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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 9779 ***
+THE BLACK BAG
+
+
+By LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE
+
+
+[Illustration: cover]
+
+
+WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THOMAS FOGARTY
+
+
+COPYRIGHT 1908
+
+
+
+
+TO MY MOTHER
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+ CHAPTER I. DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN
+ CHAPTER II. “AND SOME THERE BE WHO HAVE ADVENTURES THRUST UPON THEM”
+ CHAPTER III. CALENDAR’S DAUGHTER
+ CHAPTER IV. 9 FROGNALL STREET, W. C.
+ CHAPTER V. THE MYSTERY OF A FOUR-WHEELER
+ CHAPTER VI. “BELOW BRIDGE”
+ CHAPTER VII. DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN—RESUMED
+ CHAPTER VIII. MADAME L’INTRIGANTE
+ CHAPTER IX. AGAIN "BELOW BRIDGE"; AND BEYOND
+ CHAPTER X. DESPERATE MEASURES
+ CHAPTER XI. OFF THE NORE
+ CHAPTER XII. PICARESQUE PASSAGES
+ CHAPTER XIII. A PRIMER OF PROGRESSIVE CRIME
+ CHAPTER XIV. STRATAGEMS AND SPOILS
+ CHAPTER XV. REFUGEES
+ CHAPTER XVI. TRAVELS WITH A CHAPERON
+ CHAPTER XVII. ROGUES AND VAGABONDS
+ CHAPTER XVIII. ADVENTURERS’ LUCK
+ CHAPTER XIX. i—THE UXBRIDGE ROAD
+ ii—THE CROWN AND MITRE
+ iii—THE JOURNEY’S END
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+ Permit me to introduce an old friend.
+ “I’m awaiting your explanation,” she said coldly.
+ The boat gathered impetus.
+ He helped the boy to his feet, and stood waiting.
+ Eccles
+ “Hi, matey!” he blustered. “’Ow goes it now?”
+ Straddling Mulready’s body, he confronted Calendar and Stryker.
+ From the window, Mrs. Hallam turned with a curling lip.
+ A costume consisting mainly of a flowered dressing-gown and slippers.
+ “Good evening, all!” he saluted them blandly.
+
+
+
+
+THE BLACK BAG
+
+
+
+
+I
+DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN
+
+
+Upon a certain dreary April afternoon in the year of grace, 1906, the
+apprehensions of Philip Kirkwood, Esquire, _Artist-peintre_, were
+enlivened by the discovery that he was occupying that singularly
+distressing social position, which may be summed up succinctly in a
+phrase through long usage grown proverbial: “Alone in London.” These
+three words have come to connote in our understanding so much of human
+misery, that to Mr. Kirkwood they seemed to epitomize absolutely, if
+not happily, the various circumstances attendant upon the predicament
+wherein he found himself. Inevitably an extremist, because of his
+youth, (he had just turned twenty-five), he took no count of mitigating
+matters, and would hotly have resented the suggestion that his case was
+anything but altogether deplorable and forlorn.
+
+That he was not actually at the end of his resources went for nothing;
+he held the distinction a quibble, mockingly immaterial,—like the store
+of guineas in his pocket, too insignificant for mention when contrasted
+with his needs. And his base of supplies, the American city of his
+nativity, whence—and not without a glow of pride in his secret heart—he
+was wont to register at foreign hostelries, had been arbitrarily cut
+off from him by one of those accidents sardonically classified by
+insurance and express corporations as Acts of God.
+
+Now to one who has lived all his days serenely in accord with the
+dictates of his own sweet will, taking no thought for the morrow, such
+a situation naturally seems both appalling and intolerable, at the
+first blush. It must be confessed that, to begin with, Kirkwood drew a
+long and disconsolate face over his fix. And in that black hour,
+primitive of its kind in his brief span, he became conscious of a
+sinister apparition taking shape at his elbow—a shade of darkness
+which, clouting him on the back with a skeleton hand, croaked hollow
+salutations in his ear.
+
+“Come, Mr. Kirkwood, come!” its mirthless accents rallied him. “Have
+you no welcome for me?—you, who have been permitted to live the quarter
+of a century without making my acquaintance? Surely, now, it’s high
+time we were learning something of one another, you and I!” “But I
+don’t understand,” returned Kirkwood blankly. “I don’t know you—”
+
+“True! But you shall: I am the Shade of Care—”
+
+“Dull Care!” murmured Kirkwood, bewildered and dismayed; for the
+visitation had come upon him with little presage and no invitation
+whatever.
+
+“Dull Care,” the Shade assured him. “Dull Care am I—and Care that’s
+anything but dull, into the bargain: Care that’s like a keen pain in
+your body, Care that lives a horror in your mind, Care that darkens
+your days and flavors with bitter poison all your nights, Care that—”
+
+But Kirkwood would not listen further. Courageously submissive to his
+destiny, knowing in his heart that the Shade had come to stay, he yet
+found spirit to shake himself with a dogged air, to lift his chin, set
+the strong muscles of his jaw, and smile that homely wholesome smile
+which was his peculiarly.
+
+“Very well,” he accepted the irremediable with grim humor; “what must
+be, must. I don’t pretend to be glad to see you, but—you’re free to
+stay as long as you find the climate agreeable. I warn you I shan’t
+whine. Lots of men, hundreds and hundreds of ’em, have slept tight o’
+nights with you for bedfellow; if they could grin and bear you, I
+believe I can.”
+
+Now Care mocked him with a sardonic laugh, and sought to tighten upon
+his shoulders its bony grasp; but Kirkwood resolutely shrugged it off
+and went in search of man’s most faithful dumb friend, to wit, his
+pipe; the which, when found and filled, he lighted with a spill twisted
+from the envelope of a cable message which had been vicariously
+responsible for his introduction to the Shade of Care.
+
+“It’s about time,” he announced, watching the paper blacken and burn in
+the grate fire, “that I was doing something to prove my title to a
+living.” And this was all his valedictory to a vanished competence.
+“Anyway,” he added hastily, as if fearful lest Care, overhearing, might
+have read into his tone a trace of vain repining, “anyway, I’m a sight
+better off than those poor devils over there! I really have a great
+deal to be thankful for, now that my attention’s drawn to it.”
+
+For the ensuing few minutes he thought it all over, soberly but with a
+stout heart; standing at a window of his bedroom in the Hotel Pless,
+hands deep in trouser pockets, pipe fuming voluminously, his gaze
+wandering out over a blurred infinitude of wet shining roofs and sooty
+chimney-pots: all of London that a lowering drizzle would let him see,
+and withal by no means a cheering prospect, nor yet one calculated to
+offset the disheartening influence of the indomitable Shade of Care.
+But the truth is that Kirkwood’s brain comprehended little that his
+eyes perceived; his thoughts were with his heart, and that was half a
+world away and sick with pity for another and a fairer city, stricken
+in the flower of her loveliness, writhing in Promethean agony upon her
+storied hills.
+
+There came a rapping at the door.
+
+Kirkwood removed the pipe from between his teeth long enough to say
+“Come in!” pleasantly.
+
+The knob was turned, the door opened. Kirkwood, swinging on one heel,
+beheld hesitant upon the threshold a diminutive figure in the livery of
+the Pless pages.
+
+“Mister Kirkwood?”
+
+Kirkwood nodded.
+
+“Gentleman to see you, sir.”
+
+Kirkwood nodded again, smiling. “Show him up, please,” he said. But
+before the words were fairly out of his mouth a footfall sounded in the
+corridor, a hand was placed upon the shoulder of the page, gently but
+with decision swinging him out of the way, and a man stepped into the
+room.
+
+“Mr. Brentwick!” Kirkwood almost shouted, jumping forward to seize his
+visitor’s hand.
+
+“My dear boy!” replied the latter. “I’m delighted to see you. ’Got your
+note not an hour ago, and came at once—you see!”
+
+“It was mighty good of you. Sit down, please. Here are cigars.... Why,
+a moment ago I was the most miserable and lonely mortal on the
+footstool!”
+
+“I can fancy.” The elder man looked up, smiling at Kirkwood from the
+depths of his arm-chair, as the latter stood above him, resting an
+elbow on the mantel. “The management knows me,” he offered explanation
+of his unceremonious appearance; “so I took the liberty of following on
+the heels of the bellhop, dear boy. And how are you? Why are you in
+London, enjoying our abominable spring weather? And why the anxious
+undertone I detected in your note?”
+
+He continued to stare curiously into Kirkwood’s face. At a glance, this
+Mr. Brentwick was a man of tallish figure and rather slender; with a
+countenance thin and flushed a sensitive pink, out of which his eyes
+shone, keen, alert, humorous, and a trace wistful behind his glasses.
+His years were indeterminate; with the aspect of fifty, the spirit and
+the verve of thirty assorted oddly. But his hands were old, delicate,
+fine and fragile; and the lips beneath the drooping white mustache at
+times trembled, almost imperceptibly, with the generous sentiments that
+come with mellow age. He held his back straight and his head with an
+air—an air that was not a swagger but the sign-token of seasoned
+experience in the world. The most carping could have found no flaw in
+the quiet taste of his attire. To sum up, Kirkwood’s very good
+friend—and his only one then in London—Mr. Brentwick looked and was an
+English gentleman.
+
+“Why?” he persisted, as the younger man hesitated. “I am here to find
+out. To-night I leave for the Continent. In the meantime ...”
+
+“And at midnight I sail for the States,” added Kirkwood. “That is
+mainly why I wished to see you—to say good-by, for the time.”
+
+“You’re going home—” A shadow clouded Brentwick’s clear eyes.
+
+“To fight it out, shoulder to shoulder with my brethren in adversity.”
+
+The cloud lifted. “That is the spirit!” declared the elder man. “For
+the moment I did you the injustice to believe that you were running
+away. But now I understand. Forgive me.... Pardon, too, the stupidity
+which I must lay at the door of my advancing years; to me the thought
+of you as a Parisian fixture has become such a commonplace, Philip,
+that the news of the disaster hardly stirred me. Now I remember that
+you are a Californian!”
+
+“I was born in San Francisco,” affirmed Kirkwood a bit sadly. “My
+father and mother were buried there ...”
+
+“And your fortune—?”
+
+“I inherited my father’s interest in the firm of Kirkwood & Vanderlip;
+when I came over to study painting, I left everything in Vanderlip’s
+hands. The business afforded me a handsome living.”
+
+“You have heard from Mr. Vanderlip?”
+
+“Fifteen minutes ago.” Kirkwood took a cable-form, still damp, from his
+pocket, and handed it to his guest. Unfolding it, the latter read:
+
+“_Kirkwood, Pless, London. Stay where you are no good coming back
+everything gone no insurance letter follows vanderlip_.”
+
+“When I got the news in Paris,” Kirkwood volunteered, “I tried the
+banks; they refused to honor my drafts. I had a little money in
+hand,—enough to see me home,—so closed the studio and came across. I’m
+booked on the _Minneapolis_, sailing from Tilbury at daybreak; the
+boat-train leaves at eleven-thirty. I had hoped you might be able to
+dine with me and see me off.”
+
+In silence Brentwick returned the cable message. Then, with a
+thoughtful look, “You are sure this is wise?” he queried.
+
+“It’s the only thing I can see.”
+
+“But your partner says—”
+
+“Naturally he thinks that by this time I should have learned to paint
+well enough to support myself for a few months, until he can get things
+running again. Perhaps I might.” Brentwick supported the presumption
+with a decided gesture. “But have I a right to leave Vanderlip to fight
+it out alone? For Vanderlip has a wife and kiddies to support; I—”
+
+“Your genius!”
+
+“My ability, such as it is—and that only. It can wait.... No; this
+means simply that I must come down from the clouds, plant my feet on
+solid earth, and get to work.”
+
+“The sentiment is sound,” admitted Brentwick, “the practice of it,
+folly. Have you stopped to think what part a rising young
+portrait-painter can contribute toward the rebuilding of a devastated
+city?”
+
+“The painting can wait,” reiterated Kirkwood. “I can work like other
+men.”
+
+“You can do yourself and your genius grave injustice. And I fear me you
+will, dear boy. It’s in keeping with your heritage of American
+obstinacy. Now if it were a question of money—”
+
+“Mr. Brentwick!” Kirkwood protested vehemently. “I’ve ample for my
+present needs,” he added.
+
+“Of course,” conceded Brentwick with a sigh. “I didn’t really hope you
+would avail yourself of our friendship. Now there’s my home in Aspen
+Villas.... You have seen it?”
+
+“In your absence this afternoon your estimable butler, with commendable
+discretion, kept me without the doors,” laughed the young man.
+
+“It’s a comfortable home. You would not consent to share it with me
+until—?”
+
+“You are more than good; but honestly, I must sail to-night. I wanted
+only this chance to see you before I left. You’ll dine with me, won’t
+you?”
+
+“If you would stay in London, Philip, we would dine together not once
+but many times; as it is, I myself am booked for Munich, to be gone a
+week, on business. I have many affairs needing attention between now
+and the nine-ten train from Victoria. If you will be my guest at Aspen
+Villas—”
+
+“Please!” begged Kirkwood, with a little laugh of pleasure because of
+the other’s insistence. “I only wish I could. Another day—”
+
+“Oh, you will make your million in a year, and return scandalously
+independent. It’s in your American blood.” Frail white fingers tapped
+an arm of the chair as their owner stared gravely into the fire. “I
+confess I envy you,” he observed.
+
+“The opportunity to make a million in a year?” chuckled Kirkwood.
+
+“No. I envy you your Romance.”
+
+“The Romance of a Poor Young Man went out of fashion years ago.... No,
+my dear friend; my Romance died a natural death half an hour since.”
+
+“There spoke Youth—blind, enviable Youth!... On the contrary, you are
+but turning the leaves of the first chapter of your Romance, Philip.”
+
+“Romance is dead,” contended the young man stubbornly.
+
+“Long live the King!” Brentwick laughed quietly, still attentive to the
+fire. “Myself when young,” he said softly, “did seek Romance, but never
+knew it till its day was done. I’m quite sure that is a poor paraphrase
+of something I have read. In age, one’s sight is sharpened—to see
+Romance in another’s life, at least. I say I envy you. You have Youth,
+unconquerable Youth, and the world before you.... I must go.”
+
+He rose stiffly, as though suddenly made conscious of his age. The old
+eyes peered more than a trifle wistfully, now, into Kirkwood’s. “You
+will not fail to call on me by cable, dear boy, if you need—anything? I
+ask it as a favor.... I’m glad you wished to see me before going out of
+my life. One learns to value the friendship of Youth, Philip. Good-by,
+and good luck attend you.”
+
+Alone once more, Kirkwood returned to his window. The disappointment he
+felt at being robbed of his anticipated pleasure in Brentwick’s company
+at dinner, colored his mood unpleasantly. His musings merged into
+vacuity, into a dull gray mist of hopelessness comparable only to the
+dismal skies then lowering over London-town.
+
+Brentwick was good, but Brentwick was mistaken. There was really
+nothing for Kirkwood to do but to go ahead. But one steamer-trunk
+remained to be packed; the boat-train would leave before midnight, the
+steamer with the morning tide; by the morrow’s noon he would be upon
+the high seas, within ten days in New York and among friends; and then
+...
+
+The problem of that afterwards perplexed Kirkwood more than he cared to
+own. Brentwick had opened his eyes to the fact that he would be
+practically useless in San Francisco; he could not harbor the thought
+of going back, only to become a charge upon Vanderlip. No; he was
+resolved that thenceforward he must rely upon himself, carve out his
+own destiny. But—would the art that he had cultivated with such
+assiduity, yield him a livelihood if sincerely practised with that end
+in view? Would the mental and physical equipment of a painter,
+heretofore dilettante, enable him to become self-supporting?
+
+Knotting his brows in concentration of effort to divine the future, he
+doubted himself, darkly questioning alike his abilities and his temper
+under trial; neither ere now had ever been put to the test. His eyes
+became somberly wistful, his heart sore with regret of Yesterday—his
+Yesterday of care-free youth and courage, gilded with the ineffable,
+evanescent glamour of Romance—of such Romance, thrice refined of dross,
+as only he knows who has wooed his Art with passion passing the love of
+woman.
+
+Far away, above the acres of huddled roofs and chimney-pots, the
+storm-mists thinned, lifting transiently; through them, gray,
+fairy-like, the towers of Westminster and the Houses of Parliament
+bulked monstrous and unreal, fading when again the fugitive dun vapors
+closed down upon the city.
+
+Nearer at hand the Shade of Care nudged Kirkwood’s elbow, whispering
+subtly. Romance was indeed dead; the world was cold and cruel.
+
+The gloom deepened.
+
+In the cant of modern metaphysics, the moment was psychological.
+
+There came a rapping at the door.
+
+Kirkwood removed the pipe from between his teeth long enough to say
+“Come in!” pleasantly.
+
+The knob was turned, the door opened. Kirkwood, turning on one heel,
+beheld hesitant upon the threshold a diminutive figure in the livery of
+the Pless pages.
+
+“Mr. Kirkwood?”
+
+Kirkwood nodded.
+
+“Gentleman to see you, sir.”
+
+Kirkwood nodded again, smiling if somewhat perplexed. Encouraged, the
+child advanced, proffering a silver card-tray at the end of an
+unnaturally rigid forearm. Kirkwood took the card dubiously between
+thumb and forefinger and inspected it without prejudice.
+
+“‘George B. Calendar,’” he read. “‘George B. Calendar!’ But I know no
+such person. Sure there’s no mistake, young man?”
+
+The close-cropped, bullet-shaped, British head was agitated in vigorous
+negation, and “Card for Mister Kirkwood!” was mumbled in dispassionate
+accents appropriate to a recitation by rote.
+
+“Very well. But before you show him up, ask this Mr. Calendar if he is
+quite sure he wants to see Philip Kirkwood.”
+
+“Yessir.”
+
+The child marched out, punctiliously closing the door. Kirkwood tamped
+down the tobacco in his pipe and puffed energetically, dismissing the
+interruption to his reverie as a matter of no consequence—an obvious
+mistake to be rectified by two words with this Mr. Calendar whom he did
+not know. At the knock he had almost hoped it might be Brentwick,
+returning with a changed mind about the bid to dinner.
+
+He regretted Brentwick sincerely. Theirs was a curious sort of
+friendship—extraordinarily close in view of the meagerness of either’s
+information about the other, to say nothing of the disparity between
+their ages. Concerning the elder man Kirkwood knew little more than
+that they had met on shipboard, “coming over”; that Brentwick had spent
+some years in America; that he was an Englishman by birth, a
+cosmopolitan by habit, by profession a gentleman (employing that term
+in its most uncompromisingly British significance), and by inclination
+a collector of “articles of virtue and bigotry,” in pursuit of which he
+made frequent excursions to the Continent from his residence in a
+quaint quiet street of Old Brompton. It had been during his not
+infrequent, but ordinarily abbreviated, sojourns in Paris that their
+steamer acquaintance had ripened into an affection almost filial on the
+one hand, almost paternal on the other....
+
+There came a rapping at the door.
+
+Kirkwood removed the pipe from between his teeth long enough to say
+“Come in!” pleasantly.
+
+The knob was turned, the door opened. Kirkwood, swinging on one heel,
+beheld hesitant upon the threshold a rather rotund figure of medium
+height, clad in an expressionless gray lounge suit, with a brown
+“bowler” hat held tentatively in one hand, an umbrella weeping in the
+other. A voice, which was unctuous and insinuative, emanated from the
+figure.
+
+“Mr. Kirkwood?”
+
+Kirkwood nodded, with some effort recalling the name, so detached had
+been his thoughts since the disappearance of the page.
+
+“Yes, Mr. Calendar—?”
+
+“Are you—ah—busy, Mr. Kirkwood?”
+
+“Are you, Mr. Calendar?” Kirkwood’s smile robbed the retort of any
+flavor of incivility.
+
+Encouraged, the man entered, premising that he would detain his host
+but a moment, and readily surrendering hat and umbrella. Kirkwood,
+putting the latter aside, invited his caller to the easy chair which
+Brentwick had occupied by the fireplace.
+
+“It takes the edge off the dampness,” Kirkwood explained in deference
+to the other’s look of pleased surprise at the cheerful bed of coals.
+“I’m afraid I could never get acclimated to life in a cold, damp
+room—or a damp cold room—such as you Britishers prefer.”
+
+“It is grateful,” Mr. Calendar agreed, spreading plump and well
+cared-for hands to the warmth. “But you are mistaken; I am as much an
+American as yourself.”
+
+“Yes?” Kirkwood looked the man over with more interest, less
+matter-of-course courtesy.
+
+He proved not unprepossessing, this unclassifiable Mr. Calendar; he was
+dressed with some care, his complexion was good, and the fullness of
+his girth, emphasized as it was by a notable lack of inches, bespoke a
+nature genial, easy-going and sybaritic. His dark eyes, heavy-lidded,
+were active—curiously, at times, with a subdued glitter—in a face
+large, round, pink, of which the other most remarkable features were a
+mustache, close-trimmed and showing streaks of gray, a chubby nose, and
+duplicate chins. Mr. Calendar was furthermore possessed of a polished
+bald spot, girdled with a tonsure of silvered hair—circumstances which
+lent some factitious distinction to a personality otherwise
+commonplace.
+
+His manner might be best described as uneasy with assurance; as though
+he frequently found it necessary to make up for his unimpressive
+stature by assuming an unnatural habit of authority. And there you have
+him; beyond these points, Kirkwood was conscious of no impressions; the
+man was apparently neutral-tinted of mind as well as of body.
+
+“So you knew I was an American, Mr. Calendar?” suggested Kirkwood.
+
+“’Saw your name on the register; we both hail from the same neck of the
+woods, you know.”
+
+“I didn’t know it, and—”
+
+“Yes; I’m from Frisco, too.”
+
+“And I’m sorry.”
+
+Mr. Calendar passed five fat fingers nervously over his mustache,
+glanced alertly up at Kirkwood, as if momentarily inclined to question
+his tone, then again stared glumly into the fire; for Kirkwood had
+maintained an attitude purposefully colorless. Not to put too fine a
+point upon it, he believed that his caller was lying; the man’s
+appearance, his mannerisms, his voice and enunciation, while they might
+have been American, seemed all un-Californian. To one born and bred in
+that state, as Kirkwood had been, her sons are unmistakably
+hall-marked.
+
+Now no man lies without motive. This one chose to reaffirm, with a show
+of deep feeling: “Yes; I’m from Frisco, too. We’re companions in
+misfortune.”
+
+“I hope not altogether,” said Kirkwood politely.
+
+Mr. Calendar drew his own inferences from the response and mustered up
+a show of cheerfulness. “Then you’re not completely wiped out?”
+
+“To the contrary, I was hoping you were less unhappy.”
+
+“Oh! Then you are—?”
+
+Kirkwood lifted the cable message from the mantel. “I have just heard
+from my partner at home,” he said with a faint smile; and quoted:
+“‘Everything gone; no insurance.’”
+
+Mr. Calendar pursed his plump lips, whistling inaudibly. “Too bad, too
+bad!” he murmured sympathetically. “We’re all hard hit, more or less.”
+He lapsed into dejected apathy, from which Kirkwood, growing at length
+impatient, found it necessary to rouse him.
+
+“You wished to see me about something else, I’m sure?”
+
+Mr. Calendar started from his reverie. “Eh? ... I was dreaming. I beg
+pardon. It seems hard to realize, Mr. Kirkwood, that this awful
+catastrophe has overtaken our beloved metropolis—”
+
+The canting phrases wearied Kirkwood; abruptly he cut in. “Would a
+sovereign help you out, Mr. Calendar? I don’t mind telling you that’s
+about the limit of my present resources.”
+
+“Pardon _me_.” Mr. Calendar’s moon-like countenance darkened; he
+assumed a transparent dignity. “You misconstrue my motive, sir.”
+
+“Then I’m sorry.”
+
+“I am not here to borrow. On the other hand, quite by accident I
+discovered your name upon the register, down-stairs; a good old Frisco
+name, if you will permit me to say so. I thought to myself that here
+was a chance to help a fellow-countryman.” Calendar paused,
+interrogative; Kirkwood remained interested but silent. “If a passage
+across would help you, I—I think it might be arranged,” stammered
+Calendar, ill at ease.
+
+“It might,” admitted Kirkwood, speculative.
+
+“I could fix it so that you could go over—first-class, of course—and
+pay your way, so to speak, by, rendering us, me and my partner, a
+trifling service.”
+
+“Ah?”
+
+“In fact,” continued Calendar, warming up to his theme, “there might be
+something more in it for you than the passage, if—if you’re the right
+man, the man I’m looking for.”
+
+“That, of course, is the question.”
+
+“Eh?” Calendar pulled up suddenly in a full-winged flight of
+enthusiasm.
+
+Kirkwood eyed him steadily. “I said that it is a question, Mr.
+Calendar, whether or not I am the man you’re looking for. Between you
+and me and the fire-dogs, I don’t believe I am. Now if you wish to name
+your _quid pro quo_, this trifling service I’m to render in recognition
+of your benevolence, you may.”
+
+“Ye-es,” slowly. But the speaker delayed his reply until he had
+surveyed his host from head to foot, with a glance both critical and
+appreciative.
+
+He saw a man in height rather less than the stock size six-feet so much
+in demand by the manufacturers of modern heroes of fiction; a man a bit
+round-shouldered, too, but otherwise sturdily built, self-contained,
+well-groomed.
+
+Kirkwood wears a boy’s honest face; no one has ever called him
+handsome. A few prejudiced persons have decided that he has an
+interesting countenance; the propounders of this verdict have been, for
+the most part, feminine. Kirkwood himself has been heard to declare
+that his features do not fit; in its essence the statement is true, but
+there is a very real, if undefinable, engaging quality in their very
+irregularity. His eyes are brown, pleasant, set wide apart,
+straightforward of expression.
+
+Now it appeared that, whatever his motive, Mr. Calendar had acted upon
+impulse in sending his card up to Kirkwood. Possibly he had anticipated
+a very different sort of reception from a very different sort of man.
+Even in the light of subsequent events it remains difficult to fathom
+the mystery of his choice. Perhaps Fate directed it; stranger things
+have happened at the dictates of a man’s Destiny.
+
+At all events, this Calendar proved not lacking in penetration; men of
+his stamp are commonly endowed with that quality to an eminent degree.
+Not slow to reckon the caliber of the man before him, the leaven of
+intuition began to work in his adipose intelligence. He owned himself
+baffled.
+
+“Thanks,” he concluded pensively; “I reckon you’re right. You won’t do,
+after all. I’ve wasted your time. Mine, too.”
+
+“Don’t mention it.”
+
+Calendar got heavily out of his chair, reaching for his hat and
+umbrella. “Permit me to apologize for an unwarrantable intrusion, Mr.
+Kirkwood.” He faltered; a worried and calculating look shadowed his
+small eyes. “I _was_ looking for some one to serve me in a certain
+capacity—”
+
+“Certain or questionable?” propounded Kirkwood blandly, opening the
+door.
+
+Pointedly Mr. Calendar ignored the imputation. “Sorry I disturbed you.
+G’dafternoon, Mr. Kirkwood.”
+
+“Good-by, Mr. Calendar.” A smile twitched the corners of Kirkwood’s
+too-wide mouth.
+
+Calendar stepped hastily out into the hall. As he strode—or rather,
+rolled—away, Kirkwood maliciously feathered a Parthian arrow.
+
+“By the way, Mr. Calendar—?”
+
+The sound of retreating footsteps was stilled and “Yes?” came from the
+gloom of the corridor.
+
+“Were you ever in San Francisco? Really and truly? Honest Injun, Mr.
+Calendar?”
+
+For a space the quiet was disturbed by harsh breathing; then, in a
+strained voice, “Good day, Mr. Kirkwood”; and again the sound of
+departing footfalls.
+
+Kirkwood closed the door and the incident simultaneously, with a smart
+bang of finality. Laughing quietly he went back to the window with its
+dreary outlook, now the drearier for lengthening evening shadows.
+
+“I wonder what his game is, anyway. An adventurer, of course; the woods
+are full of ’em. A queer fish, even of his kind! And with a trick up
+his sleeve as queer and fishy as himself, no doubt!”
+
+
+
+
+II
+“AND SOME THERE BE WHO HAVE ADVENTURES THRUST UPON THEM”
+
+
+The assumption seems not unwarrantable, that Mr. Calendar figuratively
+washed his hands of Mr. Kirkwood. Unquestionably Mr. Kirkwood
+considered himself well rid of Mr. Calendar. When the latter had gone
+his way, Kirkwood, mindful of the fact that his boat-train would leave
+St. Pancras at half-after eleven, set about his packing and dismissed
+from his thoughts the incident created by the fat _chevalier
+d’industrie_; and at six o’clock, or thereabouts, let himself out of
+his room, dressed for the evening, a light rain-coat over one arm, in
+the other hand a cane,—the drizzle having ceased.
+
+A stolid British lift lifted him down to the ground floor of the
+establishment in something short of five minutes. Pausing in the office
+long enough to settle his bill and leave instructions to have his
+luggage conveyed to the boat-train, he received with entire equanimity
+the affable benediction of the clerk, in whose eyes he still figured as
+that radiant creature, an American millionaire; and passed on to the
+lobby, where he surrendered hat, coat and stick to the cloak-room
+attendant, ere entering the dining-room.
+
+The hour was a trifle early for a London dinner, the handsome room but
+moderately filled with patrons. Kirkwood absorbed the fact
+unconsciously and without displeasure; the earlier, the better: he was
+determined to consume his last civilized meal (as he chose to consider
+it) at his serene leisure, to live fully his ebbing moments in the
+world to which he was born, to drink to its cloying dregs one ultimate
+draught of luxury.
+
+A benignant waiter bowed him into a chair by a corner table in
+juxtaposition with an open window, through which, swaying imperceptibly
+the closed hangings, were wafted gentle gusts of the London evening’s
+sweet, damp breath.
+
+Kirkwood settled himself with an inaudible sigh of pleasure. He was
+dining, for the last time in Heaven knew how long, in a first-class
+restaurant.
+
+With a deferential flourish the waiter brought him the menu-card. He
+had served in his time many an “American, millionaire”; he had also
+served this Mr. Kirkwood, and respected him as one exalted above the
+run of his kind, in that he comprehended the art of dining.
+
+Fifteen minutes later the waiter departed rejoicing, his order
+complete.
+
+To distract a conscience whispering of extravagance, Kirkwood lighted a
+cigarette.
+
+The room was gradually filling with later arrivals; it was the most
+favored restaurant in London, and, despite the radiant costumes of the
+women, its atmosphere remained sedate and restful.
+
+A cab clattered down the side street on which the window opened.
+
+At a near-by table a woman laughed, quietly happy. Incuriously Kirkwood
+glanced her way. She was bending forward, smiling, flattering her
+escort with the adoration of her eyes. They were lovers alone in the
+wilderness of the crowded restaurant. They seemed very happy.
+
+Kirkwood was conscious of a strange pang of emotion. It took him some
+time to comprehend that it was envy.
+
+He was alone and lonely. For the first time he realized that no woman
+had ever looked upon him as the woman at the adjoining table looked
+upon her lover. He had found time to worship but one mistress—his art.
+
+And he was renouncing her.
+
+He was painfully conscious of what he had missed, had lost—or had not
+yet found: the love of woman.
+
+The sensation was curious—new, unique in his experience.
+
+His cigarette burned down to his fingers as he sat pondering.
+Abstractedly, he ground its fire out in an ash-tray.
+
+The waiter set before him a silver tureen, covered.
+
+He sat up and began to consume his soup, scarce doing it justice. His
+dream troubled him—his dream of the love of woman.
+
+From a little distance his waiter regarded him, with an air of
+disappointment. In the course of an hour and a half he awoke, to
+discover the attendant in the act of pouring very hot and black coffee
+from a bright silver pot into a demi-tasse of fragile porcelain.
+Kirkwood slipped a single lump of sugar into the cup, gave over his
+cigar-case to be filled, then leaned back, deliberately lighting a long
+and slender panetela as a preliminary to a last lingering appreciation
+of the scene of which he was a part.
+
+He reviewed it through narrowed eyelids, lazily; yet with some slight
+surprise, seeming to see it with new vision, with eyes from which
+scales of ignorance had dropped.
+
+This long and brilliant dining-hall, with its quiet perfection of
+proportion and appointment, had always gratified his love of the
+beautiful; to-night it pleased him to an unusual degree. Yet it was the
+same as ever; its walls tinted a deep rose, with their hangings of dull
+cloth-of-gold, its lights discriminatingly clustered and discreetly
+shaded, redoubled in half a hundred mirrors, its subdued shimmer of
+plate and glass, its soberly festive assemblage of circumspect men and
+women splendidly gowned, its decorously muted murmur of voices
+penetrated and interwoven by the strains of a hidden string
+orchestra—caressed his senses as always, yet with a difference.
+To-night he saw it a room populous with lovers, lovers insensibly
+paired, man unto woman attentive, woman of man regardful.
+
+He had never understood this before. This much he had missed in life.
+
+It seemed hard to realize that one must forego it all for ever.
+
+Presently he found himself acutely self-conscious. The sensation
+puzzled him; and without appearing to do so, he traced it from effect
+to cause; and found the cause in a woman—a girl, rather, seated at a
+table the third removed from him, near the farther wall of the room.
+
+Too considerate, and too embarrassed, to return her scrutiny openly,
+look for look, he yet felt sure that, however temporarily, he was
+become the object of her intent interest.
+
+Idly employed with his cigar, he sipped his coffee. In time aware that
+she had turned her attention elsewhere, he looked up.
+
+At first he was conscious of an effect of disappointment. She was
+nobody that he knew, even by reputation. She was simply a young girl,
+barely out of her teens—if as old as that phrase would signify. He
+wondered what she had found in him to make her think him worth so long
+a study; and looked again, more keenly curious.
+
+With this second glance, appreciation stirred the artistic side of his
+nature, that was already grown impatient of his fretted mood. The
+slender and girlish figure, posed with such absolute lack of intrusion
+against a screen of rose and gilt, moved him to critical admiration.
+The tinted glow of shaded candles caught glistening on the spun gold of
+her fair hair, and enhanced the fine pallor of her young shoulders. He
+saw promise, and something more than promise, in her face, its oval
+something dimmed by warm shadows that unavailingly sought to blend
+youth and beauty alike into the dull, rich background.
+
+In the sheer youth of her (he realized) more than in aught else, lay
+her chiefest charm. She could be little more than a child, indeed, if
+he were to judge her by the purity of her shadowed eyes and the absence
+of emotion in the calm and direct look which presently she turned upon
+him who sat wondering at the level, penciled darkness of her brows.
+
+At length aware that she had surprised his interest, Kirkwood glanced
+aside—coolly deliberate, lest she should detect in his attitude
+anything more than impersonal approval.
+
+A slow color burned his cheeks. In his temples there rose a curious
+pulsing.
+
+After a while she drew his gaze again, imperiously—herself all unaware
+of the havoc she was wreaking on his temperament.
+
+He could have fancied her distraught, cloaking an unhappy heart with
+placid brow and gracious demeanor; but such a conception matched
+strangely her glowing youth and spirit. What had she to do with Care?
+What concern had Black Care, whose gaunt shape in sable shrouds had
+lurked at his shoulder all the evening, despite his rigid
+preoccupation, with a being as charmingly flushed with budding
+womanhood as this girl?
+
+“Eighteen?” he hazarded. “Eighteen, or possibly nineteen, dining at the
+Pless in a ravishing dinner-gown, and—unhappy? Oh, hardly—not she!”
+
+Yet the impression haunted him, and ere long he was fain to seek
+confirmation or denial of it in the manner of her escort.
+
+The latter sat with back to Kirkwood, cutting a figure as negative as
+his snug evening clothes. One could surmise little from a fleshy thick
+neck, a round, glazed bald spot, a fringe of grizzled hair, and two
+bright red ears.
+
+Calendar?
+
+Somehow the fellow did suggest Kirkwood’s caller of the afternoon. The
+young man could not have said precisely how, for he was unfamiliar with
+the aspect of that gentleman’s back. None the less the suggestion
+persisted.
+
+By now, a few of the guests, theater-bound, for the most part, were
+leaving. Here and there a table stood vacant, that had been filled,
+cloth tarnished, chairs disarranged: in another moment to be
+transformed into its pristine brilliance under the deft attentions of
+the servitors.
+
+Down an aisle, past the table at which the girl was sitting, came two,
+making toward the lobby; the man, a slight and meager young
+personality, in the lead. Their party had attracted Kirkwood’s notice
+as they entered; why, he did not remember; but it was in his mind that
+then they had been three. Instinctively he looked at the table they had
+left—one placed at some distance from the girl, and hidden from her by
+an angle in the wall. It appeared that the third member had chosen to
+dally a few moments over his tobacco and a liqueur-brandy. Kirkwood
+could see him plainly, lounging in his chair and fumbling the stem of a
+glass: a heavy man, of somber habit, his black and sullen brows
+lowering and thoughtful above a face boldly handsome.
+
+The woman of the trio was worthy of closer attention. Some paces in the
+wake of her lack-luster esquire, she was making a leisurely progress,
+trailing the skirts of a gown magnificent beyond dispute, half
+concealed though it was by the opera cloak whose soft folds draped her
+shoulders. Slowly, carrying her head high, she approached, insolent
+eyes reviewing the room from beneath their heavy lids; a metallic and
+mature type of dark beauty, supremely self-confident and
+self-possessed.
+
+Men turned involuntarily to look after her, not altogether in undiluted
+admiration.
+
+In the act of passing behind the putative Calendar, she paused
+momentarily, bending as if to gather up her train. Presumably the
+action disturbed her balance; she swayed a little, and in the effort to
+recover, rested the tips of her gloved fingers upon the edge of the
+table. Simultaneously (Kirkwood could have sworn) a single word left
+her lips, a word evidently pitched for the ear of the hypothetical
+Calendar alone. Then she swept on, imperturbable, assured.
+
+To the perplexed observer it was indubitably evident that some
+communication had passed from the woman to the man. Kirkwood saw the
+fat shoulders of the girl’s companion stiffen suddenly as the woman’s
+hand rested at his elbow; as she moved away, a little rippling shiver
+was plainly visible in the muscles of his back, beneath his coat—mute
+token of relaxing tension. An instant later one plump and mottled hand
+was carelessly placed where the woman’s had been; and was at once
+removed with fingers closed.
+
+To the girl, watching her face covertly, Kirkwood turned for clue to
+the incident. He made no doubt that she had observed the passage; proof
+of that one found in her sudden startling pallor (of indignation?) and
+in her eyes, briefly alight with some inscrutable emotion, though
+quickly veiled by lowered lashes. Slowly enough she regained color and
+composure, while her _vis-à-vis_ sat motionless, head inclined as if in
+thought.
+
+Abruptly the man turned in his chair to summon a waiter, and exposed
+his profile. Kirkwood was in no wise amazed to recognize Calendar—a
+badly frightened Calendar now, however, and hardly to be identified
+with the sleek, glib fellow who had interviewed Kirkwood in the
+afternoon. His flabby cheeks were ashen and trembling, and upon the
+back of his chair the fat white fingers were drumming incessantly an
+inaudible tattoo of shattered nerves.
+
+“Scared silly!” commented Kirkwood. “Why?” Having spoken to his waiter,
+Calendar for some seconds raked the room with quick glances, as if
+seeking an acquaintance. Presumably disappointed, he swung back to face
+the girl, bending forward to reach her ears with accents low-pitched
+and confidential. She, on her part, fell at once attentive, grave and
+responsive. Perhaps a dozen sentences passed between them. At the
+outset her brows contracted and she shook her head in gentle dissent;
+whereupon Calendar’s manner became more imperative. Gradually,
+unwillingly, she seemed to yield consent. Once she caught her breath
+sharply, and, infected by her companion’s agitation, sat back, color
+fading again in the round young cheeks.
+
+Kirkwood’s waiter put in an inopportune appearance with the bill. The
+young man paid it. When he looked up again Calendar had swung squarely
+about in his chair. His eye encountered Kirkwood’s. He nodded
+pleasantly. Temporarily confused, Kirkwood returned the nod.
+
+In a twinkling he had repented; Calendar had left his chair and was
+wending his way through the tables toward Kirkwood’s. Reaching it, he
+paused, offering the hand of genial fellowship. Kirkwood accepted it
+half-heartedly (what else was he to do?) remarking at the same time
+that Calendar had recovered much of his composure. There was now a
+normal coloring in the heavily jowled countenance, with less glint of
+fear in the quick, dark eyes; and Calendar’s hand, even if moist and
+cold, no longer trembled. Furthermore it was immediately demonstrated
+that his impudence had not deserted him.
+
+“Why, Kirkwood, my dear fellow!” he crowed—not so loudly as to attract
+attention, but in a tone assumed to divert suspicion, should he be
+overheard. “This is great luck, you know—to find you here.”
+
+“Is it?” returned Kirkwood coolly. He disengaged his fingers.
+
+The pink plump face was contorted in a furtive grimace of deprecation.
+Without waiting for permission Calendar dropped into the vacant chair.
+
+“My dear sir,” he proceeded, unabashed, “I throw myself upon your
+mercy.”
+
+“The devil you do!”
+
+“I must. I’m in the deuce of a hole, and there’s no one I know here
+besides yourself. I—I—”
+
+Kirkwood saw fit to lead him on; partly because, out of the corner of
+his eye, he was aware of the girl’s unconcealed suspense. “Go on,
+please, Mr. Calendar. You throw yourself on a total stranger’s mercy
+because you’re in the deuce of a hole; and—?”
+
+“It’s this way; I’m called away on urgent business imperative business.
+I must go at once. My daughter is with me. My daughter! Think of my
+embarrassment; I can not leave her here, alone, nor can I permit her to
+go home unprotected.”
+
+Calendar paused in anxiety.
+
+“That’s easily remedied, then,” suggested Kirkwood.
+
+“How?”
+
+“Put her in a cab at the door.”
+
+“I ... No. The devil! I couldn’t think of it. You won’t understand. I—”
+
+“I do not understand,—” amended the younger man politely.
+
+Calendar compressed his lips nervously. It was plain that the man was
+quivering with impatience and half-mad with excitement. He held quiet
+only long enough to regain his self-control and take counsel with his
+prudence.
+
+“It is impossible, Mr. Kirkwood. I must ask you to be generous and
+believe me.”
+
+“Very well; for the sake of the argument, I do believe you, Mr.
+Calendar.”
+
+“Hell!” exploded the elder man in an undertone. Then swiftly,
+stammering in his haste: “I can’t let Dorothy accompany me to the
+door,” he declared. “She—I—I throw myself upon your mercy!”
+
+“What—again?”
+
+“The truth—the truth is, if you will have it, that I am in danger of
+arrest the moment I leave here. If my daughter is with me, she will
+have to endure the shame and humiliation—”
+
+“Then why place her in such a position?” Kirkwood demanded sharply.
+
+Calendar’s eyes burned, incandescent with resentment. Offended, he
+offered to rise and go, but changed his mind and sat tight in hope.
+
+“I beg of you, sir—”
+
+“One moment, Mr. Calendar.”
+
+Abruptly Kirkwood’s weathercock humor shifted—amusement yielding to
+intrigued interest. After all, why not oblige the fellow? What did
+anything matter, now? What harm could visit him if he yielded to this
+corpulent adventurer’s insistence? Both from experience and observation
+he knew this for a world plentifully peopled by soldiers of fortune,
+contrivers of snares and pitfalls for the feet of the unwary. On the
+other hand, it is axiomatic that a penniless man is perfectly safe
+anywhere. Besides, there was the girl to be considered.
+
+Kirkwood considered her, forthwith. In the process thereof, his eyes
+sought her, perturbed. Their glances clashed. She looked away hastily,
+crimson to her temples.
+
+Instantly the conflict between curiosity and caution, inclination and
+distrust, was at an end. With sudden compliance, the young man rose.
+
+“I shall be most happy to be of service to your daughter, Mr.
+Calendar,” he said, placing the emphasis with becoming gravity. And
+then, the fat adventurer leading the way, Kirkwood strode across the
+room—wondering somewhat at himself, if the whole truth is to be
+disclosed.
+
+
+
+
+III
+CALENDAR’S DAUGHTER
+
+
+All but purring with satisfaction and relief, Calendar halted.
+
+“Dorothy, my dear, permit me to introduce an old friend—Mr. Kirkwood.
+Kirkwood, this is my daughter.”
+
+
+[Illustration: Permit me to introduce an old friend.]
+
+
+“Miss Calendar,” acknowledged Kirkwood.
+
+The girl bowed, her eyes steady upon his own. “Mr. Kirkwood is very
+kind,” she said gravely.
+
+“That’s right!” Calendar exclaimed blandly. “He’s promised to see you
+home. Now both of you will pardon my running away, I know.”
+
+“Yes,” assented Kirkwood agreeably.
+
+The elder man turned and hurried toward the main entrance.
+
+Kirkwood took the chair he had vacated. To his disgust he found himself
+temporarily dumb. No flicker of thought illuminated the darkness of his
+confusion. How was he to open a diverting conversation with a young
+woman whom he had met under auspices so extraordinary? Any attempt to
+gloze the situation, he felt, would be futile. And, somehow, he did not
+care to render himself ridiculous in her eyes, little as he knew her.
+
+Inanely dumb, he sat watching her, smiling fatuously until it was borne
+in on him that he was staring like a boor and grinning like an idiot.
+Convinced, he blushed for himself; something which served to make him
+more tongue-tied than ever.
+
+As for his involuntary protégée, she exhibited such sweet composure
+that he caught himself wondering if she really appreciated the
+seriousness of her parent’s predicament; if, for that matter, its true
+nature were known to her at all. Calendar, he believed, was capable of
+prevarication, polite and impolite. Had he lied to his daughter? or to
+Kirkwood? To both, possibly; to the former alone, not improbably. That
+the adventurer had told him the desperate truth, Kirkwood was quite
+convinced; but he now began to believe that the girl had been put off
+with some fictitious explanation. Her tranquillity and self-control
+were remarkable, otherwise; she seemed very young to possess those
+qualities in such eminent degree.
+
+She was looking wearily past him, her gaze probing some unguessed abyss
+of thought. Kirkwood felt himself privileged to stare in wonder. Her
+naïve aloofness of poise gripped his imagination powerfully,—the more
+so, perhaps, since it seemed eloquent of her intention to remain
+enigmatic,—but by no means more powerfully than the unaided appeal of
+her loveliness.
+
+Presently the girl herself relieved the tension of the situation,
+fairly startling the young man by going straight to the heart of
+things. Without preface or warning, lifting her gaze to his, “My name
+is really Dorothy Calendar,” she observed. And then, noting his
+astonishment, “You would be privileged to doubt, under the
+circumstances,” she added. “Please let us be frank.”
+
+“Well,” he stammered, “if I didn’t doubt, let’s say I was
+unprejudiced.”
+
+His awkward, well-meant pleasantry, perhaps not conceived in the best
+of taste, sounded in his own ears wretchedly flat and vapid. He
+regretted it spontaneously; the girl ignored it.
+
+“You are very kind,” she iterated the first words he had heard from her
+lips. “I wish you to understand that I, for one, appreciate it.”
+
+“Not kind; I have done nothing. I am glad.... One is apt to become
+interested when Romance is injected into a prosaic existence.” Kirkwood
+allowed himself a keen but cheerful glance.
+
+She nodded, with a shadowy smile. He continued, purposefully, to
+distract her, holding her with his honest, friendly eyes.
+
+“Since it is to be confidences” (this she questioned with an all but
+imperceptible lifting of the eyebrows), “I don’t mind telling you my
+own name is really Philip Kirkwood.”
+
+“And you are an old friend of my father’s?”
+
+He opened his lips, but only to close them without speaking. The girl
+moved her shoulders with a shiver of disdain.
+
+“I knew it wasn’t so.”
+
+“You know it would be hard for a young man like myself to be a very old
+friend,” he countered lamely.
+
+“How long, then, have you known each other?”
+
+“Must I answer?”
+
+“Please.”
+
+“Between three and four hours.”
+
+“I thought as much.” She stared past him, troubled. Abruptly she said:
+“Please smoke.”
+
+“Shall I? If you wish it, of course....”
+
+She repeated: “Please.”
+
+“We were to wait ten minutes or so,” she continued.
+
+He produced his cigarette-case.
+
+“If you care to smoke it will seem an excuse.” He lighted his
+cigarette.
+
+“And then, you may talk to me,” she concluded calmly.
+
+“I would, gladly, if I could guess what would interest you.”
+
+“Yourself. Tell me about yourself,” she commanded.
+
+“It would bore you,” he responded tritely, confused.
+
+“No; you interest me very much.” She made the statement quietly,
+contemptuous of coquetry.
+
+“Very well, then; I am Philip Kirkwood, an American.”
+
+“Nothing more?”
+
+“Little worth retailing.”
+
+“I’m sorry.”
+
+“Why?” he demanded, piqued.
+
+“Because you have merely indicated that you are a wealthy American.”
+
+“Why wealthy?”
+
+“If not, you would have some aim in life—a calling or profession.”
+
+“And you think I have none?”
+
+“Unless you consider it your vocation to be a wealthy American.”
+
+“I don’t. Besides, I’m not wealthy. In point of fact, I ...” He pulled
+up short, on the verge of declaring himself a pauper. “I am a painter.”
+
+Her eyes lightened with interest. “An artist?”
+
+“I hope so. I don’t paint signs—or houses,” he remarked.
+
+Amused, she laughed softly. “I suspected it,” she declared.
+
+“Not really?”
+
+“It was your way of looking at—things, that made me guess it: the
+painter’s way. I have often noticed it.”
+
+“As if mentally blending colors all the time?”
+
+“Yes; that and—seeing flaws.”
+
+“I have discovered none,” he told her brazenly.
+
+But again her secret cares were claiming her thoughts, and the gay,
+inconsequential banter died upon her scarlet lips as a second time her
+glance ranged away, sounding mysterious depths of anxiety.
+
+Provoked, he would have continued the chatter. “I have confessed,” he
+persisted. “You know everything of material interest about me. And
+yourself?”
+
+“I am merely Dorothy Calendar,” she answered.
+
+“Nothing more?” He laughed.
+
+“That is all, if you please, for the present.”
+
+“I am to content myself with the promise of the future?”
+
+“The future,” she told him seriously, “is to-morrow; and to-morrow ...”
+She moved restlessly in her chair, eyes and lips pathetic in their
+distress. “Please, we will go now, if you are ready.”
+
+“I am quite ready, Miss Calendar.”
+
+He rose. A waiter brought the girl’s cloak and put it in Kirkwood’s
+hands. He held it until, smoothing the wrists of her long white gloves,
+she stood up, then placed the garment upon her white young shoulders,
+troubled by the indefinable sense of intimacy imparted by the
+privilege. She permitted him this personal service! He felt that she
+trusted him, that out of her gratitude had grown a simple and almost
+childish faith in his generosity and considerateness.
+
+As she turned to go her eyes thanked him with an unfathomable glance.
+He was again conscious of that esoteric disturbance in his temples.
+Puzzled, hazily analyzing the sensation, he followed her to the lobby.
+
+A page brought him his top-coat, hat and stick; tipping the child from
+sheer force of habit, he desired a gigantic porter, impressively ornate
+in hotel livery, to call a hansom. Together they passed out into the
+night, he and the girl.
+
+Beneath a permanent awning of steel and glass she waited patiently,
+slender, erect, heedless of the attention she attracted from wayfarers.
+
+The night was young, the air mild. Upon the sidewalk, muddied by a
+million feet, two streams of wayfarers flowed incessantly, bound west
+from Green Park or east toward Piccadilly Circus; a well-dressed throng
+for the most part, with here and there a man in evening dress. Between
+the carriages at the curb and the hotel doors moved others, escorting
+fluttering butterfly women in elaborate toilets, heads bare, skirts
+daintily gathered above their perishable slippers. Here and there
+meaner shapes slipped silently through the crowd, sinister shadows of
+the city’s proletariat, blotting ominously the brilliance of the scene.
