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In "Who Killed Caldwell?", Carolyn Wells weaves a gripping mystery that encapsulates the essence of early 20th-century detective fiction. The narrative unfolds in a series of intricately constructed plot twists, characteristic of Wells' adept storytelling. With a sharp focus on character development and a signature use of clever dialogue, the novel invites readers into a labyrinth of motives and secrets surrounding the mysterious death of Caldwell, engaging them in a quest for truth against the backdrop of societal norms of the period. The book showcases Wells' knack for blending humor with suspense, reflecting both her literary style and the conventions of the detective genre at the time. Carolyn Wells, known for her role in popularizing the mystery genre, drew from her experiences as an author and poet to craft a novel that not only entertains but also critiques the complexities of human relationships. Her literary career was marked by a profound understanding of crime and morality, perhaps rooted in her own diverse experiences, which prompted her to explore the darker facets of psychology through her characters. "Who Killed Caldwell?" is highly recommended for aficionados of classic detective literature and those intrigued by the psychological underpinnings of crime. Wells' unique voice and engaging narrative will undoubtedly captivate readers, making it a must-read for anyone interested in the artistry of mystery storytelling. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Who Killed Caldwell?
Table of Contents
Introduction
At the heart of Who Killed Caldwell? lies the unnerving recognition that in the most orderly rooms the truth moves silently among manners, alibis, and desires, revealing how a single violent act exposes a web of intimacies where loyalty competes with self-preservation and memory proves a treacherous guide, so that every pleasantry, every hesitation, and every carefully arranged object becomes part of a moral puzzle in which certainty is earned slowly, suspicion carries a cost, and the contours of character, not merely opportunity, determine whether justice can emerge from the shadows cast by privilege, affection, fear, and the complicated performances of everyday life.
Carolyn Wells, a prolific American author of early twentieth-century detective fiction, situates this novel firmly within the classic puzzle tradition associated with the Golden Age of the genre. Who Killed Caldwell? unfolds in a closed-circle milieu shaped by domestic spaces, social calls, and the quiet rituals of respectable life, a setting that restricts opportunity while widening suspicion. Shaped by the Golden Age appetite for cerebral mysteries, the book favors deduction over sensation and invites the reader to compete with the investigating mind. Its world is genteel yet fraught, where propriety provides both cover for wrongdoing and a measure against which conduct is judged.
The premise is disarmingly simple: a figure named Caldwell is found dead under circumstances that appear at once obvious and inexplicable, and a finite circle of acquaintances must be examined to discover motive, means, and opportunity. An investigator, methodical and keenly attentive to small discrepancies, follows a path through parlors and confidences, measuring what is said against what is done. The narrative parcels its revelations with economy, relying on tangible clues, psychological pressure, and sharply drawn interviews rather than spectacle. Readers encounter brisk scenes, crisp transitions, and an insistence that attention to detail—an overlooked object, a misremembered hour—can reorganize an entire case.
Wells writes with an urbane steadiness that blends civility and unease, using bright, social surfaces to heighten the sting of discovery. Dialogue carries much of the motion, yet description counts: furnishings, letters, and casual gestures become part of a symphony of inference. The tone is neither lurid nor clinical; it is assured, curious, and occasionally wry, trusting the reader to recognize significance without signposting. Crucially, the prose aims for fairness, arranging evidence so that attentive readers may form and revise hypotheses alongside the sleuth. The pleasure rests in patterns—contradictions, echoes, convenient coincidences—that, once aligned, reveal a careful architecture of motive.
Among the book’s animating themes are the instability of perception and the pressure of social performance. Witnesses report sincerely yet incompletely; politeness smooths over friction that might otherwise clarify events. The story probes status and reputation, asking how privilege can both shield and compromise a person under scrutiny. It also weighs the ethics of suspicion: what do we owe our neighbors when fear clouds judgment, and how do we balance empathy with the need to test stories against facts? Threaded through is a meditation on memory—its gaps, ornaments, and corrections—suggesting that truth must be assembled, not simply recovered from hiding.
