[Illustration: THE HEAD AND SHOULDERS OF A MAN ROSE QUICKLY ABOVE
THE LEDGE (_Page 265_)]
THE CITY
OF MASKS
By GEORGE BARR McCUTCHEON
AUTHOR OF
"Mr. Bingle," "Jane Cable," "Black is White," Etc.
[Illustration]
With Frontispiece
By MAY WILSON PRESTON
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York
Published by arrangement with DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
Copyright, 1918
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I LADY JANE THORNE COMES TO DINNER 1
II OUT OF THE FOUR CORNERS OF THE EARTH 12
III THE CITY OF MASKS 24
IV THE SCION OF A NEW YORK HOUSE 37
V MR. THOMAS TROTTER HEARS SOMETHING TO
HIS ADVANTAGE 50
VI THE UNFAILING MEMORY 67
VII THE FOUNDATION OF THE PLOT 79
VIII LADY JANE GOES ABOUT IT PROMPTLY 94
IX MR. TROTTER FALLS INTO A NEW POSITION 110
X PUTTING THEIR HEADS--AND HEARTS--TOGETHER 121
XI WINNING BY A NOSE 134
XII IN THE FOG 155
XIII NOT CLOUDS ALONE HAVE LININGS 172
XIV DIPLOMACY 188
XV ONE NIGHT AT SPANGLER'S 202
XVI SCOTLAND YARD TAKES A HAND 219
XVII FRIDAY FOR LUCK 233
XVIII FRIDAY FOR BAD LUCK 250
XIX FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT 263
XX AN EXCHANGE OF COURTESIES 279
XXI THE BRIDE-ELECT 294
XXII THE BEGINNING 307
THE CITY OF MASKS
CHAPTER I
LADY JANE THORNE COMES TO DINNER
THE Marchioness carefully draped the dust-cloth over the head of an
andiron and, before putting the question to the parlour-maid, consulted,
with the intensity of a near-sighted person, the ornate French clock in
the centre of the mantelpiece. Then she brushed her fingers on the
voluminous apron that almost completely enveloped her slight person.
"Well, who is it, Julia?"
"It's Lord Temple, ma'am, and he wants to know if you're too busy to
come to the 'phone. If you are, I'm to ask you something."
The Marchioness hesitated. "How do you know it is Lord Eric? Did he
mention his name?"
"He did, ma'am. He said 'this is Tom Trotter speaking, Julia, and is
your mistress disengaged?' And so I knew it couldn't be any one else but
his Lordship."
"And what are you to ask me?"
"He wants to know if he may bring a friend around tonight, ma'am. A
gentleman from Constantinople, ma'am."
"A Turk? He knows I do not like Turks," said the Marchioness, more to
herself than to Julia.
"He didn't say, ma'am. Just Constantinople."
The Marchioness removed her apron and handed it to Julia. You would
have thought she expected to confront Lord Temple in person, or at
least that she would be fully visible to him despite the distance and
the intervening buildings that lay between. Tucking a few stray locks of
her snow-white hair into place, she approached the telephone in the
hall. She had never quite gotten over the impression that one could be
seen through as well as heard over the telephone. She always smiled or
frowned or gesticulated, as occasion demanded; she was never languid,
never bored, never listless. A chat was a chat, at long range or short;
it didn't matter.
"Are you there? Good evening, Mr. Trotter. So charmed to hear your
voice." She had seated herself at the little old Italian table.
Mr. Trotter devoted a full two minutes to explanations.
"Do bring him with you," cried she. "Your word is sufficient. He _must_
be delightful. Of course, I shuddered a little when you mentioned
Constantinople. I always do. One can't help thinking of the Armenians.
Eh? Oh, yes,--and the harems."
Mr. Trotter: "By the way, are you expecting Lady Jane tonight?"
The Marchioness: "She rarely fails us, Mr. Trotter."
Mr. Trotter: "Right-o! Well, good-bye,--and thank you. I'm sure you will
like the baron. He is a trifle seedy, as I said before,--sailing vessel,
you know, and all that sort of thing. By way of Cape Town,--pretty well
up against it for the past year or two besides,--but a regular fellow,
as they say over here."
