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Updated: June 5, 2025
Wrenching her mind away from apprehensiveness she moved quickly to the kitchen door and into the dimly-lighted dowdy passage-way. Somewhere beyond the gas flicker and the hat-stand lay what? With all her determination she pushed forward, almost running to the door.
Full of his revelation, then, he rang the bell of his friend's lodging-house at precisely one o'clock the next day. "I'll go right up to Mr. Davenport's room," he said to the negro boy at the door. "All right, sir, but I don't think you'll find Mr. Davenport up there," replied the servant, glancing at a brown envelope on the hat-stand. Larcher saw that it was addressed to Murray Davenport.
"It isn't possible that he has gone out!" was her instant mental ejaculation; and she passed quickly into the adjoining chamber to see if he were there. It was empty. For some time Mrs. Ellis stood in deep abstraction of mind; then, as a sigh heaved her bosom, she moved from the chamber and went down-stairs. A glance at the hat-stand confirmed her fears; her husband had left the house.
Nothing, of course, was visible nothing but the hat-stand, the African spears in dark lines upon the wall and the high-backed wooden chair standing grotesquely underneath on the oilcloth floor. For one instant the fog seemed to move and thicken oddly; but he set that down to the score of the imagination. The door had opened upon nothing.
Sommers realized for the first time how the Aurora and the Queen Louise must worry Miss Hitchcock; how the neat Swedish maids and the hat-stand in the hall must offend young Hitchcock. The incongruities of the house had never disturbed him. So far as he had noticed them, they accorded well with the simple characters of his host and hostess.
No surprise of strangeness could equal the surprise of that complete familiarity. There was the bust of Chalmers near the stair-railings, there was the clothes-brush in the accustomed place; and there, on the hat-stand, hung hats and coats that must surely be the same as he remembered.
In place of the modest passage with the yellow marble wall-paper, the mahogany hat-stand, and the elderly barometer in a state of chronic depression which he knew so well, he found an arched octagonal entrance-hall with arabesques of blue, crimson, and gold, and richly-embroidered hangings; the floor was marble, and from a shallow basin of alabaster in the centre a perfumed fountain rose and fell with a lulling patter.
There was a rickety hat-stand in the entry, upon which, by the side of a schoolboy's cap, there hung a broad-brimmed white hat, somewhat fatigued by use, but looking gentle and kindly, as I have often noticed good old gentlemen's hats do, after they have worn them for a time. The door of the dining-room was standing wide open, and I went in.
'OH! said Jane in a queer voice, 'I wonder whether it was one of those... they came that night you know, when we were playing "devil in the dark" and I put them in the hat-stand drawer, behind the clothes-brushes and' she pulled out the drawer as she spoke 'and here they are! There was a letter for Nurse and one for the children.
Ralph!" he called in vain; then he got up and went to the door, opened it, looked into the fully- lighted hall; all was so quiet there that he could hear the quiet voices of the women in the drawing-room talking together. He thought for a moment, went to the hat-stand, and missed Ralph's low-crowned straw hat.
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