Unseen Hands

Front matter

UNSEEN

§ BY §

ROBERT ORR CHIPPERFIELD

Chapter 1

UNSEEN HANDS

CHAPTER I

TERROR

IT was a week since Julian Chalmers's tragic young death and the fourth day after the funeral, and yet the odor of dying flowers and the chill gloom which only so mournful a function can radiate seemed still to cling about the spacious room. It bore an air of unfamiliarity, too, which was due in part to the fact that the massive old furniture had not been replaced with the exactitude which its long-established position warranted.

The little faded woman who appeared noiselessly on the threshold and peered within much as a mouse might have done seemed at once to sense the general atmosphere and perceive its source. She entered, and as a light footfall sounded upon the stairs she laid her slender arms about a huge old arm chair and strove with all her frail strength to move it toward the table.

"Oh, Aunt Effie, what are you doing?" The words were more an awestruck exclamation than a question, and a young girl halted in the doorway as had the older woman at first. She was small and lithe; a dark, gypsy-like creature who would have been pretty in other circumstances. Now her big soft eyes were deeply encircled, and her clear dark skin chalkily pallid.

"Peters and Gerda have been sadly careless in rearranging the room, dear. I suppose I must not scold them at—at such a time, but I should have seen to it myself." The little lady's voice was low and as colorless as her personality. "You know your stepfather always likes this chair nearer the light."

"Well, do let Peters attend to it later and come into the dining-room!" It was not impatience but entreaty which sounded in the seemingly impulsive cry. "It's—it's simply horrible in here! Haven't father and the boys come down yet? Rannie's always late!"

"You have no patience with his infirmity, Nan, child," her aunt responded in gentle reproof as she followed the girl into the brilliantly lighted dining-room, where at one end a round table had been laid for six. "Remember he cannot run up and down the stairs as quickly as you."

"Oh, I did not mean to be unkind!" Nan Chalmers spoke in quick remorse, and her eyes darkened as she added in a half whisper, "We should none of us be unkind to each other, should we? We can not tell which will be the next to be taken!"

"It is the Lord's will." Miss Effie's soft, resigned voice was lost in the clear, flippant tones of a young man and the deep rumble of that of an older one as Richard Lorne and his eldest living step-son entered the room together.

"Remember, Eugene, not to speak of this to your aunt—" Lorne broke off abruptly as he caught sight of Miss Effie standing beside the cold hearth.

"Oh, Aunt Effie knows as well as we do that things always run in three's," Eugene responded nonchalantly enough as he moved toward the table; but his light eyes wavered and a slight flush mounted to his sleek golden hair and receded, leaving him more pale than before. He turned to the younger sister, who was so unlike him in type, and asked with a flippancy which the quivering of his rather weak chin belied: "Why so tragic. Nan? It'll be me, not you; and the infernal jinx that is over this house will have to work quick, for next month I'll be twenty-five—"

"Silence!" His stepfather's round reddened face puffed out in anger, and his close-clipped gray mustache fairly bristled. "If you have no heart, at least preserve a semblance of decency and do not jest about—about matters which have bowed all our heads in grief!"

His tone grew husky toward the last, and his slightly prominent blue eyes filled as he turned away.

Nan laid a cool little hand over his.

"Don't mind Gene, father. He's only trying to cover up his own feelings; I know him!" She spoke with infinite tenderness; and it was evident that between the girl and her stepfather a very real affection existed. "Come, shall we wait for the other two?"

"I'm here!" A thin, high, whining voice with an indescribably sarcastic undernote in it replied to the question; and a distorted, humpbacked figure came forward. Randall, the youngest of the Chalmers children, was a boy of about eighteen, and dark like Nan, who was two years his senior; but there the resemblance ceased. Her witching charm seemed in him to be changed to a malevolent humor, and his thin lips were twisted, by past pain perhaps, into a perpetually sardonic leer. In his correct, somber mourning clothes, cleverly built to conceal as much as possible of his infirmity, he nevertheless made one think irresistibly of a jester in motley as he slid sinuously into his seat at the table and made an impish grace at his sister's face.

