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[Illustration: ROSALIE LE GRANGE]


THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY

AN EPISODE IN THE CAREER OF ROSALIE LE GRANGE, CLAIRVOYANT


By WILL IRWIN


Illustrated by Frederick C. Yohn




1910




CONTENTS

I. The Unknown Girl

II. Mr. Norcross Wastes Time

III. The Light

IV. His First Call

V. The Light Wavers

VI. Enter Rosalie Le Grange

VII. Rosalie's First Report

VIII. The Fish Nibbles

XI. Rosalie's Second Report

X. The Streams Converge

XI. Through the Wall-Paper

XII. Annette Lies

XIII. Annette Tells the Truth

XIV. Mainly from the Papers



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Rosalie le Grange

Annette

"It wasn't the money; it was the game--"

He had taken an impression of mental power as startling as a sudden
blow in the face

"Then it's as good as done"

Norcross's breath came a little faster

"I was looking straight down on the back parlors"

"Stay where you are," he commanded



THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY




I

THE UNKNOWN GIRL


In a Boston and Albany parlor-car, east bound through the Berkshires,
sat a young man respectfully, but intently studying a young woman. Now
and then, from the newspapers heaped in mannish confusion about his
chair, he selected another sheet. Always, he took advantage of this
opportunity to face the chair across the aisle and to sweep a glance
over a piquant little profile, intent on a sober-looking book. Again,
he would gaze out of the window; and he gazed oftenest when a freight
train hid the beauties of outside nature. The dun sides of freight cars
make out of a window a passable mirror. Twice, in those dim and
confused glimpses, he caught just a flicker of her eye across her book,
as though, she, on her part, were studying him.

It was her back hair which had first entangled Dr. Blake's thoughts; it
was the graceful nape of her neck which had served to hold them fast.
When the hair and the neck below dawned on him, he identified her as
that blonde girl whom he had noted at the train gate, waving farewell
to some receding friend--and noted with approval. As a traveler on many
seas and much land, he knew the lonely longing to address the woman in
the next seat. He knew also, as all seasoned travelers in America know,
that such desire is sometimes gratified, and without any surrender of
decency, in the frank and easy West--but never east of Chicago. This
girl, however, exercised somehow, a special pull upon his attention and
his imagination. And he found himself playing a game by which he had
mitigated many a journey of old. He divided his personality into two
parts--man and physician--and tried, by each separate power, to find as
much as he could from surface indications about this travel-mate of
his.

Mr. Walter Huntington Blake perceived, besides the hair like dripping
honey, deep blue eyes--the blue not of a turquoise but of a
sapphire--and an oval face a little too narrow in the jaw, so that the
chin pointed a delicate Gothic arch. He noted a good forehead, which
inclined him to the belief that she "did" something--some subtle
addition which he could not formulate confirmed that observation. He
saw that her hands were long and tipped with nails no larger than a
grain of maize, that when they rested for a moment on her face, in the
shifting attitudes of her reading, they fell as gently as flower-stalks
swaying together in a breeze. He saw that her shoulders had a slight
slope, which combined with hands and eyes to express a being all
feminine--the kind made for a lodestone to a man who has known the hard
spots of the world, like Mr. Walter Huntington Blake.

"A pippin!" pronounced Mr. Blake, the man.

Dr. Blake, the physician, on the other hand, caught a certain languor
in her movements, a physical tenuity which, in a patient, he would have
considered diagnostic. So transparent was her skin that when her
profile dipped forward across a bar of sunshine the light shone through
the bridge of her nose--a little observation charming to Blake, the
man, but a guide to Blake, the physician. She had the look, Dr. Blake
told himself, which old-fashioned country nurses of the herb-doctor
school refer to as "called." He knew that, in about one case out of
three, that look does in fact amount to a real "call"--the outward
expression of an obscure disease.

"Her heart?" queried Blake, the physician. The transparent, porcelain
quality of her skin would indicate that. But he found, as he watched,
no nervous twitching, no look as of an incipient sack under her eyes;
nor did the transparent quality seem waxy. There was, too, a certain
pinkness in the porcelain which showed that her blood ran red and pure.