For contemporary readers, the novel’s inquiries align with ongoing debates about evidence, narrative, and the public appetite for crime stories. It demonstrates how explanations harden too quickly when repeated, and how biases—class-based, personal, or sentimental—shape what we accept as plausible. In an era of continuous information, the book’s measured pace and insistence on corroboration feel newly bracing. It honors attentiveness, encourages rereading of assumptions, and models intellectual humility without dulling suspense. Moreover, its portrait of a community negotiating shock, rumor, and self-interest resonates with current conversations about trust, accountability, and the fragile boundary between private life and collective judgment.
Who Killed Caldwell? thus occupies a meaningful place in the lineage of fair-play detection, showcasing Carolyn Wells’s commitment to clarity of construction and the drama of reasoning. It offers the satisfactions of a classic whodunit while inviting reflection on how people present themselves when stakes are high. Because its power rests on structure rather than shock, the novel rewards close reading and remains accessible to newcomers to vintage crime fiction. Entering without prior knowledge is ideal: the path from puzzle to resolution is carefully signposted yet never obvious, and the journey supplies that enduring pleasure for which the genre was prized.
Synopsis
Carolyn Wells’s Who Killed Caldwell? is a classic American murder mystery that turns on a single, urgent question embedded in its title. Set within the author’s tradition of carefully clued, puzzle-centered storytelling, the novel introduces a tightly connected social world disrupted by a death that cannot be dismissed as accidental. The narrative establishes its central premise with economy, situating the victim’s final hours in a milieu where routine, habit, and proximity matter. From the outset, the book frames inquiry as both an intellectual challenge and a moral imperative, inviting readers to measure appearances against evidence and to test every easy assumption.
The opening movement traces the discovery of Caldwell’s death and the swift cordoning of his immediate circle. Those who last saw him, those who might gain or lose by his absence, and those who simply crossed his path become the subject of orderly scrutiny. Early impressions hint at competing explanations, yet none fit cleanly. Items at the scene, the disposition of personal effects, and the ordinary details of a day now interrupted are logged and weighed. The question becomes less who had an opportunity than how opportunity was crafted, and whether routine patterns hid an intentional design.
As inquiries deepen, testimony and timetable come to the forefront. The investigators collect statements, compare recollections, and look for the seams where stories fray. Minor discrepancies—where someone was, when a message was sent, why an errand took longer than usual—are checked against tangible traces. The novel’s disciplined focus on sequence and interval turns time itself into evidence. The interplay between what people say and what objects silently reveal provides the narrative’s propulsion, while the reader is invited to note how plausible narratives can coexist with details that refuse to align.
Suspicions migrate as the chain of facts grows. Relationships around Caldwell—professional obligations, social courtesies, lingering resentments—are examined not for sensational revelation but for how they shape behavior in small, telling ways. The book tracks access points and opportunities, the unnoticed movement through familiar spaces, and the unguarded gesture that seems inconsequential until set beside a new fact. Hints appear, recede, and return with altered significance. In this middle stretch, the novel’s hallmark misdirection functions less as trickery than as a reminder that context transforms meaning, and that partial truths can obscure the central one.
Methodical reasoning gradually overtakes first impressions. The investigators reassemble the day’s fragments, testing each piece against a reconstructed timeline and the physical realities that constrain it. An overlooked detail—mundane on first pass—acquires weight when paired with a pattern of behavior. Claims that seemed irrefutable are revisited under stricter standards of plausibility. The narrative emphasizes fairness: relevant clues are on the page, available to perception, though their import is easy to underrate. By demonstrating how a false step in logic can propagate, the book clarifies what must have happened without yet stating who ensured it did.
The approach to resolution tightens the focus to a few contending possibilities. Each hypothesis is walked through its consequences, and contradictions are allowed to surface. A decisive connection, hiding in plain sight among previously cataloged facts, becomes the lever that moves the case. The culminating explanation is prepared by cumulative reasoning rather than sudden revelation, and it accounts for motive, means, and moment with equal rigor. When the final accounting arrives, it does so in a form that ties earlier ambiguities into a coherent whole, while preserving the shock of recognition that characterizes a well-earned answer.
