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

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 absentminded 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

ADVENTURERS’ 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 porti�res 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