Chapter XXIII: The Naked Footstep

“You fool!” Dolly had said. “You selfish, selfish fool!”

It was not much of a congratulation on her sister’s engagement and she had gone out without another word. The little sitting-room in Hare’s Buildings seemed very dull and cheerless to Magdalen, left alone there; but, even so, that was no reason that she should come out of her sullen thoughts with a jump and find herself leaning forward--listening till her heart seemed to stop in her.

She had been alone there often enough, since Dolly was always out; she must be getting nervous. She said a scornful word to herself and tried to think of Lovell. But it was no use.

The sound--that could be no sound but the moving of her own blood--had her by the throat. It was not a rustle, more like a certain subtle jarring; a pad, pad, as of bare feet stepping very softly.

“Some one on the stairs,” she thought determinedly, but her eyes were very black in her pale face. She marched to the hall door and opened it.

There was the empty landing, the vacant staircase that went down to the entrance, where the fanlight in the tailor’s side door glowed cheerfully.

“It was imagination,” she thought, for not a sound came now from anywhere.

She locked the door and went back to her seat, something making her move softly; an absurd thing to do in an empty house. More absurd still, she sat down by the fire, facing the door of the little room, her back hard against the wall, as if the place were haunted.

She looked round her with a kind of contempt for herself. The room was not big enough to swing a cat in or to hide one. Opposite her was a sofa and the open door; at her right hand a window and a writing-table; at her left a high bookcase in the middle of a blank wall. The whole place was not more than four yards square. It was a fine thing to be nervous here, when in all the eery gloom of Ardmore Castle she had been steady enough.

Her face grew hard and dark. If Dolly would only listen to her! But not a word she said went through that armor of Dolly’s that was made of obstinacy and--even to herself she would not say deceit.

All the same, there was absolutely no cause for the uneasiness that was gripping the girl’s soul.

A week had gone by since that vision of Keith and Stratharden at the window; a week in which there had been no sign of either; no stranger at the door; not so much as a glance cast after either Dolly or Magdalen in the street. Starr-Dalton had never appeared again after that one day; and whatever had troubled Dolly was over. Except that she never let Ronald out of her sight or the front door off the latch, she seemed to have forgotten that she had ever feared Stratharden or anyone else. But somehow that very thought set the girl’s face in what Dolly called “Magdalen’s scowl.”

“She’s been at her old tricks,” she reflected angrily. “He must have lent her that money.” Which was true enough; even Mr. Starr-Dalton could rake up five pounds to lend to a lady who allowed him fifteen per cent. on every check he cashed for her.

“She’s out a great deal; she never seems to think it mayn’t be safe to take Ronald,” she mused. “But they wouldn’t dare kidnap him. I fancy Lord Stratharden has done his best and shot his bolt. Any more would make a noise and we know too much for it to be safe to meddle with us. I wish Dolly would come home. It’s getting dark.”

It was; dark and foggy. The room looked thick with the fog that crept in through the badly fitting windows. The fire had died down to a dull-red glow, ugly, cheerless; she was cold. Miss Clyde stretched out a long, graceful arm to the grate--and sat with a pounding heart.

“Pad, pad!” there it was again. More the feeling of a sound than a sound itself, yet her young flesh crawled on her bones.

The thing, whatever it was, was in the house, not on the stairs. She sat rigid on the rug, one hand still stretched out to the forgotten fire. The soft, slow sound was over her head, upstairs; almost inaudible in the hush of her listening, through which came the cheerful passing of cabs in the street. If it was tangible enough to be like anything human it was like a bare foot on a bare floor. Only nerves strung up and sharpened could have known there was a sound at all.

“Fool!” exclaimed the girl through shut, vicious teeth. A great tide of hot blood seemed to flash through her veins that had run so slow.

She got up and went out in the hall and up-stairs. All the fear had gone out of her; she moved like a man does, confidently. If there were a thief in the house, or any one else, he might have done well to run from a girl whose eyes looked like Magdalen Clyde’s.

The dim staircase was empty. The dining-room that was in the back of the house, over the sitting-room, empty, desolate; for as Dolly would have no servants they never used it. In the kitchen there was no one, the slim ranks of dishes on the dresser were as usual; the table, set for dinner, was untouched.

In Magdalen’s own bedroom there was nothing more ghostly than her gowns hanging on the wall, very black and straight.

Mr. Lovell’s “good luck” stood in the middle of the room and looked a fool. It had all been imagination. The windows were three stories above the street and no one but a cat could have entered them. One of them was open six inches or so, leaving plenty of room for just that cat.

“I am an idiot, with my footsteps!” thought Miss Clyde wrathfully. She shut down the window and lighted all the gas, up-stairs and down, before she sat down again.

She had been listening for Dolly and that began the mischief. No one can listen long in an empty house and not hear something. Certainly there was no sound now, nor the dream of one.

“Still, I may as well finish, or I’ll be thinking of it in the night,” she thought. It was half-past six; the tailor’s shop would be shut, the hands gone home; the back premises down-stairs open to the explorer.

Candle in hand, latch-key and matches in pocket, she emerged on the landing and shut her own front door behind her. The tailor’s shop was dark; the street door ajar at the foot of the staircase. A streak of light came through it and the cheerful yell of a newsboy. Standing with her back to the door, she saw the bare, narrow passage, half-way down it her own stairs; past them, at the end of it, a green baize door. As she looked at it it swung forward a little, as with some draft, then swung back. It must have been that soft closing and opening she had magnified into a quiet foot over her head.

“Still,” she thought sensibly, “they oughtn’t to go away and leave a ground-floor window open if it is in a dark area. Goodness knows who may live in those horrid houses behind us.”

