The Black Bag by Louis Joseph Vance (snow like ashes txt) 📕

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 topcoat 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 downstream, 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, sixpence,” 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,