Anna Katharine Green - The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow

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THE MYSTERY OF THE HASTY ARROW

by

ANNA KATHARINE GREEN

Author of "The Chief Legatee," "That Affair Next Door," "A Strange
Disappearance," Etc.

With Frontispiece by H. R. Ballinger

[Illustration: "Do not by any show of curiosity endanger her recovery.
I would not have her body or mind sacrificed on any account."]

A. L. Burt Company
Publishers New York
Published by Arrangement with Dodd, Mead & Company
Copyright, 1917,
By Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc.
Made in U.S.A.

CONTENTS

BOOK I--A PROBLEM OF THE FIRST ORDER

CHAPTER

I "Let Some One Speak!"

II In Room B

III "I Have Something to Show You"

IV A Strategic Move

V Three Where Two Should Be

VI The Man in the Gallery

VII "You Think that of Me!"

BOOK II--MR. X

VIII On the Search

IX While the City Slept

X "And He Stood Here?"

XI Footsteps

XII "Spare Nobody! I Say, Spare Nobody!"

XIII "Write Me His Name"

XIV A Loop of Silk

XV News from France

BOOK III--STORM IN THE MOUNTAINS

XVI Friends

XVII The Cuckoo-Clock

XVIII Mrs. Davis' Strange Lodger

XIX Mr. Gryce and the Timid Child

XX Mr. Gryce and the Unwary Woman

XXI Perplexed

XXII He Remembers

XXIII Girls, Girls! Nothing but Girls!

XXIV Flight

XXV Terror

XXVI The Face in the Window

BOOK IV--NEMESIS

XXVII From Lips Long Silent

XXVIII "Romantic! Too Romantic!"

XXIX A Strong Man

XXX The Creeping Shadow

XXXI Confronted

XXXII "Why Is that Here?"

XXXIII Again the Cuckoo-Clock

XXXIV The Bud--Then the Deadly Flower

BOOK I

A PROBLEM OF THE FIRST ORDER

I

"LET SOME ONE SPEAK!"

The hour of noon had just struck, and the few visitors still lingering
among the curiosities of the great museum were suddenly startled by the
sight of one of the attendants running down the broad, central staircase,
loudly shouting:

"Close the doors! Let no one out! An accident has occurred, and nobody's
to leave the building."

There was but one person near either of the doors, and as he chanced to
be a man closely connected with the museum,--being, in fact, one of its
most active directors,--he immediately turned about and in obedience to a
gesture made by the attendant, ran up the marble steps, followed by some
dozen others.

At the top they all turned, as by common consent, toward the left-hand
gallery, where in the section marked II, a tableau greeted them which few
of them will ever forget.

I say "tableau" because the few persons concerned in it stood as in a
picture, absolutely motionless and silent as the dead. Sense, if not
feeling, was benumbed in them all, as in another moment it was benumbed
in the breasts of these new arrivals. Tragedy was there in its most
terrible, its most pathetic, aspect. The pathos was given by the
victim,--a young and pretty girl lying face upward on the tessellated
floor with an arrow in her breast and death stamped unmistakably on every
feature,--the terror by the look and attitude of the woman they saw
kneeling over her--a remarkable woman, no longer young, but of a presence
to hold the attention, even if the circumstances had been of a far less
tragic nature. Her hand was on the arrow but she had made no movement to
withdraw it, and her eyes, fixed upon space, showed depths of horror
hardly to be explained even by the suddenness and startling character
of the untoward fatality of which she had just been made the unhappy
witness.

The director, whose name was Roberts, thought as he paused on the edge of
the crowd that he had never seen a countenance upon which woe had stamped
so deep a mark; and greatly moved by it, he was about to seek some
explanation of a scene to which appearances gave so little clue, when the
tall but stooping figure of the Curator entered, and he found himself
relieved from a task whose seriousness he had no difficulty in measuring.

To those who knew William Jewett well, it was evident that he had been
called from some task which still occupied his thoughts and for the
moment somewhat bewildered his understanding. But as he was a
conscientious man and quite capable of taking the lead when once roused
to the exigencies of an occasion, Mr. Roberts felt a certain interest in
watching the slow awakening of this self-absorbed man to the awful
circumstances which in one instant had clouded the museum in an
atmosphere of mysterious horror.

