The sinister mark
Peter nodded to himself.
"I suppose it was a desire for admiration," Lord went on, in his
gentle, kindly voice, "that was the cause of--of the trouble that came
to poor little Rosamond."
Peter pricked up his ears. Was he to learn something at last? Something
of the secret, perhaps, that Mary Blake thought no one would ever
know--the reason that she----
"What trouble?" asked Peter, aloud, carefully restraining his eagerness.
Walter Lord's chin was on his hand and his eyes were bent upon the two
little pictures. He spoke slowly, sadly:
"It didn't happen until after their mother passed away.... I could
always thank God for that.... The girls were eighteen then, well grown,
tall and graceful, and Rosamond most beautiful--magnificent--though I
always thought that Anne----"
Lord paused an instant and then caught up again the thread of his
narrative.
"Well--no one knew exactly how it happened. On the mountain, beyond
that valley over there"--he pointed through the window, where a full,
bright moon lit hill and vale with tender radiance--"on the far side of
the mountain there had sprung up a summer colony of city people. We saw
them, once in a while, riding through here on horseback--a gay lot of
young people, rich and careless....
"How Rosamond met--the man--Anne never knew. She loved her sister
passionately, devotedly, but Rosamond never confided in her. All Anne
knew was that Rosamond went off for long walks by herself. She'd be
gone all day, and come home, laughing and happy, with a brilliant
colour in her face and her eyes alight.... And then, one day, she did
not come back.... Anne watched, in sleepless agony, all through the
night, and in the morning she came down to me....
"We never heard from Rosamond but once.... Only once, and that was
the next day. Just one letter to Anne, which she never showed me. I
don't know if even she knew the name of the man.... All she said to
me was: 'She's never coming back, Uncle Walter,' and then she covered
her poor face with her arm and laid her head against the wall. 'She's
not married to him,' she sobbed, 'and she says--oh, God!--she says she
doesn't care.....'"
"So that was it," thought Peter. "That was Mary Blake's secret. Good
God! How shall I tell Morris? A young, pleasure-loving, untaught,
unmoral creature.... And he thinks her perfect.... What was his phrase?
'A wonder-woman'!"
Old Walter Lord talked on sadly, reminiscently, but for a long time
Peter did not hear what he was saying. He was thinking--"What shall I
tell Morris? How shall I tell Morris?"
CHAPTER XIX
IN THE OLD PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY
When Peter awoke very early the next morning, though the problem was
still the same, the form of his inner question had slightly changed.
"How much need I tell Morris?" he asked himself. "If Mary Blake never
is found, why dig up the sad old sordid story? It must have happened
ten years ago--and perhaps she'd redeemed herself--who can tell? And
it's a thankless job, chucking stones is, Pete.... If what O'Malley and
I doped out turns out to be true, and Anne, in spite of the virtues old
Lord attributes to her.... If Anne, for the sake of her clever sister's
money--or from jealousy of her perfect beauty----H'm'm'm."
He broke off here to wonder how the sisters came together afterward.
Lord evidently knew nothing about it. So far as Peter could learn he
was quite unaware that they had ever met again.
After recovering from the shock of Lord's disclosure in regard to
Rosamond, Peter had, carefully and skilfully, questioned him. The talk
lasted far into the night, but all he had found out was this:
Upon Rosamond's disappearance from Hobart Falls, Anne had retired,
absolutely, within herself. All that winter she lived alone in the
small house on the other side of the mountain and never came at all to
the village. Lord had gone up to see her many times, and at last she
confided to him that she had almost no money at all.
He didn't say it in so many words, but Peter gathered that the
generous, kind old man had offered to share what little he had with her
and had been refused.
"When summer came," he told Peter, "without saying anything to me, she
went over and got work from the rich city people in Fennimore Park."
Peter understood that the old man was very angry when he found it
out, but that it had had no effect on Anne's unyielding spirit. She
continued to take washing and to do day's work for the summer people.
There was nothing else to be done. She was too proud to take money she
had not earned, and this seemed to be the only way in which she could
make a livelihood.
And then, one day late in the fall, Lord had received a letter from her
saying that she was going away as a sort of maid or companion to an
old lady, a Mrs. Rutherford, who had a cottage in Fennimore Park. She
told him that she hoped, before very long, to be able to send the money
he had loaned her on her father's watch and an old seal ring. (Lord
had been worried for fear Mr. Clancy might think he had exacted this
security. Peter assured him that he readily understood that it must
have been forced upon him.)
"And did she send for them?" Peter had asked with interest.
It transpired that she had and that Lord had returned the watch and
ring in Mrs. Rutherford's care, to the Holland House in New York.
And that was the last he had ever heard of Anne Curwood. He had made
a pilgrimage to Fennimore Park the next summer, only to find that
Mrs. Rutherford had gone abroad and that no one knew anything about
Anne. The following year he succeeded in seeing Mrs. Rutherford, who
was obviously, from Lord's tone, an awe-inspiring lady. She had dimly
remembered that she had once had a maid named Anne Curwood, but the
young woman was no longer in her employ and she could, unfortunately,
give Mr. Lord no address.
