Waltz Into Darkness (17 page)

"Just
a moment, please."

He
could hear a bolt forced out, then the catch of a finger lock being
turned. Then the door opened, and she was standing there surveying
him, kerosene lamp held somewhat raised in one hand so that its rays
could reach out to and fall upon him for her own satisfaction.

She
was about fifty, or very close upon it. She was a tall, largebuilt
woman, but not stout withal; she gave an impression of angularity,
rather. Her color was not good; it had a waxlike yellowishness, as of
one who has worried and kept indoors for a considerable period. Her
hair, coarse and glossy, was in the earlier stages of turning gray.
Still dark at the back, it was above the forehead that the first
slanting, upward wedges of white had appeared, and the way she wore
it emphasized rather than attempted to conceal this: drawn severely
back, so tight that it seemed to be pulled-at, and then carelessly
wound into a knot. It gave her an aspect of sternness that might not
have been wholly justified, though in truth there was little humor or
tenderness to be read in her features even by themselves.

She
wore a dress of stiff black alpaca, a stringy white crocheted collar
closing its throat and fastened by a carnelian brooch.

"Yes"
she said on a rising inflection. "I'm Bertha Russell. Do I know
you?"

"I'm
Louis Durand," he replied gravely. "I've just arrived from
New Orleans."

He
heard her draw a sharp breath. She stared for a long moment, as if
familiarizing herself with him. Then abruptly slanted the door still
further inward. "Come in, Mr. Durand," she said. "Come
in the house."

She
closed the street door behind him. He waited aside, then he once more
let her take the lead.

"This
way," she said. "The parlor's in here."

He
followed her down a dark-floored, rag-carpeted hall, and in at one
side. She must have been reading when he interrupted; as she set the
lamp down on a center table, a massive, open, gilt-edged book swam
into view, a pair of silver-edged spectacles discarded to one side.
He recognized it as the Bible. A ribbon of crimson velvet protruded
as a bookmark.

"Wait,
I'll put on more light."

She
lit a second lamp, evening the radius of brightness somewhat, so that
it did not all come from one place. The room still remained anything
but brilliant.

"Sit
down, Mr. Durand."

She
sat across the table from him, where she had originally been sitting
while still alone. She drew the ribbon marker through the new place
in the Bible, closed the heavy cubical volume, moved it slightly
aside.

He
could see her throbbing with a mixture of excitement and anticipatory
fear. It was almost physical, it was so strong an agitation; and yet
so strongly quelled.

She
clasped her hands with an effort, and placed them against the edge of
the table, where the Bible had been until now.

She
moistened the bloodless outline of her lips.

"Now
what can you tell me? What have you come here to say to me?"

"It's
not what I can tell you," he replied. "It's what you can
tell me."

She
nodded somewhat dourly, as though, while disagreeing with the
challenge, she was willing nonetheless to accept it, for the sake
of progressing with the matter.

"Very
well, then. I can tell you this much. My sister Julia received a
proposal of marriage from you, by letter, on about the fifteenth of
April of this year. Do you deny that ?"

He
brushed away the necessity of a direct answer to that; held silent to
let her continue.

"My
sister Julia left here on May the eighteenth, to join you in New
Orleans." Her eyes bored into his. "That was the last I saw
of her. Since that date I have not heard from her again." She
drew a long, tightly compressed breath. "I received an answer to
one of my letters in a stranger's handwriting. And now you come here
alone."

"There
is no one down there any longer I could bring."

He
saw her eyes widen, but she waited.

"Just
a moment," he said. "I think it will save both of us time
if we establish one thing before we go any--"

Then
suddenly he stopped, without need of completing the sentence. He'd
found the answer for himself, looking upward to the wall, past her
shoulder. It was incredible that he had failed to see it until now,
but his whole attention had been given to her and not to the
surroundings, and it was subdued by the marginal shade beyond the
lamps.

It
was a large photographic portrait, set in a cherry-colored velour
frame, of a head nearly life-size. The subject was not young, not a
girl. There was an incisiveness to the mouth that promised sharpness.
There was a keen appearance to the eyes that heralded creases. She
was not beautiful. Dark hair, gathered at the back. . .

Bertha
had risen, was standing slightly aside from it, holding the lamp
aloft and backward to it past her own shoulder, so that it was in
fullest untramelled pathway of the upsurging glow.

"That
is Julia. That is my sister. There. Before you. What you are
looking at now. It's an enlargement taken only two or three years
ago."

His
voice was a whisper that barely reached her. "Then it was-- not
she I married."

She
hastily put the lamp down, at what it showed her now in the opposite
direction. "Mr. Durand!" She half started toward him, as if
to support him. "Can I get you something?"

He
warded her off with a vague lift of his hand. He could hear his
labored breathing sounding in his own ears like a bellows. He sought
the chair he had risen from and by his own efforts dropped back into
it, half turned to clutch at it and hold it steady as he did so.

He
extended his hand and pointed a finger; the finger switching up and
down while it waited for his lips to gain speech and catch up to it.
"That is the woman whose photograph I received from here. But
that is not the woman I was married to in New Orleans on last May the
eighteenth."

