The Sleuth of St. James's Square, Melville Davisson Post [learn to read activity book .txt] 📗

The girl sat in a great chair before the fire, huddled, staring into the glow of the smoldering logs.

Her dark hair clouded her face. The evening gown was twisted and crumpled about her. There was no ornament on her; her arms, her shoulders, the exquisite column of her throat were bare.

She sat with her eyes wide, unmoving, in a profound reflection.

The library was softly lighted; richly furnished, a little beyond the permission of good taste. On a table at the girl's elbow were two objects; a ruby necklace, and a dried flower. The flower, fragile with age, seemed a sort of scrub poppy of a delicate yellow; the flower of some dwarfed bush, prickly like a cactus.

The necklace made a great heap of jewels on the buhl top of the table, above the intricate arabesque of silver and tortoise-shell.

It was nearly midnight. Outside, the dull rumble of London seemed a sound, continuous, unvarying, as though it were the distant roar of a world turning in some stellar space.

It was a great old house in Park Lane, heavy and of that gloomy architecture with which the feeling of the English people, at an earlier time, had been so strangely in accord. It stood before St. James's Park oppressive and monumental, and now in the midst of yellow fog its heavy front was like a mausoleum.

But within, the house had been treated to a modern re-casting, not entirely independent of the vanity of wealth.

After the dinner at the Ritz, the girl felt that she could not go on; and Lady Mary's party, on its way to the dancing, put her down at the door. She gave the excuse of a crippling headache. But it was a deeper, more profound aching that disturbed her. She was before the tragic hour, appearing in the lives of many women, when suddenly, as by the opening of a door, one realizes the irrevocable aspect of a marriage of which the details are beginning to be arranged. That hour in which a woman must consider, finally, the clipping of all threads, except the single one that shall cord her to a mate for life.

Until to-night, in spite of preparations on the way, the girl had not felt this marriage as inevitable. Her aunt had pressed for it, subtly, invisibly, as an older woman is able to do.

Her situation was always, clearly before her. She was alone in the world; with very little, almost nothing. The estate her father inherited he had finally spent in making great explorations. There was no unknown taste of the world that he had not undertaken to enter. The final driblets of his fortune had gone into his last adventure in the Great Gobi Desert from which he had never returned.

The girl had been taken by this aunt in London, incredibly rich, but on the fringes of the fashionable society of England, which she longed to enter. Even to the young girl, her aunt's plan was visible. With a great settlement, such as this ambitious woman could manage, the girl could be a duchess.

The marriage to Lord Eckhart in the diplomatic service, who would one day be a peer of England, had been a lure dangled unavailingly before her, until that night, when, on his return from India, he had carried her off her feet with his amazing incredible sacrifice. It was the immense idealism, the immense romance of it that had swept her into this irrevocable thing.

She got up now, swiftly, as though she would again realize how the thing had happened and stooped over the table above the heap of jewels. They were great pigeon-blood rubies, twenty-seven of them, fastened together with ancient crude gold work. She lifted the long necklace until it hung with the last jewel on the table.

The thing was a treasure, an immense, incredible treasure. And it was for this—for the privilege of putting this into her hands, that the man had sold everything he had in England—and endured what the gossips said—endured it during the five years in India—kept silent and was now silent. She remembered every detail the rumor of a wild life, a dissolute reckless life, the gradual, piece by piece sale of everything that could be turned into money. London could not think of a ne'er-do-well to equal him in the memory of its oldest gossips—and all the time with every penny, he was putting together this immense treasure—for her. A dreamer writing a romance might imagine a thing like this, but had it any equal in the realities of life?

She looked down at the chain of great jewels, and the fragment of prickly shrub with its poppy-shaped yellow flower. They were symbols, each, of an immense idealism, an immense conception of sacrifice that lifted the actors in their dramas into gigantic figures illumined with the halos of romance.

Until to-night it had been this ideal figure of Lord Eckhart that the girl considered in this marriage. And to-night, suddenly, the actual physical man had replaced it. And, alarmed, she had drawn back. Perhaps it was the Teutonic blood in him—a grandmother of a German house. And, yet, who could say, perhaps this piece of consuming idealism was from that ancient extinct Germany of Beethoven.

But the man and the ideal seemed distinct things having no relation. She drew back from the one, and she stood on tip-toe, with arms extended longingly toward the other.

What should she do?

Had the example of her father thrown on Lord Eckhart a golden shadow? She moved the bit of flower, gently as in a caress. He had given up the income of a leading profession and gone to his death. His fortune and his life had gone in the same high careless manner for the thing he sought. For the treasure that he believed lay in the Gobi Desert—not for himself, but for every man to be born into the world. He was the great dreamer, the great idealist, a vague shining figure before the girl like the cloud in the Hebraic Myth.

The girl stood up and linked her fingers together behind her back. If her father were only here—for an hour, for a moment! Or if, in the world beyond sight and hearing, he could somehow get a message to her!

At this moment a bell, somewhere in the deeps of the house, jangled, and she heard the old butler moving through the hall to the door. The other servants had been dismissed for the night, and her aunt on the