She gave the green door a push and went in as it gave to her hand, and saw nothing but the dark hole where the tailor hands ate their dinner on a table littered with crumbs and greasy papers. The barred and grated window was shut, yet the air in the room was oddly fresh.

“A ventilator, of course!” she thought vexedly, having let her nerves run riot for nothing.

At the foot of her own stairs she turned and saw the baize door move again stealthily and swing back; if she had not known about that draft, would have been certain some one stood behind it. But as it was she went up-stairs with a contemptuous dismissal of the feeling that there was somebody behind her. It was time to get ready for Dolly--to cook.

“Why on earth couldn’t we have an all-night restaurant below us instead of a tailor’s shop? It mightn’t be so respectable, but it would be a hundred times more convenient,” she thought; yet it was not the cooking that was on her mind, but the loneliness of the place at night, that she had never cared two pins about till now. And the next second she forgot it, for Dolly’s key clicked in the latch.

Hand in hand with Ronald she swept in, a different Dolly from the angry one who had gone out.

“We’re awfully late; I’m starving,” she cried gaily. “Oh, it’s so horrid out of doors! What a wretched fire, Magdalen.”

“I forgot it,” she replied guiltily. “Where’ve you been?” There was a quick, incredulous hope in her that Dolly had repented about Lovell.

“Oh, shopping”--putting down heterogeneous parcels.

“Don’t sit on that, Ronald! It’s a chicken. I felt it would be my death if I didn’t have chicken.”

She pulled something from the front of her dress and rustled it in Magdalen’s face.

“What about old Stratharden now?” she exclaimed triumphantly. “He can watch at the bank till he’s black in the face. Look there!” her packet of clean five-pound notes flourished over her head.

“How did you manage?”

“Starr-Dalton cashed it,” Dolly observed, half careless, half defiant. “I told you he’d be useful.”

There was a senseless lump in Magdalen’s throat.

“It’s all so unnecessary,” she said heavily. “There’s no sense in it. Why can’t we behave like ordinary people?” Perhaps the knowledge that she herself had not been behaving like an ordinary person during Dolly’s absence sharpened her tongue. “What excuse would Stratharden have for hunting us? And if he wanted to, putting that out of the question, there’s no possible hope that he couldn’t lay his finger on us this very minute.” Somehow that creeping noise that she had but just now thoroughly explained to herself came back to her unreasonably.

Dolly looked at her, a sudden breeze of good sense blowing through her shut-up little mind. But Dolly never believed in impulses.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked reasonably enough. “It’s got nothing to do with you. I’m sick of it,” and truly she looked it as her small head went back distastefully.

“Put yourself in my place, Dolly. You don’t really put enough trust in me to be open with me. I have to live shut up in this hole--oh, I don’t mind the cooking and cleaning; it isn’t that. It’s because you know all about Stratharden and yet you won’t protect yourself against him. I’m tired of it. I want to have some life of my own.”

The devil in the Countess of Barnysdale woke up.

“Which means Mr. Lovell!” she said with a polite gaze at the opposite wall.

Perhaps it did. Magdalen did not care.

“It’s plain sense,” she retorted. “You’ve money; Stratharden has nothing against you but that silly invention of madness that wouldn’t work anywhere but in an out-of-the-world place like Ardmore. Why can’t we go and live openly somewhere and let Starr-Dalton be ‘useful’ to other people? Then, if Stratharden did anything, you’d have a good case and the law at your back. While here----” She shrugged her shoulders.

The law at her back! When, for what she had done to Magdalen alone she could be put in prison to-morrow, let alone anything else. The rouge on Dolly’s cheeks stood out like fire.

“Here he can’t send in servants to meddle with Ronald,” she said irrelevantly. “That’s why I won’t have one. How do I know who she might be? As for a good case and the police”--for one instant she shut her eyes--“I’m not going to have all my past life dragged up by the police because you’re bored--so now you know.”

“Then there’s something----” It was a stupid speech from Magdalen Clyde, who was not surprised at all, but only contemptuous.

“There’s nothing.” There was nothing in the voice to tell whether Dolly was ghastly from fright or fury. “How dare you say there is?” With the old, senseless fierceness she snatched Ronald to her. “I tell you he’s Barnysdale’s son and I’ll fight for him in my own way. You can interfere, if you want to kill me.”

For a girl who had all along been sure there was a lie somewhere, Magdalen felt oddly sick.

“Don’t talk about it, will you?” It was an order, not a question. “I only told you to--to make you understand. I suppose you haven’t told your Lovell about me yet.”

“Doll,” said the girl impulsively, “give up being a countess!” If there was meaning in her words Dolly did not mark it. “This place is paid for. I’ll work for you.”

“How?” scornfully. “Take in washing? Don’t be a fool.”

“No, make hats,” practically.

“Who’ll buy them? Nonsense! Half of this is for you.” She held out the roll of notes. “I owe it to you.”

For once in her life Magdalen turned scarlet.

“How could you owe me anything?” she cried and turned away; no power on earth would have made her touch that money Dolly had been afraid to go and get. “I’ll begin that hat business to-morrow. I’ve been sending away Madame Aline’s old customers all the week.”

To work at anything would be better than to sit thinking her nerves into fiddlestrings as she had to-day. The prospect of it cheered her as she woke in the middle of the night. The next minute she sat bolt upright in her bed. That sound had been no fancy this afternoon. She heard it now through the black dark.

With a curious impulse--and surely her guardian angel must have been at her elbow--Magdalen Clyde got up and locked her thick wooden shutters and her window.

Still she heard the sound.

Alone in the night, with her body dull and her spirit quick, she thrilled superstitiously, so like was that soft, clinging pad to the feet of death dogging her. What madness was it put into her head that it was just like that, soft and slow, with long steps, that Lovell would move on bare feet?