The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 12

With one hand, I noticed, she clung to the frame of the door. With the other hand she held back a heavy portiere, which hung across this frame. I could see the white half-oval of her intent face as she stood there. Something about her suggested not the spying intruder so much as the secret listener. Her attention seemed directed toward some object which her eyes were not seeing. It appeared as though she stood waiting to overhear a sound which meant much to her.

As I peered past her through the dim light I could catch a faint glimmer of green and white marble, with here and there the high-lights reflected from polished nickel. I knew then that the room into which she was peering was a bathroom, and this bathroom, I concluded, opened on a second sleeping-chamber which held the _raison d'etre_ of her motionless apprehension. I directed my glance once more at the woman.

Something almost penitential in her att.i.tude brought the sudden thought to my mind that she had committed a crime at the mere memory of which she was already morally stricken. Unexpected discovery, I began to suspect, had driven her to an extreme which she was already beginning to regret. There was, in fact, something so pregnant and portentous in that unchanging att.i.tude of hers that I began to feel it would be a mean surrender on my part to evade the issue in which I had already risked so much. So I moved silently into the room, crossing it without a sound, until I dropped into a high-backed _fauteuil_ upholstered in embossed and pale-green leather.

I sat there studying her, unaccountably at my ease, fortified by the knowledge that I was the observer of an illicit intrusion and that my own presence, if impertinent, might at least be easily explained. I saw her sigh deeply and audibly, and then gently close the door, dropping the curtain as she turned slowly away.

I watched her as she crossed to the dresser, looked over the toilet articles on it, and then turned away. She next skirted a heavy cheval-mirror, crossed to the writing-table with her quick yet quietly restless movements, and from this table caught up what seemed to be a metal paper-knife. She moved on to an ivory and mother-of-pearl desk, which, apparently, she already knew to be locked. For after one short glance toward the curtained door again, she inserted the edge of the knife in a crack of this desk and slowly pried on the lock-bar that held it shut.

I saw her second apprehensive glance toward the curtained door as the lock sprung with a snap. She sank into a chair before it, breathing quickly, obviously waiting a minute or two to make sure she had not been overheard. Then with quick and dextrous fingers she rummaged through the desk. Just what she swept from one of the drawers into her open hand-bag I could not distinguish. But I plainly saw the package of letters which she took up in her hand, turned over and over, then carefully and quietly secreted within the bosom of her dress. She looked deeper into the desk, examined an additional paper or two which appeared not to interest her, and slowly swung back the cover.

Then she slowly rose to her feet, standing beside the desk. She let her gaze, as she stood there, wander about the room. I could distinctly see the look on her face, the hungry and unhappy look of unsatisfied greed. I sat motionless, waiting for that expression to change. I knew that it must change, for it would be but a moment or two before she caught sight of me. But I had seen enough. I felt sure of my position--in fact, I found a wayward relish in it, an almost enjoyable antic.i.p.ation of the shock which I knew the discovery of my presence there would bring to her. I even exulted a little in that impending dramatic crisis, rejoicing in the slowness with which the inevitable yet epochal moment was approaching.

Her eyes must have dwelt on my figure for several seconds before her mind became convinced of my actual presence there. She did not scream, as I thought she was about to do when I saw one terrified hand go up to her partly open lips. Beyond that single hand-movement there was no motion whatever from her. She simply stood mere, white-faced and speechless, staring at me out of wide and vacant eyes.

"Good evening--or, rather, good morning!" I said, with all the calmness at my command.

For one brief second she glanced back toward the curtained door, as though behind it lay a sleeper my words might awaken. Then she stared at me again.

She did not speak. She did not even move. The intent and staring face, white as a half-moon in a misty sky, seemed floating in s.p.a.ce.

The faint light of the room swallowed up the lines of her black-clad figure, enisling the face in the unbroken gloom of a Rembrandt-like background, making it stand out as though it were luminous.

It was a face well worth studying. What first struck me was its pallor. Across this the arched, faintly interrogative eyebrows gave it a false air of delicacy. The eyes themselves had a s.p.a.cious clarity which warned me my enemy would not be without a capable enough mind, once she regained possession of her wits. Her mouth, no longer distorted by terror, was the nervous, full-lipped mouth of a once ardent spirit touched with rebellion.

She was, I could see, no every-day thief of the streets, no ordinary offender satisfied with mean and petty offenses. There would, I told myself, always be a largeness about her wrong-doing, a sinister brilliance in her illicit pursuits. And even while I decided this, I was forced to admit that it was not precisely terror I was beholding on her face. It seemed to merge into something more like a sense of shame, the same speechless horror which I might have met with had I intruded on her bodily nakedness. I could see that she was even beginning to resent my stare of curiosity. Then, for the first time, she spoke.

"Who are you?" she asked. Her voice was low; in it was the quaver of the frightened woman resolutely steeling herself to courage.

"That's a question you're first going to answer for me," was my calmly deliberate retort.

"What are you doing here?" she demanded, still confronting me from the same spot. I remembered the bundle of loot which I had dropped just outside the door.

"I can answer that more easily than you can," I replied, with a slight head-movement toward the broken desk-top.

Once more her glance went back to the curtained door. Then she studied me from head to foot, each sartorial detail and accessory of clothing, hat, gloves, and shoes, as though each must figure in the resolution of some final judgment.

"What do you want?" she demanded.

I preferred to leave that question unanswered.

"What do you intend to do?" she demanded, once more searching my face.

I resented the way in which she antic.i.p.ated my own questions. I could see, from the first, that she was going to be an extraordinarily adept and circuitous person to handle. I warned myself that I would have to be ready for every trick and turn.

"What do you suppose I'm going to do?" I equivocated, looking for some betraying word to put me on firmer ground. I could see that she was slowly regaining her self-possession.

"You have no right in this house," she had the brazenness to say to me.

"Have _you_?" I quickly retorted. She was silent for a second or two.

"No," she admitted, much as she would like to have claimed the contrary.

"Of course not! And I imagine you realize what your presence here implies, just as what your discovery here entails?"

"Yes," she admitted.

"And I think you have the intelligence to understand that I'm here for motives somewhat more disinterested than your own?"

"What are they?" she demanded, letting her combative eyes meet mine.

"That," I calmly replied, "can wait until you've explained yourself."

"I've nothing to explain."

There was a newer note in her voice again--one of stubbornness. I could see that the calmness with which I pretended to regard the whole affair was a source of bewilderment to her.

"You've got to explain," was my equally obdurate retort.

Her next pose was one of frigidity.

"You are quite mistaken. We have nothing whatever to do with each other."

"Oh, yes we have. And I'm going to prove it."

"How?"

"By putting an end to this play-acting."

"That sounds like a threat."

"It was meant for one."

"What right have you to threaten me?"

She looked about as she spoke, almost wearily. Then she sank into the chair that stood beside the ravaged writing-desk. It was all diverting enough, but I was beginning to lose patience with her.

"I'm tired of all this side-stepping," I told her. An answering look of anger flashed from her eyes.

"I object to your presence here," she had the effrontery to exclaim.

"You mean, I suppose, that I'm rather interfering with your night's operations?"

"Those operations," she answered in a fluttering dignity, "are my own affairs."

"Of course they are!" I scoffed. "They _have_ to be! But you should have kept them your own affairs. When you drop a bundle of swag out of a window you shouldn't come so perilously near to knocking a man's hat off."

"A bundle of swag?" she echoed, with such a precise imitation of wonder that I could plainly see she was going to be the astutest of liars.

"The loot you intended carrying off," I calmly explained. "The stuff you dropped down beside the house-step, to be ready for your getaway."