+
+A cab drew in at the block. The porter clapped an arc of wickerwork
+over its wheel to protect the girl’s skirts. She ascended to the seat.
+
+Kirkwood, dropping sixpence in the porter’s palm, prepared to follow;
+but a hand fell upon his arm, peremptory, inexorable. He faced about,
+frowning, to confront a slight, hatchet-faced man, somewhat under
+medium height, dressed in a sack suit and wearing a derby well forward
+over eyes that were hard and bright.
+
+“Mr. Calendar?” said the man tensely. “I presume I needn’t name my
+business. I’m from the Yard—”
+
+“My name is _not_ Calendar.”
+
+The detective smiled wearily. “Don’t be a fool, Calendar,” he began.
+But the porter’s hand fell upon his shoulder and the giant bent low to
+bring his mouth close to the other’s ear. Kirkwood heard indistinctly
+his own name followed by Calendar’s, and the words: “Never fear. I’ll
+point him out.”
+
+“But the woman?” argued the detective, unconvinced, staring into the
+cab.
+
+“Am I not at liberty to have a lady dine with me in a public
+restaurant?” interposed Kirkwood, without raising his voice.
+
+The hard eyes looked him up and down without favor. Then: “Beg pardon,
+sir. I see my mistake,” said the detective brusquely.
+
+“I am glad you do,” returned Kirkwood grimly. “I fancy it will bear
+investigation.”
+
+He mounted the step. “Imperial Theater,” he told the driver, giving the
+first address that occurred to him; it could be changed. For the moment
+the main issue was to get the girl out of the range of the detective’s
+interest.
+
+He slipped into his place as the hansom wheeled into the turgid tide of
+west-bound traffic.
+
+So Calendar had escaped, after all! Moreover, he had told the truth to
+Kirkwood.
+
+By his side the girl moved uneasily. “Who was that man?” she inquired.
+
+Kirkwood sought her eyes, and found them wholly ingenuous. It seemed
+that Calendar had not taken her into his confidence, after all. She
+was, therefore, in no way implicated in her father’s affairs.
+Inexplicably the young man’s heart felt lighter. “A mistake; the fellow
+took me for some one he knew,” he told her carelessly.
+
+The assurance satisfied her. She rested quietly, wrapped up in personal
+concerns. Her companion pensively contemplated an infinity of arid and
+hansom-less to-morrows. About them the city throbbed in a web of misty
+twilight, the humid farewell of a dismal day. In the air a faint haze
+swam, rendering the distances opalescent. Athwart the western sky the
+after-glow of a drenched sunset lay like a wash of rose-madder.
+Piccadilly’s asphalt shone like watered silk, black and lustrous,
+reflecting a myriad lights in vibrant ribbons of party-colored
+radiance. On every hand cab-lamps danced like fire-flies; the rumble of
+wheels blended with the hollow pounding of uncounted hoofs, merging
+insensibly into the deep and solemn roar of London-town.
+
+Suddenly Kirkwood was recalled to a sense of duty by a glimpse of Hyde
+Park Corner. He turned to the girl. “I didn’t know where you wished to
+go—?”
+
+She seemed to realize his meaning with surprise, as one, whose thoughts
+have strayed afar, recalled to an imperative world.
+
+“Oh, did I forget? Tell him please to drive to Number Nine, Frognall
+Street, Bloomsbury.”
+
+Kirkwood poked his cane through the trap, repeating the address. The
+cab wheeled smartly across Piccadilly, swung into Half Moon Street, and
+thereafter made better time, darting briskly down abrupt vistas of
+shining pavement, walled in by blank-visaged houses, or round two sides
+of one of London’s innumerable private parks, wherein spring foliage
+glowed a tender green in artificial light; now and again it crossed
+brilliant main arteries of travel, and eventually emerged from a maze
+of backways into Oxford Street, to hammer eastwards to Tottenham Court
+Road.
+
+Constraint hung like a curtain between the two; a silence which the
+young man forbore to moderate, finding more delight that he had cared
+(or dared) confess to, in contemplation of the pure girlish profile so
+close to him.
+
+She seemed quite unaware of him, lost in thought, large eyes sober,
+lips serious that were fashioned for laughter, round little chin firm
+with some occult resolution. It was not hard to fancy her nerves keyed
+to a high pitch of courage and determination, nor easy to guess for
+what reason. Watching always, keenly sensitive to the beauty of each
+salient line betrayed by the flying lights, Kirkwood’s own
+consciousness lost itself in a profitless, even a perilous labyrinth of
+conjecture.
+
+The cab stopped. Both occupants came to their senses with a little
+start. The girl leaned out over; the apron, recognized the house she
+sought in one swift glance, testified to the recognition with a hushed
+exclamation, and began to arrange her skirts. Kirkwood, unheeding her
+faint-hearted protests, jumped out, interposing his cane between her
+skirts and the wheel. Simultaneously he received a vivid mental
+photograph of the locality.
+
+Frognall Street proved to be one of those by-ways, a short block in
+length, which, hemmed in on all sides by a meaner purlieu, has (even in
+Bloomsbury!) escaped the sordid commercial eye of the keeper of
+furnished lodgings, retaining jealously something of the old-time
+dignity and reserve that were its pride in the days before Society
+swarmed upon Mayfair and Belgravia.
+
+Its houses loomed tall, with many windows, mostly lightless—materially
+aggravating that air of isolate, cold dignity which distinguishes the
+Englishman’s castle. Here and there stood one less bedraggled than its
+neighbors, though all, without exception, spoke assertively of
+respectability down-at-the-heel but fighting tenaciously for existence.
+Some, vanguards of that imminent day when the boarding-house should
+reign supreme, wore with shamefaced air placards of estate-agents,
+advertising their susceptibility to sale or lease. In the company of
+the latter was Number 9.
+
+The American noted the circumstance subconsciously, at a moment when
+Miss Calendar’s hand, small as a child’s, warm and compact in its white
+glove, lay in his own. And then she was on the sidewalk, her face,
+upturned to his, vivacious with excitement.
+
+“You have been so kind,” she told him warmly, “that one hardly knows
+how to thank you, Mr. Kirkwood.”
+
+“I have done nothing—nothing at all,” he mumbled, disturbed by a
+sudden, unreasoning alarm for her.
+
+She passed quickly to the shelter of the pillared portico. He followed
+clumsily. On the door-step she turned, offering her hand. He took and
+retained it.
+
+“Good night,” she said.
+
+“I’m to understand that I’m dismissed, then?” he stammered ruefully.
+
+She evaded his eyes. “I—thank you—I have no further need—”
+
+“You are quite sure? Won’t you believe me at your service?”
+
+She laughed uneasily. “I’m all right now.”
+
+“I can do nothing more? Sure?”
+
+“Nothing. But you—you make me almost sorry I can’t impose still further
+upon your good nature.”
+
+“Please don’t hesitate ...”
+
+“Aren’t you very persistent, Mr. Kirkwood?” Her fingers moved in his;
+burning with the reproof, he released them, and turned to her so
+woebegone a countenance that she repented of her severity. “Don’t worry
+about me, please. I am truly safe now. Some day I hope to be able to
+thank you adequately. Good night!”
+
+Her pass-key grated in the lock. Opening, the door disclosed a dark and
+uninviting entry-hall, through which there breathed an air heavy with
+the dank and dusty odor of untenanted rooms. Hesitating on the
+threshold, over her shoulder the girl smiled kindly upon her
+commandeered esquire; and stepped within.
+
+He lifted his hat automatically. The door closed with an echoing slam.
+He turned to the waiting cab, fumbling for change.
+
+“I’ll walk,” he told the cabby, paying him off.
+
+The hansom swept away to a tune of hammering hoofs; and quiet rested
+upon the street as Kirkwood turned the nearest corner, in an unpleasant
+temper, puzzled and discontented. It seemed hardly fair that he should
+have been dragged into so promising an adventure, by his ears (so to
+put it), only to be thus summarily called upon to write “Finis” beneath
+the incident.
+
+He rounded the corner and walked half-way to the next street, coming to
+an abrupt and rebellious pause by the entrance to a covered alleyway,
+of two minds as to his proper course of action.
+
+In the background of his thoughts Number 9, Frognall Street, reared its
+five-story façade, sinister and forbidding. He reminded himself of its
+unlighted windows; of its sign, “To be let”; of the effluvia of
+desolation that had saluted him when the door swung wide. A deserted
+house; and the girl alone in it!—was it right for him to leave her so?
+
+
+
+
+IV
+9 FROGNALL STREET, W. C.
+
+
+The covered alleyway gave upon Quadrant Mews; or so declared a notice
+painted on the dead wall of the passage.
+
+Overhead, complaining as it swayed in the wind, hung the smirched and
+weather-worn sign-board of the Hog-in-the-Pound public house; wherefrom
+escaped sounds of such revelry by night as is indulged in by the
+British working-man in hours of ease. At the curb in front of the house
+of entertainment, dejected animals drooping between their shafts, two
+hansoms stood in waiting, until such time as the lords of their
+destinies should see fit to sally forth and inflict themselves upon a
+cab-hungry populace. As Kirkwood turned, a third vehicle rumbled up out
+of the mews.
+
+Kirkwood can close his eyes, even at this late day, and both see and
+hear it all again—even as he can see the unbroken row of dingy
+dwellings that lined his way back from Quadrant Mews to Frognall Street
+corner: all drab and unkempt, all sporting in their fan-lights the
+legend and lure, “Furnished Apartments.”
+
+For, between his curiosity about and his concern for the girl, he was
+being led back to Number 9, by the nose, as it were,—hardly willingly,
+at best. Profoundly stupefied by the contemplation of his own temerity,
+he yet returned unfaltering. He who had for so long plumed himself upon
+his strict supervision of his personal affairs and equally steadfast
+unconsciousness of his neighbor’s businesses, now found himself in the
+very act of pushing in where he was not wanted: as he had been advised
+in well-nigh as many words. He experienced an effect of standing to one
+side, a witness of his own folly, with rising wonder, unable to credit
+the strength of the infatuation which was placing him so conspicuously
+in the way of a snubbing.
+
+If perchance he were to meet the girl again as she was leaving Number
+9,—what then? The contingency dismayed him incredibly, in view of the
+fact that it did not avail to make him pause. To the contrary he
+disregarded it resolutely; mad, impertinent, justified of his unnamed
+apprehensions, or simply addled,—he held on his way.
+
+He turned up Frognall Street with the manner of one out for a leisurely
+evening stroll. Simultaneously, from the farther corner, another
+pedestrian debouched, into the thoroughfare—a mere moving shadow at
+that distance, brother to blacker shadows that skulked in the fenced
+areas and unlively entries of that poorly lighted block. The hush was
+something beyond belief, when one remembered the nearness of blatant
+Tottenham Court Road.
+
+Kirkwood conceived a wholly senseless curiosity about the other
+wayfarer. The man was walking rapidly, heels ringing with uncouth
+loudness, cane tapping the flagging at brief intervals. Both sounds
+ceased abruptly as their cause turned in beneath one of the porticos.
+In the emphatic and unnatural quiet that followed, Kirkwood, stepping
+more lightly, fancied that another shadow followed the first,
+noiselessly and with furtive stealth.
+
+Could it be Number 9 into which they had passed? The American’s heart
+beat a livelier tempo at the suggestion. If it had not been Number 9—he
+was still too far away to tell—it was certainly one of the dwellings
+adjacent thereunto. The improbable possibility (But why improbable?)
+that the girl was being joined by her father, or by friends, annoyed
+him with illogical intensity. He mended his own pace, designing to pass
+whichever house it might be before the door should be closed; thought
+better of this, and slowed up again, anathematizing himself with much
+excuse for being the inquisitive dolt that he was.
+
+Approaching Number 9 with laggard feet, he manufactured a desire to
+light a cigarette, as a cover for his design, were he spied upon by
+unsuspected eyes. Cane under arm, hands cupped to shield a vesta’s
+flame, he stopped directly before the portico, turning his eyes askance
+to the shadowed doorway; and made a discovery sufficiently startling to
+hold him spellbound and, incidentally, to scorch his gloves before he
+thought to drop the match.
+
+The door of Number 9 stood ajar, a black interval an inch or so in
+width showing between its edge and the jamb.
+
+Suspicion and alarm set his wits a-tingle. More distinctly he recalled
+the jarring bang, accompanied by the metallic click of the latch, when
+the girl had shut herself in—and him out. Now, some person or persons
+had followed her, neglecting the most obvious precaution of a
+householder. And why? Why but because the intruders did not wish the
+sound of closing to be audible to her—or those—within?
+
+He reminded himself that it was all none of his affair, decided to pass
+on and go his ways in peace, and impulsively, swinging about, marched
+straight away for the unclosed door.
+
+“’Old’ard, guvner!”
+
+Kirkwood halted on the cry, faltering in indecision. Should he take the
+plunge, or withdraw? Synchronously he was conscious that a man’s figure
+had detached itself from the shadows beneath the nearest portico and
+was drawing nearer, with every indication of haste, to intercept him.
+
+“’Ere now, guvner, yer mykin’ a mistyke. You don’t live ’ere.”
+
+“How do you know?” demanded Kirkwood crisply, tightening his grip on
+his stick.
+
+Was this the second shadow he had seemed to see—the confederate of him
+who had entered Number 9; a sentry to forestall interruption? If so,
+the fellow lacked discretion, though his determination that the
+American should not interfere was undeniable. It was with an ugly and
+truculent manner, if more warily, that the man closed in.
+
+“_I_ knows. You clear hout, or—”
+
+He flung out a hand with the plausible design of grasping Kirkwood by
+the collar. The latter lifted his stick, deflecting the arm, and
+incontinently landed his other fist forcibly on the fellow’s chest. The
+man reeled back, cursing. Before he could recover Kirkwood calmly
+crossed the threshold, closed the door and put his shoulder to it. In
+another instant, fumbling in the darkness, he found the bolts and drove
+them home.
+
+And it was done, the transformation accomplished; his inability to
+refrain from interfering had encompassed his downfall, had changed a
+peaceable and law-abiding alien within British shores into a busybody,
+a trespasser, a misdemeanant, a—yes, for all he knew to the contrary,
+in the estimation of the Law, a burglar, prime candidate for a
+convict’s stripes!
+
+Breathing hard with excitement he turned and laid his back against the
+panels, trembling in every muscle, terrified by the result of his
+impulsive audacity, thunder-struck by a lightning-like foreglimpse of
+its possible consequences. Of what colossal imprudence had he not been
+guilty?
+
+“The devil!” he whispered. “What an ass, what an utter ass I am!”
+
+Behind him the knob was rattled urgently, to an accompaniment of feet
+shuffling on the stone; and immediately—if he were to make a logical
+deduction from the rasping and scraping sound within the
+door-casing—the bell-pull was violently agitated, without, however,
+educing any response from the bell itself, wherever that might be
+situate. After which, as if in despair, the outsider again rattled and
+jerked the knob.
+
+Be his status what it might, whether servant of the household, its
+caretaker, or a night watchman, the man was palpably determined both to
+get himself in and Kirkwood out, and yet (curious to consider)
+determined to gain his end without attracting undue attention. Kirkwood
+had expected to hear the knocker’s thunder, as soon as the bell failed
+to give tongue; but it did not sound although there _was_ a
+knocker,—Kirkwood himself had remarked that antiquated and rusty bit of
+ironmongery affixed to the middle panel of the door. And it made him
+feel sure that something surreptitious and lawless was in process
+within those walls, that the confederate without, having failed to
+prevent a stranger from entering, left unemployed a means so
+certain-sure to rouse the occupants.
+
+But his inferential analysis of this phase of the proceedings was
+summarily abrupted by that identical alarm. In a trice the house was
+filled with flying echoes, wakened to sonorous riot by the crash and
+clamor of the knocker; and Kirkwood stood fully two yards away, his
+heart hammering wildly, his nerves a-jingle, much as if the resounding
+blows had landed upon his own person rather than on stout oaken
+planking.
+
+Ere he had time to wonder, the racket ceased, and from the street
+filtered voices in altercation. Listening, Kirkwood’s pulses quickened,
+and he laughed uncertainly for pure relief, retreating to the door and
+putting an ear to a crack.
+
+The accents of one speaker were new in his hearing, stern, crisp, quick
+with the spirit of authority which animates that most austere and
+dignified limb of the law to be encountered the world over, a London
+bobby.
+
+“Now then, my man, what do you want there? Come now, speak up, and step
+out into the light, where I can see you.”
+
+The response came in the sniffling snarl of the London ne’er-do-well,
+the unemployable rogue whose chiefest occupation seems to be to march
+in the ranks of The Unemployed on the occasion of its annual
+demonstrations.
+
+“Le’ me alone, carntcher? Ah’m doin’ no ’arm, officer,—”
+
+“Didn’t you hear me? Step out here. Ah, that’s better.... No harm, eh?
+Perhaps you’ll explain how there’s no harm breakin’ into unoccupied
+’ouses?”
+
+“Gorblimy, ’ow was I to know? ’Ere’s a toff ’ands me sixpence fer
+hopenin’ ’is cab door to-dye, an’, sezee, ‘My man,’ ’e sez, ‘yer’ve got
+a ’onest fyce. W’y don’cher work?’ sezee. ‘’Ow can I?’ sez I. ‘’Ere’m I
+hout of a job these six months, lookin’ fer work every dye an’ carn’t
+find it.’ Sezee, ‘Come an’ see me this hevenin’ at me home, Noine,
+Frognall Stryte,’ ’e sez, an’—”
+
+“That’ll do for now. You borrow a pencil and paper and write it down
+and I’ll read it when I’ve got more time; I never heard the like of it.
+This ’ouse hasn’t been lived in these two years. Move on, and don’t let
+me find you round ’ere again. March, I say!”
+
+There was more of it—more whining explanations artfully tinctured with
+abuse, more terse commands to depart, the whole concluding with
+scraping footsteps, diminuendo, and another perfunctory, rattle of the
+knob as the bobby, having shoo’d the putative evil-doer off, assured
+himself that no damage had actually been done. Then he, too, departed,
+satisfied and self-righteous, leaving a badly frightened but very
+grateful amateur criminal to pursue his self-appointed career of crime.
+
+He had no choice other than to continue; in point of fact, it had been
+insanity just then to back out, and run the risk of apprehension at the
+hands of that ubiquitous bobby, who (for all he knew) might be lurking
+not a dozen yards distant, watchful for just such a sequel. Still,
+Kirkwood hesitated with the best of excuses. Reassuring as he had found
+the sentinel’s extemporized yarn,—proof positive that the fellow had
+had no more right to prohibit a trespass than Kirkwood to commit
+one,—at the same time he found himself pardonably a prey to emotions of
+the utmost consternation and alarm. If he feared to leave the house he
+had no warrant whatever to assume that he would be permitted to remain
+many minutes unharmed within its walls of mystery.
+
+The silence of it discomfited him beyond measure; it was, in a word,
+uncanny.
+
+Before him, as he lingered at the door, vaguely disclosed by a wan
+illumination penetrating a dusty and begrimed fan-light, a broad hall
+stretched indefinitely towards the rear of the building, losing itself
+in blackness beyond the foot of a flight of stairs. Save for a few
+articles of furniture,—a hall table, an umbrella-stand, a tall dumb
+clock flanked by high-backed chairs,—it was empty. Other than
+Kirkwood’s own restrained respiration not a sound throughout the house
+advertised its inhabitation; not a board creaked beneath the pressure
+of a foot, not a mouse rustled in the wainscoting or beneath the
+floors, not a breath of air stirred sighing in the stillness.
+
+And yet, a tremendous racket had been raised at the front door, within
+the sixty seconds past! And yet, within twenty minutes two persons, at
+least, had preceded Kirkwood into the building! Had they not heard? The
+speculation seemed ridiculous. Or had they heard and, alarmed, been too
+effectually hobbled by the coils of their nefarious designs to dare
+reveal themselves, to investigate the cause of that thunderous summons?
+Or were they, perhaps, aware of Kirkwood’s entrance, and lying
+_perdui_, in some dark corner, to ambush him as he passed?
+
+True, that were hardly like the girl. True, on the other hand, it were
+possible that she had stolen away while Kirkwood was hanging in
+irresolution by the passage to Quadrant Mews. Again, the space of time
+between Kirkwood’s dismissal and his return had been exceedingly brief;
+whatever her errand, she could hardly have fulfilled it and escaped. At
+that moment she might be in the power and at the mercy of him who had
+followed her; providing he were not friendly. And in that case, what
+torment and what peril might not be hers?
+
+Spurred by solicitude, the young man put personal apprehensions in his
+pocket and forgot them, cautiously picking his way through the gloom to
+the foot of the stairs. There, by the newel-post, he paused. Darkness
+walled him about. Overhead the steps vanished in a well of blackness;
+he could not even see the ceiling; his eyes ached with futile effort to
+fathom the unknown; his ears rang with unrewarded strain of listening.
+The silence hung inviolate, profound.
+
+Slowly he began to ascend, a hand following the balusters, the other
+with his cane exploring the obscurity before him. On the steps, a
+carpet, thick and heavy, muffled his footfalls. He moved noiselessly.
+Towards the top the staircase curved, and presently a foot that groped
+for a higher level failed to find it. Again he halted, acutely
+distrustful.
+
+Nothing happened.
+
+He went on, guided by the balustrade, passing three doors, all open,
+through which the undefined proportions of a drawing-room and boudoir
+were barely suggested in a ghostly dusk. By each he paused, listening,
+hearing nothing.
+
+His foot struck with a deadened thud against the bottom step of the
+second flight, and his pulses fluttered wildly for a moment. Two
+minutes—three—he waited in suspense. From above came no sound. He went
+on, as before, save that twice a step yielded, complaining, to his
+weight. Toward the top the close air, like the darkness, seemed to
+weigh more heavily upon his consciousness; little drops of perspiration
+started out on his forehead, his scalp tingled, his mouth was hot and
+dry, he felt as if stifled.
+
+Again the raised foot found no level higher than its fellows. He
+stopped and held his breath, oppressed by a conviction that some one
+was near him. Confirmation of this came startlingly—an eerie whisper in
+the night, so close to him that he fancied he could feel the disturbed
+air fanning his face.
+
+“_Is it you, Eccles_?” He had no answer ready. The voice was masculine,
+if he analyzed it correctly. Dumb and stupid he stood poised upon the
+point of panic.
+
+“_Eccles, is it you_?”
+
+The whisper was both shrill and shaky. As it ceased Kirkwood was half
+blinded by a flash of light, striking him squarely in the eyes.
+Involuntarily he shrank back a pace, to the first step from the top.
+Instantaneously the light was eclipsed.
+
+“_Halt or—or I fire_!”
+
+By now he realized that he had been scrutinized by the aid of an
+electric hand-lamp. The tremulous whisper told him something else—that
+the speaker suffered from nerves as high-strung as his own. The
+knowledge gave him inspiration. He cried at a venture, in a guarded
+voice, “_Hands up_!”—and struck out smartly with his stick. Its ferrule
+impinged upon something soft but heavy. Simultaneously he heard a low,
+frightened cry, the cane was swept aside, a blow landed glancingly on
+his shoulder, and he was carried fairly off his feet by the weight of a
+man hurled bodily upon him with staggering force and passion. Reeling,
+he was borne back and down a step or two, and then,—choking on an
+oath,—dropped his cane and with one hand caught the balusters, while
+the other tore ineffectually at wrists of hands that clutched his
+throat. So, for a space, the two hung, panting and struggling.
+
+Then endeavoring to swing his shoulders over against the wall, Kirkwood
+released his grip on the hand-rail and stumbled on the stairs, throwing
+his antagonist out of balance. The latter plunged downward, dragging
+Kirkwood with him. Clawing, kicking, grappling, they went to the
+bottom, jolted violently by each step; but long before the last was
+reached, Kirkwood’s throat was free.
+
+Throwing himself off, he got to his feet and grasped the railing for
+support; then waited, panting, trying to get his bearings. Himself
+painfully shaken and bruised, he shrewdly surmised that his assailant
+had fared as ill, if not worse. And, in point of fact, the man lay with
+neither move nor moan, still as death at the American’s feet.
+
+And once more silence had folded its wings over Number 9, Frognall
+Street.
+
+More conscious of that terrifying, motionless presence beneath him,
+than able to distinguish it by power of vision, he endured interminable
+minutes of trembling horror, in a witless daze, before he thought of
+his match-box. Immediately he found it and struck a light. As the wood
+caught and the bright small flame leaped in the pent air, he leaned
+forward, over the body, breathlessly dreading what he must discover.
+
+The man lay quiet, head upon the floor, legs and hips on the stairs.
+One arm had fallen over his face, hiding the upper half. The hand
+gleamed white and delicate as a woman’s. His chin was smooth and round,
+his lips thin and petulant. Beneath his top-coat, evening dress clothed
+a short and slender figure. Nothing whatever of his appearance
+suggested the burly ruffian, the midnight marauder; he seemed little
+more than a boy old enough to dress for dinner. In his attitude there
+was something pitifully suggestive of a beaten child, thrown into a
+corner.
+
+Conscience-smitten and amazed Kirkwood stared on until, without
+warning, the match flickered and went out. Then, straightening up with
+an exclamation at once of annoyance and concern, he rattled the box; it
+made no sound,—was empty. In disgust he swore it was the devil’s own
+luck, that he should run out of vestas at a time so critical. He could
+not even say whether the fellow was dead, unconscious, or simply
+shamming. He had little idea of his looks; and to be able to identify
+him might save a deal of trouble at some future time,—since he,
+Kirkwood, seemed so little able to disengage himself from the clutches
+of this insane adventure! And the girl—. what had become of her? How
+could he continue to search for her, without lights or guide, through
+all those silent rooms, whose walls might inclose a hundred hidden
+dangers in that house of mystery?
+
+But he debated only briefly. His blood was young, and it was hot; it
+was quite plain to him that he could not withdraw and retain his
+self-respect. If the girl was there to be found, most assuredly, he
+must find her. The hand-lamp that had dazzled him at the head of the
+stairs should be his aid, now that he thought of it,—and providing he
+was able to find it.
+
+In the scramble on the stairs he had lost his hat, but he remembered
+that the vesta’s short-lived light had discovered this on the floor
+beyond the man’s body. Carefully stepping across the latter he
+recovered his head-gear, and then, kneeling, listened with an ear close
+to the fellow’s face. A softly regular beat of breathing reassured him.
+Half rising, he caught the body beneath the armpits, lifting and
+dragging it off the staircase; and knelt again, to feel of each pocket
+in the man’s clothing, partly as an obvious precaution, to relieve him
+of his advertised revolver against an untimely wakening, partly to see
+if he had the lamp about him.
+
+The search proved fruitless. Kirkwood suspected that the weapon, like
+his own, had existed only in his victim’s ready imagination. As for the
+lamp, in the act of rising he struck it with his foot, and picked it
+up.
+
+It felt like a metal tube a couple of inches in diameter, a foot or so
+in length, passably heavy. He fumbled with it impatiently. “However the
+dickens,” he wondered audibly, “does the infernal machine work?” As it
+happened, the thing worked with disconcerting abruptness as his
+untrained fingers fell hapchance on the spring. A sudden glare again
+smote him in the face, and at the same instant, from a point not a yard
+away, apparently, an inarticulate cry rang out upon the stillness.
+
+Heart in his mouth, he stepped back, lowering the lamp (which impishly
+went out) and lifting a protecting forearm.
+
+“Who’s that?” he demanded harshly.
+
+A strangled sob of terror answered him, blurred by a swift rush of
+skirts, and in a breath his shattered nerves quieted and a glimmer of
+common sense penetrated the murk anger and fear had bred in his brain.
+He understood, and stepped forward, catching blindly at the darkness
+with eager hands.
+
+“Miss Calendar!” he cried guardedly. “Miss Calendar, it is I—Philip
+Kirkwood!”
+
+There was a second sob, of another caliber than the first; timid
+fingers brushed his, and a hand, warm and fragile, closed upon his own
+in a passion of relief and gratitude.
+
+“Oh, I am so g-glad!” It was Dorothy Calendar’s voice, beyond mistake.
+“I—I didn’t know what t-to t-think.... When the light struck your face
+I was sure it was you, but when I called, you answered in a voice so
+strange,—not like yours at all! ... Tell me,” she pleaded, with
+palpable effort to steady herself; “what has happened?”
+
+“I think, perhaps,” said Kirkwood uneasily, again troubled by his
+racing pulses, “perhaps you can do that better than I.”
+
+“Oh!” said the voice guiltily; her fingers trembled on his, and were
+gently withdrawn. “I was so frightened,” she confessed after a little
+pause, “so frightened that I hardly understand ... But you? How did
+you—?”
+
+“I worried about you,” he replied, in a tone absurdly apologetic.
+“Somehow it didn’t seem right. It was none of my business, of course,
+but ... I couldn’t help coming back. This fellow, whoever he is—don’t
+worry; he’s unconscious—slipped into the house in a manner that seemed
+to me suspicious. I hardly know why I followed, except that he left the
+door an open invitation to interference ...”
+
+“I can’t be thankful enough,” she told him warmly, “that you did
+interfere. You have indeed saved me from ...”
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“I don’t know what. If I knew the man—”
+
+“You don’t _know_ him?”
+
+“I can’t even guess. The light—?”
+
+She paused inquiringly. Kirkwood fumbled with the lamp, but, whether
+its rude handling had impaired some vital part of the mechanism, or
+whether the batteries through much use were worn out, he was able to
+elicit only one feeble glow, which was instantly smothered by the
+darkness.
+
+“It’s no use,” he confessed. “The thing’s gone wrong.”
+
+“Have you a match?”
+
+“I used my last before I got hold of this.”
+
+“Oh,” she commented, discouraged. “Have you any notion what he looks
+like?”
+
+Kirkwood thought briefly. “Raffles,” he replied with a chuckle. “He
+looks like an amateurish and very callow Raffles. He’s in dress
+clothes, you know.”
+
+“I wonder!” There was a nuance of profound bewilderment in her
+exclamation. Then: “He knocked against something in the hall—a chair, I
+presume; at all events, I heard that and put out the light. I was ...
+in the room above the drawing-room, you see. I stole down to this
+floor—was there, in the corner by the stairs when he passed within six
+inches, and never guessed it. Then, when he got on the next floor, I
+started on; but you came in. I slipped into the drawing-room and
+crouched behind a chair. You went on, but I dared not move until ...
+And then I heard some one cry out, and you fell down the stairs
+together. I hope you were not hurt—?”
+
+“Nothing worth mention; but _he_ must have got a pretty stiff knock, to
+lay him out so completely.” Kirkwood stirred the body with his toe, but
+the man made no sign. “Dead to the world ... And now, Miss Calendar?”
+
+If she answered, he did not hear; for on the heels of his query banged
+the knocker down below; and thereafter crash followed crash, brewing a
+deep and sullen thundering to rouse the echoes and send them rolling,
+like voices of enraged ghosts, through the lonely rooms.
+
+
+
+
+V
+THE MYSTERY OF A FOUR-WHEELER
+
+
+“What’s that?” At the first alarm the girl had caught convulsively at
+Kirkwood’s arm. Now, when a pause came in the growling of the knocker,
+she made him hear her voice; and it was broken and vibrant with a
+threat of hysteria. “Oh, what can it mean?”
+
+“I don’t know.” He laid a hand reassuringly over that which trembled on
+his forearm. “The police, possibly.”
+
+“Police!” she iterated, aghast. “What makes you think—?”
+
+“A man tried to stop me at the door,” he answered quickly. “I got in
+before he could. When he tried the knocker, a bobby came along and
+stopped him. The latter may have been watching the house since
+then,—it’d be only his duty to keep an eye on it; and Heaven knows we
+raised a racket, coming head-first down those stairs! Now we are up
+against it,” he added brightly.
+
+But the girl was tugging at his hand. “Come!” she begged breathlessly.
+“Come! There is a way! Before they break in—”
+
+“But this man—?” Kirkwood hung back, troubled.
+
+“They—the police are sure to find and care for him.”
+
+“So they will.” He chuckled, “And serve him right! He’d have choked me
+to death, with all the good will in the world!”
+
+“Oh, do hurry!”
+
+Turning, she sped light-footed down the staircase to the lower hall, he
+at her elbow. Here the uproar was loudest—deep enough to drown whatever
+sounds might have been made by two pairs of flying feet. For all that
+they fled on tiptoe, stealthily, guilty shadows in the night; and at
+the newel-post swung back into the unbroken blackness which shrouded
+the fastnesses backward of the dwelling. A sudden access of fury on the
+part of the alarmist at the knocker, spurred them on with quaking
+hearts. In half a dozen strides, Kirkwood, guided only by instinct and
+the _frou-frou_ of the girl’s skirts as she ran invisible before him,
+stumbled on the uppermost steps of a steep staircase; only a hand-rail
+saved him, and that at the last moment. He stopped short, shocked into
+caution. From below came a contrite whisper: “I’m so sorry! I should
+have warned you.”
+
+He pulled himself together, glaring wildly at nothing. “It’s all
+right—”
+
+“You’re not hurt, truly? Oh, do come quickly.”
+
+She waited for him at the bottom of the flight;—happily for him, for he
+was all at sea.
+
+“Here—your hand—let me guide you. This darkness is dreadful ...”
+
+He found her hand, somehow, and tucked his into it, confidingly, and
+not without an uncertain thrill of satisfaction.
+
+“Come!” she panted. “Come! If they break in—”
+
+Stifled by apprehension, her voice failed her.
+
+They went forward, now less impetuously, for it was very black; and the
+knocker had fallen still.
+
+“No fear of that,” he remarked after a time. “They wouldn’t dare break
+in.”
+
+A fluttering whisper answered him: “I don’t know. We dare risk
+nothing.”
+
+They seemed to explore, to penetrate acres of labyrinthine chambers and
+passages, delving deep into the bowels of the earth, like rabbits
+burrowing in a warren, hounded by beagles.
+
+Above stairs the hush continued unbroken; as if the dumb Genius of the
+Place had cast a spell of silence on the knocker, or else, outraged,
+had smitten the noisy disturber with a palsy.
+
+The girl seemed to know her way; whether guided by familiarity or by
+intuition, she led on without hesitation, Kirkwood blundering in her
+wake, between confusion of impression, and dawning dismay conscious of
+but one tangible thing, to which he clung as to his hope of salvation:
+those firm, friendly fingers that clasped his own.
+
+It was as if they wandered on for an hour; probably from start to
+finish their flight took up three minutes, no more. Eventually the girl
+stopped, releasing his hand. He could hear her syncopated breathing
+before him, and gathered that something was wrong. He took a step
+forward.
+
+“What is it?”
+
+Her full voice broke out of the obscurity startlingly close, in his
+very ear.
+
+“The door—the bolts—I can’t budge them.”
+
+“Let me ...”
+
+He pressed forward, brushing her shoulder. She did not draw away, but
+willingly yielded place to his hands at the fastenings; and what had
+proved impossible to her, to his strong fingers was a matter of
+comparative ease. Yet, not entirely consciously, he was not quick. As
+he tugged at the bolts he was poignantly sensitive to the subtle warmth
+of her at his side; he could hear her soft dry sobs of excitement and
+suspense, punctuating the quiet; and was frightened, absolutely, by an
+impulse, too strong for ridicule, to take her in his arms and comfort
+her with the assurance that, whatever her trouble, he would stand by
+her and protect her.... It were futile to try to laugh it off; he gave
+over the endeavor. Even at this critical moment he found himself
+repeating over and over to his heart the question: “Can this be love?
+Can this be love? ...”
+
+Could it be love at an hour’s acquaintance? Absurd! But he could not
+laugh—nor render himself insensible to the suggestion.
+
+He found that he had drawn the bolts. The girl tugged and rattled at
+the knob. Reluctantly the door opened inwards. Beyond its threshold
+stretched ten feet or more of covered passageway, whose entrance framed
+an oblong glimmering with light. A draught of fresh air smote their
+faces. Behind them a door banged.
+
+“Where does this open?”
+
+“On the mews,” she informed him.
+
+“The mews!” He stared in consternation at the pallid oval that stood
+for her face. “The mews! But you, in your evening gown, and I—”
+
+“There’s no other way. We must chance it. Are you afraid?”
+
+Afraid? ... He stepped aside. She slipped by him and on. He closed the
+door, carefully removing the key and locking it on the outside; then
+joined the girl at the entrance to the mews, where they paused
+perforce, she as much disconcerted as he, his primary objection
+momentarily waxing in force as they surveyed the conditions
+circumscribing their escape.
+
+Quadrant Mews was busily engaged in enjoying itself. Night had fallen
+sultry and humid, and the walls and doorsteps were well fringed and
+clustered with representatives of that class of London’s population
+which infests mews through habit, taste, or force of circumstance.
+
+On the stoops men sprawled at easy length, discussing short, foul
+cutties loaded with that rank and odoriferous compound which, under the
+name and in the fame of tobacco, is widely retailed at tuppence the
+ounce. Their women-folk more commonly squatted on the thresholds,
+cheerfully squabbling; from opposing second-story windows, two leaned
+perilously forth, slanging one another across the square briskly in the
+purest billingsgate; and were impartially applauded from below by an
+audience whose appreciation seemed faintly tinged with envy. Squawking
+and yelling children swarmed over the flags and rude cobblestones that
+paved the ways. Like incense, heavy and pungent, the rich effluvia of
+stable-yards swirled in air made visible by its faint burden of mist.
+
+Over against the entrance wherein Kirkwood and the girl lurked,
+confounded by the problem of escaping undetected through this vivacious
+scene, a stable-door stood wide, exposing a dimly illumined interior.
+Before it waited a four-wheeler, horse already hitched in between the
+shafts, while its driver, a man of leisurely turn of mind, made
+lingering inspection of straps and buckles, and, while Kirkwood watched
+him, turned attention to the carriage lamps.
+
+The match which he raked spiritedly down his thigh, flared ruddily; the
+succeeding paler glow of the lamp threw into relief a heavy beefy mask,
+with shining bosses for cheeks and nose and chin; through narrow slits
+two cunning eyes glittered like dull gems. Kirkwood appraised him with
+attention, as one in whose gross carcass was embodied their only hope
+of unannoyed return to the streets and normal surroundings of their
+world. The difficulty lay in attracting the man’s attention and
+engaging him without arousing his suspicions or bringing the population
+about their ears. Though he hesitated long, no favorable opportunity
+presented itself; and in time the Jehu approached the box with the
+ostensible purpose of mounting and driving off. In this critical
+situation the American, forced to recognize that boldness must mark his
+course, took the girl’s fate and his own in his hands, and with a quick
+word to his companion, stepped out of hiding.
+
+The cabby had a foot upon the step when Kirkwood tapped his shoulder.
+
+“My man—”
+
+“Lor, lumme!” cried the fellow in amaze, pivoting on his heel. Cupidity
+and quick understanding enlivened the eyes which in two glances looked
+Kirkwood up and down, comprehending at once both his badly rumpled hat
+and patent-leather shoes. “S’help me,”—thickly,—“where’d you drop from,
+guvner?”
+
+“That’s my affair,” said Kirkwood briskly. “Are you engaged?”
+
+“If you mykes yerself my fare,” returned the cabby shrewdly, “I _ham_.”
+
+“Ten shillings, then, if you get us out of here in one minute and
+to—say—Hyde Park Corner in fifteen.”
+
+“Us?” demanded the fellow aggressively.
+
+Kirkwood motioned toward the passageway. “There’s a lady with me—there.
+Quick now!”
+
+Still the man did not move. “Ten bob,” he bargained; “an’ you runnin’
+awye with th’ stuffy ol’ gent’s fair darter? Come now, guvner, is it
+gen’rous? Myke it a quid an’—”
+
+“A pound then. _Will_ you hurry?”
+
+By way of answer the fellow scrambled hastily up to the box and
+snatched at the reins. “_Ck_! Gee-e hup!” he cried sonorously.
+
+By now the mews had wakened to the fact of the presence of a “toff” in
+its midst. His light topcoat and silk hat-rendered him as conspicuous
+as a red Indian in war-paint would have been on Rotten Row. A cry of
+surprise was raised, and drowned in a volley of ribald inquiry and
+chaff.
+
+Fortunately, the cabby was instant to rein in skilfully before the
+passageway, and Kirkwood had the door open before the four-wheeler
+stopped. The girl, hugging her cloak about her, broke cover (whereat
+the hue and cry redoubled), and sprang into the body of the vehicle.
+Kirkwood followed, shutting the door. As the cab lurched forward he
+leaned over and drew down the window-shade, shielding the girl from
+half a hundred prying eyes. At the same time they gathered momentum,
+banging swiftly, if loudly out of the mews.
+
+An urchin, leaping on the step to spy in Kirkwood’s window, fell off,
+yelping, as the driver’s whiplash curled about his shanks.
+
+The gloom of the tunnel inclosed them briefly ere the lights of the
+Hog-in-the-Pound flashed by and the wheels began to roll more easily.
+Kirkwood drew back with a sigh of relief.
+
+“Thank God!” he said softly.
+
+The girl had no words.
+
+Worried by her silence, solicitous lest, the strain ended, she might be
+on the point of fainting, he let up the shade and lowered the window at
+her side.
+
+She seemed to have collapsed in her corner. Against the dark upholstery
+her hair shone like pale gold in the half-light; her eyes were closed
+and she held a handkerchief to her lips; the other hand lay limp.
+
+“Miss Calendar?”
+
+She started, and something bulky fell from the seat and thumped heavily
+on the floor. Kirkwood bent to pick it up, and so for the first time
+was made aware that she had brought with her a small black gladstone
+bag of considerable weight. As he placed it on the forward seat their
+eyes met.
+
+“I didn’t know—” he began.
+
+“It was to get that,” she hastened to explain, “that my father sent me
+...”
+
+“Yes,” he assented in a tone indicating his complete comprehension. “I
+trust ...” he added vaguely, and neglected to complete the observation,
+losing himself in a maze of conjecture not wholly agreeable. This was a
+new phase of the adventure. He eyed the bag uneasily. What did it
+contain? How did he know ...?
+
+Hastily he abandoned that line of thought. He had no right to infer
+anything whatever, who had thrust himself uninvited into her
+concerns—uninvited, that was to say, in the second instance, having
+been once definitely given his congé. Inevitably, however, a thousand
+unanswerable questions pestered him; just as, at each fresh facet of
+mystery disclosed by the sequence of the adventure, his bewilderment
+deepened.
+
+The girl stirred restlessly. “I have been thinking,” she volunteered in
+a troubled tone, “that there is absolutely no way I know of, to thank
+you properly.”
+
+“It is enough if I’ve been useful,” he rose in gallantry to the
+emergency.
+
+“That,” she commented, “was very prettily said. But then I have never
+known any one more kind and courteous and—and considerate, than you.”
+There was no savor of flattery in the simple and direct statement;
+indeed, she was looking away from him, out of the window, and her face
+was serious with thought; she seemed to be speaking of, rather than to,
+Kirkwood. “And I have been wondering,” she continued with unaffected
+candor, “what you must be thinking of me.”
+
+“I? ... What should I think of you, Miss Calendar?”
+
+With the air of a weary child she laid her head against the cushions
+again, face to him, and watched him through lowered lashes, unsmiling.
+
+“You might be thinking that an explanation is due you. Even the way we
+were brought together was extraordinary, Mr. Kirkwood. You must be very
+generous, as generous as you have shown yourself brave, not to require
+some sort of an explanation of me.”
+
+“I don’t see it that way.”
+
+“I do ... You have made me like you very much, Mr. Kirkwood.”
+
+He shot her a covert glance—causelessly, for her _naiveté_ was
+flawless. With a feeling of some slight awe he understood this—a
+sensation of sincere reverence for the unspoiled, candid, child’s heart
+and mind that were hers. “I’m glad,” he said simply; “very glad, if
+that’s the case, and presupposing I deserve it. Personally,” he
+laughed, “I seem to myself to have been rather forward.”
+
+“No; only kind and a gentleman.”
+
+“But—please!” he protested.
+
+“Oh, but I mean it, every word! Why shouldn’t I? In a little while, ten
+minutes, half an hour, we shall have seen the last of each other. Why
+should I not tell you how I appreciate all that you have unselfishly
+done for me?”
+
+“If you put it that way,—I’m sure I don’t know; beyond that it
+embarrasses me horribly to have you overestimate me so. If any courage
+has been shown this night, it is yours ... But I’m forgetting again.”
+He thought to divert her. “Where shall I tell the cabby to go this
+time, Miss Calendar?”
+
+“Craven Street, please,” said the girl, and added a house number. “I am
+to meet my father there, with this,”—indicating the gladstone bag.
+
+Kirkwood thrust head and shoulders out the window and instructed the
+cabby accordingly; but his ruse had been ineffectual, as he found when
+he sat back again. Quite composedly the girl took up the thread of
+conversation where it had been broken off.
+
+“It’s rather hard to keep silence, when you’ve been so good. I don’t
+want you to think me less generous than yourself, but, truly, I can
+tell you nothing.” She sighed a trace resentfully; or so he thought.
+“There is little enough in this—this wretched affair, that I understand
+myself; and that little, I may not tell ... I want you to know that.”
+
+“I understand, Miss Calendar.”
+
+“There’s one thing I may say, however. I have done nothing wrong
+to-night, I believe,” she added quickly.
+
+“I’ve never for an instant questioned that,” he returned with a qualm
+of shame; for what he said was not true.
+
+“Thank you ...”
+
+The four-wheeler swung out of Oxford Street into Charing Cross Road.
+Kirkwood noted the fact with a feeling of some relief that their ride
+was to be so short; like many of his fellow-sufferers from “the
+artistic temperament,” he was acutely disconcerted by spoken words of
+praise and gratitude; Miss Calendar, unintentionally enough, had
+succeeded only in rendering him self-conscious and ill at ease.
+
+Nor had she fully relieved her mind, nor voiced all that perturbed her.
+“There’s one thing more,” she said presently: “my father. I—I hope you
+will think charitably of him.”
+
+“Indeed, I’ve no reason or right to think otherwise.”
+
+“I was afraid—afraid his actions might have seemed peculiar, to-night
+...”
+
+“There are lots of things I don’t understand, Miss Calendar. Some day,
+perhaps, it will all clear up,—this trouble of yours. At least, one
+supposes it is trouble, of some sort. And then you will tell me the
+whole story.... Won’t you?” Kirkwood insisted.
+
+“I’m afraid not,” she said, with a smile of shadowed sadness. “We are
+to say good night in a moment or two, and—it will be good-by as well.
+It’s unlikely that we shall ever meet again.”
+
+“I refuse positively to take such a gloomy view of the case!”
+
+She shook her head, laughing with him, but with shy regret. “It’s so,
+none the less. We are leaving London this very night, my father and
+I—leaving England, for that matter.”
+
+“Leaving England?” he echoed. “You’re not by any chance bound for
+America, are you?”
+
+“I ... can’t tell you.”
+
+“But you can tell me this: are you booked on the _Minneapolis_?”
+
+“No—o; it is a—quite another boat.”
+
+“Of course!” he commented savagely. “It wouldn’t be me to have _any_
+sort of luck!”
+
+She made no reply beyond a low laugh. He stared gloomily out of his
+window, noting indifferently that they were passing the National
+Gallery. On their left Trafalgar Square stretched, broad and bare, a
+wilderness of sooty stone with an air of mutely tolerating its
+incongruous fountains. Through Charing Cross roared a tide-rip of
+motor-busses and hackney carriages.
+
+Glumly the young man foresaw the passing of his abbreviated romance;
+their destination was near at hand. Brentwick had been right, to some
+extent, at least; it was quite true that the curtain had been rung up
+that very night, upon Kirkwood’s Romance; unhappily, as Brentwick had
+not foreseen, it was immediately to be rung down.
+
+The cab rolled soberly into the Strand.
+
+“Since we are to say good-by so very soon,” suggested Kirkwood, “may I
+ask a parting favor, Miss Calendar?”
+
+She regarded him with friendly eyes. “You have every right,” she
+affirmed gently.
+
+“Then please to tell me frankly: are you going into any further
+danger?”
+
+“And is that the only boon you crave at my hands, Mr. Kirkwood?”
+
+“Without impertinence ...”
+
+For a little time, waiting for him to conclude his vague phrase, she
+watched him in an expectant silence. But the man was diffident to a
+degree—At length, somewhat unconsciously, “I think not,” she answered.
+“No; there will be no danger awaiting me at Mrs. Hallam’s. You need not
+fear for me any more—Thank you.”
+
+He lifted his brows at the unfamiliar name. “Mrs. Hallam—?”
+
+“I am going to her house in Craven Street.”
+
+“Your father is to meet you there?”—persistently.
+
+“He promised to.”
+
+“But if he shouldn’t?”
+
+“Why—” Her eyes clouded; she pursed her lips over the conjectural
+annoyance. “Why, in that event, I suppose—It would be very
+embarrassing. You see, I don’t know Mrs. Hallam; I don’t know that she
+expects me, unless my father is already there. They are old friends—I
+could drive round for a while and come back, I suppose.”
+
+But she made it plain that the prospect did not please her.
+
+“Won’t you let me ask if Mr. Calender is there, before you get out,
+then? I don’t like to be dismissed,” he laughed; “and, you know, you
+shouldn’t go wandering round all alone.”
+
+The cab drew up. Kirkwood put a hand on the door and awaited her will.
+
+“It—it would be very kind ... I hate to impose upon you.”
+
+He turned the knob and got out. “If you’ll wait one moment,” he said
+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.
+
+With a sigh he surrendered to the flesh’s frailty. An early cabby,
+cruising up from Cannon Street station on the off-chance of finding
+some one astir in the city, aside from the doves and sparrows, suffered
+the surprise of his life when Kirkwood hailed him. His face was blank
+with amazement when he reined in, and his eyes bulged when the
+prospective fare, on impulse, explained his urgent needs. Happily he
+turned out a fair representative of his class, an intelligent and
+unfuddled cabby.
+
+“Jump in, sir,” he told Kirkwood cheerfully, as soon as he had
+assimilated the latter’s demands. “I knows precisely wotcher wants.
+Leave it all to me.”
+
+The admonition was all but superfluous; Kirkwood was unable, for the
+time being, to do aught else than resign his fate into another’s
+guidance. Once in the cab he slipped insensibly into a nap, and slept
+soundly on, as reckless of the cab’s swift pace and continuous jouncing
+as of the sunlight glaring full in his tired young face.
+
+He may have slept twenty minutes; he awoke faint with drowsiness,
+tingling from head to toe from fatigue, and in distress of a queer
+qualm in the pit of his stomach, to find the hansom at rest and the
+driver on the step, shaking his fare with kindly determination. “Oh, a’
+right,” he assented surlily, and by sheer force of will made himself
+climb out to the sidewalk; where, having rubbed his eyes, stretched
+enormously and yawned discourteously in the face of the East End, he
+was once more himself and a hundred times refreshed into the bargain.
+Contentedly he counted three shillings into the cabby’s palm—the fare
+named being one-and-six.
+
+“The shilling over and above the tip’s for finding me the waterman and
+boat,” he stipulated.
+
+“Right-o. You’ll mind the ’orse a minute, sir?”
+
+Kirkwood nodded. The man touched his hat and disappeared inexplicably.
+Kirkwood, needlessly attaching himself to the reins near the animal’s
+head, pried his sense of observation open and became alive to the fact
+that he stood in a quarter of London as strange to him as had been
+Bermondsey Wall.
+
+To this day he can not put a name to it; he surmises that it was
+Wapping.
+
+Ramshackle tenements with sharp gable roofs lined either side of the
+way. Frowsy women draped themselves over the window-sills. Pallid and
+wasted parodies on childhood contested the middle of the street with
+great, slow drays, drawn by enormous horses. On the sidewalks twin
+streams of masculine humanity flowed without rest, both bound in the
+same direction: dock laborers going to their day’s work. Men of every
+nationality known to the world (he thought) passed him in his short
+five-minute wait by the horse’s head; Britons, brown East Indians,
+blacks from Jamaica, swart Italians, Polaks, Russian Jews, wire-drawn
+Yankees, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, even a Nubian or two: uniform
+in these things only, that their backs were bent with toil, bowed
+beyond mending, and their faces stamped with the blurred type-stamp of
+the dumb laboring brute. A strangely hideous procession, they shambled
+on, for the most part silent, all uncouth and unreal in the clear
+morning glow.
