My Heart Laid Bare Read Online Free PDF Page B

—like a suddenly aged, broken man—his “good” eye glassy in disbelief—staring after the unknown agent who had made off with his Zodiac prize, the culmination of his astrological speculations as, witnesses afterward surmised, it was perhaps the culmination of his life—staring at the empty window, the flung-open French doors, as if, poor fool! poor coward! he hoped for Fate to reverse itself, and his hard-won money to be returned, by the very agent who had carried it off into the night.
9.
    Now it is all history, the improbable no less than the probable.
    Little Shep Tatlock maintained to the day of his death (soon, in 1914) that he was “poisoned” on the morning of the Derby.
    Xalapa’s beautiful corpse was shipped to his grieving owner’s farm in Aylesbury, Pennsylvania, where it was interred with great ceremony, including a five-gun salute.
    Midnight Sun, to earn a fair amount of money for his controversialowner, was never again to run quite so spirited a race; nor would his rider Parmelee enjoy so spectacular a victory.
    The Warwicks, Edgar E. and Seraphina, publicly humiliated by their Lutheran God, as punishment (so Seraphina believed, stricken with repentance) for gambling, withdrew abruptly from social intercourse. And the “astrological sportsman” A. Washburn Frelicht, a broken man, a disappointment to all the ladies, disappeared from Chautauqua Falls within a day or two, after having given testimony to police, never to be glimpsed again in American racing circles.
    What of the “Black Phantom”—as he was dubbed by excitable journalists, particularly execrated in Mr. William Randolph Hearst’s papers as a “Negro Devil”? This amazing figure apparently disappeared as well, despite enormous publicity, police efforts ranging over five states, and the vigilance of all.
    And the $400,000 was never returned to its rightful owners.

“THE LASS OF AVIEMORE”
1.
    I t was eight days after the shock of Mr. Stirling’s death, when the house at Greenley Square was still steeped in grief, that the girl in the worn black velveteen cloak came to the front door—knocking so faintly with her small gloved fist (did the poor child know nothing of doorbells, or of the use of the wrought-iron American eagle knocker?) that the downstairs maidfailed to hear her for several minutes. And what a wild gusty May morning it was, the air so agitated, the sunshine so chill, the season might well have been late winter, and not spring . . . .
    Who was she? Yet another mourner, arriving belatedly? (For the elaborate wake, the yet more elaborate funeral services and burial, the several crowded days of visitors, were just past.) Or had she nothing to do with Mr. Stirling’s passing at all? And why, being so young, surely no more than seventeen, was she alone, unaccompanied, in a city the size of Contracoeur? Strange, too, how long she hesitated before finally, and rather timorously, unlatching the front gate, to proceed up the brick walk to the front door; her face all but hidden by her loose-fitting hood, as if she feared someone might be watching her, and dreaded being known.
    As it happened, by chance someone was watching her from an upstairs window: nineteen-year-old Warren Stirling, the deceased man’s younger, romantically inclined son, who, exhausted and sluggish with grief, had fallen into the habit of staring down into the square for long minutes at a time; watching hackney cabs, motorcars and pedestrians pass by in a sporadic, monotonous stream, his thoughts, too, wayward, melancholy, tinged with the anger of loss, passing in a monotonous and ungovernable stream. Why could he not think of his father but only, obsessively, of Death? And why, trying to envision his father, whom he had respected and loved, could he recall only the shock of that ghastly wax-faced corpse, that mimicry of a living man in its false slumber amid white satin cushions