Best Short Stories Omnibus - Volume 2

Behind the Curtain-1

Behind the Curtain––––––––

It was as dark as the belly of the fish that swallowed Jonah. A drizzling rain blanketed the earth in chill discomfort. As I splashed and struggled along the country road, now in the beaten path, and now among the wet weeds by its side, I had never more heartily yearned for the dullness and comforts of respectability. Here was I with more talents in my quiver, it pleased me to think, than nine out of ten of the burghers I had left sleeping snug and smug in the town a few miles behind; with as much real love of humanity as the next man, too; and yet shivering and cursing my way into another situation that might well mean my death. And all for what? For fame or riches? No, for little more than a mere existence, albeit free from responsibility. Indeed, I was all but ready to become an honest man then and there, to turn back and give up the night's adventure, had but my imagination furnished me with the picture of some occupation whereby I might gain the same leisure and independence as by what your precisians call thieving.

With the thought I stumbled off the road again, and into a narrow gully that splashed me to the knees with muddy water. Out of that, I walked plump into a hedge, and when I sought to turn from it at right angles, I found myself still following its line. This circumstance showed me that I was come unaware upon the sharp turn of the road which marked the whereabouts of the house that was my object. Following the hedge, I found the entrance to the graveled driveway within a hundred yards of my last misstep, and entered the grounds. I groped about me for a space, not daring to show a light, until presently a blacker bulk, lifting itself out of the night's comprehensive blackness, indicated the house itself, to my left and a bit in front of me. I left the moist gravel—for there is nothing to be gained on an expedition of this sort by advertising the size and shape of your boots to a morbidly inquisitive public—and reached the shelter of the veranda by walking across the lawn.

There, being out of eyeshot from the upper windows, I risked a gleam from my pocket lantern, one of those little electric affairs that are occasionally useful to others than night watchmen. Two long French windows gave on the veranda; and, as I knew, both of them opened from the reception hall. A bit of a way with the women is not amiss in my profession; and the little grayeyed Irish maid, who had told me three weeks before of old man Rolfe's stinginess and brutality towards the young wife whom he had cooped up here for the past four years, had also given me, bit by bit, other information more valuable than she could guess. So, thanks to the maid, I was aware that the safe where the Rolfe jewels were kept—and often a substantial bit of money as well—was situated in the library; which was just beyond the hall and connected with it by a flight of four or five steps. This safe was my objective point.

The wooden window shutters were but the work of a moment; and the window fastenings themselves of only a few minutes more. (I flatter myself that I have a very coaxing way with window fasteners.) The safe itself would give me the devil's own trouble, I knew. It was really a job for two men, and I ached all over to be at it, to be safely through with it, and away, a good hour before sunrise.

The window opened noiselessly enough, and I stepped within and set my little satchel full of necessary tools upon the floor. But the damp weather had swelled the woodwork, and as I closed the window again, though I pushed it ever so gently, it gave forth a noise something between a grunt and a squeak.

And as pat as the report of a pistol to the pressure of the trigger came the answer—a sound of a quickly-caught breath from the warm dimness of the room. I made no motion; though the blood drummed desperately through my brain and my scalp tingled with apprehension and excitement.

For ten, for twenty, for thirty seconds I stood so; and then the silence was broken by the unmistakable rustle of a woman's skirts. The sound came softly towards me through the darkness. It was my turn to let loose my held breath with a gasp, and in another moment I should have been through the window and running for it; when a woman's whisper halted me.

“Is that you, Charles? And why did you not rap upon the shutter?”

So some one called Charles was expected? Then, ticked off my thoughts almost automatically, the lady somewhere near me in the dark might have her own reasons for not caring to alarm the house just then! The thought steadied me to action.

“Shh,” I whispered, feeling behind me for the window, and gradually opening it again. “S-h-h! No, it is not Charles”—and I put one foot backward across the sill. “It is not Charles, but Charles has sent me to say——”

Click!—went something by the window, and the room was flooded with sudden brilliance from a dozen electric globes. And again, click!—and I looked with blinking eyes at the muzzle of a c****d pistol held by the most beautiful, the most be-jeweled, the most determined-looking young woman it has ever been my lot to meet.

“Who are you?” she asked in a voice that was at once hoarse and sweet. “Who are you? And what do you want? And where is Charles?”

As I stood there dripping moisture upon the oiled floor, with my hands in the air—they had gone up quite involuntarily—I must have been the very picture of idiocy and discomfiture. I wondered if Charles, whoever the devil Charles might be, was always welcomed with a c****d pistol. Probably not; but, I wondered, how did she happen to have a pistol with her? I wondered why neck, breast, hair, arms, and hands should be ablaze with the diamonds that accentuated her lithe and vivid loveliness. I wondered why, now that she saw I was not Charles, she did not alarm the house. I wondered everything; but nothing to the point. And as I stood wondering she repeated:

“Who are you? And what do you want?”