When the full realization came,--which was not till a way had been made
for him to the side of the stricken woman crouching over the dead
child,--the energy which transformed his countenance and gave character
to his usually bent and inconspicuous figure was all if not more than the
anxious director expected.

Finding that his attempts to meet the older woman's eye only prolonged
the suspense, the Curator addressed her quietly, and in sympathetic tones
inquired whose child this was and how so dreadful a thing had happened.

She did not answer. She did not even look his way. With a rapid glance
into the faces about him, ending in one of deep compassion directed
toward herself, he repeated his question.

Still no response--still that heavy silence, that absolute immobility of
face and limb. If her faculty of hearing was dulled, possibly she would
yield to that of touch. Stooping, he laid his hand on her arm.

This roused her. Slowly her eyes lost their fixed stare and took on a
more human light. A shudder shook her frame, and gazing down into the
countenance of the young girl lying at her feet, she broke into moans of
such fathomless despair as wrung the hearts of all about her.

It was a scene to test the nerve of any man. To one of the Curator's
sympathetic temperament it was well-nigh unendurable. Turning to those
nearest, he begged for an explanation of what they saw before them:

"Some one here must be able to tell me. Let that some one speak."

At this the quietest and least conspicuous person present, a young man
heavily spectacled and of student-like appearance, advanced a step and
said:

"I was the first person to come in here after this poor young lady fell.
I was looking at coins just beyond the partition there, when I heard a
gasping cry. I had not heard her fall--I fear I was very much preoccupied
in my search for an especial coin I had been told I should find here--but
I did hear the cry she gave, and startled by the sound, left the section
where I was and entered this one, only to see just what you are seeing
now."

The Curator pointed at the two women.

"This? The one woman kneeling over the other with her hand on the arrow?"

"Yes, sir."

A change took place in the Curator's expression. Involuntarily his eyes
rose to the walls hung closely with Indian relics, among which was a
quiver in which all could see arrows similar to the one now in the breast
of the young girl lying dead before them.

"This woman must be made to speak," he said in answer to the low murmur
which followed this discovery. "If there is a doctor present----"

Waiting, but receiving no response, he withdrew his hand from the woman's
arm and laid it on the arrow.

This roused her completely. Loosing her own grasp upon the shaft, she
cried, with sudden realization of the people pressing about her:

"I could not draw it. That causes death, they say. Wait! she may still be
alive. She may have a word to speak."

She was bending to listen. It was hardly a favorable moment for further
questioning, but the Curator in his anxiety could not refrain from
saying:

"Who is she? What is her name and what is yours?"

"Her name?" repeated the woman, rising to face him again. "How should I
know? I was passing through this gallery and had just stopped to take a
look into the court when this young girl bounded by me from behind and
flinging up her arms, fell with a deep sigh to the floor. I saw an arrow
in her breast, and----"

Emotion choked her, and when some one asked if the girl was a stranger to
her, she simply bowed her head; then, letting her gaze pass from face to
face till it had completed the circle of those about her, she said in her
former mechanical way:

"My name is Ermentrude Taylor. I came to look at the bronzes. I should
like to go now."

But the crowd which had formed about her was too compact to allow her to
pass. Besides, the director, Mr. Roberts, had something to say first.
Working his way forward, he waited till he had attracted her attention
and then remarked in his most considerate manner:

"You will pardon these importunities, Mrs. Taylor. I am a director of
this museum, and if Mr. Jewett will excuse me,"--here he bowed to the
Curator,--"I should like to inquire from what direction the arrow came
which ended this young girl's life?"

For a moment she stood aghast, fixing him with her eye as though to ask
whither this inquiry tended. Then with an air of intention which was not
without some strange element of fear, she allowed her glance to travel
across the court till it rested upon the row of connected arches facing
them from the opposite gallery.

"Ah," said he, putting her look into words, "you think the arrow came
from the other side of the building. Did you see anyone over there,--in
the gallery, I mean,--at or before the instant of this young girl's
fall?"

She shook her head.

"Did any of _you_?" he urged, with his eyes on the crowd. "Some one must
have been looking that way."

But no answer came, and the silence was fast becoming oppressive when
these words, whispered by one woman to another, roused them anew and
sent every glance again to the walls--even hers for whose benefit this
remark had possibly been made:

"But there are no arrows over there. All the arrows are here."