Richard Lorne turned to the impassive butler.

"Dinner, Peters. We shall not wait for Miss Chalmers."

Soup was almost finished before the beauty of the family appeared. Christine was twenty-two and resembled Eugene in her coloring save that her blondness was of a colder, more brilliant type, and there was no hint of weakness in her exquisite, perfectly chiseled features. She carried herself with the assured air of one conscious of her beauty; and her elaborate crêpe gown made the more simple mourning of her sister and aunt appear dowdy by comparison.

"I've been frightfully busy," she announced as she seated herself. "It's a bore to try to separate the sheep from the goats; but one simply must know whom merely to send cards to, and who must be replied to personally. Why do people send condolences, anyway?"

"Usually to be on the safe side in case they might have been remembered in the will." The cripple looked up with a shrewd twinkle in his sunken eyes.

"I hope, my dear, that you have not touched the pile of correspondence on the desk in the library." Miss Effie Meade glanced at her butterfly niece in nervous deprecation. "I have it all nicely arranged for Gene; he says that he will attend to it this evening."

Christine tossed her head.

"I meant my own personal mail, Aunt Effie. I assure you, it's quite enough for me to take on my shoulders."

Gene opened his lips as if to retort, but evidently thought better of it and with a shrug devoted himself to his fish. The dinner progressed in silence to its close; but when Peters at a nod from Richard Lorne had placed the coffee upon the table and departed little Miss Effie glanced about and said timidly:

"We—we mustn't go on like this, you know. The—the loss of our dear ones—". She put her handkerchief for a moment to her brimming eyes. "To have my poor sister and her dear son taken from us so suddenly and with so short a space of time between is heartrending, but it is the Lord's will and we must not complain. If we go on as we have been, we shall have Peters talking to the other servants about us. We are acting as if—as if—"

"As if we were afraid!" Randall, the cripple, thrust himself forward suddenly in his chair. "Must we be hypocrites eternally? We grieve, of course, each in our own way, and that concerns only our own souls if we have any, but there is something else back in the minds of all of us and that is fear! Even you, even Dad! Why, look around the table! Aren't we each asking ourselves: 'Will I be the next? Will I be the next?' Do we believe it was the Lord's will?"

"This is madness!" Richard Lorne put down his coffee-cup, which he had held suspended in a shaking hand while he listened as if hypnotized to his step-son's harangue. "Let us hear no more of this, this wild raving! I believe you are losing your mind! You know that the deaths of both your mother and brother were due to perfectly natural causes: accidents. If you do not still that mad tongue of yours I will have you put away!"

He strode from the room, and Randall laughed shrilly.

"You see? Can't bear to have his innermost thoughts brought to the light of day!"

But the others were not listening. Instead they were glancing about as he had bade them; and each read in the eyes of the others the nameless thing which had been locked in their own breasts for an interminable week.

In all eyes save those of their mother's sister, Miss Effie; they shone through her tears with an almost fanatical light. After a moment of silence she rose and put her arm tenderly about the cripple's shoulders.

"Come, Rannie, you are all overwrought, and the fever mustn't rise again. You know what pain it always brings. Lie on the couch in my room and let me read to you for a while."

The boy flung her off impatiently.

"Let me alone, Aunt Effie! I'm not a child, I tell you! I'm wise; wiser than all of you!"

Nevertheless, he suffered her to lead him from the room and preceded her when, on the threshold, she turned.

"You'll find the light just right, I think, over the desk, Gene," she said. "Don't work too late, dear. There are so many letters, and I can find time to help you in the morning."

As the door closed Christine began to sob hysterically.

"I'm going to get out of this dreadful house to-morrow!" she cried. "I've felt ever since p-poor Julian was found as if s-something were hanging over my h-head! I'm going to Dorothy Landis's and stay; I'd go to-night if I c-could!"

