superfluously, as he closed the door.
Pausing only to verify the number, he sprang up the steps and found the
bell-button.
It was a modest little residence, in nothing more remarkable than its
neighbors, unless it was for a certain air of extra grooming: the area
railing was sleek with fresh black paint; the doorstep looked the
better for vigorous stoning; the door itself was immaculate, its
brasses shining lustrous against red-lacquered woodwork. A soft glow
filled the fanlight. Overhead the drawing-room windows shone with a
cozy, warm radiance.
The door opened, framing the figure of a maid sketched broadly in
masses of somber black and dead white.
“Can you tell me, is Mr. Calendar here?”
The servant’s eyes left his face, looked past him at the waiting cab,
and returned.
“I’m not sure, sir. If you will please step in.”
Kirkwood hesitated briefly, then acceded. The maid closed the door.
“What name shall I say, sir?”
“Mr. Kirkwood.”
“If you will please to wait one moment, sir—”
He was left in the entry hall, the servant hurrying to the staircase
and up. Three minutes elapsed; he was on the point of returning to the
girl, when the maid reappeared.
“Mrs. Hallam says, will you kindly step up-stairs, sir.”
Disgruntled, he followed her; at the head of the stairs she bowed him
into the drawing-room and again left him to his own resources.
Nervous, annoyed, he paced the floor from wall to wall, his footfalls
silenced by heavy rugs. As the delay was prolonged he began to fume
with impatience, wondering, half regretting that he had left the girl
outside, definitely sorry that he had failed to name his errand more
explicitly to the maid. At another time, in another mood, he might have
accorded more appreciation to the charm of the apartment, which,
betraying the feminine touch in every detail of arrangement and
furnishing, was very handsome in an unconventional way. But he was
quite heedless of externals.
Wearied, he deposited himself sulkily in an armchair by the hearth.
From a boudoir on the same floor there came murmurs of two voices, a
man’s and a woman’s. The latter laughed prettily.
“Oh, any time!” snorted the American. “Any time you’re through with
your confounded flirtation, Mr. George B. Calendar!”
The voices rose, approaching. “Good night,” said the woman gaily;
“farewell and—good luck go with you!”
“Thank you. Good night,” replied the man more conservatively.
Kirkwood rose, expectant.
There was a swish of draperies, and a moment later he was acknowledging
the totally unlooked-for entrance of the mistress of the house. He had
thought to see Calendar, presuming him to be the man closeted with Mrs.
Hallam; but, whoever that had been, he did not accompany the woman.
Indeed, as she advanced from the doorway, Kirkwood could hear the man’s
footsteps on the stairs.
“This is Mr. Kirkwood?” The note of inquiry in the well-trained voice—a
very alluring voice and one pleasant to listen to, he thought—made it
seem as though she had asked, point-blank, “Who is Mr. Kirkwood?”
He bowed, discovering himself in the presence of an extraordinarily
handsome and interesting woman; a woman of years which as yet had not
told upon her, of experience that had not availed to harden her, at
least in so far as her exterior charm of personality was involved; a
woman, in brief, who bore close inspection well, despite an elusive
effect of maturity, not without its attraction for men. Kirkwood was
impressed that it would be very easy to learn to like Mrs. Hallam more
than well—with her approval.
Although he had not anticipated it, he was not at all surprised to
recognize in her the woman who, if he were not mistaken, had slipped to
Calendar that warning in the dining-room of the Pless. Kirkwood’s state
of mind had come to be such, through his experiences of the past few
hours, that he would have accepted anything, however preposterous, as a
commonplace happening. But for that matter there was nothing
particularly astonishing in this _rencontre_.
“I am Mrs. Hallam. You were asking for Mr. Calendar?”
“He was to have been here at this hour, I believe,” said Kirkwood.
“Yes?” There was just the right inflection of surprise in her carefully
controlled tone.
He became aware of an undercurrent of feeling; that the woman was
estimating him shrewdly with her fine direct eyes. He returned her
regard with admiring interest; they were gray-green eyes, deep-set but
large, a little shallow, a little changeable, calling to mind the sea
on a windy, cloudy day.
Below stairs a door slammed.
“I am not a detective, Mrs. Hallam,” announced the young man suddenly.
“Mr. Calendar required a service of me this evening; I am here in
natural consequence. If it was Mr. Calendar who left this house just
now, I am wasting time.”
“It was not Mr. Calendar.” The fine-lined brows arched in surprise,
real or pretended, at his first blurted words, and relaxed; amused, the
woman laughed deliciously. “But I am expecting him any moment; he was
to have been here half an hour since.... Won’t you wait?”
She indicated, with a gracious gesture, a chair, and took for herself
one end of a davenport. “I’m sure he won’t be long, now.”
“Thank you, I will return, if I may.” Kirkwood moved toward the door.
“But there’s no necessity—” She seemed insistent on detaining him,
possibly because she questioned his motive, possibly for her own
divertisement.
Kirkwood deprecated his refusal with a smile. “The truth is, Miss
Calendar is waiting in a cab, outside. I—”
“Dorothy Calendar!” Mrs. Hallam rose alertly. “But why should she wait
there? To be sure, we’ve never met; but I have known her father for
many years.” Her eyes held steadfast to his face; shallow, flawed by
her every thought, like the sea by a cat’s-paw he found them altogether
inscrutable; yet received an impression that their owner was now unable
to account for him.
She swung about quickly, preceding him to the door and down the stairs.
“I am sure Dorothy will come in to wait, if I ask her,” she told
Kirkwood in a high sweet voice. “I’m so anxious to know her. It’s quite
absurd, really, of her—to stand on ceremony with me, when her father
made an appointment here. I’ll run out and ask—”
Mrs. Hallam’s slim white fingers turned latch and knob, opening the
street door, and her voice died away as she stepped out into the night.
For a moment, to Kirkwood, tagging after her with an uncomfortable
sense of having somehow done the wrong thing, her figure—full fair
shoulders and arms rising out of the glittering dinner gown—cut a
gorgeous silhouette against the darkness. Then, with a sudden,
imperative gesture, she half turned towards him.
“But,” she exclaimed, perplexed, gazing to right and left, “but the
cab, Mr. Kirkwood?”
He was on the stoop a second later. Standing beside her, he stared
blankly.
To the left the Strand roared, the stream of its night-life in high
spate; on the right lay the Embankment, comparatively silent and
deserted, if brilliant with its high-swung lights. Between the two,
quiet Craven Street ran, short and narrow, and wholly innocent of any
form of equipage.
VI
“BELOW BRIDGE”
In silence Mrs. Hallam turned to Kirkwood, her pose in itself a
question and a peremptory one. Her eyes had narrowed; between their
lashes the green showed, a thin edge like jade, cold and calculating.
The firm lines of her mouth and chin had hardened.
Temporarily dumb with consternation, he returned her stare as silently.
“_Well_, Mr.—Kirkwood?”
“Mrs. Hallam,” he stammered, “I—”
She lifted her shoulders impatiently and with a quick movement stepped
back across the threshold, where she paused, a rounded arm barring the
entrance, one hand grasping the door-knob, as if to shut him out at any
moment.
“I’m awaiting your explanation,” she said coldly.
[Illustration: “I’m awaiting your explanation,” she said coldly.]
He grinned with nervousness, striving to penetrate the mental processes
of this handsome Mrs. Hallam. She seemed to regard him with a suspicion
which he thought inexcusable. Did she suppose he had spirited Dorothy
Calendar away and then called to apprise her of the fact? Or that he
was some sort of an adventurer, who had manufactured a plausible yarn
to gain him access to her home? Or—harking back to her original
theory—that he was an emissary from Scotland Yard? ... Probably she
distrusted him on the latter hypothesis. The reflection left him more
at ease.
“I am quite as mystified as you, Mrs. Hallam,” he began. “Miss Calendar
was here, at this door, in a four-wheeler, not ten minutes ago, and—”
“Then where is she now?”
“Tell me where Calendar is,” he retorted, inspired, “and I’ll try to
answer you!”
But her eyes were blank. “You mean—?”
“That Calendar was in this house when I came; that he left, found his
daughter in the cab, and drove off with her. It’s clear enough.”
“You are quite mistaken,” she said thoughtfully. “George Calendar has
not been here this night.”
He wondered that she did not seem to resent his imputation. “I think
not—”
“Listen!” she cried, raising a warning hand; and relaxing her vigilant
attitude, moved forward once more, to peer down toward the Embankment.
A cab had cut in from that direction and was bearing down upon them
with a brisk rumble of hoofs. As it approached, Kirkwood’s heart, that
had lightened, was weighed upon again by disappointment. It was no
four-wheeler, but a hansom, and the open wings of the apron, disclosing
a white triangle of linen surmounted by a glowing spot of fire,
betrayed the sex of the fare too plainly to allow of further hope that
it might be the girl returning.
At the door, the cab pulled up sharply and a man tumbled hastily out
upon the sidewalk.
“Here!” he cried throatily, tossing the cabby his fare, and turned
toward the pair upon the doorstep, evidently surmising that something
was amiss. For he was Calendar in proper person, and a sight to upset
in a twinkling Kirkwood’s ingeniously builded castle of suspicion.
“Mrs. Hallam!” he cried, out of breath. “’S my daughter here?” And
then, catching sight of Kirkwood’s countenance: “Why, hello, Kirkwood!”
he saluted him with a dubious air.
The woman interrupted hastily. “Please come in, Mr. Calendar. This
gentleman has been inquiring for you, with an astonishing tale about
your daughter.”
“Dorothy!” Calendar’s moon-like visage was momentarily divested of any
trace of color. “What of her?”
“You had better come in,” advised Mrs. Hallam brusquely.
The fat adventurer hopped hurriedly across the threshold, Kirkwood
following. The woman shut the door, and turned with back to it, nodding
significantly at Kirkwood as her eyes met Calendar’s.
“Well, well?” snapped the latter impatiently, turning to the young man.
But Kirkwood was thinking quickly. For the present he contented himself
with a deliberate statement of fact: “Miss Calendar has disappeared.”
It gave him an instant’s time ... “There’s something damned fishy!” he
told himself. “These two are playing at cross-purposes. Calendar’s no
fool; he’s evidently a crook, to boot. As for the woman, she’s had her
eyes open for a number of years. The main thing’s Dorothy. She didn’t
vanish of her own initiative. And Mrs. Hallam knows, or suspects, more
than she’s going to tell. I don’t think she wants Dorothy found.
Calendar does. So do I. Ergo: I’m for Calendar.”
“Disappeared?” Calendar was barking at him. “How? When? Where?”
“Within ten minutes,” said Kirkwood. “Here, let’s get it straight....
With her permission I brought her here in a four-wheeler.” He was
carefully suppressing all mention of Frognall Street, and in Calendar’s
glance read approval of the elision. “She didn’t want to get out,
unless you were here. I asked for you. The maid showed me up-stairs. I
left your daughter in the cab—and by the way, I hadn’t paid the driver.
That’s funny, too! Perhaps six or seven minutes after I came in Mrs.
Hallam found out that Miss Calendar was with me and wanted to ask her
in. When we got to the door—no cab. There you have it all.”
“Thanks—it’s plenty,” said Calendar dryly. He bent his head in thought
for an instant, then looked up and fixed Mrs. Hallam with an
unprejudiced eye, “I say!” he demanded explosively. “There wasn’t any
one here that knew—eh?”
Her fine eyes wavered and fell before his; and Kirkwood remarked that
her under lip was curiously drawn in.
“I heard a man leave as Mrs. Hallam joined me,” he volunteered
helpfully, and with a suspicion of malice. “And after that—I paid no
attention at the time—it seems to me I did hear a cab in the street—”
“Ow?” interjected Calendar, eying the woman steadfastly and employing
an exclamation of combined illumination and inquiry more typically
British than anything Kirkwood had yet heard from the man.
For her part, the look she gave Kirkwood was sharp with fury. It was
more; it was a mistake, a flaw in her diplomacy; for Calendar
intercepted it. Unceremoniously he grasped her bare arm with his fat
hand.
“Tell me who it was,” he demanded in an ugly tone.
She freed herself with a twist, and stepped back, a higher color in her
cheeks, a flash of anger in her eyes.
“Mr. Mulready,” she retorted defiantly. “What of that?”