Peter was going over all this in his mind as he bathed and dressed. He
was in a somewhat despondent mood for one of his sanguine temperament,
and rather wished he had not humoured Walter Lord's absurd request
that he should sit for his photograph before he left in the morning.
To be sure, he had refused once, on the ground that his train left at
nine-thirty, but when he saw how disappointed Lord was not to have
this souvenir of what was, evidently, an event in the old man's life,
he hastily relented, and as a result, he was up and dressed at seven
o'clock.
He had heard his host pottering about the kitchen before he was up,
and when he presently descended the old carpeted front stair, he found
an ample and savoury breakfast awaiting him. It was rapidly, and by
Walter Lord gleefully, dispatched.
"The light is great this morning," the old enthusiast said, as he led
the way up the back stairs, "and I'm going to make a fine picture of
you, Mr. Clancy. It's awfully good of you to be willing to humour an
old codger like me. I hope you won't mind the gallery being a bit
dusty," he added, opening a gray painted door. "I don't have much
incentive, these days, to keep it spick and span, and I never have
allowed Miranda to tidy up here since the day she carefully dusted six
wet negatives." He laughed over his shoulder as he went into a closet
for his plate holders.
Peter, left to his own devices for a moment, wandered about the room.
It was an ordinary country photograph gallery, with the usual top and
side lights, platform, screens, and chairs. The only odd thing about
it was that the walls, from a chair rail at the bottom to well above
the eye line, were completely covered with photographs. It was a big
room, and there was not one inch of space wasted. It must have been the
enthusiastic work of a lifetime, and Walter Lord was, obviously, a good
workman for even the portraits which, judging by the costumes, dated
far back, were not badly faded.
"This is some collection you've got here," said Peter, admiringly, as
Lord came back into the room. "Wish I had time to look it all over."
Lord laid his plates down on a table near by, and smiling at the
compliment, motioned Peter to a chair on the platform. Then he ducked
under the black cloth of the camera, talking all the while:
"Yes, I've done a fairish amount of work in my time, Mr. Clancy, though
a lot of it was gratis, as you may imagine. (A little more to the
left, please.) I haven't made a lot of money, but I've had a splendid
time. (Chin up, just a little. Not quite so much--there, that's fine.
Couldn't be better.) I'll show you some things you may be interested
in, in just a moment. Now, don't move, _please_."
He slipped out from under the black cloth, caught up and adjusted the
plate holder with expert hands, and then stood beside the camera, with
the bulb ready.
"Now imagine that you've just caught a two-pound trout, Mr. Clancy!
That's what I want! That's fine, fine! Oh, that's going to be splendid,
Mr. Clancy," he said, gleefully, as he manipulated the plates. "Now
just once more to make sure. A little to the right--there--and another
fish!"
Peter laughed aloud. The shutter clicked. The old man was delighted.
"I caught that laugh of yours, Mr. Clancy, and that was just what I
wanted--to remember you by. It's good to be young, and to laugh. I
don't believe you have a care in the world!"
Peter laughed inwardly, sardonically, at this. And all the while he was
thinking of Donald Morris. How much need he be told?
"Come over here, and I'll show you something pretty, Mr. Clancy."
Walter Lord, having disposed of his precious plates, was again at
Peter's side. "I think this is one of the most charming pictures I've
ever made. See if you recognize it."
He led the way to a corner of the room where some of the photographs
were turning a little brown; evidently they had been placed there years
ago. He pointed to a cabinet-size picture half way up the wall. Peter
looked and saw, dressed in a fanciful costume of fluttering gauze, a
delicate, slender child's figure standing, fairy-like, beside the trunk
of a great beech. The flicker of sun and leaf shadows was all about
her, and her little oval face was alight with joy and mischief. The
beauty of it caught Peter's breath.
"Why, it's Mar--Rosamond Curwood, isn't it?" he exclaimed. "And, by
George, I'll say you're some artist, Mr. Lord!"
"It is lovely, isn't it?" said the old man, happily. "I remember
how I enjoyed taking it. Not many regular photographers were doing
outdoor backgrounds at that time, but I had nothing here"--he glanced
scornfully at the stiffly painted old screens--"nothing that was
suitable. And I did want to keep a memory of the way the child looked
in that fairy dress. I saw her at the school in a little play, and
persuaded her--not that there was any trouble about that--to sit for
me. It was a curious thing how well Rosamond acted in all the little
entertainments they gave at the school.... At the same time, I don't
think she was half so clever, in that way, as Anne, but of course Anne
was so shy that she would never appear in public, and I imagine almost
no one knew that she had any talent. I only found it out, myself, by
accident."
Peter saw in this the old man's habitual defence of his favourite, a
natural siding with "the underdog." To humour this kindly quality, he
asked:
"How was that?"
"Why," said Walter Lord, reminiscently, "it started one day when I was
going up to their house through the woods. I was walking along quietly,
and suddenly I thought I heard someone talking, half singing, a little
way to the left, behind a screen of young hemlock. The words, such as
I could catch, sounded strangely familiar. My curiosity got the better
of me, and I slipped quietly through the bushes and parted the hemlock