The Marchioness: "Where did you say he is stopping?"
Mr. Trotter: "Can't for the life of me remember whether it's the
'Sailors' Loft' or the 'Sailors' Bunk.' He told me too. On the
water-front somewhere. I knew him in Hong Kong. He says he has cut it
all out, however."
The Marchioness: "Cut it all out, Mr. Trotter?"
Mr. Trotter, laughing: "Drink, and all that sort of thing, you know.
Jolly good thing too. I give you my personal guarantee that he--"
The Marchioness: "Say no more about it, Mr. Trotter. I am sure we shall
all be happy to receive any friend of yours. By the way, where are you
now--where are you telephoning from?"
Mr. Trotter: "Drug store just around the corner."
The Marchioness: "A booth, I suppose?"
Mr. Trotter: "Oh, yes. Tight as a sardine box."
The Marchioness: "Good-bye."
Mr. Trotter: "Oh--hello? I beg your pardon--are you there? Ah,
I--er--neglected to mention that the baron may not appear at his best
tonight. You see, the poor chap is a shade large for my clothes.
Naturally, being a sailor-man, he hasn't--er--a very extensive wardrobe.
I am fixing him out in a--er--rather abandoned evening suit of my own.
That is to say, I abandoned it a couple of seasons ago. Rather nobby
thing for a waiter, but not--er--what you might call--"
The Marchioness, chuckling: "Quite good enough for a sailor, eh? Please
assure him that no matter what he wears, or how he looks, he will not be
conspicuous."
After this somewhat ambiguous remark, the Marchioness hung up the
receiver and returned to the drawing-room; a prolonged search revealing
the dust-cloth on the "nub" of the andiron, just where she had left it,
she fell to work once more on the velvety surface of a rare old Spanish
cabinet that stood in the corner of the room.
"Don't you want your apron, ma'am?" inquired Julia, sitting back on her
heels and surveying with considerable pride the leg of an enormous
throne seat she had been rubbing with all the strength of her stout
arms.
Her mistress ignored the question. She dabbed into a tiny recess and
wriggled her finger vigorously.
"I can't imagine where all the dust comes from, Julia," she said.
"Some of it comes from Italy, and some of it from Spain, and some from
France," said Julia promptly. "You could rub for a hundred years, ma'am,
and there'd still be dust that you couldn't find, not to save your soul.
And why not? I'd bet my last penny there's dust on that cabinet this
very minute that settled before Napoleon was born, whenever that was."
"I daresay," said the Marchioness absently.
More often than otherwise she failed to hear all that Julia said to her,
or in her presence rather, for Julia, wise in association, had come to
consider these lapses of inattention as openings for prolonged and
rarely coherent soliloquies on topics of the moment. Julia, by virtue of
long service and a most satisfying avoidance of matrimony, was a
privileged servant between the hours of eight in the morning and eight
in the evening. After eight, or more strictly speaking, the moment
dinner was announced, Julia became a perfect servant. She would no more
have thought of addressing the Marchioness as "ma'am" than she would
have called the King of England "mister." She had crossed the Atlantic
with her mistress eighteen years before; in mid-ocean she celebrated her
thirty-fifth birthday, and, as she had been in the family for ten years
prior to that event, even a child may solve the problem that here
presents a momentary and totally unnecessary break in the continuity of
this narrative. Julia was English. She spoke no other language.
Beginning with the soup, or the _hors d'oeuvres_ on occasion, French was
spoken in the house of the Marchioness. Physically unable to speak
French and psychologically unwilling to betray her ignorance, Julia
became a model servant. She lapsed into perfect silence.
The Marchioness seldom if ever dined alone. She always dined in state.
Her guests,--English, Italian, Russian, Belgian, French, Spanish,
Hungarian, Austrian, German,--conversed solely in French. It was a very
agreeable way of symphonizing Babel.
