Lost Man’s Lane quotes

I ought to have been on my guard. I ought to have known the old fox well enough to feel certain that when he went so manifestly out of his way to take me into his confidence he did it for a purpose.

But Jove nods now and then⁠—or so I have been assured on unimpeachable authority⁠—and if Jove has ever been caught napping, surely Amelia Butterworth may be pardoned a like inconsistency.

“It is not a city crime,” Mr. Gryce went on to explain, and here he was base enough to sigh. “At my time of life this is an important consideration.

I paused.

Sometimes discreet silence is more sarcastic than speech.

“Well, what lady would lend herself to this scheme?” I demanded at last.

“Oh,” he replied, “I have been in them all, of course; but a mystery such as we are investigating is not written upon the walls of parlors or halls.”

“You freeze my blood,” was my uncharacteristic rejoinder.

Somehow the sight of the homes indicated on this diagram seemed to bring me into more intimate sympathy with the affair.

I forgot that these girls had a brother and that—But not a word to forestall the truth.

I wish this story to grow upon you just as it did upon me, and with just as little preparation.

The farmer who drove me, and who I afterwards learned was called Simsbury, showed a certain dogged interest in my behavior that would have amused me, or, at least, have awakened my disdain under circumstances of a less thrilling nature.

… the occasion had any of the real Amelia Butterworth in it, so much was my mind divided between a desire to produce a favorable impression and a very decided and not-to-be-hidden fear of the dog who had greeted my arrival with such an ominous howl.

“Call off the dog!” I cried almost before I saw what sort of person I was addressing.

Mr. Gryce, when I saw him later, declared this to be the most significant introduction I could have made of myself upon entering the Knollys mansion.

I spoke with a due regard to truth when I assured Miss Knollys that I entertained no fears at the prospect of sleeping apart from the rest of the family.

I am a woman of courage⁠—or so I have always believed⁠—and at home occupy my second floor alone without the least apprehension.

But there is a difference in these two abiding-places, as I think you are ready by this time to acknowledge, and, though I felt little of what is called fear, I certainly did not experience my usual satisfaction in the minute preparations with which I …

This was so unexpected that for an instant I stood baffled and wondering. Then my nose went up, and I laughed quietly to myself. I could see nothing and I could hear nothing; but

Amelia Butterworth, like most of her kind, boasts of more than two senses, and happily there was something to smell.

A quickly blown-out candle leaves a witness behind it to sensitive nostrils like mine, and this witness assured me that the darkness was deceptive.

“Only,” I added, as her whole face showed relief, “we will go to the locksmith tomorrow and get a key; and after tonight you will be kind enough to see that I have a cup of tea brought to my room just before I retire.

I am no good without my cup of tea, my dear. What keeps other people awake makes me sleep.

”

“Ah, a good way to keep me in,” I reasoned. “But I shall see the grounds yet if I have to poison that dog.” Notwithstanding, I made no haste to leave the house.

I don’t believe in tempting Providence, especially where a dog is concerned.

Instead of that, I stood still and looked up and down the halls, endeavoring to get some idea of their plan and of the location of my own room in reference to the rest.

“Oh, that den!” he exclaimed, bitterly; then, seeing me look a little shocked, he added, with an admirable return to his old manner,

“I call any place a den where flowers do not grow.”

And jumping from the buggy, he gathered an exquisite bunch of heliotrope, which he pressed upon me. “I love sunshine, beds of roses, fountains, and a sweep of lawn like this we see before us. But do not let me bore you.

“Hardly.” She made the greatest effort to sustain the jest, but her concern and dread were manifest.

“I think I had better give you the keys now, than subject you to the drafts and chilling discomforts of this old place at midnight.”

I rose with a semblance of eager anticipation.

secondly, of simply leaving one of these blinds ajar; and finally, of chipping off a piece with the penknife I always carry with innumerable other small things in the bag I invariably wear at my side. (

Fashion, I hold, counts for nothing against convenience.

)

… not, I felt sure, from any connection he found between what he had just said and anything to be observed in me, but from—Well, I was glad that I had been carefully trained in my youth to pay the greatest attention to my morning toilets.

Any woman can look well at night and many women in the flush of a bright afternoon, but the woman who looks well in the morning needs not always to be young to attract the appreciative gaze of a man of real penetration.

Mr. Trohm was such a man, and I did not begrudge him the pleasure he showed in my neat gray silk and carefully adjusted collar. But he said nothing, and a short silence ensued, which was perhaps more of a compliment than otherwise.

I did not answer.

Even I understand that on occasion the tongue plays but a sorry part in interviews of this nature.