Her
own fright, which was ghastly on her face, was overruled, submerged,
by the sight of his, which must have been that much greater to
witness.

"I'll
get you some wine," she offered hastily.

He
raised his hand protestingly. Pulled at his collar to ease it.

"I'll
get you some wine," she repeated helplessly.

"No,
I'm all right. Don't take the time."

"Have
you a photograph, any sort of likeness, of the other person you can
show me ?" she asked after a moment.

"I
have nothing, not a scrap of anything. She somehow even postponed
having our bridal photograph taken. It occurs to me now that this
oversight may have been intentional."

He
smiled bleakly. "I can tell you what she was like, if that will
do. I don't need a photograph to remember that. She was blonde. She
was small. She was a good deal--I should say somewhat younger than
your sister." He faltered to a stop, as if realizing the
uselessness of proceeding.

"But
Julia ?" she persisted, as though he were able to give her the
answer. "Where's Julia, then? What's become of her? Where is
she?" She planted her hands in flat despair on the tabletop,
leaned over above them. "I saw her off on that boat."

"I
met the boat. It came without her. She wasn't on it."

"You're
sure, you're sure ?" Her eyes were bright with questioning
tears.

"I
watched them get off it. All left it. She wasn't among them. She
wasn't on it."

She
sank back into the chair beyond the table. She planed the edge of her
hand flat across the top of her forehead, held her head thus for a
moment or two. She did not weep, but her mouth winced flickeringly
once or twice.

They
both had to face the thing. It was out in the open between them now.
Not to be avoided, not to be shunned. It had come to this. It was a
question of which of them would first put it into words.

She
did.

She
let her hand drop. "She was done away with!" she whispered
noarsely. "She met her end on that boat." She shuddered as
though some insidious evil presence had come into the room, without
need of door or window. "In some way, at someone's hands."
She shuddered again, almost as if she had the ague. "Between the
time I waved her goodbye that Wednesday afternoon--"

He
let his head go down slowly in grim assent. Convinced now at last,
understanding the whole thing finally for what it really was. He
finished it for her.

"--and
the time I stood by the gangplank to greet her that Friday
afternoon."

28

He
found Bertha Russell, coated, gloved and bonnetted, a spectral figure
in the unrelieved black of full mourning, waiting for him in the open
doorway of her house, early as it was, when he drove up shortly
before nine the following morning to keep their appointment
prearranged the night before. Whatever grief or bitterness had been
hers during the unseen hours of the night just gone, she had mastered
it now, there were only faint traces of it left behind. Her face was
cold and stonelike in its fortitude; there were, however, bluish
bruises under her eyes, and the transparent pallor of sleeplessness
lay livid upon her features. It was the face of a woman bent upon
retribution, who would show no more mercy than had been shown her,
whatever the cost to herself.

"Have
you breakfasted ?" she asked him when he had alighted and come
forward to join her.

"I
have no wish to," he answered shortly.

She
closed the door forthwith and made her way beside him to the
carriage; the impression conveyed was that she would have served him
food if obliged to, but would have begrudged the time it would have
cost them.

"Have
you anyone in mind ?" he asked as they drove off. She had given
an address, unfamiliar to him as all addresses up here were bound to
be, on entering the carriage.

"I
made inquiries after you left last evening. I have had someone
recommended to me. He was well spoken of."

They
were driven downtown into the bustling business section, the strange
pair that they made, both so tight-lipped, both sitting so stark and
straight, with not a word between them. The carriage stopped at last
before a distinctly ugly-looking building, of beefy red brick,
honeycombed with countless windows in four parallel rows, all with
rounded tops. A veritable hive of small individual offices and
businesses. Its appearance did not bespeak a very prosperous class of
tenantry.

Durand
paid off the carriage and accompanied her in. A rather chill musty
air, far cooler than that outside on the street, immediately assailed
them, as well as a considerable lessening of light, in no wise
ameliorated by the bowls of gaslight bracketed at very sparing
intervals along its corridors.

She
consulted a populous directory-chart on the wall, but without tracing
her finger down it, and had quitted it again before he could gain an
inkling of whose name she sought.

They
had to climb stairs, the building offered no lift. Following her up,
first one flight, then a second, at last a third, he received the
impression she would have climbed a mountain, Everest itself, to gain
her objective. They were, she had told him, ancestrally of
Holland-Dutch stock, she and her sister. He had never seen such
silent stubbornness expressed in anyone as he did in every move of
her hard-pressed laboring body on those stairs. She was more
dreadfully inflexible in her stolid purpose than any passionate,
quickgesturing Creole of the Southland could have been. He couldn't
help but admire her; and, for a moment, he couldn't help but wonder
what sort of wife the other one, Julia, would have made him.

At
the third landing stage they turned off down endless reaches of
arterial passageway, even more poorly lighted than below, and in
sections that were not of one level, some higher than others, some
lower.

"It
doesn't indicate very much prosperity in business, would you say?"
he remarked idly, without thinking.

"It
bespeaks honesty," she answered shortly, "and that is what
I seek."

He
regretted having made the observation.