"Did you see if there was any one missing in the house?" I asked,
ignoring the array of sauce-pans rolling-pins, and the poker of the
range.
"Rosie is missing," Liddy said with unction. She had objected to
Rosie, the parlor maid, from the start. "Mrs. Watson went into her
room, and found she had gone without her hat. People that trust
themselves a dozen miles from the city, in strange houses, with
servants they don't know, needn't be surprised if they wake up some
morning and find their throats cut."
After which carefully veiled sarcasm Liddy relapsed into gloom. Warner
came in then with a handful of small tools, and Mr. Jamieson went with
him to the basement. Oddly enough, I was not alarmed. With all my
heart I wished for Halsey, but I was not frightened. At the door he
was to force, Warner put down his tools and looked at it. Then he
turned the handle. Without the slightest difficulty the door opened,
revealing the blackness of the drying-room beyond!
Mr. Jamieson gave an exclamation of disgust.
"Gone!" he said. "Confound such careless work! I might have known."
It was true enough. We got the lights on finally and looked all
through the three rooms that constituted this wing of the basement.
Everything was quiet and empty. An explanation of how the fugitive had
escaped injury was found in a heaped-up basket of clothes under the
chute. The basket had been overturned, but that was all. Mr. Jamieson
examined the windows: one was unlocked, and offered an easy escape.
The window or the door? Which way had the fugitive escaped? The door
seemed most probable, and I hoped it had been so. I could not have
borne, just then, to think that it was my poor Gertrude we had been
hounding through the darkness, and yet--I had met Gertrude not far from
that very window.
I went up-stairs at last, tired and depressed. Mrs. Watson and Liddy
were making tea in the kitchen. In certain walks of life the tea-pot
is the refuge in times of stress, trouble or sickness: they give tea to
the dying and they put it in the baby's nursing bottle. Mrs. Watson
was fixing a tray to be sent in to me, and when I asked her about Rosie
she confirmed her absence.
"She's not here," she said; "but I would not think much of that, Miss
Innes. Rosie is a pretty young girl, and perhaps she has a sweetheart.
It will be a good thing if she has. The maids stay much better when
they have something like that to hold them here."
Gertrude had gone back to her room, and while I was drinking my cup of
hot tea, Mr. Jamieson came in.
"We might take up the conversation where we left off an hour and a half
ago," he said. "But before we go on, I want to say this: The person
who escaped from the laundry was a woman with a foot of moderate size
and well arched. She wore nothing but a stocking on her right foot,
and, in spite of the unlocked door, she escaped by the window."