“I wish I was sure,” declared the fat adventurer, exasperated. “As it
is, I bet a dollar you’ve put your foot in it, my lady. I warned you of
that blackguard.... There! The mischief’s done; we won’t row over it.
One moment.” He begged it with a wave of his hand; stood pondering
briefly, fumbled for his watch, found and consulted it. “It’s the
barest chance,” he muttered. “Perhaps we can make it.”
“What are you going to do?” asked the woman.
“Give _Mister_ Mulready a run for his money. Come along, Kirkwood; we
haven’t a minute. Mrs. Hallam, permit us....” She stepped aside and he
brushed past her to the door. “Come, Kirkwood!”
He seemed to take Kirkwood’s company for granted; and the young man was
not inclined to argue the point. Meekly enough he fell in with Calendar
on the sidewalk. Mrs. Hallam followed them out. “You won’t forget?” she
called tentatively.
“I’ll ’phone you if we find out anything.” Calendar jerked the words
unceremoniously over his shoulder as, linking arms with Kirkwood, he
drew him swiftly along. They heard her shut the door; instantly
Calendar stopped. “Look here, did Dorothy have a—a small parcel with
her?”
“She had a gladstone bag.”
“Oh, the devil, the devil!” Calendar started on again, muttering
distractedly. As they reached the corner he disengaged his arm. “We’ve
a minute and a half to reach Charing Cross Pier; and I think it’s the
last boat. You set the pace, will you? But remember I’m an oldish man
and—and fat.”
They began to run, the one easily, the other lumbering after like an
old-fashioned square-rigged ship paced by a liner.
Beneath the railway bridge, in front of the Underground station, the
cab-rank cried them on with sardonic view-halloos; and a bobby remarked
them with suspicion, turning to watch as they plunged round the corner
and across the wide Embankment.
The Thames appeared before them, a river of ink on whose burnished
surface lights swam in long winding streaks and oily blobs. By the
floating pier a County Council steamboat strained its hawsers, snoring
huskily. Bells were jingling in her engine-room as the two gained the
head of the sloping gangway.
Kirkwood slapped a shilling down on the ticket-window ledge. “Where
to?” he cried back to Calendar.
“Cherry Gardens Pier,” rasped the winded man. He stumbled after
Kirkwood, groaning with exhaustion. Only the tolerance of the pier
employees gained them their end; the steamer was held some seconds for
them; as Calendar staggered to its deck, the gangway was jerked in, the
last hawser cast off. The boat sheered wide out on the river, then shot
in, arrow-like, to the pier beneath Waterloo Bridge.
The deck was crowded and additional passengers embarked at every stop.
In the circumstances conversation, save on the most impersonal topics,
was impossible; and even had it been necessary or advisable to discuss
the affair which occupied their minds, where so many ears could hear,
Calendar had breath enough neither to answer nor to catechize Kirkwood.
They found seats on the forward deck and rested there in grim silence,
both fretting under the enforced restraint, while the boat darted, like
some illuminated and exceptionally active water insect, from pier to
pier.
As it snorted beneath London Bridge, Calendar’s impatience drove him
from his seat back to the gangway. “Next stop,” he told Kirkwood
curtly; and rested his heavy bulk against the paddle-box, brooding
morosely, until, after an uninterrupted run of more than a mile, the
steamer swept in, side-wheels backing water furiously against the
ebbing tide, to Cherry Gardens landing.
Sweet name for a locality unsavory beyond credence! ... As they emerged
on the street level and turned west on Bermondsey Wall, Kirkwood was
fain to tug his top-coat over his chest and button it tight, to hide
his linen. In a guarded tone he counseled his companion to do likewise;
and Calendar, after a moment’s blank, uncomprehending stare,
acknowledged the wisdom of the advice with a grunt.
The very air they breathed was rank with fetid odors bred of the gaunt
dark warehouses that lined their way; the lights were few; beneath the
looming buildings the shadows were many and dense. Here and there
dreary and cheerless public houses appeared, with lighted windows
conspicuous in a lightless waste. From time to time, as they hurried
on, they encountered, and made wide detours to escape contact with
knots of wayfarers—men debased and begrimed, with dreary and slatternly
women, arm in arm, zigzaging widely across the sidewalks, chorusing
with sodden voices the burden of some popularized ballad. The
cheapened, sentimental refrains echoed sadly between benighted
walls....
Kirkwood shuddered, sticking close to Calendar’s side. Life’s naked
brutalities had theretofore been largely out of his ken. He had heard
of slums, had even ventured to mouth politely moral platitudes on the
subject of overcrowding in great centers of population, but in the
darkest flights of imagination had never pictured to himself anything
so unspeakably foul and hopeless as this.... And they were come hither
seeking—Dorothy Calendar! He was unable to conceive what manner of
villainy could be directed against her, that she must be looked for in
such surroundings.
After some ten minutes’ steady walking, Calendar turned aside with a
muttered word, and dived down a covered, dark and evil-smelling
passageway that seemed to lead toward the river.
Mastering his involuntary qualms, Kirkwood followed.
Some ten or twelve paces from its entrance the passageway swerved at a
right angle, continuing three yards or so to end in a blank wall,
wherefrom a flickering, inadequate gas-lamp jutted. At this point a
stone platform, perhaps four feet square, was discovered, from the edge
of which a flight of worn and slimy stone steps led down to a permanent
boat-landing, where another gas-light flared gustily despite the
protection of its frame of begrimed glass.
“Good Lord!” exclaimed the young man. “What, in Heaven’s name,
Calendar—?”
“Bermondsey Old Stairs. Come on.”
They descended to the landing-stage. Beneath them the Pool slept, a
sheet of polished ebony, whispering to itself, lapping with small
stealthy gurgles angles of masonry and ancient piles. On the farther
bank tall warehouses reared square old-time heads, their
uncompromising, rugged profile relieved here and there by tapering
mastheads. A few, scattering, feeble lights were visible. Nothing moved
save the river and the wind.
The landing itself they found quite deserted; something which the
adventurer comprehended with a nod which, like its accompanying,
inarticulate ejaculation, might have been taken to indicate either
satisfaction or disgust. He ignored Kirkwood altogether, for the time
being, and presently produced a small, bright object, which, applied to
his lips, proved to be a boatswain’s whistle. He sounded two blasts,
one long, one brief.
There fell a lull, Kirkwood watching the other and wondering what next
would happen. Calendar paced restlessly to and fro upon the narrow
landing, now stopping to incline an ear to catch some anticipated
sound, now searching with sweeping glances the black reaches of the
Pool.
Finally, consulting his watch, “Almost ten,” he announced.
“We’re in time?”
“Can’t say.... Damn! ... If that infernal boat would only show up—”
He was lifting the whistle to sound a second summons when a rowboat
rounded a projecting angle formed by the next warehouse down stream,
and with clanking oar-locks swung in toward the landing. On her thwarts
two figures, dipping and rising, labored with the sweeps. As they drew
in, the man forward shipped his blades, and rising, scrambled to the
bows in order to grasp an iron mooring-ring set in the wall. The other
awkwardly took in his oars and, as the current swung the stern
downstream, placed a hand palm downward upon the bottom step to hold
the boat steady.
Calendar waddled to the brink of the stage, grunting with relief.
“The other man?” he asked brusquely. “Has he gone aboard? Or is this
the first trip to-night?”
One of the watermen nodded assent to the latter question, adding
gruffly: “Seen nawthin’ of ’im, sir.”
“Very good,” said Calendar, as if he doubted whether it were very good
or bad. “We’ll wait a bit.”
“Right-o!” agreed the waterman civilly.
Calendar turned back, his small eyes glimmering with satisfaction.
Fumbling in one coat pocket he brought to light a cigar-case. “Have a
smoke?” he suggested with a show of friendliness. “By Heaven, I was
beginnin’ to get worried!”
“As to what?” inquired Kirkwood pointedly, selecting a cigar.
He got no immediate reply, but felt Calendar’s sharp eyes upon him
while he manoeuvered with matches for a light.
“That’s so,” it came at length. “You don’t know. I kind of forgot for a
minute; somehow you seemed on the inside.”
Kirkwood laughed lightly. “I’ve experienced something of the same
sensation in the past few hours.”
“Don’t doubt it.” Calendar was watching him narrowly. “I suppose,” he
put it to him abruptly, “you haven’t changed your mind?”
“Changed my mind?”
“About coming in with me.”
“My dear sir, I can have no mind to change until a plain proposition is
laid before me.”
“Hmm!” Calendar puffed vigorously until it occurred to him to change
the subject. “You won’t mind telling me what happened to you and
Dorothy?”
“Certainly not.”
Calendar drew nearer and Kirkwood, lowering his voice, narrated briefly
the events since he had left the Pless in Dorothy’s company.
Her father followed him intently, interrupting now and again with
exclamation or pertinent question; as, Had Kirkwood been able to see
the face of the man in No. 9, Frognall Street? The negative answer
seemed to disconcert him.
“Youngster, you say? Blam’ if I can lay my mind to _him_! Now if that
Mulready—”
“It would have been impossible for Mulready—whoever he is—to recover
and get to Craven Street before we did,” Kirkwood pointed out.
“Well—go on.” But when the tale was told, “It’s that scoundrel,
Mulready!” the man affirmed with heat. “It’s his hand—I know him. I
might have had sense enough to see he’d take the first chance to hand
me the double-cross. Well, this does for _him_, all right!” Calendar
lowered viciously at the river. “You’ve been blame’ useful,” he told
Kirkwood assertively. “If it hadn’t been for you, I don’t know where
_I’d_ be now,—nor Dorothy, either,”—an obvious afterthought. “There’s
no particular way I can show my appreciation, I suppose? Money—?”
“I’ve got enough to last me till I reach New York, thank you.”
“Well, if the time ever comes, just shout for George B. I won’t be
wanting.... I only wish you were with us; but that’s out of the
question.”
“Doubtless ...”
“No two ways about it. I bet anything you’ve got a conscience concealed
about your person. What? You’re an honest man, eh?”
“I don’t want to sound immodest,” returned Kirkwood, amused.
“You don’t need to worry about that.... But an honest man’s got no
business in _my_ line.” He glanced again at his watch. “Damn that
Mulready! I wonder if he was ’cute enough to take another way? Or did
he think ... The fool!”
He cut off abruptly, seeming depressed by the thought that he might
have been outwitted; and, clasping hands behind his back, chewed
savagely on his cigar, watching the river. Kirkwood found himself
somewhat wearied; the uselessness of his presence there struck him with
added force. He bethought him of his boat-train, scheduled to leave a
station miles distant, in an hour and a half. If he missed it, he would
be stranded in a foreign land, penniless and practically without
friends—Brentwick being away and all the rest of his circle of
acquaintances on the other side of the Channel. Yet he lingered, in
poor company, daring fate that he might see the end of the affair. Why?
There was only one honest answer to that question. He stayed on because
of his interest in a girl whom he had known for a matter of three
hours, at most. It was insensate folly on his part, ridiculous from any
point of view. But he made no move to go.
The slow minutes lengthened monotonously.
There came a sound from the street level. Calendar held up a hand of
warning. “Here they come! Steady!” he said tensely. Kirkwood, listening
intently, interpreted the noise as a clash of hoofs upon cobbles.
Calendar turned to the boat.
“Sheer off,” he ordered. “Drop out of sight. I’ll whistle when I want
you.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The boat slipped noiselessly away with the current and in an instant
was lost to sight. Calendar plucked at Kirkwood’s sleeve, drawing him
into the shadow of the steps. “E-easy,” he whispered; “and, I say, lend
me a hand, will you, if Mulready turns ugly?”
“Oh, yes,” assented Kirkwood, with a nonchalance not entirely
unassumed.
The racket drew nearer and ceased; the hush that fell thereafter seemed
only accentuated by the purling of the river. It was ended by footsteps
echoing in the covered passageway. Calendar craned his thick neck round
the shoulder of stone, reconnoitering the landing and stairway.
“Thank God!” he said under his breath. “I was right, after all!”
A man’s deep tones broke out above. “This way. Mind the steps; they’re
a bit slippery, Miss Dorothy.”
“But my father—?” came the girl’s voice, attuned to doubt.