+
+The outlander was sensible of some relief when his cabby popped
+hurriedly out of the entrance to a tenement, a dull-visaged,
+broad-shouldered waterman ambling more slowly after.
+
+“Nevvy of mine, sir,” announced the cabby; “and a fust-ryte waterman;
+knows the river like a book, he do.”
+
+The nephew touched his forelock sheepishly.
+
+“Thank you,” said Kirkwood; and, turning to the man, “Your boat?” he
+asked with the brevity of weariness.
+
+“This wye, sir.”
+
+At his guide’s heels Kirkwood threaded the crowd and, entering the
+tenement, stumbled through a gloomy and unsavory passage, to come out
+at last upon a scanty, unrailed veranda overlooking the river. Ten feet
+below, perhaps, foul waters purred and eddied round the piles
+supporting the rear of the building. On one hand a ladder-like flight
+of rickety steps descended to a floating stage to which a heavy rowboat
+lay moored. In the latter a second waterman was seated bailing out
+bilge with a rusty can.
+
+“’Ere we are, sir,” said the cabman’s nephew, pausing at the head of
+the steps. “Now, where’s it to be?”
+
+The American explained tersely that he had a message to deliver a
+friend, who had shipped aboard a vessel known as the _Alethea_,
+scheduled to sail at floodtide; further than which deponent averred
+naught.
+
+The waterman scratched his head. “A ’ard job, sir; not knowin’ wot kind
+of a boat she are mykes it ’arder.” He waited hopefully.
+
+“Ten shillings,” volunteered Kirkwood promptly; “ten shillings if you
+get me aboard her before she weighs anchor; fifteen if I keep you out
+more than an hour, and still you put me aboard. After that we’ll make
+other terms.”
+
+The man promptly turned his back to hail his mate. “’Arf a quid, Bob,
+if we puts this gent aboard a wessel name o’ _Allytheer_ afore she
+syles at turn o’ tide.”
+
+In the boat the man with the bailing can turned up an impassive
+countenance. “Coom down,” he clenched the bargain; and set about
+shipping the sweeps.
+
+Kirkwood crept down the shaky ladder and deposited himself in the stern
+of the boat; the younger boatman settled himself on the midship thwart.
+
+“Ready?”
+
+“Ready,” assented old Bob from the bows. He cast off the painter,
+placed one sweep against the edge of the stage, and with a vigorous
+thrust pushed off; then took his seat.
+
+Bows swinging down-stream, the boat shot out from the shore.
+
+“How’s the tide?” demanded Kirkwood, his impatience growing.
+
+“On th’ turn, sir,” he was told.
+
+For a long moment broadside to the current, the boat responded to the
+sturdy pulling of the port sweeps. Another moment, and it was in full
+swing, the watermen bending lustily to their task. Under their
+unceasing urge, the broad-beamed, heavy craft, aided by the ebbing
+tide, surged more and more rapidly through the water; the banks, grim
+and unsightly with their towering, impassive warehouses broken by
+toppling wooden tenements, slipped swiftly up-stream. Ship after ship
+was passed, sailing vessels in the majority, swinging sluggishly at
+anchor, drifting slowly with the river, or made fast to the
+goods-stages of the shore; and in keen anxiety lest he should overlook
+the right one, Kirkwood searched their bows and sterns for names, which
+in more than one case proved hardly legible.
+
+The _Alethea_ was not of their number.
+
+In the course of some ten minutes, the watermen drove the boat sharply
+inshore, bringing her up alongside another floating stage, in the
+shadow of another tenement.—both so like those from which they had
+embarked that Kirkwood would have been unable to distinguish one from
+another.
+
+In the bows old Bob lifted up a stentorian voice, summoning one
+William.
+
+Recognizing that there was some design in this, the passenger subdued
+his disapproval of the delay, and sat quiet.
+
+In answer to the third ear-racking hail, a man, clothed simply in dirty
+shirt and disreputable trousers, showed himself in the doorway above,
+rubbing the sleep out of a red, bloated countenance with a mighty and
+grimy fist.
+
+“’Ello,” he said surlily. “Wot’s th’ row?”
+
+“’Oo,” interrogated old Bob, holding the boat steady by grasping the
+stage, “was th’ party wot engyged yer larst night, Bill?”
+
+“Party name o’ _Allytheer_,” growled the drowsy one. “W’y?”
+
+“Party ’ere’s lookin’ for ’im. Where’ll I find this _Allytheer?_”
+
+“Best look sharp ’r yer won’t find ’im,” retorted the one above. “’E
+_was_ at anchor off Bow Creek larst night.”
+
+Kirkwood’s heart leaped in hope. “What sort of a vessel was she?” he
+asked, half rising in his eagerness.
+
+“Brigantine, sir.”
+
+“_Thank—you!_” replied Kirkwood explosively, resuming his seat with
+uncalculated haste as old Bob, deaf to the amenities of social
+intercourse in an emergency involving as much as ten-bob, shoved off
+again.
+
+And again the boat was flying down in midstream, the leaden waters,
+shot with gold of the morning sun, parting sullenly beneath its bows.
+
+The air was still, heavy and tepid; the least exertion brought out
+beaded moisture on face and hands. In the east hung a turgid sky, dull
+with haze, through which the mounting sun swam like a plaque of brass;
+overhead it was clear and cloudless, but besmirched as if the polished
+mirror of the heavens had been fouled by the breath of departing night.
+
+On the right, ahead, Greenwich Naval College loomed up, the great
+gray-stone buildings beyond the embankment impressively dominating the
+scene, in happy relief against the wearisome monotony of the
+river-banks; it came abreast; and ebbed into the backwards of the
+scene.
+
+The watermen straining at the sweeps, the boat sped into Blackwall
+Reach, Bugsby Marshes a splash of lurid green to port, dreary Cubitt
+Town and the West India Docks to starboard. Here the river ran thick
+with shipping.
+
+“Are we near?” Kirkwood would know; and by way of reply had a grunt of
+the younger waterman.
+
+Again, “Will we make it?” he asked.
+
+The identical grunt answered him; he was free to interpret it as he
+would; young William—as old Bob named him—had no breath for idle words.
+Kirkwood subsided, controlling his impatience to the best of his
+ability; the men, he told himself again and again, were earning their
+pay, whether or not they gained the goal of his desire.... Their labors
+were titanic; on their temples and foreheads the knotted veins stood
+out like discolored whip-cord; their faces were the shade of raw beef,
+steaming with sweat; their eyes protruded with the strain that set
+their jaws like vises; their chests heaved and shrank like bellows;
+their backs curved, straightened, and bent again in rhythmic unison as
+tiring to the eye as the swinging of a pendulum.
+
+Hugging the marshy shore, they rounded the Blackwall Point. Young
+William looked to Kirkwood, caught his eye, and nodded.
+
+“Here?”
+
+Kirkwood rose, balancing himself against the leap and sway of the boat.
+
+“Sumwhere’s ... ’long ... o’ ’ere.”
+
+From right to left his eager glance swept the river’s widening reach.
+Vessels were there in abundance, odd, unwieldy, blunt-bowed craft with
+huge, rakish, tawny sails; long strings of flat barges, pyramidal
+mounds of coal on each, lashed to another and convoyed by panting tugs;
+steam cargo boats, battered, worn, rusted sore through their age-old
+paint; a steel leviathan of the deep seas, half cargo, half passenger
+boat, warping reluctantly into the mouth of the Victoria Dock tidal
+basin,—but no brigantine, no sailing vessel of any type.
+
+The young man’s lips checked a cry that was half a sob of bitter
+disappointment. He had entered into the spirit of the chase heart and
+soul, with an enthusiasm that was strange to him, when he came to look
+back upon the time; and to fail, even though failure had been
+discounted a hundredfold since the inception of his mad adventure,
+seemed hard, very hard.
+
+He sat down suddenly. “She’s gone!” he cried in a hollow gasp.
+
+The boatmen eased upon their oars, and old Bob stood up in the bows,
+scanning the river-scape with keen eyes shielded by a level palm. Young
+William drooped forward suddenly, head upon knees, and breathed
+convulsively. The boat drifted listlessly with the current.
+
+Old Bob panted: “‘Dawn’t—see—nawthin’—o’ ’er.” He resumed his seat.
+
+“There’s no hope, I suppose?”
+
+The elder waterman shook his head. “‘Carn’t sye.... Might be round—nex’
+bend—might be—passin’ Purfleet.... ’Point is—me an’ young Wilyum
+’ere—carn’t do no more—’n we ’as. We be wore out.”
+
+“Yes,” Kirkwood assented, disconsolate, “You’ve certainly earned your
+pay.” Then hope revived; he was very young in heart, you know. “Can’t
+you suggest something? I’ve _got_ to catch that ship!”
+
+Old Bob wagged his head in slow negation; young William lifted his.
+
+“There’s a rylewye runs by Woolwich,” he ventured. “Yer might tyke
+tryne an’ go to Sheerness, sir. Yer’d be positive o’ passin’ ’er if she
+didn’t syle afore ’igh-tide. ’Ire a boat at Sheerness an’ put out an’
+look for ’er.”
+
+“How far’s Woolwich?” Kirkwood demanded instantly.
+
+“Mile,” said the elder man. “Tyke yer for five-bob extry.”
+
+“Done!”
+
+Young William dashed the sweat from his eyes, wiped his palms on his
+hips, and fitted the sweeps again to the wooden tholes. Old Bob was as
+ready. With an inarticulate cry they gave way.
+
+
+
+
+X
+DESPERATE MEASURES
+
+
+Old Bob seemed something inclined toward optimism, when the boat lay
+alongside a landing-stage at Woolwich, and Kirkwood had clambered
+ashore.
+
+“Yer’ll mebbe myke it,” the waterman told him with a weatherwise survey
+of the skies. “Wind’s freshenin’ from the east’rds, an’ that’ll ’old
+’er back a bit, sir.”
+
+“Arsk th’ wye to th’ Dorkyard Styshun,” young William volunteered.
+“’Tis th’ shortest walk, sir. I ’opes yer catches ’er.... Thanky, sir.”
+
+He caught dextrously the sovereign which Kirkwood, in ungrudging
+liberality, spared them of his store of two. The American nodded
+acknowledgments and adieux, with a faded smile deprecating his chances
+of winning the race, sorely handicapped as he was. He was very, very
+tired, and in his heart suspected that he would fail. But, if he did,
+he would at least be able to comfort himself that it was not for lack
+of trying. He set his teeth on that covenant, in grim determination;
+either there was a strain of the bulldog latent in the Kirkwood breed
+or else his infatuation gripped him more strongly than he guessed.
+
+Yet he suspected something of its power; he knew that this was
+altogether an insane proceeding, and that the lure that led him on was
+Dorothy Calendar. A strange dull light glowed in his weary eyes, on the
+thought of her. He’d go through fire and water in her service. She was
+costing him dear, perhaps was to cost him dearer still; and perhaps
+there’d be for his guerdon no more than a “Thank you, Mr. Kirkwood!” at
+the end of the passage. But that would be no less than his deserts; he
+was not to forget that he was interfering unwarrantably; the girl was
+in her father’s hands, surely safe enough there—to the casual mind. If
+her partnership in her parent’s fortunes were distasteful, she endured
+it passively, without complaint.
+
+He decided that it was his duty to remind himself, from time to time,
+that his main interest must be in the game itself, in the solution of
+the riddle; whatever should befall, he must look for no reward for his
+gratuitous and self-appointed part. Indeed he was all but successful in
+persuading himself that it was the fascination of adventure alone that
+drew him on.
+
+Whatever the lure, it was inexorable; instead of doing as a sensible
+person would have done—returning to London for a long rest in his hotel
+room, ere striving to retrieve his shattered fortunes—Philip Kirkwood
+turned up the village street, intent only to find the railway station
+and catch the first available train for Sheerness, were that an early
+one or a late.
+
+A hapchance native whom he presently encountered, furnished minute
+directions for reaching the Dockyard Station of the Southeastern and
+Chatham Rail-way, adding comfortable information to the effect that the
+next east-bound train would pass through in ten minutes; if Kirkwood
+would mend his pace he could make it easily, with time to spare.
+
+Kirkwood mended his pace accordingly, but, contrary to the prediction,
+had no time to spare at all. Even as he stormed the ticket-grating, the
+train was thundering in at the platform. Therefore a nervous ticket
+agent passed him out a first-class ticket instead of the third-class he
+had asked for; and there was no time wherein to have the mistake
+rectified. Kirkwood planked down the fare, swore, and sprinted for the
+carriages.
+
+The first compartment whose door he jerked violently open, proved to be
+occupied, and was, moreover, not a smoking-car. He received a fleeting
+impression of a woman’s startled eyes, staring into his own through a
+thin mesh of veiling, fell off the running-board, slammed the door, and
+hurled himself to-wards the next compartment. Here happier fortune
+attended upon his desire; the box-like section was untenanted, and a
+notice blown upon the window-glass announced that it was “2nd Class
+Smoking.” Kirkwood promptly tumbled in; and when he turned to shut the
+door the coaches were moving.
+
+A pipe helped him to bear up while the train was making its two other
+stops in the Borough of Woolwich: a circumstance so maddening to a man
+in a hurry, that it set Kirkwood’s teeth on edge with sheer impatience,
+and made him long fervently for the land of his birth, where they do
+things differently—where the Board of Directors of a railway company
+doesn’t erect three substantial passenger depôts in the course of a
+mile and a half of overgrown village. It consoled him little that none
+disputed with him his lonely possession of the compartment, that he
+_had_ caught the Sheerness train, or that he was really losing no time;
+a sense of deep dejection had settled down upon his consciousness, with
+a realization of how completely a fool’s errand was this of his. He
+felt foredoomed to failure; he was never to see Dorothy Calendar again;
+and his brain seemed numb with disappointment.
+
+Rattling and swaying, the train left the town behind.
+
+Presently he put aside his pipe and stared blankly out at a reeling
+landscape, the pleasant, homely, smiling countryside of Kent. A deeper
+melancholy tinted his mind: Dorothy Calendar was for ever lost to him.
+
+The trucks drummed it out persistently—he thought, vindictively:
+“_Lost!... Lost!... For ever lost!..._”
+
+And he had made—was then making—a damned fool of himself. The trucks
+had no need to din _that_ into his thick skull by their ceaseless
+iteration; he knew it, would not deny it....
+
+And it was all his own fault. He’d had his chance, Calendar had offered
+him it. If only he had closed with the fat adventurer!...
+
+Before his eyes field and coppice, hedge and homestead, stream and
+flowing highway, all blurred and ran streakily into one another, like a
+highly impressionistic water-color. He could make neither head nor tail
+of the flying views, and so far as coherent thought was concerned, he
+could not put two ideas together. Without understanding distinctly, he
+presently did a more wise and wholesome thing: which was to topple
+limply over on the cushions and fall fast asleep.
+
+
+After a long time he seemed to realize rather hazily that the
+carriage-door had been opened to admit somebody. Its smart closing
+_bang_ shocked him awake. He sat up, blinking in confusion, hardly
+conscious of more, to begin with, than that the train had paused and
+was again in full flight. Then, his senses clearing, he became aware
+that his solitary companion, just entered, was a woman. She was seated
+over across from him, her back to the engine, in an attitude which
+somehow suggested a highly nonchalant frame of mind. She laughed, and
+immediately her speaking voice was high and sweet in his hearing.
+
+“Really, you know, Mr. Kirkwood, I simply couldn’t contain my
+impatience another instant.”
+
+Kirkwood gasped and tried to re-collect his wits.
+
+“Beg pardon—I’ve been asleep,” he said stupidly.
+
+“Yes. I’m sorry to have disturbed you, but, you know, you must make
+allowances for a woman’s nerves.”
+
+Beneath his breath the bewildered man said: “The deuce!” and above it,
+in a stupefied tone: “Mrs. Hallam!”
+
+She nodded in a not unfriendly fashion, smiling brightly. “Myself, Mr.
+Kirkwood! Really, our predestined paths are badly tangled, just now;
+aren’t they? Were you surprised to find me in here, with you? Come now,
+confess you were!”
+
+He remarked the smooth, girlish freshness of her cheeks, the sense and
+humor of her mouth, the veiled gleam of excitement in her eyes of the
+changing sea; and saw, as well, that she was dressed for traveling,
+sensibly but with an air, and had brought a small hand-bag with her.
+
+“Surprised and delighted,” he replied, recovering, with mendacity so
+intentional and obvious that the woman laughed aloud.
+
+“I knew you’d be!... You see, I had the carriage ahead, the one you
+didn’t take. I was so disappointed when you flung up to the door and
+away again! You didn’t see me hanging half out the window, to watch
+where you went, did you? That’s how I discovered that your discourtesy
+was unintentional, that you hadn’t recognized me,—by the fact that you
+took this compartment, right behind my own.”
+
+She paused invitingly, but Kirkwood, grown wary, contented himself with
+picking up his pipe and carefully knocking out the dottle on the
+window-ledge.
+
+“I was glad to see _you_,” she affirmed; “but only partly because you
+were you, Mr. Kirkwood. The other and major part was because sight of
+you confirmed my own secret intuition. You see, I’m quite old enough
+and wise enough to question even my own intuitions.”
+
+“A woman wise enough for that is an adult prodigy,” he ventured
+cautiously.
+
+“It’s experience and age. I insist upon the age; I the mother of a
+grown-up boy! So I deliberately ran after you, changing when we stopped
+at Newington. You might’ve escaped me if I had waited until We got to
+Queensborough.”
+
+Again she paused in open expectancy. Kirkwood, perplexed, put the pipe
+in his pocket, and assumed a factitious look of resignation, regarding
+her askance with that whimsical twist of his eyebrows.
+
+“For you are going to Queensborough, aren’t you, Mr. Kirkwood?”
+
+“Queensborough?” he echoed blankly; and, in fact, he was at a loss to
+follow her drift. “No, Mrs. Hallam; I’m not bound there.”
+
+Her surprise was apparent; she made no effort to conceal it. “But,” she
+faltered, “if not there—”
+
+“’Give you my word, Mrs. Hallam, I have no intention whatever of going
+to Queensborough,” Kirkwood protested.
+
+“I don’t understand.” The nervous drumming of a patent-leather covered
+toe, visible beneath the hem of her dress, alone betrayed a rising tide
+of impatience. “Then my intuition _was_ at fault!”
+
+“In this instance, if it was at all concerned with my insignificant
+affairs, yes—most decidedly at fault.”
+
+She shook her head, regarding him with grave suspicion. “I hardly know:
+whether to believe you. I think....”
+
+Kirkwood’s countenance displayed an added shade of red. After a moment,
+“I mean no discourtesy,” he began stiffly, “but—”
+
+“But you don’t care a farthing whether I believe you or not?”
+
+He caught her laughing eye, and smiled, the flush subsiding.
+
+“Very well, then! Now let us see: Where _are_ you bound?”
+
+Kirkwood looked out of the window.
+
+“I’m convinced it’s a rendezvous...?”
+
+Kirkwood smiled patiently at the landscape.
+
+“Is Dorothy Calendar so very, very beautiful, Mr. Kirkwood?”—with a
+trace of malice.
+
+Ostentatiously Kirkwood read the South Eastern and Chatham’s framed
+card of warning, posted just above Mrs. Hallam’s head, to all such
+incurable lunatics as are possessed of a desire to travel on the
+running-boards of railway carriages.
+
+“You are going to meet her, aren’t you?”
+
+He gracefully concealed a yawn.
+
+The woman’s plan of attack took another form. “Last night, when you
+told me your story, I believed you.”
+
+He devoted himself to suppressing the temptingly obvious retort, and
+succeeded; but though he left it unspoken, the humor of it twitched the
+corners of his mouth; and Mrs. Hallam was observant. So that her next
+attempt to draw him out was edged with temper.
+
+“I believed you an American but a gentleman; it appears that, if you
+ever were the latter, you’ve fallen so low that you willingly cast your
+lot with thieves.”
+
+Having exhausted his repertoire of rudenesses, Kirkwood took to
+twiddling his thumbs.
+
+“I want to ask you if you think it fair to me or my son, to leave us in
+ignorance of the place where you are to meet the thieves who stole
+our—my son’s jewels?”
+
+“Mrs. Hallam,” he said soberly, “if I am going to meet Mr. Calendar or
+Mr. Mulready, I have no assurance of that fact.”
+
+There was only the briefest of pauses, during which she analyzed this;
+then, quickly, “But you hope to?” she snapped.
+
+He felt that the only adequate retort to this would be a shrug of his
+shoulders; doubted his ability to carry one off; and again took refuge
+in silence.
+
+The woman abandoned a second plan of siege, with a readiness that did
+credit to her knowledge of mankind. She thought out the next very
+carefully, before opening with a masked battery.
+
+“Mr. Kirkwood, can’t we be friends—this aside?”
+
+“Nothing could please me more, Mrs. Hallam!”
+
+“I’m sorry if I’ve annoyed you—”
+
+“And I, too, have been rude.”
+
+“Last night, when you cut away so suddenly, you prevented my making you
+a proposal, a sort of a business proposition....”
+
+“Yes—?”
+
+“To come over to our side—”
+
+“I thought so. That was why I went.”
+
+“Yes; I understood. But this morning, when you’ve had time to think it
+over—?”
+
+“I have no choice in the matter, Mrs. Hallam.” The green eyes darkened
+ominously. “You mean—I am to understand, then, that you’re against us,
+that you prefer to side with swindlers and scoundrels, all because of
+a—”
+
+She discovered him eying her with a smile of such inscrutable and
+sardonic intelligence, that the words died on her lips, and she
+crimsoned, treasonably to herself. For he saw it; and the belief he had
+conceived while attending to her tissue of fabrication, earlier that
+morning, was strengthened to the point of conviction that, if anything
+had been stolen by anybody, Mrs. Hallam and her son owned it as little
+as Calendar.
+
+As for the woman, she felt she had steadily lost, rather than gained,
+ground; and the flash of anger that had colored her cheeks, lit twin
+beacons in her eyes, which she resolutely fought down until they faded
+to mere gleams of resentment and determination. But she forgot to
+control her lips; and they are the truest indices to a woman’s
+character and temperament; and Kirkwood did not overlook the
+circumstance that their specious sweetness had vanished, leaving them
+straight, set and hard, quite the reverse of attractive.
+
+“So,” she said slowly, after a silent time, “you are not for
+Queensborough! The corollary of that _admission_, Mr. Kirkwood, is that
+you are for Sheerness.”
+
+“I believe,” he replied wearily, “that there are no other stations on
+this line, after Newington.”
+
+“It follows, then, that—that I follow.” And in answer to his perturbed
+glance, she added: “Oh, I’ll grant that intuition is sometimes a poor
+guide. But if you meet George Calendar, so shall I. Nothing can prevent
+that. You can’t hinder me.”
+
+Considerably amused, he chuckled. “Let us talk of other things, Mrs.
+Hallam,” he suggested pleasantly. “How is your son?”
+
+At this juncture the brakes began to shriek and grind upon the wheels.
+The train slowed; it stopped; and the voice of a guard could be heard
+admonishing passengers for Queensborough Pier to alight and take the
+branch line. In the noise the woman’s response was drowned, and
+Kirkwood was hardly enough concerned for poor Freddie to repeat his
+question.
+
+When, after a little, the train pulled out of the junction, neither
+found reason to resume the conversation. During the brief balance of
+the journey Mrs. Hallam presumably had food for thought; she frowned,
+pursed her lips, and with one daintily gloved forefinger followed a
+seam of her tailored skirt; while Kirkwood sat watching and wondering
+how to rid himself of her, if she proved really as troublesome as she
+threatened to be.
+
+Also, he wondered continually what it was all about. Why did Mrs.
+Hallam suspect him of designing to meet Calendar at Queensborough? Had
+she any tangible ground for believing that Calendar could be found in
+Queensborough? Presumably she had, since she was avowedly in pursuit of
+that gentleman, and, Kirkwood inferred, had booked for Queensborough.
+Was he, then, running away from Calendar and his daughter to chase a
+will-o’-the-wisp of his credulous fancy, off Sheerness shore?
+
+Disturbing reflection. He scowled over it, then considered the other
+side of the face. Presuming Mrs. Hallam to have had reasonably
+dependable assurance that Calendar would stop in Queensborough, would
+she so readily have abandoned her design to catch him there, on the
+mere supposition that Kirkwood might be looking for him in Sheerness?
+That did not seem likely to one who esteemed Mrs. Hallam’s acumen as
+highly as Kirkwood did. He brightened up, forgot that his was a fool’s
+errand, and began again to project strategic plans into a problematic
+future.
+
+A sudden jolt interrupted this pastime, and the warning screech of the
+brakes informed that he had no time to scheme, but had best continue on
+the plan of action that had brought him thus far—that is, trust to his
+star and accept what should befall without repining.
+
+He rose, opened the door, and holding it so, turned.
+
+“I regret, Mrs. Hallam,” he announced, smiling his crooked smile, “that
+a pressing engagement is about to prohibit my ’squiring you through the
+ticket-gates. You understand, I’m sure.”
+
+His irrepressible humor proved infectious; and Mrs. Hallam’s spirit ran
+as high as his own. She was smiling cheerfully when she, too, rose.
+
+“I also am in some haste,” she averred demurely, gathering up her
+hand-bag and umbrella.
+
+A raised platform shot in beside the carriage, and the speed was so
+sensibly moderated that the train seemed to be creeping rather than
+running. Kirkwood flung the door wide open and lowered himself to the
+running-board. The end of the track was in sight and—a man who has been
+trained to board San Francisco cable-cars fears to alight from no
+moving vehicle. He swung off, got his balance, and ran swiftly down the
+platform.
+
+A cry from a bystander caused him to glance over his shoulder; Mrs.
+Hallam was then in the act of alighting. As he looked the flurry of
+skirts subsided and she fell into stride, pursuing.
+
+Sleepy Sheerness must have been scandalized, that day, and its gossips
+have acquired ground for many, an uncharitable surmise.
+
+Kirkwood, however, was so fortunate as to gain the wicket before the
+employee there awoke to the situation. Otherwise, such is the temper of
+British petty officialdom, he might have detained the fugitive. As it
+was, Kirkwood surrendered his ticket and ran out into the street with
+his luck still a dominant factor in the race. For, looking back, he saw
+that Mrs. Hallam had been held up at the gate, another victim of
+British red-tape; her ticket read for Queensborough, she was attempting
+to alight one station farther down the line, and while undoubtedly she
+was anxious to pay the excess fare, Heaven alone knew when she would
+succeed in allaying the suspicions and resentment of the ticket-taker.
+
+“That’s good for ten minutes’ start!” Kirkwood crowed. “And it never
+occurred to me—!”
+
+Before the station he found two hacks in waiting, with little to choose
+between them; neither was of a type that did not seem to advertise its
+pre-Victorian fashioning, and to neither was harnessed an animal that
+deserved anything but the epithet of screw. Kirkwood took the nearest
+for no other reason than because it was the nearest, and all but
+startled the driver off his box by offering double-fare for a brisk
+pace and a simple service at the end of the ride. Succinctly he set
+forth his wants, jumped into the antiquated four-wheeler, and threw
+himself down upon musty, dusty cushions to hug himself over the joke
+and bless whatever English board of railway, directors it was that
+first ordained that tickets should be taken up at the end instead of
+the outset of a journey.
+
+It was promptly made manifest that he had further cause for
+gratulation. The cabby, recovering from his amazement, was plying an
+indefatigable whip and thereby eliciting a degree of speed from his
+superannuated nag, that his fare had by no means hoped for, much less
+anticipated. The cab rocked and racketed through Sheerness’ streets at
+a pace which is believed to be unprecedented and unrivaled; its
+passenger, dashed from side to side, had all he could do to keep from
+battering the vehicle to pieces with his head; while it was entirely
+out of the question to attempt to determine whether or not he was being
+pursued. He enjoyed it all hugely.
+
+In a period of time surprisingly short, he saw, from fleeting glimpses
+of the scenery to be obtained through the reeling windows, that they
+were threading the outskirts of the town; synchronously, whether by
+design or through actual inability to maintain it, the speed was
+moderated. And in the course of a few more minutes the cab stopped
+definitely.
+
+Kirkwood clambered painfully out, shook himself together and the
+bruises out of his bones, and looked fearfully back.
+
+Aside from a slowly settling cloud of dust, the road ran clear as far
+as he could see—to the point, in fact, where the town closed in about
+it.
+
+He had won; at all events in so much as to win meant eluding the
+persevering Mrs. Hallam. But to what end?
+
+Abstractedly he tendered his lonely sovereign to the driver, and
+without even looking at it, crammed the heavy weight of change into his
+pocket; an oversight which not only won him the awe-struck admiration
+of the cabby, but entailed consequences (it may be) he little
+apprehended. It was with an absentminded nod that he acquiesced in the
+man’s announcement that he might arrange about the boat for him.
+Accordingly the cabby disappeared; and Kirkwood continued to stare
+about him, eagerly, hopefully.
+
+He stood on the brink of the Thames estuary, there a possible five
+miles from shore to shore; from his feet, almost, a broad shingle beach
+sloped gently to the water.
+
+On one hand a dilapidated picket-fence enclosed the door-yard of a
+fisherman’s cottage, or, better, hovel,—if it need be accurately
+described—at the door of which the cabby was knocking.
+
+The morning was now well-advanced. The sun rode high, a sphere of
+tarnished flame in a void of silver-gray, its thin cold radiance
+striking pallid sparks from the leaping crests of wind-whipped waves.
+In the east a wall of vapor, dull and lusterless, had taken body since
+the dawn, masking the skies and shutting down upon the sea like some
+vast curtain; and out of the heart of this a bitter and vicious wind
+played like a sword.
+
+To the north, Shoeburyness loomed vaguely, like a low-drifted bank of
+cloud. Off to the right the Nore Lightship danced, a tiny fleck of warm
+crimson in a wilderness of slatey-blue waters, plumed with a myriad of
+vanishing white-caps.
+
+Up the shelving shore, small, puny wavelets dashed in impotent fury,
+and the shingle sang unceasingly its dreary, syncopated monotone. High
+and dry, a few dingy boats lay canted wearily upon their broad,
+swelling sides,—a couple of dories, apparently in daily use; a small
+sloop yacht, dismantled and plainly beyond repair; and an oyster-smack
+also out of commission. About them the beach was strewn with a litter
+of miscellany,—nets, oars, cork buoys, bits of wreckage and driftwood,
+a few fish too long forgotten and (one assumed) responsible in part for
+the foreign wealth of the atmosphere.
+
+Some little distance offshore a fishing-boat, catrigged and not more
+than twenty-feet over all, swung bobbing at her mooring, keen nose
+searching into the wind; at sight of which Kirkwood gave thanks, for
+his adventitious guide had served him well, if that boat were to be
+hired by any manner of persuasion.
+
+But it was to the farther reaches of the estuary that he gave more
+prolonged and most anxious heed, scanning narrowly what shipping was
+there to be seen. Far beyond the lightship a liner was riding the waves
+with serene contempt, making for the river’s mouth and Tilbury Dock.
+Nearer in, a cargo boat was standing out upon the long trail, the white
+of riven waters showing clearly against her unclean freeboard. Out to
+east a little covey of fishing-smacks, red sails well reefed, were
+scudding before the wind like strange affrighted water-fowl, and
+bearing down past a heavy-laden river barge. The latter, with tarpaulin
+battened snugly down over the cockpit and the seas dashing over her
+wash-board until she seemed under water half the time, was forging
+stodgily Londonwards, her bargee at the tiller smoking a placid pipe.
+
+But a single sailing vessel of any notable tonnage was in sight; and
+when he saw her Kirkwood’s heart became buoyant with hope, and he began
+to tremble with nervous eagerness. For he believed her to be the
+_Alethea_.
+
+There’s no mistaking a ship brigantine-rigged for any other style of
+craft that sails the seas.
+
+From her position when first he saw her, Kirkwood could have fancied
+she was tacking out of the mouth of the Medway; but he judged that,
+leaving the Thames’ mouth, she had tacked to starboard until well-nigh
+within hail of Sheerness. Now, having presumably, gone about, she was
+standing out toward the Nore, boring doggedly into the wind. He would
+have given a deal for glasses wherewith to read the name upon her bows,
+but was sensible of no hampering doubts; nor, had he harbored any,
+would they have deterred him. He had set his heart upon the winning of
+his venture, had come too far, risked far too much, to suffer anything
+now to stay his hand and stand between him and Dorothy Calendar.
+Whatever the further risks and hazards, though he should take his life
+in his hands to win to her side, he would struggle on. He recked
+nothing of personal danger; a less selfish passion ran molten in his
+veins, moving him to madness.
+
+Fascinated, he fixed his gaze upon the reeling brigantine, and for a
+space it was as if by longing he had projected his spirit to her
+slanting deck, and were there, pleading his case with the mistress of
+his heart....
+
+Voices approaching brought him back to shore. He turned, resuming his
+mask of sanity, the better to confer with the owner of the cottage and
+boats—a heavy, keen-eyed fellow, ungracious and truculent of habit, and
+chary of his words; as he promptly demonstrated.
+
+“I’ll hire your boat,” Kirkwood told him, “to put me aboard that
+brigantine, off to leeward. We ought to start at once.”
+
+The fisherman shifted his quid of tobacco from cheek to cheek, grunted
+inarticulately, and swung deliberately on his heel, displaying a bull
+neck above a pair of heavy shoulders.
+
+“Dirty weather,” he croaked, facing back from his survey of the eastern
+skies before the American found out whether or not he should resent his
+insolence.
+
+“How much?” Kirkwood demanded curtly, annoyed.
+
+The man hesitated, scowling blackly at the heeling vessel, momentarily
+increasing her distance from shore. Then with a crafty smile, “Two
+pound’,” he declared.
+
+The American nodded. “Very well,” he agreed simply. “Get out your
+boat.”
+
+The fisherman turned away to shamble noisily over the shingle, huge
+booted heels crunching, toward one of the dories. To this he set his
+shoulder, shoving it steadily down the beach until only the stern was
+dry.
+
+Kirkwood looked back, for the last time, up the road to Sheerness.
+Nothing moved upon it. He was rid of Mrs. Hallam, if face to face with
+a sterner problem. He had a few pence over ten shillings in his pocket,
+and had promised to pay the man four times as much. He would have
+agreed to ten times the sum demanded; for the boat he must and would
+have. But he had neglected to conclude his bargain, to come to an
+understanding as to the method of payment; and he felt more than a
+little dubious as to the reception the fisherman would give his
+proposition, sound as he, Kirkwood, knew it to be.
+
+In the background the cabby loitered, gnawed by insatiable curiosity.
+
+The fisherman turned, calling over his shoulder: “If ye’d catch yon
+vessel, come!”
+
+With one final twinge of doubt—the task of placating this surly dog was
+anything but inviting—the American strode to the boat and climbed in,
+taking the stern seat. The fisherman shoved off, wading out thigh-deep
+in the spiteful waves, then threw himself in over the gunwales and
+shipped the oars. Bows swinging offshore, rocking and dancing, the dory
+began to forge slowly toward the anchored boat. In their faces the wind
+beat gustily, and small, slapping waves, breaking against the sides,
+showered them with fine spray....
+
+In time the dory lay alongside the cat-boat, the fisherman with a
+gnarled hand grasping the latter’s gunwale to hold the two together.
+With some difficulty Kirkwood transhipped himself, landing asprawl in
+the cockpit, amid a tangle of cordage slippery with scales. The skipper
+followed, with clumsy expertness bringing the dory’s painter with him
+and hitching it to a ring-bolt abaft the rudder-head. Then, pausing an
+instant to stare into the East with somber eyes, he shipped the tiller
+and bent to the halyards. As the sail rattled up, flapping wildly,
+Kirkwood marked with relief—for it meant so much time saved—that it was
+already close reefed.
+
+But when at least the boom was thrashing overhead and the halyards had
+been made fast to their cleats, the fisherman again stood erect,
+peering distrustfully at the distant wall of cloud.
+
+Then, in two breaths: “Can’t do it,” he decided; “not at the price.”
+
+“Why?” Kirkwood stared despairingly after the brigantine, that was
+already drawn far ahead.
+
+“Danger,” growled the fellow, “—wind.”
+
+At a loss completely, Kirkwood found no words. He dropped his head,
+considering.
+
+“Not at the price,” the sullen voice iterated; and he looked up to find
+the cunning gaze upon him.
+
+“How much, then?”
+
+“Five poun’ I’ll have—no less, for riskin’ my life this day.”
+
+“Impossible. I haven’t got it.”
+
+In silence the man unshipped the tiller and moved toward the cleats.
+
+“Hold on a minute.”
+
+Kirkwood unbuttoned his coat and, freeing the chain from his waistcoat
+buttonholes, removed his watch.... As well abandon them altogether; he
+had designed to leave them as security for the two pounds, and had
+delayed stating the terms only for fear lest they be refused. Now, too
+late as ever, he recognized his error. But surely, he thought, it
+should be apparent even to that low intelligence that the timepiece
+alone was worth more than the boat itself.
+
+“Will you take these?” he offered. “Take and keep them—only set me
+aboard that ship!”
+
+Deliberately the fisherman weighed the watch and chain in his broad,
+hard palm, eyes narrowing to mere slits in his bronzed mask.
+
+“How much?” he asked slowly.
+
+“Eighty pounds, together; the chain alone cost me twenty.”
+
+The shifty, covetous eyes ranged from the treasure in his hand to the
+threatening east. A puff of wind caught the sail and sent the boom
+athwartships, like a mighty flail. Both men ducked instinctively, to
+escape a braining.
+
+“How do I know?” objected the skipper.
+
+“I’m telling you. If you’ve got eyes, you can see,” retorted Kirkwood
+savagely, seeing that he had erred in telling the truth; the amount he
+had named was too great to be grasped at once by this crude, cupidous
+brain.
+
+“How do I know?” the man repeated. Nevertheless he dropped watch and
+chain into his pocket, then with a meaning grimace extended again his
+horny, greedy palm.
+
+“What...?”
+
+“Hand over th’ two pound’ and we’ll go.”
+
+“I’ll see you damned first!”
+
+A flush of rage blinded the young man. The knowledge that the _Alethea_
+was minute by minute slipping beyond his reach seemed to madden him.
+White-lipped and ominously quiet he rose from his seat on the combing,
+as, without answer, the fisherman, crawling out on the overhand, began
+to haul in the dory.
+
+“Ashore ye go,” he pronounced his ultimatum, motioning Kirkwood to
+enter the boat.
+
+The American turned, looking for the _Alethea_, or for the vessel that
+he believed bore that name. She was nearing the light-ship when he
+found her, and as he looked a squall blurred the air between them,
+blotting the brigantine out with a smudge of rain. The effect was as if
+she had vanished, as if she were for ever snatched from his grasp; and
+with Dorothy aboard her—Heaven alone knew in what need of him!
+
+Mute and blind with despair and wrath, he turned upon the man and
+caught him by the collar, forcing him out over the lip of the overhang.
+They were unevenly matched, Kirkwood far the slighter, but strength
+came to him in the crisis, physical strength and address such as he had
+not dreamed was at his command. And the surprise of his onslaught
+proved an ally of unguessed potency. Before he himself knew it he was
+standing on the overhang and had shifted his hold to seize the fellow
+about the waist; then, lifting him clear of the deck, and aided by a
+lurch of the cat-boat, he cast him bodily into the dory. The man,
+falling, struck his head against one of the thwarts, a glancing blow
+that stunned him temporarily. Kirkwood himself dropped as if shot, a
+trailing reef-point slapping his cheek until it stung as the boom
+thrashed overhead. It was as close a call as he had known; the
+knowledge sickened him a little.
+
+Without rising he worked the painter loose and cast the dory adrift;
+then crawled back into the cockpit. No pang of compassion disturbed him
+as he abandoned the fisherman to the mercy of the sea; though the
+fellow lay still, uncouthly distorted, in the bottom of the dory, he
+was in no danger; the wind and waves together would carry the boat
+ashore.... For that matter, the man was even then recovering,
+struggling to sit up.
+
+Crouching to avoid the boom, Kirkwood went forward to the bows, and,
+grasping the mooring cable, drew it in, slipping back into the cockpit
+to get a stronger purchase with his feet. It was a struggle; the boat
+pulled sluggishly against the wind, the cable inching in jealously. And
+behind him he could hear a voice bellowing inarticulate menaces, and
+knew that in another moment the fisherman would be at his oars.
+Frantically he tugged and tore at the slimy rope, hauling with a will
+and a prayer. It gave more readily, towards the end, but he seemed to
+have fought with it for ages when at last the anchor tripped and he got
+it in.
+
+Immediately he leaped back to the stern, fitted in the tiller, and
+seizing the mainsheet, drew the boom in till the wind should catch in
+the canvas. In the dory the skipper, bending at his oars, was not two
+yards astern.
+
+He was hard aboard when, the sail filling with a bang, Kirkwood pulled
+the tiller up; and the cat-boat slid away, a dozen feet separating them
+in a breath.
+
+A yell of rage boomed down the wind, but he paid no heed. Careless
+alike of the dangers he had passed and those that yawned before him, he
+trimmed the sheet and stood away on the port tack, heading directly for
+the Nore Lightship.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+OFF THE NORE
+
+
+Kirkwood’s anger cooled apace; at worst it had been a flare of
+passion—incandescent. It was seldom more. His brain clearing, the
+temperature of his judgment quickly regained its mean, and he saw his
+chances without distortion, weighed them without exaggeration.
+
+Leaning against the combing, feet braced upon the slippery and
+treacherous deck, he clung to tiller and mainsheet and peered ahead
+with anxious eyes, a pucker of daring graven deep between his brows.
+
+A mile to westward, three or more ahead, he could see the brigantine
+standing close in under the Essex shore. At times she was invisible;
+again he could catch merely the glint of her canvas, white against the
+dark loom of the littoral, toned by a mist of flying spindrift. He
+strained his eyes, watching for the chance which would take place in
+the rake of her masts and sails, when she should come about.
+
+For the longer that manoeuver was deferred, the better was his chance
+of attaining his object. It was a forlorn hope. But in time the
+brigantine, to escape Maplin Sands, would be forced to tack and stand
+out past the lightship, the wind off her port bows. Then their courses
+would intersect. It remained to be demonstrated whether the cat-boat
+was speedy enough to arrive at this point of contact in advance of, or
+simultaneously with, the larger vessel. Every minute that the putative
+_Alethea_ put off coming about brought the cat-boat nearer that goal,
+but Kirkwood could do no more than hope and try to trust in the
+fisherman’s implied admission that it could be done. It was all in the
+boat and the way she handled.
+
+He watched her anxiously, quick to approve her merits as she displayed
+them. He had sailed small craft before—frail center-board cat-boats,
+handy and swift, built to serve in summer winds and protected waters:
+never such an one as this. Yet he liked her.
+
+Deep bosomed she was, with no center-board, dependent on her draught
+and heavy keel to hold her on the wind; stanch and seaworthy, sheathed
+with stout plank and ribbed with seasoned timber, designed to keep
+afloat in the wickedest weather brewed by the foul-tempered German
+Ocean. Withal her lines were fine and clean; for all her beam she was
+calculated to nose narrowly into the wind and make a pretty pace as
+well. A good boat: he had the grace to give the credit to his luck.
+
+Her disposition was more fully disclosed as they drew away from the
+beach. Inshore with shoaling water, the waves had been choppy and
+spiteful but lacking force of weight. Farther out, as the bottom fell
+away, the rollers became more uniform and powerful; heavy sweeping seas
+met the cat-boat, from their hollows looming mountainous to the man in
+the tiny cockpit; who was nevertheless aware that to a steamer they
+would be negligible.
+
+His boat breasted them gallantly, toiling sturdily up the steep
+acclivities, poising breathlessly on foam-crested summits for dizzy
+instants, then plunging headlong down the deep green swales; and left a
+boiling wake behind her,—urging ever onward, hugging the wind in her
+wisp of blood-red sail, and boring into it, pulling at the tiller with
+the mettle of a race-horse slugging at the bit.
+
+Offshore, too, the wind stormed with added strength, or, possibly, had
+freshened. For minutes on end the leeward gunwales would run green, and
+now and again the screaming, pelting squalls that scoured the estuary
+would heel her over until the water cascaded in over the lee combing,
+and the rudder, lifted clear, would hang idle until, smitten by some
+racing billow, the tiller would be all but torn from Kirkwood’s hands.
+Again and again this happened; and those were times of trembling. But
+always the cat-boat righted, shaking the clinging waters from her and
+swinging her stem into the wind again; and there would follow an
+abbreviated breathing spell, during which Kirkwood was at liberty to
+dash the salt spray from his eyes and search the wind-harried waste for
+the brigantine. Sometimes he found her, sometimes not.
+
+Long after he had expected her to, she went about and they began to
+close in upon each other. He could see that even with shortened canvas
+she was staggering drunkenly under the fierce impacts of the wind. For
+himself, it was nip-and-tuck, now, and no man in his normal sense would
+have risked a sixpence on the boat’s chance to live until she crossed
+the brigantine’s bows.
+
+Time out of reckoning he was forced to kneel in the swimming cockpit,
+steering with one hand, using the bailing-dish with the other, and
+keeping his eyes religiously turned to the bellying patch of sail. It
+was heartbreaking toil; he began reluctantly to concede that it could
+not last much longer. And if he missed the brigantine he would be lost;
+mortal strength was not enough to stand the unending strain upon every
+bone, muscle and sinew, required to keep the boat upon her course;
+though for a time it might cope with and solve the problems presented
+by each new, malignant billow and each furious, howling squall, the end
+inevitably must be failure. To struggle on would be but to postpone the
+certain end ... save and except the possibility of his gaining the
+brigantine within the period of time strictly and briefly limited by
+his powers of endurance.
+
+Long since he had become numb with cold from incessant drenchings of
+icy spray, that piled in over the windward counter, keeping the bottom
+ankle-deep regardless of his laborious but intermittent efforts with
+the bailing dish. And the two, brigantine and cockle-shell, were
+drawing together with appalling deliberation.
+
+A dozen times he was on the point of surrender, as often plucked up
+hope; as the minutes wore on and he kept above water, he began to
+believe that if he could stick it out his judgment and seamanship would
+be justified ... though human ingenuity backed by generosity could by
+no means contrive adequate excuse for his foolhardiness.
+
+But that was aside, something irreparable. Wan and grim, he fought it
+out.
+
+But that his voice stuck in his parched throat, he could have shouted
+in his elation, when eventually he gained the point of intersection an
+eighth of a mile ahead of the brigantine and got sight of her windward
+freeboard as, most slowly, the cat-boat forged across her course.
+
+For all that, the moment of his actual triumph was not yet; he had
+still to carry off successfully a scheme that for sheer audacity of
+conception and contempt for danger, transcended all that had gone
+before.
+
+Holding the cat-boat on for a time, he brought her about handsomely a
+little way beyond the brigantine’s course, and hung in the eye of the
+wind, the leach flapping and tightening with reports like rifle-shots,
+and the water sloshing about his calves—bailing-dish now altogether out
+of mind—while he watched the oncoming vessel, his eyes glistening with
+anticipation.
+
+She was footing it smartly, the brigantine—lying down to it and snoring
+into the wind. Beneath her stem waves broke in snow-white showers,
+whiter than the canvas of her bulging jib—broke and, gnashing their
+teeth in impotent fury, swirled and eddied down her sleek dark flanks.
+Bobbing, courtesying, she plunged onward, shortening the interval with
+mighty, leaping bounds. On her bows, with each instant, the golden
+letters of her name grew larger and more legible until—_Alethea_!—he
+could read it plain beyond dispute.
+
+Joy welled in his heart. He forgot all that he had undergone in the
+prospect of what he proposed still to do in the name of the only woman
+the world held for him. Unquestioning he had come thus far in her
+service; unquestioning, by her side, he was prepared to go still
+farther, though all humanity should single her out with accusing
+fingers....
+
+They were watching him, aboard the brigantine; he could see a line of
+heads above her windward rail. Perhaps _she_ was of their number. He
+waved an audacious hand. Some one replied, a great shout shattering
+itself unintelligibly against the gale. He neither understood nor
+attempted to reply; his every faculty was concentrated on the supreme
+moment now at hand.
+
+Calculating the instant to a nicety, he paid off the sheet and pulled
+up the tiller. The cat-boat pivoted on her heel; with a crack her sail
+flapped full and rigid; then, with the untempered might of the wind
+behind her, she shot like an arrow under the brigantine’s bows, so
+close that the bowsprit of the latter first threatened to impale the
+sail, next, the bows plunging, crashed down a bare two feet behind the
+cat-boat’s stern.
+
+Working in a frenzy of haste, Kirkwood jammed the tiller hard alee,
+bringing the cat about, and, trimming the mainsheet as best he might,
+found himself racing under the brigantine’s leeward quarter,—water
+pouring in generously over the cat’s.
+
+Luffing, he edged nearer, handling his craft as though intending to ram
+the larger vessel, foot by foot shortening the little interval. When it
+was four feet, he would risk the jump; he crawled out on the overhang,
+crouching on his toes, one hand light upon the tiller, the other
+touching the deck, ready ... ready....
+
+Abruptly the _Alethea_ shut off the wind; the sail flattened and the
+cat dropped back. In a second the distance had doubled. In anguish
+Kirkwood uttered an exceeding bitter cry. Already he was falling far
+off her counter....
+
+A shout reached him. He was dimly conscious of a dark object hurtling
+through the air. Into the cockpit, splashing, something dropped—a coil
+of rope. He fell forward upon it, into water eighteen inches deep; and
+for the first time realized that, but for that line, he had gone to his
+drowning in another minute. The cat was sinking.
+
+As he scrambled to his feet, clutching the life-line, a heavy wave
+washed over the water-logged craft and left it all but submerged; and a
+smart tug on the rope added point to the advice which, reaching his
+ears in a bellow like a bull’s, penetrated the panic of his wits.
+
+“Jump! _Jump, you fool_!”
+
+In an instant of coherence he saw that the brigantine was luffing; none
+the less much of the line had already been paid out, and there was no
+reckoning when the end would be reached. Without time to make it fast,
+he hitched it twice round his waist and chest, once round an arm, and,
+grasping it above his head to ease its constriction when the tug should
+come, leaped on the combing and overboard. A green roaring avalanche
+swept down upon him and the luckless cat-boat, overwhelming both
+simultaneously.
+
+The agony that was his during the next few minutes can by no means be
+exaggerated. With such crises the human mind is not fitted adequately
+to cope; it retains no record of the supreme moment beyond a vague and
+incoherent impression of poignant, soul-racking suffering. Kirkwood
+underwent a prolonged interval of semi-sentience, his mind dominated
+and oppressed by a deathly fear of drowning and a deadening sense of
+suffocation, with attendant tortures as of being broken on the
+wheel—limb rending from limb; of compression of his ribs that
+threatened momentarily to crush in his chest; of a world a-welter with
+dim swirling green half-lights alternating with flashes of blinding
+white; of thunderings in his ears like salvoes from a thousand
+cannon....
+
+And his senses were blotted out in blackness....
+
+Then he was breathing once more, the keen clean air stabbing his lungs,
+the while he swam unsupported in an ethereal void of brilliance. His
+mouth was full of something that burned, a liquid hot, acrid, and
+stinging. He gulped, swallowed, slobbered, choked, coughed, attempted
+to sit up, was aware that he was the focal center of a ring of glaring,
+burning eyes, like eyes of ravening beasts; and fainted.
+
+His next conscious impression was of standing up, supported by friendly
+arms on either side, while somebody was asking him if he could walk a
+step or two.
+
+He lifted his head and let it fall in token of assent, mumbling a yes;
+and looked round him with eyes wherein the light of intelligence burned
+more clear with every second. By degrees he catalogued and comprehended
+his weirdly altered circumstances and surroundings.