He sighed again and uttered some short encouragement to his horse, which started that animal up and sent him slowly pacing down the road toward the cheerful clearing whither my own eyes were looking with what I was determined should not be construed even by …

“You are an interesting girl, and you have, what your mother had not, a serious side to your nature that is anything but displeasing to me.

But my kisses, Lucetta, are as rare as my tears.

I had rather give you good advice, and that is a fact. Perhaps it is as strong a proof of affection as any ordinary caress would be.”

“Ah!” I ejaculated slowly. “It is you, is it? Well, I am not surprised.” (I shouldn’t have been.) “

When you say you are old, you mean old enough to pull the wool over other people’s eyes, and when you say you are lame, you mean that you only halt long enough to let others get far enough ahead for them not to see how fast you hobble up behind them.

But do not think I am not happy to see you. I am, Mr. Gryce, for I have discovered the secret of Lost Man’s Lane, and find it somewhat too heavy a one for my own handling.”

He did not get angry.

He has an admirable temper, has Mr. Gryce, but he did stop a minute to consider.

“Miss Butterworth,” he said at last, “most detectives would have held their peace and let you go on with what you have to tell without a hint that it was either unwelcome or unnecessary, but I have consideration for persons’ feelings and for persons’ secrets …

“I thought not!” I could not help the exclamation.

It is so seldom one can really triumph over this man.

“Not having the cue, you would not be apt to see what gives this whole thing away. I would never have thought of it again if we had not had this talk. Is Mr. Simsbury a neat man?”

My next move was to go to my room and take from my trunk a tiny hammer and some very small, sharp-pointed tacks. Curious articles, you will think, for a woman to carry on her travels, but

I am a woman of experience, and have known only too often what it was to want these petty conveniences and not be able to get them.

They were to serve me an odd turn now. Taking a half-dozen tacks in one hand and concealing the hammer in my bag, I started boldly for William’s room.

When I undertook to come to X, it was with the latent expectation of making myself useful in ferreting out its mystery. And how had I succeeded?

I had been the means through which one of its secrets had been discovered, but not the secret; and while Mr. Gryce was good enough, or wise enough, to show no diminution in his respect for me, I knew that I had sunk a peg in his estimation from the consciousness I had of having sunk two, if not three pegs, in my own.

This was a galling thought to me. But it was not the only one which disturbed me.

That Mr. Gryce felt that he was playing a great card in thus enlisting her despair in our service, did not comfort me.

I am not fond of games in which real hearts take the place of painted ones;

and, besides, I was not ready to acknowledge that my own capacity for ferreting out this mystery was quite exhausted, or that I ought to remain idle while Lucetta bent under a task so much beyond her strength.

I had brought something from the hut besides this victim of the old imbecile’s fury, and I was no more willing that Mr. Gryce should see the one than detect the other. I had brought away a clue.

“The birds of the air shall carry it.” So the Scripture runs.

This bird, this pigeon, who now lay panting out his life in my arms had brought her the ring which in Mr. Gryce’s eyes had seemed to connect her with the disappearance of young Mr. Chittenden.

When, in the course of events, the current of my thoughts receive a decided check and I find myself forced to change former conclusions or habituate myself to new ideas and a fresh standpoint, I do it, as I do everything else, with determination and a total disregard of my own previous predilections.

Before the afternoon was well over I was ready for any revelations which might follow Lucetta’s contemplated action, merely reserving a vague hope that my judgment would yet be found superior to her instinct.

“Good God!” I whispered. “You do not share her sister’s fears that it is in the heart of this man to kill Lucetta?”

“Five strong men have disappeared hereabout,” said the fellow, never moving his eye from the couple before us. “Why not one weak girl?”

With a cry Loreen started forward. “Run!” she whispered. “Run!”

… the dim halls of the haunted house of the Knollys family in that midnight hour when I saw a body carried out for burial amid trouble and hush and a mystery so great it would have daunted most spirits for the remainder of their lives.

The very sweetness of the scene made its horror.

Never have I had such sensations, never have I felt so deeply the power of the unseen, yet it seemed so impossible that anything could happen here, anything which would explain the total disappearance of several persons at different times, without a trace of their …

“No,” she calmly returned, though her face blanched to the colorlessness of wax, “I have not said what I think of you yet.”

Oh, the cunning that crept into his face!

“She has not said. Oh, the little Lucetta, the wise, the careful little Lucetta!”

Rising up, she threw her arms around his neck and let him lift her.

As he carried her⁠—where was his rheumatism now?⁠—out of those baleful grounds and away from the reach of the maniac’s mingled laughs and cries, her face was peace itself.

But his—well, his was a study.