Great Britain -- Fiction; Political fiction; Science fiction
He reached the St. James and asked a page to be directed to Mrs. Carey's
apartment. The boy grinned at first, but was silent at a word from Carey
and led him the way. When they reached her door, at the end of a long
series of corridors and stairs, the page wished to announce him, but
Carey pushed him aside roughly and opened the door. His fingers were
clinched upon the pistol in his pocket; his plan was to ask her one
question, and then, while she was hesitating about her answer, to kill
her.
The drawing-room was a large apartment, vulgarly furnished in a style
gone by. A marble clock was on the mantel, and a photograph of the King.
Carey pressed through into the bedroom. No one was there. Bits of lace
and muslin were scattered about the floor, and one or two garments lying
on the chairs as if hastily thrown aside. Carey thoroughly examined the
rooms and then turned back to the page.
"Where is Mrs. Carey? Do you know?"
"I do not. I heard that she was about to leave the court."
Carey turned away, and, leaving the hotel, took a carriage and drove to
the railway station. A train had just left for New York. At the
news-stand was the usual collection of her pictures on sale. Carey spoke
to the boy in charge, pointing to a photograph.
"Have you seen that woman go by here to-day?"
"Yes, sir; I see that woman go by here not twenty minutes ago. That's
the beauty, Mrs. Carey, that is. There was another woman with her, and a
man."
Her maid, probably. But who could the man be? Carey found the next train
for New York did not leave till evening. He waited in the station for
it, and arrived in that city at midnight. It was too late to get any
trace of his wife that night.
Early in the morning he began the search, but it was all of no avail.
His wife had apparently stopped at none of the hotels. A certain lady
looking like her had been seen at a small hotel on the Fifth Avenue,
but she had been with a gentleman, and their names were registered as
Mr. and Mrs. Copley Hutchinson, of Boston.
Carey wondered whether she could have left the city. Several European
steamers had sailed or were to sail that day, and he spent an hour or
two at the docks searching them. All the papers, all the shops, were
full of his wife and her movements; he alone knew nothing of them.
As he walked back, up Broadway, he looked at the bulletin boards. He had
a habit of doing this now. In front of the _Herald_ office they were
changing the bulletin, and he waited a moment to see. The first line on
the new broadside he read aloud:
"_Mrs. Oswald Carey sails for Brazil._"
Carey went in and bought a copy of the newspaper. In it he found the
sailing-list of the City of Rio, and there the first name was "Mrs.
Oswald Carey and maid," and then, just below, "Jarley Jawkins."
Carey stood on the sidewalk several minutes, like a statue. Then, slowly
crumpling up the newspaper in his hand, he threw it in the gutter. That
night he was a passenger in the emigrant train for the North-west.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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