Of Doctor Walker’s sensational escape that night to South America, of the
recovery of over a million dollars in cash and securities in the safe from the
chimney room—the papers have kept the public well informed. Of my share
in discovering the secret chamber they have been singularly silent. The inner
history has never been told. Mr. Jamieson got all kinds of credit, and some of
it he deserved, but if Jack Bailey, as Alex, had not traced Halsey and insisted
on the disinterring of Paul Armstrong’s casket, if he had not suspected
the truth from the start, where would the detective have been?
When Halsey learned the truth, he insisted on going the next morning, weak as
he was, to Louise, and by night she was at Sunnyside, under Gertrude’s
particular care, while her mother had gone to Barbara Fitzhugh’s.
What Halsey said to Mrs. Armstrong I never knew, but that he was considerate
and chivalrous I feel confident. It was Halsey’s way always with women.
He and Louise had no conversation together until that night. Gertrude and
Alex—I mean Jack—had gone for a walk, although it was nine
o’clock, and anybody but a pair of young geese would have known that dew
was falling, and that it is next to impossible to get rid of a summer cold.
At half after nine, growing weary of my own company, I went downstairs to find
the young people. At the door of the living-room I paused. Gertrude and Jack
had returned and were there, sitting together on a divan, with only one lamp
lighted. They did not see or hear me, and I beat a hasty retreat to the
library. But here again I was driven back. Louise was sitting in a deep chair,
looking the happiest I had ever seen her, with Halsey on the arm of the chair,
holding her close.
It was no place for an elderly spinster. I retired to my upstairs sitting-room
and got out Eliza Klinefelter’s lavender slippers. Ah, well, the foster
motherhood would soon have to be put away in camphor again.
The next day, by degrees, I got the whole story.
Paul Armstrong had a besetting evil—the love of money. Common enough, but
he loved money, not for what it would buy, but for its own sake. An examination
of the books showed no irregularities in the past year since John had been
cashier, but before that, in the time of Anderson, the old cashier, who had
died, much strange juggling had been done with the records. The railroad in New
Mexico had apparently drained the banker’s private fortune, and he
determined to retrieve it by one stroke. This was nothing less than the looting
of the bank’s securities, turning them into money, and making his escape.
But the law has long arms. Paul Armstrong evidently studied the situation
carefully. Just as the only good Indian is a dead Indian, so the only safe
defaulter is a dead defaulter. He decided to die, to all appearances, and when
the hue and cry subsided, he would be able to enjoy his money almost anywhere
he wished.
The first necessity was an accomplice. The connivance of Doctor Walker was
suggested by his love for Louise. The man was unscrupulous, and with the girl
as a bait, Paul Armstrong soon had him fast. The plan was apparently the acme
of simplicity: a small town in the west, an attack of heart disease, a body
from a medical college dissecting-room shipped in a trunk to Doctor Walker by a
colleague in San Francisco, and palmed off for the supposed dead banker. What
was simpler?
The woman, Nina Carrington, was the cog that slipped. What she only suspected,
what she really knew, we never learned. She was a chambermaid in the hotel at
C—, and it was evidently her intention to blackmail Doctor Walker. His
position at that time was uncomfortable: to pay the woman to keep quiet would
be confession. He denied the whole thing, and she went to Halsey.
It was this that had taken Halsey to the doctor the night he disappeared. He
accused the doctor of the deception, and, crossing the lawn, had said something
cruel to Louise. Then, furious at her apparent connivance, he had started for
the station. Doctor Walker and Paul Armstrong—the latter still lame where
I had shot him—hurried across to the embankment, certain only of one
thing. Halsey must not tell the detective what he suspected until the money had
been removed from the chimney-room. They stepped into the road in front of the
car to stop it, and fate played into their hands. The car struck the train, and
they had only to dispose of the unconscious figure in the road. This they did
as I have told. For three days Halsey lay in the box car, tied hand and foot,
suffering tortures of thirst, delirious at times, and discovered by a tramp at
Johnsville only in time to save his life.
To go back to Paul Armstrong. At the last moment his plans had been frustrated.
Sunnyside, with its hoard in the chimney-room, had been rented without his
knowledge! Attempts to dislodge me having failed, he was driven to breaking
into his own house. The ladder in the chute, the burning of the stable and the
entrance through the card-room window—all were in the course of a
desperate attempt to get into the chimney-room.
Louise and her mother had, from the first, been the great stumbling-blocks. The
plan had been to send Louise away until it was too late for her to interfere,
but she came back to the hotel at C— just at the wrong time. There was a
terrible scene. The girl was told that something of the kind was necessary,
that the bank was about to close and her stepfather would either avoid arrest
and disgrace in this way, or kill himself. Fanny Armstrong was a weakling, but
Louise was more difficult to manage. She had no love for her stepfather, but
her devotion to her mother was entire, self-sacrificing. Forced into
acquiescence by her mother’s appeals, overwhelmed by the situation, the
girl consented and fled.
From somewhere in Colorado she sent an anonymous telegram to Jack Bailey at the
Traders’ Bank. Trapped as she was, she did not want to see an innocent
man arrested. The telegram, received on Thursday, had sent the cashier to the
bank that night in a frenzy.