Beyond its central puzzle, Who Killed Caldwell? endures for the clarity of its investigative ethic and its exacting portrait of how truth is built from ordinary things. The book illustrates how social surfaces—politeness, habit, convenience—can both conceal and inadvertently disclose. It celebrates the disciplined reader, rewarding attention to proportion, placement, and possibility. Within Carolyn Wells’s broader body of work, it affirms the appeal of the fair-play mystery, inviting participation without resorting to obscurity. Its resonance lies in the steady insistence that reasoned inquiry, sustained over time, can recover what deception seeks to erase.
Historical Context
Who Killed Caldwell? by Carolyn Wells is an American detective novel from the interwar era, situated within the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Wells (1862–1942), a prolific New Jersey–born author, produced scores of puzzle mysteries featuring logical detection and a closed circle of suspects. Her work catered to readers drawn to fair-play whodunits popular in the United States and Britain between World War I and World War II. The novel reflects this milieu: a self-contained crime, a finite cast, and emphasis on clue-hunting and deduction. It participates in a transatlantic movement that prized ingenuity, order, and the reader’s opportunity to solve the case.
Set against contemporary American society of its publication, the novel evokes the comfortable milieu of prosperous households, clubs, and offices that commonly furnished Golden Age plots. Urban centers such as New York and nearby suburban or country districts formed a recognizable backdrop for many U.S. mysteries in this period, with automobiles, commuter rail, and telephone exchanges knitting spaces together. Class distinctions remained visible: employers and domestic staff, professionals and tradespeople, all interacting within tightly defined social rituals. These environments provided plausible motives—reputation, property, and status—and enabled the “closed” settings favored by puzzle writers, from town houses to country residences and private workplaces.
American law-enforcement and medico-legal institutions were modernizing rapidly in the early twentieth century. Municipal police forces expanded record-keeping and investigative divisions; fingerprint identification, adopted by major departments in the 1910s, became routine by the 1920s. The federal Bureau of Investigation established its technical laboratory in 1932, publicizing scientific methods in ballistics, document analysis, and toxicology. County coroners or medical examiners conducted inquests to determine cause and manner of death, procedures that mystery writers frequently dramatized. Newspapers—and, increasingly, radio—shaped public fascination with crime, while private detectives and attorneys often appeared as intermediaries between families, insurers, and officials, reflecting the period’s layered investigative landscape.
Genre conventions coalesced during this period. Ronald Knox’s 1929 “Decalogue” and S. S. Van Dine’s 1928 “Twenty Rules” articulated expectations for fair-play detection: the culprit should be knowable, clues disclosed, and solutions derived logically rather than by accident or secret knowledge. Publishers marketed mysteries as intellectual games, a trend reinforced by the early-1920s crossword craze and the circulation of puzzle columns in newspapers. American and British writers exchanged ideas through magazines, book reviews, and transatlantic reprints, producing familiar patterns—alibis, timetables, wills, and incriminating objects— that readers learned to parse, and that authors like Wells arranged with deliberate, rule-conscious precision.
Carolyn Wells entered crime fiction after establishing herself in light verse, children’s literature, and literary anthologies, bringing a taste for wordplay and structured puzzles to the genre. Her recurring sleuth Fleming Stone appeared in numerous novels from 1909 onward, helping to anchor her reputation with American readers. She wrote swiftly and abundantly, aligning with a market that favored series detectives and dependable formulas. Critics of the time often evaluated such work on ingenuity rather than characterization, a metric Wells embraced by foregrounding clues, testimony, and staged reconstructions. This background informs Who Killed Caldwell?, which prioritizes deduction and orderly unraveling over sensational violence.
Interwar America experienced sharp economic contrasts, from the prosperity of the 1920s to the Great Depression after 1929. Popular detective fiction frequently explored motives tied to money—wills, securities, insurance, and control of businesses—because financial upheaval made such stakes legible to a wide readership. Estate law, trust arrangements, and the etiquette of inheritance provided ready-made complications that authors could translate into clues and conflicts. Though far from the urban gangster narratives associated with Prohibition, puzzle mysteries often noted the era’s financial anxieties indirectly, by confining scrutiny to drawing rooms, boardrooms, and lawyers’ offices where reputation, liquidity, and the disposition of property quietly governed behavior.
