Then he made a circle on a piece of paper and marked it around with perhaps a dozen dots.
It bore a rough relation to a clock-face, but without the hands, when he held it out to me.
“This dial thing,” he said.
“It may not refer to a clock, you know. It might be a safe.
You haven’t a safe in the house, have you?”
“No.”
“A safe, or something resembling a clock, but not necessarily a clock.
Something round.
Would that mean anything to you? A picture, maybe?
Have you any round pictures, with nails at the back?”
“One or two.
I can examine them.”
The train was drawing in.
He helped me into my wraps, and we sat down again while we were being slowly moved into the station.
“I suppose,” he said, not looking directly at me, “that you realize what all this has done to me?”
“To you!”
“About Judy.
I’ll be nobody’s kept husband, and Judy’s got a couple of millions or so.
I fade, that’s all.”
“Judy has a right to a vote on that, hasn’t she?”
“She’s voted.
She’ll keep the money.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Well, the equivalent of that.
She says I’m a poor mean-spirited creature to refuse to let her support me in luxury.
She says it takes a strong man to marry money, and I’m weak or I’d do it.”
Then the train stopped.
I was glad to get home, to find Robert at the station and Joseph at the open door.
I like my servants; I have to live with them, and so when I do not like them they must go.
And the house was cool and quiet, after New York.
I relaxed at once under Joseph’s care; the well-laid tea table, the small hot rolls, the very smoothness and greenness of the lawns outside the windows.
For the first time since Sarah’s death I felt secure.
Surely now it was over; we had had our three tragedies, according to the old superstition.
I leaned back and looked at Joseph, and for the first time, I realized that he was pale, almost waxy.
“Have you been ill, Joseph?”
“No, madam.
I have had an accident.”
“An accident?
What sort of an accident?”
But as it turned out, Joseph had had no accident.
Dragged out of him, and later corroborated by the maids, came the story of an attack in broad daylight so mysterious and so brutal that it made my blood run cold.
The story was this: on the afternoon of the day I left for New York, he had allowed the women servants to go out.
He often did this in my absence, getting himself a supper of sorts, and apparently glad to have his pantry to himself.
The house was locked and Robert was washing the car in the garage.
According to Robert, and this was later found to be true, the first knowledge he had of any trouble was at four o’clock that afternoon, when he heard a faint rapping on the pantry window and looking toward the house, saw a bloody head, wavering with weakness, inside.
Robert was frightened.
He made no effort to get into the house alone, but summoned a white chauffeur from the garage of my bootlegger neighbor, and the two of them broke open the basement door and rushed up the stairs.
They found Joseph unconscious on the pantry floor, his head bleeding profusely from a bad cut, and as Doctor Simonds later discovered, his body a mass of bruises.
It was two hours before he recovered consciousness, and then he could give no description of his assailant.
“I saw and heard nobody,” he told me.