+
+He was partly seated, partly held up, on the edge of the cabin
+sky-light, an object of interest to some half-dozen men, seafaring
+fellows all, by their habit, clustered round between him and the
+windward rail. Of their number one stood directly before him, dwarfing
+his companions as much by his air of command as by his uncommon height:
+tall, thin-faced and sallow, with hollow weather-worn cheeks, a mouth
+like a crooked gash from ear to ear, and eyes like dying coals, with
+which he looked the rescued up and down in one grim, semi-humorous,
+semi-speculative glance. In hands both huge and red he fondled tenderly
+a squat brandy flask whose contents had apparently been employed as a
+first aid to the drowning.
+
+As Kirkwood’s gaze encountered his, the man smiled sourly, jerking his
+head to one side with a singularly derisive air.
+
+“Hi, matey!” he blustered. “’Ow goes it now? Feelin’ ’appier, eigh?”
+
+
+[Illustration: “Hi, matey!” he blustered. “’Ow goes it now?”]
+
+
+“Some, thank you ... more like a drowned rat.” Kirkwood eyed him
+sheepishly. “I suppose you’re the man who threw me that line? I’ll have
+to wait till my head clears up before I can thank you properly.”
+
+“Don’t mention it.” He of the lantern jaws stowed the bottle away with
+jealous care in one of his immense coat pockets, and seized Kirkwood’s
+hand in a grasp that made the young man wince. “You’re syfe enough now.
+My nyme’s Stryker, Capt’n Wilyum Stryker.... Wot’s the row? Lookin’ for
+a friend?” he demanded suddenly, as Kirkwood’s attention wandered.
+
+For the memory of the errand that had brought him into the hands of
+Captain William Stryker had come to the young man very suddenly; and
+his eager eyes were swiftly roving not along the decks but the wide
+world besides, for sight or sign of his heart’s desire.
+
+After luffing to pick him up, the brigantine had been again pulled off
+on the port tack. The fury of the gale seemed rather to have waxed than
+waned, and the _Alethea_ was bending low under the relentless fury of
+its blasts, driving hard, with leeward channels awash. Under her port
+counter, a mile away, the crimson light-ship wallowed in a riot of
+breaking combers. Sheerness lay abeam, five miles or more. Ahead the
+northeast headland of the Isle of Sheppey was bulking large and near.
+The cat-boat had vanished....
+
+More important still, no one aboard the brigantine resembled in the
+remotest degree either of the Calendars, father or daughter, or even
+Mulready, the black-avised.
+
+“I sye, ’re you lookin’ for some one you know?”
+
+“Yes—your passengers. I presume they’re below—?”
+
+“Passengers!”
+
+A hush fell upon the group, during which Kirkwood sought Stryker’s eye
+in pitiful pleading; and Stryker looked round him blankly.
+
+“Where’s Miss Calendar?” the young man demanded sharply. “I must see
+her at once!”
+
+The keen and deep-set eyes of the skipper clouded as they returned to
+Kirkwood’s perturbed countenance. “Wot’re you talking about?” he
+demanded brusquely.
+
+“I must see Miss Calendar, or Calendar himself, or Mulready.” Kirkwood
+paused, and, getting no reply, grew restive under Stryker’s inscrutable
+regard.
+
+“That’s why I came aboard,” he amended, blind to the absurdity of the
+statement; “to see—er—Calendar.”
+
+“Well ... I’m damned!”
+
+Stryker managed to infuse into his tone a deal of suspicious contempt.
+
+“Why?” insisted Kirkwood, nettled but still uncomprehending.
+
+“D’you mean to tell me you came off from—wherever in ’ell you did come
+from—intendin’ to board this wessel and find a party nymed Calendar?”
+
+“Certainly I did. Why—?”
+
+“Well!” cried Mr. Stryker, rubbing his hands together with an air
+oppressively obsequious, “I’m sorry to _hin_-form you you’ve come to
+the wrong shop, sir; we don’t stock no Calendars. We’re in the ’ardware
+line, we are. You might try next door, or I dessay you’ll find what you
+want at the stytioner’s, round the corner.”
+
+A giggle from his audience stimulated him. “If,” he continued acidly,
+“I’d a-guessed you was such a damn’ fool, blimmy if I wouldn’t’ve let
+you drownd!”
+
+Staggered, Kirkwood bore his sarcastic truculence without resentment.
+
+“Calendar,” he stammered, trying to explain, “Calendar _said_—”
+
+“I carn’t ’elp wot Calendar said. Mebbe ’e _did_ myke an engygement
+with you, an’ you’ve gone and went an’ forgot the dyte. Mebbe it’s
+larst year’s calendar you’re thinkin’ of. You Johnny” (to a lout of a
+boy in the group of seamen), “you run an’ fetch this gentleman
+Whitaker’s for Nineteen-six. Look sharp, now!”
+
+“But—!” With an effort Kirkwood mustered up a show of dignity. “Am I to
+understand,” he said, as calmly as he could, “that you deny knowing
+George B. Calendar and his daughter Dorothy and—”
+
+“I don’t ’ave to. Listen to me, young man.” For the time the fellow
+discarded his clumsy facetiousness. “I’m Wilyum Stryker, Capt’n
+Stryker, marster and ’arf-owner of this wessel, and wot I says ’ere is
+law. We don’t carry no passengers. D’ye understand me?”—aggressively.
+“There ain’t no pusson nymed Calendar aboard the _Allytheer_, an’ never
+was, an’ never will be!”
+
+“What name did you say?” Kirkwood inquired.
+
+“This ship? The _Allytheer_; registered from Liverpool; bound from
+London to Hantwerp, in cargo. Anythink else?”
+
+Kirkwood shook his head, turning to scan the seascape with a gloomy
+gaze. As he did so, and remarked how close upon the Sheppey headland
+the brigantine had drawn, the order was given to go about. For the
+moment he was left alone, wretchedly wet, shivering, wan and shrunken
+visibly with the knowledge that he had dared greatly for nothing. But
+for the necessity of keeping up before Stryker and his crew, the young
+man felt that he could gladly have broken down and wept for sheer
+vexation and disappointment.
+
+Smartly the brigantine luffed and wore about, heeling deep as she spun
+away on the starboard tack.
+
+Kirkwood staggered round the skylight to the windward rail. From this
+position, looking forward, he could see that they were heading for the
+open sea, Foulness low over the port quarter, naught before them but a
+brawling waste of leaden-green and dirty white. Far out one of the
+sidewheel boats of the Queensborough-Antwerp line was heading directly
+into the wind and making heavy weather of it.
+
+Some little while later, Stryker again approached him, perhaps swayed
+by an unaccustomed impulse of compassion; which, however, he artfully
+concealed. Blandly ironic, returning to his impersonation of the
+shopkeeper, “Nothink else we can show you, sir?” he inquired.
+
+“I presume you couldn’t put me ashore?” Kirkwood replied ingenuously.
+
+In supreme disgust the captain showed him his back. “’Ere, you!” he
+called to one of the crew. “Tyke this awye—tyke ’im below and put ’im
+to bed; give ’im a drink and dry ’is clo’s. Mebbe ’e’ll be better when
+’e wykes up. ’E don’t talk sense now, that’s sure. If you arsk me, I
+sye ’e’s balmy and no ’ope for ’im.”
+
+
+
+
+XII
+PICARESQUE PASSAGES
+
+
+Contradictory to the hopeful prognosis of Captain Stryker, his
+unaccredited passenger was not “better” when, after a period of
+oblivious rest indefinite in duration, he awoke. His subsequent
+assumption of listless resignation, of pacific acquiescence in the
+dictates of his destiny, was purely deceptive—thin ice of despair over
+profound depths of exasperated rebellion.
+
+Blank darkness enveloped him when first he opened eyes to wonder. Then
+gradually as he stared, piecing together unassorted memories and
+striving to quicken drowsy wits, he became aware of a glimmer that
+waxed and waned, a bar of pale bluish light striking across the gloom
+above his couch; and by dint of puzzling divined that this had access
+by a port. Turning his head upon a stiff and unyielding pillow, he
+could discern a streak of saffron light lining the sill of a doorway,
+near by his side. The one phenomenon taken with the other confirmed a
+theretofore somewhat hazy impression that his dreams were dignified by
+a foundation of fact; that, in brief, he was occupying a cabin-bunk
+aboard the good ship _Alethea_.
+
+Overhead, on the deck, a heavy thumping of hurrying feet awoke him to
+keener perceptiveness.
+
+Judging from the incessant rolling and pitching of the brigantine, the
+crashing thunder of seas upon her sides, the eldrich shrieking of the
+gale, as well as from the chorused groans and plaints of each
+individual bolt and timber in the frail fabric that housed his
+fortunes, the wind had strengthened materially during his hours of
+forgetfulness—however many the latter might have been.
+
+He believed, however, that he had slept long, deeply and exhaustively.
+He felt now a little emaciated mentally and somewhat absent-bodied—so
+he put it to himself. A numb languor, not unpleasant, held him
+passively supine, the while he gave himself over to speculative
+thought.
+
+A wild night, certainly; probably, by that time, the little vessel was
+in the middle of the North Sea ... _bound for Antwerp_!
+
+“Oh-h,” said Kirkwood vindictively, “_hell_!”
+
+So he was bound for Antwerp! The first color of resentment ebbing from
+his thoughts left him rather interested than excited by the prospect.
+He found that he was neither pleased nor displeased. He presumed that
+it would be no more difficult to raise money on personal belongings in
+Antwerp than anywhere else; it has been observed that the first flower
+of civilization is the rum-blossom, the next, the conventionalized
+fleur-de-lis of the money-lender. There would be pawnshops, then, in
+Antwerp; and Kirkwood was confident that the sale or pledge of his
+signet-ring, scarf-pin, match-box and cigar-case, would provide him
+with money enough for a return to London, by third-class, at the worst.
+There ... well, all events were on the knees of the gods; he’d squirm
+out of his troubles, somehow. As for the other matter, the Calendar
+affair, he presumed he was well rid of it,—with a sigh of regret. It
+had been a most enticing mystery, you know; and the woman in the case
+was extraordinary, to say the least.
+
+The memory of Dorothy Calendar made him sigh again, this time more
+violently: a sigh that was own brother to (or at any rate descended in
+a direct line from) the furnace sigh of the lover described by, the
+melancholy Jaques. And he sat up, bumped his head, groped round until
+his hand fell upon a doorknob, opened the door, and looked out into the
+blowsy emptiness of the ship’s cabin proper, whose gloomy confines were
+made visible only by the rays of a dingy and smoky lamp swinging
+violently in gimbals from a deck-beam.
+
+Kirkwood’s clothing, now rough-dried and warped wretchedly out of
+shape, had been thrown carelessly on a transom near the door. He got
+up, collected them, and returning to his berth, dressed at leisure,
+thinking heavily, disgruntled—in a humor as evil as the after-taste of
+bad brandy in his mouth.
+
+When dressed he went out into the cabin, closing the door upon his
+berth, and for lack of anything better to do, seated himself on the
+thwartships transom, against the forward bulkhead, behind the table.
+Above his head a chronometer ticked steadily and loudly, and, being
+consulted, told him that the time of day was twenty minutes to four;
+which meant that he had slept away some eighteen or twenty hours. That
+was a solid spell of a rest, when he came to think of it, even allowing
+that he had been unusually and pardonably fatigued when conducted to
+his berth. He felt stronger now, and bright enough—and enormously
+hungry into the bargain.
+
+Abstractedly, heedless of the fact that his tobacco would be
+water-soaked and ruined, he fumbled in his pockets for pipe and pouch,
+thinking to soothe the pangs of hunger against breakfast-time; which
+was probably two hours and a quarter ahead. But his pockets were
+empty—every one of them. He assimilated this discovery in patience and
+cast an eye about the room, to locate, if possible, the missing
+property. But naught of his was visible. So he rose and began a more
+painstaking search.
+
+The cabin was at once tiny, low-ceiled, and depressingly gloomy. Its
+furniture consisted entirely in a chair or two, supplementing the
+transoms and lockers as resting-places, and a center-table covered with
+a cloth of turkey-red, whose original aggressiveness had been darkly
+moderated by libations of liquids, principally black coffee, and burnt
+offerings of grease and tobacco-ash. Aside from the companion-way to
+the deck, four doors opened into the room, two probably giving upon the
+captain’s and the mate’s quarters, the others on pseudo state-rooms—one
+of which he had just vacated—closets large enough to contain a small
+bunk and naught beside. The bulkheads and partitions were badly broken
+out with a rash of pictures from illustrated papers, mostly offensive.
+Kirkwood was interested to read a half-column clipping from a New York
+yellow journal, descriptive of the antics of a drunken British sailor
+who had somehow found his way to the bar-room of the Fifth Avenue
+Hotel; the paragraph exploiting the fact that it had required four
+policemen in addition to the corps of porters to subdue him, was
+strongly underscored in red ink; and the news-story wound up with the
+information that in police court the man had given his name as William
+Stranger and cheerfully had paid a fine of ten dollars, alleging his
+entertainment to have been cheap at the price.
+
+While Kirkwood was employed in perusing this illuminating anecdote,
+eight bells sounded, and, from the commotion overhead, the watch
+changed. A little later the companion-way door slammed open and shut,
+and Captain Stryker—or Stranger; whichever you please—fell down, rather
+than descended, the steps.
+
+Without attention to the American he rolled into the mate’s room and
+roused that personage. Kirkwood heard that the name of the
+second-in-command was ’Obbs, as well as that he occupied the starboard
+state-room aft. After a brief exchange of comment and instruction, Mr.
+’Obbs appeared in the shape of a walking pillar of oil-skins capped by
+a sou’wester, and went on deck; Stryker, following him out of the
+state-room, shed his own oilers in a clammy heap upon the floor, opened
+a locker from which he brought forth a bottle and a dirty glass, and,
+turning toward the table, for the first time became sensible of
+Kirkwood’s presence.
+
+“Ow, there you are, eigh, little bright-eyes!” he exclaimed with
+surprised animation.
+
+“Good morning, Captain Stryker,” said Kirkwood, rising. “I want to tell
+you—”
+
+But Stryker waved one great red paw impatiently, with the effect of
+sweeping aside and casting into the discard Kirkwood’s intended speech
+of thanks; nor would he hear him further.
+
+“Did you ’ave a nice little nap?” he interrupted. “Come up bright and
+smilin’, eigh? Now I guess”—the emphasis made it clear that the captain
+believed himself to be employing an Americanism; and so successful was
+he in his own esteem that he could not resist the temptation to improve
+upon the imitation—“Na-ow I guess yeou’re abaout right ready, ben’t ye,
+to hev a drink, sonny?”
+
+“No, thank you,” said Kirkwood, smiling tolerantly. “I’ve got any
+amount of appetite...”
+
+“’Ave you, now?” Stryker dropped his mimicry and glanced at the clock.
+“Breakfast,” he announced, “will be served in the myne dinin’ saloon at
+eyght a. m. Passingers is requested not to be lyte at tyble.”
+
+Depositing the bottle on the said table, the captain searched until he
+found another glass for Kirkwood, and sat down.
+
+“Do you good,” he insinuated, pushing the bottle gently over.
+
+“No, thank you,” reiterated Kirkwood shortly, a little annoyed.
+
+Stryker seized his own glass, poured out a strong man’s dose of the
+fiery concoction, gulped it down, and sighed. Then, with a glance at
+the American’s woebegone countenance (Kirkwood was contemplating a
+four-hour wait for breakfast, and, consequently, looking as if he had
+lost his last friend), the captain bent over, placing both hands palm
+down before him and wagging his head earnestly.
+
+“Please,” he implored,—“Please don’t let me hinterrupt;” and filled his
+pipe, pretending a pensive detachment from his company.
+
+The fumes of burning shag sharpened the tooth of desire. Kirkwood stood
+it as long as he could, then surrendered with an: “If you’ve got any
+more of that tobacco, Captain, I’d be glad of a pipe.”
+
+An intensely contemplative expression crept into the captain’s small
+blue eyes.
+
+“I only got one other pyper of this ’ere ’baccy,” he announced at
+length, “and I carn’t get no more till I gets ’ome. I simply couldn’t
+part with it hunder ’arf a quid.”
+
+Kirkwood settled back with a hopeless lift of his shoulders.
+Abstractedly Stryker puffed the smoke his way until he could endure the
+deprivation no longer.
+
+“I had about ten shillings in my pocket when I came aboard, captain,
+and ... a few other articles.”
+
+“Ow, yes; so you ’ad, now you mention it.”
+
+Stryker rose, ambled into his room, and returned with Kirkwood’s
+possessions and a fresh paper of shag. While the young man was hastily
+filling, lighting, and inhaling the first strangling but delectable
+whiff, the captain solemnly counted into his own palm all the loose
+change except three large pennies. The latter he shoved over to
+Kirkwood in company with a miscellaneous assortment of articles, which
+the American picked up piece by piece and began to bestow about his
+clothing. When through, he sat back, troubled and disgusted. Stryker
+met his regard blandly.
+
+“Anything I can do?” he inquired, in suave concern.
+
+“Why ... there _was_ a black pearl scarfpin—”
+
+“W’y, don’t you remember? You gave that to me, ’count of me ’avin syved
+yer life. ’Twas me throwed you that line, you know.”
+
+“Oh,” commented Kirkwood briefly. The pin had been among the most
+valuable and cherished of his belongings.
+
+“Yes,” nodded the captain in reminiscence. “You don’t remember? Likely
+’twas the brandy singing in yer ’ead. You pushes it into my
+’ands,—almost weepin’, you was,—and sez, sez you, ‘Stryker,’ you sez,
+‘tyke this in triflin’ toking of my gratichood; I wouldn’t hinsult
+you,’ you sez, ‘by hofferin’ you money, but this I can insist on yer
+acceptin’, and no refusal,’ says you.”
+
+“Oh,” repeated Kirkwood.
+
+“If I for a ninstant thought you wasn’t sober when you done it.... But
+no; you’re a gent if there ever was one, and I’m not the man to offend
+you.”
+
+“Oh, indeed.”
+
+The captain let the implication pass, perhaps on the consideration that
+he could afford to ignore it; and said no more. The pause held for
+several minutes, Kirkwood having fallen into a mood of grave
+distraction. Finally Captain Stryker thoughtfully measured out a second
+drink, limited only by the capacity of the tumbler, engulfed it
+noisily, and got up.
+
+“Guess I’ll be turnin’ in,” he volunteered affably, yawning and
+stretching.
+
+“I was about to ask you to do me a service....” began Kirkwood.
+
+“Yes?”—with the rising inflection of mockery.
+
+Kirkwood quietly produced his cigar-case, a gold match-box, gold
+card-case, and slipped a signet ring from his finger. “Will you buy
+these?” he asked. “Or will you lend me five pounds and hold them as
+security?”
+
+Stryker examined the collection with exaggerated interest strongly
+tinctured with mistrust. “I’ll buy ’em,” he offered eventually, looking
+up.
+
+“That’s kind of you—”
+
+“Ow, they ain’t much use to me, but Bill Stryker’s allus willin’ to
+accommodate a friend.... Four quid, you said?”
+
+“Five....”
+
+“They ain’t wuth over four to me.”
+
+“Very well; make it four,” Kirkwood assented contemptuously.
+
+The captain swept the articles into one capacious fist, pivoted on one
+heel at the peril of his neck, and lumbered unsteadily off to his room.
+Pausing at the door he turned back in inquiry.
+
+“I sye, ’ow did you come to get the impression there was a party named
+Almanack aboard this wessel?”
+
+“Calendar—”
+
+“’Ave it yer own wye,” Stryker conceded gracefully.
+
+“There isn’t, is there?”
+
+“You ’eard me.”
+
+“Then,” said Kirkwood sweetly, “I’m sure you wouldn’t be interested.”
+
+The captain pondered this at leisure. “You seemed pretty keen abaht
+seein’ ’im,” he remarked conclusively.
+
+“I was.”
+
+“Seems to me I did ’ear the nyme sumw’eres afore.” The captain appeared
+to wrestle with an obdurate memory. “Ow!” he triumphed. “I know. ’E was
+a chap up Manchester wye. Keeper in a loonatic asylum, ’e was. ’That
+yer party?”
+
+“No,” said Kirkwood wearily.
+
+“I didn’t know but mebbe ’twas. Excuse me. ’Thought as ’ow mebbe you’d
+escyped from ’is tender care, but, findin’ the world cold, chynged yer
+mind and wanted to gow back.”
+
+Without waiting for a reply he lurched into his room and banged the
+door to. Kirkwood, divided between amusement and irritation, heard him
+stumbling about for some time; and then a hush fell, grateful enough
+while it lasted; which was not long. For no sooner did the captain
+sleep than a penetrating snore added itself unto the cacophony of waves
+and wind and tortured ship.
+
+Kirkwood, comforted at first by the blessed tobacco, lapsed insensibly
+into dreary meditations. Coming after the swift movement and sustained
+excitement of the eighteen hours preceding his long sleep, the monotony
+of shipboard confinement seemed irksome to a maddening degree. There
+was absolutely nothing he could discover to occupy his mind. If there
+were books aboard, none was in evidence; beyond the report of Mr.
+Stranger’s Manhattan night’s entertainment the walls were devoid of
+reading matter; and a round of the picture gallery proved a diversion
+weariful enough when not purely revolting.
+
+Wherefore Mr. Kirkwood stretched himself out on the transom and smoked
+and reviewed his adventures in detail and seriatim, and was by turns
+indignant, sore, anxious on his own account as well as on Dorothy’s,
+and out of all patience with himself. Mystified he remained throughout,
+and the edge of his curiosity held as keen as ever, you may believe.
+
+Consistently the affair presented itself to his fancy in the guise of a
+puzzle-picture, which, though you study it never so diligently, remains
+incomprehensible, until by chance you view it from an unexpected angle,
+when it reveals itself intelligibly. It had not yet been his good
+fortune to see it from the right viewpoint. To hold the metaphor, he
+walked endless circles round it, patiently seeking, but ever failing to
+find the proper perspective.... Each incident, however insignificant,
+in connection with it, he handled over and over, examining its every
+facet, bright or dull, as an expert might inspect a clever imitation of
+a diamond; and like a perfect imitation it defied analysis.
+
+Of one or two things he was convinced; for one, that Stryker was a liar
+worthy of classification with Calendar and Mrs. Hallam. Kirkwood had
+not only the testimony of his sense to assure him that the ship’s name,
+_Alethea_ (not a common one, by the bye), had been mentioned by both
+Calendar and Mulready during their altercation on Bermondsey Old
+Stairs, but he had the confirmatory testimony of the sleepy waterman,
+William, who had directed Old Bob and Young William to the anchorage
+off Bow Creek. That there should have been two vessels of the same
+unusual name at one and the same time in the Port of London, was a
+coincidence too preposterous altogether to find place in his
+calculations.
+
+His second impregnable conclusion was that those whom he sought had
+boarded the _Alethea_, but had left her before she tripped her anchor.
+That they were not stowed away aboard her seemed unquestionable. The
+brigantine was hardly large enough for the presence of three persons
+aboard her to be long kept a secret from an inquisitive fourth,—unless,
+indeed, they lay in hiding in the hold; for which, once the ship got
+under way, there could be scant excuse. And Kirkwood did not believe
+himself a person of sufficient importance in Calendar’s eyes, to make
+that worthy endure the discomforts of a’tween-decks imprisonment
+throughout the voyage, even to escape recognition.
+
+With every second, then, he was traveling farther from her to whose aid
+he had rushed, impelled by motives so hot-headed, so innately,
+chivalric, so unthinkingly gallant, so exceptionally idiotic!
+
+Idiot! Kirkwood groaned with despair of his inability to fathom the
+abyss of his self-contempt. There seemed to be positively no excuse for
+_him_. Stryker had befriended him indeed, had he permitted him to
+drown. Yet he had acted for the best, as he saw it. The fault lay in
+himself: an admirable fault, that of harboring and nurturing generous
+and compassionate instincts. But, of course, Kirkwood couldn’t see it
+that way.
+
+“What else could I do?” he defended himself against the indictment of
+common sense. “I couldn’t leave her to the mercies of that set of
+rogues!... And Heaven knows I was given every reason to believe she
+would be aboard this ship! Why, she herself told me that she was
+sailing ...!”
+
+Heaven knew, too, that this folly of his had cost him a pretty penny,
+first and last. His watch was gone beyond recovery, his homeward
+passage forfeited; he no longer harbored illusions as to the steamship
+company presenting him with another berth in lieu of that called for by
+that water-soaked slip of paper then in his pocket—courtesy of Stryker.
+He had sold for a pittance, a tithe of its value, his personal jewelry,
+and had spent every penny he could call his own. With the money Stryker
+was to give him he would be able to get back to London and his
+third-rate hostelry, but not with enough over to pay that one week’s
+room-rent, or ...
+
+“Oh, the devil!” he groaned, head in hands.
+
+The future loomed wrapped in unspeakable darkness, lightened by no
+least ray of hope. It had been bad enough to lose a comfortable living
+through a gigantic convulsion of Nature; but to think that he had lost
+all else through his own egregious folly, to find himself reduced to
+the kennels—!
+
+So Care found him again in those weary hours,—came and sat by his side,
+slipping a grisly hand in his and tightening its grip until he could
+have cried out with the torment of it; the while whispering insidiously
+subtile, evil things in his ear. And he had not even Hope to comfort
+him; at any previous stage he had been able to distil a sort of
+bitter-sweet satisfaction from the thought that he was suffering for
+the love of his life. But now—now Dorothy was lost, gone like the
+glamour of Romance in the searching light of day.
+
+Stryker, emerging from his room for breakfast, found the passenger with
+a hostile look in his eye and a jaw set in ugly fashion. His eyes, too,
+were the abiding-place of smoldering devils; and the captain,
+recognizing them, considerately forbore to stir them up with any
+untimely pleasantries. To be sure, he was autocrat in his own ship, and
+Kirkwood’s standing aboard was _nil_; but then there was just enough
+yellow in the complexion of Stryker’s soul to incline him to sidestep
+trouble whenever feasible. And besides, he entertained dark suspicions
+of his guest—suspicions he scarce dared voice even to his inmost heart.
+
+The morning meal, therefore, passed off in constrained silence. The
+captain ate voraciously and vociferously, pushed back his chair, and
+went on deck to relieve the mate. The latter, a stunted little Cockney
+with a wizened countenance and a mind as foul as his tongue, got small
+change of his attempts to engage the passenger in conversation on
+topics that he considered fit for discussion. After the sixth or eighth
+snubbing he rose in dudgeon, discharged a poisonous bit of insolence,
+and retired to his berth, leaving Kirkwood to finish his breakfast in
+peace; which the latter did literally, to the last visible scrap of
+food and the ultimate drop of coffee, poor as both were in quality.
+
+To the tune of a moderating wind, the morning wearied away. Kirkwood
+went on deck once, for distraction from the intolerable monotony of it
+all, got a sound drenching of spray, with a glimpse of a dark line on
+the eastern horizon, which he understood to be the low littoral of
+Holland, and was glad to dodge below once more and dry himself.
+
+He had the pleasure of the mate’s company at dinner, the captain
+remaining on deck until Hobbs had finished and gone up to relieve him;
+and by that time Kirkwood likewise was through.
+
+Stryker blew down with a blustery show of cheer. “Well, well, my little
+man!” (It happened that he topped Kirkwood’s stature by at least five
+inches.) “Enj’yin’ yer sea trip?”
+
+“About as much as you’d expect,” snapped Kirkwood.
+
+“Ow?” The captain began to shovel food into his face. (The author
+regrets he has at his command no more delicate expression that is
+literal and illustrative.) Kirkwood watched him, fascinated with
+suspense; it seemed impossible that the man could continue so to employ
+his knife without cutting his throat from the inside. But years of such
+manipulation had made him expert, and his guest, keenly disappointed,
+at length ceased to hope.
+
+Between gobbles Stryker eyed him furtively.
+
+“’Treat you all right?” he demanded abruptly.
+
+Kirkwood started out of a brown study. “What? Who? Why, I suppose I
+ought to be—indeed, I _am_ grateful,” he asserted. “Certainly you saved
+my life, and—”
+
+“Ow, I don’t mean that.” Stryker gathered the imputation into his paw
+and flung it disdainfully to the four winds of Heaven. “Bless yer ’art,
+you’re welcome; I wouldn’t let no dorg drownd, ’f I could ’elp it. No,”
+he declared, “nor a loonatic, neither.”
+
+He thrust his plate away and shifted sidewise in his chair. “I ’uz just
+wonderin’,” he pursued, picking his teeth meditatively with a
+pen-knife, “’ow they feeds you in them _as_-ylums. ’Avin’ never been
+inside one, myself, it’s on’y natural I’d be cur’us.... There was one
+of them institootions near where I was borned—Birming’am, that is. I
+used to see the loonies playin’ in the grounds. I remember _just_ as
+well!... One of ’em and me struck up quite an acquaintance—”
+
+“Naturally he’d take to you on sight.”
+
+“Ow? Strynge ’ow _we_ ’it it off, eigh?... You myke me think of ’im.
+Young chap, ’e was, the livin’ spi’t-’n-himage of you. It don’t happen,
+does it, you’re the same man?”
+
+“Oh, go to the devil!”
+
+“Naughty!” said the captain serenely, wagging a reproving forefinger.
+“Bad, naughty word. You’ll be sorry when you find out wot it means....
+Only ’e was allus plannin’ to run awye and drownd ’is-self.”...
+
+He wore the joke threadbare, even to his own taste, and in the end got
+heavily to his feet, starting for the companionway. “Land you this
+arternoon,” he remarked casually, “come three o’clock or thereabahts.
+Per’aps later. I don’t know, though, as I ’ad ought to let you loose.”
+
+Kirkwood made no answer. Chuckling, Stryker went on deck.
+
+In the course of an hour the American followed him.
+
+Wind and sea alike had gone down wonderfully since daybreak—a
+circumstance undoubtedly in great part due to the fact that they had
+won in under the lee of the mainland and were traversing shallower
+waters. On either hand, like mist upon the horizon, lay a streak of
+gray, a shade darker than the gray of the waters. The _Alethea_ was
+within the wide jaws of the Western Scheldt. As for the wind, it had
+shifted several points to the northwards; the brigantine had it abeam
+and was lying down to it and racing to port with slanting deck and
+singing cordage.
+
+Kirkwood approached the captain, who, acting as his own pilot, was
+standing by the wheel and barking sharp orders to the helmsman.
+
+“Have you a Bradshaw on board?” asked the young man.
+
+“Steady!” This to the man at the wheel; then to Kirkwood: “Wot’s that,
+me lud?”
+
+Kirkwood repeated his question. Stryker eyed him suspiciously for a
+thought.
+
+“Wot d’you want it for?”
+
+“I want to see when I can get a boat back to England.”
+
+“Hmm.... Yes, you’ll find a Bradshaw in the port-locker, near the
+for’ard bulk’ead. Run along now and pl’y—and mind you don’t go tearin’
+out the pyges to myke pyper boatses to go sylin’ in.”
+
+Kirkwood went below. Like its adjacent rooms, the cabin was untenanted;
+the watch was the mate’s, and Stryker a martinet. Kirkwood found the
+designated locker and, opening it, saw first to his hand the familiar
+bulky red volume with its red garter. Taking it out he carried it to a
+chair near the companionway, for a better reading light: the skylight
+being still battened down.
+
+The strap removed, the book opened easily, as if by force of habit, at
+the precise table he had wished to consult; some previous client had
+left a marker between the pages,—and not an ordinary book-mark, by any
+manner of means. Kirkwood gave utterance to a little gasp of amazement,
+and instinctively glanced up at the companionway, to see if he were
+observed.
+
+He was not, but for safety’s sake he moved farther back into the cabin
+and out of the range of vision of any one on deck; a precaution which
+was almost immediately justified by the clumping of heavy feet upon the
+steps as Stryker descended in pursuit of the ever-essential drink.
+
+“’Find it?” he demanded, staring blindly—with eyes not yet focused to
+the change from light to gloom—at the young man, who was sitting with
+the guide open on his knees, a tightly clenched fist resting on the
+transom at either side of him.
+
+In reply he received a monosyllabic affirmative; Kirkwood did not look
+up.
+
+“You must be a howl,” commented the captain, making for the seductive
+locker.
+
+“A—what?”
+
+“A howl, readin’ that fine print there in the dark. W’y don’t you go
+over to the light?... I’ll ’ave to ’ave them shutters tyken off the
+winders.” This was Stryker’s amiable figure of speech, frequently
+employed to indicate the coverings of the skylight.
+
+“I’m all right.” Kirkwood went on studying the book.
+
+Stryker swigged off his rum and wiped his lips with the back of a red
+paw, hesitating a moment to watch his guest.
+
+“Mykes it seem more ’ome-like for you, I expect,” he observed.
+
+“What do you mean?”
+
+“W’y, Bradshaw’s first-cousin to a halmanack, ain’t ’e? Can’t get one,
+take t’other—next best thing. Sorry I didn’t think of it sooner; like
+my passengers to feel comfy.... Now don’t you go trapsein’ off to gay
+Paree and squanderin’ wot money you got left. You ’ear?”
+
+“By the way, Captain!” Kirkwood looked up at this, but Stryker was
+already half-way up the companion.
+
+Cautiously the American opened his right fist and held to the light
+that which had been concealed, close wadded in his grasp,—a square of
+sheer linen edged with lace, crumpled but spotless, and diffusing in
+the unwholesome den a faint, intangible fragrance, the veriest wraith
+of that elusive perfume which he would never again inhale without
+instantly recalling that night ride through London in the intimacy of a
+cab.
+
+He closed his eyes and saw her again, as clearly as though she stood
+before him,—hair of gold massed above the forehead of snow, curling in
+adorable tendrils at the nape of her neck, lips like scarlet splashed
+upon the immaculate whiteness of her skin, head poised audaciously in
+its spirited, youthful allure, dark eyes smiling the least trace sadly
+beneath the level brows.
+
+Unquestionably the handkerchief was hers; if proof other than the
+assurance of his heart were requisite, he had it in the initial
+delicately embroidered in one corner: a D, for Dorothy!... He looked
+again, to make sure; then hastily folded up the treasure-trove and
+slipped it into a breast pocket of his coat.
+
+No; I am not sure that it was not the left-hand pocket.
+
+Quivering with excitement he bent again over the book and studied it
+intently. After all, he had not been wrong! He could assert now,
+without fear of refutation, that Stryker had lied.
+
+Some one had wielded an industrious pencil on the page. It was, taken
+as a whole, fruitful of clues. Its very heading was illuminating:
+
+LONDON to VLISSINGEN (FLUSHING) AND BREDA;
+
+
+which happened to be the quickest and most direct route between London
+and Antwerp. Beneath it, in the second column from the right, the
+pencil had put a check-mark against:
+
+QUEENSBOROUGH ... DEP ... 11a10.
+
+
+And now he saw it clearly—dolt that he had been not to have divined it
+ere this! The _Alethea_ had run in to Queensborough, landing her
+passengers there, that they might make connection with the eleven-ten
+morning boat for Flushing,—the very side-wheel steamer, doubtless,
+which he had noticed beating out in the teeth of the gale just after
+the brigantine had picked him up. Had he not received the passing
+impression that the _Alethea_, when first he caught sight of her, might
+have been coming out of the Medway, on whose eastern shore is situate
+Queensborough Pier? Had not Mrs. Hallam, going upon he knew not what
+information or belief, been bound for Queensborough, with design there
+to intercept the fugitives?
+
+Kirkwood chuckled to recall how, all unwittingly, he had been the means
+of diverting from her chosen course that acute and resourceful lady;
+then again turned his attention to the tables.
+
+A third check had been placed against the train for Amsterdam scheduled
+to leave Antwerp at 6:32 p. m. Momentarily his heart misgave him, when
+he saw this, in fear lest Calendar and Dorothy should have gone on from
+Antwerp the previous evening; but then he rallied, discovering that the
+boat-train from Flushing did not arrive at Antwerp till after ten at
+night; and there was no later train thence for Amsterdam. Were the
+latter truly their purposed destination, they would have stayed
+overnight and be leaving that very evening on the 6:32. On the other
+hand, why should they wait for the latest train, rather than proceed by
+the first available in the morning? Why but because Calendar and
+Mulready were to wait for Stryker to join them on the _Alethea_?
+
+Very well, then; if the wind held and Stryker knew his business, there
+would be another passenger on that train, in addition to the Calendar
+party.
+
+Making mental note of the fact that the boat-train for Flushing and
+London was scheduled to leave Antwerp daily at 8:21 p. m., Kirkwood
+rustled the leaves to find out whether or not other tours had been
+planned, found evidences of none, and carefully restored the guide to
+the locker, lest inadvertently the captain should pick it up and see
+what Kirkwood had seen.
+
+An hour later he went on deck. The skies had blown clear and the
+brigantine was well in land-bound waters and still footing a rattling
+pace. The river-banks had narrowed until, beyond the dikes to right and
+left, the country-side stretched wide and flat, a plain of living green
+embroidered with winding roads and quaint Old-World hamlets whose red
+roofs shone like dull fire between the dark green foliage of dwarfed
+firs.
+
+Down with the Scheldt’s gray shimmering flood were drifting little
+companies of barges, sturdy and snug both fore and aft, tough tanned
+sails burning in the afternoon sunlight. A long string of canal-boats,
+potted plants flowering saucily in their neatly curtained windows,
+proprietors expansively smoking on deck, in the bosoms of their very
+large families, was being mothered up-stream by two funny, clucking
+tugs. Behind the brigantine a travel-worn Atlantic liner was scolding
+itself hoarse about the right of way. Outward bound, empty cattle
+boats, rough and rusty, were swaggering down to the sea, with the
+careless, independent thumbs-in-armholes air of so many navvies off the
+job.
+
+And then lifting suddenly above the level far-off sky-line, there
+appeared a very miracle of beauty; the delicate tracery of the great
+Cathedral’s spire of frozen lace, glowing like a thing of spun gold,
+set against the sapphire velvet of the horizon.
+
+Antwerp was in sight.
+
+A troublesome care stirring in his mind, Kirkwood looked round the
+deck; but Stryker was very busy, entirely too preoccupied with the
+handling of his ship to be interrupted with impunity. Besides, there
+was plenty of time.
+
+More slowly now, the wind falling, the brigantine crept up the river,
+her crew alert with sheets and halyards as the devious windings of the
+stream rendered it necessary to trim the canvas at varying angles to
+catch the wind.
+
+Slowly, too, in the shadow of that Mechlin spire, the horizon grew
+rough and elevated, taking shape in the serrated profile of a thousand
+gables and a hundred towers and cross-crowned steeples.
+
+Once or twice, more and more annoyed as the time of their association
+seemed to grow more brief, Kirkwood approached the captain; but Stryker
+continued to be exhaustively absorbed in the performance of his duties.
+
+Up past the dockyards, where spidery masts stood in dense groves about
+painted funnels, and men swarmed over huge wharves like ants over a
+crust of bread; up and round the final, great sweeping bend of the
+river, the _Alethea_ made her sober way, ever with greater slowness;
+until at length, in the rose glow of a flawless evening, her windlass
+began to clank like a mad thing and her anchor bit the riverbed, near
+the left bank, between old Forts Isabelle and Tête de Flandre, frowned
+upon from the right by the grim pile of the age-old Steen castle.
+
+And again Kirkwood sought Stryker, his carking query ready on his lips.
+But the captain impatiently waved him aside.
+
+“Don’t you bother me now, me lud juke! Wyte until I gets done with the
+custom hofficer.”
+
+Kirkwood acceded, perforce; and bided his time with what tolerance he
+could muster.
+
+A pluttering customs launch bustled up to the _Alethea’s_ side,
+discharged a fussy inspector on the brigantine’s deck, and panted
+impatiently until he, the examination concluded without delay, was
+again aboard.
+
+Stryker, smirking benignly and massaging his lips with the back of his
+hand, followed the official on deck, nodded to Kirkwood an intimation
+that he was prepared to accord him an audience, and strolled forward to
+the waist. The American, mastering his resentment, meekly followed; one
+can not well afford to be haughty when one is asking favors.
+
+Advancing to the rail, the captain whistled in one of the river-boats;
+then, while the waterman waited, faced his passenger.
+
+“Now, yer r’yal ’ighness, wot can I do for you afore you goes ashore?”
+
+“I think you must have forgotten,” said Kirkwood quietly. “I hate to
+trouble you, but—there’s that matter of four pounds.”
+
+Stryker’s face was expressive only of mystified vacuity. “Four quid? I
+dunno _as_ I know just wot you means.”
+
+“You agreed to advance me four pounds on those things of mine....”
+
+“Ow-w!” Illumination overspread the hollow-jowled countenance. Stryker
+smiled cheerfully. “Garn with you!” he chuckled. “You will ’ave yer
+little joke, won’t you now? I declare I never see a loony with such
+affecsh’nit, pl’yful wyes!”
+
+Kirkwood’s eyes narrowed. “Stryker,” he said steadily, “give me the
+four pounds and let’s have no more nonsense; or else hand over my
+things at once.”
+
+“Daffy,” Stryker told vacancy, with conviction. “Lor’ luv me if I sees
+’ow he ever ’ad sense enough to escype. W’y, yer majesty!” and he
+bowed, ironic. “I ’_ave_ given you yer quid.”
+
+“Just about as much as I gave you that pearl pin,” retorted Kirkwood
+hotly. “What the devil do you mean—”
+
+“W’y, yer ludship, four pounds jus pyes yer passyge; I thought you
+understood.”
+
+“My passage! But I can come across by steamer for thirty shillings,
+first-class—”
+
+“Aw, but them steamers! Tricky, they is, and unsyfe ... No, yer gryce,
+the W. Stryker Packet Line Lim’ted, London to Antwerp, charges four
+pounds per passyge and no reduction for return fare.”
+
+Stunned by his effrontery, Kirkwood stared in silence.
+
+“Any complynts,” continued the captain, looking over Kirkwood’s head,
+“must be lyde afore the Board of Directors in writin’ not more’n thirty
+dyes arfter—”
+
+“You damned scoundrel!” interpolated Kirkwood thoughtfully.
+
+Stryker’s mouth closed with a snap; his features froze in a cast of
+wrath; cold rage glinted in his small blue eyes. “W’y,” he bellowed,
+“you bloomin’ loonatic, d’ye think you can sye that to Bill Stryker on
+’is own wessel!”
+
+He hesitated a moment, then launched a heavy fist at Kirkwood’s face.
+Unsurprised, the young man side-stepped, caught the hard, bony wrist as
+the captain lurched by, following his wasted blow, and with a dexterous
+twist laid him flat on his back, with a sounding thump upon the deck.
+And as the infuriated scamp rose—which he did with a bound that placed
+him on his feet and in defensive posture; as though the deck had been a
+spring-board—Kirkwood leaped back, seized a capstan-bar, and faced him
+with a challenge.
+
+“Stand clear, Stryker!” he warned the man tensely, himself livid with
+rage. “If you move a step closer I swear I’ll knock the head off your
+shoulders! Not another inch, you contemptible whelp, or I’ll brain
+you!... That’s better,” he continued as the captain, caving, dropped
+his fists and moved uneasily back. “Now give that boatman money for
+taking me ashore. Yes, I’m going—and if we ever meet again, take the
+other side of the way, Stryker!”
+
+Without response, a grim smile wreathing his thin, hard lips, Stryker
+thrust one hand into his pocket, and withdrawing a coin, tossed it to
+the waiting waterman. Whereupon Kirkwood backed warily to the rail,
+abandoned the capstan-bar and dropped over the side.
+
+Nodding to the boatman, “The Steen landing—quickly,” he said in French.
+
+Stryker, recovering, advanced to the rail and waved him a derisive _bon
+voyage_.
+
+“By-by, yer hexcellency. I ’opes it may soon be my pleasure to meet you
+again. You’ve been a real privilege to know; I’ve henjoyed yer comp’ny
+somethin’ immense. Don’t know as I ever met such a rippin’, Ay Number
+One, all-round, entertynin’ ass, afore!”
+
+He fumbled nervously about his clothing, brought to light a rag of
+cotton, much the worse for service, and ostentatiously wiped from the
+corner of each eye tears of grief at parting. Then, as the boat swung
+toward the farther shore, Kirkwood’s back was to the brigantine, and he
+was little tempted to turn and invite fresh shafts of ridicule.
+
+Rapidly, as he was ferried across the busy Scheldt, the white blaze of
+his passion cooled; but the biting irony of his estate ate, corrosive,
+into his soul. Hollow-eyed he glared vacantly into space, pale lips
+unmoving, his features wasted with despair.
+
+They came to the landing-stage and swung broad-side on. Mechanically
+the American got up and disembarked. As heedless of time and place he
+moved up the Quai to the gangway and so gained the esplanade; where
+pausing he thrust a trembling hand into his trouser pocket.
+
+The hand reappeared, displaying in its outspread palm three big, round,
+brown, British pennies. Staring down at them, Kirkwood’s lips moved.
+
+“Bed rock!” he whispered huskily.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+A PRIMER OF PROGRESSIVE CRIME
+
+
+Without warning or presage the still evening air was smitten and made
+softly musical by the pealing of a distant chime, calling vespers to
+its brothers in Antwerp’s hundred belfries; and one by one, far and
+near, the responses broke out, until it seemed as if the world must be
+vibrant with silver and brazen melody; until at the last the great
+bells in the Cathedral spire stirred and grumbled drowsily, then woke
+to such ringing resonance as dwarfed all the rest and made it seem as
+nothing.
+
+Like the beating of a mighty heart heard through the rushing clamor of
+the pulses, a single deep-throated bell boomed solemnly six heavy,
+rumbling strokes.
+
+Six o’clock! Kirkwood roused out of his dour brooding. The Amsterdam
+express would leave at 6:32, and he knew not from what station.
+
+Striding swiftly across the promenade, he entered a small tobacco shop
+and made inquiry of the proprietress. His command of French was
+tolerable; he experienced no difficulty in comprehending the good
+woman’s instructions.
+
+Trains for Amsterdam, she said, left from the Gare Centrale, a mile or
+so across the city. M’sieur had plenty of time, and to spare. There was
+the tram line, if m’sieur did not care to take a fiacre. If he would go
+by way of the Vielle Bourse he would discover the tram cars of the Rue
+Kipdorp. M’sieur was most welcome....
+
+Monsieur departed with the more haste since he was unable to repay this
+courtesy with the most trifling purchase; such slight matters annoyed
+Kirkwood intensely. Perhaps it was well for him that he had the long
+walk to help him work off the fit of nervous exasperation into which he
+was plunged every time his thoughts harked back to that jovial
+black-guard, Stryker.... He was quite calm when, after a brisk walk of
+some fifteen minutes, he reached the station.
+
+A public clock reassured him with the information that he had the
+quarter of an hour’s leeway; it was only seventeen minutes past
+eighteen o’clock (Belgian railway time, always confusing). Inquiring
+his way to the Amsterdam train, which was already waiting at the
+platform, he paced its length, peering brazenly in at the coach
+windows, now warm with hope, now shivering with disappointment,
+realizing as he could not but realize that, all else aside, his only
+chance of rehabilitation lay in meeting Calendar. But in none of the
+coaches or carriages did he discover any one even remotely resembling
+the fat adventurer, his daughter, or Mulready.
+
+Satisfied that they had not yet boarded the train, he stood aside,
+tortured with forebodings, while anxiously scrutinizing each individual
+of the throng of intending travelers.... Perhaps they had been
+delayed—by the _Alethea’s_ lateness in making port very likely; perhaps
+they purposed taking not this but a later train; perhaps they had
+already left the city by an earlier, or had returned to England.
+
+On time, the bell clanged its warning; the guards bawled theirs; doors
+were hastily opened and slammed; the trucks began to groan, couplings
+jolting as the engine chafed in constraint. The train and Kirkwood
+moved simultaneously out of opposite ends of the station, the one to
+rattle and hammer round the eastern boundaries of the city and
+straighten out at top speed on the northern route for the Belgian line,
+the other to stroll moodily away, idle hands in empty pockets, bound
+aimlessly anywhere—it didn’t matter!
+
+Nothing whatever mattered in the smallest degree. Ere now the outlook
+had been dark; but this he felt to be the absolute nadir of his
+misfortunes. Presently—after a while—as soon as he could bring himself
+to it—he would ask the way and go to the American Consulate. But just
+now, low as the tide of chance had ebbed, leaving him stranded on the
+flats of vagabondage, low as showed the measure of his self-esteem, he
+could not tolerate the prospect of begging for assistance—help which
+would in all likelihood be refused, since his story was quite too
+preposterous to gain credence in official ears that daily are filled
+with the lamentations of those whose motives do not bear investigation.
+And if he chose to eliminate the strange chain of events which had
+landed him in Antwerp, to base his plea solely on the fact that he was
+a victim of the San Francisco disaster ... he himself was able to
+smile, if sourly, anticipating the incredulous consular smile with
+which he would be shown the door.
+
+No; that he would reserve as a last resort. True, he had already come
+to the Jumping-off Place; to the Court of the Last Resort alone could
+he now appeal. But ... not yet; after a while he could make his
+petition, after he had made a familiar of the thought that he must
+armor himself with callous indifference to rebuff, to say naught of the
+waves of burning shame that would overwhelm him when he came to the
+point of asking charity.
+
+He found himself, neither knowing nor caring how he had won thither, in
+the Place Verte, the vast venerable pile of the Cathedral rising on his
+right, hotels and quaint Old-World dwellings with peaked roofs and
+gables and dormer windows, inclosing the other sides of the square. The
+chimes (he could hear none but those of the Cathedral) were heralding
+the hour of seven. Listless and preoccupied in contemplation of his
+wretched case he wandered purposelessly half round the square, then
+dropped into a bench on its outskirts.
+
+It was some time later that he noticed, with a casual, indifferent eye,
+a porter running out of the Hôtel de Flandre, directly opposite, and
+calling a fiacre in to the carriage block.
+
+As languidly he watched a woman, very becomingly dressed, follow the
+porter down to the curb.
+
+The fiacre swung in, and the woman dismissed the porter before entering
+the vehicle; a proceeding so unusual that it fixed the onlooker’s
+interest. He sat rigid with attention; the woman seemed to be giving
+explicit and lengthy directions to the driver, who nodded and
+gesticulated his comprehension.
+
+The woman was Mrs. Hallam.
+
+The first blush of recognition passed, leaving Kirkwood without any
+amazement. It was an easy matter to account for her being where she
+was. Thrown off the scent by Kirkwood at Sheerness, the previous
+morning, she had missed the day boat, the same which had ferried over
+those whom she pursued. Returning from Sheerness to Queensborough,
+however, she had taken the night boat for Flushing and Antwerp,—and not
+without her plan, who was not a woman to waste her strength aimlessly;
+Kirkwood believed that she had had from the first a very definite
+campaign in view. In that campaign Queensborough Pier had been the
+first strategic move; the journey to Antwerp, apparently, the second;
+and the American was impressed that he was witnessing the inception of
+the third decided step.... The conclusion of this process of reasoning
+was inevitable: Madam would bear watching.
+
+Thus was a magical transformation brought about. Instantaneously
+lassitude and vain repinings were replaced by hopefulness and energy.
+In a twinkling the young man was on his feet, every nerve a-thrill with
+excitement.
+
+Mrs. Hallam, blissfully ignorant of this surveillance over her
+movements, took her place in the fiacre. The driver clucked to his
+horse, cracked his whip, and started off at a slow trot: a pace which
+Kirkwood imitated, keeping himself at a discreet distance to the rear
+of the cab, but prepared to break into a run whenever it should prove
+necessary.
+
+Such exertion, however, was not required of him. Evidently Mrs. Hallam
+was in no great haste to reach her destination; the speed of the fiacre
+remained extremely moderate; Kirkwood found a long, brisk stride fast
+enough to keep it well in sight.
+
+Round the green square, under the beautiful walls of Notre Dame
+d’Anvers, through Grande Place and past the Hôtel de Ville, the cab
+proceeded, dogged by what might plausibly be asserted the most
+persistent and infatuated soul that ever crossed the water; and so on
+into the Quai Van Dyck, turning to the left at the old Steen dungeon
+and, slowing to a walk, moving soberly up the drive.