“Oh, he’ll be along—if he isn’t waiting now, in the boat.”
They descended, the man leading. At the foot, without a glance to right
or left, he advanced to the edge of the stage, leaning out over the
rail as if endeavoring to locate the rowboat. At once the girl
appeared, moving to his side.
“But, Mr. Mulready—”
The girl’s words were drowned by a prolonged blast on the boatswain’s
whistle at her companion’s lips; the shorter one followed in due
course. Calendar edged forward from Kirkwood’s side.
“But what shall we do if my father isn’t here? Wait?”
“No; best not to; best to get on the _Alethea_ as soon as possible,
Miss Calendar. We can send the boat back.”
“‘Once aboard the lugger the girl is mine’—eh, Mulready?—to say nothing
of the loot!”
If Calendar’s words were jocular, his tone conveyed a different
impression entirely. Both man and girl wheeled right about to face him,
the one with a strangled oath, the other with a low cry.
“The devil!” exclaimed this Mr. Mulready.
“Oh! My father!” the girl voiced her recognition of him.
“Not precisely one and the same person,” commented Calendar suavely.
“But—er—thanks, just as much.... You see, Mulready, when I make an
appointment, I keep it.”
“We’d begun to get a bit anxious about you—” Mulready began
defensively.
“So I surmised, from what Mrs. Hallam and Mr. Kirkwood told me....
Well?”
The man found no ready answer. He fell back a pace to the railing, his
features working with his deep chagrin. The murky flare of the gas-lamp
overhead fell across a face handsome beyond the ordinary but marred by
a sullen humor and seamed with indulgence: a face that seemed
hauntingly familiar until Kirkwood in a flash of visual memory
reconstructed the portrait of a man who lingered over a dining-table,
with two empty chairs for company. This, then, was he whom Mrs. Hallam
had left at the Pless; a tall, strong man, very heavy about the chest
and shoulders....
“Why, my dear friend,” Calendar was taunting him, “you don’t seem
overjoyed to see me, for all your wild anxiety! ’Pon my word, you act
as if you hadn’t expected me—and our engagement so clearly understood,
at that! ... Why, you fool!”—here the mask of irony was cast. “Did you
think for a moment I’d let myself be nabbed by that yap from Scotland
Yard? Were you banking on that? I give you my faith I ambled out under
his very nose! ... Dorothy, my dear,” turning impatiently from
Mulready, “where’s that bag?”
The girl withdrew a puzzled gaze from Mulready’s face, (it was apparent
to Kirkwood that this phase of the affair was no more enigmatic to him
than to her), and drew aside a corner of her cloak, disclosing the
gladstone bag, securely grasped in one gloved hand.
“I have it, thanks to Mr. Kirkwood,” she said quietly.
Kirkwood chose that moment to advance from the shadow. Mulready started
and fixed him with a troubled and unfriendly stare. The girl greeted
him with a note of sincere pleasure in her surprise.
“Why, Mr. Kirkwood! ... But I left you at Mrs. Hallam’s!”
Kirkwood bowed, smiling openly at Mulready’s discomfiture.
“By your father’s grace, I came with him,” he said. “You ran away
without saying good night, you know, and I’m a jealous creditor.”
She laughed excitedly, turning to Calendar. “But _you_ were to meet me
at Mrs. Hallam’s?”
“Mulready was good enough to try to save me the trouble, my dear. He’s
an unselfish soul, Mulready. Fortunately it happened that I came along
not five minutes after he’d carried you off. How was that, Dorothy?”
Her glance wavered uneasily between the two, Mulready and her father.
The former, shrugging to declare his indifference, turned his back
squarely upon them. She frowned.
“He came out of Mrs. Hallam’s and got into the four-wheeler, saying you
had sent him to take your place, and would join us on the _Alethea_.”
“So-o! How about it, Mulready?”
The man swung back slowly. “What you choose to think,” he said after a
deliberate pause.
“Well, never mind! We’ll go over the matter at our leisure on the
_Alethea_.”
There was in the adventurer’s tone a menace, bitter and not to be
ignored; which Mulready saw fit to challenge.
“I think not,” he declared; “I think not. I’m weary of your addle-pated
suspicions. It’d be plain to any one but a fool that I acted for the
best interests of all concerned in this matter. If you’re not content
to see it in that light, I’m done.”
“Oh, if you want to put it that way, I’m _not_ content, Mr. Mulready,”
retorted Calendar dangerously.
“Please yourself. I bid you good evening and—good-by.” The man took a
step toward the stairs.
Calendar dropped his right hand into his top-coat pocket. “Just a
minute,” he said sweetly, and Mulready stopped. Abruptly the fat
adventurer’s smoldering resentment leaped in flame. “That’ll be about
all, Mr. Mulready! ’Bout face, you hound, and get into that boat! D’you
think I’ll temporize with you till Doomsday? Then forget it. You’re
wrong, dead wrong. Your bluff’s called, and”—with an evil chuckle—“I
hold a full house, Mulready,—every chamber taken.” He lifted meaningly
the hand in the coat pocket. “Now, in with you.”
With a grin and a swagger of pure bravado Mulready turned and obeyed.
Unnoticed of any, save perhaps Calendar himself, the boat had drawn in
at the stage a moment earlier. Mulready dropped into it and threw
himself sullenly upon the midships thwart.
“Now, Dorothy, in you go, my dear,” continued Calendar, with a
self-satisfied wag of his head.
Half dazed, to all seeming, she moved toward the boat. With clumsy and
assertive gallantry her father stepped before her, offering his
hand,—his hand which she did not touch; for, in the act of descending,
she remembered and swung impulsively back to Kirkwood.
“Good night, Mr. Kirkwood; good night,—I shan’t forget.”
He took her hand and bowed above it; but when his head was lifted, he
still retained her fingers in a lingering clasp.
“Good night,” he said reluctantly.
The crass incongruity of her in that setting smote him with renewed
force. Young, beautiful, dainty, brilliant and graceful in her pretty
evening gown, she figured strangely against the gloomy background of
the river, in those dull and mean surroundings of dank stone and rusted
iron. She was like (he thought extravagantly) a whiff of
flower-fragrance lost in the miasmatic vapors of a slough.
The innocent appeal and allure of her face, upturned to his beneath the
gas-light, wrought compassionately upon his sensitive and generous
heart. He was aware of a little surge of blind rage against the
conditions that had brought her to that spot, and against those whom he
held responsible for those conditions.
In a sudden flush of daring he turned and nodded coolly to Calendar.
“With your permission,” he said negligently; and drew the girl aside to
the angle of the stairway.
“Miss Calendar—” he began; but was interrupted.
“Here—I say!”
Calendar had started toward him angrily.
Kirkwood calmly waved him back. “I want a word in private with your
daughter, Mr. Calendar,” he announced with quiet dignity. “I don’t
think you’ll deny me? I’ve saved you some slight trouble to-night.”
Disgruntled, the adventurer paused. “Oh—_all_ right,” he grumbled. “I
don’t see what ...” He returned to the boat.
“Forgive me, Miss Calendar,” continued Kirkwood nervously. “I know I’ve
no right to interfere, but—”
“Yes, Mr. Kirkwood?”
“—but hasn’t this gone far enough?” he floundered unhappily. “I can’t
like the look of things. Are you sure—sure that it’s all right—with
you, I mean?”
She did not answer at once; but her eyes were kind and sympathetic. He
plucked heart of their tolerance.
“It isn’t too late, yet,” he argued. “Let me take you to your
friends,—you must have friends in the city. But this—this midnight
flight down the Thames, this atmosphere of stealth and suspicion,
this—”
“But my place is with my father, Mr. Kirkwood,” she interposed. “I
daren’t doubt him—dare I?”
“I ... suppose not.”
“So I must go with him.... I’m glad—thank you for caring, dear Mr.
Kirkwood. And again, good night.”
“Good luck attend you,” he muttered, following her to the boat.
Calendar helped her in and turned back to Kirkwood with a look of arch
triumph; Kirkwood wondered if he had overheard. Whether or no, he could
afford to be magnanimous. Seizing Kirkwood’s hand, he pumped it
vigorously.
“My dear boy, you’ve been an angel in disguise! And I guess you think
me the devil in masquerade.” He chuckled, in high conceit with himself
over the turn of affairs. “Good night and—and fare thee well!” He
dropped into the boat, seating himself to face the recalcitrant
Mulready. “Cast off, there!”
The boat dropped away, the oars lifting and falling. With a weariful
sense of loneliness and disappointment, Kirkwood hung over the rail to
watch them out of sight.
A dozen feet of water lay between the stage and the boat. The girl’s
dress remained a spot of cheerful color; her face was a blur. As the
watermen swung the bows down-stream, she looked back, lifting an arm
spectral in its white sheath. Kirkwood raised his hat.
The boat gathered impetus, momentarily diminishing in the night’s
illusory perspective; presently it was little more than a fugitive
blot, gliding swiftly in midstream. And then, it was gone entirely,
engulfed by the obliterating darkness.
[Illustration: The boat gathered impetus.]
Somewhat wearily the young man released the railing and ascended the
stairs. “And that is the end!” he told himself, struggling with an
acute sense of personal injury. He had been hardly used. For a few
hours his life had been lightened by the ineffable glamor of Romance;
mystery and adventure had engaged him, exorcising for the time the
Shade of Care; he had served a fair woman and been associated with men
whose ways, however questionable, were the ways of courage, hedged
thickly about with perils.
All that was at an end. Prosaic and workaday to-morrows confronted him
in endless and dreary perspective; and he felt again upon his shoulder
the bony hand of his familiar, Care....
He sighed: “Ah, well!”
Disconsolate and aggrieved, he gained the street. He was miles from St.
Pancras, foot-weary, to all intents and purposes lost.
In this extremity, Chance smiled upon him. The cabby who, at his
initial instance, had traveled this weary way from Quadrant Mews, after
the manner of his kind, ere turning back, had sought surcease of
fatigue at the nearest public; from afar Kirkwood saw the four-wheeler
at the curb, and made all haste toward it.
Entering the gin-mill he found the cabby, soothed him with bitter, and,
instructing him for St. Pancras with all speed, dropped, limp and
listless with fatigue, into the conveyance.
As it moved, he closed his eyes; the face of Dorothy Calendar shone out
from the blank wall of his consciousness, like an illuminated picture
cast upon a screen. She smiled upon him, her head high, her eyes tender
and trustful. And he thought that her scarlet lips were sweet with
promise and her glance a-brim with such a light as he had never dreamed
to know.
And now that he knew it and desired it, it was too late; an hour gone
he might, by a nod of his head, have cast his fortunes with hers for
weal or woe. But now ... Alas and alackaday, that Romance was no more!
VII
DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN,—RESUMED
From the commanding elevation of the box, “Three ’n’ six,” enunciated
the cabby, his tone that of a man prepared for trouble, acquainted with
trouble, inclined to give trouble a welcome. His bloodshot eyes blinked
truculently at his alighted fare. “Three ’n’ six,” he iterated
aggressively.
An adjacent but theretofore abstracted policeman pricked up his ears
and assumed an intelligent expression.
“Bermondsey Ol’ Stairs to Sain’ Pancras,” argued the cabby assertively;
“seven mile by th’ radius; three ’n’ six!”
Kirkwood stood on the outer station platform, near the entrance to
third-class waiting-rooms. Continuing to fumble through his pockets for
an elusive sovereign purse, he looked up mildly at the man.
“All right, cabby,” he said, with pacific purpose; “you’ll get your
fare in half a shake.”
“Three ’n’ six!” croaked the cabby, like a blowsy and vindictive
parrot.
The bobby strolled nearer.
“Yes?” said Kirkwood, mildly diverted. “Why not sing it, cabby?”
“Lor’ lumme!” The cabby exploded with indignation, continuing to give a
lifelike imitation of a rumpled parrot. “I ’ad trouble enough wif you
at Bermondsey Ol’ Stairs, hover that quid you promised, didn’t I? Sing
it! My heye!”
“Quid, cabby?” And then, remembering that he had promised the fellow a
sovereign for fast driving from Quadrant Mews, Kirkwood grinned
broadly, eyes twinkling; for Mulready must have fallen heir to that
covenant. “But you got the sovereign? You got it, didn’t you, cabby?”
