The Inspiration
“Will there be a bobby to hear her scream, north of the Zambezi?”
There were two persons in the room.
It was a small room, looking out over St. James’s Park, and attached
to the library of the great London house. It was meant for the
comfort of one who wished to withdraw from the library in order to
examine some book at his leisure, or to make some annotation. There
were a table, two comfortable chairs, and a painting, rather large
for the room, representing an affair of honor on a snow-covered
highway in the rear of a French column, presumably Napoleon’s army
in Russia.
The conversation between the two persons in the room, Lord Donald
Muir and Walker, of the American Secret Service, had passed its
preliminary stage.
The youth seated in one of the great chairs was a typical product of
the aristocracy of England. He was little more than a boy, but he
had already something of the reserve, the almost pretentious
restraint, of his race. But he was not entirely within this
discipline; an intensity of feeling broke out. It appeared now and
then in a word, in an inflection of his voice, in a gesture.
He sat very straight in the chair, in his well-cut evening
clothes—his gloves crushed together and gripped in a firm hand that
could not remain idle under his intensity of feeling. He was a very
good-looking boy, with a single startling feature, his eyebrows were
straight and dark, while his hair, weathered by the outdoors, was
straw-colored. It gave his blue eyes at all times a somewhat tense
expression.
Walker had come to London for a conference with the American
Ambassador on the passport forgeries, and he had remained a guest at
the Embassy ball. And when the Ambassador had asked him to hear the
boy and help him if he could, he had gone with Lord Donald Muir into
the little room beyond the great library.
The Ambassador had explained the matter. He had given him each
detail; the girl’s mother was American; she had married the Earl of
Rexford; she was dead; Rexford was dead, and here was this dilemma.
Walker knew each of the persons in this drama, especially Sir Henry
Dercum, who had been in the English foreign service, and at one time
attached to the Embassy in Washington.
Walker was standing, now, before a window, looking out into the
night that enveloped London. The boy continued to speak.
“Will he not have the right to take her anywhere he likes?”
The Secret Service agent made a slight gesture, as of one rejecting
a suggestion. The gesture was unconscious. The man was thinking of
what Lord Donald Muir was saying to him.
“I suppose he has the right to take her anywhere he likes, provided
he remains within the jurisdiction of the English law.”
“Surely,” replied the boy. “Dercum is a clever beast; he will keep
within the jurisdiction of the English law.”
Walker turned slightly, his face was outlined against the black
square of the night framed in the window.
“Then why do you have this fear about it?” he said.
There came a sudden energy into Lord Muir’s voice.
“That is all very well as a theory,” he said, “but it is quite
different in fact.... The English law runs in South Africa; that is
the theory. It is a very fine theory, as it used to be lectured into
us at the Hill—a great empire providing precisely the same measure
of protection for its subject at the most distant point of its
dominion that it provided for him in the very capital itself. That
is as nearly as I can remember it. It is a fine theory.”
“It is a magnificent theory,” replied the Secret Service agent, “and
England has always endeavored to maintain it.”
Lord Muir twisted his gloves; his brown hands gripped them.
“But England can’t maintain it; that is the very thing I mean. What
protection can the law of England give her in northwestern Rhodesia?
The law of England will run there in theory, but it’s Dercum’s
damned will that will run there in fact.”
He gripped the gloves suddenly with both hands, as though he were
about to destroy them.
“Will there be a bobby to hear her scream?”
He leaned forward in his intensity.
“And what will she be when she comes out? And she won’t come out
until Dercum’s ready. I will tell you what she will be, she will be
what Dercum intends her to be.”
He looked at the Secret Service agent, his face covered with sweat.
Then he continued:
“Do you think this fine English law will do her any good then?”
Walker came a step or two away from the window. He looked down at
the boy. His face was composed, with that vague expression it always
took on when his interest was very much awakened.
“Sir Henry Dercum,” he said, “will have some instincts of a
gentleman.”
