The Black Bag, Louis Joseph Vance [some good books to read .txt] 📗
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- Author: Louis Joseph Vance
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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 armchair 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
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