The driver affirmed the fact with unnecessary heat and profanity and an
amendment to the effect that he would have spoiled his fare’s
sanguinary conk had the outcome been less satisfactory.
The information proved so amusing that Kirkwood, chuckling, forbore to
resent the manner of its delivery, and, abandoning until a more
favorable time the chase of the coy sovereign purse, extracted from one
trouser pocket half a handful of large English small change.
“Three shillings, six-pence,” he counted the coins into the cabby’s
grimy and bloated paw; and added quietly: “The exact distance is rather
less than, four miles, my man; your fare, precisely two shillings. You
may keep the extra eighteen pence, for being such a conscientious
blackguard,—or talk it over with the officer here. Please yourself.”
He nodded to the bobby, who, favorably impressed by the silk hat which
Kirkwood, by diligent application of his sleeve during the cross-town
ride, had managed to restore to a state somewhat approximating its
erstwhile luster, smiled at the cabby a cold, hard smile. Whereupon the
latter, smirking in unabashed triumph, spat on the pavement at
Kirkwood’s feet, gathered up the reins, and wheeled out.
“A ’ard lot, sir,” commented the policeman, jerking his helmeted head
towards the vanishing four-wheeler.
“Right you are,” agreed Kirkwood amiably, still tickled by the
knowledge that Mulready had been obliged to pay three times over for
the ride that ended in his utter discomfiture. Somehow, Kirkwood had
conceived no liking whatever for the man; Calendar he could, at a
pinch, tolerate for his sense of humor, but Mulready—! “A surly dog,”
he thought him.
Acknowledging the policeman’s salute and restoring two shillings and a
few fat copper pennies to his pocket, he entered the vast and echoing
train-shed. In the act, his attention was attracted and immediately
riveted by the spectacle of a burly luggage navvy in a blue jumper in
the act of making off with a large, folding sign-board, of which the
surface was lettered expansively with the advice, in red against a
white background:
BOAT-TRAIN LEAVES ON TRACK 3
Incredulous yet aghast the young man gave instant chase to the navvy,
overhauling him with no great difficulty. For your horny-handed British
working-man is apparently born with two golden aphorisms in his mouth:
“Look before you leap,” and “Haste makes waste.” He looks continually,
seldom, if ever, leaps, and never is prodigal of his leisure.
Excitedly Kirkwood touched the man’s arm with a detaining hand.
“Boat-train?” he gasped, pointing at the board.
“Left ten minutes ago, thank you, sir.”
“Wel-l, but...! Of course I can get another train at Tilbury?”
“For yer boat? No, sir, thank you, sir. Won’t be another tryne till
mornin’, sir.”
“Oh-h!...”
Aimlessly Kirkwood drifted away, his mind a blank.
Sometime later he found himself on the steps outside the station,
trying to stare out of countenance a glaring electric mineral-water
advertisement on the farther side of the Euston Road.
He was stranded....
Beyond the spiked iron fence that enhedges the incurving drive, the
roar of traffic, human, wheel and hoof, rose high for all the lateness
of the hour: sidewalks groaning with the restless contact of hundreds
of ill-shod feet; the roadway thundering—hansoms, four-wheelers,
motor-cars, dwarfed coster-mongers’ donkey-carts and ponderous,
rumbling, C.-P. motor-vans, struggling for place and progress. For St.
Pancras never sleeps.
The misty air swam luminous with the light of electric signs as with
the radiance of some lurid and sinister moon. The voice of London
sounded in Kirkwood’s ears, like the ominous purring of a somnolent
brute beast, resting, gorged and satiated, ere rising again to devour.
To devour—
Stranded!...
Distracted, he searched pocket after pocket, locating his watch, cigar-
and cigarette-cases, match-box, penknife—all the minutiæ of
pocket-hardware affected by civilized man; with old letters, a
card-case, a square envelope containing his steamer ticket; but no
sovereign purse. His small-change pocket held less than three
shillings—two and eight, to be exact—and a brass key, which he failed
to recognize as one of his belongings.
And that was all. At sometime during the night he had lost (or been
cunningly bereft of?) that little purse of chamois-skin containing the
three golden sovereigns which he had been husbanding to pay his steamer
expenses, and which, if only he had them now, would stand between him
and starvation and a night in the streets.
And, searching his heart, he found it brimming with gratitude to
Mulready, for having relieved him of the necessity of settling with the
cabby.
“Vagabond?” said Kirkwood musingly. “Vagabond?” He repeated the word
softly a number of times, to get the exact flavor of it, and found it
little to his taste. And yet...
He thrust both hands deep in his trouser pockets and stared
purposelessly into space, twisting his eyebrows out of alignment and
crookedly protruding his lower lip.
If Brentwick were only in town—But he wasn’t, and wouldn’t be, within
the week.
“No good waiting here,” he concluded. Composing his face, he reëntered
the station. There were his trunks, of course. He couldn’t leave them
standing on the station platform for ever.
He found the luggage-room and interviewed a mechanically courteous
attendant, who, as the result of profound deliberation, advised him to
try his luck at the lost-luggage room, across the station. He accepted
the advice; it was a foregone conclusion that his effects had not been
conveyed to the Tilbury dock; they could not have been loaded into the
luggage van without his personal supervision. Still, anything was
liable to happen when his unlucky star was in the ascendant.
He found them in the lost-luggage room.
A clerk helped him identify the articles and ultimately clucked with a
perfunctory note: “Sixpence each, please.”
“I—ah—pardon?”
“Sixpence each, the fixed charge, sir. For every twenty-four hours or
fraction thereof, sixpence per parcel.”
“Oh, thank you so much,” said Kirkwood sweetly. “I will call
to-morrow.”
“Very good, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“Five times sixpence is two-and-six,” Kirkwood computed, making his way
hastily out of the station, lest a worse thing befall him. “No, bless
your heart!—not while two and eight represents the sum total of my
fortune.”
He wandered out into the night; he could not linger round the station
till dawn; and what profit to him if he did? Even were he to ransom his
trunks, one can scarcely change one’s clothing in a public
waiting-room.
Somewhere in the distance a great clock chimed a single stroke,
freighted sore with melancholy. It knelled the passing of the half-hour
after midnight; a witching hour, when every public shuts up tight, and
gentlemen in top-hats and evening dress are doomed to pace the pave
till day (barring they have homes or visible means of support)—till
day, when pawnshops open and such personal effects as watches and
hammered silver cigar-cases may be hypothecated.
Sable garments fluttering, Care fell into step with Philip Kirkwood;
Care the inexorable slipped a skeleton arm through his and would not be
denied; Care the jade clung affectionately to his side, refusing to be
jilted.
“Ah, you thought you would forget me?” chuckled the fleshless lips by
his ear. “But no, my boy; I’m with you now, for ever and a day. ‘Misery
loves company,’ and it wouldn’t be pretty of me to desert you in this
extremity, would it? Come, let us beguile the hours till dawn with
conversation. Here’s a sprightly subject: What are you going to do, Mr.
Kirkwood? _What are you going to do?_”
But Kirkwood merely shook a stubborn head and gazed straight before
him, walking fast through ways he did not recognize, and pretending not
to hear. None the less the sense of Care’s solicitous query struck like
a pain into his consciousness. What was he to do?
An hour passed.
Denied the opportunity to satisfy its beast hunger and thirst, humanity
goes off to its beds. In that hour London quieted wonderfully; the
streets achieved an effect of deeper darkness, the skies, lowering,
looked down with a blush less livid for the shamelessness of man; cab
ranks lengthened; solitary footsteps added unto themselves loud,
alarming, offensive echoes; policemen, strolling with lamps blazing on
their breasts, became as lightships in a trackless sea; each new-found
street unfolded its perspective like a canyon of mystery, and yet
teeming with a hundred masked hazards; the air acquired a smell more
clear and clean, an effect more volatile; and the night-mist thickened
until it studded one’s attire with myriads of tiny buttons, bright as
diamond dust.
Through this long hour Kirkwood walked without a pause.
Another clock, somewhere, clanged resonantly twice.
The world was very still....
And so, wandering foot-loose in a wilderness of ways, turning
aimlessly, now right, now left, he found himself in a street he knew,
yet seemed not to know: a silent, black street one brief block in
length, walled with dead and lightless dwellings, haunted by his errant
memory; a street whose atmosphere was heavy with impalpable essence of
desuetude; in two words, Frognall Street.
Kirkwood identified it with a start and a guilty tremor. He stopped
stock-still, in an unreasoning state of semi-panic, arrested by a silly
impulse to turn and fly; as if the bobby, whom he descried approaching
him with measured stride, pausing now and again to try a door or flash
his bull’s-eye down an area, were to be expected to identify the man
responsible for that damnable racket raised ere midnight in vacant
Number 9!
Oddly enough, the shock of recognition brought him to his
senses,—temporarily. He was even able to indulge himself in a quiet,
sobering grin at his own folly. He passed the policeman with a nod and
a cool word in response to the man’s good-natured, “Good-night, sir.”
Number 9 was on the other side of the street; and he favored its blank
and dreary elevation with a prolonged and frank stare—that profited him
nothing, by the way. For a crazy notion popped incontinently into his
head, and would not be cast forth.
At the corner he swerved and crossed, still possessed of his devil of
inspiration. It would be unfair to him to say that he did not struggle
to resist it, for he did, because it was fairly and egregiously
asinine; yet struggling, his feet trod the path to which it tempted
him.
“Why,” he expostulated feebly, “I might’s well turn back and beat that
bobby over the head with my cane!...”
But at the moment his hand was in his change pocket, feeling over that
same brass door-key which earlier he had been unable to account for,
and he was informing himself how very easy it would have been for the
sovereign purse to have dropped from his waistcoat pocket while he was
sliding on his ear down the dark staircase. To recover it meant, at the
least, shelter for the night, followed by a decent, comfortable and
sustaining morning meal. Fortified by both he could redeem his luggage,
change to clothing more suitable for daylight traveling, pawn his
valuables, and enter into negotiations with the steamship company for
permission to exchange his passage, with a sum to boot, for
transportation on another liner. A most feasible project! A temptation
all but irresistible!
But then—the risk.... Supposing (for the sake of argument) the
customary night-watchman to have taken up a transient residence in
Number 9; supposing the police to have entered with him and found the
stunned man on the second floor: would the watchman not be vigilant for
another nocturnal marauder? would not the police now, more than ever,
be keeping a wary eye on that house of suspicious happenings?
Decidedly, to reënter it would be to incur a deadly risk. And yet,
undoubtedly, beyond question! his sovereign purse was waiting for him
somewhere on the second flight of stairs; while as his means of
clandestine entry lay warm in his fingers—the key to the dark entry,
which he had by force of habit pocketed after locking the door.
He came to the Hog-in-the-Pound. Its windows were dim with low-turned
gas-lights. Down the covered alleyway, Quadrant Mews slept in a dusk
but fitfully relieved by a lamp or two round which the friendly mist
clung close and thick.
There would be none to see....
Skulking, throat swollen with fear, heart beating like a snare-drum,
Kirkwood took his chance. Buttoning his overcoat collar up to his chin
and cursing the fact that his hat must stand out like a chimney-pot on
a detached house, he sped on tiptoe down the cobbled way and close
beneath the house-walls of Quadrant Mews. But, half-way in, he stopped,
confounded by an unforeseen difficulty. How was he to identify the
narrow entry of Number 9, whose counterparts doubtless communicated
with the mews from every residence on four sides of the city block?
The low inner tenements were yet high enough to hide the rear
elevations of Frognall Street houses, and the mist was heavy besides;
otherwise he had made shift to locate Number 9 by ticking off the
dwellings from the corner. If he went on, hit or miss, the odds were
anything-you-please to one that he would blunder into the servant’s
quarters of some inhabited house, and—be promptly and righteously sat
upon by the service-staff, while the bobby was summoned.
Be that as it might—he almost lost his head when he realized
this—escape was already cut off by the way he had come. Some one, or,
rather, some two men were entering the alley. He could hear the
tramping and shuffle of clumsy feet, and voices that muttered
indistinctly. One seemed to trip over something, and cursed. The other
laughed; the voices grew more loud. They were coming his way. He dared
no longer vacillate.
But—which passage should he choose?