The room in which she and the temporarily imperfect though treasured
servant were employed in the dusk of this stormy day in March was at the
top of an old-fashioned building in the busiest section of the city, a
building that had, so far, escaped the fate of its immediate neighbours
and remained, a squat and insignificant pygmy, elbowing with some
arrogance the lofty structures that had shot up on either side of it
with incredible swiftness.
It was a large room, at least thirty by fifty feet in dimensions, with a
vaulted ceiling that encroached upon the space ordinarily devoted to
what architects, builders and the Board of Health describe as an air
chamber, next below the roof. There was no elevator in the building. One
had to climb four flights of stairs to reach the apartment.
From its long, heavily curtained windows one looked down upon a crowded
cross-town thoroughfare, or up to the summit of a stupendous hotel on
the opposite side of the street. There was a small foyer at the rear of
this lofty room, with an entrance from the narrow hall outside.
Suspended in the wide doorway between the two rooms was a pair of blue
velvet Italian portières of great antiquity and, to a connoisseur,
unrivaled quality. Beyond the foyer and extending to the area wall was
the rather commodious dining-room, with its long oaken English table,
its high-back chairs, its massive sideboard and the chandelier that is
said to have hung in the Doges' Palace when the Bridge of Sighs was a
new and thriving avenue of communication.
At least, so stated the dealer's tag tucked carelessly among the crystal
prisms, supplying the observer with the information that, in case one
was in need of a chandelier, its price was five hundred guineas. The
same curious-minded observer would have discovered, if he were not above
getting down on his hands and knees and peering under the table, a price
tag; and by exerting the strength necessary to pull the sideboard away
from the wall, a similar object would have been exposed.
In other words, if one really wanted to purchase any article of
furniture or decoration in the singularly impressive apartment of the
Marchioness, all one had to do was to signify the desire, produce a
check or its equivalent, and give an address to the competent-looking
young woman who would put in an appearance with singular promptness in
response to a couple of punches at an electric button just outside the
door, any time between nine and five o'clock, Sundays included.
The drawing-room contained many priceless articles of furniture, wholly
antique--(and so guaranteed), besides rugs, draperies, tapestries and
stuffs of the rarest quality. Bronzes, porcelains, pottery, things of
jade and alabaster, sconces, candlesticks and censers, with here and
there on the walls lovely little "primitives" of untold value. The most
exotic taste had ordered the distribution and arrangement of all these
objects. There was no suggestion of crowding, nothing haphazard or
bizarre in the exposition of treasure, nothing to indicate that a cheap
intelligence revelled in rich possessions.
You would have sat down upon the first chair that offered repose and you
would have said you had wandered inadvertently into a palace. Then,
emboldened by an interest that scorned politeness, you would have got up
to inspect the riches at close range,--and you would have found
price-marks everywhere to overcome the impression that Aladdin had been
rubbing his lamp all the way up the dingy, tortuous stairs.
You are not, however, in the shop of a dealer in antiques, price-marks
to the contrary. You are in the home of a Marchioness, and she is not a
dealer in old furniture, you may be quite sure of that. She does not owe
a penny on a single article in the apartment nor does she, on the other
hand, own a penny's worth of anything that meets the eye,--unless, of
course, one excepts the dust-cloth and the can of polish that follows
Julia about the room. Nor is it a loan exhibit, nor the setting for a
bazaar.
The apartment being on the top floor of a five-story building, it is
necessary to account for the remaining four. In the rear of the fourth
floor there was a small kitchen and pantry from which a dumb-waiter
ascended and descended with vehement enthusiasm. The remainder of the
floor was divided into four rather small chambers, each opening into the
outer hall, with two bath-rooms inserted. Each of these rooms contained
a series of lockers, not unlike those in a club-house. Otherwise they
were unfurnished except for a few commonplace cane bottom chairs in
various stages of decrepitude.
The third floor represented a complete apartment of five rooms, daintily
furnished. This was where the Marchioness really lived.