She was right. They were here, quiver after quiver of them; nor were they
all beyond reach. As the woman thus significantly assailed noted this and
saw with what suspicion others noted it also, a decided change took place
in her aspect.

"I should like to sit down," she murmured. Possibly she was afraid she
might fall.

As some one brought a chair, she spoke, but very tremulously, to the
director:

"Are there no arrows in the rooms over there?"

"I am quite sure not."

"And no bows?"

"None."

"If--if anyone had been seen in the gallery----"

"No one was."

"You are sure of that?"

"You heard the question asked. It brought no answer."

"But--but these galleries are visible from below. Some one may have been
looking up from the court and----"

"If there was any such person in the building, he would have been here by
this time. People don't hold back such information."

"Then--then--" she stammered, her eyes taking on a hunted look, "you
conclude--these people conclude _what_?"

"Madam,"--the word came coldly, stinging her into drawing herself to her
full height,--"it is not for me to conclude in a case like this. That is
the business of the police."

At this word, with its suggestion of crime, her air of conscious power
vanished in sudden collapse. Possibly she had seen the significant
gesture with which the Curator pointed out a quiver from which one of the
arrows was missing. That this was so, was shown by her next question:

"But where is the bow? Look about on the floor. You will find none. How
can an arrow be shot without a bow?"

"It cannot be," came from some one at her back. "But it can be driven
home like a dagger if the hand wielding it is sufficiently powerful."

A cry left her lips; she seemed to listen as for some echo; then in a
wild abandonment which ignored person and place she flung herself again
at the dead girl's side, and before the astonished people surrounding her
could intervene, she had caught up the body in her arms, and bending over
it, whispered word after word into the poor child's closed ear.

II

IN ROOM B

Five minutes later the Curator was at the 'phone calling up Police
Headquarters. A death had occurred at the museum. Would they send over
a capable detective?

"What kind of death?" was the harsh reply. "We don't send detectives in
cases of heart-failure or simple accident. Is it an accident?"

"No--no--hardly. It looks more like an insane woman's attack upon a
harmless stranger. It's the oddest sort of an affair, and we feel very
helpless. No common officer will do. We have one of that kind in the
building. What we want is a man of brains; he will need them."

A muffled sound at the other end--then a different voice asking some
half-dozen comprehensive questions--which, having been answered to the
best of the Curator's ability, were followed by the welcome assurance
that a man on whose experience he could rely would be at the museum doors
within five minutes.

With an air of relief Mr. Jewett stepped again into the court, and
repelling with hasty gestures the importunities of the small group of men
and women who had lacked the courage to follow the more adventurous ones
upstairs, crossed to where the door-man stood on guard over the main
entrance.

"Locked?" he asked.

"Yes, sir. Such were the orders. Didn't you give them?"

"No, but I should have done so, had I known. No one's to go out, and no
one's to come in but the detective whom I am expecting any moment."

They had not long to wait. Before their suspense had reached fever-point,
a tap was heard on the great door. It was opened, and a young man stepped
in.

"Coast clear?" he sang out with a humorous twist of his jaw as he noted
the Curator's evident chagrin at his meager and unsatisfactory
appearance. "Oh, I'm not your man," he added as his eye ran over the
whole place with a look which seemed to take in every detail in an
instant. "Mr. Gryce is in the automobile. Wait till I help him up."

He was gone before the Curator could utter a word, only to reappear in a
few minutes with a man in his wake whom the former at first blush thought
to be as much past the age where experience makes for efficiency as the
other seemed to be short of it.

But this impression, if impression it were, was of short duration. No
sooner had this physically weak but extremely wise old man entered upon
the scene than his mental power became evident to every person there.
Timorous hearts regained their composure, and the Curator--who in his ten
years of service had never felt the burden of his position so acutely as
in the last ten minutes--showed his relief by a volubility quite
unnatural to him under ordinary conditions. As he conducted the
detectives across the court, he talked not of the victim, as might
reasonably be expected, but of the woman who had been found leaning over
her with her hand on the arrow.

