DETECTIVE EBENEZER GRYCE - Complete Murder-Mysteries Collection: 11 Novels in One Volume
he begged for an explanation of what they saw before them:
“Some one here must be able to tell me. Let that some one speak.”
At this the quietest and least conspicuous person present, a young man heavily spectacled and of student-like appearance, advanced a step and said:
“I was the first person to come in here after this poor young lady fell. I was looking at coins just beyond the partition there, when I heard a gasping cry. I had not heard her fall—I fear I was very much preoccupied in my search for an especial coin I had been told I should find here—but I did hear the cry she gave, and startled by the sound, left the section where I was and entered this one, only to see just what you are seeing now.”
The Curator pointed at the two women.
“This? The one woman kneeling over the other with her hand on the arrow?”
“Yes, sir.”
A change took place in the Curator’s expression. Involuntarily his eyes rose to the walls hung closely with Indian relics, among which was a quiver in which all could see arrows similar to the one now in the breast of the young girl lying dead before them.
“This woman must be made to speak,” he said in answer to the low murmur which followed this discovery. “If there is a doctor present——”
Waiting, but receiving no response, he withdrew his hand from the woman’s arm and laid it on the arrow.
This roused her completely. Loosing her own grasp upon the shaft, she cried, with sudden realization of the people pressing about her:
“I could not draw it. That causes death, they say. Wait! she may still be alive. She may have a word to speak.”
She was bending to listen. It was hardly a favorable moment for further questioning, but the Curator in his anxiety could not refrain from saying:
“Who is she? What is her name and what is yours?”
“Her name?” repeated the woman, rising to face him again. “How should I know? I was passing through this gallery and had just stopped to take a look into the court when this young girl bounded by me from behind and flinging up her arms, fell with a deep sigh to the floor. I saw an arrow in her breast, and——”
Emotion choked her, and when some one asked if the girl was a stranger to her, she simply bowed her head; then, letting her gaze pass from face to face till it had completed the circle of those about her, she said in her former mechanical way:
“My name is Ermentrude Taylor. I came to look at the bronzes. I should like to go now.”
But the crowd which had formed about her was too compact to allow her to pass. Besides, the director, Mr. Roberts, had something to say first. Working his way forward, he waited till he had attracted her attention and then remarked in his most considerate manner:
“You will pardon these importunities, Mrs. Taylor. I am a director of this museum, and if Mr. Jewett will excuse me,”—here he bowed to the Curator,—“I should like to inquire from what direction the arrow came which ended this young girl’s life?”
For a moment she stood aghast, fixing him with her eye as though to ask whither this inquiry tended. Then with an air of intention which was not without some strange element of fear, she allowed her glance to travel across the court till it rested upon the row of connected arches facing them from the opposite gallery.
“Ah,” said he, putting her look into words, “you think the arrow came from the other side of the building. Did you see anyone over there,—in the gallery, I mean,—at or before the instant of this young girl’s fall?”
She shook her head.
“Did any of you?” he urged, with his eyes on the crowd. “Some one must have been looking that way.”
But no answer came, and the silence was fast becoming oppressive when these words, whispered by one woman to another, roused them anew and sent every glance again to the walls—even hers for whose benefit this remark had possibly been made:
“But there are no arrows over there. All the arrows are here.”
She was right. They were here, quiver after quiver of them; nor were they all beyond reach. As the woman thus significantly assailed noted this and saw with what suspicion others noted it also, a decided change took place in her aspect.
“I should like to sit down,” she murmured. Possibly she was afraid she might fall.
As some one brought a chair, she spoke, but very tremulously, to the director:
“Are there no arrows in the rooms over there?”
“I am quite sure not.”
“And no bows?”
“None.”
“If—if anyone had been seen in the gallery——”
“No one was.”
“You are sure of that?”
“You heard the question asked. It brought no answer.”
“But—but these galleries are visible from below. Some one may have been looking up from the court and——”
“If there was any such person in the building, he would have been here by this time. People don’t hold back such information.”
“Then—then—” she stammered, her eyes taking on a hunted look, “you conclude—these people conclude what?”
“Madam,”—the word came coldly, stinging her into drawing herself to her full height,—“it is not for me to conclude in a case like this. That is the business of the police.”
At this word, with its suggestion of crime, her air of conscious power vanished in sudden collapse. Possibly she had seen the significant gesture with which the Curator pointed out a quiver from which one of the arrows was missing. That this was so, was shown by her next question:
“But where is the bow? Look about on the floor. You will find none. How can an arrow be shot without a bow?”
“It cannot be,” came from some one at her back. “But it can be driven home like a dagger if the hand wielding it is sufficiently powerful.”
A cry left her lips; she seemed to listen as for some echo; then in a wild abandonment which ignored person and place she flung herself again at the dead girl’s side, and before the astonished people surrounding her could intervene, she had caught up the body in her arms, and bending over it, whispered word after word into the poor child’s closed ear.
Chapter II.
In Room B
Five minutes later the Curator was at the ‘phone calling up Police Headquarters. A death had occurred at the museum. Would they send over a capable detective?
“What kind of death?” was the harsh reply. “We don’t send detectives in cases of heart-failure or simple accident. Is it an accident?”
“No—no—hardly. It looks more like an insane woman’s attack upon a harmless stranger. It’s the oddest sort of an affair, and we feel very helpless. No common officer will do. We have one of that kind in the building. What we want is a man of brains; he will need them.”
A muffled sound at the other end—then a different voice asking some half-dozen comprehensive questions—which, having been answered to the best of the Curator’s ability, were followed by the welcome assurance that a man on whose experience he could rely would be at the museum doors within five minutes.
With an air of relief Mr. Jewett stepped