Then Mr. Blake and Dr. Blake re-fused into one psychology and decided
that her appearance of delicacy was subtly psychological. It haunted
him with an irritating effect of familiarity--as of a symptom which he
ought to recognize. In all ways was it intertwined with the expression
of her mouth. She had never smiled enough; therein lay all the trouble.
She presented a very pretty problem to his imagination. Here she was,
still so very young that little was written on her face, yet the
little, something unusual, baffling. The mouth, too tightly set, too
drooping--that expressed it all. To educate such a one in the ways of
innocent frivolity!

When the porter's "last call for luncheon" brought that flutter of
satisfaction by which a bored parlor-car welcomes even such a trivial
diversion as food, Dr. Blake waited a fair interval for her toilet
preparations, and followed toward the dining-car. He smiled a little at
himself as he realized that he was craftily scheming to find a seat, if
not opposite her, at least within seeing distance. On a long and lonely
day-journey, he told himself, travelers are like invalids--the smallest
incident rolls up into a mountain of adventure. Here he was, playing
for sight of an interesting girl, as another traveler timed the
train-speed by the mile-posts, or counted the telegraph poles along the
way.

So he came out suddenly into the Pullman car ahead--and almost stumbled
over the nucleus of his meditations. She was half-kneeling beside a
seat, clasping in her arms the figure of a little, old woman. He
hesitated, stock still. The blonde girl shifted her position as though
to take better hold of her burden, and glanced backward with a look of
appeal. The doctor came forward on that; and his sight caught the face
of the old woman. Her eyes were closed, her head had dropped to one
side and lay supine upon the girl's shoulder. It appeared to be a plain
case of faint.

[Illustration: ANNETTE]

"I am a physician," he said simply, "Get the porter, will you?" Without
an instant's question or hesitation, the girl permitted him to relieve
her, and turned to the front of the car. Other women and one fussy,
noisy man were coming up now. Dr. Blake waved them aside. "We need air
most of all--open that window, will you?" The girl was back with the
porter. "Is the compartment occupied? Then open it. We must put her on
her back." The porter fumbled for his keys. Dr. Blake gathered up the
little old woman in his arms, and spoke over his shoulder to the blonde
girl:

"You will come with us?" She nodded. Somehow, he felt that he would
have picked her from the whole car to assist in this emergency. She was
like one of those born trained nurses who ask no questions, need no
special directions, and are as reliable as one's instruments.

The old woman was stirring by the time he laid her out on the sofa of
the compartment. He wet a towel in the pitcher at the washstand, wrung
it out, pressed it on her forehead. It needed no more than that to
bring her round.

"Only a faint," said Dr. Blake; "the day's hot and she's not accustomed
to train travel, I suppose. Is she--does she belong to your party?"

The girl spoke for the first time in his hearing. Even before he seized
the meaning of her speech, he noted with a thrill the manner of it.
Such a physique as this should go with the high, silvery tone of a
flute; so one always imagines it. This girl spoke in the voice of a
violin--soft, deep, deliciously resonant. In his mind flashed a picture
for which he was a long time accounting--last winter's ballet of the
New York Hippodrome. Afterward, he found the key to that train of
thought. It, had been a ballet of light, shimmering colors, until
suddenly a troop of birds in royal purple had slashed their way down
the center of the stage. They brought the same glorified thrill of
contrast as this soft but strong contralto voice proceeding from that
delicate blondness.

"Oh, no!" she said, "I never saw her before. She was swaying as I came
down the aisle, and I caught her. She's--she's awake." The old woman
had stirred again.

"Get my bag from seat 12, parlor-car," said Dr. Blake to the porter.
"Tell them outside that it is a simple fainting-spell and we shall need
no assistance." Now his charity patient had recovered voice; she was
moaning and whimpering. The girl, obeying again Dr. Blake's unspoken
thought, took a quick step toward the door. He understood without
further word from her.

"All right," he said; "she may want to discuss symptoms. You're on the
way to the dining-car aren't you? I'll be along in five minutes, and
I'll let you know how she is. Tell them outside that it is nothing
serious and have the porter stand by--please." That last word of
politeness came out on an afterthought--he had been addressing her in
the capacity of a trained nurse. He recognized this with confusion, and
he apologized by a smile which illuminated his rather heavy, dark face.
She answered with the ghost of a smile--it moved her eyes rather than
her mouth--and the door closed.