+
+Beyond the lip of the embankment, the Scheldt flowed, its broad shining
+surface oily, smooth and dark, a mirror for the incandescent glory of
+the skies. Over on the western bank old Tête de Flandre lifted up its
+grim curtains and bastions, sable against the crimson, rampart and
+parapet edged with fire. Busy little side-wheeled ferry steamers
+spanked the waters noisily and smudged the sunset with dark drifting
+trails of smoke; and ever and anon a rowboat would slip out of shadow
+to glide languidly with the current. Otherwise the life of the river
+was gone; and at their moorings the ships swung in great quietness,
+riding lights glimmering like low wan stars.
+
+In the company of the latter the young man marked down the _Alethea_; a
+sight which made him unconsciously clench both fists and teeth,
+reminding him of that rare wag, Stryker....
+
+To his way of thinking the behavior of the fiacre was quite
+unaccountable. Hardly had the horse paced off the length of two blocks
+on the Quai ere it was guided to the edge of the promenade and brought
+to a stop. And the driver twisted the reins round his whip, thrust the
+latter in its socket, turned sidewise on the box, and began to smoke
+and swing his heels, surveying the panorama of river and sunset with
+complacency—a cabby, one would venture, without a care in the world and
+serene in the assurance of a generous _pour-boire_ when he lost his
+fare. But as for the latter, she made no move; the door of the cab
+remained closed,—like its occupant’s mind, a mystery to the watcher.
+
+Twilight shadows lengthened, darkling, over the land; street-lights
+flashed up in long, radiant ranks. Across the promenade hotels and
+shops were lighted up; people began to gather round the tables beneath
+the awnings of an open-air café. In the distance, somewhere, a band
+swung into the dreamy rhythm of a haunting waltz. Scattered couples
+moved slowly, arm in arm, along the riverside walk, drinking in the
+fragrance of the night. Overhead stars popped out in brilliance and
+dropped their reflections to swim lazily on spellbound waters.... And
+still the fiacre lingered in inaction, still the driver lorded it
+aloft, in care-free abandon.
+
+In the course of time this inertia, where he had looked for action,
+this dull suspense when he had forecast interesting developments, wore
+upon the watcher’s nerves and made him at once impatient and
+suspicious. Now that he had begun to doubt, he conceived it as quite
+possible that Mrs. Hallam (who was capable of anything) should have
+stolen out of the cab by the other and, to him, invisible door. To
+resolve the matter, finally, he took advantage of the darkness, turned
+up his coat collar, hunched up his shoulders, hid his hands in pockets,
+pulled the visor of his cap well forward over his eyes, and slouched
+past the fiacre.
+
+Mrs. Hallam sat within. He could see her profile clearly silhouetted
+against the light; she was bending forward and staring fixedly out of
+the window, across the driveway. Mentally he calculated the direction
+of her gaze, then, moved away and followed it with his own eyes; and
+found himself staring at the façade of a third-rate hotel. Above its
+roof the gilded letters of a sign, catching the illumination from
+below, spelled out the title of “Hôtel du Commerce.”
+
+Mrs. Hallam was interested in the Hôtel du Commerce?
+
+Thoughtfully Kirkwood fell back to his former point of observation, now
+the richer by another object of suspicion, the hostelry. Mrs. Hallam
+was waiting and watching for some one to enter or to leave that
+establishment. It seemed a reasonable inference to draw. Well, then, so
+was Kirkwood, no less than the lady; he deemed it quite conceivable
+that their objects were identical.
+
+He started to beguile the time by wondering what she would do, if...
+
+Of a sudden he abandoned this line of speculation, and catching his
+breath, held it, almost afraid to credit the truth that for once his
+anticipations were being realized under his very eyes.
+
+Against the lighted doorway of the Hôtel du Commerce, the figures of
+two men were momentarily sketched, as they came hurriedly forth; and of
+the two, one was short and stout, and even at a distance seemed to bear
+himself with an accent of assertiveness, while the other was tall and
+heavy of shoulder.
+
+Side by side they marched in step across the embankment to the head of
+the Quai gangway, descending without pause to the landing-stage.
+Kirkwood, hanging breathlessly over the guard-rail, could hear their
+footfalls ringing in hollow rhythm on the planks of the inclined
+way,—could even discern Calendar’s unlovely profile in dim relief
+beneath one of the waterside lights; and he recognized unmistakably
+Mulready’s deep voice, grumbling inarticulately.
+
+At the outset he had set after them, with intent to accost Calendar;
+but their pace had been swift and his irresolute. He hung fire on the
+issue, dreading to reveal himself, unable to decide which were the
+better course, to pursue the men, or to wait and discover what Mrs.
+Hallam was about. In the end he waited; and had his disappointment for
+recompense.
+
+For Mrs. Hallam did nothing intelligible. Had she driven over to the
+hotel, hard upon the departure of the men, he would have believed that
+she was seeking Dorothy, and would, furthermore, have elected to crowd
+their interview, if she succeeded in obtaining one with the girl. But
+she did nothing of the sort. For a time the fiacre remained as it had
+been ever since stopping; then, evidently admonished by his fare, the
+driver straightened up, knocked out his pipe, disentangled reins and
+whip, and wheeled the equipage back on the way it had come,
+disappearing in a dark side street leading eastward from the
+embankment.
+
+Kirkwood was, then, to believe that Mrs. Hallam, having taken all that
+trouble and having waited for the two adventurers to appear, had been
+content with sight of them? He could hardly believe that of the woman;
+it wasn’t like her.
+
+He started across the driveway, after the fiacre, but it was lost in a
+tangle of side streets before he could make up his mind whether it was
+worth while chasing or not; and, pondering the woman’s singular action,
+he retraced his steps to the promenade rail.
+
+Presently he told himself he understood. Dorothy was no longer of her
+father’s party; he had a suspicion that Mulready’s attitude had made it
+seem advisable to Calendar either to leave the girl behind, in England,
+or to segregate her from his associates in Antwerp. If not lodged in
+another quarter of the city, or left behind, she was probably traveling
+on ahead, to a destination which he could by no means guess. And Mrs.
+Hallam was looking for the girl; if there were really jewels in that
+gladstone bag, Calendar would naturally have had no hesitation about
+intrusting them to his daughter’s care; and Mrs. Hallam avowedly sought
+nothing else. How the woman had found out that such was the case,
+Kirkwood did not stop to reckon; unless he explained it on the
+proposition that she was a person of remarkable address. It made no
+matter, one way or the other; he had lost Mrs. Hallam; but Calendar and
+Mulready he could put his finger on; they had undoubtedly gone off to
+the _Alethea_ to confer again with Stryker,—that was, unless they
+proposed sailing on the brigantine, possibly at turn of tide that
+night.
+
+Panic gripped his soul and shook it, as a terrier shakes a rat, when he
+conceived this frightful proposition.
+
+In his confusion of mind he evolved spontaneously an entirely new
+hypothesis: Dorothy had already been spirited aboard the vessel;
+Calendar and his confederate, delaying to join her from enigmatic
+motives, were now aboard; and presently the word would be, Up-anchor
+and away!
+
+Were they again to elude him? Not, he swore, if he had to swim for it.
+And he had no wish to swim. The clothes he stood in, with what was left
+of his self-respect, were all that he could call his own on that side
+of the North Sea. Not a boatman on the Scheldt would so much as
+consider accepting three English pennies in exchange for boat-hire. In
+brief, it began to look as if he were either to swim or ... to steal a
+boat.
+
+Upon such slender threads of circumstance depends our boasted moral
+health. In one fleeting minute Kirkwood’s conception of the law of
+_meum et tuum_, its foundations already insidiously undermined by a
+series of cumulative misfortunes, toppled crashing to its fall; and was
+not.
+
+He was wholly unconscious of the change. Beneath him, in a space
+between the quays bridged by the gangway, a number of rowboats, a
+putative score, lay moored for the night and gently rubbing against
+each other with the soundless lift and fall of the river. For all that
+Kirkwood could determine to the contrary, the lot lay at the mercy of
+the public; nowhere about was he able to discern a figure in anything
+resembling a watchman.
+
+Without a quiver of hesitation—moments were invaluable, if what he
+feared were true—he strode to the gangway, passed down, and with
+absolute nonchalance dropped into the nearest boat, stepping from one
+to another until he had gained the outermost. To his joy he found a
+pair of oars stowed beneath the thwarts.
+
+If he had paused to moralize—which he didn’t—upon the discovery, he
+would have laid it all at the door of his lucky star; and would have
+been wrong. We who have never stooped to petty larceny know that the
+oars had been placed there at the direction of his evil genius bent
+upon facilitating his descent into the avernus of crime. Let us, then,
+pity the poor young man without condoning his offense.
+
+Unhitching the painter he set one oar against the gunwale of the next
+boat, and with a powerful thrust sent his own (let us so call it for
+convenience) stern-first out upon the river; then sat him composedly
+down, fitted the oars to their locks, and began to pull straight
+across-stream, trusting to the current to carry him down to the
+_Alethea_. He had already marked down that vessel’s riding-light; and
+that not without a glow of gratitude to see it still aloft and in
+proper juxtaposition to the river-bank; proof that it had not moved.
+
+He pulled a good oar, reckoned his distance prettily, and shipping the
+blades at just the right moment, brought the little boat in under the
+brigantine’s counter with scarce a jar. An element of surprise he held
+essential to the success of his plan, whatever that might turn out to
+be.
+
+Standing up, he caught the brigantine’s after-rail with both hands, one
+of which held the painter of the purloined boat, and lifted his head
+above the deck line. A short survey of the deserted after-deck gave him
+further assurance. The anchor-watch was not in sight; he may have been
+keeping well forward by Stryker’s instructions, or he may have crept
+off for forty winks. Whatever the reason for his absence from the post
+of duty, Kirkwood was relieved not to have him to deal with; and
+drawing himself gently in over the rail, made the painter fast, and
+stepped noiselessly over toward the lighted oblong of the companionway.
+A murmur of voices from below comforted him with the knowledge that he
+had not miscalculated, this time; at last he stood within striking
+distance of his quarry.
+
+The syllables of his surname ringing clearly in his ears and followed
+by Stryker’s fleeting laugh, brought him to a pause. He flushed hotly
+in the darkness; the captain was retailing with relish some of his most
+successful witticisms at Kirkwood’s expense.... “You’d ought to’ve seed
+the wye’e looked at me!” concluded the _raconteur_ in a gale of mirth.
+
+Mulready laughed with him, if a little uncertainly. Calendar’s chuckle
+was not audible, but he broke the pause that followed.
+
+“I don’t know,” he said with doubting emphasis. “You say you landed him
+without a penny in his pocket? I don’t call that a good plan at all. Of
+course, he ain’t a factor, but ... Well, it might’ve been as well to
+give him his fare home. He might make trouble for us, somehow.... I
+don’t mind telling you, Cap’n, that you’re an ass.”
+
+The tensity of certain situations numbs the sensibilities. Kirkwood had
+never in his weirdest dreams thought of himself as an eavesdropper; he
+did not think of himself as such in the present instance; he merely
+listened, edging nearer the skylight, of which the wings were slightly
+raised, and keeping as far as possible in shadow.
+
+“Ow, I sye!” the captain was remonstrating, aggrieved. “’Ow was I to
+know ’e didn’t ’ave it in for you? First off, when ’e comes on board
+(I’ll sye this for ’im, ’e’s as plucky as they myke ’em), I thought ’e
+was from the Yard. Then, when I see wot a bally hinnocent ’e was, I
+mykes up my mind ’e’s just some one you’ve been ply in’ one of your
+little gymes on, and ’oo was lookin’ to square ’is account. So I did
+’im proper.”
+
+“Evidently,” assented Calendar dryly. “You’re a bit of a heavy-handed
+brute, Stryker. Personally I’m kind of sorry for the boy; he wasn’t a
+bad sort, as his kind runs, and he was no fool, from what little I saw
+of him.... I wonder what he wanted.”
+
+“Possibly,” Mulready chimed in suavely, “you can explain what you
+wanted of him, in the first place. How did you come to drag him into
+_this_ business?”
+
+“Oh, that!” Calendar laughed shortly. “That was partly accident, partly
+inspiration. I happened to see his name on the Pless register; he’d put
+himself down as from ’Frisco. I figured it out that he would be next
+door to broke and getting desperate, ready to do anything to get home;
+and thought we might utilize him; to smuggle some of the stuff into the
+States. Once before, if you’ll remember—no; that was before we got
+together, Mulready—I picked up a fellow-countryman on the Strand. He
+was down and out, jumped at the job, and we made a neat little wad on
+it.”
+
+“The more fool you, to take outsiders into your confidence,” grumbled
+Mulready.
+
+“Ow?” interrogated Calendar, mimicking Stryker’s accent inimitably.
+“Well, you’ve got a heap to learn about this game, Mul; about the first
+thing is that you must trust Old Man Know-it-all, which is me. I’ve run
+more diamonds into the States, in one way or another, in my time, than
+you ever pinched out of the shirt-front of a toff on the Empire Prom.,
+before they made the graft too hot for you and you came to take lessons
+from me in the gentle art of living easy.”
+
+“Oh, cut that, cawn’t you?”
+
+“Delighted, dear boy.... One of the first principles, next to profiting
+by the admirable example I set you, is to make the fellows in your own
+line trust you. Now, if this boy had taken on with me, I could have got
+a bunch of the sparklers on my mere say-so, from old Morganthau up on
+Finsbury Pavement. He does a steady business hoodwinking the Customs
+for the benefit of his American clients—and himself. And I’d’ve made a
+neat little profit besides: something to fall back on, if this fell
+through. I don’t mind having two strings to my bow.”
+
+“Yes,” argued Mulready; “but suppose this Kirkwood had taken on with
+you and then peached?”
+
+“That’s another secret; you’ve got to know your man, be able to size
+him up. I called on this chap for that very purpose; but I saw at a
+glance he wasn’t our man. He smelt a nigger in the woodpile and most
+politely told me to go to the devil. But if he _had_ come in, he’d’ve
+died before he squealed. I know the breed; there’s honor among
+gentlemen that knocks the honor of thieves higher’n a kite, the old saw
+to the contrary—nothing doing.... You understand me, I’m sure,
+Mulready?” he concluded with envenomed sweetness.
+
+“I don’t see yet how Kirkwood got anything to do with Dorothy.”
+
+“Miss Calendar to you, _Mister_ Mulready!” snapped Calendar. “There,
+there, now! Don’t get excited.... It was when the Hallam passed me word
+that a man from the Yard was waiting on the altar steps for me, that
+Kirkwood came in. He was dining close by; I went over and worked on his
+feelings until he agreed to take Dorothy off my hands. If I had
+attempted to leave the place with her, they’d’ve spotted me for
+sure.... My compliments to you, Dick Mulready.”
+
+There came the noise of chair legs scraped harshly on the cabin deck.
+Apparently Mulready had leaped to his feet in a rage.
+
+“I’ve told you—” he began in a voice thick with passion.
+
+“Oh, sit down!” Calendar cut in contemptuously. “Sit down, d’you hear?
+That’s all over and done with. We understand each other now, and you
+won’t try any more monkey-shines. It’s a square deal and a square
+divide, so far’s I’m concerned; if we stick together there’ll be profit
+enough for all concerned. Sit down, Mul, and have another slug of the
+captain’s bum rum.”
+
+Although Mulready consented to be pacified, Kirkwood got the impression
+that the man was far gone in drink. A moment later he heard him growl
+“Chin-chin!” antiphonal to the captain’s “Cheer-o!”
+
+“Now, then,” Calendar proposed, “Mr. Kirkwood aside—peace be with
+him!—let’s get down to cases.”
+
+“Wot’s the row?” asked the captain.
+
+“The row, Cap’n, is the Hallam female, who has unexpectedly shown up in
+Antwerp, we have reason to believe with malicious intent and a private
+detective to add to the gaiety of nations.”
+
+“Wot’s the odds? She carn’t ’urt us without lyin’ up trouble for
+’erself.”
+
+“Damn little consolation to us when we’re working it out in Dartmoor.”
+
+“Speak for yourself,” grunted Mulready surlily.
+
+“I do,” returned Calendar easily; “we’re both in the shadow of
+Dartmoor, Mul, my boy; since you choose to take the reference as
+personal. Sing Sing, however, yawns for me alone; it’s going to keep on
+yawning, too, unless I miss my guess. I love my native land most to
+death, _but_ ...”
+
+“Ow, blow that!” interrupted the captain irritably. “Let’s ’ear about
+the ’Allam. Wot’re you afryd of?”
+
+“’Fraid she’ll set up a yell when she finds out we’re planting the
+loot, Cap’n. She’s just that vindictive; you’d think she’d be satisfied
+with her end of the stick, but you don’t know the Hallam. That
+milk-and-water offspring of hers is the apple of her eye, and Freddie’s
+going to collar the whole shooting-match or madam will kick over the
+traces.”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Well, she’s queered us here. We can’t do anything if my lady is going
+to camp on our trail and tell everybody we’re shady customers, can we?
+The question now before the board is: Where now,—and how?”
+
+“Amsterdam,” Mulready chimed in. “I told you that in the beginning.”
+
+“But how?” argued Calendar. “The Lord knows I’m willing but ... we
+can’t go by rail, thanks to the Hallam. We’ve got to lose her first of
+all.”
+
+“But wot I’m arskin’ is, wot’s the matter with—”
+
+“The _Alethea_, Cap’n? Nothing, so far as Dick and I are concerned. But
+my dutiful daughter is prejudiced; she’s been so long without proper
+paternal discipline,” Calendar laughed, “that she’s rather
+high-spirited. Of course I might overcome her objections, but the
+girl’s no fool, and every ounce of pressure I bring to bear just now
+only helps make her more restless and suspicious.”
+
+“You leave her to me,” Mulready interposed, with a brutal laugh. “I’ll
+guarantee to get her aboard, or...”
+
+“Drop it, Dick!” Calendar advised quietly. “And go a bit easy with that
+bottle for five minutes, can’t you?”
+
+“Well, then,” Stryker resumed, apparently concurring in Calendar’s
+attitude, “w’y don’t one of you tyke the stuff, go off quiet and
+dispose of it to a proper fence, and come back to divide. I don’t see
+w’y that—”
+
+“Naturally you wouldn’t,” chuckled Calendar. “Few people besides the
+two of us understand the depth of affection existing between Dick,
+here, and me. We just can’t bear to get out of sight of each other.
+We’re sure inseparable—since night before last. Odd, isn’t it?”
+
+“You drop it!” snarled Mulready, in accents so ugly that the listener
+was startled. “Enough’s enough and—”
+
+“There, there, Dick! All right; I’ll behave,” Calendar soothed him.
+“We’ll forget and say no more about it.”
+
+“Well, see you don’t.”
+
+“But ’as either of you a plan?” persisted Stryker.
+
+“I have,” replied Mulready; “and it’s the simplest and best, if you
+could only make this long-lost parent here see it.”
+
+“Wot is it?”
+
+Mulready seemed to ignore Calendar and address himself to the captain.
+He articulated with some difficulty, slurring his words to the point of
+indistinctness at times.
+
+“Simple enough,” he propounded solemnly. “We’ve got the gladstone bag
+here; Miss Dolly’s at the hotel—that’s her papa’s bright notion; he
+thinks she’s to be trusted ... Now then, what’s the matter with
+weighing anchor and slipping quietly out to sea?”
+
+“Leavin’ the dootiful darter?”
+
+“Cert’n’y. She’s only a drag any way. ’Better off without her.... Then
+we can wait our time and get highest market prices—”
+
+“You forget, Dick,” Calendar put it, “that there’s a thousand in it for
+each of us if she’s kept out of England for six weeks. A thousand’s
+five thousand in the land I hail from; I can use five thousand in my
+business.”
+
+“Why can’t you be content with what you’ve got?” demanded Mulready
+wrathfully.
+
+“Because I’m a seventh son of a seventh son; I can see an inch or two
+beyond my nose. If Dorothy ever finds her way back to England she’ll
+spoil one of the finest fields of legitimate graft I ever licked my
+lips to look at. The trouble with you, Mul, is you’re too high-toned.
+You want to play the swell mobs-man from post to finish. A quick touch
+and a clean getaway for yours. Now, that’s all right; that has its good
+points, but you don’t want to underestimate the advantages of a good
+blackmailing connection.... If I can keep Dorothy quiet long enough, I
+look to the Hallam and precious Freddie to be a great comfort to me in
+my old age.”
+
+“Then, for God’s sake,” cried Mulready, “go to the hotel, get your brat
+by the scruif of her pretty neck and drag her aboard. Let’s get out of
+this.”
+
+“I won’t,” returned Calendar inflexibly.
+
+The dispute continued, but the listener had heard enough. He had to get
+away and think, could no longer listen; indeed, the voices of the three
+blackguards below came but indistinctly to his ears, as if from a
+distance. He was sick at heart and ablaze with indignation by turns.
+Unconsciously he was trembling violently in every limb; swept by
+alternate waves of heat and cold, feverish one minute, shivering the
+next. All of which phenomena were due solely to the rage that welled
+inside his heart.
+
+Stealthily he crept away to the rail, to stand grasping it and staring
+across the water with unseeing eyes at the gay old city twinkling back
+with her thousand eyes of light. The cool night breeze, sweeping down
+unhindered over the level Netherlands from the bleak North Sea, was
+comforting to his throbbing temples. By degrees his head cleared, his
+rioting pulses subsided, he could think; and he did.
+
+Over there, across the water, in the dingy and disreputable Hôtel du
+Commerce, Dorothy waited in her room, doubtless the prey of unnumbered
+nameless terrors, while aboard the brigantine her fate was being
+decided by a council of three unspeakable scoundrels, one of whom,
+professing himself her father, openly declared his intention of using
+her to further his selfish and criminal ends.
+
+His first and natural thought, to steal away to her and induce her to
+accompany him back to England, Kirkwood perforce discarded. He could
+have wept over the realization of his unqualified impotency. He had no
+money,—not even cab-fare from the hotel to the railway station.
+Something subtler, more crafty, had to be contrived to meet the
+emergency. And there was one way, one only; he could see none other.
+Temporarily he must make himself one of the company of her enemies,
+force himself upon them, ingratiate himself into their good graces,
+gain their confidence, then, when opportunity offered, betray them. And
+the power to make them tolerate him, if not receive him as a fellow,
+the knowledge of them and their plans that they had unwittingly given
+him, was his.
+
+And Dorothy, was waiting....
+
+He swung round and without attempting to muffle his footfalls strode
+toward the companionway. He must pretend he had just come aboard.
+
+Subconsciously he had been aware, during his time of pondering, that
+the voices in the cabin had been steadily gaining in volume, rising
+louder and yet more loud, Mulready’s ominous, drink-blurred accents
+dominating the others. There was a quarrel afoot; as soon as he gave it
+heed, Kirkwood understood that Mulready, in the madness of his inflamed
+brain, was forcing the issue while Calendar sought vainly to calm and
+soothe him.
+
+The American arrived at the head of the companionway at a critical
+juncture. As he moved to descend some low, cool-toned retort of
+Calendar’s seemed to enrage his confederate beyond reason. He yelped
+aloud with wrath, sprang to his feet, knocking over a chair, and
+leaping back toward the foot of the steps, flashed an adroit hand
+behind him and found his revolver.
+
+“I’ve stood enough from you!” he screamed, his voice oddly clear in
+that moment of insanity. “You’ve played with me as long as you will,
+you hulking American hog! And now I’m going to show—”
+
+As he held his fire to permit his denunciation to bite home, Kirkwood,
+appalled to find himself standing on the threshold of a tragedy,
+gathered himself together and launched through the air, straight for
+the madman’s shoulders.
+
+As they went down together, sprawling, Mulready’s head struck against a
+transom and the revolver fell from his limp fingers.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+STRATAGEMS AND SPOILS
+
+
+Prepared as he had been for the shock, Kirkwood was able to pick
+himself up quickly, uninjured, Mulready’s revolver in his grasp.
+
+On his feet, straddling Mulready’s insentient body, he confronted
+Calendar and Stryker. The face of the latter was a sickly green, the
+gift of his fright. The former seemed coldly composed, already
+recovering from his surprise and bringing his wits to bear upon the new
+factor which had been so unceremoniously injected into the situation.
+
+
+[Illustration: Straddling Mulready’s body, he confronted Calendar and
+Stryker.]
+
+
+Standing, but leaning heavily upon a hand that rested flat on the
+table, in the other he likewise held a revolver, which he had
+apparently drawn in self-defense, at the crisis of Mulready’s frenzy.
+Its muzzle was deflected. He looked Kirkwood over with a cool gray eye,
+the color gradually returning to his fat, clean-shaven cheeks,
+replacing the pardonable pallor which had momentarily rested thereon.
+
+As for Kirkwood, he had covered the fat adventurer before he knew it.
+Stryker, who had been standing immediately in the rear of Calendar,
+immediately cowered and cringed to find himself in the line of fire.
+
+Of the three conscious men in the brigantine’s cabin, Calendar was
+probably the least confused or excited. Stryker was palpably unmanned.
+Kirkwood was tingling with a sense of mastery, but collected and
+rapidly revolving the combinations for the reversed conditions which
+had been brought about by Mulready’s drunken folly. His elation was
+apparent in his shining, boyish eyes, as well as in the bright color
+that glowed in his cheeks. When he decided to speak it was with rapid
+enunciation, but clearly and concisely.
+
+“Calendar,” he began, “if a single shot is fired about this vessel the
+river police will be buzzing round your ears in a brace of shakes.”
+
+The fat adventurer nodded assent, his eyes contracting.
+
+“Very well!” continued Kirkwood brusquely. “You must know that I have
+personally nothing to fear from the police; if arrested, I wouldn’t be
+detained a day. On the other hand, you ... Hand me that pistol,
+Calendar, butt first, please. Look sharp, my man! If you don’t...”
+
+He left the ellipsis to be filled in by the corpulent blackguard’s
+intelligence. The latter, gray eyes still intent on the younger man’s
+face, wavered, plainly impressed, but still wondering.
+
+“Quick! I’m not patient to-night...”
+
+No longer was Calendar of two minds. In the face of Kirkwood’s attitude
+there was but one course to be followed: that of obedience. Calendar
+surrendered an untenable position as gracefully as could be wished.
+
+“I guess you know what you mean by this,” he said, tendering the weapon
+as per instructions; “I’m doggoned if I do.... You’ll allow a certain
+latitude in consideration of my relief; I can’t say we were
+anticipating this—ah—Heaven-sent visitation.”
+
+Accepting the revolver with his left hand and settling his forefinger
+on the trigger, Kirkwood beamed with pure enjoyment. He found the
+deference of the older man, tempered though it was by his indomitable
+swagger, refreshing in the extreme.
+
+“A little appreciation isn’t exactly out of place, come to think of
+it,” he commented, adding, with an eye for the captain: “Stryker, you
+bold, bad butterfly, have you got a gun concealed about your unclean
+person?”
+
+The captain shook visibly with contrition. “No, Mr. Kirkwood,” he
+managed to reply in a voice singularly lacking in his wonted bluster.
+
+“Say ‘sir’!” suggested Kirkwood.
+
+“No, Mr. Kirkwood, sir,” amended Stryker eagerly.
+
+“Now come round here and let’s have a look at you. Please stay where
+you are, Calendar.... Why, Captain, you’re shivering from head to foot!
+Not ill are you, you wag? Step over to the table there, Stryker, and
+turn out your pockets; turn ’em inside out and let’s see what you carry
+in the way of offensive artillery. And, Stryker, don’t be rash; don’t
+do anything you’d be sorry for afterwards.”
+
+“No fear of that,” mumbled the captain, meekly shambling toward the
+table, and, in his anxiety to give no cause for unpleasantness,
+beginning to empty his pockets on the way.
+
+“Don’t forget the ‘sir,’ Stryker. And, Stryker, if you happen to think
+of anything in the line of one of your merry quips or jests, don’t
+strain yourself holding in; get it right off your chest, and you’ll
+feel better.”
+
+Kirkwood chuckled, in high conceit with himself, watching Calendar out
+of the corner of his eye, but with his attention centered on the
+infinitely diverting spectacle afforded by Stryker, whose predacious
+hands were trembling violently as, one by one, they brought to light
+the articles of which he had despoiled his erstwhile victim.
+
+“Come, come, Stryker! Surely you can think of something witty, surely
+you haven’t exhausted the possibilities of that almanac joke! Couldn’t
+you ring another variation on the lunatic wheeze? Don’t hesitate out of
+consideration for me, Captain; I’m joke proof—perhaps you’ve noticed?”
+
+Stryker turned upon him an expression at once ludicrous, piteous and
+hateful. “That’s all, sir,” he snarled, displaying his empty palms in
+token of his absolute tractability.
+
+“Good enough. Now right about face—quick! Your back’s prettier than
+your face, and besides, I want to know whether your hip-pockets are
+empty. I’ve heard it’s the habit of you gentry to pack guns in your
+clothes.... None? That’s all right, then. Now roost on the transom,
+over there in the corner, Stryker, and don’t move. Don’t let me hear a
+word from you. Understand?”
+
+Submissively the captain retired to the indicated spot. Kirkwood turned
+to Calendar; of whose attitude, however, he had not been for an instant
+unmindful.
+
+“Won’t you sit down, Mr. Calendar?” he suggested pleasantly. “Forgive
+me for keeping you waiting.”
+
+For his own part, as the adventurer dropped passively into his chair,
+Kirkwood stepped over Mulready and advanced to the middle of the cabin,
+at the same time thrusting Calendar’s revolver into his own coat
+pocket. The other, Mulready’s, he nursed significantly with both hands,
+while he stood temporarily quiet, surveying the fleshy face of the
+prime factor in the intrigue.
+
+A quaint, grim smile played about the American’s lips, a smile a little
+contemptuous, more than a little inscrutable. In its light Calendar
+grew restive and lost something of his assurance. His feet shifted
+uneasily beneath the table and his dark eyes wavered, evading
+Kirkwood’s. At length he seemed to find the suspense unendurable.
+
+“Well?” he demanded testily. “What d’you want of me?”
+
+“I was just wondering at you, Calendar. In the last few days you’ve
+given me enough cause to wonder, as you’ll admit.”
+
+The adventurer plucked up spirit, deluded by Kirkwood’s pacific tone.
+“I wonder at you, Mr. Kirkwood,” he retorted. “It was good of you to
+save my life and—”
+
+“I’m not so sure of that! Perhaps it had been more humane—”
+
+Calendar owned the touch with a wry grimace. “But I’m damned if I
+understand this high-handed attitude of yours!” he concluded heatedly.
+
+“Don’t you?” Kirkwood’s humor became less apparent, the smile sobering.
+“You will,” he told the man, adding abruptly: “Calendar, where’s your
+daughter?”
+
+The restless eyes sought the companionway.
+
+“Dorothy,” the man lied spontaneously, without a tremor, “is with
+friends in England. Why? Did you want to see her?”
+
+“I rather expected to.”
+
+“Well, I thought it best to leave her home, after all.”
+
+“I’m glad to hear she’s in safe hands,” commented Kirkwood.
+
+The adventurer’s glance analyzed his face. “Ah,” he said slowly, “I
+see. You followed me on Dorothy’s account, Mr. Kirkwood?”
+
+“Partly; partly on my own. Let me put it to you fairly. When you forced
+yourself upon me, back there in London, you offered me some sort of
+employment; when I rejected it, you used me to your advantage for the
+furtherance of your purposes (which I confess I don’t understand), and
+made me miss my steamer. Naturally, when I found myself penniless and
+friendless in a strange country, I thought again of your offer; and
+tried to find you, to accept it.”
+
+“Despite the fact that you’re an honest man, Kirkwood?” The fat lips
+twitched with premature enjoyment.
+
+“I’m a desperate man to-night, whatever I may have been yesterday.” The
+young man’s tone was both earnest and convincing. “I think I’ve shown
+that by my pertinacity in hunting you down.”
+
+“Well—yes.” Calendar’s thick fingers caressed his lips, trying to hide
+the dawning smile.
+
+“Is that offer still open?”
+
+His nonchalance completely restored by the very naïveté of the
+proposition, Calendar laughed openly and with a trace of irony. The
+episode seemed to be turning out better than he had anticipated. Gently
+his mottled fat fingers played about his mouth and chins as he looked
+Kirkwood up and down.
+
+“I’m sorry,” he replied, “that it isn’t—now. You’re too late, Kirkwood;
+I’ve made other arrangements.”
+
+“Too bad.” Kirkwood’s eyes narrowed. “You force me to harsher measures,
+Calendar.”
+
+Genuinely diverted, the adventurer laughed a second time, tipping back
+in his chair, his huge frame shaking with ponderous enjoyment. “Don’t
+do anything you’d be sorry for,” he parroted, sarcastical, the young
+man’s recent admonition to the captain.
+
+“No fear, Calendar. I’m just going to use my advantage, which you won’t
+dispute,”—the pistol described an eloquent circle, gleaming in the
+lamplight—“to levy on you a little legitimate blackmail. Don’t be
+alarmed; I shan’t hit you any harder than I have to.”
+
+“What?” stammered Calendar, astonished. “What in hell _are_ you driving
+at?”
+
+“Recompense for my time and trouble. You’ve cost me a pretty penny,
+first and last, with your nasty little conspiracy—whatever it’s all
+about. Now, needing the money, I purpose getting some of it back. I
+shan’t precisely rob you, but this is a hold-up, all right....
+Stryker,” reproachfully, “I don’t see my pearl pin.”
+
+“I got it ’ere,” responded the sailor hastily, fumbling with his tie.
+
+“Give it me, then.” Kirkwood held out his hand and received the
+trinket. Then, moving over to the table, the young man, while abating
+nothing of his watchfulness, sorted out his belongings from the mass of
+odds and ends Stryker had disgorged. The tale of them was complete; the
+captain had obeyed him faithfully. Kirkwood looked up, pleased.
+
+“Now see here, Calendar; this collection of truck that I was robbed of
+by this resurrected Joe Miller here, cost me upwards of a hundred and
+fifty. I’m going to sell it to you at a bargain—say fifty dollars, two
+hundred and fifty francs.”
+
+“The juice you are!” Calendar’s eyes opened wide, partly in admiration.
+“D’you realize that this is next door to highway robbery, my young
+friend?”
+
+“High-seas piracy, if you prefer,” assented Kirkwood with entire
+equanimity. “I’m going to have the money, and you’re going to give it
+up. The transaction by any name would smell no sweeter, Calendar.
+Come—fork over!”
+
+“And if I refuse?”
+
+“I wouldn’t refuse, if I were you.”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“The consequences would be too painful.”
+
+“You mean you’d puncture me with that gun?”
+
+“Not unless you attack or attempt to follow me. I mean to say that the
+Belgian police are notoriously a most efficient body, and that I’ll
+make it my duty and pleasure to introduce ’em to you, if you refuse.
+But you won’t,” Kirkwood added soothingly, “will you, Calendar?”
+
+“No.” The adventurer had become suddenly thoughtful. “No, I won’t.
+’Glad to oblige you.”
+
+He tilted his chair still farther back, straightening out his
+elephantine legs, inserted one fat hand into his trouser pocket and
+with some difficulty extracted a combined bill-fold and coin-purse, at
+once heavy with gold and bulky with notes. Moistening thumb and
+forefinger, “How’ll you have it?” he inquired with a lift of his
+cunning eyes; and when Kirkwood had advised him, slowly counted out
+four fifty-franc notes, placed them near the edge of the table, and
+weighted them with five ten-franc pieces. And, “’That all?” he asked,
+replacing the pocket-book.
+
+“That will be about all. I leave you presently to your unholy devices,
+you and that gay dog, over there.” The captain squirmed, reddening.
+“Just by way of precaution, however, I’ll ask you to wait in here till
+I’m off.” Kirkwood stepped backwards to the door of the captain’s room,
+opened it and removed the key from the inside. “Please take Mulready in
+with you,” he continued. “By the time you get out, I’ll be clear of
+Antwerp. Please don’t think of refusing me,—I really mean it!”
+
+The latter clause came sharply as Calendar seemed to hesitate, his
+weary, wary eyes glimmering with doubt. Kirkwood, watching him as a cat
+her prey, intercepted a lightning-swift sidelong glance that shifted
+from his face to the port lockers, forward. But the fat adventurer was
+evidently to a considerable degree deluded by the very child-like
+simplicity of Kirkwood’s attitude. If the possibility that his
+altercation with Mulready had been overheard, crossed his mind,
+Calendar had little choice other than to accept the chance. Either way
+he moved, the risk was great; if he refused to be locked in the
+captain’s room, there was the danger of the police, to which Kirkwood
+had convincingly drawn attention; if he accepted the temporary
+imprisonment, he took a risk with the gladstone bag. On the other hand,
+he had estimated Kirkwood’s honesty as thorough-going, from their first
+interview; he had appraised him as a gentleman and a man of honor. And
+he did not believe the young man knew, after all ... Perplexed, at
+length he chose the smoother way, and with an indulgent lifting of
+eyebrows and fat shoulders, rose and waddled over to Mulready.
+
+“Oh, all right,” he conceded with deep toleration in his tone for the
+idiosyncrasies of youth. “It’s all the same to me, beau.” He laughed a
+nervous laugh. “Come along and lend us a hand, Stryker.”
+
+The latter glanced timidly at Kirkwood, his eyes pleading for leave to
+move; which Kirkwood accorded with an imperative nod and a fine
+flourish of the revolver. Promptly the captain, sprang to Calendar’s
+assistance; and between the two of them, the one taking Mulready’s
+head, the other his feet, they lugged him quickly into the stuffy
+little state-room. Kirkwood, watching and following to the threshold,
+inserted the key.
+
+“One word more,” he counseled, a hand on the knob. “Don’t forget I’ve
+warned you what’ll happen if you try to break even with me.”
+
+“Never fear, little one!” Calendar’s laugh was nervously cheerful. “The
+Lord knows you’re welcome.”
+
+“Thank you ’most to death,” responded Kirkwood politely. “Good-by—and
+good-by to you, Stryker. ’Glad to have humored your desire to meet me
+soon again.”
+
+Kirkwood, turning the key in the lock, withdrew it and dropped it on
+the cabin table; at the same time he swept into his pocket the money he
+had extorted of Calendar. Then he paused an instant, listening; from
+the captain’s room came a sound of murmurs and scuffling. He debated
+what they were about in there—but time pressed. Not improbably they,
+were crowding for place at the keyhole, he reflected, as he crossed to
+the port locker forward.
+
+He had its lid up in a twinkling, and in another had lifted out the
+well-remembered black gladstone bag.
+
+This seems to have been his first compound larceny.
+
+As if stimulated by some such reflection he sprang for the
+companionway, dropping the lid of the locker with a bang which must
+have been excruciatingly edifying to the men in the captain’s room.
+Whatever their emotions, the bang was mocked by a mighty kick, shaking
+the door; which, Kirkwood reflected, opened outward and was held only
+by the frailest kind of a lock: it would not hold long.
+
+Spurred onward by a storm of curses, Stryker’s voice chanting
+infuriated cacophony with Calendar’s, Kirkwood leapt up the
+companionway even as the second tremendous kick threatened to shatter
+the panels. Heart in mouth, a chill shiver of guilt running up and down
+his spine, he gained the deck, cast loose the painter, drew in his
+rowboat, and dropped over the side; then, the gladstone bag nestling
+between his feet, sat down and bent to the oars.
+
+And doubts assailed him, pressing close upon the ebb of his
+excitement—doubts and fears innumerable.
+
+There was no longer a distinction to be drawn between himself and
+Calendar; no more could he esteem himself a better and more honest man
+than that accomplished swindler. He was not advised as to the Belgian
+code, but English law, he understood, made no allowance for the good
+intent of those caught in possession of stolen property; though he was
+acting with the most honorable motives in the world, the law, if he
+came within its cognizance, would undoubtedly place him on Calendar’s
+plane and judge him by the same standard. To all intents and purposes
+he was a thief, and thief he would remain until the gladstone bag with
+its contents should be restored to its rightful owner.
+
+Voluntarily, then, he had stepped from the ranks of the hunters to
+those of the hunted. He now feared police interference as abjectly as
+did Calendar and his set of rogues; and Kirkwood felt wholly warranted
+in assuming that the adventurer, with his keen intelligence, would not
+handicap himself by ignoring this point. Indeed, if he were to be
+judged by what Kirkwood had inferred of his character, Calendar would
+let nothing whatever hinder him, neither fear of bodily hurt nor danger
+of apprehension at the hands of the police, from making a determined
+and savage play to regain possession of his booty.
+
+Well! (Kirkwood set his mouth savagely) Calendar should have a run for
+his money!
+
+For the present he could compliment himself with the knowledge that he
+had outwitted the rogues, had lifted the jewels and probably two-thirds
+of their armament; he had also the start, the knowledge of their
+criminal guilt and intent, and his own plans, to comfort him. As for
+the latter, he did not believe that Calendar would immediately fathom
+them; so he took heart of grace and tugged at the oars with a will,
+pulling directly for the city and permitting the current to drift him
+down-stream at its pleasure. There could be no more inexcusable folly
+than to return to the _Quai Steen_ landing and (possibly) the arms of
+the despoiled boat-owner.
+
+At first he could hear crash after splintering crash sounding dully
+muffled from the cabin of the _Alethea_: a veritable devil’s tattoo
+beaten out by the feet of the prisoners. Evidently the fastening was
+serving him better than he had dared hope. But as the black rushing
+waters widened between boat and brigantine, the clamor aboard the
+latter subsided, indicating that Calendar and Stryker had broken out or
+been released by the crew. In ignorance as to whether he were seen or
+being pursued, Kirkwood pulled on, winning in under the shadow of the
+quais and permitting the boat to drift down to a lonely landing on the
+edge of the dockyard quarter of Antwerp.
+
+Here alighting, he made the boat fast and, soothing his conscience with
+a surmise that its owner would find it there in the morning, strode
+swiftly over to the train line that runs along the embankment, swung
+aboard an adventitious car and broke his first ten-franc piece in order
+to pay his fare.
+
+The car made a leisurely progress up past the old Steen castle and the
+Quai landing, Kirkwood sitting quietly, the gladstone bag under his
+hand, a searching gaze sweeping the waterside. No sign of the
+adventurers rewarded him, but it was now all chance, all hazard. He had
+no more heart for confidence.
+
+They passed the Hôtel du Commerce. Kirkwood stared up at its windows,
+wondering....
+
+A little farther on, a disengaged fiacre, its driver alert for possible
+fares, turned a corner into the esplanade. At sight of it Kirkwood,
+inspired, hopped nimbly off the tram-car and signaled the cabby. The
+latter pulled up and Kirkwood started to charge him with instructions;
+something which he did haltingly, hampered by a slight haziness of
+purpose. While thus engaged, and at rest in the stark glare of the
+street-lamps, with no chance of concealing himself, he was aware of a
+rising tumult in the direction of the landing, and glancing round,
+discovered a number of people running toward him. With no time to
+wonder whether or no he was really the object of the hue-and-cry, he
+tossed the driver three silver francs.
+
+“Gare Centrale!” he cried. “And drive like the devil!”
+
+Diving into the fiacre he shut the door and stuck his head out of the
+window, taking observations. A ragged fringe of silly rabble was
+bearing down upon them, with one or two gendarmes in the forefront, and
+a giant, who might or might not be Stryker, a close second.
+Furthermore, another cab seemed to have been requisitioned for the
+chase. His heart misgave him momentarily; but his driver had taken him
+at his word and generosity, and in a breath the fiacre had turned the
+corner on two wheels, and the glittering reaches of the embankment,
+drive and promenade, were blotted out, as if smudged with lamp-black,
+by the obscurity of a narrow and tortuous side street.
+
+He drew in his head the better to preserve his brains against further
+emergencies.
+
+After a block or two Kirkwood picked up the gladstone bag, gently
+opened the door, and put a foot on the step, pausing to look back. The
+other cab was pelting after him with all the enthusiasm of a hound on a
+fresh trail. He reflected that this mad progress through the
+thoroughfares of a civilized city would not long endure without police
+intervention. So he waited, watching his opportunity. The fiacre
+hurtled onward, the driver leaning forward from his box to urge the
+horse with lash of whip and tongue, entirely unconscious of his fare’s
+intentions.
+
+Between two streets the mouth of a narrow and darksome byway flashed
+into view. Kirkwood threw wide the door, and leaped, trusting to the
+night to hide his stratagem, to luck to save his limbs. Neither failed
+him; in a twinkling he was on all fours in the mouth of the alley, and
+as he picked himself up, the second fiacre passed, Calendar himself
+poking a round bald poll out of the window to incite his driver’s
+cupidity with promises of redoubled fare.
+
+Kirkwood mopped his dripping forehead and whistled low with dismay; it
+seemed that from that instant on it was to be a vendetta with a
+vengeance. Calendar, as he had foreseen, was stopping at nothing.
+
+At a dog trot he sped down the alley to the next street, on which he
+turned back—more sedately—toward the river, debouching on the esplanade
+just one block from the Hôtel du Commerce. As he swung past the serried
+tables of a café, whatever fears he had harbored were banished by the
+discovery that the excitement occasioned by the chase had already
+subsided. Beneath the garish awnings the crowd was laughing and
+chattering, eating and sipping its bock with complete unconcern,
+heedless altogether of the haggard and shabby young man carrying a
+black hand-bag, with the black Shade of Care for company and a blacker
+threat of disaster dogging his footsteps. Without attracting any
+attention whatever, indeed, he mingled with the strolling crowds,
+making his way toward the Hôtel du Commerce. Yet he was not at all at
+ease; his uneasy conscience invested the gladstone bag with a magnetic
+attraction for the public eye. To carry it unconcealed in his hand
+furnished him with a sensation as disturbing as though its worn black
+sides had been stenciled STOLEN! in letters of flame. He felt it
+rendered him a cynosure of public interest, an object of suspicion to
+the wide cold world, that the gaze which lit upon the bag traveled to
+his face only to espy thereon the brand of guilt.
+
+For ease of mind, presently, he turned into a convenient shop and spent
+ten invaluable francs for a hand satchel big enough to hold the
+gladstone bag.
+
+With more courage, now that he had the hateful thing under cover, he
+found and entered the Hôtel du Commerce.
+
+In the little closet which served for an office, over a desk visibly
+groaning with the weight of an enormous and grimy registry book, a
+sleepy, fat, bland and good-natured woman of the Belgian _bourgeoisie_
+presided, a benign and drowsy divinity of even-tempered courtesy. To
+his misleading inquiry for Monsieur Calendar she returned a cheerful
+permission to seek that gentleman for himself.
+
+“Three flights, M’sieu’, in the front; suite seventeen it is. M’sieu’
+does not mind walking up?” she inquired.
+
+M’sieu’ did not in the least, though by no strain of the imagination
+could it, be truthfully said that he walked up those steep and redolent
+stairways of the Hôtel du Commerce d’Anvers. More literally, he flew
+with winged feet, spurning each third padded step with a force that
+raised a tiny cloud of fine white dust from the carpeting.
+
+Breathless, at last he paused at the top of the third flight. His heart
+was hammering, his pulses drumming like wild things; there was a queer
+constriction in his throat, a fire of hope in his heart alternating
+with the ice of doubt. Suppose she were not there! What if he were
+mistaken, what if he had misunderstood, what if Mulready and Calendar
+had referred to another lodging-house?
+
+Pausing, he gripped the balustrade fiercely, forcing his self-control,
+forcing himself to reflect that the girl (presuming, for the sake of
+argument, he were presently to find her) could not be expected to
+understand how ardently he had discounted this moment of meeting, or
+how strangely it affected him. Indeed, he himself was more than a
+little disturbed by the latter phenomenon, though he was no longer
+blind to its cause. But he was not to let her see the evidences of his
+agitation, lest she be frightened.
+
+Slowly schooling himself to assume a masque of illuding self-possession
+and composure, he passed down the corridor to the door whose panels
+wore the painted legend, 17; and there knocked.
+
+Believing that he overheard from within a sudden startled exclamation,
+he smiled patiently, tolerant of her surprise.
+
+Burning with impatience as with a fever, he endured a long minute’s
+wait.
+
+Misgivings were prompting him to knock again and summon her by name,
+when he heard footfalls on the other side of the door, followed by a
+click of the lock. The door was opened grudgingly, a bare six inches.
+
+Of the alarmed expression in the eyes that stared into his, he took no
+account. His face lengthened a little as he stood there, dumb, panting,
+staring; and his heart sank, down, deep down into a gulf of
+disappointment, weighted sorely with chagrin.
+
+Then, of the two the first to recover countenance, he doffed his cap
+and bowed.
+
+“Good evening, Mrs. Hallam,” he said with a rueful smile.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+REFUGEES
+
+
+Now, if Kirkwood’s emotion was poignant, Mrs. Hallam’s astonishment
+paralleled, and her relief transcended it. In order to understand this
+it must be remembered that while Mr. Kirkwood was aware of the lady’s
+presence in Antwerp, on her part she had known nothing of him since he
+had so ungallantly fled her company in Sheerness. She seemed to
+anticipate that either Calendar or one of his fellows would be
+discovered at the door,—to have surmised it without any excessive
+degree of pleasure.
+
+Only briefly she hesitated, while her surprise swayed her; then with a
+hardening of the eyes and a curt little nod, “I’m sorry,” she said with
+decision, “but I am busy and can’t see you now, Mr. Kirkwood”; and
+attempted to shut the door in his face.
+
+Deftly Kirkwood forestalled her intention by inserting both a foot and
+a corner of the newly purchased hand-bag between the door and the jamb.
+He had dared too greatly to be thus dismissed. “Pardon me,” he
+countered, unabashed, “but I wish to speak with Miss Calendar.”
+
+“Dorothy,” returned the lady with spirit, “is engaged....”
+
+She compressed her lips, knitted her brows, and with disconcerting
+suddenness thrust one knee against the obstructing hand-bag; Kirkwood,
+happily, anticipated the movement just in time to reinforce the bag
+with his own knee; it remained in place, the door standing open.
+
+The woman flushed angrily; their glances crossed, her eyes flashing
+with indignation; but Kirkwood’s held them with a level and unyielding
+stare.
+
+“I intend,” he told her quietly, “to see Miss Calendar. It’s useless
+your trying to hinder me. We may as well understand each other, Madam,
+and I’ll tell you now that if you wish to avoid a scene—”
+
+“Dorothy!” the woman called over her shoulder; “ring for the porter.”
+
+“By all means,” assented Kirkwood agreeably. “I’ll send him for a
+gendarme.”
+
+“You insolent puppy!”
+
+“Madam, your wit disarms me—”
+
+“What is the matter, Mrs. Hallam?” interrupted a voice from the other
+side of the door. “Who is it?” “Miss Calendar!” cried Kirkwood hastily,
+raising his voice. “Mr. Kirkwood!” the reply came on the instant. She
+knew his voice! “Please, Mrs. Hallam, I will see Mr. Kirkwood.”
+
+“You have no time to waste with him, Dorothy,” said the woman coldly.
+“I must insist—”
+
+“But you don’t seem to understand; it is Mr. Kirkwood!” argued the
+girl,—as if he were ample excuse for any imprudence!
+
+Kirkwood’s scant store of patience was by this time rapidly becoming
+exhausted. “I should advise you not to interfere any further, Mrs.
+Hallam,” he told her in a tone low, but charged with meaning.
+
+How much did he know? She eyed him an instant longer, in sullen
+suspicion, then swung open the door, yielding with what grace she
+could. “Won’t you come in, Mr. Kirkwood?” she inquired with acidulated
+courtesy. “If you press me,” he returned winningly, “how can I refuse?
+You are too good!”
+
+His impertinence disconcerted even himself; he wondered that she did
+not slap him as he passed her, entering the room; and felt that he
+deserved it, despite her attitude. But such thoughts could not long
+trouble one whose eyes were enchanted by the sight of Dorothy,
+confronting him in the middle of the dingy room, her hands, bristling
+dangerously with hat pins, busy with the adjustment of a small gray
+toque atop the wonder that was her hair. So vivacious and charming she
+seemed, so spirited and bright her welcoming smile, so foreign was she
+altogether to the picture of her, worn and distraught, that he had
+mentally conjured up, that he stopped in an extreme of disconcertion;
+and dropped the hand-bag, smiling sheepishly enough under her ready
+laugh—mirth irresistibly incited by the plainly-read play of expression
+on his mobile countenance.