He moved on with more haste than discretion. One heel slipped on a
cobble time-worn to glassy smoothness; he lurched, caught himself up in
time to save a fall, lost his hat, recovered it, and was discovered. A
voice, maudlin with drink, hailed and called upon him to stand and give
an account of himself, “like a goo’ feller.” Another tempted him with
offers of drink and sociable confabulation. He yielded not; adamantine
to the seductive lure, he picked up his heels and ran. Those behind
him, remarking with resentment the amazing fact that an intimate of the
mews should run away from liquor, cursed and made after him, veering,
staggering, howling like ravening animals.
For all their burden of intoxication, they knew the ground by instinct
and from long association. They gained on him. Across the way a
window-sash went up with a bang, and a woman screamed. Through the only
other entrance to the mews a belated cab was homing; its driver,
getting wind of the unusual, pulled up, blocking the way, and added his
advice to the uproar.
Caught thus between two fires, and with his persecutors hard upon him,
Kirkwood dived into the nearest black hole of a passageway and in sheer
desperation flung himself, key in hand, against the door at the end.
Mark how his luck served him who had forsworn her! He found a keyhole
and inserted the key. It turned. So did the knob. The door gave inward.
He fell in with it, slammed it, shot the bolts, and, panting, leaned
against its panels, in a pit of everlasting night but—saved!—for the
time being, at all events.
Outside somebody brushed against one wall, cannoned to the other,
brought up with a crash against the door, and, perforce at a
standstill, swore from his heart.
“Gorblimy!” he declared feelingly. “I’d ’a’ took my oath I sore’m run
in ’ere!” And then, in answer to an inaudible question: “No, ’e ain’t.
Gorn an’ let the fool go to ’ell. ’Oo wants ’im to share goo’ liker?
Not I!...”
Joining his companion he departed, leaving behind him a trail of
sulphur-tainted air. The mews quieted gradually. Indoors Kirkwood faced
unhappily the enigma of fortuity, wondering: Was this by any
possibility Number 9? The key had fitted; the bolts had been drawn on
the inside; and while the key had been one of ordinary pattern and
would no doubt have proven effectual with any one of a hundred common
locks, the finger of probability seemed to indicate that his luck had
brought him back to Number 9. In spite of all this, he was sensible of
little confidence; though this were truly Number 9, his freedom still
lay on the knees of the gods, his very life, belike, was poised,
tottering, on a pinnacle of chance. In the end, taking heart of
desperation, he stooped and removed his shoes; a precaution which later
appealed to his sense of the ridiculous, in view of the racket he had
raised in entering, but which at the moment seemed most natural and in
accordance with common sense. Then rising, he held his breath, staring
and listening. About him the pitch darkness was punctuated with fading
points of fire, and in his ears was a noise of strange whisperings,
very creepy—until, gritting his teeth, he controlled his nerves and
gradually realized that he was alone, the silence undisturbed. He went
forward gingerly, feeling his way like a blind man on strange ground.
Ere long he stumbled over a door-sill and found that the walls of the
passage had fallen away; he had entered a room, a black cavern of
indeterminate dimensions. Across this he struck at random, walked
himself flat against a wall, felt his way along to an open door, and
passed through to another apartment as dark as the first.
Here, endeavoring to make a circuit of the walls, he succeeded in
throwing himself bodily across a bed, which creaked horribly; and for a
full minute lay as he had fallen, scarce daring to think. But nothing
followed, and he got up and found a shut door which let him into yet a
third room, wherein he barked both shins on a chair; and escaped to a
fourth whose atmosphere was highly flavored with reluctant odors of
bygone cookery, stale water and damp plumbing—probably the kitchen.
Thence progressing over complaining floors through what may have been
the servants’ hall, a large room with a table in the middle and a
number of promiscuous chairs (witness his tortured shins!), he finally
blundered into the basement hallway.
By now a little calmer, he felt assured that this was really Number 9,
Frognall Street, and a little happier about it all, though not even
momentarily forgetful of the potential police and night-watchman.
However, he mounted the steps to the ground floor without adventure and
found himself at last in the same dim and ghostly hall which he had
entered some six hours before; the mockery of dusk admitted by the
fan-light was just strong enough to enable him to identify the general
lay of the land and arrangement of furniture.
More confidently with each uncontested step, he continued his quest.
Elation was stirring his spirit when he gained the first floor and
moved toward the foot of the second flight, approaching the spot
whereat he was to begin the search for the missing purse. The knowledge
that he lacked means of obtaining illumination deterred him nothing; he
had some hope of finding matches in one of the adjacent rooms, but,
failing that, was prepared to ascend the stairs on all fours, feeling
every inch of their surface, if it took hours. Ever an optimistic soul,
instinctively inclined to father faith with a hope, he felt supremely
confident that his search would not prove fruitless, that he would win
early release from his temporary straits.
And thus it fell out that, at the instant he was thinking it time to
begin to crawl and hunt, his stockinged feet came into contact with
something heavy, yielding, warm—something that moved, moaned, and
caused his hair to bristle and his flesh to creep.
We will make allowances for him; all along he had gone on the
assumption that his antagonist of the dark stairway would have
recovered and made off with all expedition, in the course of ten or
twenty minutes, at most, from the time of his accident. To find him
still there was something entirely outside of Kirkwood’s reckoning: he
would as soon have thought to encounter say, Calendar,—would have
preferred the latter, indeed. But this fellow whose disability was due
to his own interference, who was reasonably to be counted upon to raise
the very deuce and all of a row!
The initial shock, however shattering to his equanimity, soon, lost
effect. The man evidently remained unconscious, in fact had barely
moved; while the moan that Kirkwood heard, had been distressingly
faint.
“Poor devil!” murmured the young man. “He must be in a pretty bad way,
for sure!” He knelt, compassion gentling his heart, and put one hand to
the insentient face. A warm sweat moistened his fingers; his palm was
fanned by steady respiration.
Immeasurably perplexed, the American rose, slipped on his shoes and
buttoned them, thinking hard the while. What ought he to do? Obviously
flight suggested itself,—incontinent flight, anticipating the man’s
recovery. On the other hand, indubitably the latter had sustained such
injury that consciousness, when it came to him, would hardly be
reinforced by much aggressive power. Moreover, it was to be remembered
that the one was in that house with quite as much warrant as the other,
unless Kirkwood had drawn a rash inference from the incident of the
ragged sentry. The two of them were mutual, if antagonistic,
trespassers; neither would dare bring about the arrest of the other.
And then—and this was not the least consideration to influence
Kirkwood—perhaps the fellow would die if he got no attention.
Kirkwood shut his teeth grimly. “I’m no assassin,” he informed himself,
“to strike and run. If I’ve maimed this poor devil and there are
consequences, I’ll stand ’em. The Lord knows it doesn’t matter a damn
to anybody, not even to me, what happens to me; while _he_ may be
valuable.”
Light upon the subject, actual as well as figurative, seemed to be the
first essential; his mind composed, Kirkwood set himself in search of
it. The floor he was on, however, afforded him no assistance; the
mantels were guiltless of candles and he discovered no matches, either
in the wide and silent drawing-room, with its ghastly furniture, like
mummies in their linen swathings, or in the small boudoir at the back.
He was to look either above or below, it seemed.
After some momentary hesitation, he went up-stairs, his ascent marked
by a single and grateful accident; half-way to the top he trod on an
object that clinked underfoot, and, stooping, retrieved the lost purse.
Thus was he justified of his temerity; the day was saved—that is,
to-morrow was.
The rooms of the second-floor were bedchambers, broad, deep, stately,
inhabited by seven devils of loneliness. In one, on a dresser, Kirkwood
found a stump of candle in a china candlestick; the two charred ends of
matches at its base were only an irritating discovery, however—evidence
that real matches had been the mode in Number 9, at some remote date.
Disgusted and oppressed by cumulative inquisitiveness, he took the
candle-end back to the hall; he would have given much for the time and
means to make a more detailed investigation into the secret of the
house.
Perhaps it was mostly his hope of chancing on some clue to the mystery
of Dorothy Calender—bewitching riddle that she was!—that fascinated his
imagination so completely. Aside from her altogether, the great house
that stood untenanted, yet in such complete order, so self-contained in
its darkened quiet, intrigued him equally with the train of
inexplicable events that had brought him within its walls. Now—since
his latest entrance—his vision had adjusted itself to cope with the
obscurity to some extent; and the street lights, meagerly reflected
through the windows from the bosom of a sullen pall of cloud, low-swung
above the city, had helped him to piece together many a detail of
decoration and furnishing, alike somber and richly dignified. Kirkwood
told himself that the owner, whoever he might be, was a man of wealth
and taste inherited from another age; he had found little of
meretricious to-day in the dwelling, much that was solid and sedate and
homely, and—Victorian.... He could have wished for more; a box of early
Victorian vestas had been highly acceptable.
Making his way down-stairs to the stricken man—who was quite as he had
been—Kirkwood bent over and thrust rifling fingers into his pockets,
regardless of the wretched sense of guilt and sneakishness imparted by
the action, stubbornly heedless of the possibility of the man’s
awakening to find himself being searched and robbed.
In the last place he sought, which should (he realized) have been the
first, to wit, the fob pocket of the white waistcoat, he found a small
gold matchbox, packed tight with wax vestas; and, berating himself for
crass stupidity—he had saved a deal of time and trouble by thinking of
this before—lighted the candle.
As its golden flame shot up with scarce a tremor, preyed upon by a
perfectly excusable concern, he bent to examine the man’s
countenance.... The arm which had partly hidden it had fallen back into
a natural position. It was a young face that gleamed pallid in the
candlelight—a face unlined, a little vapid and insignificant, with
features regular and neat, betraying few characteristics other than the
purely negative attributes of a character as yet unformed, possibly
unformable; much the sort of a face that he might have expected to see,
remembering those thin and pouting lips that before had impressed him.
Its owner was probably little more than twenty. In his attire there was
a suspicion of a fop’s preciseness, aside from its accidental disarray;
the cut of his waistcoat was the extreme of the then fashion, the white
tie (twisted beneath one ear) an exaggerated “butterfly,” his collar
nearly an inch too tall; and he was shod with pumps suitable only for
the dancing-floor,—a whim of the young-bloods of London of that year.
“I can’t make him out at all!” declared Kirkwood. “The son of a
gentleman too weak to believe that cubs need licking into shape? Reared
to man’s estate, so sheltered from the wicked world that he never grew
a bark?... The sort that never had a quarrel in his life, ’cept with
his tailor?... Now what the devil is _this_ thing doing in this
midnight mischief?... Damn!”
It was most exasperating, the incongruity of the boy’s appearance
assorted with his double rôle of persecutor of distressed damsels and
nocturnal house-breaker!
Kirkwood bent closer above the motionless head, with puzzled eyes
striving to pin down some elusive resemblance that he thought to trace
in those vacuous features—a resemblance to some one he had seen, or
known, at some past time, somewhere, somehow.
“I give it up. Guess I’m mistaken. Anyhow, five young Englishmen out of
every ten of his class are just as blond and foolish. Now let’s see how
bad he’s hurt.”
With hands strong and gentle, he turned the round, light head. Then,
“Ah!” he commented in the accent of comprehension. For there was an
angry looking bump at the base of the skull; and, the skin having been
broken, possibly in collision with the sharp-edged newel-post, a little
blood had stained and matted the straw-colored hair.
Kirkwood let the head down and took thought. Recalling a bath-room on
the floor above, thither he went, unselfishly forgetful of his
predicament if discovered, and, turning on the water, sopped his
handkerchief until it dripped. Then, returning, he took the boy’s head
on his knees, washed the wound, purloined another handkerchief (of
silk, with a giddy border) from the other’s pocket, and of this
manufactured a rude but serviceable bandage.
Toward the conclusion of his attentions, the sufferer began to show
signs of returning animation. He stirred restlessly, whimpered a
little, and sighed. And Kirkwood, in consternation, got up.
“So!” he commented ruefully. “I guess I am an ass, all right—taking all
that trouble for you, my friend. If I’ve got a grain of sense left,
this is my cue to leave you alone in your glory.”
He was lingering only to restore to the boy’s pockets such articles as
he had removed in the search for matches,—the match-box, a few silver
coins, a bulky sovereign purse, a handsome, plain gold watch, and so
forth. But ere he concluded he was aware that the boy was conscious,
that his eyes, open and blinking in the candlelight, were upon him.
