decorated in coloured chalks, the man-headed-snake motive predominating; they were also loopholed for firing into the hayloft. Upon the table lay a battered spy-glass, minus lenses, and, nearby, two boxes, one containing dried corn-silk, the other hayseed, convenient for the making of amateur cigarettes; the smoker’s outfit being completed by a neat pile of rectangular clippings from newspapers. On the shelves of the whatnot were some fragments of a dead pie, the relics of a “Fifteen-Puzzle,” a pink Easter-egg, four seashells, a tambourine with part of a girl’s face still visible in aged colours, about two thirds of a hot-water bag, a tintype of Hedrick, and a number of books: several by Henty, “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” “100 Practical Jokes, Easy to Perform,” “The Jungle Book,” “My Lady Rotha,” a “Family Atlas,” “Three Weeks,” “Pilgrim’s Progress,” “A Boy’s Life in Camp,” and “The Mystery of the Count’s Bedroom.”
The gloomy eye of Hedrick wandered to “The Mystery of the Count’s Bedroom,” and remained fixed upon it moodily and contemptuously. His own mystery made that one seem tame and easy: Laura’s bedroom laid it all over the Count’s, in his conviction; and with a soul too weary of pain to shudder, he reviewed the bafflements and final catastrophe of the preceding night.
He had not essayed the attempt upon the mattress until assured that the house was wrapped in slumber. Then, with hope in his heart, he had stolen to Laura’s room, lit the lamp, feeling safe from intrusion, and set to work. His implement at first was a long hatpin of Cora’s. Lying on his back beneath the bed, and, moving the slats as it became necessary, he sounded every cubic inch of the mysterious mattress without encountering any obstruction which could reasonably be supposed to be the ledger. This was not more puzzling than it was infuriating, since by all processes of induction, deduction, and pure logic, the thing was necessarily there. It was nowhere else. Therefore it was there. It HAD to be there! With the great blade of his Boy Scout’s knife he began to disembowel the mattress
For a time he had worked furiously and effectively, but the position was awkward, the search laborious, and he was obliged to rest frequently. Besides, he had waited to a later hour than he knew, for his mother to go to bed, and during one of his rests he incautiously permitted his eyes to close. When he woke, his sisters were in the room, and he thought it advisable to remain where he was, though he little realized how he had weakened his shelter. When Cora left the room, he heard Laura open the window, sigh, and presently a tiny clinking and a click set him a- tingle from head to foot: she was opening the padlocked book. The scratching sound of a pen followed. And yet she had not come near the bed. The mattress, then, was a living lie.
With infinite caution he had moved so that he could see her, arriving at a coign of vantage just as she closed the book. She locked it, wrapped it in an oilskin cover which lay beside it on the table, hung the key-chain round her neck, rose, yawned, and, to his violent chagrin, put out the light. He heard her moving but could not tell where, except that it was not in his part of the room. Then a faint shuffling warned him that she was approaching the bed, and he withdrew his head to avoid being stepped upon. The next moment the world seemed to cave in upon him.
Laura’s flight had given him opportunity to escape to his own room unobserved; there to examine, bathe and bind his wounds, and to rectify his first hasty impression that he had been fatally mangled.
Hedrick glared at “The Mystery of the Count’s Bedroom.”
By and by he got up, brought the book to the sofa and began to read it over.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The influence of a familiar and sequestered place is not only soothing; the bruised mind may often find it