After five minutes of perfunctory examination and courteous attention
to symptoms, he tore himself away from his patient upon the pretext
that she needed quiet. He wasted three more golden minutes in assuring
his fellow passengers that it was nothing. He escaped to the dining
car, to find that the delay had favored him. Her honey-colored back
hair gleamed from one of the narrow tables to left of the aisle. The
unconsidered man opposite her had just laid a bill on the waiter's
check, and dipped his hands in the fingerbowl. Dr. Blake invented a
short colloquy with the conductor and slipped up just as the waiter
returned with the change. He bent over the girl.

"I have to report," said he, "that the patient is doing nicely; doctor
and nurse are both discharged!"

She returned a grave smile and answered conventionally, "I am very
glad."

At that precise moment, the man across the table, as though recognizing
friendship or familiarity between these two, pocketed his change and
rose. Feeling that he was doing the thing awkwardly, that he would give
a year for a light word to cover up his boldness, Dr. Blake took the
seat. He looked slowly up as he settled himself, and he could feel the
heat of a blush on his temples. He perceived--and for a moment it did
not reassure him--that she on her part neither blushed nor bristled.
Her skin kept its transparent whiteness, and her eyes looked into his
with intent gravity. Indeed, he felt through her whole attitude the
perfect frankness of good breeding--a frankness which discouraged
familiarity while accepting with human simplicity an accidental contact
of the highway. She was the better gentleman of the two. His renewed
confusion set him to talking fast.

"If it weren't that you failed to come in with any superfluous advice,
I should say that you had been a nurse--you seem to have the instinct.
You take hold, somehow, and make no fuss."

"Why should I?" she asked, "with a doctor at hand? I was thinking all
the time how you lean on a doctor. I should never have known what to
do. How is she? What was the matter?"

"She's resting. It isn't every elderly lady who can get a compartment
from the Pullman Company for the price of a seat. She was put on at
Albany by one set of grandchildren and she's to be taken off at
Boston by another set. And she's old and her heart's a little
sluggish--self-sacrifice goes downward not upward, through the
generations, I observe--though I'm a young physician at that!"

Her next words, simply spoken as they were, threw him again into
confusion.

"I don't know your name, I think--mine is Annette Markham."

Dr. Blake drew out a card.

"Dr. W.H. Blake, sometime contract surgeon to the Philippine Army of
Occupation," he supplemented, "now looking for a practice in these
United States!"

"The Philippines--oh, you've been in the East? When we were in the
Orient, I used to hear of them ever so dimly--I didn't think we'd all
be talking of them so soon--"

"Oh, you've been in the Orient--do you know the China Coast--and Nikko
and--"

"No, only India."

"I've never been there--and I've heard it's the kernel of the East," he
said with his lips. But his mind was puzzling something out and finding
a solution. The accent of that deep, resonant voice was neither Eastern
nor Western, Yankee nor Southern--nor yet quite British. It was rather
cosmopolitan--he had dimly placed her as a Californienne. Perhaps this
fragment explained it. She must be a daughter of the English official
class, reared in America. The theory would explain her complexion and
her simple, natural balance between frankness and reserve. He formed
that conclusion, but, "How do you like America after India?" was all he
said.

"How do you like it after the Philippines?" she responded.

"That is a Yankee trick--answering one question with another," he said,
still following his line of conjecture; "it was invented by the
original Yankee philosopher, a person named Socrates. I like it after
everything--I'm an American. I'm one of those rare birds in the Eastern
United States, a native of New York City."

"Well, then,"--her manner had, for the first time, the brightness which
goes with youth, plus the romantic adventure--"I like it not only after
anything but before anything--I'm an American, too."

A sense of irritation rose in him. He had let conjecture grow to
conclusion in the most reckless fashion. And why should he care so much
that he had risked offending a mere passing acquaintance of the road?

"Somehow, I had taken it for granted--your reference to India I
suppose--that you were English."

"Oh, no! Though an English governess made me fond of the English. I'm
another of the rare birds. I was hardly out of New York in my life
until five years ago, when my aunt took me for a stay of two years in
the Orient--in India at least. I've been very happy to be back."

The current of talk drifted then from the coast of confidences to the
open sea of general conversation. He pulled himself up once or twice by
the reflection that he was talking too much about himself. Once--and he
remembered it with blushes afterward--he went so far as to say, "I
didn't really need to be a doctor, any more than I needed to go to the
Philippines--the family income takes care of that. But a man should do
something." Nevertheless, she seemed disposed to encourage him in this
course, seemed most to encourage him when he told his stories about the
Philippine Army of Occupation.