They were blue eyes, blue and shallow as a doll’s, and edged with long,
fine lashes. Intelligence, of a certain degree, was rapidly informing
them. Kirkwood returned their questioning glance, transfixed in
indecision, his primal impulse to cut-and-run for it was gone; he had
nothing to fear from this child who could not prevent his going
whenever he chose to go; while by remaining he might perchance worm
from him something about the girl.
“You’re feeling better?” He was almost surprised to hear his own voice
put the query.
“I—I think so. Ow, my head!... I say, you chap, whoever you are, what’s
happened?... I want to get up.” The boy added peevishly: “Help a
fellow, can’t you?”
“You’ve had a nasty fall,” Kirkwood observed evenly, passing an arm
beneath the boy’s shoulder and helping him to a sitting position. “Do
you remember?”
The other snuffled childishly and scrubbed across the floor to rest his
back against the wall.
“Why-y ... I remember fallin’; and then ... I woke up and it was all
dark and my head achin’ fit to split. I presume I went to sleep again
... I say, what’re you, doing here?”
Instead of replying, Kirkwood lifted a warning finger.
“Hush!” he said tensely, alarmed by noises in the street. “You don’t
suppose—?”
He had been conscious of a carriage rolling up from the corner, as well
as that it had drawn up (presumably) before a near-by dwelling. Now the
rattle of a key in the hall-door was startlingly audible. Before he
could move, the door itself opened with a slam.
Kirkwood moved toward the stair-head, and drew back with a cry of
disgust. “Too late!” he told himself bitterly; his escape was cut off.
He could run up-stairs and hide, of course, but the boy would inform
against him and....
He buttoned up his coat, settled his hat on his head, and moved near
the candle, where it rested on the floor. One glimpse would suffice to
show him the force of the intruders, and one move of his foot put out
the light; then—_perhaps_—he might be able to rush them.
Below, a brief pause had followed the noise of the door, as if those
entering were standing, irresolute, undecided which way to turn; but
abruptly enough the glimmer of candlelight must have been noticed.
Kirkwood heard a hushed exclamation, a quick clatter of high heels on
the parquetry, pattering feet on the stairs, all but drowned by swish
and ripple of silken skirts; and a woman stood at the head of the
flight—to the American an apparition profoundly amazing as she paused,
the light from the floor casting odd, theatric shadows beneath her eyes
and over her brows, edging her eyes themselves with brilliant light
beneath their dark lashes, showing her lips straight and drawn, and
shimmering upon the spangles of an evening gown, visible beneath the
dark cloak which had fallen back from her white, beautiful shoulders.
VIII
MADAME L’INTRIGANTE
“Mrs. Hallam!” cried Kirkwood, beneath his breath.
The woman ignored his existence. Moving swiftly forward, she dropped on
both knees by the side of the boy, and caught up one of his hands,
clasping it passionately in her own.
“Fred!” she cried, a curious break in her tone. “My little Freddie! Oh,
what has happened, dearie?”
“Oh, hello, Mamma,” grunted that young man, submitting listlessly to
her caresses and betraying no overwhelming surprise at her appearance
there. Indeed he seemed more concerned as to what Kirkwood, an older
man, would be thinking, to see him so endeared and fondled, than moved
by any other emotion. Kirkwood could see his shamefaced, sidelong
glances; and despised him properly for them.
But without attending to his response, Mrs. Hallam rattled on in the
uneven accents of excitement. “I waited until I couldn’t wait any
longer, Freddie dear. I had to know—had to come. Eccles came home about
nine and said that you had told him to wait outside, that some one had
followed you in here, and that a bobby had told him to move on. I
didn’t know what—”
“What’s o’clock now?” her son interrupted.
“It’s about three, I think ... Have you hurt yourself, dear? Oh, why
_didn’t_ you come home? You must’ve known I was dying of anxiety!”
“Oh, I say! Can’t you see I’m hurt? ’Had a nasty fall and must’ve been
asleep ever since.”
“My precious one! How—?”
“Can’t say, hardly ... I say, don’t paw a chap so, Mamma ... I brought
Eccles along and told him to wait because—well, because I didn’t feel
so much like shuttin’ myself up in this beastly old tomb. So I left the
door ajar, and told him not to let anybody come in. Then I came
up-stairs. There must’ve been somebody already in the house; I know I
_thought_ there was. It made me feel creepy, rather. At any rate, I
heard voices down below, and the door banged, and somebody began
hammerin’ like fun on the knocker.”
The boy paused, rolling an embarrassed eye up at the stranger.
“Yes, yes, dear!” Mrs. Hallam urged him on.
“Why, I—I made up my mind to cut my stick—let whoever it was pass me on
the stairs, you know. But he followed me and struck me, and then I
jumped at him, and we both fell down the whole flight. And that’s all.
Besides, my head’s achin’ like everything.”
“But this man—?”
Mrs. Hallam looked up at Kirkwood, who bowed silently, struggling to
hide both his amusement and perplexity. More than ever, now, the case
presented a front inscrutable to his wits; try as he might, he failed
to fit an explanation to any incident in which he had figured, while
this last development—that his antagonist of the dark stairway had been
Mrs. Hallam’s son!—seemed the most astounding of all, baffling
elucidation completely.
He had abandoned all thought of flight and escape. It was too late; in
the brisk idiom of his mother-tongue, he was “caught with the goods
on.” “May as well face the music,” he counseled himself, in
resignation. From what he had seen and surmised of Mrs. Hallam, he
shrewdly suspected that the tune would prove an exceedingly lively one;
she seemed a woman of imagination, originality, and an able-bodied
temper.
“_You_, Mr. Kirkwood!”
Again he bowed, grinning awry.
She rose suddenly. “You will be good enough to explain your presence
here,” she informed him with dangerous serenity.
“To be frank with you—”
“I advise that course, Mr. Kirkwood.”
“Thanks, awf’ly.... I came here, half an hour ago, looking for a lost
purse full—well, not _quite_ full of sovereigns. It was my purse, by
the way.”
Suspicion glinted like foxfire in the cold green eyes beneath her
puckered brows. “I do not understand,” she said slowly and in level
tones.
“I didn’t expect you to,” returned Kirkwood; “no more do I.... But,
anyway, it must be clear to you that I’ve done my best for this
gentleman here.” He paused with an interrogative lift of his eyebrows.
“‘This gentleman’ is my son, Frederick Hallam.... But you will
explain—”
“Pardon me, Mrs. Hallam; I shall explain nothing, at present. Permit me
to point out that your position here—like mine—is, to say the least,
anomalous.” The random stroke told, as he could tell by the instant
contraction of her eyes of a cat. “It would be best to defer
explanations till a more convenient time—don’t you think? Then, if you
like, we can chant confidences in an antiphonal chorus. Just now
your—er—son is not enjoying himself apparently, and ... the attention
of the police had best not be called to this house too often in one
night.”
His levity seemed to displease and perturb the woman; she turned from
him with an impatient movement of her shoulders.
“Freddie, dear, do you feel able to walk?”
“Eh? Oh, I dare say—I don’t know. Wonder would your friend—ah—Mr.
Kirkwood, lend me an arm?”
“Charmed,” Kirkwood declared suavely. “If you’ll take the candle, Mrs.
Hallam—”
He helped the boy to his feet and, while the latter hung upon him and
complained querulously, stood waiting for the woman to lead the way
with the light; something which, however, she seemed in no haste to do.
The pause at length puzzled Kirkwood, and he turned, to find Mrs.
Hallam holding the candlestick and regarding him steadily, with much
the same expression of furtive mistrust as that with which she had
favored him on her own door-stoop.
[Illustration: He helped the boy to his feet, and stood waiting.]
“One moment,” she interposed in confusion; “I won’t keep you
waiting...;” and, passing with an averted face, ran quickly up-stairs
to the second floor, taking the light with her. Its glow faded from the
walls above and Kirkwood surmised that she had entered the front
bedchamber. For some moments he could hear her moving about; once,
something scraped and bumped on the floor, as if a heavy bit of
furniture had been moved; again there was a resounding thud that defied
speculation; and this was presently followed by a dull clang of metal.
His fugitive speculations afforded him little enlightenment; and,
meantime, young Hallam, leaning partly against the wall and quite
heavily on Kirkwood’s arm, filled his ears with puerile oaths and
lamentations; so that, but for the excuse of his really severe
shaking-up, Kirkwood had been strongly tempted to take the youngster by
the shoulders and kick him heartily, for the health of his soul.
But eventually—it was not really long—there came the quick rush of Mrs.
Hallam’s feet along the upper hall, and the woman reappeared, one hand
holding her skirts clear of her pretty feet as she descended in a rush
that caused the candle’s flame to flicker perilously.
Half-way down, “Mr. Kirkwood!” she called tempestuously.
“Didn’t you find it?” he countered blandly.
She stopped jerkily at the bottom, and, after a moment of confusion.
“Find what, sir?” she asked.
“What you sought, Mrs. Hallam.”
Smiling, he bore unflinching the prolonged inspection of her eyes, at
once somber with doubt of him and flashing with indignation because of
his impudence.
“You knew I wouldn’t find it, then!... Didn’t you?”
“I may have suspected you wouldn’t.”
Now he was sure that she had been searching for the gladstone bag.
That, evidently, was the bone of contention. Calendar had sent his
daughter for it, Mrs. Hallam her son; Dorothy had been successful ...
But, on the other hand, Calendar and Mrs. Hallam were unquestionably
allies. Why, then—?
“Where is it, Mr. Kirkwood?”
“Madam, have you the right to know?”
Through another lengthening pause, while they faced each other, he
marked again the curious contraction of her under lip.
“I have the right,” she declared steadily. “Where is it?”
“How can I be sure?”
“Then you don’t know—!”
“Indeed,” he interrupted, “I would be glad to feel that I ought to tell
you what I know.”
“What you know!”
The exclamation, low-spoken, more an echo of her thoughts than intended
for Kirkwood, was accompanied by a little shake of the woman’s head,
mute evidence to the fact that she was bewildered by his finesse. And
this delighted the young man beyond measure, making him feel himself
master of a difficult situation. Mysteries had been woven before his
eyes so persistently, of late, that it was a real pleasure to be able
to do a little mystifying on his own account. By adopting this reticent
and non-committal attitude, he was forcing the hand of a woman old
enough to be his mother and most evidently a past-mistress in the art
of misleading. All of which seemed very fascinating to the amateur in
adventure.
The woman would have led again, but young Hallam cut in, none too
courteously.
“I say, Mamma, it’s no good standing here, palaverin’ like a lot of
flats. Besides, I’m awf’ly knocked up. Let’s get home and have it out
there.”
Instantly his mother softened. “My poor boy!... Of course we’ll go.”
Without further demur she swept past and down the stairway before
them—slowly, for their progress was of necessity slow, and the light
most needed. Once they were in the main hall, however, she extinguished
the candle, placed it on a side table, and passed out through the door.
It had been left open, as before; and Kirkwood was not at all surprised
to see a man waiting on the threshold,—the versatile Eccles, if he
erred not. He had little chance to identify him, as it happened, for at
a word from Mrs. Hallam the man bowed and, following her across the
sidewalk, opened the door of a four-wheeler which, with lamps alight
and liveried driver on the box, had been waiting at the carriage-block.
As they passed out, Kirkwood shut the door; and at the same moment the
little party was brought up standing by a gruff and authoritative
summons.
“Just a minute, please, you there!”
“Aha!” said Kirkwood to himself. “I thought so.” And he halted, in
unfeigned respect for the burly and impressive figure, garbed in blue
and brass, helmeted and truncheoned, bull’s-eye shining on breast like
the Law’s unblinking and sleepless eye, barring the way to the
carriage.
Mrs. Hallam showed less deference for the obstructionist. The assumed
hauteur and impatience of her pose was artfully reflected in her voice
as she rounded upon the bobby, with an indignant demand: “What is the
meaning of this, officer?”
“Precisely what I wants to know, ma’am,” returned the man, unyielding
beneath his respectful attitude. “I’m obliged to ask you to tell me
what you were doing in that ’ouse.... And what’s the matter with this
’ere gentleman?” he added, with a dubious stare at young Hallam’s
bandaged head and rumpled clothing.