Commerce, after a fashion, occupied the two lower floors. It stopped
short at the bottom of the second flight of stairs where it encountered
an obstacle in the shape of a grill-work gate that bore the laconic word
"Private," and while commerce may have peeped inquisitively through and
beyond the barrier it was never permitted to trespass farther than an
occasional sly, surreptitious and unavailing twist of the knob.
The entire second floor was devoted to work-rooms in which many sewing
machines buzzed during the day and went to rest at six in the evening.
Tables, chairs, manikins, wall-hooks and hangers thrust forward a
bewildering assortment of fabrics in all stages of development, from an
original uncut piece to a practically completed garment. In other words,
here was the work-shop of the most exclusive, most expensive _modiste_
in all the great city.
The ground floor, or rather the floor above the English basement,
contained the _salon_ and fitting rooms of an establishment known to
every woman in the city as
DEBORAH'S.
To return to the Marchioness and Julia.
"Not that a little dust or even a great deal of dirt will make any
different to the Princess," the former was saying, "but, just the same,
I feel better, if I _know_ we've done our best."
"Thank the Lord, she don't come very often," was Julia's frank remark.
"It's the stairs, I fancy."
"And the car-fare," added her mistress. "Is it six o'clock, Julia?"
"Yes, ma'am, it is."
The Marchioness groaned a little as she straightened up and tossed the
dust-cloth on the table. "It catches me right across here," she
remarked, putting her hand to the small of her back and wrinkling her
eyes.
"You shouldn't be doing my work," scolded Julia. "It's not for the likes
of you to be--"
"I shall lie down for half an hour," said the Marchioness calmly. "Come
at half-past six, Julia."
"Just Lady Jane, ma'am? No one else?"
"No one else," said the other, and preceded Julia down the two flights
of stairs to the charming little apartment on the third floor. "She is a
dear girl, and I enjoy having her all to myself once in a while."
"She is so, ma'am," agreed Julia, and added. "The oftener the better."
At half-past seven Julia ran down the stairs to open the gate at the
bottom. She admitted a slender young woman, who said, "Thank you," and
"Good evening, Julia," in the softest, loveliest voice imaginable, and
hurried up, past the apartment of the Marchioness, to the fourth floor.
Julia, in cap and apron, wore a pleased smile as she went in to put the
finishing touches on the coiffure of her mistress.
"Pity there isn't more like her," she said, at the end of five minutes'
reflection. Patting the silvery crown of the Marchioness, she observed
in a less detached manner: "As I always says, the wonderful part is that
it's all your own, ma'am."
"I am beginning to dread the stairs as much as any one," said the
Marchioness, as she passed out into the hall and looked up the dimly
lighted steps. "That is a bad sign, Julia."
A mass of coals crackled in the big fireplace on the top floor, and a
tall man in the resplendent livery of a footman was engaged in poking
them up when the Marchioness entered.
"Bitterly cold, isn't it, Moody?" inquired she, approaching with stately
tread, her lorgnon lifted.
"It is, my lady,--extremely nawsty," replied Moody. "The trams are a bit
off, or I should 'ave 'ad the coals going 'alf an hour sooner
than--Ahem! They call it a blizzard, my lady."
"I know, thank you, Moody."
"Thank you, my lady," and he moved stiffly off in the direction of the
foyer.
The Marchioness languidly selected a magazine from the litter of
periodicals on the table. It was _La Figaro_, and of recent date. There
were magazines from every capital in Europe on that long and time-worn
table.
A warm, soft light filled the room, shed by antique lanthorns and
wall-lamps that gave forth no cruel glare. Standing beside the table,
the Marchioness was a remarkable picture. The slight, drooping figure of
the woman with the dust-cloth and creaking knees had been transformed,
like Cinderella, into a fairly regal creature attired in one of the most
fetching costumes ever turned out by the rapacious Deborah, of the first
floor front!
The foyer curtains parted, revealing the plump, venerable figure of a
butler who would have done credit to the lordliest house in all England.
"Lady Jane Thorne," he announced, and a slim, radiant young person
entered the room, and swiftly approached the smiling Marchioness.