“No,” she replied, “not a relative, but,” she went on, looking every way but in my face, “a very dear friend—a—a—protégée, I think they call it, of mine; I—I—She must be found,” she again reiterated.
We were by this time in the street.
“Nothing must be said about it,” she now whispered, catching me by the arm. “I told him so,” nodding back to the building from which we had just issued, “and he promised secrecy. It can be done without folks knowing anything about it, can’t it?”
“What?” I asked.
“Finding the girl.”
“Well,” said I, “we can tell you better about that when we know a few more of the facts. What is the girl’s name and what makes you think she didn’t go out of the house-door of her own accord?”
“Why, why, everything. She wasn’t the person to do it; then the looks of her room, and—They all got out of the window,” she cried suddenly, “and went away by the side gate into ⸻ Street.”
“They? Who do you mean by they?”
“Why, whoever they were who carried her off.”
I could not suppress the “bah!” that rose to my lips. Mr. Gryce might have been able to, but I am not Gryce.
“You don’t believe,” said she, “that she was carried off?”
“Well, no,” said I, “not in the sense you mean.”
She gave another nod back to the police station now a block or so distant. “He didn’t seem to doubt it at all.”
I laughed. “Did you tell him you thought she had been taken off in this way?”
“Yes, and he said, ‘Very likely.’ And well he might, for I heard the men talking in her room, and—”
“You heard men talking in her room—when?”
“O, it must have been as late as half-past twelve. I had been asleep and the noise they made whispering, woke me.”
“Wait,” I said, “tell me where her room is, hers and yours.”
“Hers is the third story back, mine the front one on the same floor.”
“Who are you?” I now inquired. “What position do you occupy in Mr. Blake’s house?”
“I am the housekeeper.”
Mr. Blake was a bachelor.
“And you were wakened last night by hearing whispering which seemed to come from this girl’s room.”
“Yes, I at first thought it was the folks next door—we often hear them when they are unusually noisy—but soon I became assured it came from her room; and more astonished than I could say—She is a good girl,” she broke in, suddenly looking at me with hotly indignant eyes, “a—a—as good a girl as this whole city can show; don’t you dare, any of you, to hint at anything else or—”
“Come, come,” I said soothingly, a little ashamed of my too communicative face, “I haven’t said anything, we will take it for granted she is as good as gold, go on.”
The woman wiped her forehead with a hand that trembled like a leaf. “Where was I?” said she. “O, I heard voices and was surprised and got up and went to her door. The noise I made unlocking my own must have startled her, for all was perfectly quiet when I got there. I waited a moment, then I turned the knob and called her: she did not reply and I called again. Then she came to the door, but did not unlock it. ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘O,’ said I, ‘I thought I heard talking here and I was frightened.’ ‘It must have been next door,’ said she. I begged pardon and went back to my room. There was no more noise, but when in the morning we broke into her room and found her gone, the window open and signs of distress and struggle around, I knew I had not been mistaken; that there were men with her when I went to her door, and that they had carried her off—”
This time I could not restrain myself.
“Did they drop her out of the window?” I inquired.
“O,” said she, “we are building an extension, and there is a ladder running up to the third floor, and it was by means of that they took her.”
“Indeed! she seems at least to have been a willing victim,” I remarked.
The woman clutched my arm with a grip like iron. “Don’t you believe it,” gasped she, stopping me in the street where we were. “I tell you if what I say is true, and these burglars or whatever they were, did carry her off, it was an agony to her, an awful, awful thing that will kill her if it has not done so already. You don’t know what you are talking about, you never saw her—”
“Was she pretty,” I asked, hurrying the woman along, for more than one passerby had turned their heads to look at us. The question seemed in some way to give her a shock.
“Ah, I don’t know,” she muttered; “some might not think so, I always did; it depended upon the way you looked at her.”
For the first time I felt a thrill of anticipation shoot through my veins. Why, I could not say. Her tone was peculiar, and she spoke in a sort of brooding way as though she were weighing something in her own mind; but then her manner had been peculiar throughout. Whatever it was that aroused my suspicion, I determined henceforth to keep a very sharp eye upon her ladyship. Levelling a straight glance at her face, I asked her how it was that she came to be the one to inform the authorities of the girl’s disappearance.
“Doesn’t Mr. Blake know anything about it?”
The faintest shadow of a change came into her manner. “Yes,” said she, “I told him at breakfast time; but Mr. Blake doesn’t take much interest in his servants; he leaves all such matters to me.”
“Then he does not know you have come for the police?”
“No, sir, and O, if you would be so good as to keep it from him. It is not necessary he should know. I shall let you in the back way.