“If he has any instincts of a gentleman,” replied the boy, with a
sudden energy, “he has kept them so far concealed. London does not
know about this man. I have had him looked up. He was unspeakable in
Hongkong. No members of the English colony came down to the boat to
see him off, although he did represent the empire. But he is a
clever beast; one can’t get at him.
“I wanted my solicitor to resist his confirmation as guardian, but
he said I was not a party in interest.”
The boy’s voice was charged with an intense vigor.
“I wonder why the law is always so helpless about anything that is
important. I had rather see her go to the devil than to Dercum. The
devil has a reputation for what he is, and Dercum has a carefully
built up reputation in London for what he is not—an explorer, with
that sporting instinct that is dear to the English, and a gentleman,
when the fact is, he is a crook, a thief when it comes to the
accumulation of scientific data, and a bounder! But he is not a
fool, and that’s what makes him so damnably dangerous; he is
infinitely clever.”
Walker remained where he had been standing, looking down at the man
in the chair, his face in its vague repose. The dilemma of Lord
Donald Muir profoundly impressed him.
“I am very much puzzled about this matter,” he said. “I cannot say
that I trust Dercum, but I can say that I have no reason not to
trust him. In fact, he has acted, the American Ambassador tells me,
with extreme delicacy. The property which the girl takes from her
mother lies in America. He has made no effort to exercise any
control over it; he has, in fact, advised the Ambassador that he
would be pleased to have the trustees of her mother’s estate
continue to administer this property until the girl comes of age to
receive it. That did not sound like a man with a design.
“It was quite possible for him to obtain the sale of this property
in America and the transfer of the funds into his custody under the
English law, but he takes the other course. This does not seem
precisely consistent with your estimate of the man.”
There was a note as of a bitter laugh under Lord Muir’s answer.
“It’s precisely consistent with my estimate of him. What the brute’s
after is the girl; when he gets her, he will get everything with
her. Why hurry? When Dercum has degraded her enough, he will get all
the rest of it; he knows what he is doing.”
The boy got up suddenly.
“And I can’t stop him,” he said, “unless I go and kill him; and the
beast is too clever to be killed except in the nastiest way. ‘The
duel has gone out with the lace coat,’ he laughs at me with his
little reptilian eyes under the heavy eyelids. ‘Have a bit of
patience, my boy; I have no objection to you, if you please my ward.
But you must wait a little; she is quite young. It is admirable to
be youthful and impetuous, but it makes life difficult for a
guardian.’ That’s what he says. And I know what he thinks, and I
know what he is going to do.”
The Secret Service agent interrupted:
“What, precisely?”
“It will be just what I told you a moment ago,” replied Lord Muir.
“He is laying plans now; she’s quite keen to get into any queer
corner of the earth. It is easy enough to get a girl worked up,
especially when she has a big legend of her father before her. He
will do precisely what I have said, take her into South Africa.”
He got up with sudden energy.
“The law can’t stop him, but there must be something, and that’s why
I come to you, sir,” he added.
“To me,” said Walker, “—because you believe in providence?”
“Yes, sir,” the boy continued, “that is precisely the reason I came
to you. It is true that the American Ambassador has a point of
attack with Dercum because of these American properties, but that is
not the thing I depended upon. My uncle, when he was chief of the
criminal investigation department of Scotland Yard, used to say when
we had a perplexed thing to take up with America: ‘We can unravel
it, if Captain Walker comes up with one of his inspirations from
heaven.’ Well, sir, I have come to you for one of these
inspirations.”
Walker laughed softly. The reputation was perhaps his greatest
asset—a sort of intuition arising at certain complicated stages of
an affair, the sudden swift realization of some essential hitherto
unobserved.
Walker continued to smile.
The young man was looking at him with a tense, serious expression.
“You will have one of these inspirations, Captain Walker?”
The Secret Service agent began to walk about the room.
He was disturbed that Lord Donald Muir should come to him with this
affair. It was not a thing in which he ought to take any part.