+
+“You must forgive the unconventionally, Mr. Kirkwood,” she apologized,
+needlessly enough, but to cover his embarrassment. “I am on the point
+of going out with Mrs. Hallam—and of course you are the last person on
+earth I expected to meet here!”
+
+“It’s good to see you, Miss Calendar,” he said simply, remarking with
+much satisfaction that her trim walking costume bore witness to her
+statement that she was prepared for the street.
+
+The girl glanced into a mirror, patted the small, bewitching hat an
+infinitesimal fraction of an inch to one side, and turned to him again,
+her hands free. One of them, small but cordial, rested in his grasp for
+an instant all too brief, the while he gazed earnestly into her face,
+noting with concern what the first glance had not shown him,—the almost
+imperceptible shadows beneath her eyes and cheek-bones, pathetic
+records of the hours the girl had spent, since last he had seen her, in
+company with his own grim familiar, Care.
+
+Not a little of care and distress of mind had seasoned her portion in
+those two weary days. He saw and knew it; and his throat tightened
+inexplicably, again, as it had out there in the corridor. Possibly the
+change in her had passed unchallenged by any eyes other than his, but
+even in the little time that he had spent in her society, the image of
+her had become fixed so indelibly on his memory, that he could not now
+be deceived. She was changed—a little, but changed; she had suffered,
+and was suffering and, forced by suffering, her nascent womanhood was
+stirring in the bud. The child that he had met in London, in Antwerp he
+found grown to woman’s stature and slowly coming to comprehension of
+the nature of the change in herself,—the wonder of it glowing softly in
+her eyes....
+
+The clear understanding of mankind that is an appanage of woman’s
+estate, was now added to the intuitions of a girl’s untroubled heart.
+She could not be blind to the mute adoration of his gaze; nor could she
+resent it. Beneath it she colored and lowered her lashes.
+
+“I was about to go out,” she repeated in confusion. “I—it’s pleasant to
+see you, too.”
+
+“Thank you,” he stammered ineptly; “I—I—”
+
+“If Mr. Kirkwood will excuse us, Dorothy,” Mrs. Hallam’s sharp tones
+struck in discordantly, “we shall be glad to see him when we return to
+London.”
+
+“I am infinitely complimented, Mrs. Hallam,” Kirkwood assured her; and
+of the girl quickly: “You’re going back home?” he asked.
+
+She nodded, with a faint, puzzled smile that included the woman. “After
+a little—not immediately. Mrs. Hallam is so kind—”
+
+“Pardon me,” he interrupted; “but tell me one thing, please: have you
+any one in England to whom you can go without invitation and be
+welcomed and cared for—any friends or relations?”
+
+“Dorothy will be with me,” Mrs. Hallam answered for her, with cold
+defiance.
+
+Deliberately insolent, Kirkwood turned his back to the woman. “Miss
+Calendar, will you answer my question for yourself?” he asked the girl
+pointedly.
+
+“Why—yes; several friends; none in London, but—”
+
+“Dorothy—”
+
+“One moment, Mrs. Hallam,” Kirkwood flung crisply over his shoulder.
+“I’m going to ask you something rather odd, Miss Calendar,” he
+continued, seeking the girl’s eyes. “I hope—”
+
+“Dorothy, I—”
+
+“If you please, Mrs. Hallam,” suggested the girl, with just the right
+shade of independence. “I wish to listen to Mr. Kirkwood. He has been
+very kind to me and has every right....” She turned to him again,
+leaving the woman breathless and speechless with anger.
+
+“You told me once,” Kirkwood continued quickly, and, he felt, brazenly,
+“that you considered me kind, thoughtful and considerate. You know me
+no better to-day than you did then, but I want to beg you to trust me a
+little. Can you trust yourself to my protection until we reach your
+friends in England?”
+
+“Why, I—” the girl faltered, taken by surprise.
+
+“Mr. Kirkwood!” cried Mrs. Hallam angrily, finding her voice.
+
+Kirkwood turned to meet her onslaught with a mien grave, determined,
+unflinching. “Please do not interfere, Madam,” he said quietly.
+
+“You are impertinent, sir! Dorothy, I forbid you to listen to this
+person!”
+
+The girl flushed, lifting her chin a trifle. “Forbid?” she repeated
+wonderingly.
+
+Kirkwood was quick to take advantage of her resentment. “Mrs. Hallam is
+not fitted to advise you,” he insisted, “nor can she control your
+actions. It must already have occurred to you that you’re rather out of
+place in the present circumstances. The men who have brought you
+hither, I believe you already see through, to some extent. Forgive my
+speaking plainly ... But that is why you have accepted Mrs. Hallam’s
+offer of protection. Will you take my word for it, when I tell you she
+has not your right interests at heart, but the reverse? I happen to
+know, Miss Calendar, and I—”
+
+“How dare you, sir?”
+
+Flaming with rage, Mrs. Hallam put herself bodily between them,
+confronting Kirkwood in white-lipped desperation, her small, gloved
+hands clenched and quivering at her sides, her green eyes dangerous.
+
+But Kirkwood could silence her; and he did. “Do you wish me to speak
+frankly, Madam? Do you wish me to tell what I know—and all I know—,”
+with rising emphasis,—“of your social status and your relations with
+Calendar and Mulready? I promise you that if you wish it, or force me
+to it....”
+
+But he had need to say nothing further; the woman’s eyes wavered before
+his and a little sob of terror forced itself between her shut teeth.
+Kirkwood smiled grimly, with a face of brass, impenetrable, inflexible.
+And suddenly she turned from him with indifferent bravado. “As Mr.
+Kirkwood says, Dorothy,” she said in her high, metallic voice, “I have
+no authority over you. But if you’re silly enough to consider for a
+moment this fellow’s insulting suggestion, if you’re fool enough to go
+with him, unchaperoned through Europe and imperil your—”
+
+“Mrs. Hallam!” Kirkwood cut her short with a menacing tone.
+
+“Why, then, I wash my hands of you,” concluded the woman defiantly.
+“Make your choice, my child,” she added with a meaning laugh and moved
+away, humming a snatch from a French _chanson_ which brought the hot
+blood to Kirkwood’s face.
+
+But the girl did not understand; and he was glad of that. “You may
+judge between us,” he appealed to her directly, once more. “I can only
+offer you my word of honor as an American gentleman that you shall be
+landed in England, safe and sound, by the first available steamer—”
+
+“There’s no need to say more, Mr. Kirkwood,” Dorothy informed him
+quietly. “I have already decided. I think I begin to understand some
+things clearly, now.... If you’re ready, we will go.”
+
+From the window, where she stood, holding the curtains back and staring
+out, Mrs. Hallam turned with a curling lip.
+
+
+[Illustration: From the window, Mrs. Hallam turned with a curling lip.]
+
+
+“‘The honor of an American gentleman,’” she quoted with a stinging
+sneer; “I’m sure I wish you comfort of it, child!”
+
+“We must make haste, Miss Calendar,” said Kirkwood, ignoring the
+implication. “Have you a traveling-bag?”
+
+She silently indicated a small valise, closed and strapped, on a table
+by the bed, and immediately passed out into the hall. Kirkwood took the
+case containing the gladstone bag in one hand, the girl’s valise in the
+other, and followed.
+
+As he turned the head of the stairs he looked back. Mrs. Hallam was
+still at the window, her back turned. From her very passiveness he
+received an impression of something ominous and forbidding; if she had
+lost a trick or two of the game she played, she still held cards, was
+not at the end of her resources. She stuck in his imagination for many
+an hour as a force to be reckoned with.
+
+For the present he understood that she was waiting to apprise Calendar
+and Mulready of their flight. With the more haste, then, he followed
+Dorothy down the three flights, through the tiny office, where Madam
+sat sound asleep at her over-burdened desk, and out.
+
+Opposite the door they were fortunate enough to find a fiacre drawn up
+in waiting at the curb. Kirkwood opened the door for the girl to enter.
+
+“Gare du Sud,” he directed the driver. “Drive your fastest—double fare
+for quick time!”
+
+The driver awoke with a start from profound reverie, looked Kirkwood
+over, and bowed with gesticulative palms.
+
+“M’sieu’, I am desolated, but engaged!” he protested.
+
+“Precisely.” Kirkwood deposited the two bags on the forward seat of the
+conveyance, and stood back to convince the man. “Precisely,” said he,
+undismayed. “The lady who engaged you is remaining for a time; I will
+settle her bill.”
+
+“Very well, M’sieu’!” The driver disclaimed responsibility and accepted
+the favor of the gods with a speaking shrug. “M’sieu’ said the Gare du
+Sud? _En voiture_!”
+
+Kirkwood jumped in and shut the door; the vehicle drew slowly away from
+the curb, then with gratifying speed hammered up-stream on the
+embankment. Bending forward, elbows on knees, Kirkwood watched the
+sidewalks narrowly, partly to cover the girl’s constraint, due to Mrs.
+Hallam’s attitude, partly on the lookout for Calendar and his
+confederates. In a few moments they passed a public clock.
+
+“We’ve missed the Flushing boat,” he announced. “I’m making a try for
+the Hoek van Holland line. We may possibly make it. I know that it
+leaves by the Sud Quai, and that’s all I do know,” he concluded with an
+apologetic laugh.
+
+“And if we miss that?” asked the girl, breaking silence for the first
+time since they had left the hotel.
+
+“We’ll take the first train out of Antwerp.”
+
+“Where to?”
+
+“Wherever the first train goes, Miss Calendar.... The main point is to
+get away to-night. That we must do, no matter where we land, or how we
+get there. To-morrow we can plan with more certainty.”
+
+“Yes...” Her assent was more a sigh than a word.
+
+The cab, dashing down the Rue Leopold de Wael, swung into the Place du
+Sud, before the station. Kirkwood, acutely watchful, suddenly thrust
+head and shoulders out of his window (fortunately it was the one away
+from the depot), and called up to the driver.
+
+“Don’t stop! Gare Centrale now—and treble fare!”
+
+“_Oui, M’sieu’! Allons!_”
+
+The whip cracked and the horse swerved sharply round the corner into
+the Avenue du Sud. The young man, with a hushed exclamation, turned in
+his seat, lifting the flap over the little peephole in the back of the
+carriage.
+
+He had not been mistaken. Calendar was standing in front of the
+station; and it was plain to be seen, from his pose, that the madly
+careering fiacre interested him more than slightly. Irresolute,
+perturbed, the man took a step or two after it, changed his mind, and
+returned to his post of observation.
+
+Kirkwood dropped the flap and turned back to find the girl’s wide eyes
+searching his face. He said nothing.
+
+“What was that?” she asked after a patient moment.
+
+“Your father, Miss Calendar,” he returned uncomfortably.
+
+There fell a short pause; then: “Why—will you tell me—is it necessary
+to run away from my father, Mr. Kirkwood?” she demanded, with a moving
+little break in her voice.
+
+Kirkwood hesitated. It were unfeeling to tell her why; yet it was
+essential that she should know, however painful the knowledge might
+prove to her.
+
+And she was insistent; he might not dodge the issue. “Why?” she
+repeated as he paused.
+
+“I wish you wouldn’t press me for an answer just now, Miss Calendar.”
+
+“Don’t you think I had better know?”
+
+Instinctively he inclined his head in assent.
+
+“Then why—?”
+
+Kirkwood bent forward and patted the flank of the satchel that held the
+gladstone bag.
+
+“What does that mean, Mr. Kirkwood?”
+
+“That I have the jewels,” he told her tersely, looking straight ahead.
+
+At his shoulder he heard a low gasp of amazement and incredulity
+commingled.
+
+“But—! How did you get them? My father deposited them in bank this
+morning?”
+
+“He must have taken them out again.... I got them on board the Alethea,
+where your father was conferring with Mulready and Captain Stryker.”
+
+“The Alethea!”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“You took them from those men?—you!... But didn’t my father—?”
+
+“I had to persuade him,” said Kirkwood simply.
+
+“But there were three of them against you!”
+
+“Mulready wasn’t—ah—feeling very well, and Stryker’s a coward. They
+gave me no trouble. I locked them in Stryker’s room, lifted the bag of
+jewels, and came away.... I ought to tell you that they were discussing
+the advisability of sailing away without you—leaving you here,
+friendless and without means. That’s why I considered it my duty to
+take a hand.... I don’t like to tell you this so brutally, but you
+ought to know, and I can’t see how to tone it down,” he concluded
+awkwardly.
+
+“I understand....”
+
+But for some moments she did not speak. He avoided looking at her.
+
+The fiacre, rolling at top speed but smoothly on the broad avenues that
+encircle the ancient city, turned into the Avenue de Keyser, bringing
+into sight the Gare Centrale.
+
+“You don’t—k-know—” began the girl without warning, in a voice gusty
+with sobs.
+
+“Steady on!” said Kirkwood gently. “I do know, but don’t let’s talk
+about it now. We’ll be at the station in a minute, and I’ll get out and
+see what’s to be done about a train, if neither Mulready or Stryker are
+about. You stay in the carriage.... No!” He changed his mind suddenly.
+“I’ll not risk losing you again. It’s a risk we’ll have to run in
+company.”
+
+“Please!” she agreed brokenly.
+
+The fiacre slowed up and stopped.
+
+“Are you all right, Miss Calendar?” Kirkwood asked.
+
+The girl sat up, lifting her head proudly. “I am quite ready,” she
+said, steadying her voice.
+
+Kirkwood reconnoitered through the window, while the driver was
+descending.
+
+“Gare Centrale, M’sieu’,” he said, opening the door.
+
+“No one in sight,” Kirkwood told the girl. “Come, please.”
+
+He got out and gave her his hand, then paid the driver, picked up the
+two bags, and hurried with Dorothy into the station, to find in waiting
+a string of cars into which people were moving at leisurely rate. His
+inquiries at the ticket-window developed the fact that it was the 22:26
+for Brussels, the last train leaving the Gare Centrale that night, and
+due to start in ten minutes.
+
+The information settled their plans for once and all; Kirkwood promptly
+secured through tickets, also purchasing “Reserve” supplementary
+tickets which entitled them to the use of those modern corridor coaches
+which take the place of first-class compartments on the Belgian state
+railways.
+
+“It’s a pleasure,” said Kirkwood lightly, as he followed the girl into
+one of these, “to find one’s self in a common-sense sort of a train
+again. ’Feels like home.” He put their luggage in one of the racks and
+sat down beside her, chattering with simulated cheerfulness in a vain
+endeavor to lighten her evident depression of spirit. “I always feel
+like a traveling anachronism in one of your English trains,” he said.
+“You can’t appreciate—”
+
+The girl smiled bravely.... “And after Brussels?” she inquired.
+
+“First train for the coast,” he said promptly. “Dover, Ostend,
+Boulogne,—whichever proves handiest, no matter which, so long as it
+gets us on English soil without undue delay.”
+
+She said “Yes” abstractedly, resting an elbow on the window-sill and
+her chin in her palm, to stare with serious, sweet brown eyes out into
+the arc-smitten night that hung beneath the echoing roof.
+
+Kirkwood fidgeted in despite of the constraint he placed himself under,
+to be still and not disturb her needlessly. Impatience and apprehension
+of misfortune obsessed his mental processes in equal degree. The ten
+minutes seemed interminable that elapsed ere the grinding couplings
+advertised the imminence of their start.
+
+The guards began to bawl, the doors to slam, belated travelers to dash
+madly for the coaches. The train gave a preliminary lurch ere settling
+down to its league-long inland dash.
+
+Kirkwood, in a fever of hope and an ague of fear, saw a man sprint
+furiously across the platform and throw himself on the forward steps of
+their coach, on the very instant of the start.
+
+Presently he entered by the forward door and walked slowly through,
+narrowly inspecting the various passengers. As he approached the seats
+occupied by Kirkwood and Dorothy Calendar, his eyes encountered the
+young man’s, and he leered evilly. Kirkwood met the look with one that
+was like a kick, and the fellow passed with some haste into the car
+behind.
+
+“Who was that?” demanded the girl, without moving her head.
+
+“How did you know?” he asked, astonished. “You didn’t look—”
+
+“I saw your knuckles whiten beneath the skin.... Who was it?”
+
+“Hobbs,” he acknowledged bitterly; “the mate of the _Alethea_.”
+
+“I know.... And you think—?”
+
+“Yes. He must have been ashore when I was on board the brigantine; he
+certainly wasn’t in the cabin. Evidently they hunted him up, or ran
+across him, and pressed him into service.... You see, they’re watching
+every outlet.... But we’ll win through, never fear!”
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+TRAVELS WITH A CHAPERON
+
+
+The train, escaping the outskirts of the city, remarked the event with
+an exultant shriek, then settled down, droning steadily, to
+night-devouring flight. In the corridor-car the few passengers disposed
+themselves to drowse away the coming hour—the short hour’s ride that,
+in these piping days of frantic traveling, separates Antwerp from the
+capital city of Belgium.
+
+A guard, slamming gustily in through the front door, reeled unsteadily
+down the aisle. Kirkwood, rousing from a profound reverie, detained him
+with a gesture and began to interrogate him in French. When he departed
+presently it transpired that the girl was unaquainted with that tongue.
+
+“I didn’t understand, you know,” she told him with a slow, shy smile.
+
+“I was merely questioning him about the trains from Brussels to-night.
+We daren’t stop, you see; we must go on,—keep Hobbs on the jump and
+lose him, if possible. There’s where our advantage lies—in having only
+Hobbs to deal with. He’s not particularly intellectual; and we’ve two
+heads to his one, besides. If we can prevent him from guessing our
+destination and wiring back to Antwerp, we may win away. You
+understand?”
+
+“Perfectly,” she said, brightening. “And what do you purpose doing
+now?”
+
+“I can’t tell yet. The guard’s gone to get me some information about
+the night trains on other lines. In the meantime, don’t fret about
+Hobbs; I’ll answer for Hobbs.”
+
+“I shan’t be worried,” she said simply, “with you here....”
+
+Whatever answer he would have made he was obliged to postpone because
+of the return of the guard, with a handful of time-tables; and when,
+rewarded with a modest gratuity, the man had gone his way, and Kirkwood
+turned again to the girl, she had withdrawn her attention for the time.
+
+Unconscious of his bold regard, she was dreaming, her thoughts at
+loose-ends, her eyes studying the incalculable depths of blue-black
+night that swirled and eddied beyond the window-glass. The most shadowy
+of smiles touched her lips, the faintest shade of deepened color rested
+on her cheeks.... She was thinking of—him? As long as he dared, the
+young man, his heart in his own eyes, watched her greedily, taking a
+miser’s joy of her youthful beauty, striving with all his soul to
+analyze the enigma of that most inscrutable smile.
+
+It baffled him. He could not say of what she thought; and told himself
+bitterly that it was not for him, a pauper, to presume a place in her
+meditations. He must not forget his circumstances, nor let her
+tolerance render him oblivious to his place, which must be a servant’s,
+not a lover’s.
+
+The better to convince himself of this, he plunged desperately into a
+forlorn attempt to make head or tail of Belgian railway schedule,
+complicated as these of necessity are by the alternation from normal
+time notation to the abnormal system sanctioned by the government, and
+_vice-versa_, with every train that crosses a boundary line of the
+state.
+
+So preoccupied did he become in this pursuit that he was subconsciously
+impressed that the girl had spoken twice, ere he could detach his
+interest from the exasperatingly inconclusive and incoherent cohorts of
+ranked figures.
+
+“Can’t you find out anything?” Dorothy was asking.
+
+“Precious little,” he grumbled. “I’d give my head for a Bradshaw! Only
+it wouldn’t be a fair exchange.... There seems to be an express for
+Bruges leaving the Gare du Nord, Brussels, at fifty-five minutes after
+twenty-three o’clock; and if I’m not mistaken, that’s the latest train
+out of Brussels and the earliest we can catch,... if we _can_ catch it.
+I’ve never been in Brussels, and Heaven only knows how long it would
+take us to cab it from the Gare du Midi to the Nord.”
+
+In this statement, however, Mr. Kirkwood was fortunately mistaken; not
+only Heaven, it appeared, had cognizance of the distance between the
+two stations. While Kirkwood was still debating the question, with
+pessimistic tendencies, the friendly guard had occasion to pass through
+the coach; and, being tapped, yielded the desired information with
+entire tractability.
+
+It would be a cab-ride of perhaps ten minutes. Monsieur, however, would
+serve himself well if he offered the driver an advance tip as an
+incentive to speedy driving. Why? Why because (here the guard consulted
+his watch; and Kirkwood very keenly regretted the loss of his
+own)—because this train, announced to arrive in Brussels some twenty
+minutes prior to the departure of that other, was already late. But
+yes—a matter of some ten minutes. Could that not be made up? Ah,
+Monsieur, but who should say?
+
+The guard departed, doubtless with private views as to the madness of
+all English-speaking travelers.
+
+“And there we are!” commented Kirkwood in factitious resignation. “If
+we’re obliged to stop overnight in Brussels, our friends will be on our
+back before we can get out in the morning, if they have to come by
+motor-car.” He reflected bitterly on the fact that with but a little
+more money at his disposal, he too could hire a motor-car and cry
+defiance to their persecutors. “However,” he amended, with rising
+spirits, “so much the better our chance of losing Mr. Hobbs. We must be
+ready to drop off the instant the train stops.”
+
+He began to unfold another time-table, threatening again to lose
+himself completely; and was thrown into the utmost confusion by the
+touch of the girl’s hand, in appeal placed lightly on his own. And had
+she been observant, she might have seen a second time his knuckles
+whiten beneath the skin as he asserted his self-control—though this
+time not over his temper.
+
+His eyes, dumbly eloquent, turned to meet hers. She was smiling.
+
+“Please!” she iterated, with the least imperative pressure on his hand,
+pushing the folder aside.
+
+“I beg pardon?” he muttered blankly.
+
+“Is it quite necessary, now, to study those schedules? Haven’t you
+decided to try for the Bruges express?”
+
+“Why yes, but—”
+
+“Then please don’t leave me to my thoughts all the time, Mr. Kirkwood.”
+There was a tremor of laughter in her voice, but her eyes were grave
+and earnest. “I’m very weary of thinking round in a circle—and that,”
+she concluded, with a nervous little laugh, “is all I’ve had to do for
+days!”
+
+“I’m afraid I’m very stupid,” he humored her. “This is the second time,
+you know, in the course of a very brief acquaintance, that you have
+found it necessary to remind me to talk to you.”
+
+“Oh-h!” She brightened. “That night, at the Pless? But that was _ages_
+ago!”
+
+“It seems so,” he admitted.
+
+“So much has happened!”
+
+“Yes,” he assented vaguely.
+
+She watched him, a little piqued by his absent-minded mood, for a
+moment; then, and not without a trace of malice: “Must I tell you again
+what to talk about?” she asked.
+
+“Forgive me. I was thinking about, if not talking to, you.... I’ve been
+wondering just why it was that you left the _Alethea_ at Queensborough,
+to go on by steamer.”
+
+And immediately he was sorry that his tactless query had swung the
+conversation to bear upon her father, the thought of whom could not but
+prove painful to her. But it was too late to mend matters; already her
+evanescent flush of amusement had given place to remembrance.
+
+“It was on my father’s account,” she told him in a steady voice, but
+with averted eyes; “he is a very poor sailor, and the promise of a
+rough passage terrified him. I believe there was a difference of
+opinion about it, he disputing with Mr. Mulready and Captain Stryker.
+That was just after we had left the anchorage. They both insisted that
+it was safer to continue by the _Alethea_, but he wouldn’t listen to
+them, and in the end had his way. Captain Stryker ran the brigantine
+into the mouth of the Medway and put us ashore just in time to catch
+the steamer.”
+
+“Were you sorry for the change?”
+
+“I?” She shuddered slightly. “Hardly! I think I hated the ship from the
+moment I set foot on board her. It was a dreadful place; it was all
+night-marish, that night, but it seemed most terrible on the _Alethea_
+with Captain Stryker and that abominable Mr. Hobbs. I think that my
+unhappiness had as much to do with my father’s insistence on the
+change, as anything. He ... he was very thoughtful, most of the time.”
+
+Kirkwood shut his teeth on what he knew of the blackguard.
+
+“I don’t know why,” she continued, wholly without affectation, “but I
+was wretched from the moment you left me in the cab, to wait while you
+went in to see Mrs. Hallam. And when we left you, at Bermondsey Old
+Stairs, after what you had said to me, I felt—I hardly know what to
+say—abandoned, in a way.”
+
+“But you were with your father, in his care—”
+
+“I know, but I was getting confused. Until then the excitement had kept
+me from thinking. But you made me think. I began to wonder, to question
+... But what could I do?” She signified her helplessness with a quick
+and dainty movement of her hands. “He is my father; and I’m not yet of
+age, you know.”
+
+“I thought so,” he confessed, troubled. “It’s very inconsiderate of
+you, you must admit.”
+
+“I don’t understand...”
+
+“Because of the legal complication. I’ve no doubt your father can ‘have
+the law on me’”—Kirkwood laughed uneasily—“for taking you from his
+protection.”
+
+“Protection!” she echoed warmly. “If you call it that!”
+
+“Kidnapping,” he said thoughtfully: “I presume that’d be the charge.”
+
+“Oh!” She laughed the notion to scorn. “Besides, they must catch us
+first, mustn’t they?”
+
+“Of course; and”—with a simulation of confidence sadly deceitful—“they
+shan’t, Mr. Hobbs to the contrary notwithstanding.”
+
+“You make me share your confidence, against my better judgment.”
+
+“I wish your better judgment would counsel you to share your confidence
+with me,” he caught her up. “If you would only tell me what it’s all
+about, as far as you know, I’d be better able to figure out what we
+ought to do.”
+
+Briefly the girl sat silent, staring before her with sweet somber eyes.
+Then, “In the very beginning,” she told him with a conscious
+laugh,—“this sounds very story-bookish, I know—in the very beginning,
+George Burgoyne Calendar, an American, married his cousin a dozen times
+removed, and an Englishwoman, Alice Burgoyne Hallam.”
+
+“Hallam!”
+
+“Wait, please.” She sat up, bending forward and frowning down upon her
+interlacing, gloved fingers; she was finding it difficult to say what
+she must. Kirkwood, watching hungrily the fair drooping head, the
+flawless profile clear and radiant against the night-blackened window,
+saw hot signals of shame burning on her cheek and throat and forehead.
+
+“But never mind,” he began awkwardly.
+
+“No,” she told him with decision. “Please let me go on....” She
+continued, stumbling, trusting to his sympathy to bridge the gaps in
+her narrative. “My father ... There was trouble of some sort.... At all
+events, he disappeared when I was a baby. My mother ... died. I was
+brought up in the home of my great-uncle, Colonel George Burgoyne, of
+the Indian Army—retired. My mother had been his favorite niece, they
+say; I presume that was why he cared for me. I grew up in his home in
+Cornwall; it was my home, just as he was my father in everything but
+fact.
+
+“A year ago he died, leaving me everything,—the town house in Frognall
+Street, his estate in Cornwall: everything was willed to me on
+condition that I must never live with my father, nor in any way
+contribute to his support. If I disobeyed, the entire estate without
+reserve was to go to his nearest of kin.... Colonel Burgoyne was
+unmarried and had no children.”
+
+The girl paused, lifting to Kirkwood’s face her eyes, clear, fearless,
+truthful. “I never was given to understand that there was anybody who
+might have inherited, other than myself,” she declared.
+
+“I see... Last week I received a letter, signed with my father’s name,
+begging me to appoint an interview with him in London. I did so,—guess
+how gladly! I was alone in the world, and he, my father, whom I had
+never thought to see.... We met at his hotel, the Pless. He wanted me
+to come and live with him,—said that he was growing old and lonely and
+needed a daughter’s love and care. He told me that he had made a
+fortune in America and was amply able to provide for us both. As for my
+inheritance, he persuaded me that it was by rights the property of
+Frederick Hallam, Mrs. Hallam’s son.”
+
+“I have met the young gentleman,” interpolated Kirkwood.
+
+“His name was new to me, but my father assured me that he was the next
+of kin mentioned in Colonel Burgoyne’s will, and convinced me that I
+had no real right to the property.... After all, he was my father; I
+agreed; I could not bear the thought of wronging anybody. I was to give
+up everything but my mother’s jewels. It seems,—my father said,—I
+don’t—I can’t believe it now—”
+
+She choked on a little, dry sob. It was some time before she seemed
+able to continue.
+
+“I was told that my great-uncle’s collection of jewels had been my
+mother’s property. He had in life a passion for collecting jewels, and
+it had been his whim to carry them with him, wherever he went. When he
+died in Frognall Street, they were in the safe by the head of his bed.
+I, in my grief, at first forgot them, and then afterwards carelessly
+put off removing them.
+
+“To come back to my father: Night before last we were to call on Mrs.
+Hallam. It was to be our last night in England; we were to sail for the
+Continent on the private yacht of a friend of my father’s, the next
+morning.... This is what I was told—and believed, you understand.
+
+“That night Mrs. Hallam was dining at another table at the Pless, it
+seems. I did not then know her. When leaving, she put a note on our
+table, by my father’s elbow. I was astonished beyond words.... He
+seemed much agitated, told me that he was called away on urgent
+business, a matter of life and death, and begged me to go alone to
+Frognall Street, get the jewels and meet him at Mrs. Hallam’s later....
+I wasn’t altogether a fool, for I began dimly to suspect, then, that
+something was wrong; but I was a fool, for I consented to do as he
+desired. You understand—you know—?”
+
+“I do, indeed,” replied Kirkwood grimly. “I understand a lot of things
+now that I didn’t five minutes ago. Please let me think...”
+
+But the time he took for deliberation was short. He had hoped to find a
+way to spare her, by sparing Calendar; but momentarily he was becoming
+more impressed with the futility of dealing with her save in terms of
+candor, merciful though they might seem harsh.
+
+“I must tell you,” he said, “that you have been outrageously misled,
+swindled and deceived. I have heard from your father’s own lips that
+Mrs. Hallam was to pay him two thousand pounds for keeping you out of
+England and losing you your inheritance. I’m inclined to question,
+furthermore, the assertion that these jewels were your mother’s.
+Frederick Hallam was the man who followed you into the Frognall Street
+house and attacked me on the stairs; Mrs. Hallam admits that he went
+there to get the jewels. But he didn’t want anybody to know it.”
+
+“But that doesn’t prove—”
+
+“Just a minute.” Rapidly and concisely Kirkwood recounted the events
+wherein he had played a part, subsequent to the adventure of Bermondsey
+Old Stairs. He was guilty of but one evasion; on one point only did he
+slur the truth: he conceived it his honorable duty to keep the girl in
+ignorance of his straitened circumstances; she was not to be distressed
+by knowledge of his distress, nor could he tolerate the suggestion of
+seeming to play for her sympathy. It was necessary, then, to invent a
+motive to excuse his return to 9, Frognall Street. I believe he chose
+to exaggerate the inquisitiveness of his nature and threw in for good
+measure a desire to recover a prized trinket of no particular moment,
+esteemed for its associations, and so forth. But whatever the
+fabrication, it passed muster; to the girl his motives seemed less
+important than the discoveries that resulted from them.
+
+“I am afraid,” he concluded the summary of the confabulation he had
+overheard at the skylight of the Alethea’s cabin, “you’d best make up
+your mind that your father—”
+
+“Yes,” whispered the girl huskily; and turned her face to the window, a
+quivering muscle in the firm young throat alone betraying her emotion.
+
+“It’s a bad business,” he pursued relentlessly: “bad all round.
+Mulready, in your father’s pay, tries to have him arrested, the better
+to rob him. Mrs. Hallam, to secure your property for that precious pet,
+Freddie, connives at, if she doesn’t instigate, a kidnapping. Your
+father takes her money to deprive you of yours,—which could profit him
+nothing so long as you remained in lawful possession of it; and at the
+same time he conspires to rob, through you, the rightful owners—if they
+are rightful owners. And if they are, why does Freddie Hallam go like a
+thief in the night to secure property that’s his beyond dispute?... I
+don’t really think you owe your father any further consideration.”
+
+He waited patiently. Eventually, “No-o,” the girl sobbed assent.
+
+“It’s this way: Calendar, counting on your sparing him in the end, is
+going to hound us. He’s doing it now: there’s Hobbs in the next car,
+for proof. Until these jewels are returned, whether to Frognall Street
+or to young Hallam, we’re both in danger, both thieves in the sight of
+the law. And your father knows that, too. There’s no profit to be had
+by discounting the temper of these people; they’re as desperate a gang
+of swindlers as ever lived. They’ll have those jewels if they have to
+go as far as murder—”
+
+“Mr. Kirkwood!” she deprecated, in horror.
+
+He wagged his head stubbornly, ominously. “I’ve seen them in the raw.
+They’re hot on our trail now; ten to one, they’ll be on our backs
+before we can get across the Channel. Once in England we will be
+comparatively safe. Until then ... But I’m a brute—I’m frightening
+you!”
+
+“You are, dreadfully,” she confessed in a tremulous voice.
+
+“Forgive me. If you look at the dark side first, the other seems all
+the brighter. Please don’t worry; we’ll pull through with flying
+colors, or my name’s not Philip Kirkwood!”
+
+“I have every faith in you,” she informed him, flawlessly sincere.
+“When I think of all you’ve done and dared for me, on the mere
+suspicion that I needed your help—”
+
+“We’d best be getting ready,” he interrupted hastily. “Here’s
+Brussels.”
+
+It was so. Lights, in little clusters and long, wheeling lines, were
+leaping out of the darkness and flashing back as the train rumbled
+through the suburbs of the little Paris of the North. Already the other
+passengers were bestirring themselves, gathering together wraps and
+hand luggage, and preparing for the journey’s end.
+
+Rising, Kirkwood took down their two satchels from the overhead rack,
+and waited, in grim abstraction planning and counterplanning against
+the machinations in whose wiles they two had become so perilously
+entangled.
+
+Primarily, there was Hobbs to be dealt with; no easy task, for Kirkwood
+dared not resort to violence nor in any way invite the attention of the
+authorities; and threats would be an idle waste of breath, in the case
+of that corrupt and malignant, little cockney, himself as keen as any
+needle, adept in all the artful resources of the underworld whence he
+had sprung, and further primed for action by that master rogue,
+Calendar.
+
+The train was pulling slowly into the station when he reluctantly
+abandoned his latest unfeasible scheme for shaking off the little
+Englishman, and concluded that their salvation was only to be worked
+out through everlasting vigilance, incessant movement, and the favor of
+the blind goddess, Fortune. There was comfort of a sort in the
+reflection that the divinity of chance is at least blind; her favors
+are impartially distributed; the swing of the wheel of the world is not
+always to the advantage of the wrongdoer and the scamp.
+
+He saw nothing of Hobbs as they alighted and hastened from the station,
+and hardly had time to waste looking for him, since their train had
+failed to make up the precious ten minutes. Consequently he dismissed
+the fellow from his thoughts until—with Brussels lingering in their
+memories a garish vision of brilliant streets and glowing cafés,
+glimpsed furtively from their cab windows during its wild dash over the
+broad mid-city, boulevards—at midnight they settled themselves in a
+carriage of the Bruges express. They were speeding along through the
+open country with a noisy clatter; then a minute’s investigation
+sufficed to discover the mate of the _Alethea_ serenely ensconced in
+the coach behind.
+
+The little man seemed rarely complacent, and impudently greeted
+Kirkwood’s scowling visage, as the latter peered through the window in
+the coach-door, with a smirk and a waggish wave of his hand. The
+American by main strength of will-power mastered an impulse to enter
+and wring his neck, and returned to the girl, more disturbed than he
+cared to let her know.
+
+There resulted from his review of the case but one plan for outwitting
+Mr. Hobbs, and that lay in trusting to his confidence that Kirkwood and
+Dorothy Calendar would proceed as far toward Ostend as the train would
+take them—namely, to the limit of the run, Bruges.
+
+Thus inspired, Kirkwood took counsel with the girl, and when the train
+paused at Ghent, they made an unostentatious exit from their coach,
+finding themselves, when the express had rolled on into the west, upon
+a station platform in a foreign city at nine minutes past one o’clock
+in the morning—but at length without their shadow. Mr. Hobbs had gone
+on to Bruges.
+
+Kirkwood sped his journeyings with an unspoken malediction, and
+collected himself to cope with a situation which was to prove hardly
+more happy for them than the espionage they had just eluded. The primal
+flush of triumph which had saturated the American’s humor on this
+signal success, proved but fictive and transitory when inquiry of the
+station attendants educed the information that the two earliest trains
+to be obtained were the 5:09 for Dunkerque and the 5:37 for Ostend. A
+minimum delay of four hours was to be endured in the face of many
+contingent features singularly unpleasant to contemplate. The station
+waiting-room was on the point of closing for the night, and Kirkwood,
+already alarmed by the rapid ebb of the money he had had of Calendar,
+dared not subject his finances to the strain of a night’s lodging at
+one of Ghent’s hotels. He found himself forced to be cruel to be kind
+to the girl, and Dorothy’s cheerful acquiescence to their sole
+alternative of tramping the street until daybreak did nothing to
+alleviate Kirkwood’s exasperation.
+
+It was permitted them to occupy a bench outside the station. There the
+girl, her head pillowed on the treasure bag, napped uneasily, while
+Kirkwood plodded restlessly to and fro, up and down the platform,
+communing with the Shade of Care and addling his poor, weary wits with
+the problem of the future,—not so much his own as the future of the
+unhappy child for whose welfare he had assumed responsibility. Dark for
+both of them, in his understanding To-morrow loomed darkest for her.
+
+Not until the gray, formless light of the dawn-dusk was wavering over
+the land, did he cease his perambulations. Then a gradual stir of life
+in the city streets, together with the appearance of a station porter
+or two, opening the waiting-rooms and preparing them against the
+traffic of the day, warned him that he must rouse his charge. He paused
+and stood over her, reluctant to disturb her rest, such as it was, his
+heart torn with compassion for her, his soul embittered by the cruel
+irony of their estate.
+
+If what he understood were true, a king’s ransom was secreted within
+the cheap, imitation-leather satchel which served her for a pillow. But
+it availed her nothing for her comfort. If what he believed were true,
+she was absolute mistress of that treasure of jewels; yet that night
+she had been forced to sleep on a hard, uncushioned bench, in the open
+air, and this morning he must waken her to the life of a hunted thing.
+A week ago she had had at her command every luxury known to the
+civilized world; to-day she was friendless, but for his inefficient,
+worthless self, and in a strange land. A week ago,—had he known her
+then,—he had been free to tell her of his love, to offer her the
+protection of his name as well as his devotion; to-day he was an all
+but penniless vagabond, and there could be no dishonor deeper than to
+let her know the nature of his heart’s desire.
+
+Was ever lover hedged from a declaration to his mistress by
+circumstances so hateful, so untoward! He could have raged and railed
+against his fate like any madman. For he desired her greatly, and she
+was very lovely in his sight. If her night’s rest had been broken and
+but a mockery, she showed few signs of it; the faint, wan complexion of
+fatigue seemed only to enhance the beauty of her maidenhood; her lips
+were as fresh and desirous as the dewy petals of a crimson rose;
+beneath her eyes soft shadows lurked where her lashes lay tremulous
+upon her cheeks of satin.... She was to him of all created things the
+most wonderful, the most desirable.
+
+The temptation of his longing seemed more than he could long withstand.
+But resist he must, or part for ever with any title to her
+consideration—or his own. He shut his teeth and knotted his brows in a
+transport of desire to touch, if only with his finger-tips, the woven
+wonder of her hair.
+
+And thus she saw him, when, without warning, she awoke.
+
+Bewilderment at first informed the wide brown eyes; then, as their
+drowsiness vanished, a little laughter, a little tender mirth.
+
+“Good morning, Sir Knight of the Somber Countenance!” she cried,
+standing up. “Am I so utterly disreputable that you find it necessary
+to frown on me so darkly?”
+
+He shook his head, smiling.
+
+“I know I’m a fright,” she asserted vigorously, shaking out the folds
+of her pleated skirt. “And as for my hat, it will never be on
+straight—but then _you_ wouldn’t know.”
+
+“It seems all right,” he replied vacantly.
+
+“Then please to try to look a little happier, since you find me quite
+presentable.”
+
+“I do...”
+
+Without lifting her bended head, she looked up, laughing, not
+ill-pleased. “_You’d_ say so... really?”
+
+Commonplace enough, this banter, this pitiful endeavor to be oblivious
+of their common misery; but like the look she gave him, her words rang
+in his head like potent fumes of wine. He turned away, utterly
+disconcerted for the time, knowing only that he must overcome his
+weakness.
+
+Far down the railway tracks there rose a murmuring, that waxed to a
+rumbling roar. A passing porter answered Kirkwood’s inquiry: it was the
+night boat-train from Ostend. He picked up their bags and drew the girl
+into the waiting-room, troubled by a sickening foreboding.
+
+Through the window they watched the train roll in and stop.
+
+Among others, alighted, smirking, the unspeakable Hobbs.
+
+He lifted his hat and bowed jauntily to the waiting-room window, making
+it plain that his keen eyes had discovered them instantly.
+
+Kirkwood’s heart sank with the hopelessness of it all. If the railway
+directorates of Europe conspired against them, what chance had they? If
+the night boat-train from Ostend had only had the decency to be
+twenty-five minutes late, instead of arriving promptly on the minute of
+4:45 they two might have escaped by the 5:09 for Dunkerque and Calais.
+
+There remained but a single untried ruse in his bag of tricks;
+mercifully it might suffice.
+
+“Miss Calendar,” said Kirkwood from his heart, “just as soon as I get
+you home, safe and sound, I am going to take a day off, hunt up that
+little villain, and flay him alive. In the meantime, I forgot to dine
+last night, and am reminded that we had better forage for breakfast.”
+
+Hobbs dogged them at a safe distance while they sallied forth and in a
+neighboring street discovered an early-bird bakery. Here they were able
+to purchase rolls steaming from the oven, fresh pats of golden butter
+wrapped in clean lettuce leaves, and milk in twin bottles; all of which
+they prosaically carried with them back to the station, lacking leisure
+as they did to partake of the food before train-time.
+
+Without attempting concealment (Hobbs, he knew, was eavesdropping round
+the corner of the door) Kirkwood purchased at the ticket-window
+passages on the Dunkerque train. Mr. Hobbs promptly flattered him by
+imitation; and so jealous of his luck was Kirkwood by this time grown,
+through continual disappointment, that he did not even let the girl
+into his plans until they were aboard the 5:09, in a compartment all to
+themselves. Then, having with his own eyes seen Mr. Hobbs dodge into
+the third compartment in the rear of the same carriage, Kirkwood
+astonished the girl by requesting her to follow him; and together they
+left by the door opposite that by which they had entered.
+
+The engine was running up and down a scale of staccato snorts, in
+preparation for the race, and the cars were on the edge of moving,
+couplings clanking, wheels a-groan, ere Mr. Hobbs condescended to join
+them between the tracks.
+
+Wearily, disheartened, Kirkwood reopened the door, flung the bags in,
+and helped the girl back into their despised compartment; the quicker
+route to England via Ostend was now out of the question. As for
+himself, he waited for a brace of seconds, eying wickedly the
+ubiquitous Hobbs, who had popped back into his compartment, but stood
+ready to pop out again on the least encouragement. In the meantime he
+was pleased to shake a friendly foot at Mr. Kirkwood, thrusting that
+member out through the half-open door.
+
+Only the timely departure of the train, compelling him to rejoin
+Dorothy at once, if at all, prevented the American from adding murder
+to the already noteworthy catalogue of his high crimes and
+misdemeanors.
+
+Their simple meal, consumed to the ultimate drop and crumb while the
+Dunkerque train meandered serenely through a sunny, smiling Flemish
+countryside, somewhat revived their jaded spirits. After all, they were
+young, enviably dowered with youth’s exuberant elasticity of mood; the
+world was bright in the dawning, the night had fled leaving naught but
+an evil memory; best of all things, they were together: tacitly they
+were agreed that somehow the future would take care of itself and all
+be well with them.
+
+For a time they laughed and chattered, pretending that the present held
+no cares or troubles; but soon the girl, nestling her head in a corner
+of the dingy cushions, was smiling ever more drowsily on Kirkwood; and
+presently she slept in good earnest, the warm blood ebbing and flowing
+beneath the exquisite texture of her cheeks, the ghost of an
+unconscious smile quivering about the sensitive scarlet mouth, the
+breeze through the open window at her side wantoning at will in the
+sunlit witchery of her hair. And Kirkwood, worn with sleepless
+watching, dwelt in longing upon the dear innocent allure of her until
+the ache in his heart had grown well-nigh insupportable; then
+instinctively turned his gaze upwards, searching his heart, reading the
+faith and desire of it, so that at length knowledge and understanding
+came to him, of his weakness and strength and the clean love that he
+bore for her, and gladdened he sat dreaming in waking the same clear
+dreams that modeled her unconscious lips secretly for laughter and the
+joy of living.
+
+When Dunkerque halted their progress, they were obliged to alight and
+change cars,—Hobbs a discreetly sinister shadow at the end of the
+platform.
+
+By schedule they were to arrive in Calais about the middle of the
+forenoon, with a wait of three hours to be bridged before the departure
+of the Dover packet. That would be an anxious time; the prospect of it
+rendered both Dorothy and Kirkwood doubly anxious throughout this final
+stage of their flight. In three hours anything could happen, or be
+brought about. Neither could forget that it was quite within the bounds
+of possibilities for Calendar to be awaiting them in Calais. Presuming
+that Hobbs had been acute enough to guess their plans and advise his
+employer by telegraph, the latter could readily have anticipated their
+arrival, whether by sea in the brigantine, or by land, taking the
+direct route via Brussels and Lille. If such proved to be the case, it
+were scarcely sensible to count upon the arch-adventurer contenting
+himself with a waiting rôle like Hobbs’.
+
+With such unhappy apprehensions for a stimulant, between them the man
+and the girl contrived a make-shift counter-stratagem; or it were more
+accurate to say that Kirkwood proposed it, while Dorothy rejected,
+disputed, and at length accepted it, albeit with sad misgivings. For it
+involved a separation that might not prove temporary.
+
+Together they could never escape the surveillance of Mr. Hobbs; parted,
+he would be obliged to follow one or the other. The task of misleading
+the _Alethea’s_ mate, Kirkwood undertook, delegating to the girl the
+duty of escaping when he could provide her the opportunity, of keeping
+under cover until the hour of sailing, and then proceeding to England,
+with the gladstone bag, alone if Kirkwood was unable, or thought it
+inadvisable, to join her on the boat.
+
+In furtherance of this design, a majority of the girl’s belongings were
+transferred from her traveling bag to Kirkwood’s, the gladstone taking
+their place; and the young man provided her with voluminous
+instructions, a revolver which she did not know how to handle and
+declared she would never use for any consideration, and enough money to
+pay for her accommodation at the Terminus Hôtel, near the pier, and for
+two passages to London. It was agreed that she should secure the
+steamer booking, lest Kirkwood be delayed until the last moment.
+
+These arrangements concluded, the pair of blessed idiots sat steeped in
+melancholy silence, avoiding each other’s eyes, until the train drew in
+at the Gare Centrale, Calais.
+
+In profound silence, too, they left their compartment and passed
+through the station, into the quiet, sun-drenched streets of the
+seaport,—Hobbs hovering solicitously in the offing.
+
+Without comment or visible relief of mind they were aware that their
+fears had been without apparent foundation; they saw no sign of
+Calendar, Stryker or Mulready. The circumstance, however, counted for
+nothing; one or all of the adventurers might arrive in Calais at any
+minute.
+
+Momentarily more miserable as the time of parting drew nearer, dumb
+with unhappiness, they turned aside from the main thoroughfares of the
+city, leaving the business section, and gained the sleepier side
+streets, bordered by the residences of the proletariat, where for
+blocks none but children were to be seen, and of them but few—quaint,
+sober little bodies playing almost noiselessly in their dooryards.
+
+At length Kirkwood spoke.
+
+“Let’s make it the corner,” he said, without looking at the girl. “It’s
+a short block to the next street. You hurry to the Terminus and lock
+yourself in your room. Have the management book both passages; don’t
+run the risk of going to the pier yourself. I’ll make things
+interesting for Mr. Hobbs, and join you as soon as I can, _if_ I can.”
+
+“You must,” replied the girl. “I shan’t go without you.”
+
+“But, Dor—Miss Calendar!” he exclaimed, aghast.
+
+“I don’t care—I know I agreed,” she declared mutinously. “But I won’t—I
+can’t. Remember I shall wait for you.”
+
+“But—but perhaps—”
+
+“If you have to stay, it will be because there’s danger—won’t it? And
+what would you think of me if I deserted you then, af-after all
+y-you’ve done?... Please don’t waste time arguing. Whether you come at
+one to-day, to-morrow, or a week from to-morrow, I shall be waiting....
+You may be sure. Good-by.”
+
+They had turned the corner, walking slowly, side by side; Hobbs, for
+the first time caught off his guard, had dropped behind more than half
+a long block. But now Kirkwood’s quick sidelong glance discovered the
+mate in the act of taking alarm and quickening his pace. None the less
+the American was at the time barely conscious of anything other than a
+wholly unexpected furtive pressure of the girl’s gloved fingers on his
+own.
+
+“Good-by,” she whispered.
+
+He caught at her hand, protesting. “Dorothy—!”
+
+“Good-by,” she repeated breathlessly, with a queer little catch in her
+voice. “God be with you, Philip, and—and send you safely back to
+me....”
+
+And she was running away.
+
+Dumfounded with dismay, seeing in a flash how all his plans might be
+set at naught by this her unforeseen insubordination, he took a step or
+two after her; but she was fleet of foot, and, remembering Hobbs, he
+halted.
+
+By this time the mate, too, was running; Kirkwood could hear the heavy
+pounding of his clumsy feet. Already Dorothy had almost gained the
+farther corner; as she whisked round it with a flutter of skirts,
+Kirkwood dodged hastily behind a gate-post. A thought later, Hobbs
+appeared, head down, chest out, eyes straining for sight of his quarry,
+pelting along for dear life.
+
+As, rounding the corner, he stretched out in swifter stride, Kirkwood
+was inspired to put a spoke in his wheel; and a foot thrust suddenly
+out from behind the gate-post accomplished his purpose with more
+success than he had dared anticipate. Stumbling, the mate plunged
+headlong, arms and legs a-sprawl; and the momentum of his pace, though
+checked, carried him along the sidewalk, face downwards, a full yard
+ere he could stay himself.
+
+Kirkwood stepped out of the gateway and sheered off as Hobbs picked
+himself up; something which he did rather slowly, as if in a daze,
+without comprehension of the cause of his misfortune. And for a moment
+he stood pulling his wits together and swaying as though on the point
+of resuming his rudely interrupted chase; when the noise of Kirkwood’s
+heels brought him about face in a twinkling.
+
+“Ow, it’s you, eh!” he snarled in a temper as vicious as his
+countenance; and both of these were much the worse for wear and tear.
+
+“Myself,” admitted Kirkwood fairly; and then, in a gleam of humor:
+“Weren’t you looking for me?”
+
+His rage seemed to take the little Cockney and shake him by the throat;
+he trembled from head to foot, his face shockingly congested, and spat
+out dust and fragments of lurid blasphemy like an infuriated cat.
+
+Of a sudden, “W’ere’s the gel?” he sputtered thickly as his quick
+shifting eyes for the first time noted Dorothy’s absence.
+
+“Miss Calendar has other business—none with you. I’ve taken the liberty
+of stopping you because I have a word or two—”
+
+“Ow, you ’ave, ’ave you? Gawd strike me blind, but I’ve a word for you,
+too!... ’And over that bag—and look nippy, or I’ll myke you pye for
+w’at you’ve done to me ... I’ll myke you pye!” he iterated hoarsely,
+edging closer. “’And it over or—”
+
+“You’ve got another guess—” Kirkwood began, but saved his breath in
+deference to an imperative demand on him for instant defensive action.