As American crime writing diversified, two dominant strands emerged: the urbane puzzle tradition and the hardboiled school. Dashiell Hammett’s novels (1929–1931) and later Raymond Chandler’s pushed toward gritty realism, while contemporaries such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and S. S. Van Dine exemplified the elaborate-clue mystery. Wells’s work belongs to the latter. The period also saw expanding public roles for women after the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, with more women reading, writing, and featuring as central figures in crime fiction. Editorial pages, book clubs, and lending libraries helped cement mysteries as shared cultural touchstones discussed across gender and class lines.
Who Killed Caldwell? thus mirrors its era’s confidence in rational inquiry and institutional procedure. It invites readers to weigh testimony, documents, and physical traces within a social world governed by etiquette, property, and reputation, trusting that careful attention will expose contradictions. Its emphasis on fair disclosure of clues aligns with contemporary critical standards, while its circumscribed settings echo interwar desires for order amid broader uncertainty. By presenting crime as a solvable puzzle rather than a symptom of urban chaos, the book participates in a cultural project that affirmed reason, civility, and the capacity of trained observers to penetrate polished surfaces and restore equilibrium.
Who Killed Caldwell?
Chapter 1 The Letter
“Heaven be praised!” exclaimed Irving Caldwell, as he sat staring at a letter he had just read[1q].
“But I can’t believe it,” he went on, again scanning the page. “Come, children, come into the library and hear my news.”
The family were at the breakfast table in the dining room; and in front of it was the library, really the living room of the family. Across the wide hall was the great drawing room, and back of it a smoking and amusement room, for there were five young people in the house.
New York City cannot today boast of many of those old double-front brownstone houses[1] that gave dignity to the social life of the last century.
But there was one fine specimen on an uptown cross street, just off Fifth Avenue, that was still a home.
The Caldwell house was a delightful combination of the old original dwelling and modern improvements. Its large rooms, high ceilings, old-fashioned windows and heavy doors did not prevent its being air-conditioned, electric-lighted and possessed of every comfort and convenience recent invention could give.
And Irving Caldwell’s family was, in the main, a happy one. His sons, Vincent and Bruce, his daughter Marcia and her husband, Perry Gibbs, and his adopted daughter, Lorraine Crosby, made up the circle, and they all rose from the table and went with him to the library as he had asked.
Caldwell was a distinguished looking man. Tall and straight, he had always been of forceful effect, until of late years he had become a victim of a form of angina pectoris which had made it necessary for him to be careful of himself and being careful irked him sore.
At sixty, he was impressive in manner and bearing yet gentle and friendly in all his relationships.
Seated in his big armchair, he looked again at the letter, as if to reassure himself that it was so, and said: “Archer is coming home.”
Then Vincent said, in an awed tone, “Archer!”
And Bruce said, eagerly, “When?”
And Perry said, indifferently, “Really?”
And Marcia said, in a low tone, “Dear Archer,” and Lorraine just stared, wide-eyed.
“Yes,” Caldwell went on, “he will come this afternoon. This letter is just to announce his arrival. I will read it to you.
“Dear Father:
I am coming home. I wonder if you will be glad to see me. If not, I shall go right away again. But I am tired of wandering, and I want my own home and my own people. Look for me about midafternoon of January 12th. From your son, Archer.”
“I am overjoyed,” Caldwell went on. “I can scarcely take it in, as yet.”
“Take it calmly, dear,” Marcia said, warningly. “You don’t want to have an attack when he comes in.”
“No fear.” But there was a light in his eyes and a tremor in his voice that told of his intense excitement.
“Then I shall have a new brother,” Perry Gibbs smiled. “I hope to goodness he will like me. Stand up for me, you fellows.”
“I hardly remember him at all,” Bruce spoke wonderingly. “I was only eight when he went away!”
A silence fell on them all, for each was busy with memories and thoughts of this long absent son and brother.
Archer Caldwell, the oldest son of the family, was little more than a name to the other children. For a tragedy had wiped him out of existence so far as they were concerned, and for fourteen years he had neither been seen nor heard from.
It happened in 1926, on Archer’s birthday.