Outside of some courteous discussion at the request of the American
Ambassador, he did not see how it was possible for him to have
anything to do with the matter. And further, it disturbed him that
this youth should come depending upon what was to him the absurd
phase of a detective reputation.
Scotland Yard called his sudden swift insight into some complicated
matter, “the inspirations from heaven of the Chief of the American
Secret Service,” and not precisely with a complimentary accent. The
thing annoyed him. But he smiled at the youth in the chair—that
vague, placid smile for which the man was famous.
“I do not see what I can do, my dear Lord Muir,” he said; “but I
shall be receptive to any inspiration that may arrive. Let us go
down.”
They went out of the little room into the great library.
It was a long, immense room, and the doors were closed. As they
passed through, the music from below ascended, and the vast
confusion of human voices, like the hum of some distant insect hive.
Walker opened the door, and they were at once above an immense sea
of human figures, gay, brilliant.
The crowded Embassy ball moved below them. The jewels, the gowns of
women, the color of uniforms gave the thing the aspect of an almost
barbaric saturnalia. The dense crowd overflowed onto the bronze
stairway.
Lord Muir entered and was lost in the immense throng, seeking the
one about whom he was so greatly concerned. The Chief of the
American Secret Service went slowly down the stairway, moving his
hand along the mahogany rail under which, in a magnificent frieze, a
wood-nymph entangled in a flowering vine fled from the pursuit of
satyrs. He was more disturbed than he had been willing to admit.
This girl was the daughter of that charming American woman who had
married the Earl of Rexford.
Captain Walker had not cared greatly for the Earl of Rexford; he was
too typically an Englishman, following conventions that seemed a
trifle out of modern times; but he was compelled, in a measure, to
admire him. While other men wasted their fortunes in the frivolities
of London, this man had spent what he could get in exploration, in
fitting out expeditions to discover unknown places of the earth. And
he went with them, enduring the hardship and peril.
He had died in his greatest venture. The whole expedition had
perished on one of the wind-swept plateaus of the Antarctic. It was
Dercum who had gone in to find him, and he had found him frozen to
death—the very dogs frozen, in one of those fearful depressions of
temperature that sometimes descend in an immense blizzard on this
wind-swept plateau.
From Dercum’s report he had very nearly reached Rexford alive. The
expedition had evidently held out for days against the blizzard. The
Earl of Rexford had been the last man to go. In the snow hut, on the
canvas table, was his diary, written up. Beside it, on the blank
sheet, were a dozen paragraphs in which he had directed the
appointment of Dercum as guardian for his minor daughter, with all
custody and direction of his estate.
The Secret Service agent passed these things through his mind as he
descended—the brilliant laughter, the murmur of voices below, making
a swirl of noises. He remembered some of the details arising in the
formal matter of Dercum’s appointment after his return. A solicitor
or some official authority had ventured a doubt about the
handwriting on the page beside the last entry in the diary. But it
was shown to him that the writing of innumerable pages of the diary
varied, due to the cold or to the physical condition of the writer
at the time.
The persons in Dercum’s expedition, persons whose integrity could
not be doubted, had been but a few minutes behind him in entering
this snow hut in which the Earl of Rexford had been found, and they
had at once, at Dercum’s direction, written their signatures at the
bottom of the page.
The diary had been immediately authenticated. It could not have been
afterward changed. And it was shown that these signatures, written
in that immense cold by benumbed fingers, varied from the normal
signatures of the individuals returning to their common environment
of life. In fact, no one could have said who had written these
signatures if the men who had written them that day, at Dercum’s
direction, in the snow hut on the canvas table, had not been present
in England to establish the fact. The diary, the ink, the pen were
there on the canvas table, and these men had established by their
signatures the authenticity of this writing beyond question.
At this moment a tall man wearing a distinguished order passed the
Chief of the American Secret Service.
“Sir,” he said, “are you perhaps receiving an inspiration from
heaven on our Hyde Park murders?”
Walker smiled.
“It would be my only hope,” he said, “against the superior
intelligence of Scotland Yard.”
