With de Grandin in the lead, stepping softly as a pair of cats, we trailed the woman through the dimly lighted, barren hall and up a flight of shadowy, uncarpeted stairs. We climbed two further flights, the last one letting into a sort of little oblong foyer bounded on one end by the stair-well, on the farther extremity by a barred and very dirty window, and on each side by two sets of sagging, paint-blistered doors. On each of these was pinned a card, handwritten with the many flourishes dear to the chirography of the professional card-writer who still does business in the poorer quarters of our great cities. The air was heavy with the odor of cheap whisky, stale bacon and fried onions.
We made a hasty circuit of the hall, studying the cardboard labels. On the farthest door the notice read Miss Sieglinde.
"Mon Dieu," exclaimed de Grandin, "le mot propre!"
"Eh?" I answered, puzzled.
"Sieglinde, do you not recall her?"
"No-o, I can not say I do. The only Sieglinde I remember is the character in Wagner's Die Walkure who unwittingly became her brother's mistress and——"
"Précisément. Let us enter, if you please." Without pausing to knock, he turned the handle of the door and stepped across the threshold of the squalid room.
The woman sat upon the bed, her hat pushed backward from her brow, a cracked and dirty tumbler in one hand, a whisky bottle poised above it. "Get out!" she ordered thickly. "Get out o' here—I don't want——" A gasp cut short her utterance, and she turned her head away. Then:
"Get t’ell out o' here, you lousy rummies!" she half screamed. "Who d'ye think you are, breakin' into a lady's room like this? Get out, or——"
De Grandin eyed her steadily, and, as her strident order wavered:
"Madame Arabella, we have come to take you home," he told her softly.
"Good Lord, man, you're crazy!" I exclaimed. "Arabella? This——"
"Precisely, my good friend; this is Madame Arabella Tantavul, whom we have sought these many months in vain."
Crossing the room in two quick strides he seized the cringing woman by the shoulders and turned her face up to the window. I looked, and felt a sudden swift attack of nausea.
He was right. Thin to emaciation, her face already lined with the deep-bitten scars of dissipation, the woman on the bed was Arabella Tantavul, though the shocking change wrought in her features and the black dye in her hair had disguised her so I never would have recognized her.
"We have come to take you home, ma pauvre," he repeated. "Your husband——"
"My husband?" Her reply was half a scream. "Oh, dear God, as if I had a husband——"
"And a little one who needs you," the Frenchman interrupted. "You can not leave him so, Madame——"
"I can't? Ah, that's where you're mistaken, Doctor. I can never see him again, in this world or the next. Please, please, go away and forget you found me, or I'll have to drown myself—I've tried it twice already, but my courage failed. But if you try to take me back, or tell Dennis that you saw me——"
"Tell me, Madame," he broke in, "was not your flight caused by a visitation from the dead?"
Her faded brown eyes widened. "How did you know?" she asked.
"Tiens, one may make surmises," he