The Caldwells were at their summer home in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and as Archer had been promised a rifle on reaching his fourteenth year, the gift was forthcoming. There was a rifle range near by, but before going there Irving Caldwell taught his son as to loading and firing the gun.
They were out in a field, and were shooting at a mark.
A neighbor, passing by, paused to look on, and another man joined the group. Caldwell was called away, for a moment, and bidding the lad do nothing till his return, the father hastened away.
The stranger who had joined them took the gun up and examined it, and suddenly turning to the neighbor, one Morton, shot him in the head.
Morton fell, and the man who shot him turned to Archer and said:
“Run, run for your life! You shot him. If you are caught here you will be hanged! Run! and never come back. It is death for you if you do!”
Archer doubted no word of this, and the murderer, brandishing the rifle at him, declared he would shoot him too, unless he disappeared forever.
Frightened almost out of his senses, and believing what he was told, the boy had run as fast as he could, taking no heed where he went. Seeing a trolley car headed for Bridgeport he jumped aboard and went on.
Reaching Bridgeport, and having no thought but to get away, he bought a railroad ticket to New York and went there by train. He had some birthday money in his pocket, and by the time he reached the city he had made up his mind.
He knew the docks and piers, and he went straight to where he knew a freight ship would be leaving for Africa. Cleverly, he managed to get on board unseen, and after they were well out to sea he went to the cook, said he was a stowaway and asked to work his way.
His engaging manners, combined with the fact that it was most inconvenient to turn around and take him ashore, gained his point for him, and he worked his way easily enough and landed at Capetown.
Fourteen years had passed, with no news of him whatever, and now Irving Caldwell had received a surprising and very welcome letter.
The letter had been mailed the day before, in New York City, so that gave no information as to where he had lived or what he had done in his long absence. While the others talked busily, the father sat in a deep revery, thinking about the boy he had lost.
And now the boy was coming home.
Boy he would not be, after all these years, but a man of twenty-eight, and—a stranger, oh, surely a stranger!
Where had he lived these fourteen years? What had he done? What sort of man had he become?
The father had come to look upon his son as dead, for it seemed to him nothing else could explain the long silence.
Archer’s mother had tried bravely to face the tragedy, but had succumbed to her grief and had died within two years.
Time and a busy life had made Caldwell accustomed to the burden, and he bore it more easily as the years went by.
But now, the sudden revelation that Archer was alive and was coming home was a shock that might well have proved dangerous to his weak heart, but it seemingly proved beneficial, for instead of wondering or showing signs of apprehension about Archer or about his arrival he was placidly happy in the memory of his childhood days and ways.
“Do you remember the day he fell in the river?” he said. “You were with us, Vincent, we were in a rowboat, fishing.”
But Vincent didn’t remember and didn’t try to.
“A queer thing,” he said, “Archer coming along like this. If he’s alive and well, why hasn’t he made it known before?”
“Lots of answers to that,” Marcia told him. “I wonder what he will look like. He was a beautiful boy.”
“No two of you look alike,” her father said, “but your mother thought Archer the best looking of you all.”
“That’s only because he was the first one,” declared Bruce. “Of course, Marcia is the prettiest, unless we count in Lorraine.”
“Lorraine was Archer’s sweetheart,” Vincent looked at the girl with an air of ownership; “now she’s mine, aren’t you, Lorry?”
“I am not. I’ve never seen the man I wanted to be sweetheart to.”
“Fie, fie,” Perry Gibbs frowned at her; “did you never learn you must not use a preposition to end a sentence with? I say, I’ll bet Archer has been right here in New York all the time.”
“Never!” said Bruce. “He went West, most likely, and has by now a wife and a couple of children. Maybe he’ll bring them with him. If they want a home, Dad, will you take them all in here?”
“Of course; though it may mean turning out some of you present incumbents. But you’ve had your turn.”
“Oho! A usurper, eh?”
“No, Bruce; the king comes into his own.”
Seeing a stormy look in Vincent’s eyes, Marcia said, in her decisive way, “Now, Father, no favoritism. Archer is the prodigal son. He has been lost and is found, we will all welcome him, but he is no better than the rest of us and has no special claim to your affection.”
