The Street of Seven Stars | Page 3

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THE STREET OF SEVEN STARS BY MARY ROBERTS
RINEHART
CHAPTER I
The old stucco house sat back in a garden, or what must once have been
a garden, when that part of the Austrian city had been a royal game
preserve. Tradition had it that the Empress Maria Theresa had used the
building as a hunting-lodge, and undoubtedly there was something
royal in the proportions of the salon. With all the candles lighted in the
great glass chandelier, and no sidelights, so that the broken paneling

was mercifully obscured by gloom, it was easy to believe that the great
empress herself had sat in one of the tall old chairs and listened to
anecdotes of questionable character; even, if tradition may be believed,
related not a few herself.
The chandelier was not lighted on this rainy November night. Outside
in the garden the trees creaked and bent before the wind, and the heavy
barred gate, left open by the last comer, a piano student named
Scatchett and dubbed "Scatch"--the gate slammed to and fro
monotonously, giving now and then just enough pause for a hope that it
had latched itself, a hope that was always destroyed by the next gust.
One candle burned in the salon. Originally lighted for the purpose of
enabling Miss Scatchett to locate the score of a Tschaikowsky concerto,
it had been moved to the small center table, and had served to give light
if not festivity to the afternoon coffee and cakes. It still burned, a
gnarled and stubby fragment, in its china holder; round it the disorder
of the recent refreshment, three empty cups, a half of a small cake, a
crumpled napkin or two,--there were never enough to go round,--and
on the floor the score of the concerto, clearly abandoned for the things
of the flesh.
The room was cold. The long casement windows creaked in time with
the slamming of the gate and the candle flickered in response to a draft
under the doors. The concerto flapped and slid along the uneven old
floor. At the sound a girl in a black dress, who had been huddled near
the tile stove, rose impatiently and picked it up. There was no
impatience, however, in the way she handled the loose sheets. She put
them together carefully, almost tenderly, and placed them on the top of
the grand piano, anchoring them against the draft with a china dog from
the stand.
The room was very bare--a long mirror between two of the windows,
half a dozen chairs, a stand or two, and in a corner the grand piano.
There were no rugs--the bare floor stretched bleakly into dim corners
and was lost. The crystal pendants of the great chandelier looked like
stalactites in a cave. The girl touched the piano keys; they were ice
under her fingers.

In a sort of desperation she drew a chair underneath the chandelier, and
armed with a handful of matches proceeded to the unheard-of
extravagance of lighting it, not here and there, but throughout as high
as she could reach, standing perilously on her tiptoes on the chair.
The resulting illumination revealed a number of things: It showed that
the girl was young and comely and that she had been crying; it revealed
the fact that the coal-pail was empty and the stove almost so; it let the
initiated into the secret that the blackish fluid in the cups had been
made with coffee extract that had been made of Heaven knows what;
and it revealed in the cavernous corner near the door a number of
trunks. The girl, having lighted all the candles, stood on the chair and
looked at the trunks. She was very young, very tragic, very feminine. A
door slammed