The Burning Court Read Free

did Mrs. Henderson see the woman at all?”
    “Mrs. Henderson claims to have seen her through a window, which Miles usually kept curtained, giving on an upper sun porch. No; I haven’t mentioned it to Lucy or Edith.” He hesitated, and then laughed boisterously. “For a very good reason. That doesn’t bother me; I’m not trying to make any mystery of it. It’s the other part of Mrs. Henderson’s tale that puzzles me. According to her story, this woman in the old-fashioned clothes—now attend to me carefully—first had a little talk with Miles, and then turned round and went out of the room by a door which does not exist.”
    Stevens looked at him. Mark Despard’s thin hook-nosed face wore a gravity which may or may not have been satirical.
    “You don’t say so,” Stevens observed, with a noncommittal noise. “Ghosts?”
    “I mean,” said Mark, frowning over a careful definition of terms, “a door which has been bricked up and panelled over for two hundred years. Mysterious visitor simply opens it and walks out. Ghosts? No; I doubt it very much. We’ve managed to struggle along for a very long time without producing any ghosts. We’ve been too cursed respectable. You can’t imagine a respectable ghost; it may be a credit to the family, but it’s an insult to guests. More likely it’s something wrong with Mrs. Henderson, if you ask me.”
    Abruptly he had strode off down the avenue.
    That was a week ago; and Stevens, thinking over the interview in the train that was carrying him to Crispen now, touched the puzzle-bits without much attention. He was considering merely isolated instances—the talk with Morley at the office, the talk with Mark Despard in the road—and wondering not how they could be explained, but how they could be fitted together in the form of a story. Granted that they bore no relation to each other, any more than separate newspaper items. But here they were: a recluse of an author, Gaudan Cross, who had a passion for seeing his own photograph, not from motives of vanity; a recluse of a millionaire, Miles Despard, dying of stomach inflammation, and under his pillow a piece of string tied into nine knots; finally, a woman in old-fashioned clothes (date not specified) who was alleged to have walked out of a room through a door that had been bricked up for two hundred years. Now, how would a skilled story-teller tie together those unrelated facts or fancies into one pattern?
    Stevens gave it up. But, still curious about Cross, he opened the briefcase and drew out the manuscript in its container. It was fairly bulky; it would run, he estimated, about a hundred thousand words; and, like all Cross’s manuscripts, it was neat with an almost finicky preciseness. The chapters were punched together with brass fasteners; the prints, photographs, and drawings affixed with paper-clips. After running his eye down the table of contents, he glanced at the heading of the first chapter—but that was not what made his grip on the manuscript loosen, so that it almost slid off his knee.
    Fastened to the page was an old but still very clear photograph of a woman. Under it in small neat letters had been printed:
    Marie D’Aubray: Guillotined for Murder, 1861.
    He was looking at a photograph of his own wife.
II
    For a time he sat quiet, insistently examining the name, insistently examining the features. All the while that he went over and over them, he was hazily conscious that he still sat in the smoking-car of the 7:35 train for Crispen. But he still seemed to be in a great void.
    Presently he looked up, settled the manuscript more firmly in his lap, and looked out of the window. His feeling (it was a commonplace one) was something like that of sitting up in a dentist’s chair after an extraction: a little light-headed, conscious of a little quicker heartbeat; nothing more. He was not even conscious of being startled now. He saw that they were flashing through Overbrook, with a clackety-roar of rails, and