Two Flights Up by Mary Roberts Rinehart Read Free Book Online Page A

Sacrifices was a better one; that was what she was doing, sacrificing herself, selling herself; and for what? To restore a little elderly gentlewoman to a world she had somehow lost! A silly world, full of vain imaginings and false values.
    He succeeded finally in working himself to a very fair passion, so that sleep later on was out of the question. He got up, and in his dressing gown and slippers sat in the chair by the hearth, a cigarette in his hand—and was wakened not long after by the odour of burning carpet.
    He looked remorsefully at the charred spot on the floor, rubbed it with his fingers but failed to erase it, and was about to try bed once more when he heard a faint sound overhead.
    He stepped out into the upper hall and listened. There was a door to the attic staircase, a door which was always religiously kept closed. But now it was open, and a thin light trickled down, outlining the doorway in the surrounding darkness. A recollection of another night when he had stood there came to him, a night when Margaret had given up the battle between family pride and happiness, and had laid herself down to rest on the cold linoleum in the kitchen.
    It made his heart faint within him. There had been a sort of quiet despair in Holly’s face that afternoon, as if at last she too had reached the end of the road.
    He ran up the stairs and into the attic room.
    There was a candle on the floor, and Holly was sitting beside it. She had drawn out an old trunk and lifted pieces of two of the ancient floor boards, which had been beneath it, and over them she was staring at him with the strangest look he had ever seen on her face.
    “Please go back,” she said. “I’m quite all right.”
    “You don’t look all right,” he told her roughly. “And this place is cold. Do you want pneumonia?”
    “I’ve asked you to go. If you don’t, I’ll have to, and I’ve got to stay.”
    “Don’t be silly. If you’re in some sort of trouble—”
    “I’m in trouble enough, without you to make it worse. Please go. I’ve got to work this out alone.”
    “But if I only want to help? I give you my word of honour, that’s all.”
    She sat looking up at him for a perceptible time before she made a despairing gesture of acquiescence.
    “You’ll find out anyhow,” she said. “Look here.”
    But when he looked, he was in no way the wiser. He had, as has been said before, no background for Holly or, the family, and he had never heard of Tom Bayne. All he saw was that beneath the lifted floor boards a small suitcase was lying.
    “I see. What about it?”
    “The bond,” she said. “It must have come from here. She had no bonds. It was when she came up to get the point lace. She must have moved the trunk.”
    He was still struggling to understand.
    “You mean it didn’t belong to her?”
    “It belonged to the Harrison Bank,” she said, and sat still, waiting for the heavens to fall.
    When presently she realized that nothing fell but a silence, she looked up at him again.
    “From the bank, don’t you understand?”
    But he still looked blank.
    He had never heard of their trouble! It seemed incredible to her, who had thought all the world knew of it. But the mere telling of the facts seemed to ease her. And when he had finally gathered the essential facts, a difficult matter because she whispered them, as if to do so somehow minimized their import, he was more at a loss than he had ever been in his self-confident still young life. He saw that she was laying her burden on him with childlike faith, as if by sheer virtue of being a man he would know what to do.
    He did the only thing he could think of. He picked up the candle and held out his hand.
    “What are you going to do?”
    “Get out of here, for one thing.”
    “And leave that?”
    “Why not? It’s been here for years.”
    “But suppose she comes up again? Suppose she—”
    “She’s not likely to, before morning, is she? And she’ll have to know sooner or later