“No, no, Marcia, of course not. Dear boy, I wonder if he has suffered privation or danger.”
“Not he!” cried Bruce, who worshiped his brother’s memory, “I bet he comes home a rich nabob.”
“All nabobs are rich. But I bet he comes home a pauper; why else would he come?” This from Vincent.
His father looked at him a little sternly, then said, with an air of calm authority, “If Archer comes home manly and honest, no matter what his finances may be, he is my eldest son.”
“Great Scott, Dad, this isn’t England! Your property isn’t entailed, is it? I have always assumed we should share and share alike, when you are through with it.”
“Your remark is not in the best of taste, Vincent, but your assumption is not far wrong.”
And then Irving Caldwell relapsed into his brown study.
“I wonder what we’d better have for dinner,” said the domestic Marcia. “Do any of you remember what Archer specially liked?”
“Don’t be silly,” Bruce told her; “don’t you think his tastes must have changed? I assure you I shouldn’t enjoy now what I loved to eat fourteen years ago.”
“Bread and milk, probably,” Lorraine smiled at him. “But old Molly will know; she remembers everyone’s tastes.”
“That’s so,” and Marcia rose to leave the room. “I’ll ask her about it. What room shall he have? His old one?”
“He can’t,” Vincent declared. “I have that now, and it’s so stuffed with my things you’d never get it cleaned out. And I don’t want to move.”
“You needn’t,” said his father. “Marcia, put Archer in the best guest room, the one across the hall from my room.”
“Oh, Dad, suppose we have important company!”
“The important company can have a lesser room, or we can shuffle things around when the time comes. And ask Molly what Archer used to like. Even if it’s a childish dish, it might please him. I seem to remember he was fond of fruit batter pudding, with two kinds of sauce.”
“Who isn’t?” exclaimed Bruce. “Tell Molly to make that, Marcia, and plenty of it!”
Marcia went away, and Bruce went on, “At least, we’ll all get our share of the fatted calf that will be continuously prepared.”
Irving Caldwell sat up straighter in his chair, and said:
“I may be wrong, but I seem to perceive an unpleasant note in some of the things you boys say. Do not make it necessary for me to mention this again.”
“It wasn’t necessary that time, Dad,” and Bruce spoke whole-heartedly. “I was only fooling, Molly will make me a fruit pudding whenever I ask her.”
“Yes, of course. All right. Lorraine, child, you are showing no enthusiasm at your brother’s return. Why?”
“I doubt he will remember me at all. And he isn’t my brother.”
“Oh, yes, he is. You are my legally adopted daughter, the boys are all your brothers.”
“Oh, then I can’t marry any of them! And I was just trying to decide which one I love most.”
“Yes, you can marry one of them,” he replied, taking her seriously. “The adoption papers provide for that.”
“Well, you are foresighted!” Lorraine said. “And you are as dear a father as they come!”
“That was my wife’s foresight. You know, your mother was her dearest friend, and Emily was a born matchmaker, and positively looked forward to seeing you marry one of her boys.”
“Yes? Well, so far, I like Bruce the best; but he’s too young to marry.”
“That’s my only fault,” Bruce asserted, “and it is one that time is bound to mend.”
“I am anxious to see our Archer,” said Perry Gibbs. “I’ve never seen him, you know, so I shall be able to form an unbiased opinion. Odd that he should send his letter from New York. If he is in the city and knows your address, why not come unannounced?”
“There’s small use in saying why or why not,” Caldwell told him, “when we know nothing of the circumstances. He will explain it all when he comes. You will be glad to see him, Perry?”
“Yes, Guv’nor, of course. You think he’ll approve of me?”
“Why not?” and the fine head sank back again on the chair cushion, and a silence fell.
Vincent rose, beckoned to Lorraine, and then left the room.
The girl followed him, and found him, as she had expected, sitting on the stairs. This was always their favorite chatting place. From childhood these two had told secrets, had quarreled and made up, on the stairs.
And now, she had a premonition of what was coming, and it was a true one.
“Lorraine,” he said, without preamble, “you must be engaged to me before Archer gets home. I am afraid he will get you away from me.”
“But I am not yours.”