"Sure, run away," Gene sneered coldly. "If it is your turn next you'd probably slip on a banana-peel or get in a taxi accident before you reached the Landis place! Stick around like a sport, but watch your step and see what our jinx has in store for you!"

"Don't say such dreadful things. Gene dear; you're almost as bad as Rannie." Nan raised her white, serious face and looked straight into his. "You know you don't believe in evil spirits any more than I do. There is no use in denying that I've felt just as Cissie has all this last week; but it may be that we are all just nervous and apt to imagine things. Why, even poor father showed it to-night when Rannie burst out like that! If we could all be as stolid and calm as—as Peters, for instance."

Gene laughed.

"The impeccable Peters is carrying a newly acquired rabbit's foot! Fact. It fell out of his pocket when he stooped to pick up Dad's cane this morning. Nobody saw it but me, and I thought best not to make any inquiries just then. I've no doubt that Marcelle has one of those little Rintintin figures concealed somewhere about her person at this moment; and Jane and Gerda must be sporting whatever their particular fetishes are, too. I'm not trying to be funny!" he added. "I'm just showing you which way the wind is blowing."

"They are stupid, ignorant things," Nan commented. "But I've heard that fear is contagious; and although I don't believe in a jinx, I do believe that our thoughts can work on the people around us for good or bad. Now, sup- pose that one of us got this fear—which would be ridiculous if it were not so horrible!—and communicated it to the rest?"

"Nothing doing," Gene replied. "If a whole lot of people think the same thing it's bound to be true; not come true because they believe it, but be true from the first. You wait and see what happens next!"

Christine moaned, and regardless of her coiffure burrowed her head still deeper into her folded arms upon the table.

"If we'd try to think sanely for a minute, we'd realize how impossible any connection between mother's death and Julian's could be." Nan spoke decidedly, but her voice trembled and lowered as she mentioned those who had gone. "Dear mother ran a needle in her hand and blood-poison followed; that might happen to anyone, there is nothing strange about it."

"No, but there was something strange about the infection that set in and spread in spite of what the best specialists in the country could do; you heard them say that, themselves!" Gene retorted. "And I suppose it wasn't queer that when Jule's razor slipped while he was shaving it should just nick the jugular vein? Well, I'm going in and start upon those beastly letters. Thank the Lord, Aunt Effie got them sorted for me!"

"I'm going to pack!" Cissie jumped up as he departed. "Of course you won't go while Tad lives right next door and can run in and out any hour of the day, but I—"

"But you!" Nan interrupted hotly. "You want to go because the sorrowful atmosphere of this house won't be conducive to the comfort and pleasure of Farley Drew! Because he knows that he isn't welcomed here by any one but you and Gene! He'll probably be welcomed as your guest by the Landises; they don't know him as I do!"

"You're only a child." Cissie smoothed her crêpe draperies complacently. "What could you know of a man of the world like Farley?"

"I know that he has led Gene into all the trouble he was ever in, and poor Julian, too! That's enough for me!" Nan poured herself a cup of the cold coffee. "How you can be so stupid, Cissie!—"

But Cissie had trailed from the room, and her younger sister was left to her own thoughts.

In the smoking-room back of the library Richard Lorne was closeted with Samuel Titheredge of Titheredge, Gore & Wells, attorneys and counselors-at-law.

Samuel was as long and lean and lantern-jawed as Lorne was short and stout and round-faced; and the two had been friends since their university days thirty years before. It was with the freedom, then, of absolute camaraderie that the lawyer advised his client.

"Dick, don't be an ass! Go to the authorities with what, I should like to know? Sad as the affair is, I can't see that there is anything strange about it. It isn't at all unusual for two members of one family to die of different causes within a month of each other. Buck up, and if there is anything left in your private cellar take a swig of it before you go to bed. Why, man, there isn't even a coincidence in the affair! If you take such a cock-and-bull story to Headquarters, do you know what will happen? You'll get a lot of derisive notoriety that you're not looking for; and afterward when somebody proposes coming to you with a nice tidy investment, somebody else will tap his forehead significantly and suggest another broker!"