Louise arrived at Sunnyside and found the house rented. Not knowing what to do,
she sent for Arnold at the Greenwood Club, and told him a little, not all. She
told him that there was something wrong, and that the bank was about to close.
That his father was responsible. Of the conspiracy she said nothing. To her
surprise, Arnold already knew, through Bailey that night, that things were not
right. Moreover, he suspected what Louise did not, that the money was hidden at
Sunnyside. He had a scrap of paper that indicated a concealed room somewhere.
His inherited cupidity was aroused. Eager to get Halsey and Jack Bailey out of
the house, he went up to the east entry, and in the billiard-room gave the
cashier what he had refused earlier in the evening—the address of Paul
Armstrong in California and a telegram which had been forwarded to the club for
Bailey, from Doctor Walker. It was in response to one Bailey had sent, and it
said that Paul Armstrong was very ill.
Bailey was almost desperate. He decided to go west and find Paul Armstrong, and
to force him to disgorge. But the catastrophe at the bank occurred sooner than
he had expected. On the moment of starting west, at Andrews Station, where Mr.
Jamieson had located the car, he read that the bank had closed, and, going
back, surrendered himself.
John Bailey had known Paul Armstrong intimately. He did not believe that the
money was gone; in fact, it was hardly possible in the interval since the
securities had been taken. Where was it? And from some chance remark let fall
some months earlier by Arnold Armstrong at a dinner, Bailey felt sure there was
a hidden room at Sunnyside. He tried to see the architect of the building, but,
like the contractor, if he knew of the such a room he refused any information.
It was Halsey’s idea that John Bailey come to the house as a gardener,
and pursue his investigations as he could. His smooth upper lip had been
sufficient disguise, with his change of clothes, and a hair-cut by a country
barber.
So it was Alex, Jack Bailey, who had been our ghost. Not only had he
alarmed—Louise and himself, he admitted—on the circular staircase,
but he had dug the hole in the trunk-room wall, and later sent Eliza into
hysteria. The note Liddy had found in Gertrude’s scrap-basket was from
him, and it was he who had startled me into unconsciousness by the clothes
chute, and, with Gertrude’s help, had carried me to Louise’s room.
Gertrude, I learned, had watched all night beside me, in an extremity of
anxiety about me.
That old Thomas had seen his master, and thought he had seen the Sunnyside
ghost, there could be no doubt. Of that story of Thomas’, about seeing
Jack Bailey in the footpath between the club and Sunnyside, the night Liddy and
I heard the noise on the circular staircase—that, too, was right. On the
night before Arnold Armstrong was murdered, Jack Bailey had made his first
attempt to search for the secret room. He secured Arnold’s keys from his
room at the club and got into the house, armed with a golf-stick for sounding
the walls. He ran against the hamper at the head of the stairs, caught his
cuff-link in it, and dropped the golf-stick with a crash. He was glad enough to
get away without an alarm being raised, and he took the “owl” train
to town.
The oddest thing to me was that Mr. Jamieson had known for some time that Alex
was Jack Bailey. But the face of the pseudo-gardener was very queer indeed,
when that night, in the card-room, the detective turned to him and said:
“How long are you and I going to play our little comedy, Mr.
Bailey?”
Well, it is all over now. Paul Armstrong rests in Casanova churchyard, and this
time there is no mistake. I went to the funeral, because I wanted to be sure he
was really buried, and I looked at the step of the shaft where I had sat that
night, and wondered if it was all real. Sunnyside is for sale—no, I shall
not buy it. Little Lucien Armstrong is living with his step-grandmother, and
she is recovering gradually from troubles that had extended over the entire
period of her second marriage. Anne Watson lies not far from the man she
killed, and who as surely caused her death. Thomas, the fourth victim of the
conspiracy, is buried on the hill. With Nina Carrington, five lives were
sacrificed in the course of this grim conspiracy.
There will be two weddings before long, and Liddy has asked for my heliotrope
poplin to wear to the church. I knew she would. She has wanted it for three
years, and she was quite ugly the time I spilled coffee on it. We are very
quiet, just the two of us. Liddy still clings to her ghost theory, and points
to my wet and muddy boots in the trunk-room as proof. I am gray, I admit, but I
haven’t felt as well in a dozen years. Sometimes, when I am bored, I ring
for Liddy, and we talk things over. When Warner married Rosie, Liddy sniffed
and said what I took for faithfulness in Rosie had been nothing but
mawkishness. I have not yet outlived Liddy’s contempt because I gave them
silver knives and forks as a wedding gift.
So we sit and talk, and sometimes Liddy threatens to leave, and often I
discharge her, but we stay together somehow. I am talking of renting a house
next year, and Liddy says to be sure there is no ghost. To be perfectly frank,
I never really lived until that summer. Time has passed since I began this
story. My neighbors are packing up for another summer. Liddy is having the
awnings put up, and the window boxes filled. Liddy or no Liddy, I shall
advertise to-morrow for a house in the country, and I don’t care if it
has a Circular Staircase.
