Ransom (17 page)

Her father drew her out into the hall, and she told him about Rannie's idea of pawning his watch to pay his debts. She saw a startled flash of intense sorrow pass over his face.

“I'm glad you told me,” he said after a minute. “There may be something in it. Perhaps you ought to know that Rannie had not been doing as he ought to at school. In fact, he was seriously involved in a matter of stealing examination questions from the safe, and he had been expelled.”

“Oh, Father,” said Christobel with distress in her voice. “Did Rannie know that? I'm sure he didn't know it when he talked to me. He was so eager to get back.”

“No, he didn't know it until this afternoon. I just received the notice from the school before we went out to ride, and I told him while you were in calling on Maggie. I am greatly troubled lest your brother has taken the matter to heart and gone away of his own accord.”

The father sighed heavily, and Christobel's heart was wrung for him.

“Then he wouldn't have gone back to school, would he? If he knew he was expelled?”

“I don't know,” said the father with another troubled look. “You can't tell just what he had in mind. Rannie took an altogether cheerful view of the case. He seemed to think the action wouldn't hold. He may have got it into his head that he could persuade them to take him back and waive the disgrace. He said something to that effect. He seemed to think it wasn't serious at all. In fact, he suggested that if I subscribed a good fat sum to the endowment fund, it would all speedily be forgotten. I've just been thinking that perhaps he may have thought if he went back and ate humble pie and got around some members of the faculty, that he could avert further trouble.”

“Have you told the police that?”

“No, not yet. I am waiting till I hear from the school. If, in a reasonable length of time, he hasn't arrived, or by tomorrow morning at the latest, why, I'll be sure it wasn't that. Anyway, child, it isn't essential that they know more than they do already. They are watching cars in every direction. Chris, go to bed at once. You are white as a sheet. There is no virtue in getting sick.”

“Oh, Father, please let me lie down on the couch near you somewhere!” she pleaded.

Just then the telephone rang furiously, and the anxious father hurried away, leaving Christobel like a little lost shadow hovering about the hall.

It was an hour before the father was at liberty. The telephone kept ringing just as soon as the receiver was hung up. Business acquaintances calling up, asking questions, strangers with supposed clues to the missing son. One was sure he had seen him in a nightclub, another had seen a young man being driven furiously through a neighboring street, crying out and struggling. There were mysterious offers to restore him to his home for a consideration varying from fifty dollars to a hundred thousand, and Christobel, shivering near the telephone booth to try and listen in, felt her head grow dizzy and her heart sink. Her only hope was that there would presently come a message from the school, that after all, crazy-headed Rannie had driven there in the hope of reinstating himself in favor and relieving his father from embarrassment and mortification over his only son.

Christobel knew enough of her brother's temperament to be sure his pride must be terribly hurt and that he would not want to rest under humiliation. He adored his father.

The night wore on.

Maggie, who ordinarily would have been on the alert for Christobel, was absorbed in an orgy of scrubbing the kitchen, feeling the quicker it was in immaculate order the sooner she would be able to rightly serve her master's family. Also, her mind was much distraught at the disappearance of Rannie, and for Maggie to be anxious meant that she must plunge into her work hard and fast. She worked with wild Scotch prayers on her tongue and tears flowing down her face. She did not want the family to discover what she was doing and send her to bed, therefore she did not come out of the kitchen to discover that Christobel had not gone to bed.

It was Phil Harper who finally discovered Christobel, shivering behind the heavy curtains in the small reception room in the dark, crying her heart out all alone. It had seemed to her that death held sway upstairs, where the vanished Charmian's room seemed to dominate the whole house, and that out-of-doors lay the menace of the great unknown underworld that might have spirited away her brother. Oh, why was life like this, anyway? What an awful grilling thing was uncertainty. Perhaps even now Rannie was suffering somewhere, in peril of death, and they could not get to him because they did not know where to go.

“Now, little girl,” said Philip, putting a firm brotherly hand upon her arm, “you are going to lie down. Wouldn't it be better for you to go up to your own bed? You could rest so much better there.”

“Oh, no!” shivered Christobel. “I–I'm quite all r–rright!” Her teeth were fairly chattering.

“Oh no, you're not all right at all,” he said gently. “Your hands are like ice. Come over here then and lie on this couch.” He led her over to the soft divan where she and Mrs. Romayne had sat that first night, and piled pillows about her.

“Now, lie down there! Wait! You must have something over you.”

He pushed her gently down among the pillows and vanished. She could hear him opening the door of the coat closet in the hall and then swinging back the door of the butler's pantry that led into the kitchen. In a moment he was back with a great soft blanket that belonged in the car, wrapping it carefully about her with hands that were gentle as a woman's.

“You make a splendid nurse.” She smiled up at him shyly in the dimly lighted room. The warmth and rest were beginning to soothe her excited nerves and stop her trembling.

“I ought to,” he answered pleasantly. “I've served my time waiting on Father.”

“Oh, has he been sick for a long time?” she asked sympathetically.

“Three years,” he said grimly. “Now, you're going to drink some hot milk and go to sleep awhile. I promise to wake you if there's any news.”

And there was Maggie, parting the curtains and carrying a cup of hot milk. Oh, it was good to be taken care of. Christobel felt the tears coming to her eyes again. But she drank the milk and nestled down among her pillows with a little of the burden lifted. She was not going to sleep, of course. She couldn't while the anxiety lasted. But it was good to lie down and relax.

The next thing she knew it was broad daylight, and there was a sound of confusion in the hall. A man was being brought in and surrounded by several policemen. To her bewildered senses, it seemed as if the hall were full of policemen, and then Maggie appeared cautiously, her cheeks redder than ever with excitement, tiptoeing toward her.

Christobel threw back her warm covers and sprang up in a hurry.