“Perhaps you don’t understand,” admitted Mrs. Hallam sweetly. “Of
course—I see—it’s perfectly natural. The house has been shut up for
some time and—”
“Thank you, ma’am; that’s just it. There was something wrong going on
early in the evening, and I was told to keep an eye on the premises.
It’s duty, ma’am; I’ve got my report to make.”
“The house,” said Mrs. Hallam, with the long-suffering patience of one
elucidating a perfectly plain proposition to a being of a lower order
of intelligence, “is the property of my son, Arthur Frederick Burgoyne
Hallam, of Cornwall. This is—”
“Beg pardon, ma’am, but I was told Colonel George Burgoyne, of
Cornwall—”
“Colonel Burgoyne died some time ago. My son is his heir. This is my
son. He came to the house this evening to get some property he desired,
and—it seems—tripped on the stairs and fell unconscious. I became
worried about him and drove over, accompanied by my friend, Mr.
Kirkwood.”
The policeman looked his troubled state of mind, and wagged a doubtful
head over the case. There was his duty, and there was, opposed to it,
the fact that all three were garbed in the livery of the well-to-do.
At length, turning to the driver, he demanded, received, and noted in
his memorandum-book, the license number of the equipage.
“It’s a very unusual case, ma’am,” he apologized; “I hopes you won’t
’old it against me. I’m only trying to do my duty—”
“And safeguard our property. You are perfectly justified, officer.”
“Thank you, ma’am. And would you mind giving me your cards, please, all
of you?”
“Certainly not.” Without hesitation the woman took a little hand-bag
from the seat of the carriage and produced a card; her son likewise
found his case and handed the officer an oblong slip.
“I’ve no cards with me,” the American told the policeman; “my name,
however, is Philip Kirkwood, and I’m staying at the Pless.”
“Very good, sir; thank you.” The man penciled the information in his
little book. “Thank you, ma’am, and Mr. Hallam, sir. Sorry to have
detained you. Good morning.”
Kirkwood helped young Hallam into the carriage, gave Mrs. Hallam his
hand, and followed her. The man Eccles shut the door, mounting the box
beside the driver. Immediately they were in motion.
The American got a final glimpse of the bobby, standing in front of
Number 9, Frognall Street, and watching them with an air of profound
uncertainty. He had Kirkwood’s sympathy, therein; but he had little
time to feel with him, for Mrs. Hallam turned upon him very suddenly.
“Mr. Kirkwood, will you be good enough to tell me who and what you
are?”
The young man smiled his homely, candid smile. “I’ll be only too glad,
Mrs. Hallam, when I feel sure you’ll do as much for yourself.”
She gave him no answer; it, was as if she were choosing words. Kirkwood
braced himself to meet the storm; but none ensued. There was rather a
lull, which strung itself out indefinitely, to the monotonous music of
hoofs and rubber tires.
Young Hallam was resting his empty blond head against the cushions, and
had closed his eyes. He seemed to doze; but, as the carriage rolled
past the frequent street-lights, Kirkwood could see that the eyes of
Mrs. Hallam were steadily directed to his face.
His outward composure was tempered by some amusement, by more
admiration; the woman’s eyes were very handsome, even when hardest and
most cold. It was not easy to conceive of her as being the mother of a
son so immaturely mature. Why, she must have been at least thirty-eight
or -nine! One wondered; she did not look it....
The carriage stopped before a house with lighted windows. Eccles jumped
down from the box and scurried to open the front door. The radiance of
a hall-lamp was streaming out into the misty night when he returned to
release his employers.
They were returned to Craven Street! “One more lap round the track!”
mused Kirkwood. “Wonder will the next take me back to Bermondsey Old
Stairs.”
At Mrs. Hallam’s direction, Eccles ushered him into the smoking-room,
on the ground floor in the rear of the dwelling, there to wait while
she helped her son up-stairs and to bed. He sighed with pleasure at
first glimpse of its luxurious but informal comforts, and threw himself
carelessly into a heavily padded lounging-chair, dropping one knee over
the other and lighting the last of his expensive cigars, with a
sensation of undiluted gratitude; as one coming to rest in the shadow
of a great rock in a weary land.
Over his shoulder a home-like illumination was cast by an electric
reading-lamp shaded with red silk. At his feet brass fire-dogs winked
sleepily in the fluttering blaze of a well-tended stove. The walls were
hung with deep red, the doors and divans upholstered in the same
restful shade. In one corner an old clock ticked soberly. The
atmosphere would have proved a potent invitation to reverie, if not to
sleep—he was very sleepy—but for the confusion in the house.
In its chambers, through the halls, on the stairs, there were hurryings
and scurryings of feet and skirts, confused with murmuring voices.
Presently, in an adjoining room, Philip Kirkwood heard a maid-servant
wrestling hopefully with that most exasperating of modern time-saving
devices, the telephone as countenanced by our English cousins. Her
patience and determination won his approval, but availed nothing for
her purpose; in the outcome the telephone triumphed and the maid gave
up the unequal contest.
Later, a butler entered the room; a short and sturdy fellow, extremely
ill at ease. Drawing a small taboret to the side of Kirkwood’s chair,
he placed thereon a tray, deferentially imparting the information that
“Missis ’Allam ’ad thought ’ow as Mister Kirkwood might care for a bit
of supper.”
“Please thank Mrs. Hallam for me.” Kirkwood’s gratified eyes ranged the
laden tray. There were sandwiches, biscuit, cheese, and a pot of black
coffee, with sugar and cream. “It was very kindly thought of,” he
added.
“Very good, sir, thank you, sir.”
The man turned to go, shuffling soundlessly. Kirkwood was suddenly
impressed with his evasiveness; ever since he had entered the room, his
countenance had seemed turned from the guest.
“Eccles!” he called sharply, at a venture.
The butler halted, thunderstruck. “Ye-es, s-sir?”
[Illustration: Eccles]
“Turn round, Eccles; I want a look at you.”
Eccles faced him unwillingly, with a stolid front but shifty eyes.
Kirkwood glanced him up and down, grinning.
“Thank you, Eccles; I’ll remember you now. You’ll remember me, too,
won’t you? You’re a bad actor, aren’t you, Eccles?”
“Yes, sir; thank you, sir,” mumbled the man unhappily; and took instant
advantage of the implied permission to go.
Intensely diverted by the recollection of Eccles’ abortive attempt to
stop him at the door of Number 9, and wondering—now that he came to
think of it—why, precisely, young Hallam had deemed it necessary to
travel with a body-guard and adopt such furtive methods to enter into
as well as to obtain what was asserted to be his own property, Kirkwood
turned active attention to the lunch.
Thoughtfully he poured himself a cup of coffee, swallowing it hot and
black as it came from the silver pot; then munched the sandwiches.
It _was_ kindly thought of, this early morning repast; Mrs. Hallam
seemed more and more a remarkable woman with each phase of her
character that she chose to disclose. At odds with him, she yet took
time to think of his creature needs!
What could be her motive,—not in feeding him, but in involving her name
and fortune in an affair so strangely flavored?... This opened up a
desert waste of barren speculation. “What’s anybody’s motive, who
figures in this thundering dime-novel?” demanded the American, almost
contemptuously. And—for the hundredth time—gave it up; the day should
declare it, if so hap he lived to see that day: a distant one, he made
no doubt. The only clear fact in his befogged and bemused mentality was
that he was at once “broke” and in this business up to his ears. Well,
he’d see it through; he’d nothing better to do, and—there was the girl:
Dorothy, whose eyes and lips he had but to close his own eyes to see
again as vividly as though she stood before him; Dorothy, whose
unspoiled sweetness stood out in vivid relief against this moil and
toil of conspiracy, like a star of evening shining clear in a stormy
sky.
“Poetic simile: I’m going fast,” conceded Kirkwood; but he did not
smile. It was becoming quite too serious a matter for laughter. For her
sake, he was in the game “for keeps”; especially in view of the fact
that everything—his own heart’s inclination included—seemed to conspire
to keep him in it. Of course he hoped for nothing in return; a pauper
who turns squire-of-dames with matrimonial intent is open to the
designation, “penniless adventurer.” No; whatever service he might be
to the girl would be ample recompense to him for his labors. And
afterwards, he’d go his way in peace; she’d soon forget him—if she
hadn’t already. Women (he propounded gravely) are queer: there’s no
telling anything about them!
One of the most unreadable specimens of the sex on which he pronounced
this highly original dictum, entered the room just then; and he found
himself at once out of his chair and his dream, bowing.
“Mrs. Hallam.”
The woman nodded and smiled graciously. “Eccles has attended to your
needs, I hope? Please don’t stop smoking.” She sank into an arm-chair
on the other side of the hearth and, probably by accident, out of the
radius of illumination from the lamp; sitting sidewise, one knee above
the other, her white arms immaculate against the somber background of
shadowed crimson.
She was very handsome indeed, just then; though a keener light might
have proved less flattering.
“Now, Mr. Kirkwood?” she opened briskly, with a second intimate and
friendly nod; and paused, her pose receptive.
Kirkwood sat down again, smiling good-natured appreciation of her
unprejudiced attitude.
“Your son, Mrs. Hallam—?”
“Oh, Freddie’s doing well enough.... Freddie,” she explained, “has a
delicate constitution and has seen little of the world. Such melodrama
as to-night’s is apt to shock him severely. We must make allowances,
Mr. Kirkwood.”
Kirkwood grinned again, a trace unsympathetically; he was unable to
simulate any enthusiasm on the subject of poor Freddie, whom he had
sized up with passable acumen as a spoiled and coddled child completely
under the thumb of an extremely clever mother.
“Yes,” he responded vaguely; “he’ll be quite fit after a night’s sleep,
I dare say.”
The woman was watching him keenly, beneath her lowered lashes. “I
think,” she said deliberately, “that it is time we came to an
understanding.”
Kirkwood agreed—“Yes?” affably.
“I purpose being perfectly straightforward. To begin with, I don’t
place you, Mr. Kirkwood. You are an unknown quantity, a new factor.
Won’t you please tell me what you are and.... Are you a friend of Mr.
Calendar’s?”
“I think I may lay claim to that honor, though”—to Kirkwood’s way of
seeing things some little frankness on his own part would be essential
if they were to get on—“I hardly know him, Mrs. Hallam. I had the
pleasure of meeting him only this afternoon.”
She knitted her brows over this statement.
“That, I assure you, is the truth,” he laughed.
“But ... I really don’t understand.”
“Nor I, Mrs. Hallam. Calendar aside, I am Philip Kirkwood, American,
resident abroad for some years, a native of San Francisco, of a certain
age, unmarried, by profession a poor painter.”
“And—?”
“Beyond that? I presume I must tell you, though I confess I’m in
doubt....” He hesitated, weighing candor in the balance with
discretion.
“But who are you for? Are you in George Calendar’s pay?”
“Heaven forfend!”—piously. “My sole interest at the present moment is
to unravel a most entrancing mystery—”
“Entitled ‘Dorothy Calendar’! Of course. You’ve known her long?”
“Eight hours, I believe,” he admitted gravely; “less than that, in
fact.”
“Miss Calendar’s interests will not suffer through anything you may
tell me.”
“Whether they will or no, I see I must swing a looser tongue, or you’ll
be showing me the door.”
The woman shook her head, amused, “Not until,” she told him
significantly.
“Very well, then.” And he launched into an abridged narrative of the
night’s events, as he understood them, touching lightly on his own
circumstances, the real poverty which had brought him back to Craven
Street by way of Frognall. “And there you have it all, Mrs. Hallam.”
She sat in silent musing. Now and again he caught the glint of her eyes
and knew that he was being appraised with such trained acumen as only
long knowledge of men can give to women. He wondered if he were found
wanting.... Her dark head bended, elbow on knee, chin resting lightly
in the cradle of her slender, parted fingers, the woman thought
profoundly, her reverie ending with a brief, curt laugh, musical and
mirthless as the sound of breaking glass.
“It is so like Calendar!” she exclaimed: “so like him that one sees how
foolish it was to trust—no, not to trust, but to believe that he could
ever be thrown off the scent, once he got nose to ground. So, if we
suffer, my son and I, I shall have only myself to thank!”