And he went on. He was annoyed by the incident. Would he never
escape from this ridiculous pretension!
As he entered the crowd overflowing on the bottom of the stairway,
he caught a glimpse of Sir Henry Dercum and the girl in an eddy
beyond where the great newel post turned. Dercum’s big shoulders
would be anywhere conspicuous. He was a massive Englishman, with a
wide, Oriental face, purpled by good feeding, and little reptilian
eyes under heavy lids that very nearly obscured them. The man had a
habit of lifting his head when he was very much concerned, as though
to get a better view of his subject without the effort or the danger
of raising his eyelids.
The girl before him was in the splendid lure of youth; her dark hair
was lifted, by some subtlety of the coiffeur’s art, into a
beautiful, soft background for her face; her dark eyes and her
delicate skin were exquisitely brought out by it. She was in the
first bud of life, and she was very lovely. But there was more than
mere physical beauty; there was the charm of inexperience, the charm
of adventurous youth that does not question, and, like charity,
believeth all things—that inexperience which is gayly ready for any
adventure into what it beautifully imagines to be a fairy world.
The Secret Service agent saw the expression bedded into Dercum’s
heavy face, and he knew what it meant. He heard also the sentence he
was speaking.
“You will need a bit of change from all this artificiality.”
“Do I look stale so soon, Sir Henry?”
The girl laughed.
His eyes traveled over her, his head thrown back in a slow,
heavy-lidded expression as though it were a physical caress.
“Ah, no,” he said; “but you will have inherited some of your
father’s interest in the waste places of the earth. How would you
like to go with me and find a lost river?”
“I should love it,” she said. “Where is your lost river, Sir Henry?”
He looked about him.
“Let us find a seat somewhere,” he said, “and I will show you a
map.”
They got out of the crowd, traversed the long hall that runs
parallel to St. James’s Park, and entered the conservatory.
Walker followed. Dercum’s words had almost the sting of a blow. It
was the verification of Lord Donald Muir’s anxiety. If love were
blind, Walker reflected, it had surely the intuition of the saints.
Dercum’s plan, the plan which Walker had considered academic and
unlikely, was practical and on the way.
The Chief of the American Secret Service went on into the
conservatory, through fringes of the gay crowd floating everywhere
like gorgeous butterflies disentangled from the mass. He stopped
beside an immense vase filled with Japanese chrysanthemums of a
peculiar color, huge like a shock of hair on an immense stem. They
entirely obscured him, and he did not move.
It was not in any definite plan that he had entered the conservatory
and stopped behind this mass of flowers. He had been surprised,
shocked by the swift verification of this boy’s fear, and he wished
to reflect on it. It was not that he had followed to hear what
Dercum said; the details of what he said would be now unimportant.
It was the man’s intention alone that mattered, and this intention
required no further explanatory word.
He felt a sudden and desperate anxiety. This girl, lovely and
inexperienced, was entirely at Dercum’s will; as her guardian he
would have exclusive control of her, and, with the man’s cleverness,
what he wished he would accomplish. The English law, having put the
girl into his charge, would not concern itself about intentions that
could not be established. It would concern itself only with the
overt act, and when Dercum resorted to that he would be beyond a
running of the King’s writ.
Walker felt himself pressed for reflection, and he stopped here
unmoving, without a plan. But as chance would have it, he stopped
precisely at the place he would have selected if he had followed in
determination to hear every word that Dercum was about to say. Sir
Henry and the girl were just beyond him—beyond the screen of
flowers, on a bench by the window. Their words, although
under-uttered, came clearly to him; and in his vague reflection, the
skill with which Dercum moved in his plan was conspicuously evident.
The man was getting the lure of a land of mystery into his story; he
was deftly stimulating the girl’s fancy; he was calling her interest
in her father’s adventures to his aid; he was making a wonder
expedition out of this thing he had in mind. No element of thrill,
or color, in this adventure was lacking.
