The Golden Slipper, and Other Problems for Violet Strange. Анна ГринЧитать онлайн книгу.
as well as a poor preparation for the hour when, the noble pair gone, he stepped into the library to find Miss Strange awaiting him with one hand behind her back and a piteous look on her infantile features.
“O, Mr. Driscoll,” she began—and then he saw that a group of anxious girls hovered in her rear—“my pendant! my beautiful pendant! It is gone! Somebody reached in from the balcony and took it from my dresser in the night. Of course, it was to frighten me; all of the girls told me not to leave it there. But I—I cannot make them give it back, and papa is so particular about this jewel that I’m afraid to go home. Won’t you tell them it’s no joke, and see that I get it again. I won’t be so careless another time.”
Hardly believing his eyes, hardly believing his ears—she was so perfectly the spoiled child detected in a fault—he looked sternly about upon the girls and bade them end the jest and produce the gems at once.
But not one of them spoke, and not one of them moved; only his daughter grew pale until the roses seemed a mockery, and the steady stare of her large eyes was almost too much for him to bear.
The anguish of this gave asperity to his manner, and in a strange, hoarse tone he loudly cried:
“One of you did this. Which? If it was you, Alicia, speak. I am in no mood for nonsense. I want to know whose foot traversed the balcony and whose hand abstracted these jewels.”
A continued silence, deepening into painful embarrassment for all. Mr. Driscoll eyed them in ill-concealed anguish, then turning to Miss Strange was still further thrown off his balance by seeing her pretty head droop and her gaze fall in confusion.
“Oh! it’s easy enough to tell whose foot traversed the balcony,” she murmured. “It left this behind.” And drawing forward her hand, she held out to view a small gold-coloured slipper. “I found it outside my window,” she explained. “I hoped I should not have to show it.”
A gasp of uncontrollable feeling from the surrounding group of girls, then absolute stillness.
“I fail to recognize it,” observed Mr. Driscoll, taking it in his hand. “Whose slipper is this?” he asked in a manner not to be gainsaid.
Still no reply, then as he continued to eye the girls one after another a voice—the last he expected to hear—spoke and his daughter cried:
“It is mine. But it was not I who walked in it down the balcony.”
“Alicia!”
A month’s apprehension was in that cry. The silence, the pent-up emotion brooding in the air was intolerable. A fresh young laugh broke it.
“Oh,” exclaimed a roguish voice, “I knew that you were all in it! But the especial one who wore the slipper and grabbed the pendant cannot hope to hide herself. Her finger-tips will give her away.”
Amazement on every face and a convulsive movement in one half-hidden hand.
“You see,” the airy little being went on, in her light way, “I have some awfully funny tricks. I am always being scolded for them, but somehow I don’t improve. One is to keep my jewelry bright with a strange foreign paste an old Frenchwoman once gave me in Paris. It’s of a vivid red, and stains the fingers dreadfully if you don’t take care. Not even water will take it off, see mine. I used that paste on my pendant last night just after you left me, and being awfully sleepy I didn’t stop to rub it off. If your finger-tips are not red, you never touched the pendant, Miss Driscoll. Oh, see! They are as white as milk.
“But some one took the sapphires, and I owe that person a scolding, as well as myself. Was it you, Miss Hughson? You, Miss Yates? or—” and here she paused before Miss West, “Oh, you have your gloves on! You are the guilty one!” and her laugh rang out like a peal of bells, robbing her next sentence of even a suggestion of sarcasm. “Oh, what a sly-boots!” she cried. “How you have deceived me! Whoever would have thought you to be the one to play the mischief!”
Who indeed! Of all the five, she was the one who was considered absolutely immune from suspicion ever since the night Mrs. Barnum’s handkerchief had been taken, and she not in the box. Eyes which had surveyed Miss Driscoll askance now rose in wonder toward hers, and failed to fall again because of the stoniness into which her delicately-carved features had settled.
“Miss West, I know you will be glad to remove your gloves; Miss Strange certainly has a right to know her special tormentor,” spoke up her host in as natural a voice as his great relief would allow.
But the cold, half-frozen woman remained without a movement. She was not deceived by the banter of the moment. She knew that to all of the others, if not to Peter Strange’s odd little daughter, it was the thief who was being spotted and brought thus hilariously to light. And her eyes grew hard, and her lips grey, and she failed to unglove the hands upon which all glances were concentrated.
“You do not need to see my hands; I confess to taking the pendant.”
“Caroline!”
A heart overcome by shock had thrown up this cry. Miss West eyed her bosom-friend disdainfully.
“Miss Strange has called it a jest,” she coldly commented. “Why should you suggest anything of a graver character?”
Alicia brought thus to bay, and by one she had trusted most, stepped quickly forward, and quivering with vague doubts, aghast before unheard-of possibilities, she tremulously remarked:
“We did not sleep together last night. You had to come into my room to get my slippers. Why did you do this? What was in your mind, Caroline?”
A steady look, a low laugh choked with many emotions answered her.
“Do you want me to reply, Alicia? Or shall we let it pass?”
“Answer!”
It was Mr. Driscoll who spoke. Alicia had shrunk back, almost to where a little figure was cowering with wide eyes fixed in something like terror on the aroused father’s face.
“Then hear me,” murmured the girl, entrapped and suddenly desperate. “I wore Alicia’s slippers and I took the jewels, because it was time that an end should come to your mutual dissimulation. The love I once felt for her she has herself deliberately killed. I had a lover—she took him. I had faith in life, in honour, and in friendship. She destroyed all. A thief—she has dared to aspire to him! And you condoned her fault. You, with your craven restoration of her booty, thought the matter cleared and her a fit mate for a man of highest honour.”
“Miss West,”—no one had ever heard that tone in Mr. Driscoll’s voice before, “before you say another word calculated to mislead these ladies, let me say that this hand never returned any one’s booty or had anything to do with the restoration of any abstracted article. You have been caught in a net, Miss West, from which you cannot escape by slandering my innocent daughter.”
“Innocent!” All the tragedy latent in this peculiar girl’s nature blazed forth in the word. “Alicia, face me. Are you innocent? Who took the Dempsey corals, and that diamond from the Tiffany tray?”
“It is not necessary for Alicia to answer,” the father interposed with not unnatural heat. “Miss West stands self-convicted.”
“How about Lady Paget’s scarf? I was not there that night.”
“You are a woman of wiles. That could be managed by one bent on an elaborate scheme of revenge.”
“And so could the abstraction of Mrs. Barnum’s five-hundred-dollar handkerchief by one who sat in the next box,” chimed in Miss Hughson, edging away from the friend to whose honour she would have pinned her faith an hour before. “I remember now seeing her lean over the railing to adjust the old lady’s shawl.”
With a start, Caroline West turned a tragic gaze upon the speaker.
“You think me guilty of all because of what I did last night?”
“Why