"But I say that there is a coincidence, Sam," Lorne retorted doggedly. "I may be an ass; but I've lived with this thing in my mind ever since the poor boy was discovered lying there dead in the bathroom, and I've had time to think it over. The deaths were both on the face of them the result of accidents; but they might have been deliberately designed to appear as accidents. Do you get me? That needle which pierced my poor wife's hand might have been doctored beforehand; and anyone knowing the state of Julian's mind might have made a sudden noise behind him at a critical moment when the razor was near the artery. It would have taken a devilish clever mind—"

"Or an insane one." The attorney uncrossed his long legs and added casually: "Your theory presupposes, then, that it was an inside job?"

For a long moment the two men stared at each other; and then Samuel with a shrug settled back in his chair once more.

You see, Dick, you're going nutty about this thing. Just get the poor lad's estate in order and I'll have the necessary papers ready for you to sign. Then go away somewhere; try to amuse yourself and forget."

"You have the papers ready to-morrow morning, then, I have a complete statement and accounting for every penny that his mother left him already prepared; I was going to turn it over to him, in any event." Lorne paused and added: "I suppose if another coincidence of the same kind occurs in this family within a short time and doesn't involve me as the central figure, I shall be able to convince you that there is something in my hallucination, after all."

"I should be sorry to hear of such an occurrence," the attorney responded slowly. "But if it should happen I—yes, I'm inclined to think that I might be able to take it a bit more seriously than I can at present. If you had a single clue, a single shred of evidence to support your crazy idea—"

He paused as Lorne held up a warning hand. Steps were approaching over the bare library-floor, and the inevitable knock upon the connecting door was followed by a cough of deprecation.

"Come in, Gene," Lorne called resignedly.

"It's about one of these con—one of these letters of condolence, sir." Gene hastened to correct himself, and with a far greater respect than he exhibited toward his step-father in private. He meant to appear always at his best before the attorney who held the family fortunes, if not in his grasp, at least under his supervision. "It's from a woman—er—the stationery is not quite like that used by any of our acquaintances, and I can't make out the signature—'Mabelle' something."

"Let me see it!" Lorne demanded with an almost unprecedented irascibility in his tones. Gene passed over the table a flamboyant lavender envelope, and did not betray by a flutter of his downcast yellow eyelashes that he had observed not only his stepfather's sudden agitation but the attorney's start of surprise.

"Ill reply to this one; I see it is addressed to me—" Lorne was beginning when a terrific crash in the library made him start from his chair.

"Why, It's the portrait! The portrait of grandfather that hangs directly over the desk where I've been at work! It must weigh tons!" Gene had wheeled about, and his squeal of terror died in his throat as he turned again to face the other two, his own countenance convulsed with horror at the thought he could not utter.

For a moment they stood spellbound and then leaped past him and through the open door. The life-sized portrait with its massive gilt frame had crashed down over the desk and the space where Gene had been sitting but a minute before, splintering the heavy chair to matchwood.

"If Gene had not come to us with that letter just when he did—" Samuel paused.

"The third coincidence would be complete," Lorne finished for him. "He would have been crushed to atoms. Beginning to believe in my crazy idea a little bit, Sam? Beginning to see that there is some damnable reason for it all?"

"I'm willing now to admit the coincidence, Dick," the attorney said cautiously. "But the legal mind is not adapted to ghost-hunting; and I'd like to address your attention to the strands of wire cable which held the picture to the wall. They have been hacked almost through!"

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II

THE UNSEEN HAND

RICHARD LORNE bent forward, his stout knees shaking beneath him, and examined the cable-ends where they protruded from just under the edge of the frame. The tips of the sundered steel strands glittered as if burnished, and some had been turned inward from the force of the blows which had parted them.

He glanced up at the inscrutable face of his companion.

"What devil's work has been going on in this house!" He spoke in an awestruck whisper.