"Oh, tell me another!" she would cry. And once she said, "If there were
a piano here, I venture you'd sing Mandelay." "That would I," he
answered with a half sigh. And at last, when he was running down, she
said, "Oh, please don't stop! It makes me crazy for the Orient!" "And
me!" he confessed. Before luncheon was over, he had dragged out the two
or three best stories in his wanderer's pack, and especially that one,
which he saved for late firesides and the high moments of anecdotal
exchange, about the charge at Caloocon. She drank down these tales of
hike and jungle and firing-line like a seminary girl listening to her
first grownup caller. For his part, youth and the need of male youth to
spread its bright feathers before the female of its species, drove him
on to more tales. He contrived his luncheon so that they finished and
paid simultaneously--and in the middle of his story about Sergeant
Jones, the dynamite and the pack mule. So, when they returned to the
parlor-car, nothing was more simple, natural and necessary than that he
should drop into the vacant chair beside her, and continue where he
left off. He felt, when he had finished, the polite necessity of
leading the talk back to her; besides, he had not finished his Study of
the Unknown Girl. He returned, then, to the last thread which she had
left hanging.

"So you too are glad to be at home!" he said. "I'm so glad that I don't
want to lose sight either of a skyscraper or of apple trees for years
and years. I can't remember when I've ever wanted to stay in one place
before."

She laughed--the first full laugh he had heard from her. It was low and
deep and bubbling, like water flowing from a long-necked bottle.

"Just a moment ago, we were confessing that we were crazy for the
Orient."

"I'm glad to be caught in an inconsistency!" he answered. "I've been
afraid, though, that this desire to roost in one place was a sign of
incipient old age."

She looked at him directly, and for a moment her fearless glance played
over him, as in alarm.

"Oh, I shouldn't be afraid of _that_," she said. "I don't know your
age, of course, but if it will reassure you any, I'd put it at
twenty-eight. And that, according to Peter Ibbertson, is quite the
nicest age." Her face, with its unyouthful capacity for sudden
seriousness, grew grave. Her deep blue eyes gazed past him out of the
window.

"I'm only twenty-four, but I know what it is to think that middle age
is near--to dread it--especially when I half suspect I haven't spent
the interest on my youth." She stopped.

Dr. Blake held his very breath. His instincts warned him that she
faltered at one of those instincts when confidence lies close to the
lips. But she did not give it. Instead, she caught herself up with a
perfunctory, "I suppose everyone feels that way at times."

Although he wanted that confidence, he was clever enough not to reach
for it at this point. Instead, he took a wide detour, and returned
slowly, backing and filling to the point. But every time that he
approached a closer intimacy, she veered away with an adroitness which
was consummate art or consummate innocence. His first impression
grew--that she "did" something. She had mentioned "Peter Ibbertson." He
spoke, then, of books. She had read much, especially fiction; but she
treated books as one who does not write. He talked art. Though she
spoke with originality and understanding in response to his second-hand
studio chatter, he could see that she neither painted nor associated
much with those who did. Besides, her hands had none of the
craftswoman's muscle. Of music--beyond ragtime--she knew as little as
he. He invaded business--her ignorance was abysmal. The stage--she
could count on her fingers the late plays which she had seen.

When the trail had grown almost cold, there happened a little incident
which put him on the scent again. He had thought suddenly of his
patient in the compartment and made a visit, only to find her asleep.
Upon his return he said:

"You behaved like a soldier and a nurse toward her--a girl with such a
distinct _flair_ for the game must have had longings to take up
nursing--or perhaps you never read 'Sister Dora'?"

"I did read 'Sister Dora,'" she answered, "and I was crazy about it."

"Most girls are--hence the high death rate in hospitals," he
interrupted.

"But I gave that up--and a lot of other desires which all girls
have--for something else. I had to." Her sapphirine eyes searched the
Berkshire hills again, "Something bigger and nobler--something which
meant the entire sacrifice of self."

And here the brakeman called "Next station is Berkeley Center." Dr.
Blake came to the sudden realization that they had reached his
destination. She started, too.

"Why, I get off here!" she exclaimed.

"And so do I!" He almost laughed it out.

"That's a coincidence."