“I'm awake!” she said sharply. “What is it, Maggie, what has happened?”

“It's just that they want you to coom an' identify a dirty old tramp mon they've brought. You've only to take a luik at him, me bairnie. I tried to mak them wait till ye waked, but they was that hurried ye must com the noo. He's just a wicked old filthy lookin' mon, but they would hev ye at oncet!”

So Christobel went to the library, faithfully attended by Maggie, to face the man with the furtive eyes and stealthy step who had walked the pavement across the street the day before. A colorless creature, with an indefinite face belied by the smoldering gaze he could cast. A thin shadowlike figure, with the slump of one who had no shame. Just a drab scrap of fallen humanity who made a little link in a chain of vice and crime that might reach to the world's end. Who knew?

That smoldering gaze rested an instant on Christobel as she came into the room and then flitted past her and faded into drabness again, and she shivered as she turned away and followed her father from the room, attended by the faithful Maggie.

She was glad when they took the man away from the house. Was there no end to this procession of criminals? Were they all linked together for the ruin of her father's house? The cook, the maids, the chauffeur, the butler, and now this man? What a terrible world it was. Death and crime! And Rannie had not been heard from. Father had talked with the president of Rannie's school, and no one there knew anything of his whereabouts. Rannie was
gone
!

As the day passed on, the house was besieged by visitors and friends, strangers, reporters, and detectives, and people who thought they had a clue that was worth following.

And it was Philip Harper who found himself established in the house, standing between the master and the throng.

Hour after hour passed, and each new report brought new hope that faded into blankness again, and still Rannie was missing and no more clues to his whereabouts were discovered.

A
t last a mysterious typewritten letter arrived, purporting to be from the kidnappers, demanding an appalling sum of money for Rannie's release. It bore a postmark from the far West and even enclosed a bit of the blue silk necktie that Rannie had worn the night he disappeared. It stated that later arrangements would be made for placing the money under conditions of great secrecy and safety for the criminals, but that the money must be ready for instant demand in certain numbers of bills of small denomination and that if the money was not forthcoming when the demand was made, the young man would be killed.

Mr. Kershaw endeavored to keep knowledge of this from Christobel, but his agitation was so great, and his haggard appearance so aroused her anxiety, that she finally got it out of him.

“It is better for me to know the truth, Father,” she said. “I'll maybe think it is even worse than it is.”

“How could it be?” said the father with a groan.

“I guess things can always be worse, can't they?” she answered with a wan smile.

“Perhaps you're right,” he said and let her read the note.

“Are you going to give them all that money?” she said, appalled at the sum demanded. “Can you, Father? Are you as rich as that?”

“Unfortunately not,” said Mr. Kershaw with a wry twist of a bitter smile. “I used to be, but things have been going hard with me. I couldn't muster half that sum now. Not even on credit. You see, I've lost a lot lately. My stocks have gone way down, so that they are not worth half their former value as collateral, and some of them wouldn't even be accepted at all. And there have been two big bank failures that have put me in a terrible situation financially. I have been afraid that I would not be able to weather the storm in my business. We have been holding our own, but I knew it was going to be pretty stiff sailing. And now this comes when I just do not know where to turn for money or credit. I shall have to go out and see what I can do. I have friends, of course, but some of them are in a worse situation than I am. I suppose I ought not to be telling you these things, but you will have to know sooner or later if I go under.”

He sat slumped in a big leather chair in the library, a thin white hand up to his face, partly shading his eyes, his whole attitude that of a man who felt himself down and out. Christobel's heart went out to him, and she found the tears slowly dropping down her cheeks.

“Oh, Father dear!” she said. “You knew all that, yet you bought me that lovely fur coat and hat and those new dresses.”

“That was only a drop in the bucket,” sighed her father, trying to smile indulgently at her. “Besides, they were things you needed, things that were your right and due. You have been too long cheated out of your birthright, Chris, dear. I hope if things ever straighten out I shall be able to make it up to you somehow, but as it stands, I cannot forgive myself.”

“Oh, don't talk that way, Father dear!” begged the girl. “It has been good for me, I know it has. I would have been proud and snobbish if I had had things the way I wanted them. I'm glad I learned first to do without them. And I'm glad they don't matter to me now.”

“Well, you are a dear child. I don't want to say anything about your stepmother. She is dead. It is too late to undo the past. But sometimes I think I shall never forgive myself for having married such a woman, who spent my money on worthless friends and let my own children go without. However, she was young and ignorant and selfish. I was the most to blame. I should have known better than to marry her.”

“Oh, don't feel so badly, Father!” begged Christobel, putting her arms about her father's neck and drawing his face close to her breast. “You are a dear, dear father, and you shall not talk about yourself that way!”

The telephone bell suddenly ended the conversation, as it did so many of their talks. But when there was another opportunity, Christobel said: “Father, wouldn't it help you some if you were to sell this house and let us go and live in the old home?”

He lifted his head thoughtfully, then after a troubled silence he said, “I suppose it might, if we could find a buyer, which is doubtful in these times, without absolutely throwing it away. But I can't bear the thought of going back into poverty with my children, when I have been living in a palace with a selfish woman who did not care what became of me or mine.”

“Listen, Father dear, please, don't think of that. I would just love to get back in the dear old home with you and—and Rannie, wouldn't you? Wouldn't that be better than any palace?”

“Oh, it would!” groaned the father. “If only Rannie were back and safe, I'd gladly live in a tent the rest of my life.”

“Well, he's coming back,” said Christobel with an assurance she wasn't feeling. “I'm sure he is, and we'll be happy yet. Don't you believe so, Father?”

There was a pitiful pleading in her voice, and her lip trembled. Her father tried to smile, failed utterly, and, burying his face in his hands, groaned instead. Then he lifted his head and spoke more steadily.