For answer the attorney merely touched his finger suggestively to his closed lips with a scarcely perceptible shake of his head as Gene hastened toward them.

"Dad!" The young man's face was working convulsively. "That didn't just happen! It couldn't! Why, it doesn't seem as though it fell at all, but as though something pulled it down over the place where I'd been working only a minute before. Look at the wall!"

The two older men raised their eyes and saw a number of small, deep, round holes spaced at regular intervals which roughly outlined the size and shape of the portrait, and then glancing down at the upturned back of the fallen picture beheld a row of stout iron stakes equally spaced driven outward from the under part of the frame.

"That's a mere detail," Samuel commented "Evidently the person who hung the portrait did not put any too much faith in the strength of the stakes driven into the wall; and wisely, seeing what has occurred, he supplemented them by the steel cable which has just parted, as you see. You had a narrow escape, then, Eugene; but it was sheer accident—?"

He was interrupted by a patter of little silken mules upon the stairs, and in another moment Cissie and Nan rushed into the room and paused, rooted to the spot at sight of the fallen picture. Both were clad in kimonos, and with the golden curls and straight, fine, black hair flowing about their shoulders and mingling as they clung instinctively to each other, they looked like little children. It was Nan who first drew away from her sister's tense embrace. She could see only her father and the attorney, for Gene stood behind them, and as she advanced the childish look left her face.

"Where is my brother?" Her tone rang with tragic grief through the room. "Is he there, beneath that—?"

"Nan!" All the good in the boy's weak face shone forth as he sprang forward and caught her in his arms. "I'm safe! I missed it by a fraction of a minute!"

"How did it happen?" Cissie's voice rose shrilly, but before anybody could reply a faint cry came from the doorway behind her.

"Grene! You are hurt! Something has happened!"

Looking more mouselike than ever with her gray hair lying in soft folds about her face and her slender figure encased in a drab dressing-gown, Miss Meade glided into the room.

"No, I'm not hurt, Aunt Effie. I had just gone to ask Dad about one of the letters when the portrait fell," Gene explained as she stood swaying, her thin, delicate hand gripping his arm until the fingers almost disappeared in the folds of his coatsleeve. "Mr. Titheredge says it was a sheer accident, but after what Rannie said at dinner to-night; after we know how we've all felt since Jule—" He broke off and added: "Ouch! Aunt Effie, you hurt!"

She removed her hand from his arm and repeated mechanically in a dazed fashion:

"You had gone to ask your stepfather about one of the letters?"

"Yes. These condolence things, you know. But I'm sure it couldn't have been an accident! Why should that one picture in all this house have fallen just at the moment when I left the desk? I'd been sitting there for more than an hour."

"What a merciful blessing that you escaped!" Miss Effie spoke in a low tone, then added quickly with a sharper note: "But I—it was I who asked you to reply to the letters, and suggested that you use the library desk here! I even arranged the light for you! Had you been killed it would have been my fault!"

"Come, Miss Meade, that's all nonsense!" Samuel Titheredge stepped forward. "No one can foresee accidents; and that portrait has hung there more than twenty years without falling. In any event it is all right; Gene wasn't hurt, and you and the girls had better go back to bed and try to forget all about it."

As if conscious for the first time of their appearance she glanced down shrinkingly at her own attire and then turned to where Nan and Cissie stood.

"Mr. Titheredge is right; let us go back to our rooms. I—I should never have forgiven myself if anything had happened to Gene!"

When she and the girls had taken their departure the attorney turned to the white-faced young man.

"You, too, Gene. No use trying to clear up this mess to-night, and your Dad and I have some business matters still to talk over. You've had a bad shock and you must try to get a sound night's rest."

"Do you suppose I could sleep?" Gene turned on him hotly. "You and Dad may be blind, but I tell you I know there is something horribly wrong! We are dying one by one, and I was scheduled to be the third! There was no coincidence about any of it. Someone is trying deliberately to do us all to death, someone who knows what we are doing from hour to hour!" His voice had risen to a shrill scream. "How can you shut your eyes?"