+
+To some extent he had underestimated the brute courage of the fellow,
+the violent, desperate courage that is distilled of anger in men of his
+kind. Despising him, deeming him incapable of any overt act of
+villainy, Kirkwood had been a little less wary than he would have been
+with Calendar or Mulready. Hobbs had seemed more of the craven type
+which Stryker graced so conspicuously. But now the American was to be
+taught discrimination, to learn that if Stryker’s nature was like a
+snake’s for low cunning and deviousness, Hobbs’ soul was the soul of a
+viper.
+
+Almost imperceptibly he had advanced upon Kirkwood; almost insensibly
+his right hand had moved toward his chest; now, with a movement
+marvelously deft, it had slipped in and out of his breast pocket. And a
+six-inch blade of tarnished steel was winging toward Kirkwood’s throat
+with the speed of light.
+
+Instinctively he stepped back; as instinctively he guarded with his
+right forearm, lifting the hand that held the satchel. The knife,
+catching in his sleeve, scratched the arm beneath painfully, and
+simultaneously was twisted from the mate’s grasp, while in his surprise
+Kirkwood’s grip on the bag-handle relaxed. It was torn forcibly from
+his fingers just as he received a heavy blow on his chest from the
+mate’s fist. He staggered back.
+
+By the time he had recovered from the shock, Hobbs was a score of feet
+away, the satchel tucked under his arm, his body bent almost double,
+running like a jack-rabbit. Ere Kirkwood could get under way, in
+pursuit, the mate had dodged out of sight round the corner. When the
+American caught sight of him again, he was far down the block, and
+bettering his pace with every jump.
+
+He was approaching, also, some six or eight good citizens of Calais,
+men of the laboring class, at a guess. Their attention attracted by his
+frantic flight, they stopped to wonder. One or two moved as though to
+intercept him, and he doubled out into the middle of the street with
+the quickness of thought; an instant later he shot round another corner
+and disappeared, the natives streaming after in hot chase, electrified
+by the inspiring strains of “Stop, thief!”—or its French equivalent.
+
+Kirkwood, cheering them on with the same wild cry, followed to the
+farther street; and there paused, so winded and weak with laughter that
+he was fain to catch at a fence picket for support. Standing thus he
+saw other denizens of Calais spring as if from the ground miraculously
+to swell the hue and cry; and a dumpling of a gendarme materialized
+from nowhere at all, to fall in behind the rabble, waving his sword
+above his head and screaming at the top of his lungs, the while his fat
+legs twinkled for all the world like thick sausage links marvelously
+animated.
+
+The mob straggled round yet another corner and was gone; its clamor
+diminished on the still Spring air; and Kirkwood, recovering, abandoned
+Mr. Hobbs to the justice of the high gods and the French system of
+jurisprudence (at least, he hoped the latter would take an interest in
+the case, if haply Hobbs were laid by the heels), and went his way
+rejoicing.
+
+As for the scratch on his arm, it was nothing, as he presently
+demonstrated to his complete satisfaction in the seclusion of a
+chance-sent fiacre. Kirkwood, commissioning it to drive him to the
+American Consulate, made his diagnosis _en route_; wound a handkerchief
+round the negligible wound, rolled down his sleeve, and forgot it
+altogether in the joys of picturing to himself Hobbs in the act of
+opening the satchel in expectation of finding therein the gladstone
+bag.
+
+At the consulate door he paid off the driver and dismissed him; the
+fiacre had served his purpose, and he could find his way to the
+Terminus Hôtel at infinitely less expense. He had a considerably harder
+task before him as he ascended the steps to the consular doorway,
+knocked and made known the nature of his errand.
+
+No malicious destiny could have timed the hour of his call more
+appositely; the consul was at home and at the disposal of his
+fellow-citizens—within bounds.
+
+In the course of thirty minutes or so Kirkwood emerged with dignity
+from the consulate, his face crimson to the hair, his soul smarting
+with shame and humiliation; and left an amused official representative
+of his country’s government with the impression of having been
+entertained to the point of ennui by an exceptionally clumsy but
+pertinacious liar.
+
+For the better part of the succeeding hour Kirkwood circumnavigated the
+neighborhood of the steamer pier and the Terminus Hôtel, striving to
+render himself as inconspicuous as he felt insignificant, and keenly on
+the alert for any sign or news of Hobbs. In this pursuit he was
+pleasantly disappointed.
+
+At noon precisely, his suspense grown too onerous for his strength of
+will, throwing caution and their understanding to the winds, he walked
+boldly into the Terminus, and inquired for Miss Calendar.
+
+The assurance he received that she was in safety under its roof did not
+deter him from sending up his name and asking her to receive him in the
+public lounge; he required the testimony of his senses to convince him
+that no harm had come to her in the long hour and a half that had
+elapsed since their separation.
+
+Woman-like, she kept him waiting. Alone in the public rooms of the
+hotel, he suffered excruciating torments. How was he to know that
+Calendar had not arrived and found his way to her?
+
+When at length she appeared on the threshold of the apartment, bringing
+with her the traveling bag and looking wonderfully the better for her
+ninety minutes of complete repose and privacy, the relief he
+experienced was so intense that he remained transfixed in the middle of
+the floor, momentarily able neither to speak nor to move.
+
+On her part, so fagged and distraught did he seem, that at sight of his
+care-worn countenance she hurried to him with outstretched,
+compassionate hands and a low pitiful cry of concern, forgetful
+entirely of that which he himself had forgotten—the emotion she had
+betrayed on parting.
+
+“Oh, nothing wrong,” he hastened to reassure her, with a sorry ghost of
+his familiar grin; “only I have lost Hobbs and the satchel with your
+things; and there’s no sign yet of Mr. Calendar. We can feel pretty
+comfortable now, and—and I thought it time we had something like a
+meal.”
+
+The narrative of his adventure which he delivered over their _déjeuner
+à la fourchette_ contained no mention either of his rebuff at the
+American Consulate or the scratch he had sustained during Hobbs’
+murderous assault; the one could not concern her, the other would seem
+but a bid for her sympathy. He counted it a fortunate thing that the
+mate’s knife had been keen enough to penetrate the cloth of his sleeve
+without tearing it; the slit it had left was barely noticeable. And he
+purposely diverted the girl with flashes of humorous description, so
+that they discussed both meal and episode in a mood of wholesome
+merriment.
+
+It was concluded, all too soon for the taste of either, by the waiter’s
+announcement that the steamer was on the point of sailing.
+
+Outwardly composed, inwardly quaking, they boarded the packet, meeting
+with no misadventure whatever—if we are to except the circumstance
+that, when the restaurant bill was settled and the girl had
+punctiliously surrendered his change with the tickets, Kirkwood found
+himself in possession of precisely one franc and twenty centimes.
+
+He groaned in spirit to think how differently he might have been fixed,
+had he not in his infatuated spirit of honesty been so anxious to give
+Calendar more than ample value for his money!
+
+An inexorable anxiety held them both near the gangway until it was cast
+off and the boat began to draw away from the pier. Then, and not till
+then, did an unimpressive, small figure of a man detach itself from the
+shield of a pile of luggage and advance to the pier-head. No second
+glance was needed to identify Mr. Hobbs; and until the perspective
+dwarfed him indistinguishably, he was to be seen, alternately waving
+Kirkwood ironic farewell and blowing violent kisses to Miss Calendar
+from the tips of his soiled fingers.
+
+So he had escaped arrest....
+
+At first by turns indignant and relieved to realize that thereafter
+they were to move in scenes in which his hateful shadow would not form
+an essentially component part, subsequently Kirkwood fell a prey to
+prophetic terrors. It was not alone fear of retribution that had
+induced Hobbs to relinquish his persecution—or so Kirkwood became
+convinced; if the mate’s calculation had allowed for them the least
+fraction of a chance to escape apprehension on the farther shores of
+the Channel, nor fears nor threats would have prevented him from
+sailing with the fugitives.... Far from having left danger behind them
+on the Continent, Kirkwood believed in his secret heart that they were
+but flying to encounter it beneath the smoky pall of London.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+ROGUES AND VAGABONDS
+
+
+A westering sun striking down through the drab exhalations of
+ten-thousand sooty chimney-pots, tinted the atmosphere with the hue of
+copper. The glance that wandered purposelessly out through the carriage
+windows, recoiled, repelled by the endless dreary vista of the Surrey
+Side’s unnumbered roofs; or, probing instantaneously the hopeless
+depths of some grim narrow thoroughfare fleetingly disclosed, as the
+evening boat-train from Dover swung on toward Charing Cross, its trucks
+level with the eaves of Southwark’s dwellings, was saddened by the
+thought that in all the world squalor such as this should obtain and
+flourish unrelieved.
+
+For perhaps the tenth time in the course of the journey Kirkwood
+withdrew his gaze from the window and turned to the girl, a question
+ready framed upon his lips.
+
+“Are you quite sure—” he began; and then, alive to the clear and
+penetrating perception in the brown eyes that smiled into his from
+under their level brows, he stammered and left the query uncompleted.
+
+Continuing to regard him steadily and smilingly, Dorothy shook her head
+in playful denial and protest. “Do you know,” she commented, “that this
+is about the fifth repetition of that identical question within the
+last quarter-hour?”
+
+“How do you know what I meant to say?” he demanded, staring.
+
+“I can see it in your eyes. Besides, you’ve talked and thought of
+nothing else since we left the boat. Won’t you believe me, please, when
+I say there’s absolutely not a soul in London to whom I could go and
+ask for shelter? I don’t think it’s very nice of you to be so openly
+anxious to get rid of me.”
+
+This latter was so essentially undeserved and so artlessly insincere,
+that he must needs, of course, treat it with all seriousness.
+
+“That isn’t fair, Miss Calendar. Really it’s not.”
+
+“What am I to think? I’ve told you any number of times that it’s only
+an hour’s ride on to Chiltern, where the Pyrfords will be glad to take
+me in. You may depend upon it,—by eight to-night, at the latest, you’ll
+have me off your hands,—the drag and worry that I’ve been ever since—”
+
+“Don’t!” he pleaded vehemently. “Please!... You _know_ it isn’t that. I
+_don’t_ want you off my hands, ever.... That is to say, I—ah—” Here he
+was smitten with a dumbness, and sat, aghast at the enormity of his
+blunder, entreating her forgiveness with eyes that, very likely,
+pleaded his cause more eloquently than he guessed.
+
+“I mean,” he floundered on presently, in the fatuous belief that he
+would this time be able to control both mind and tongue, “_what_ I mean
+is I’d be glad to go on serving you in any way I might, to the end of
+time, if you’d give me....”
+
+He left the declaration inconclusive—a stroke of diplomacy that would
+have graced an infinitely more adept wooer. But he used it all
+unconsciously. “O Lord!” he groaned in spirit. “Worse and more of it!
+Why in thunder can’t I say the right thing _right_?”
+
+Egotistically absorbed by the problem thus formulated, he was heedless
+of her failure to respond, and remained pensively preoccupied until
+roused by the grinding and jolting of the train, as it slowed to a halt
+preparatory to crossing the bridge.
+
+Then he sought to read his answer in the eyes of Dorothy. But she was
+looking away, staring thoughtfully out over the billowing sea of roofs
+that merged illusively into the haze long ere it reached the horizon;
+and Kirkwood could see the pulsing of the warm blood in her throat and
+cheeks; and the glamorous light that leaped and waned in her eyes, as
+the ruddy evening sunlight warmed them, was something any man might be
+glad to live for and die for.... And he saw that she had understood,
+had grasped the thread of meaning that ran through the clumsy fabric of
+his halting speech and his sudden silences.
+
+She had understood without resentment!
+
+While, incredulous, he wrestled with the wonder of this fond discovery,
+she grew conscious of his gaze, and turned her head to meet it with one
+fearless and sweet, if troubled.
+
+“Dear Mr. Kirkwood,” she said gently, bending forward as if to read
+between the lines anxiety had graven on his countenance, “won’t you
+tell me, please, what it can be that so worries you? Is it possible
+that you still have a fear of my father? But don’t you know that he can
+do nothing now—now that we’re safe? We have only to take a cab to
+Paddington Station, and then—”
+
+“You mustn’t underestimate the resource and ability of Mr. Calendar,”
+he told her gloomily; “we’ve got a chance—no more. It wasn’t....” He
+shut his teeth on his unruly tongue—too late.
+
+Woman-quick she caught him up. “It wasn’t that? Then what was it that
+worried you? If it’s something that affects me, is it kind and right of
+you not to tell me?”
+
+“It—it affects us both,” he conceded drearily. “I—I don’t—”
+
+The wretched embarrassment of the confession befogged his wits; he felt
+unable to frame the words. He appealed speechlessly for tolerance, with
+a face utterly woebegone and eyes piteous.
+
+The train began to move slowly across the Thames to Charing Cross.
+
+Mercilessly the girl persisted. “We’ve only a minute more. Surely you
+can trust me....”
+
+In exasperation he interrupted almost rudely. “It’s only this: I—I’m
+strapped.”
+
+“Strapped?” She knitted her brows over this fresh specimen of American
+slang.
+
+“Flat strapped—busted—broke—on my uppers—down and out,” he reeled off
+synonyms without a smile. “I haven’t enough money to pay cab-fare
+across the town—”
+
+“Oh!” she interpolated, enlightened.
+
+“—to say nothing of taking us to Chiltern. I couldn’t buy you a glass
+of water if you were thirsty. There isn’t a soul on earth, within hail,
+who would trust me with a quarter—I mean a shilling—across London
+Bridge. I’m the original Luckless Wonder and the only genuine Jonah
+extant.”
+
+With a face the hue of fire, he cocked his eyebrows askew and attempted
+to laugh unconcernedly to hide his bitter shame. “I’ve led you out of
+the fryingpan into the fire, and I don’t know what to do! Please call
+me names.”
+
+And in a single instant all that he had consistently tried to avoid
+doing, had been irretrievably done; if, with dawning comprehension,
+dismay flickered in her eyes—such dismay as such a confession can rouse
+only in one who, like Dorothy Calendar, has never known the want of a
+penny—it was swiftly driven out to make place for the truest and most
+gracious and unselfish solicitude.
+
+“Oh, poor Mr. Kirkwood! And it’s all because of me! You’ve beggared
+yourself—”
+
+“Not precisely; I was beggared to begin with.” He hastened to disclaim
+the extravagant generosity of which she accused him. “I had only three
+or four pounds to my name that night we met.... I haven’t told you—I—”
+
+“You’ve told me nothing, nothing whatever about yourself,” she said
+reproachfully.
+
+“I didn’t want to bother you with my troubles; I tried not to talk
+about myself.... You knew I was an American, but I’m worse than that;
+I’m a Californian—from San Francisco.” He tried unsuccessfully to make
+light of it. “I told you I was the Luckless Wonder; if I’d ever had any
+luck I would have stored a little money away. As it was, I lived on my
+income, left my principal in ’Frisco; and when the earthquake came, it
+wiped me out completely.”
+
+“And you were going home that night we made you miss your steamer!”
+
+“It was my own fault, and I’m glad this blessed minute that I did miss
+it. Nice sort I’d have been, to go off and leave you at the mercy—”
+
+“Please! I want to think, I’m trying to remember how much you’ve gone
+through—”
+
+“Precisely what I don’t want you to do. Anyway, I did nothing more than
+any other fellow would’ve! Please don’t give me credit that I don’t
+deserve.”
+
+But she was not listening; and a pause fell, while the train crawled
+warily over the trestle, as if in fear of the foul, muddy flood below.
+
+“And there’s no way I can repay you....”
+
+“There’s nothing to be repaid,” he contended stoutly.
+
+She clasped her hands and let them fall gently in her lap. “I’ve not a
+farthing in the world!... I never dreamed.... I’m so sorry, Mr.
+Kirkwood—terribly, terribly sorry!... But what can we do? I can’t
+consent to be a burden—”
+
+“But you’re not! You’re the one thing that ...” He swerved sharply, at
+an abrupt tangent. “There’s one thing we can do, of course.”
+
+She looked up inquiringly.
+
+“Craven Street is just round the corner.”
+
+“Yes?”—wonderingly.
+
+“I mean we must go to Mrs. Hallam’s house, first off.... It’s too late
+now,—after five, else we could deposit the jewels in some bank.
+Since—since they are no longer yours, the only thing, and the proper
+thing to do is to place them in safety or in the hands of their owner.
+If you take them directly to young Hallam, your hands will be clear....
+And—I never did such a thing in my life, Miss Calendar; but if he’s got
+a spark of gratitude in his make-up, I ought to be able to—er—to borrow
+a pound or so of him.”
+
+“Do you think so?” She shook her head in doubt. “I don’t know; I know
+so little of such things.... You are right; we must take him the
+jewels, but...” Her voice trailed off into a sigh of profound
+perturbation.
+
+He dared not meet her look.
+
+Beneath his wandering gaze a County Council steam-boat darted swiftly
+down-stream from Charing Cross pier, in the shadow of the railway
+bridge. It seemed curious to reflect that from that very floating pier
+he had started first upon his quest of the girl beside him, only—he had
+to count—three nights ago! Three days and three nights! Altogether
+incredible seemed the transformation they had wrought in the complexion
+of the world. Yet nothing material was changed.... He lifted his eyes.
+
+Beyond the river rose the Embankment, crawling with traffic, backed by
+the green of the gardens and the shimmering walls of glass and stone of
+the great hotels, their windows glowing weirdly golden in the late
+sunlight. A little down-stream Cleopatra’s Needle rose, sadly the worse
+for London smoke, flanked by its couchant sphinxes, wearing a nimbus of
+circling, sweeping, swooping, wheeling gulls. Farther down, from the
+foot of that magnificent pile, Somerset House, Waterloo Bridge sprang
+over-stream in its graceful arch.... All as of yesterday; yet all
+changed. Why? Because a woman had entered into his life; because he had
+learned the lesson of love and had looked into the bright face of
+Romance....
+
+With a jar the train started and began to move more swiftly.
+
+Kirkwood lifted the traveling bag to his knees.
+
+“Don’t forget,” he said with some difficulty, “you’re to stick by me,
+whatever happens. You mustn’t desert me.”
+
+“You _know_,” the girl reproved him.
+
+“I know; but there must be no misunderstanding.... Don’t worry; we’ll
+win out yet, I’ve a plan.”
+
+_Splendide mendax_! He had not the glimmering of a plan.
+
+The engine panting, the train drew in beneath the vast sounding dome of
+the station, to an accompaniment of dull thunderings; and stopped
+finally.
+
+Kirkwood got out, not without a qualm of regret at leaving the
+compartment; therein, at least, they had some title to consideration,
+by virtue of their tickets; now they were utterly vagabondish,
+penniless adventurers.
+
+The girl joined him. Slowly, elbow to elbow, the treasure bag between
+them, they made their way down toward the gates, atoms in a tide-rip of
+humanity,—two streams of passengers meeting on the narrow strip of
+platform, the one making for the streets, the other for the suburbs.
+
+Hurried and jostled, the girl clinging tightly to his arm lest they be
+separated in the crush, they came to the ticket-wicket; beyond the
+barrier surged a sea of hats—shining “toppers,” dignified and
+upstanding, the outward and visible manifestation of the sturdy, stodgy
+British spirit of respectability; “bowlers” round and sleek and humble;
+shapeless caps with cloth visors, manufactured of outrageous plaids;
+flower-like miracles of millinery from Bond Street; strangely plumed
+monstrosities from Petticoat Lane and Mile End Road. Beneath any one of
+these might lurk the maleficent brain, the spying eyes of Calendar or
+one of his creatures; beneath all of them that he encountered, Kirkwood
+peered in fearful inquiry.
+
+Yet, when they had passed unhindered the ordeal of the wickets, had run
+the gantlet of those thousand eyes without lighting in any pair a spark
+of recognition, he began to bear himself with more assurance, to be
+sensible to a grateful glow of hope. Perhaps Hobbs’ telegram had not
+reached its destination, for unquestionably the mate would have wired
+his chief; perhaps some accident had befallen the conspirators; perhaps
+the police had apprehended them.... No matter how, one hoped against
+hope that they had been thrown off the trail.
+
+And indeed it seemed as if they must have been misguided in some
+providential manner. On the other hand, it would be the crassest of
+indiscretions to linger about the place an instant longer than
+absolutely necessary.
+
+Outside the building, however, they paused perforce, undergoing the
+cross-fire of the congregated cabbies. It being the first time that he
+had ever felt called upon to leave the station afoot, Kirkwood cast
+about irresolutely, seeking the sidewalk leading to the Strand.
+
+Abruptly he caught the girl by the arm and unceremoniously hurried her
+toward a waiting hansom.
+
+“Quick!” he begged her. “Jump right in—not an instant to spare.—”
+
+She nodded brightly, lips firm with courage, eyes shining.
+
+“My father?”
+
+“Yes.” Kirkwood glanced back over his shoulder. “He hasn’t seen us yet.
+They’ve just driven up. Stryker’s with him. They’re getting down.” And
+to himself, “Oh, the devil!” cried the panic-stricken young man.
+
+He drew back to let the girl precede him into the cab; at the same time
+he kept an eye on Calendar, whose conveyance stood half the length of
+the station-front away.
+
+The fat adventurer had finished paying off the driver, standing on the
+deck of the hansom. Stryker was already out, towering above the mass of
+people, and glaring about him with his hawk-keen vision. Calendar had
+started to alight, his foot was leaving the step when Stryker’s glance
+singled out their quarry. Instantly he turned and spoke to his
+confederate. Calendar wheeled like a flash, peering eagerly in the
+direction indicated by the captain’s index finger, then, snapping
+instructions to his driver, threw himself heavily back on the seat.
+Stryker, awkward on his land-legs, stumbled and fell in an
+ill-calculated attempt to hoist himself hastily back into the vehicle.
+
+To the delay thus occasioned alone Kirkwood and Dorothy owed a respite
+of freedom. Their hansom was already swinging down toward the great
+gates of the yard, the American standing to make the driver comprehend
+the necessity for using the utmost speed in reaching the Craven Street
+address. The man proved both intelligent and obliging; Kirkwood had
+barely time to drop down beside the girl, ere the cab was swinging out
+into the Strand, to the peril of the toes belonging to a number of
+righteously indignant pedestrians.
+
+“Good boy!” commented Kirkwood cheerfully. “That’s the greatest comfort
+of all London, the surprising intellectual strength the average cabby
+displays when you promise him a tip.... Great Heavens!” he cried,
+reading the girl’s dismayed expression. “A tip! I never thought—!” His
+face lengthened dismally, his eyebrows working awry. “Now we are in for
+it!”
+
+Dorothy said nothing.
+
+He turned in the seat, twisting his neck to peep through the small rear
+window. “I don’t see their cab,” he announced. “But of course they’re
+after us. However, Craven Street’s just round the corner; if we get
+there first, I don’t fancy Freddie Hallam will have a cordial reception
+for our pursuers. They must’ve been on watch at Cannon Street, and
+finding we were not coming in that way—of course they were expecting us
+because of Hobbs’ wire—they took cab for Charing Cross. Lucky for
+us.... Or is it lucky?” he added doubtfully, to himself.
+
+The hansom whipped round the corner into Craven Street. Kirkwood sprang
+up, grasping the treasure bag, ready to jump the instant they pulled in
+toward Mrs. Hallam’s dwelling. But as they drew near upon the address
+he drew back with an exclamation of amazement.
+
+The house was closed, showing a blank face to the street—blinds drawn
+close down in the windows, area gate padlocked, an estate-agent’s board
+projecting from above the doorway, advertising the property “To be let,
+furnished.”
+
+Kirkwood looked back, craning his neck round the side of the cab. At
+the moment another hansom was breaking through the rank of humanity on
+the Strand crossing. He saw one or two figures leap desperately from
+beneath the horse’s hoofs. Then the cab shot out swiftly down the
+street.
+
+The American stood up again, catching the cabby’s eye.
+
+“Drive on!” he cried excitedly. “Don’t stop—drive as fast as you dare!”
+
+“W’ere to, sir?”
+
+“See that cab behind? Don’t let it catch us—shake it off, lose it
+somehow, but for the love of Heaven don’t let it catch us! I’ll make it
+worth your while. Do you understand?”
+
+“Yes, sir!” The driver looked briefly over his shoulder and lifted his
+whip. “Don’t worry, sir,” he cried, entering into the spirit of the
+game with gratifying zest. “Shan’t let ’em over’aul you, sir. Mind your
+’ead!”
+
+And as Kirkwood ducked, the whip-lash shot out over the roof with a
+crack like the report of a pistol. Startled, the horse leaped
+indignantly forward. Momentarily the cab seemed to leave the ground,
+then settled down to a pace that carried them round the Avenue Theatre
+and across Northumberland Avenue into Whitehall Place apparently on a
+single wheel.
+
+A glance behind showed Kirkwood that already they had gained, the
+pursuing hansom having lost ground through greater caution in crossing
+the main-traveled thoroughfare.
+
+“Good little horse!” he applauded.
+
+A moment later he was indorsing without reserve the generalship of
+their cabby; the quick westward turn that took them into Whitehall,
+over across from the Horse Guards, likewise placed them in a pocket of
+traffic; a practically impregnable press of vehicles closed in behind
+them ere Calendar’s conveyance could follow out of the side street.
+
+That the same conditions, but slightly modified, hemmed them in ahead,
+went for nothing in Kirkwood’s estimation.
+
+“Good driver!” he approved heartily. “He’s got a head on his
+shoulders!”
+
+The girl found her voice. “How,” she demanded in a breath, face blank
+with consternation, “how did you dare?”
+
+“Dare?” he echoed exultantly; and in his veins excitement was running
+like liquid fire. “What wouldn’t I dare for you, Dorothy?”
+
+“What have you not?” she amended softly, adding with a shade of
+timidity: “Philip...”
+
+The long lashes swept up from her cheeks, like clouds revealing stars,
+unmasking eyes radiant and brave to meet his own; then they fell, even
+as her lips drooped with disappointment. And she sighed.... For he was
+not looking. Man-like, hot with the ardor of the chase, he was deaf and
+blind to all else.
+
+She saw that he had not even heard. Twice within the day she had
+forgotten herself, had overstepped the rigid bounds of her breeding in
+using his Christian name. And twice he had been oblivious to that token
+of their maturing understanding. So she sighed, and sighing, smiled
+again; resting an elbow on the window-sill and flattening one small
+gloved hand against the frame for a brace against the jouncing of the
+hansom. It swept on with unabated speed, up-stream beside the tawny
+reaches of the river; and for a time there was no speech between them,
+the while the girl lost consciousness of self and her most imminent
+peril, surrendering her being to the lingering sweetness of her long,
+dear thoughts....
+
+“I’ve got a scheme!” Kirkwood declared so explosively that she caught
+her breath with the surprise of it. “There’s the Pless; they know me
+there, and my credit’s good. When we shake them off, we can have the
+cabby take us to the hotel. I’ll register and borrow from the
+management enough to pay our way to Chiltern and the tolls for a cable
+to New York. I’ve a friend or two over home who wouldn’t let me want
+for a few miserable pounds.... So you see,” he explained boyishly,
+“we’re at the end of our troubles already!”
+
+She said something inaudible, holding her face averted. He bent nearer
+to her, wondering. “I didn’t understand,” he suggested.
+
+Still looking from him, “I said you were very good to me,” she said in
+a quavering whisper.
+
+“Dorothy!” Without his knowledge or intention before the fact, as
+instinctively as he made use of her given name, intimately, his strong
+fingers dropped and closed upon the little hand that lay beside him.
+“What _is_ the matter, dear?” He leaned still farther forward to peer
+into her face, till glance met glance in the ending and his racing
+pulses tightened with sheer delight of the humid happiness in her
+glistening eyes. “Dorothy, child, don’t worry so. No harm shall come to
+you. It’s all working out—all working out _right_. Only have a little
+faith in me, and I’ll _make_ everything work out right, Dorothy.”
+
+Gently she freed her fingers. “I wasn’t,” she told him in a voice that
+quivered between laughter and tears, “I wasn’t worrying. I was ... You
+wouldn’t understand. Don’t be afraid I shall break down or—or
+anything.”
+
+“I shan’t,” he reassured her; “I know you’re not that sort. Besides,
+you’d have no excuse. We’re moving along famously. That cabby knows his
+business.”
+
+In fact that gentleman was minute by minute demonstrating his peculiar
+fitness for the task he had so cheerfully undertaken. The superior
+horsemanship of the London hackney cabman needs no exploitation, and he
+in whose hands rested the fate of the Calendar treasure was peer of his
+compeers. He was instant to advantage himself of every opening to
+forward his pliant craft, quick to foresee the fortunes of the way and
+govern himself accordingly.
+
+Estimating with practised eye the precise moment when the police
+supervisor of traffic at the junction of Parliament and Bridge Streets,
+would see fit to declare a temporary blockade, he so managed that his
+was the last vehicle to pass ere the official wand, to ignore which
+involves a forfeited license, was lifted; and indeed, so close was his
+calculation that he escaped only with a scowl and word of warning from
+the bobby. A matter of no importance whatever, since his end was gained
+and the pursuing cab had been shut off by the blockade.
+
+In Calendar’s driver, however, he had an adversary of abilities by no
+means to be despised. Precisely how the man contrived it, is a
+question; that he made a detour by way of Derby Street is not
+improbable, unpleasant as it may have been for Stryker and Calendar to
+find themselves in such close proximity to “the Yard.” At all events,
+he evaded the block, and hardly had the chase swung across Bridge
+Street, than the pursuer was nimbly clattering in its wake.
+
+Past the Houses of Parliament, through Old Palace Yard, with the Abbey
+on their left, they swung away into Abingdon Street, whence suddenly
+they dived into the maze of backways, great and mean, which lies to the
+south of Victoria. Doubling and twisting, now this way, now that, the
+driver tooled them through the intricate heart of this labyrinth,
+leading the pursuers a dance that Kirkwood thought calculated to
+dishearten and shake off the pursuit in the first five minutes. Yet
+always, peering back through the little peephole, he saw Calendar’s cab
+pelting doggedly in their rear—a hundred yards behind, no more, no
+less, hanging on with indomitable grit and determination.
+
+By degrees they drew westwards, threading Pimlico, into Chelsea—once
+dashing briefly down the Grosvenor Road, the Thames a tawny flood
+beyond the river wall.
+
+Children cheered them on, and policemen turned to stare, doubting
+whether they should interfere. Minutes rolled into tens, measuring out
+an hour; and still they hammered on, hunted and hunters, playing their
+game of hare-and-hounds through the highways and byways of those staid
+and aged quarters.
+
+In the leading cab there were few words spoken. Kirkwood and Dorothy
+alike sat spellbound with the fascination of the game; if it is
+conceivable that the fox enjoys his part in the day’s sport, then they
+were enjoying themselves. Now one spoke, now another—chiefly in the
+clipped phraseology, of excitement. As—
+
+“We’re gaining?”
+
+“Yes—think so.”
+
+Or, “We’ll tire them out?”
+
+“Sure-ly.”
+
+“They can’t catch us, can they, Philip?”
+
+“Never in the world.”
+
+But he spoke with a confidence that he himself did not feel, for hope
+as he would he could never see that the distance between the two had
+been materially lessened or increased. Their horses seemed most evenly
+matched.
+
+The sun was very low behind the houses of the Surrey Side when Kirkwood
+became aware that their horse was flagging, though (as comparison
+determined) no more so than the one behind.
+
+In grave concern the young man raised his hand, thrusting open the trap
+in the roof. Immediately the square of darkling sky was eclipsed by the
+cabby’s face.
+
+“Yessir?”
+
+“You had better drive as directly as you can to the Hotel Pless,”
+Kirkwood called up. “I’m afraid it’s no use pushing your horse like
+this.”
+
+“I’m sure of it, sir. ’E’s a good ’oss, ’e is, but ’e carn’t keep goin’
+for hever, you know, sir.”
+
+“I know. You’ve done very well; you’ve done your best.”
+
+“Very good, sir. The Pless, you said, sir? Right.”
+
+The trap closed.
+
+Two blocks farther, and their pace had so sensibly moderated that
+Kirkwood was genuinely alarmed. The pursuing cabby was lashing his
+animal without mercy, while, “It aren’t no use my w’ippin’ ’im, sir,”
+dropped through the trap. “’E’s doing orl ’e can.”
+
+“I understand.”
+
+Despondent recklessness tightened Kirkwood’s lips and kindled an
+unpleasant light in his eyes. He touched his side pocket; Calendar’s
+revolver was still there.... Dorothy should win away clear, if—if he
+swung for it.
+
+He bent forward with the traveling bag in his hands.
+
+“What are you going to do?” The girl’s voice was very tremulous.
+
+“Stand a chance, take a losing hazard. Can you run? You’re not too
+tired?”
+
+“I can run—perhaps not far—a little way, at least.”
+
+“And will you do as I say?”
+
+Her eyes met his, unwavering, bespeaking her implicit faith.
+
+“Promise!”
+
+“I promise.”
+
+“We’ll have to drop off in a minute. The horse won’t last.... They’re
+in the same box. Well, I undertake to stand ’em off for a bit; you take
+the bag and run for it. Just as soon as I can convince them, I’ll
+follow, but if there’s any delay, you call the first cab you see and
+drive to the Pless. I’ll join you there.”
+
+He stood up, surveying the neighborhood. Behind him the girl lifted her
+voice in protest.
+
+“No, Philip, no!”
+
+“You’ve promised,” he said sternly, eyes ranging the street.
+
+“I don’t care; I won’t leave you.”
+
+He shook his head in silent contradiction, frowning; but not frowning
+because of the girl’s mutiny. He was a little puzzled by a vague
+impression, and was striving to pin it down for recognition; but was so
+thoroughly bemused with fatigue and despair that only with great
+difficulty could he force his faculties to logical reasoning, his
+memory to respond to his call upon it.
+
+The hansom was traversing a street in Old Brompton—a quaint, prim
+by-way lined with dwellings singularly Old-Worldish, even for London.
+He seemed to know it subjectively, to have retained a memory of it from
+another existence: as the stage setting of a vivid dream, all
+forgotten, will sometimes recur with peculiar and exasperating
+intensity, in broad daylight. The houses, with their sloping, red-tiled
+roofs, unexpected gables, spontaneous dormer windows, glass panes set
+in leaded frames, red brick façades trimmed with green shutters and
+doorsteps of white stone, each sitting back, sedate and
+self-sufficient, in its trim dooryard fenced off from the public
+thoroughfare: all wore an aspect hauntingly familiar, and yet strange.
+
+A corner sign, remarked in passing, had named the spot “Aspen Villas”;
+though he felt he knew the sound of those syllables as well as he did
+the name of the Pless, strive as he might he failed to make them convey
+anything tangible to his intelligence. When had he heard of it? At what
+time had his errant footsteps taken him through this curious survival
+of Eighteenth Century London?
+
+Not that it mattered when. It could have no possible bearing on the
+emergency. He really gave it little thought; the mental processes
+recounted were mostly subconscious, if none the less real. His
+objective attention was wholly preoccupied with the knowledge that
+Calendar’s cab was drawing perilously near. And he was debating whether
+or not they should alight at once and try to make a better pace afoot,
+when the decision was taken wholly out of his hands.
+
+Blindly staggering on, wilted with weariness, the horse stumbled in the
+shafts and plunged forward on its knees. Quick as the driver was to
+pull it up, with a cruel jerk of the bits, Kirkwood was caught
+unprepared; lurching against the dashboard, he lost his footing,
+grasped frantically at the unstable air, and went over, bringing up in
+a sitting position in the gutter, with a solid shock that jarred his
+very teeth.
+
+For a moment dazed he sat there blinking; by the time he got to his
+feet, the girl stood beside him, questioning him with keen solicitude.
+
+“No,” he gasped; “not hurt—only surprised. Wait....”
+
+Their cab had come to a complete standstill; Calendar’s was no more
+than twenty yards behind, and as Kirkwood caught sight of him the fat
+adventurer was in the act of lifting himself ponderously out of the
+seat.
+
+Incontinently the young man turned to the girl and forced the
+traveling-bag into her hands.
+
+“Run for it!” he begged her. “Don’t stop to argue. You promised—run!
+I’ll come....”
+
+“Philip!” she pleaded.
+
+“Dorothy!” he cried in torment.
+
+Perhaps it was his unquestionable distress that weakened her. Suddenly
+she yielded—with whatever reason. He was only hazily aware of the swish
+of her skirts behind him; he had no time to look round and see that she
+got away safely. He had only eyes and thoughts for Calendar and
+Stryker.
+
+They were both afoot, now, and running toward him, the one as awkward
+as the other, but neither yielding a jot of their malignant purpose. He
+held the picture of it oddly graphic in his memory for many a day
+thereafter: Calendar making directly, for him, his heavy-featured face
+a dull red with the exertion, his fat head dropped forward as if too
+heavy for his neck of a bull, his small eyes bright with anger; Stryker
+shying off at a discreet angle, evidently with the intention of
+devoting himself to the capture of the girl; the two cabs with their
+dejected screws, at rest in the middle of the quiet, twilit street. He
+seemed even to see himself, standing stockily prepared, hands in his
+coat pockets, his own head inclined with a suggestion of pugnacity.
+
+To this mental photograph another succeeds, of the same scene an
+instant later; all as it had been before, their relative positions
+unchanged, save that Stryker and Calendar had come to a dead stop, and
+that Kirkwood’s right arm was lifted and extended, pointing at the
+captain.
+
+So forgetful of self was he, that it required a moment’s thought to
+convince him that he was really responsible for the abrupt
+transformation. Incredulously he realized that he had drawn Calendar’s
+revolver and pulled Stryker up short, in mid-stride, by the mute menace
+of it, as much as by his hoarse cry of warning:
+
+“Stryker—not another foot—”
+
+With this there chimed in Dorothy’s voice, ringing bell-clear from a
+little distance:
+
+“Philip!”
+
+Like a flash he wheeled, to add yet another picture to his mental
+gallery.
+
+Perhaps two-score feet up the sidewalk a gate stood open; just outside
+it a man of tall and slender figure, rigged out in a bizarre costume
+consisting mainly of a flowered dressing-gown and slippers, was waiting
+in an attitude of singular impassivity; within it, pausing with a foot
+lifted to the doorstep, bag in hand, her head turned as she looked
+back, was Dorothy.
+
+
+[Illustration: A costume consisting mainly of a flowered
+dressing-gown and slippers.]
+
+
+As he comprehended these essential details of the composition, the man
+in the flowered dressing-gown raised a hand, beckoning to him in a
+manner as imperative as his accompanying words.
+
+“Kirkwood!” he saluted the young man in a clear and vibrant voice, “put
+up that revolver and stop this foolishness.” And, with a jerk of his
+head towards the doorway, in which Dorothy now waited, hesitant: “Come,
+sir—quickly!”
+
+Kirkwood choked on a laugh that was half a sob. “Brentwick!” he cried,
+restoring the weapon to his pocket and running toward his friend. “Of
+all happy accidents!”
+
+“You may call it that,” retorted the elder man with a fleeting smile as
+Kirkwood slipped inside the dooryard. “Come,” he said; “let’s get into
+the house.”
+
+“But you said—I thought you went to Munich,” stammered Kirkwood; and so
+thoroughly impregnated was his mind with this understanding that it was
+hard for him to adjust his perceptions to the truth.
+
+“I was detained—by business,” responded Brentwick briefly. His gaze,
+weary and wistful behind his glasses, rested on the face of the girl on
+the threshold of his home; and the faint, sensitive flush of her face
+deepened. He stopped and honored her with a bow that, for all his
+fantastical attire, would have graced a beau of an earlier decade.
+“Will you be pleased to enter?” he suggested punctiliously. “My house,
+such as it is, is quite at your disposal. And,” he added, with a glance
+over his shoulder, “I fancy that a word or two may presently be passed
+which you would hardly care to hear.”
+
+Dorothy’s hesitation was but transitory; Kirkwood was reassuring her
+with a smile more like his wonted boyish grin than anything he had
+succeeded in conjuring up throughout the day. Her own smile answered
+it, and with a murmured word of gratitude and a little, half timid,
+half distant bow for Brentwick, she passed on into the hallway.
+
+Kirkwood lingered with his friend upon the door-stoop. Calendar,
+recovered from his temporary consternation, was already at the gate,
+bending over it, fat fingers fumbling with the latch, his round red
+face, lifted to the house, darkly working with chagrin.
+
+From his threshold, watching him with a slight contraction of the eyes,
+Brentwick hailed him in tones of cloying courtesy.
+
+“Do you wish to see me, sir?”
+
+The fat adventurer faltered just within the gateway; then, with a
+truculent swagger, “I want my daughter,” he declared vociferously.
+
+Brentwick peered mildly over his glasses, first at Calendar, then at
+Kirkwood. His glance lingered a moment on the young man’s honest eyes,
+and swung back to Calendar.
+
+“My good man,” he said with sublime tolerance, “will you be pleased to
+take yourself off—to the devil if you like? Or shall I take the trouble
+to interest the police?”
+
+He removed one fine and fragile hand from a pocket of the flowered
+dressing-gown, long enough to jerk it significantly toward the nearer
+street-corner.
+
+Thunderstruck, Calendar glanced hastily in the indicated direction. A
+blue-coated bobby was to be seen approaching with measured stride,
+diffusing upon the still evening air an impression of ineffably capable
+self-contentment.
+
+Calendar’s fleshy lips parted and closed without a sound. They
+quivered. Beneath them quivered his assortment of graduated chins. His
+heavy and pendulous cheeks quivered, slowly empurpling with the dark
+tide of his apoplectic wrath. The close-clipped thatch of his iron gray
+mustache, even, seemed to bristle like hairs upon the neck of a
+maddened dog. Beneath him his fat legs trembled, and indeed his whole
+huge carcass shook visibly, in the stress of his restrained wrath.
+
+Suddenly, overwhelmed, he banged the gate behind him and waddled off to
+join the captain; who already, with praiseworthy native prudence, had
+fallen back upon their cab.
+
+From his coign of strategic advantage, the comfortable elevation of his
+box, Kirkwood’s cabby, whose huge enjoyment of the adventurers’
+discomfiture had throughout been noisily demonstrative, entreated
+Calendar with lifted forefinger, bland affability, and expressions of
+heartfelt sympathy.
+
+“Kebsir? ’Ave a kebsir, do! Try a ride be’ind a real ’orse, sir; don’t
+you go on wastin’ time on ’im.” A jerk of a derisive thumb singled out
+the other cabman. “’E aren’t pl’yin’ you fair, sir; I knows ’im,—’e’s a
+hartful g’y deceiver, ’e is. Look at ’is ’orse,—w’ich it aren’t; it’s a
+snyle, that’s w’at it is. Tyke a father’s hadvice, sir, and next time
+yer fairest darter runs awye with the dook in disguise, chyse ’em in a
+real kebsir, not a cheap imitashin.... Kebsir?... Garn, you
+’ard-’arted—”
+
+Here he swooped upwards in a dizzy flight of vituperation best
+unrecorded. Calendar, beyond an absent-minded flirt of one hand by his
+ear, as who should shoo away a buzzing insect, ignored him utterly.
+
+Sullenly extracting money from his pocket, he paid off his driver, and
+in company with Stryker, trudged in morose silence down the street.
+
+Brentwick touched Kirkwood’s arm and drew him into the house.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+ADVENTURES’ LUCK
+
+
+As the door closed, Kirkwood swung impulsively to Brentwick, with the
+brief, uneven laugh of fine-drawn nerves.
+
+“Good God, sir!” he cried. “You don’t know—”
+
+“I can surmise,” interrupted the elder man shrewdly.
+
+“You turned up in the nick of time, for all the world like—”
+
+“Harlequin popping through a stage trap?”
+
+“No!—an incarnation of the Providence that watches over children and
+fools.”
+
+Brentwick dropped a calming hand upon his shoulder. “Your simile seems
+singularly happy, Philip. Permit me to suggest that you join the child
+in my study.” He laughed quietly, with a slight nod toward an open door
+at the end of the hallway. “For myself, I’ll be with you in one
+moment.”
+
+A faint, indulgent smile lurking in the shadow of his white mustache,
+he watched the young man wheel and dart through the doorway. “Young
+hearts!” he commented inaudibly—and a trace sadly. “Youth!...”
+
+Beyond the threshold of the study, Kirkwood paused, eager eyes
+searching its somber shadows for a sign of Dorothy.
+
+A long room and deep, it was lighted only by the circumscribed disk of
+illumination thrown on the central desk by a shaded reading-lamp, and
+the flickering glow of a grate-fire set beneath the mantel of a
+side-wall. At the back, heavy velvet portières cloaked the recesses of
+two long windows, closed jealously even against the twilight. Aside
+from the windows, doors and chimney-piece, every foot of wall space was
+occupied by towering bookcases or by shelves crowded to the limit of
+their capacity with an amazing miscellany of objects of art, the fruit
+of years of patient and discriminating collecting. An exotic and heady
+atmosphere, compounded of the faint and intangible exhalations of these
+insentient things, fragrance of sandalwood, myrrh and musk, reminiscent
+whiffs of half-forgotten incense, seemed to intensify the impression of
+gloomy richness and repose...
+
+By the fireplace, a little to one side, stood Dorothy, one small foot
+resting on the brass fender, her figure merging into the dusky
+background, her delicate beauty gaining an effect of elusive and
+ethereal mystery in the waning and waxing ruddy glow upflung from the
+bedded coals.
+
+“Oh, Philip!” She turned swiftly to Kirkwood with extended hands and a
+low, broken cry. “I’m _so_ glad....”
+
+A trace of hysteria in her manner warned him, and he checked himself
+upon the verge of a too dangerous tenderness. “There!” he said
+soothingly, letting her hands rest gently in his palms while he led her
+to a chair. “We can make ourselves easy now.” She sat down and he
+released her hands with a reluctance less evident than actual. “If ever
+I say another word against my luck—”
+
+“Who,” inquired the girl, lowering her voice, “who is the gentleman in
+the flowered dressing-gown?”
+
+“Brentwick—George Silvester Brentwick: an old friend. I’ve known him
+for years,—ever since I came abroad. Curiously enough, however, this is
+the first time I’ve ever been here. I called once, but he wasn’t in,—a
+few days ago,—the day we met. I thought the place looked familiar.
+Stupid of me!”
+
+“Philip,” said the girl with a grave face but a shaking voice, “it
+was.” She laughed provokingly.... “It was so funny, Philip. I don’t
+know why I ran, when you told me to, but I did; and while I ran, I was
+conscious of the front door, here, opening, and this tall man in the
+flowered dressing-gown coming down to the gate as if it were the most
+ordinary thing in the world for him to stroll out, dressed that way, in
+the evening. And he opened the gate, and bowed, and said, ever so
+pleasantly, ‘Won’t you come in, Miss Calendar?’—”
+
+“He did!” exclaimed Kirkwood. “But how—?”
+
+“How can I say?” she expostulated. “At all events, he seemed to know
+me; and when he added something about calling you in, too—he said ‘Mr.
+Kirkwood’—I didn’t hesitate.”
+
+“It’s strange enough, surely—and fortunate. Bless his heart!” said
+Kirkwood.
+
+And, “Hum!” said Mr. Brentwick considerately, entering the study. He
+had discarded the dressing-gown and was now in evening dress.
+
+The girl rose. Kirkwood turned. “Mr. Brentwick—” he began.
+
+But Brentwick begged his patience with an eloquent gesture. “Sir,” he
+said, somewhat austerely, “permit me to put a single question: Have you
+by any chance paid your cabby?”
+
+“Why—” faltered the younger man, with a flaming face. “I—why, no—that
+is—”
+
+The other quietly put his hand upon a bell-pull. A faint jingling sound
+was at once audible, emanating from the basement.
+
+“How much should you say you owe him?”
+
+“I—I haven’t a penny in the world!”
+
+The shrewd eyes flashed their amusement into Kirkwood’s. “Tut, tut!”
+Brentwick chuckled. “Between gentlemen, my dear boy! Dear me! you are
+slow to learn.”
+
+“I’ll never be contented to sponge on my friends,” explained Kirkwood
+in deepest misery. “I can’t tell when—”
+
+“Tut, tut! How much did you say?”
+
+“Ten shillings—or say twelve, would be about right,” stammered the
+American, swayed by conflicting emotions of gratitude and profound
+embarrassment.
+
+A soft-footed butler, impassive as Fate, materialized mysteriously in
+the doorway.
+
+“You rang, sir?” he interrupted frigidly.
+
+“I rang, Wotton.” His master selected a sovereign from his purse and
+handed it to the servant. “For the cabby, Wotton.”
+
+“Yes sir.” The butler swung automatically, on one heel.
+
+“And Wotton!”
+
+“Sir?”
+
+“If any one should ask for me, I’m not at home.”
+
+“Very good, sir.”
+
+“And if you should see a pair of disreputable scoundrels skulking, in
+the neighborhood, one short and stout, the other tall and evidently a
+seafaring man, let me know.”
+
+“Thank you, sir.” A moment later the front door was heard to close.
+
+Brentwick turned with a little bow to the girl. “My dear Miss
+Calendar,” he said, rubbing his thin, fine hands,—“I am old enough, I
+trust, to call you such without offense,—please be seated.”
+
+Complying, the girl rewarded him with a radiant smile. Whereupon,
+striding to the fireplace, their host turned his back to it, clasped
+his hands behind him, and glowered benignly upon the two. “Ah!” he
+observed in accents of extreme personal satisfaction. “Romance!
+Romance!”
+
+“Would you mind telling us how you knew—” began Kirkwood anxiously.
+
+“Not in the least, my dear Philip. It is simple enough: I possess an
+imagination. From my bedroom window, on the floor above, I happen to
+behold two cabs racing down the street, the one doggedly pursuing the
+other. The foremost stops, perforce of a fagged horse. There alights a
+young gentleman looking, if you’ll pardon me, uncommonly seedy; he is
+followed by a young lady, if she will pardon me,” with another little
+bow, “uncommonly pretty. With these two old eyes I observe that the
+gentleman does not pay his cabby. Ergo—I intelligently deduce—he is
+short of money. Eh?”
+
+“You were right,” affirmed Kirkwood, with a rueful and crooked smile.
+“But—”
+
+“So! so!” pursued Brentwick, rising on his toes and dropping back
+again; “so this world of ours wags on to the old, old tune!... And I,
+who in my younger days pursued adventure without success, in dotage
+find myself dragged into a romance by my two ears, whether I will or
+no! Eh? And now you are going to tell me all about it, Philip. There is
+a chair.... Well, Wotton?”
+
+The butler had again appeared noiselessly in the doorway.
+
+“Beg pardon, sir; they’re waiting, sir.”
+
+“The caitiffs, Wotton?”
+
+“Yessir.”
+
+“Where waiting?”
+
+“One at each end of the street, sir.”
+
+“Thank you. You may bring us sherry and biscuit, Wotton.”
+
+“Thank you, sir.”
+
+The servant vanished.
+
+Brentwick removed his glasses, rubbed them, and blinked thoughtfully at
+the girl. “My dear,” he said suddenly, with a peculiar tremor in his
+voice, “you resemble your mother remarkably. Tut—I should know! Time
+was when I was one of her most ardent admirers.”
+
+“You—y-you knew my mother?” cried Dorothy, profoundly moved.
+
+“Did I not know you at sight? My dear, you are your mother reincarnate,
+for the good of an unworthy world. She was a very beautiful woman, my
+dear.”
+
+Wotton entered with a silver serving tray, offering it in turn to
+Dorothy, Kirkwood and his employer. While he was present the three held
+silent—the girl trembling slightly, but with her face aglow; Kirkwood
+half stupefied between his ease from care and his growing astonishment,
+as Brentwick continued to reveal unexpected phases of his personality;
+Brentwick himself outwardly imperturbable and complacent, for all that
+his hand shook as he lifted his wine glass.
+
+“You may go, Wotton—or, wait. Don’t you feel the need of a breath of
+fresh air, Wotton?”
+
+“Yessir, thank you, sir.”