"We think her some escaped lunatic," he remarked. "Only a demented woman
would act as she does. First she denied all knowledge of the girl. Then
when she was made to see that the arrow sticking in the girl's breast had
been taken from a quiver hanging within arm's reach on the wall and used
as lances are used, she fell a-moaning and crying, and began to whisper
in the poor child's senseless ear."

"A common woman? One of a low-down type?"

"Not at all. A lady, and an impressive one, at that. You seldom see her
equal. That's what has upset us so. The crime and the criminal do not
seem to fit."

The detective blinked. Then suddenly he seemed to grow an inch taller.

"Where is she now?" he asked.

"In Room B, away from the crowd. She is not alone. A young lady detained
with the rest of the people here is keeping her company, to say nothing
of an officer we have put on guard."

"And the victim?"

"Lies where she fell, in Section II on the upper floor. There was no call
to move her. She was dead when we came upon the scene. She does not look
to be more than sixteen years old."

"Let's go up. But wait--can we see that section from here?"

They were standing at the foot of the great staircase connecting the two
floors. Above them, stretching away on either side, ran the two famous,
highly ornamented galleries, with their row of long, low arches
indicating the five compartments into which they were severally divided.
Pointing to the second one on the southern side, the Curator replied:

"That's it--the one where you see the Apache relics hanging high on the
rear wall. We shall have to shift those to some other place just as soon
as we can recover from this horror. I don't want the finest spot in the
whole museum made a Mecca for the morbid and the curious."

The remark fell upon unheeding ears. Detective Gryce was looking, not in
the direction named, but in the one directly opposite to it.

"I see," he quietly observed, "that there is a clear view across. Was
there no one in the right-hand gallery to see what went on in the left?"

"Not that I have heard of. It's the dullest hour of the day, and not only
this gallery but many of the rooms were entirely empty."

"I see. And now, what about the persons who were here? How many of them
have you let go?"

"Not one; the doors have been opened twice only--once to admit the
officer you will find on guard, and the other to let in yourself."

"Good! And how many have you here, all told?"

"I have not had time to count them, but I should say less than thirty.
This includes myself, as well as two attendants."

With a thoughtful air Mr. Gryce turned in the direction of the few
persons he could see huddled together around one of the central statues.

"Where are the others?" he asked.

"Upstairs--in and about the place where the poor child lies."

"They must be got out of there. Sweetwater!"

The young man who had entered with him was at his side in an instant.

"Clear the galleries. Then take down the name and address of every person
in the building."

"Yes, sir."

Before the last word had left his lips, the busy fellow was halfway up
the marble steps. "Lightning," some of his pals called him, perhaps
because he was as noiseless as he was quick. Meanwhile the senior
detective had drawn the Curator to one side.

"We'll take a look at these people as they come down. I have been said to
be able to spot a witness with my eyes shut. Let's see what I can do with
my eyes open."

"Young and old, rich and poor," murmured the Curator as some dozen
persons appeared at the top of the staircase.

"Yes," sighed the detective, noting each one carefully as he or she filed
down, "we sha'n't make much out of this experiment. Not one of them
avoids our looks. Emotion enough, but not of the right sort. Well, we'll
leave them to Sweetwater. Our business is above."

The Curator offered his arm. The old man made a move to take it--then
drew himself up with an air of quiet confidence.

"Many thanks," said he, "but I can go alone. Rheumatism is my trouble,
but these mild days loosen its grip upon my poor old muscles." He did
not say that the prospect of an interesting inquiry had much the same
effect, but the Curator suspected it, possibly because he was feeling
just a little bit spry himself.

Steeled as such experienced officers necessarily are to death in all its
phases, it was with no common emotion that the aged detective entered the
presence of the dead girl and took his first look at this latest victim
of mental or moral aberration. So young! so innocent! so fair! A
schoolgirl, or little more, of a class certainly above the average,
whether judged from the contour of her features or the niceties of her
dress. With no evidences of great wealth about her, there was yet
something in the cut of her garments and the careful attention to each
detail which bespoke not only natural but cultivated taste. On her breast
just above the spot where the cruel dart had entered, a fresh and
blooming nosegay still exhaled its perfume--a tragic detail accentuating
the pathos of a death so sudden that the joy with which she had pinned on
this simple adornment seemed to linger about her yet.