Titheredge compressed his lips and nudged Lorne, who glanced at him and then spoke with sudden sternness:

"Eugene, you are hysterical! You are behaving like a child! This matter of the fall of the portrait will be thoroughly investigated to-morrow, but meanwhile you must try to pull yourself together. Things will look different to you in the morning. Go on up to bed like a good chap, and let Mr. Titheredge and me finish our conference."

Gene went shakily from the room and they heard him ascending the steep, old-fashioned staircase. Waiting until his footsteps had ceased with the thud of a closing door, Lorne turned to his companion.

"Nevertheless, Sam, the boy is dead right! There is something horribly sinister back of the whole thing, and it is an insult to even his intelligence to try to convince him of the fallacy of mere coincidence. I'm not going to wait until morning and perhaps find some other member of the family dead in bed! At the risk of the derisive notoriety you were talking about a little while ago I'm going to have the authorities in here now!"

"I agree with you that it looks very much as if some human agency has been at work. We can at least be certain of it in this last case, with the evidence of the cut cable; but it is after midnight, and I don't believe another attempt will be made to-night." The attorney's calm, sane voice fell upon the other's ears like a dash of cold water. "Besides, if you call up now you'll have a mob of heavy-footed, matter-of-fact plainclothesmen in here who wouldn't be able to comprehend your almost superstitious apprehension and who would obliterate any clue which may remain. There is just one lad in the Homicide Bureau at Headquarters who could Understand your point of view and carry out the investigation with the necessary tact and discretion if we are to avoid undue notoriety, and that is Barry Odell. I'll stay here to-night with you and keep guard if you think it necessary, turn and turn about; and in the morning we'll go down to Headquarters. I'll have a word with the Commissioner, and we'll bring young Odell back with us."

Agitated as he was, Lorne saw the wisdom of the attorney's advice and accepted it. After a further examination of the fallen portrait they turned out the lights and went upstairs. Samuel elected to share his friend's room; but sleep did not come and they were still discussing the extraordinary chain of tragic events when Lorne stopped in the middle of a sentence and held up a warning hand.

"Did you hear that?" he whispered after a moment.

"What? Don't let your nerves run away with you, old man.

"Nerves nothing! Don't speak aloud! I'm sure I heard a step out in the hall."

"Well, I didn't, and I've keener ears than you," retorted Titheredge.

Lorne padded softly to the door and listened for a space of several minutes, then turned away with a sigh of relief.

"I guess I must have been mistaken. I'll go to pieces myself, like Gene, if I'm not careful. God! I wish this night would end, and we could get hold of that young fellow you spoke of! Perhaps it would be better, though, to go to some private detective agency and avoid the police."

"And have your home overrun with operatives, every member of your household shadowed and their affairs investigated; and nothing to show for it but a bill as long as a Japanese letter?" Titheredge demanded contemptuously. "Use your head, Dick! I wouldn't recommend this young—"

He paused, silenced by a swift gesture from his companion.

"Listen! Do you hear it—that grating, gnawing sound?" It was a cool September night and the windows were open, but the sweat was pouring down Lorne's chubby countenance. He padded to the door as before, then beckoned insistently, "Come over here! Don't you dare pretend—"

With an expression of boredom the attorney rose and tiptoed across the room. He placed his ear to the keyhole for a minute and then straightened with a shrug.

"Of course I hear it. Mice or even rats in the walls; you can't drive them out of an old house like this. That's probably what you heard before." He resumed his seat. "You can hear all sorts of noises at night if you only listen for them."

"I suppose so," Lorne muttered somewhat doubtfully as he went back to his chair. "I could have sworn, though, that it sounded louder than any rat."

"As I was saying when you interrupted"—Titheredge ignored the last remark—^"I would not have recommended Barry Odell to you if I didn't know all about him and his capabilities. He's young still, about twenty-eight or thirty; but I've watched his work on a couple of murder cases, and I tell you he will go far."