“Yes, you are. But you have never solemnly promised, and you must do it now.”
“Can’t. I don’t feel a bit solemn, and I am not engaged to you, or to anybody else. Sorry, Vincent, but that’s the way it is.”
“You’re just waiting to see what Archer looks like!”
“And isn’t that what we’re all waiting for?”
Then she ran away.
Chapter 2 Archer Comes Home
“Why doesn’t he come? It’s mid-afternoon. It’s three o’clock. Afternoon is from one to six, and three is half way there.”
“No, it isn’t, Bruce. Half way between one and six is half-past three. But I think afternoon begins at twelve, post meridian, you know.”
“Lorraine, you know too much. Anyway, if you begin the afternoon at twelve, three is its mid, and it’s three now.”
“He’s bound to be late, anyway,” and Vincent turned back to the magazine he was reading.
“No,” his father said, “Archer was always prompt, I remember that about him very well.”
“Oh, it wouldn’t be his fault; but coming on a journey, there are always delays with trains or boats.”
“Why do you think he is coming on a journey?” Marcia asked. “His letter was posted here in the city.”
“Where do you think he’s been, Dad?” Bruce asked. “Let’s all guess.”
“Overseas, I’d say. He was forever reading books of travel or stories of adventure.”
“Maybe he’s a pirate bold, then. But if he’s already in New York, he may come in his own car.”
“He may come in rags,” put in Vincent.
“Not he!” and Marcia smiled at the idea. “Archer was very fussy about his clothes. He used to lecture me about dressing correctly.”
“And you never forgot it,” Lorraine said. “You are the best dressed woman I know.”
Marcia bridled a little. She was a careful dresser and always looked exactly right. Her fair hair was done in the very latest mode of puffs and rolls, and her light make-up was so deftly applied that it changed her pale countenance into a bright, live face.
Her powder blue house dress was smart and becoming, and she felt, complacently, that Archer must admire her appearance.
She had done all she could with her husband, but Perry was careless by nature and seemed incapable of reform. However, he looked all right, if he wouldn’t tousle his hair too much, and would sit up straight.
Lorraine’s little head knew no puffs and rolls, but was covered with soft brown ringlets, that looked to be natural curls whether they were or not. She wore a red dress, because of a dim memory that Archer liked red. Her face was charming when animated, but when she was quietly self-absorbed, as she so often was, it was not strikingly pretty.
Irving Caldwell sat in a happy daze, taking no note of time, merely waiting to see once more his long lost firstborn.
And then the bell did ring, though they did not hear it, Briggs did go through the hall and open the front door, and, as in a dream, they heard him say, “Mr. Archer,” and they looked up.
The big man stood in the hall doorway and looked at the group in the library.
His brown eyes moved from one face to another, his expression of uncertainty giving way to relief and satisfaction, then breaking into a smile of pleasure.
“It’s all right,” he said, “I didn’t know how you were going to receive me—”
Marcia went forward and laid her hand on his arm.
“Dad first,” he said, and crossed the room to the man in the chair.
Years seemed to fall from the man who rose and grasped the offered hand.
“My boy!” he cried; “my son, my Emily’s son—you are so like your mother. Welcome home, Archer, welcome home.”
His strength flagged, and he sank back into his chair. Marcia hovered round him, with a capsule of amyl nitrite[2] ready in a handkerchief. These were always kept near by, in case of an attack of the dread angina.
“Wait, Father, wait! I must say this, first of all. I didn’t shoot Mr. Morton! That strange man that came along just then, he shot him really. He put the gun back in my hands and then he aimed it at Mr. Morton, and he pulled the trigger—I didn’t!”
“Yes, we learned that, later. He pretended you shot Morton and ran away in fear of the consequences—”
“I did do that; he told me I had killed a man and I must run for my life and never come back. I was so frightened, I ran and ran—”
“Dear boy, let’s leave all that for the moment, and just rejoice that you are back here with us. We want to hear your story, we want to know all about your life while away from us, but first, I must just revel in the blessed certainty that you are with us again. Oh, could your mother but have lived—”
“When, Father—when did she—”
“She lived for two years, and then her gentle heart could bear it no longer and she died of her grief.”