Kirkwood waited in patient attention till she chose to continue. When
she did “Now for my side of the case!” cried Mrs. Hallam; and rising,
began to pace the room, her slender and rounded figure swaying
gracefully, the while she talked.
“George Calendar is a scoundrel,” she said: “a swindler, gambler,—what
I believe you Americans call a confidence-man. He is also my late
husband’s first cousin. Some years since he found it convenient to
leave England, likewise his wife and daughter. Mrs. Calendar, a
country-woman of yours, by the bye, died shortly afterwards. Dorothy,
by the merest accident, obtained a situation as private secretary in
the household of the late Colonel Burgoyne, of The Cliffs, Cornwall.
You follow me?”
“Yes, perfectly.”
“Colonel Burgoyne died, leaving his estates to my son, some time ago.
Shortly afterwards Dorothy Calendar disappeared. We know now that her
father took her away, but then the disappearance seemed inexplicable,
especially since with her vanished a great deal of valuable
information. She alone knew of the location of certain of the old
colonel’s personal effects.”
“He was an eccentric. One of his peculiarities involved the secreting
of valuables in odd places; he had no faith in banks. Among these
valuables were the Burgoyne family jewels—quite a treasure, believe me,
Mr. Kirkwood. We found no note of them among the colonel’s papers, and
without Dorothy were powerless to pursue a search for them. We
advertised and employed detectives, with no result. It seems that
father and daughter were at Monte Carlo at the time.”
“Beautifully circumstantial, my dear lady,” commented Kirkwood—to his
inner consciousness. Outwardly he maintained consistently a pose of
impassive gullibility.
“This afternoon, for the first time, we received news of the Calendars.
Calendar himself called upon me, to beg a loan. I explained our
difficulty and he promised that Dorothy should send us the information
by the morning’s post. When I insisted, he agreed to bring it himself,
after dinner, this evening.... I make it quite clear?” she interrupted,
a little anxious.
“Quite clear, I assure you,” he assented encouragingly.
“Strangely enough, he had not been gone ten minutes when my son came in
from a conference with our solicitors, informing me that at last a
memorandum had turned up, indicating that the heirlooms would be found
in a safe secreted behind a dresser in Colonel Burgoyne’s bedroom.”
“At Number 9, Frognall Street.”
“Yes.... I proposed going there at once, but it was late and we were
dining at the Pless with an acquaintance, a Mr. Mulready, whom I now
recall as a former intimate of George Calendar. To our surprise we saw
Calendar and his daughter at a table not far from ours. Mr. Mulready
betrayed some agitation at the sight of Calendar, and told me that
Scotland Yard had a man out with a warrant for Calendar’s arrest, on
old charges. For old sake’s sake, Mr. Mulready begged me to give
Calendar a word of warning. I did so—foolishly, it seems: Calendar was
at that moment planning to rob us, Mulready aiding and abetting him.”
The woman paused before Kirkwood, looking down upon him. “And so,” she
concluded, “we have been tricked and swindled. I can scarcely believe
it of Dorothy Calendar.”
“I, for one, don’t believe it.” Kirkwood spoke quietly, rising.
“Whatever the culpability of Calendar and Mulready, Dorothy was only
their hoodwinked tool.”
“But, Mr. Kirkwood, she must have known the jewels were not hers.”
“Yes,” he assented passively, but wholly unconvinced.
“And what,” she demanded with a gesture of exasperation, “what would
you advise?”
“Scotland Yard,” he told her bluntly.
“But it’s a family secret! It must not appear in the papers. Don’t you
understand—George Calendar is my husband’s cousin!”
“I can think of nothing else, unless you pursue them in person.”
“But—whither?”
“That remains to be discovered; I can tell you nothing more than I
have.... May I thank you for your hospitality, express my regrets that
I should unwittingly have been made the agent of this disaster, and
wish you good night—or, rather, good morning, Mrs. Hallam?”
For a moment she held him under a calculating glance which he withstood
with graceless fortitude. Then, realizing that he was determined not by
any means to be won to her cause, she gave him her hand, with a
commonplace wish that he might find his affairs in better order than
seemed probable; and rang for Eccles.
The butler showed him out.
He took away with him two strong impressions; the one visual, of a
strikingly handsome woman in a wonderful gown, standing under the red
glow of a reading-lamp, in an attitude of intense mental concentration,
her expression plainly indicative of a train of thought not guiltless
of vindictiveness; the other, more mental but as real, he presently
voiced to the huge bronze lions brooding over desolate Trafalgar
Square.
“Well,” appreciated Mr. Kirkwood with gusto, “_she’s_ got Ananias and
Sapphira talked to a standstill, all right!” He ruminated over this for
a moment. “Calendar can lie some, too; but hardly with her picturesque
touch.... Uncommon ingenious, _I_ call it. All the same, there were
only about a dozen bits of tiling that didn’t fit into her mosaic a
little bit.... I think they’re all tarred with the same stick—all but
the girl. And there’s something afoot a long sight more devilish and
crafty than that shilling-shocker of madam’s.... Dorothy Calendar’s got
about as much active part in it as I have. I’m only from California,
but they’ve got to show me, before I’ll believe a word against her.
Those infernal scoundrels!...Somebody’s got to be on the girl’s side
and I seem to have drawn the lucky straw.... Good Heavens! is it
possible for a grown man to fall heels over head in love in two short
hours? I don’t believe it. It’s just interest—nothing more.... And I’ll
have to have a change of clothes before I can do anything further.”
He bowed gratefully to the lions, in view of their tolerant interest in
his soliloquy, and set off very suddenly round the square and up St.
Martin’s Lane, striking across town as directly as might be for St.
Pancras Station. It would undoubtedly be a long walk, but cabs were
prohibited by his straitened means, and the busses were all abed and
wouldn’t be astir for hours.
He strode along rapidly, finding his way more through intuition than by
observation or familiarity with London’s geography—indeed, was scarce
aware of his surroundings; for his brain was big with fine imagery,
rapt in a glowing dream of knighterrantry and chivalric deeds.
Thus is it ever and alway with those who in the purity of young hearts
rush in where angels fear to tread; if these, Kirkwood and his ilk, be
fools, thank God for them, for with such foolishness is life savored
and made sweet and sound! To Kirkwood the warp of the world and the
woof of it was Romance, and it wrapped him round, a magic mantle to set
him apart from all things mean and sordid and render him impregnable
and invisible to the haunting Shade of Care.
Which, by the same token, presently lost track of him entirely, and
wandered off to find and bedevil some other poor devil. And Kirkwood,
his eyes like his spirit elevated, saw that the clouds of night were
breaking, the skies clearing, that the East pulsed ever more strongly
with the dim golden promise of the day to come. And this he chose to
take for an omen—prematurely, it may be.
IX
AGAIN “BELOW BRIDGE”; AND BEYOND
Kirkwood wasted little time, who had not much to waste, were he to do
that upon whose doing he had set his heart. It irked him sore to have
to lose the invaluable moments demanded by certain imperative
arrangements, but his haste was such that all was consummated within an
hour.
Within the period of a single hour, then, he had ransomed his luggage
at St. Pancras, caused it to be loaded upon a four-wheeler and
transferred to a neighboring hotel of evil flavor but moderate tariff,
where he engaged a room for a week, ordered an immediate breakfast, and
retired with his belongings to his room; he had shaved and changed his
clothes, selecting a serviceable suit of heavy tweeds, stout shoes, a
fore-and-aft cap and a negligée shirt of a deep shade calculated at
least to seem clean for a long time; finally, he had devoured his bacon
and eggs, gulped down his coffee and burned his mouth, and, armed with
a stout stick, set off hotfoot in the still dim glimmering of early
day.
By this time his cash capital had dwindled to the sum of two pounds,
ten shillings, eight-pence, and would have been much less had he paid
for his lodging in advance. But he considered his trunks ample security
for the bill, and dared not wait the hour when shopkeepers begin to
take down shutters and it becomes possible to realize upon one’s
jewelry. Besides which, he had never before been called upon to
consider the advisability of raising money by pledging personal
property, and was in considerable doubt as to the right course of
procedure in such emergency.
At King’s Cross Station on the Underground an acute disappointment
awaited him; there, likewise, he learned something about London. A
sympathetic bobby informed him that no trains would be running until
after five-thirty, and that, furthermore, no busses would begin to ply
until half after seven.
“It’s tramp it or cab it, then,” mused the young man mournfully, his
longing gaze seeking a nearby cab-rank—just then occupied by a solitary
hansom, driver somnolent on the box. “Officer,” he again addressed the
policeman, mindful of the English axiom: “When in doubt, ask a
bobby.”—“Officer, when’s high-tide this morning?”
The bobby produced a well-worn pocket-almanac, moistened a massive
thumb, and rippled the pages.
“London Bridge, ’igh tide twenty minutes arfter six, sir,” he announced
with a glow of satisfaction wholly pardonable in one who combines the
functions of perambulating almanac, guide-book, encyclopedia, and
conserver of the peace.
Kirkwood said something beneath his breath—a word in itself a
comfortable mouthful and wholesome and emphatic. He glanced again at
the cab and groaned: “O Lord, I just dassent!” With which, thanking the
bureau of information, he set off at a quick step down Grey’s Inn Road.
The day had closed down in brilliance upon the city—and the voice of
the milkman was to be heard in the land—when he trudged, still briskly
if a trifle wearily, into Holborn, and held on eastward across the
Viaduct and down Newgate Street; the while addling his weary wits with
heart-sickening computations of minutes, all going hopelessly to prove
that he would be late, far too late even presupposing the unlikely. The
unlikely, be it known, was that the _Alethea_ would not attempt to sail
before the turn of the tide.
For this was his mission, to find the _Alethea_ before she sailed.
Incredible as it may appear, at five o’clock, or maybe earlier, on the
morning of the twenty-second of April, 1906, A.D., Philip Kirkwood,
normally a commonplace but likable young American in full possession of
his senses, might have been seen (and by some was seen) plodding
manfully through Cheapside, London, England, engaged upon a quest as
mad, forlorn, and gallant as any whose chronicle ever inspired the pen
of a Malory or a Froissart. In brief he proposed to lend his arm and
courage to be the shield and buckler of one who might or might not be a
damsel in distress; according as to whether Mrs. Hallam had spoken
soothly of Dorothy Calendar, or Kirkwood’s own admirable faith in the
girl were justified of itself.
Proceeding upon the working hypothesis that Mrs. Hallam was a polished
liar in most respects, but had told the truth, so far as concerned her
statement to the effect that the gladstone bag contained valuable real
property (whose ownership remained a moot question, though Kirkwood was
definitely committed to the belief that it was none of Mrs. Hallam’s or
her son’s): he reasoned that the two adventurers, with Dorothy and
their booty, would attempt to leave London by a water route, in the
ship, _Alethea_, whose name had fallen from their lips at Bermondsey
Old Stairs.
Kirkwood’s initial task, then, would be to find the needle in the
haystack—the metaphor is poor: more properly, to sort out from the
hundreds of vessels, of all descriptions, at anchor in midstream,
moored to the wharves of ’long-shore warehouses, or in the gigantic
docks that line the Thames, that one called _Alethea_; of which he was
so deeply mired in ignorance that he could not say whether she were
tramp-steamer, coastwise passenger boat, one of the liners that ply
between Tilbury and all the world, Channel ferry-boat, private yacht
(steam or sail), schooner, four-master, square-rigger, barque or
brigantine.
A task to stagger the optimism of any but one equipped with the sublime
impudence of Youth! Even Kirkwood was disturbed by some little awe when
he contemplated the vast proportions of his undertaking. None the less
doggedly he plugged ahead, and tried to keep his mind from vain
surmises as to what would be his portion when eventually he should find
himself a passenger, uninvited and unwelcome, upon the _Alethea_....
London had turned over once or twice, and was pulling the bedclothes
over its head and grumbling about getting up, but the city was still
sound asleep when at length he paused for a minute’s rest in front of
the Mansion House, and realized with a pang of despair that he was
completely tuckered out. There was a dull, vague throbbing in his head;
weights pressed upon his eyeballs until they ached; his mouth was hot
and tasted of yesterday’s tobacco; his feet were numb and heavy; his
joints were stiff; he yawned frequently.