Walker could almost see Dercum’s finger on the map. But the map
would be only a property of the thing he was staging. He did not
explain precisely where this river lay, or the route to it. But on
some golden afternoon they would unship at a seaport, assemble a
fantastic company and go into some lost country that would be like
the Wood beyond the World, or the waste regions of some fairy
kingdom. And they would go now, this very summer, when the London
season had slacked a little.
Dercum was beginning to specify dates. Walker could not see him, but
he knew that the bit of pencil moved on the map; he would arrange
everything. From the few words of the girl, reaching him across the
Japanese chrysanthemums, she was entranced. A butterfly entangled in
illusions—she was ready to go, and she would go.
And with his clear vision, the vision not accustomed to be obscured
by detail, the Chief of the American Secret Service saw that the
thing could not be prevented. One could interfere with the custody
of a guardian only with an established intent in an English court.
This intent must be based on evidence, and there would be no
evidence; there would not be even the knowledge that the thing was
contemplated. With infinite cleverness Dercum had drawn the girl
into a conspiracy of silence. They would arrange it; they would keep
their own counsels, and they would go. It would have all the secret,
alluring charm of a fairy adventure.
Walker heard the pledge of silence, and knew that they were coming
out. He saw, also, looking down the long hall toward the
drawing-room, Lord Donald Muir advancing in his search. He would be
here in a moment; the three of them would meet, in a moment, just
beyond where he stood behind the chrysanthemums. Already Dercum and
the girl were very nearly up to him.
What would he do?
There was something surely to be done. The world behind its harsh,
indifferent machinery must be controlled by some immense considerate
impulse. All the operations of life could not be abandoned to a mere
physical fatalism, to laws that were unthinking, or to a tendency
that could not change. There must be something in the universe to
interfere against the iniquity of human intentions and this
indifference of nature! And suddenly, with a flash of vision, Walker
saw what had happened in Rexford’s snow hut, on the plateau of the
Antarctic, during the twenty minutes that Dercum had been there
before his expedition had come up—he saw it as clearly as though he
had been looking on.
He called to Lord Donald Muir, and he advanced to meet Dercum and
the girl.
“Sir Henry,” he said, “will you release these young people to the
dance and walk a moment with me?”
Dercum lifted his big Oriental face, looking out under his heavy
eyelids. He moved the tips of the girl’s fingers to his lips, and he
nodded to Muir.
“You will be a very brilliant couple,” he said. “I shall be charmed
to observe you.”
And then he turned to the Chief of the American Secret Service.
“Ah, Walker,” he said, “I have not seen you since the old days in
Washington.”
The Chief of the American Secret Service put his hand through
Dercum’s arm and drew him along beside him, down the hall, with an
ease of manner as though he were the warm companion of a lifetime.
“My friend,” he said, “I am going to ask you to release this
guardianship and go on your expedition alone.”
Dercum stopped suddenly, his body rigid.
“You have overheard,” he said.
Walker smiled. He made a slight gesture.
“It is one of the perquisites of the Secret Service,” he said. “You
will grant my request, Sir Henry.”
“Your request?” Dercum’s voice was almost a stutter. “I grant it?”
The Chief of the American Secret Service took a firmer hold of his
arm.
“Walk with me,” he said; “we may be noticed.... Ah, yes, my friend,
you will grant it.”
“Why should I grant it, pray?” said the amazed Dercum.
“You will grant it,” replied Walker, “because you will not wish to
answer in the English courts—in the English criminal courts—a
question that has just occurred to me.”
The Chief of the American Secret Service laughed; two persons
connected with a Continental Embassy were regarding him. Then he
went on:
“How did it happen, Sir Henry, that when you came on Lord Rexford’s
expedition on the Antarctic plateau, that morning, when you entered
his snow hut some twenty minutes ahead of the other members of your
expedition, and in that low temperature, in that deadly Antarctic
temperature, you found everything frozen, the food, the very mercury
in the thermometer, the bodies of the dead—how did it happen, Sir
Henry”—and his hand moved on Dercum’s arm like a caress—“how did it
happen that the ink on the canvas table was not also frozen?”