+
+“Then change your coat, Wotton, light your pipe, and stroll out for
+half an hour. You need not leave the street, but if either the tall
+thin blackguard with the seafaring habit, or the short stout rascal
+with the air of mystery should accost you, treat them with all
+courtesy, Wotton. You will be careful not to tell either of them
+anything in particular, although I don’t mind your telling them that
+Mr. Brentwick lives here, if they ask. I am mostly concerned to
+discover if they purpose becoming fixtures on the street-corners,
+Wotton.”
+
+“Quite so, sir.”
+
+“Now you may go.... Wotton,” continued his employer as the butler took
+himself off as softly as a cat, “grows daily a more valuable mechanism.
+He is by no means human in any respect, but I find him extremely handy
+to have round the house.... And now, my dear,” turning to Dorothy,
+“with your permission I desire to drink to the memory of your beautiful
+mother and to the happiness of her beautiful daughter.”
+
+“But you will tell me—”
+
+“A number of interesting things, Miss Calendar, if you’ll be good
+enough to let me choose the time. I beg you to be patient with the
+idiosyncrasies of an old man, who means no harm, who has a reputation
+as an eccentric to sustain before his servants.... And now,” said
+Brentwick, setting aside his glass, “now, my dear boy, for the
+adventure.”
+
+Kirkwood chuckled, infected by his host’s genial humor. “How do you
+know—”
+
+“How can it be otherwise?” countered Brentwick with a trace of
+asperity. “Am I to be denied my adventure? Sir, I refuse without
+equivocation. Your very bearing breathes of Romance. There must be an
+adventure forthcoming, Philip; otherwise my disappointment will be so
+acute that I shall be regretfully obliged seriously to consider my
+right, as a householder, to show you the door.”
+
+“But Mr. Brentwick—!”
+
+“Sit down, sir!” commanded Brentwick with such a peremptory note that
+the young man, who had risen, obeyed out of sheer surprise. Upon which
+his host advanced, indicting him with a long white forefinger. “Would
+you, sir,” he demanded, “again expose this little lady to the
+machinations of that corpulent scoundrel, whom I have just had the
+pleasure of shooing off my premises, because you choose to resent an
+old man’s raillery?”
+
+“I apologize,” Kirkwood humored him.
+
+“I accept the apology in the spirit in which it is offered.... I
+repeat, now for the adventure, Philip. If the story’s long, epitomize.
+We can consider details more at our leisure.”
+
+Kirkwood’s eyes consulted the girl’s face; almost imperceptibly she
+nodded him permission to proceed.
+
+“Briefly, then,” he began haltingly, “the man who followed us to the
+door here, is Miss Calendar’s father.”
+
+“Oh? His name, please?”
+
+“George Burgoyne Calendar.”
+
+“Ah! An American; I remember, now. Continue, please.”
+
+“He is hounding us, sir, with the intention of stealing some property,
+which he caused to be stolen, which we—to put it bluntly—stole from
+him, to which he has no shadow of a title, and which, finally, we’re
+endeavoring to return to its owners.”
+
+“My dear!” interpolated Brentwick gently, looking down at the girl’s
+flushed face and drooping head.
+
+“He ran us to the last ditch,” Kirkwood continued; “I’ve spent my last
+farthing trying to lose him.”
+
+“But why have you not caused his arrest?” Brentwick inquired.
+
+Kirkwood nodded meaningly toward the girl. Brentwick made a sound
+indicating comprehension, a click of the tongue behind closed teeth.
+
+“We came to your door by the merest accident—it might as well have been
+another. I understood you were in Munich, and it never entered my head
+that we’d find you home.”
+
+“A communication from my solicitors detained me,” explained Brentwick.
+“And now, what do you intend to do?”
+
+“Trespass as far on your kindness as you’ll permit. In the first place,
+I—I want the use of a few pounds with which to cable some friends in
+New York, for money; on receipt of which I can repay you.”
+
+“Philip,” observed Brentwood, “you are a most irritating child. But I
+forgive you the faults of youth. You may proceed, bearing in mind, if
+you please, that I am your friend equally with any you may own in
+America.”
+
+“You’re one of the best men in the world,” said Kirkwood.
+
+“Tut, tut! Will you get on?”
+
+“Secondly, I want you to help us to escape Calendar to-night. It is
+necessary that Miss Calendar should go to Chiltern this evening, where
+she has friends who will receive and protect her.”
+
+“Mm-mm,” grumbled their host, meditative. “My faith!” he commented,
+with brightening eyes. “It sounds almost too good to be true! And I’ve
+been growing afraid that the world was getting to be a most humdrum and
+uninteresting planet!... Miss Calendar, I am a widower of so many years
+standing that I had almost forgotten I had ever been anything but a
+bachelor. I fear my house contains little that will be of service to a
+young lady. Yet a room is at your disposal; the parlor-maid shall show
+you the way. And Philip, between you and me, I venture to remark that
+hot water and cold steel would add to the attractiveness of your
+personal appearance; my valet will attend you in my room. Dinner,”
+concluded Brentwick with anticipative relish, “will be served in
+precisely thirty minutes. I shall expect you to entertain me with a
+full and itemized account of every phase of your astonishing adventure.
+Later, we will find a way to Chiltern.”
+
+Again he put a hand upon the bell-pull. Simultaneously Dorothy and
+Kirkwood rose.
+
+“Mr. Brentwick,” said the girl, her eyes starred with tears of
+gratitude, “I don’t, I really don’t know how—”
+
+“My dear,” said the old gentleman, “you will thank me most
+appropriately by continuing, to the best of your ability, to resemble
+your mother more remarkably every minute.”
+
+“But I,” began Kirkwood——.
+
+“You, my dear Philip, can thank me best by permitting me to enjoy
+myself; which I am doing thoroughly at the present moment. My pleasure
+in being invited to interfere in your young affairs is more keen than
+you can well surmise. Moreover,” said Mr. Brentwick, “so long have I
+been an amateur adventurer that I esteem it the rarest privilege to
+find myself thus on the point of graduating into professional ranks.”
+He rubbed his hands, beaming upon them. “And,” he added, as a maid
+appeared at the door, “I have already schemed me a scheme for the
+discomfiture of our friends the enemy: a scheme which we will discuss
+with our dinner, while the heathen rage and imagine a vain thing, in
+the outer darkness.”
+
+Kirkwood would have lingered, but of such inflexible temper was his
+host that he bowed him into the hands of a man servant without
+permitting him another word.
+
+“Not a syllable,” he insisted. “I protest I am devoured with curiosity,
+my dear boy, but I have also bowels of compassion. When we are well on
+with our meal, when you are strengthened with food and drink, then you
+may begin. But now—Dickie,” to the valet, “do your duty!”
+
+Kirkwood, laughing with exasperation, retired at discretion, leaving
+Brentwick the master of the situation: a charming gentleman with a will
+of his own and a way that went with it.
+
+He heard the young man’s footsteps diminish on the stairway; and again
+he smiled the indulgent, melancholy smile of mellow years. “Youth!” he
+whispered softly. “Romance!... And now,” with a brisk change of tone as
+he closed the study door, “now we are ready for this interesting Mr.
+Calendar.”
+
+Sitting down at his desk, he found and consulted a telephone directory;
+but its leaves, at first rustling briskly at the touch of the slender
+and delicate fingers, were presently permitted to lie unturned,—the
+book resting open on his knees the while he stared wistfully into the
+fire.
+
+A suspicion of moisture glimmered in his eyes. “Dorothy!” he whispered
+huskily. And a little later, rising, he proceeded to the telephone....
+
+An hour and a half later Kirkwood, his self-respect something restored
+by a bath, a shave, and a resumption of clothes which had been hastily
+but thoroughly cleansed and pressed by Brentwick’s valet; his
+confidence and courage mounting high under the combined influence of
+generous wine, substantial food, the presence of his heart’s mistress
+and the admiration—which was unconcealed—of his friend, concluded at
+the dinner-table, his narration.
+
+“And that,” he said, looking up from his savory, “is about all.”
+
+“Bravo!” applauded Brentwick; eyes shining with delight.
+
+“All,” interposed Dorothy in warm reproach, “but what he hasn’t told—”
+
+“Which, my dear, is to be accounted for wholly by a very creditable
+modesty, rarely encountered in the young men of the present day. It
+was, of course, altogether different with those of my younger years.
+Yes, Wotton?”
+
+Brentwick sat back in his chair, inclining an attentive ear to a
+communication murmured by the butler.
+
+Kirkwood’s gaze met Dorothy’s across the expanse of shining cloth; he
+deprecated her interruption with a whimsical twist of his eyebrows.
+“Really, you shouldn’t,” he assured her in an undertone. “I’ve done
+nothing to deserve...” But under the spell of her serious sweet eyes,
+he fell silent, and presently looked down, strangely abashed; and
+contemplated the vast enormity of his unworthiness.
+
+Coffee was set before them by Wotton, the impassive, Brentwick refusing
+it with a little sigh. “It is one of the things, as Philip knows,” he
+explained to the girl, “denied me by the physician who makes his life
+happy by making mine a waste. I am allowed but three luxuries; cigars,
+travel in moderation, and the privilege of imposing on my friends. The
+first I propose presently, to enjoy, by your indulgence; and the second
+I shall this evening undertake by virtue of the third, of which I have
+just availed myself.”
+
+Smiling at the involution, he rested his head against the back of the
+chair, eyes roving from the girl’s face to Kirkwood’s. “Inspiration to
+do which,” he proceeded gravely, “came to me from the seafaring
+picaroon (Stryker did you name him?) via the excellent Wotton. While
+you were preparing for dinner, Wotton returned from his constitutional
+with the news that, leaving the corpulent person on watch at the
+corner, Captain Stryker had temporarily, made himself scarce. However,
+we need feel no anxiety concerning his whereabouts, for he reappeared
+in good time and a motor-car. From which it becomes evident that you
+have not overrated their pertinacity; the fiasco of the cab-chase is
+not to be reënacted.”
+
+Resolutely the girl repressed a gasp of dismay. Kirkwood stared moodily
+into his cup.
+
+“These men bore me fearfully,” he commented at last.
+
+“And so,” continued Brentwick, “I bethought me of a counter-stroke. It
+is my good fortune to have a friend whose whim it is to support a
+touring-car, chiefly in innocuous idleness. Accordingly I have
+telephoned him and commandeered the use of this machine—mechanician,
+too.... Though not a betting man, I am willing to risk recklessly a few
+pence in support of my contention, that of the two, Captain Stryker’s
+car and ours, the latter will prove considerably the most speedy....
+
+“In short, I suggest,” he concluded, thoughtfully lacing his long white
+fingers, “that, avoiding the hazards of cab and railway carriage, we
+motor to Chiltern: the night being fine and the road, I am told,
+exceptionally good. Miss Dorothy, what do you think?”
+
+Instinctively the girl looked to Kirkwood; then shifted her glance to
+their host. “I think you are wonderfully thoughtful and kind,” she said
+simply.
+
+“And you, Philip?”
+
+“It’s an inspiration,” the younger man declared. “I can’t think of
+anything better calculated to throw them off, than to distance them by
+motor-car. It would be always possible to trace our journey by rail.”
+
+“Then,” announced Brentwick, making as if to rise, “we had best go. If
+neither my hearing nor Captain Stryker’s car deceives me, our fiery
+chariot is panting at the door.”
+
+A little sobered from the confident spirit of quiet gaiety in which
+they had dined, they left the table. Not that, in their hearts, either
+greatly questioned their ultimate triumph; but they were allowing for
+the element of error so apt to set at naught human calculations.
+Calendar himself had already been proved fallible. Within the bounds of
+possibility, their turn to stumble might now be imminent.
+
+When he let himself dwell upon it, their utter helplessness to give
+Calendar pause by commonplace methods, maddened Kirkwood. With another
+scoundrel it had been so simple a matter to put a period to his
+activities by a word to the police. But he was her father; for that
+reason he must continually be spared ... Even though, in desperate
+extremity, she should give consent to the arrest of the adventurers,
+retaliation would follow, swift and sure. For they might not overlook
+nor gloze the fact that hers had been the hands responsible for the
+theft of the jewels; innocent though she had been in committing that
+larceny, a cat’s-paw guided by an intelligence unscrupulous and malign,
+the law would not hold her guiltless were she once brought within its
+cognizance. Nor, possibly, would the Hallams, mother and son.
+
+Upon their knowledge and their fear of this, undoubtedly Calendar was
+reckoning: witness the barefaced effrontery with which he operated
+against them. His fear of the police might be genuine enough, but he
+was never for an instant disturbed by any doubt lest his daughter
+should turn against him. She would never dare that.
+
+Before they left the house, while Dorothy was above stairs resuming her
+hat and coat, Kirkwood and Brentwick reconnoitered from the
+drawing-room windows, themselves screened from observation by the
+absence of light in the room behind.
+
+Before the door a motor-car waited, engines humming impatiently,
+mechanician ready in his seat, an uncouth shape in goggles and leather
+garments that shone like oilskins under the street lights.
+
+At one corner another and a smaller car stood in waiting, its lamps
+like baleful eyes glaring through the night.
+
+In the shadows across the way, a lengthy shadow lurked: Stryker, beyond
+reasonable question. Otherwise the street was deserted. Not even that
+adventitous bobby of the early evening was now in evidence.
+
+Dorothy presently joining them, Brentwick led the way to the door.
+
+Wotton, apparently nerveless beneath his absolute immobility, let them
+out—and slammed the door behind them with such promptitude as to give
+cause for the suspicion that he was a fraud, a sham, beneath his icy
+exterior desperately afraid lest the house be stormed by the
+adventurers.
+
+Kirkwood to the right, Brentwick to the left of Dorothy, the former
+carrying the treasure bag, they hastened down the walk and through the
+gate to the car.
+
+The watcher across the way was moved to whistle shrilly; the other car
+lunged forward nervously.
+
+Brentwick taking the front seat, beside the mechanician, left the
+tonneau to Kirkwood and Dorothy. As the American slammed the door, the
+car swept smoothly out into the middle of the way, while the pursuing
+car swerved in to the other curb, slowing down to let Stryker jump
+aboard.
+
+Kirkwood put himself in the seat by the girl’s side and for a few
+moments was occupied with the arrangement of the robes. Then, sitting
+back, he found her eyes fixed upon him, pools of inscrutable night in
+the shadow of her hat.
+
+“You aren’t afraid, Dorothy?”
+
+She answered quietly: “I am with you, Philip.”
+
+Beneath the robe their hands met...
+
+Exalted, excited, he turned and looked back. A hundred yards to the
+rear four unwinking eyes trailed them, like some modern Nemesis in
+monstrous guise.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+I——THE UXBRIDGE ROAD
+
+At a steady gait, now and again checked in deference to the street
+traffic, Brentwick’s motor-car rolled, with resonant humming of the
+engine, down the Cromwell Road, swerved into Warwick Road and swung
+northward through Kensington to Shepherd’s Bush. Behind it Calendar’s
+car clung as if towed by an invisible cable, never gaining, never
+losing, mutely testifying to the adventurer’s unrelenting, grim
+determination to leave them no instant’s freedom from surveillance, to
+keep for ever at their shoulders, watching his chance, biding his time
+with sinister patience until the moment when, wearied, their vigilance
+should relax....
+
+To some extent he reckoned without his motor-car. As long as they
+traveled within the metropolitan limits, constrained to observe a
+decorous pace in view of the prejudices of the County Council, it was a
+matter of no difficulty whatever to maintain his distance. But once
+they had won through Shepherd’s Bush and, paced by huge doubledeck
+trolley trams, were flying through Hammersmith on the Uxbridge Road;
+once they had run through Acton, and knew beyond dispute that now they
+were without the city boundaries, then the complexion of the business
+was suddenly changed.
+
+Not too soon for honest sport; Calendar was to have (Kirkwood would
+have said in lurid American idiom) a run for his money. The scattered
+lights of Southall were winking out behind them before Brentwick chose
+to give the word to the mechanician.
+
+Quietly the latter threw in the clutch for the third speed—and the
+fourth. The car leaped forward like a startled race-horse. The motor
+lilted merrily into its deep-throated song of the open road, its
+contented, silken humming passing into a sonorous and sustained purr.
+
+Kirkwood and the girl were first jarred violently forward, then thrown
+together. She caught his arm to steady herself; it seemed the most
+natural thing imaginable that he should take her hand and pass it
+beneath his arm, holding her so, his fingers closed above her own.
+Before they had recovered, or had time to catch their breath, a mile of
+Middlesex had dropped to the rear.
+
+Not quite so far had they distanced Calendar’s trailing Nemesis of the
+four glaring eyes; the pursuers put forth a gallant effort to hold
+their place. At intervals during the first few minutes a heavy roaring
+and crashing could be heard behind them; gradually it subsided, dying
+on the wings of the free rushing wind that buffeted their faces as mile
+after mile was reeled off and the wide, darkling English countryside
+opened out before them, sweet and wonderful.
+
+Once Kirkwood looked back; in the winking of an eye he saw four faded
+disks of light, pallid with despair, top a distant rise and glide down
+into darkness. When he turned, Dorothy was interrogating him with eyes
+whose melting, shadowed loveliness, revealed to him in the light of the
+far, still stars, seemed to incite him to that madness which he had
+bade himself resist with all his strength.
+
+He shook his head, as if to say: They can not catch us.
+
+His hour was not yet; time enough to think of love and marriage (as if
+he were capable of consecutive thought on any other subject!)—time
+enough to think of them when he had gone back to his place, or rather
+when he should have found it, in the ranks of bread-winners, and so
+have proved his right to mortal happiness; time enough then to lay
+whatever he might have to offer at her feet. Now he could conceive of
+no baser treachery to his soul’s-desire than to advantage himself of
+her gratitude.
+
+Resolutely he turned his face forward, striving with all his will and
+might to forget the temptation of her lips, weary as they were and
+petulant with waiting; and so sat rigid in his time of trial, clinging
+with what strength he could to the standards of his honor, and trying
+to lose his dream in dreaming of the bitter struggle that seemed likely
+to be his future portion.
+
+Perhaps she guessed a little of the fortunes of the battle that was
+being waged within him. Perhaps not. Whatever the trend of her
+thoughts, she did not draw away from him.... Perhaps the breath of
+night, fresh and clean and fragrant with the odor of the fields and
+hedges, sweeping into her face with velvety caress, rendered her
+drowsy. Presently the silken lashes drooped, fluttering upon her
+cheeks, the tired and happy smile hovered about her lips....
+
+In something less than half an hour of this wild driving, Kirkwood
+roused out of his reverie sufficiently to become sensible that the
+speed was slackening. Incoherent snatches of sentences, fragments of
+words and phrases spoken by Brentwick and the mechanician, were flung
+back past his ears by the rushing wind. Shielding his eyes he could see
+dimly that the mechanician was tinkering (apparently) with the driving
+gear. Then, their pace continuing steadily to abate, he heard Brentwick
+fling at the man a sharp-toned and querulously impatient question: What
+was the trouble? His reply came in a single word, not distinguishable.
+
+The girl sat up, opening her eyes, disengaging her arm.
+
+Kirkwood bent forward and touched Brentwick on the shoulder; the latter
+turned to him a face lined with deep concern.
+
+“Trouble,” he announced superfluously. “I fear we have blundered.”
+
+“What is it?” asked Dorothy in a troubled voice.
+
+“Petrol seems to be running low. Charles here” (he referred to the
+mechanician) “says the tank must be leaking. We’ll go on as best we can
+and try to find an inn. Fortunately, most of the inns nowadays keep
+supplies of petrol for just such emergencies.”
+
+“Are we—? Do you think—?”
+
+“Oh, no; not a bit of danger of that,” returned Brentwick hastily.
+“They’ll not catch up with us this night. That is a very inferior car
+they have,—so Charles says, at least; nothing to compare with this. If
+I’m not in error, there’s the Crown and Mitre just ahead; we’ll make
+it, fill our tanks, and be off again before they can make up half their
+loss.”
+
+Dorothy looked anxiously to Kirkwood, her lips forming an unuttered
+query: What did he think?
+
+“Don’t worry; we’ll have no trouble,” he assured her stoutly; “the
+chauffeur knows, undoubtedly.”
+
+None the less he was moved to stand up in the tonneau, conscious of the
+presence of the traveling bag, snug between his feet, as well as of the
+weight of Calendar’s revolver in his pocket, while he stared back along
+the road.
+
+There was nothing to be seen of their persecutors.
+
+The car continued to crawl. Five minutes dragged out tediously.
+Gradually they, drew abreast a tavern standing back a distance from the
+road, embowered in a grove of trees between whose ancient boles the
+tap-room windows shone enticingly, aglow with comfortable light. A
+creaking sign-board, much worn by weather and age, swinging from a
+roadside post, confirmed the accuracy of Brentwick’s surmise,
+announcing that here stood the Crown and Mitre, house of entertainment
+for man and beast.
+
+Sluggishly the car rolled up before it and came to a dead and silent
+halt. Charles, the mechanician, jumping out, ran hastily up the path
+towards the inn. In the car Brentwick turned again, his eyes curiously
+bright in the starlight, his forehead quaintly furrowed, his voice
+apologetic.
+
+“It may take a few minutes,” he said undecidedly, plainly endeavoring
+to cover up his own dark doubts. “My dear,” to the girl, “if I have
+brought trouble upon you in this wise, I shall never earn my own
+forgiveness.”
+
+Kirkwood stood up again, watchful, attentive to the sounds of night;
+but the voice of the pursuing motor-car was not of their company. “I
+hear nothing,” he announced.
+
+“You will forgive me,—won’t you, my dear?—for causing you these few
+moments of needless anxiety?” pleaded the old gentleman, his tone
+tremulous.
+
+“As if you could be blamed!” protested the girl. “You mustn’t think of
+it that way. Fancy, what should we have done without you!”
+
+“I’m afraid I have been very clumsy,” sighed Brentwick, “clumsy and
+impulsive ... Kirkwood, do you hear anything?”
+
+“Not yet, sir.”
+
+“Perhaps,” suggested Brentwick a little later, “perhaps we had better
+alight and go up to the inn. It would be more cosy there, especially if
+the petrol proves hard to obtain, and we have long to wait.”
+
+“I should like that,” assented the girl decidedly.
+
+Kirkwood nodded his approval, opened the door and jumped out to assist
+her; then picked up the bag and followed the pair,—Brentwick leading
+the way with Dorothy on his arm.
+
+At the doorway of the Crown and Mitre, Charles met them evidently
+seriously disturbed. “No petrol to be had here, sir,” he announced
+reluctantly; “but the landlord will send to the next inn, a mile up the
+road, for some. You will have to be patient, I’m afraid, sir.”
+
+“Very well. Get some one to help you push the car in from the road,”
+ordered Brentwick; “we will be waiting in one of the private parlors.”
+
+“Yes, sir; thank you, sir.” The mechanician touched the visor of his
+cap and hurried off.
+
+“Come, Kirkwood.” Gently Brentwick drew the girl in with him.
+
+Kirkwood lingered momentarily on the doorstep, to listen acutely. But
+the wind was blowing into that quarter whence they had come, and he
+could hear naught save the soughing in the trees, together with an
+occasional burst of rude rustic laughter from the tap-room. Lifting his
+shoulders in dumb dismay, and endeavoring to compose his features, he
+entered the tavern.
+
+
+
+
+II——THE CROWN AND MITRE
+
+
+A rosy-cheeked and beaming landlady met him in the corridor and, all
+bows and smiles, ushered him into a private parlor reserved for the
+party, immediately bustling off in a desperate flurry, to secure
+refreshments desired by Brentwick.
+
+The girl had seated herself on one end of an extremely comfortless
+lounge and was making a palpable effort to seem at ease. Brentwick
+stood at one of the windows, shoulders rounded and head bent, hands
+clasped behind his back as he peered out into the night. Kirkwood
+dropped the traveling bag beneath a chair the farthest removed from the
+doorway, and took to pacing the floor.
+
+In a corner of the room a tall grandfather’s clock ticked off ten
+interminable minutes. For some reason unconscionably delaying, the
+landlady did not reappear. Brentwick, abruptly turning from the window,
+remarked the fact querulously, then drew a chair up to a marble-topped
+table in the middle of the floor.
+
+“My dear,” he requested the girl, “will you oblige me by sitting over
+here? And Philip, bring up a chair, if you will. We must not permit
+ourselves to worry, and I have something here which may, perhaps,
+engage your interest for a while.”
+
+To humor him and alleviate his evident distress of mind, they acceded.
+Kirkwood found himself seated opposite Dorothy, Brentwick between them.
+After some hesitation, made the more notable by an air of uneasiness
+which sat oddly on his shoulders, whose composure and confident mien
+had theretofore been so complete and so reassuring, the elder gentleman
+fumbled in an inner coat-pocket and brought to light a small black
+leather wallet. He seemed to be on the point of opening it when hurried
+footfalls sounded in the hallway. Brentwick placed the wallet, still
+with its secret intact, on the table before him, as Charles burst
+unceremoniously in, leaving the door wide open.
+
+“Mr. Brentwick, sir!” he cried gustily. “That other car—”
+
+With a smothered ejaculation Kirkwood leaped to his feet, tugging at
+the weapon in his pocket. In another instant he had the revolver
+exposed. The girl’s cry of alarm, interrupting the machinist, fixed
+Brentwick’s attention on the young man. He, too, stood up, reaching
+over very quickly, to clamp strong supple fingers round Kirkwood’s
+wrist, while with the other hand he laid hold of the revolver and by a
+single twist wrenched it away.
+
+Kirkwood turned upon him in fury. “So!” he cried, shaking with passion.
+“This is what your hospitality meant! You’re going to—”
+
+“My dear young friend,” interrupted Brentwick with a flash of
+impatience, “remember that if I had designed to betray you, I could
+have asked no better opportunity than when you were my guest under my
+own roof.”
+
+“But—hang it all, Brentwick!” expostulated Kirkwood, ashamed and
+contrite, but worked upon by desperate apprehension; “I didn’t mean
+that, but—”
+
+“Would you have bullets flying when she is near?” demanded Brentwick
+scathingly. Hastily he slipped the revolver upon a little shelf beneath
+the table-top. “Sir!” he informed Kirkwood with some heat, “I love you
+as my own son, but you’re a young fool!... as I have been, in my time
+... and as I would to Heaven I might be again! Be advised, Philip,—be
+calm. Can’t you see it’s the only way to save your treasure?”
+
+“Hang the jewels!” retorted Kirkwood warmly. “What—”
+
+“Sir, who said anything about the jewels?”
+
+As Brentwick spoke, Calendar’s corpulent figure filled the doorway;
+Stryker’s weather-worn features loomed over his shoulder, distorted in
+a cheerful leer.
+
+“As to the jewels,” announced the fat adventurer, “I’ve got a word to
+say, if you put it to me that way.”
+
+He paused on the threshold, partly for dramatic effect, partly for his
+own satisfaction, his quick eyes darting from face to face of the four
+people whom he had caught so unexpectedly. A shade of complacency
+colored his expression, and he smiled evilly beneath the coarse short
+thatch of his gray mustache. In his hand a revolver appeared, poised
+for immediate use if there were need.
+
+There was none. Brentwick, at his primal appearance, had dropped a
+peremptory hand on Kirkwood’s shoulder, forcing the young man back to
+his seat; at the same time he resumed his own. The girl had not stirred
+from hers since the first alarm; she sat as if transfixed with terror,
+leaning forward with her elbows on the table, her hands tightly
+clasped, her face, a little blanched, turned to the door. But her
+scarlet lips were set and firm with inflexible purpose, and her brown
+eyes met Calendar’s with a look level and unflinching. Beyond this she
+gave no sign of recognition.
+
+Nearest of the four to the adventurers was Charles, the mechanician,
+paused in affrighted astonishment at sight of the revolver. Calendar,
+choosing to advance suddenly, poked the muzzle of the weapon jocularly
+in the man’s ribs. “Beat it, Four-eyes!” he snapped. “This is your cue
+to duck! Get out of my way.”
+
+The mechanician jumped as if shot, then hastily, retreated to the
+table, his sallow features working beneath the goggle-mask which had
+excited the fat adventurer’s scorn.
+
+“Come right in, Cap’n,” Calendar threw over one shoulder; “come in,
+shut the door and lock it. Let’s all be sociable, and have a nice quiet
+time.” vStryker obeyed, with a derisive grimace for Kirkwood.
+
+Calendar, advancing jauntily to a point within a yard of the table,
+stopped, smiling affably down upon his prospective victims, and airily
+twirling his revolver.
+
+“_Good_ evening, all!” he saluted them blandly. “Dorothy, my child,”
+with assumed concern, “you’re looking a trifle upset; I’m afraid you’ve
+been keeping late hours. Little girls must be careful, you know, or
+they lose the bloom of roses in their cheeks.... Mr. Kirkwood, it’s a
+pleasure to meet you again! Permit me to paraphrase your most sound
+advice, and remind you that pistol-shots are apt to attract undesirable
+attention. It wouldn’t be wise for _you_ to bring the police about our
+ears. I believe that in substance such was your sapient counsel to me
+in the cabin of the _Alethea_; was it not?... And you, sir!”—fixing
+Brentwick with a cold unfriendly eye. “You animated fossil, what d’you
+mean by telling me to go to the devil?... But let that pass; I hold no
+grudge. What might your name be?”
+
+
+[Illustration: “_Good_ evening, all!” he saluted them blandly.]
+
+
+“It might be Brentwick,” said that gentleman placidly.
+
+“Brentwick, eh? Well, I like a man of spirit. But permit me to advise
+you—”
+
+“Gladly,” nodded Brentwick.
+
+“Eh?... Don’t come a second time between father and daughter; another
+man might not be as patient as I, Mister Brentwick. There’s a law in
+the land, if you don’t happen to know it.”
+
+“I congratulate you on your success in evading it,” observed Brentwick,
+undisturbed. “And it was considerate of you not to employ it in this
+instance.” Then, with a sharp change of tone, “Come, sir!” he demanded.
+“You have unwarrantably intruded in this room, which I have engaged for
+my private use. Get through with your business and be off with you.”
+
+“All in my good time, my antediluvian friend. When I’ve wound up my
+business here I’ll go—not before. But, just to oblige you, we’ll get
+down to it.... Kirkwood, you have a revolver of mine. Be good enough to
+return it.”
+
+“I have it here,—under the table,” interrupted Brentwick suavely.
+“Shall I hand it to you?”
+
+“By the muzzle, if you please. Be very careful; this one’s loaded,
+too—apt to explode any minute.”
+
+To Kirkwood’s intense disgust Brentwick quietly slipped one hand
+beneath the table and, placing the revolver on its top, delicately with
+his finger-tips shoved it toward the farther edge. With a grunt of
+approval, Calendar swept the weapon up and into his pocket.
+
+“Any more ordnance?” he inquired briskly, eyes moving alertly from face
+to face. “No matter; you wouldn’t dare use ’em anyway. And I’m about
+done. Dorothy, my dear, it’s high time you returned to your father’s
+protection. Where’s that gladstone bag?”
+
+“In my traveling bag,” the girl told him in a toneless voice.
+
+“Then you may bring it along. You may also say good night to the kind
+gentlemen.”
+
+Dorothy did not move; her pallor grew more intense and Kirkwood saw her
+knuckles tighten beneath the gloves. Otherwise her mouth seemed to grow
+more straight and hard.
+
+“Dorothy!” cried the adventurer with a touch of displeasure. “You heard
+me?”
+
+“I heard you,” she replied a little wearily, more than a little
+contemptuously. “Don’t mind him, please, Mr. Kirkwood!”—with an
+appealing gesture, as Kirkwood, unable to contain himself, moved
+restlessly in his chair, threatening to rise. “Don’t say anything. I
+have no intention whatever of going with this man.”
+
+Calendar’s features twitched nervously; he chewed a corner of his
+mustache, fixing the girl with a black stare. “I presume,” he remarked
+after a moment, with slow deliberation, “you’re aware that, as your
+father, I am in a position to compel you to accompany me.”
+
+“I shall not go with you,” iterated Dorothy in a level tone. “You may
+threaten me, but—I shall not go. Mr. Brentwick and Mr. Kirkwood are
+taking me to—friends, who will give me a home until I can find a way to
+take care of myself. That is all I have to say to you.”
+
+“Bravo, my dear!” cried Brentwick encouragingly.
+
+“Mind your business, sir!” thundered Calendar, his face darkening.
+Then, to Dorothy, “You understand, I trust, what this means?” he
+demanded. “I offer you a home—and a good one. Refuse, and you work for
+your living, my girl! You’ve forfeited your legacy—”
+
+“I know, I know,” she told him in cold disdain. “I am content. Won’t
+you be kind enough to leave me alone?”
+
+For a breath, Calendar glowered over her; then, “I presume,” he
+observed, “that all these heroics are inspired by that whipper-snapper,
+Kirkwood. Do you know that he hasn’t a brass farthing to bless himself
+with?”
+
+“What has that—?” cried the girl indignantly.
+
+“Why, it has everything to do with me, my child. As your doting parent,
+I can’t consent to your marrying nothing-a-year.... For I surmise you
+intend to marry this Mr. Kirkwood, don’t you?”
+
+There followed a little interval of silence, while the warm blood
+flamed in the girl’s face and the red lips trembled as she faced her
+tormentor. Then, with a quaver that escaped her control, “If Mr.
+Kirkwood asks me, I shall,” she stated very simply.
+
+“That,” interposed Kirkwood, “is completely understood.” His gaze
+sought her eyes, but she looked away.
+
+“You forget that I am your father,” sneered Calendar; “and that you are
+a minor. I can refuse my consent.”
+
+“But you won’t,” Kirkwood told him with assurance.
+
+The adventurer stared. “No,” he agreed, after slight hesitation; “no, I
+shan’t interfere. Take her, my boy, if you want her—and a father’s
+blessing into the bargain. The Lord knows I’ve troubles enough; a
+parent’s lot is not what it’s cracked up to be.” He paused, leering,
+ironic. “But,”—deliberately, “there’s still this other matter of the
+gladstone bag. I don’t mind abandoning my parental authority, when my
+child’s happiness is concerned, but as for my property—”
+
+“It is not your property,” interrupted the girl.
+
+“It was your mother’s, dear child. It’s now mine.”
+
+“I dispute that assertion,” Kirkwood put in.
+
+“You may dispute it till the cows come home, my boy: the fact will
+remain that I intend to take my property with me when I leave this
+room, whether you like it or not. Now are you disposed to continue the
+argument, or may I count on your being sensible?”
+
+“You may put away your revolver, if that’s what you mean,” said
+Kirkwood. “We certainly shan’t oppose you with violence, but I warn you
+that Scotland Yard—”
+
+“Oh, that be blowed!” the adventurer snorted in disgust. “I can sail
+circles round any tec. that ever blew out of Scotland Yard! Give me an
+hour’s start, and you’re free to do all the funny business you’ve a
+mind to, with—Scotland Yard!”
+
+“Then you admit,” queried Brentwick civilly, “that you’ve no legal
+title to the jewels in dispute?”
+
+“Look here, my friend,” chuckled Calendar, “when you catch me admitting
+anything, you write it down in your little book and tell the bobby on
+the corner. Just at present I’ve got other business than to stand round
+admitting anything about anything.... Cap’n, let’s have that bag of my
+dutiful daughter’s.”
+
+“’Ere you are.” Stryker spoke for the first time since entering the
+room, taking the valise from beneath the chair and depositing it on the
+table.
+
+“Well, we shan’t take anything that doesn’t belong to us,” laughed
+Calendar, fumbling with the catch; “not even so small a matter as my
+own child’s traveling bag. A small—heavy—gladstone bag,” he grunted,
+opening the valise and plunging in one greedy hand, “will—just—about—do
+for mine!” With which he produced the article mentioned. “This for the
+discard, Cap’n,” he laughed contentedly, pushing the girl’s valise
+aside; and, rumbling with stentorian mirth, stood beaming benignantly
+over the assembled company.
+
+“Why,” he exclaimed, “this moment is worth all it cost me! My children,
+I forgive you freely. Mr. Kirkwood, I felicitate you cordially on
+having secured a most expensive wife. Really—d’you know?—I feel as if I
+ought to do a little something for you both.” Gurgling with delight he
+smote his fat palms together. “I just tell you what,” he resumed, “no
+one yet ever called Georgie Calendar a tight-wad. I just believe I’m
+going to make you kids a handsome wedding present.... The good Lord
+knows there’s enough of this for a fellow to be a little generous and
+never miss it!”
+
+The thick mottled fingers tore nervously at the catch; eventually he
+got the bag open. Those about the table bent forward, all quickened by
+the prospect of for the first time beholding the treasure over which
+they had fought, for which they had suffered, so long....
+
+A heady and luscious fragrance pervaded the atmosphere, exhaling from
+the open mouth of the bag. A silence, indefinitely sustained, impressed
+itself upon the little audience,—a breathless pause ended eventually by
+a sharp snap of Calendar’s teeth. “_Mmm_!” grunted the adventurer in
+bewilderment. He began to pant.
+
+Abruptly his heavy hands delved into the contents of the bag, like the
+paws of a terrier digging in earth. To Kirkwood the air seemed
+temporarily thick with flying objects. Beneath his astonished eyes a
+towel fell upon the table—a crumpled, soiled towel, bearing on its
+dingy hem the inscription in indelible ink: “_Hôtel du Commerce,
+Anvers_.” A tooth-mug of substantial earthenware dropped to the floor
+with a crash. A slimy soap-dish of the same manufacture slid across the
+table and into Brentwick’s lap. A battered alarm clock with never a
+tick left in its abused carcass rang vacuously as it fell by the open
+bag.... The remainder was—oranges: a dozen or more small, round, golden
+globes of ripe fruit, perhaps a shade overripe, therefore the more
+aromatic.
+
+The adventurer ripped out an oath. “Mulready, by the living God!” he
+raged in fury. “Done up, I swear! Done by that infernal sneak—me, blind
+as a bat!”
+
+He fell suddenly silent, the blood congesting in his face; as suddenly
+broke forth again, haranguing the company.
+
+“That’s why he went out and bought those damned oranges, is it? Think
+of it—me sitting in the hotel in Antwerp and him lugging in oranges by
+the bagful because he was fond of fruit! When did he do it? How do I
+know? If I knew, would I be here and him the devil knows where, this
+minute? When my back was turned, of course, the damned snake! That’s
+why he was so hot about picking a fight on the boat, hey? Wanted to get
+thrown off and take to the woods—leaving me with _this_! And that’s why
+he felt so awful done up he wouldn’t take a hand at hunting you two
+down, hey? Well—by—the—Eternal! I’ll camp on his trail for the rest of
+his natural-born days! I’ll have his eye-teeth for this, I’ll—”
+
+He swayed, gibbering with rage, his countenance frightfully contorted,
+his fat hands shaking as he struggled for expression.
+
+And then, while yet their own astonishment held Dorothy, Kirkwood,
+Brentwick and Stryker speechless, Charles, the mechanician, moved
+suddenly upon the adventurer.
+
+There followed two metallic clicks. Calendar’s ravings were abrupted as
+if his tongue had been paralyzed. He fell back a pace, flabby jowls
+pale and shaking, ponderous jaw dropping on his breast, mouth wide and
+eyes crazed as he shook violently before him his thick fleshy
+wrists—securely handcuffed.
+
+Simultaneously the mechanician whirled about, bounded eagerly across
+the floor, and caught Stryker at the door, his dexterous fingers
+twisting in the captain’s collar as he jerked him back and tripped him.
+
+“Mr. Kirkwood!” he cried. “Here, please—one moment. Take this man’s
+gun, from him, will you?”
+
+Kirkwood sprang to his assistance, and without encountering much
+trouble, succeeded in wresting a Webley from Stryker’s limp, flaccid
+fingers.
+
+Roughly the mechanician shook the man, dragging him to his feet. “Now,”
+he ordered sternly, “you march to that corner, stick your nose in it,
+and be good! You can’t get away if you try. I’ve got other men outside,
+waiting for you to come out. Understand?”
+
+Trembling like a whipped cur, Stryker meekly obeyed his instructions to
+the letter.
+
+The mechanician, with a contemptuous laugh leaving him, strode back to
+Calendar, meanwhile whipping off his goggles; and clapped a hearty hand
+upon the adventurer’s quaking shoulders.
+
+“Well!” he cried. “And are you still sailing circles round the men from
+Scotland Yard, Simmons, or Bellows, or Sanderson, or Calendar, or
+Crumbstone, or whatever name you prefer to sail under?”
+
+Calendar glared at him aghast; then heaved a profound sigh, shrugged
+his fat shoulders, and bent his head in thought. An instant later he
+looked up. “You can’t do it,” he informed the detective vehemently;
+“you haven’t got a shred of evidence against me! What’s there? A pile
+of oranges and a peck of trash! What of it?... Besides,” he threatened,
+“if you pinch me, you’ll have to take the girl in, too. I swear that
+whatever stealing was done, she did it. I’ll not be trapped this way by
+her and let her off without a squeal. Take me—take her; d’you hear?”
+
+“I think,” put in the clear, bland accents of Brentwick, “we can
+consider that matter settled. I have here, my man,”—nodding to the
+adventurer as he took up the black leather wallet,—“I have here a
+little matter which may clear up any lingering doubts as to your
+standing, which you may be disposed at present to entertain.”
+
+He extracted a slip of cardboard and, at arm’s length, laid it on the
+table-edge beneath the adventurer’s eyes. The latter, bewildered, bent
+over it for a moment, breathing heavily; then straightened back, shook
+himself, laughed shortly with a mirthless note, and faced the
+detective.
+
+“It’s come with you now, I guess?” he suggested very quietly.
+
+“The Bannister warrant is still out for you,” returned the man.
+“That’ll be enough to hold you on till extradition papers arrive from
+the States.”
+
+“Oh, I’ll waive those; and I won’t give you any trouble, either.... I
+reckon,” mused the adventurer, jingling his manacles thoughtfully, “I’m
+a back-number, anyway. When a half-grown girl, a half-baked boy, a flub
+like Mulready—damn his eyes!—and a club-footed snipe from Scotland Yard
+can put it all over me this way,... why, I guess it’s up to me to go
+home and retire to my country-place up the Hudson.” He sighed wearily.
+
+“Yep; time to cut it out. But I would like to be free long enough to
+get in one good lick at that mutt, Mulready. My friend, you get your
+hands on him, and I’ll squeal on him till I’m blue in the face. That’s
+a promise.”
+
+“You’ll have the chance before long,” replied the detective. “We
+received a telegram from the Amsterdam police late this afternoon,
+saying they’d picked up Mr. Mulready with a woman named Hallam, and
+were holding them on suspicion. It seems,”—turning to Brentwick,—“they
+were opening negotiations for the sale of a lot of stones, and seemed
+in such a precious hurry that the diamond merchant’s suspicions were
+roused. We’re sending over for them, Miss Calendar, so you can make
+your mind easy about your jewels; you’ll have them back in a few days.”
+
+“Thank you,” said the girl with an effort.
+
+“Well,” the adventurer delivered his peroration, “I certainly am blame’
+glad to hear it. ’Twouldn’t ’ve been a square deal, any other way.”
+
+He paused, looking his erstwhile dupes over with a melancholy eye;
+then, with an uncertain nod comprehending the girl, Kirkwood and
+Brentwick, “So long!” he said thickly; and turned, with the detective’s
+hand under his arm and, accompanied by the thoroughly cowed Stryker,
+waddled out of the room.
+
+
+
+
+III——THE JOURNEY’S END
+
+
+Kirkwood, following the exodus, closed the door with elaborate care and
+slowly, deep in thought, returned to the table.
+
+Dorothy seemed not to have moved, save to place her elbows on the
+marble slab, and rest her cheeks between hands that remained clenched,
+as they had been in the greatest stress of her emotion. The color had
+returned to her face, with a slightly enhanced depth of hue to the
+credit of her excitement. Her cheeks were hot, her eyes starlike
+beneath the woven, massy sunlight of her hair. Temporarily unconscious
+of her surroundings she stared steadfastly before her, thoughts astray
+in the irridescent glamour of the dreams that were to come....
+
+Brentwick had slipped down in his chair, resting his silvered head upon
+its back, and was smiling serenely up at the low yellow ceiling. Before
+him on the table his long white fingers were drumming an inaudible
+tune. Presently rousing, he caught Kirkwood’s eye and smiled
+sheepishly, like a child caught in innocent mischief.
+
+The younger man grinned broadly. “And you were responsible for all
+that!” he commented, infinitely amused.
+
+Brentwick nodded, twinkling self-satisfaction. “I contrived it all,” he
+said; “neat, I call it, too.” His old eyes brightened with reminiscent
+enjoyment. “Inspiration!” he crowed softly. “Inspiration, pure and
+simple. I’d been worrying my wits for fully five minutes before Wotton
+settled the matter by telling me about the captain’s hiring of the
+motor-car. Then, in a flash, I had it.... I talked with Charles by
+telephone,—his name is really Charles, by, the bye,—overcame his
+conscientious scruples about playing his fish when they were already
+all but landed, and settled the artistic details.”
+
+He chuckled delightedly. “It’s the instinct,” he declared emphatically,
+“the instinct for adventure. I knew it was in me, latent somewhere, but
+never till this day did it get the opportunity to assert itself. A born
+adventurer—that’s what I am!... You see, it was essential that they
+should believe we were frightened and running from them; that way, they
+would be sure to run after us. Why, we might have baited a dozen traps
+and failed to lure them into my house, after that stout scoundrel knew
+you’d had the chance to tell me the whole yarn... Odd!”
+
+“Weren’t you taking chances, you and Charles?” asked Kirkwood
+curiously.
+
+“Precious few. There was another motor from Scotland Yard trailing
+Captain Stryker’s. If they had run past, or turned aside, they would
+have been overhauled in short order.”
+
+He relapsed into his whimsical reverie; the wistful look returned to
+his eyes, replacing the glow of triumph and pleasure. And he sighed a
+little regretfully.
+
+“What I don’t understand,” contended Kirkwood, “is how you convinced
+Calendar that he couldn’t get revenge by pressing his charge against
+Miss Calendar—Dorothy.”
+
+“Oh-h?” Mr. Brentwick elevated his fine white eyebrows and sat up
+briskly. “My dear boy, that was the most delectable dish on the entire
+menu. I have been reserving it, I don’t mind owning, that I might
+better enjoy the full relish of it.... I may answer you best, perhaps,
+by asking you to scan what I offered to the fat scoundrel’s respectful
+consideration, my dear sir.”
+
+He leveled a forefinger at the card.
+
+At first glance it conveyed nothing to the younger man’s benighted
+intelligence. He puzzled over it, twisting his brows out of alignment.
+An ordinary oblong slip of thin white cardboard, it was engraved in
+fine script as follows:
+
+MR. GEORGE BURGOYNE CALENDAR
+
+
+81, ASPEN VILLAS, S. W.
+
+“Oh!” exclaimed Kirkwood at length, standing up, his face bright with
+understanding. “_You_—!”
+
+“I,” laconically assented the elder man.
+
+Impulsively Kirkwood leaned across the table. “Dorothy,” he said
+tenderly; and when the girl’s happy eyes met his, quietly drew her
+attention to the card.
+
+Then he rose hastily, and went over to stand by the window, staring
+mistily into the blank face of night beyond its unseen panes.
+
+Behind him there was a confusion of little noises; the sound of a chair
+pushed hurriedly aside, a rustle of skirts, a happy sob or two, low
+voices intermingling; sighs.... Out of it finally came the father’s
+accents.
+
+“There, there, my dear! My dearest dear!” protested the old gentleman.
+“Positively I don’t deserve a tithe of this. I—” The young old voice
+quavered and broke, in a happy laugh.... “You must understand,” he
+continued more soberly, “that no consideration of any sort is due me.
+When we married, I was too old for your mother, child; we both knew it,
+both believed it would never matter. But it did. By her wish, I went
+back to America; we were to see what separation would do to heal the
+wounds dissension had caused. It was a very foolish experiment. Your
+mother died before I could return....”
+
+There fell a silence, again broken by the father. “After that I was in
+no haste to return. But some years ago, I came to London to live. I
+communicated with the old colonel, asking permission to see you. It was
+refused in a manner which precluded the subject being reopened by me: I
+was informed that if I persisted in attempting to see you, you would be
+disinherited.... He was very angry with me—justly, I admit.... One must
+grow old before one can see how unforgivably one was wrong in youth....
+So I settled down to a quiet old age, determined not to disturb you in
+your happiness.... Ah—Kirkwood!”
+
+The old gentleman was standing, his arm around his daughter’s
+shoulders, when Kirkwood turned.
+
+“Come here, Philip; I’m explaining to Dorothy, but you should hear....
+The evening I called on you, dear boy, at the Pless, returning home I
+received a message from my solicitors, whom I had instructed to keep an
+eye on Dorothy’s welfare. They informed me that she had disappeared.
+Naturally I canceled my plans to go to Munich, and stayed, employing
+detectives. One of the first things they discovered was that Dorothy
+had run off with an elderly person calling himself George Burgoyne
+Calendar—the name I had discarded when I found that to acknowledge me
+would imperil my daughter’s fortune.... The investigations went deeper;
+Charles—let us continue to call him—had been to see me only this
+afternoon, to inform me of the plot they had discovered. This Hallam
+woman and her son—it seems that they were legitimately in the line of
+inheritance, Dorothy out of the way. But the woman was—ah—a bad lot.
+Somehow she got into communication with this fat rogue and together
+they plotted it out. Charles doesn’t believe that the Hallam woman
+expected to enjoy the Burgoyne estates for very many days. Her plan was
+to step in when Dorothy stepped out, gather up what she could, realize
+on it, and decamp. That is why there was so much excitement about the
+jewels: naturally the most valuable item on her list, the most easy to
+convert into cash.... The man Mulready we do not place; he seems to
+have been a shady character the fat rogue picked up somewhere. The
+latter’s ordinary line of business was diamond smuggling, though he
+would condescend to almost anything in order to turn a dishonest
+penny....
+
+“That seems to exhaust the subject. But one word more.... Dorothy, I am
+old enough and have suffered enough to know the wisdom of seizing one’s
+happiness when one may. My dear, a little while ago, you did a very
+brave deed. Under fire you said a most courageous, womanly, creditable
+thing. And Philip’s rejoinder was only second in nobility to yours....
+I do hope to goodness that you two blessed youngsters won’t let any
+addlepated scruples stand between yourselves and—the prize of Romance,
+your inalienable inheritance!”
+
+Abruptly Brentwick, who was no longer Brentwick, but the actual
+Calendar, released the girl from his embrace and hopped nimbly toward
+the door. “Really, I must see about that petrol!” he cried. “While it’s
+perfectly true that Charles lied about it’s running out, we must be
+getting on. I’ll call you when we’re ready to start.”
+
+And the door crashed to behind him....
+
+Between them was the table. Beyond it the girl stood with head erect,
+dim tears glimmering on the lashes of those eyes with which she met
+Philip’s steady gaze so fearlessly.
+
+Singing about them, the silence deepened. Fascinated, though his heart
+was faint with longing, Kirkwood faltered on the threshold of his
+kingdom.
+
+“Dorothy!... You did mean it, dear?”
+
+She laughed, a little, low, sobbing laugh that had its source deep in
+the hidden sanctuary of her heart of a child.
+
+“I meant it, my dearest.... If you’ll have a girl so bold and forward,
+who can’t wait till she’s asked but throws herself into the arms of the
+man she loves—Philip, I meant it, every word!...”
+
+And as he went to her swiftly, round the table, she turned to meet him,
+arms uplifted, her scarlet lips a-tremble, the brown and bewitching
+lashes drooping over her wondrously lighted eyes....
+
+After a time Philip Kirkwood laughed aloud.
+
+And there was that quality in the ring of his laughter that caused the
+Shade of Care, which had for the past ten minutes been uneasily luffing
+and filling in the offing and, on the whole, steadily diminishing and
+becoming more pale and wan and emaciated and indistinct—there was that
+in the laughter of Philip Kirkwood, I say, which caused the Shade of
+Care to utter a hollow croak of despair as, incontinently, it vanished
+out of his life.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 9779 ***