Dr. Blake refrained from calling her attention to the general flutter
of the parlor-car and the industry of two porters. This being the
high-tide time of the summer migration, and Berkeley Center being the
popular resort on that line, nearly everyone was getting off. However
as he delivered himself over to the porter, he nodded:

"The climax of a series!"

As they waited, bags in hand, "I am on my way to substitute for a month
at the Hill Sanatorium," he said. "The assistant physician is going on
a vacation--I suppose the ambulance will be waiting."

"And I am going to the Mountain House--it's a little place and more the
house of friends than an inn. If your work permits--"

He interrupted with a boyish laugh.

"Oh, it will!" But he said good-bye at the vestibule with a vague idea
that she might have trouble explaining him to any very particular
friends. He saw her mount an old-fashioned carry-all, saw her turn to
wave a farewell. The carry-all disappeared. He started toward the Hill
ambulance, but he was still thinking, "Now what is the thing which a
girl like _that_ would consider more self-sacrificing than nursing?"




II

MR. NORCROSS WASTES TIME


Robert H. Norcross looked up from a sheet of figures, and turned his
vision upon the serrated spire of old Trinity Church, far below. Since
his eyes began to fail, he had cultivated the salutary habit of resting
them every half-hour or so. The action was merely mechanical; his mind
still lingered on the gross earnings of the reorganized L.D. and M.
railroad. It was a sultry afternoon in early fall. The roar of lower
New York came up to him muffled by the haze. The traffic seemed to move
more slowly than usual, as though that haze clogged its wheels and
congealed its oils. The very tugs and barges, on the river beyond,
partook of the season's languor. They crept over the oily waves at a
sluggard pace, their smoke-streamers dropping wearily toward the water.

The eyes of Robert H. Norcross swept this vista for the allotted two
minutes of rest. Presently--and with the very slightest change of
expression--they fixed themselves on a point so far below that he needs
must lean forward and rest his arms on the window sill in order to
look. He wasted thus a minute; and such a wasting, in the case of
Robert H. Norcross, was a considerable matter. The Sunday
newspapers--when in doubt--always played the income of Robert H.
Norcross by periods of months, weeks, days, hours and minutes. Every
minute of his time, their reliable statisticians computed, was worth a
trifle less than forty-seven dollars. Regardless of the waste of time,
he continued to gaze until the watch on his desk had ticked off five
minutes, or two hundred and thirty-five dollars.

The thing which had caught and held his attention was a point in the
churchyard of old Trinity near to the south door.

The Street had been remarking, for a year, that Norcross was growing
old. The change did not show in his operations. His grip on the market
was as firm as ever, his judgment as sure, his imagination as daring,
his habit of keeping his own counsel as settled. Within that year, he
had consummated the series of operations by which the L.D. and M.,
final independent road needed by his system, had "come in"; within that
year, he had closed the last finger of his grip on a whole principality
of our domain. Every laborer in that area would thenceforth do a part
of his day's delving, every merchant a part of his day's bargaining,
for Robert H. Norcross. Thenceforth--until some other robber baron
should wrest it from his hands--Norcross would make laws and unmake
legislatures, dictate judgments and overrule appointments--give the
high justice while courts and assemblies trifled with the middle and
the low. Certainly the history of that year in American finance
indicated no flagging in the powers of Robert H. Norcross.

The change which the Street had marked lay in his face--it had taken on
the subtle imprint of a first frosty day. He had never looked the power
that he was. Short and slight of build, his head was rather small even
for his size, and his features were insignificant--all except the
mouth, whose wide firmness he covered by a drooping mustache, and the
eyes, which betrayed always an inner fire. The trained observer of
faces noticed this, however; every curve of his facial muscles, every
plane of the inner bone-structure, was set by nature definitely and
properly in its place to make a powerful and perfectly cooerdinated
whole. In this facial manifestation of mental powers, he was like one
of those little athletes who, carrying nothing superfluous, show the
power, force and endurance which is in them by no masses of overlying
muscles, but only by a masterful symmetry.

Now, in a year, the change had come over his face--the jump as abrupt
as that by which a young girl grows up--the transition from middle age
to old age. It was not so much that his full, iron-gray hair and
mustache had bleached and silvered. It was more that the cheeks were
falling from middle-aged masses to old-age creases, more that the skin
was drawing up, most that the inner energy which had vitalized his walk
and gestures was his no longer.

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