“Madame,” I stammered, my jarred brain fastening upon the sentence she had interrupted, “Charles sent me to—to say to you——”

“Charles who?” she asked. And as tense as was her face, a gleam of merriment shot through her eyes. “Charles who?” she repeated.

Charles was not one of the points upon which the Irish maid had given me information.

The lady with the pistol considered for a moment. “You are not very clever, are you?” she said.

“If you will pardon me,” I said, “I think I had better be going. I seem to have mistaken the house.”

“You at least seem to have mistaken the proper manner in which to enter it,” she returned.

“Why, as to the mode of entrance,” I said, “I might plead that the mistake appears to have been less in that than in the person who employed it.”

I could not resist the retort. A dull red crept slowly up her neck and face; a pallid, olive-tinted face, beautiful in itself, beautiful for its oval contour and broad brow, and frame of black hair; beautiful in itself, and yet dominated and outdone by the lustrous, restless beauty of the dark eyes wherewith she held me more surely captive than by virtue of the pistol.

“You will come in,” she said, “and sit there.” She indicated a seat beside a central table. “But first you will kindly let me have whatever weapons you may possess.” She took my revolver, examined it, and put her own in the breast of her gown. “Now you may put your hands down,” she said, “your arms must ache by now. Sit down.”

I sat. She stood and looked at me for a moment.

“I am wondering what you are going to do with me,” I ventured.

In all of her quick actions, and in the tones of her voice, there was evident a most unnatural sort of strain. She may well have been excited; that was only to be expected in the circumstances. But the repressed excitement in this woman's manner was not that of a woman who is forcing herself to keep her courage up; not that of a woman who would like to scream; but a steadier nervous energy which seemed to burn in her like a fire, to escape from her finger tips, and almost to crackle in her hair; an intensity that was vibrant. I marveled. Most women would have screamed at the advent of a man in the dead of night; screamed and fainted. Or the ones who would not, and who were armed as she, would ordinarily have been inclined to shoot, and at once; or immediately to have given the alarm. She had done none of these things. She had merely taken me captive. She had set me down in a chair at the center of the room. She had not roused the house. And now she stood looking at me with a trace of abstraction in her manner; looking at me, for the moment, less as if I were a human being than as if I were a factor in some mathematical problem which it was the immediate task of that active, high-keyed brain of hers to solve. And there was a measure of irony in her glance, as if she alone tasted and enjoyed some ulterior jest.

“I am wondering,” I repeated, “what you are going to do with me.”

She sat down at the opposite side of the table before she replied.

“I believe,” she said slowly, “that I have nearly made up my mind what to do with you.”

“Well?” I asked.

But she said nothing, and continued to say nothing. I looked at her and her diamonds—the diamonds I had come after!—and wondered again why she was wearing them; wondered why she had tricked herself out as for some grand entertainment. And as the ignominious result of my night's expedition pressed more sharply against my pride I could have strangled her through sheer disappointment and mortification. The pistol she held was the answer to that impulse. But what was the answer to her hesitancy in alarming the house? Why did she not give me up and be done with me?

At the farther end of the room was a long red curtain, which covered the entrance to a sitting-room or parlor, as I guessed; and by the side of the curtain hung an old-fashioned bell cord, also of red, which I supposed to communicate with the servants' quarters. It were easy enough, now that she had taken the whip hand of me so cleverly, to pull that rope, to set the bell jangling, to rouse the house. Why did she not do so?

Was she a mad woman? There was that in her inexplicable conduct, and in her highly-wrought, yet governed, mood, as she sat in brooding silence across the table from me, to make the theory plausible. Brooding she was, and studying me, I thought; yet watchful, too. For at any least motion of mine her hand tightened slightly upon the pistol. We sat thus while the slow seconds lengthened into intolerable minutes; and I steamed with sweat, and fidgeted. Nor was I set more at my ease by her long searching glances. In fact, my overthrow had been so instant and so complete that my scattered wits had never drawn themselves together again; I continued as one in a haze; as a person half under the power of the hypnotist; as a mouse must feel after the first blow of the cat's paw. And yet one idea began to loom clearly out of that haze and possess me—the idea that she desired the alarm to be given as little as I did myself.

But there was no light in that. It was easy to understand why she did not wish the house aroused while she still believed me to be Charles—whoever Charles might be. But now?—it was too much for me. I could not find a justification in reason for my belief; and yet the conviction grew.

She broke the silence with a question that might have been put with full knowledge of my thought.

“You are still wondering why I do not give you up?” she said.

I nodded. She leaned towards me across the table, and if ever the demons of mockery danced through a woman's eyes it was then; and her lips parted in a kind of silent laughter.

She touched the diamonds about her throat.

“It was these you came after?”

I nodded again. Evidently speech was of no avail with this lady. She asked questions at her will, and reserved the right of answering none.