The detective, with no words for this touching spectacle, stretched out
his hand and with a reverent and fatherly touch pressed down the lids
over the unseeing eyes. This office done to the innocent dead, he asked
if anything had been found to establish the young girl's identity.

"Surely," he observed, "she was not without a purse or handbag. All young
ladies carry them."

For answer the officer on guard thrust his hand into one of his capacious
pockets, and drawing out a neat little bag of knitted beads, passed it
over to the detective with the laconic remark:

"Nothing doing."

And so it proved. It held only a pocket handkerchief--embroidered but
without a monogram--and a memorandum-book without an entry.

"A blind alley, if ever there was one," muttered Mr. Gryce; and ordering
the policeman to replace the bag as nearly as possible on the spot from
which it had been taken, he proceeded with the Curator to Room B.

Prepared to encounter a woman of disordered mind, the appearance
presented by Mrs. Taylor at his entrance greatly astonished Mr. Gryce.
There was a calmness in her attitude which one would scarcely expect to
see in a woman whom mania had just driven into crime. Surely lunacy does
not show such self-restraint; nor does lunacy awaken any such feelings of
awe as followed a prolonged scrutiny of her set but determined features.
Only grief of the most intense and sacred character could account for the
aspect she presented, and as the man to whom the tragedies of life were
of daily occurrence took in this mystery with all its incongruities, he
realized, not without a sense of professional pleasure, no doubt, that he
had before him an affair calling for the old-time judgment which, for
forty or more years, had made his record famous in the police annals of
the metropolis.

She was seated with no one near her but a young lady whom sympathetic
interest had drawn to her side. Mr. Roberts stood in one of the windows,
and not far from him a man in the museum uniform.

At the authoritative advance of the old detective, the woman, whose eye
he had caught, attempted to struggle to her feet, but desisted after a
moment of hopeless effort, and sank back in her chair. There was no
pretense in this. Though gifted with a strong frame, emotion had so
weakened her that she was simply unable to stand. Quite convinced of
this, and affected in spite of himself by her look of lofty patience, Mr.
Gryce prefaced his questions with an apology--quite an unusual proceeding
for him.

Whether or no she heard it, he could not tell; but she was quite ready to
answer when he asked her name and then her place of residence--saying in
response to the latter query:

"I live at the Calderon, a family hotel in Sixty-seventh Street.
My name"--here she paused for a second to moisten her lips--"is
Taylor--Ermentrude Taylor.... Nothing else," she speedily added in
a tone which drew every eye her way. Then more evenly: "You will find
the name on the hotel's books."

"Wife or widow?"

"Widow."

What a voice! how it reached every heart, waking strange sympathies
there! As the word fell, not a person in the room but stirred uneasily.
Even she herself started at its sound; and moved, perhaps, by the depth
of silence which followed, she added in suppressed tones:

"A widow within the hour. That's why you see me still in colors, but
crushed as you behold--killed! killed!"

That settled it. There was no mistaking her condition after an expression
of this kind. The Curator and Mr. Gryce exchanged glances, and Mr.
Roberts, stepping from his corner, betrayed the effect which her words
had produced on him, by whispering in the detective's ear:

"What you need is an alienist."

Had she heard? It would seem so from the quick way she roused and
exclaimed with indignant emphasis:

"You do not understand me! I see that I must drink my bitter cup to the
dregs. This is what I mean: My husband was living this morning--living
up to the hour when the clock in this building struck twelve. I knew it
from the joyous hopes with which my breast was filled. But with the
stroke of noon the blow fell. I was bending above the poor child who had
fallen so suddenly at my feet, when the vision came, and I saw him gazing
at me from a distance so remote--across a desert so immeasurable--that
nothing but death could create such a removal or make of him the ghastly
silhouette I saw. He is dead. At that moment I felt his soul pass; and so
I say that I am a widow."

Ravings? No, the calm certainty of her tone, the grief, touching depths
so profound it had no need of words, showed the confidence she felt in
the warning she believed herself to have received. Though probably not
a single person present put any faith in occultism in any of its forms,
there was a general movement of sympathy which led Mr. Gryce to pass the
matter by without any attempt at controversy, and return to the question
in hand. With a decided modification of manner, he therefore asked her to
relate how she came to be kneeling over the injured girl with her hand
upon the arrow.

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