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Page 92

Marie had never seen Peter angry. She shrank from this gaunt and
gray-faced man who raved up and down the salon, questioning the
frightened Portier, swearing fierce oaths, bringing accusation
after accusation against some unnamed woman to whom he applied
epithets that Marie's English luckily did not comprehend. Not a
particularly heroic figure was Peter that night: a frantic,
disheveled individual, before whom the Portier cowered, who
struggled back to sanity through a berserk haze and was liable to
swift relapses into fury again.

To this succeeded at last the mental condition that was to be
Peter's for many days, hopelessness and alarm and a grim
determination to keep on searching.

There were no clues. The Portier made inquiries of all the
cabstands in the neighborhood. Harmony had not taken a cab. The
delicatessen seller had seen her go out that afternoon with a
bundle and return without it. She had been gone only an hour or
so. That gave Peter a ray of hope that she might have found a
haven in the neighborhood--until he recalled the parcel-post.

One possibility he clung to: Mrs. Boyer had made the mischief,
but she had also offered the girl a home. She might be at the
Boyers'. Peter, flinging on a hat and without his overcoat, went
to the Boyers'. Time was valuable, and he had wasted an hour, two
hours, in useless rage. So he took a taxicab, and being by this
time utterly reckless of cost let it stand while he interviewed
the Boyers.

Boyer himself, partially undressed, opened the door to his ring.
Peter was past explanation or ceremonial.

"Is Harmony here?" he demanded.

"Harmony?"

"Harmony Wells. She's disappeared, missing."

"Come in," said Boyer, alive to the strain in Peter's voice. "I
don't know, I haven't heard anything. I'll ask Mrs. Boyer."

During the interval it took for a whispered colloquy in the
bedroom, and for Mrs. Boyer to don her flannel wrapper, Peter
suffered the tortures of the damned. Whatever Mrs. Boyer had
meant to say by way of protest at the intrusion on the sacred
privacy of eleven o'clock and bedtime died in her throat. Her
plump and terraced chin shook with agitation, perhaps with guilt.
Peter, however, had got himself in hand. He told a quiet story;
Boyer listened; Mrs. Boyer, clutching her wrapper about her
unstayed figure, listened.

"I thought," finished Peter, "that since you had offered her a
refuge--from me--she might have come here."

"I offered her a refuge--before I had been to the Pension
Schwarz."

"Ah!" said Peter slowly. "And what about the Pension Schwarz?"

"Need you ask? I learned that you were all put out there. I am
obliged to say, Dr. Byrne, that under the circumstances had the
girl come here I could hardly--Frank, I will speak!--I could
hardly have taken her in."

Peter went white and ducked as from a physical blow, stumbling
out into the hall again. There he thought of something to say in
reply, repudiation, thought better of it, started down the
stairs.

Boyer followed him helplessly. At the street door, however, he
put his hand on Peter's shoulder. "You know, old man, I don't
believe that. These women--"

"I know," said Peter simply. "Thank you. Good-night."

CHAPTER XXII

Harmony's only thought had been flight, from Peter, from McLean,
from Mrs. Boyer. She had devoted all her energies to losing
herself, to cutting the threads that bound her to the life in the
Siebensternstrasse. She had drawn all her money, as Peter
discovered later. The discovery caused him even more acute
anxiety. The city was full of thieves; poverty and its companion,
crime, lurked on every shadowy staircase of the barracklike
houses, or peered, red-eyed, from every alleyway.

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Books | Photos | Paul Mutton | Sat 27th Dec 2025, 13:37

The Street of Seven Stars by Mary Roberts Rinehart