The Bandbox, Louis Joseph Vance [little red riding hood ebook free .TXT] 📗

women who live on their nerves and apparently thrive on excitement, ignorant of the meaning of rest save in association with those rest-cure sanatoriums to which they repair for a fortnight semi-annually—or oftener.

Against her protests, then, Eleanor was dragged out in full dress when what she really wanted to do was to eat a light and simple meal and go early to bed. In not unnatural consequence she found herself, when they got home after one in the morning, in a state of nervous disquiet caused by the strain of keeping herself keyed up to the pitch of an animated party.

Insomnia stared her in the face with its blind, blank eyes. In the privacy of her own room, she expressed a free opinion of her countrymen, conceiving them all in the guise of fevered, unquiet souls cast in the mould of Mrs. Ilkington.

Divesting herself of her dinner-gown, she slipped into a négligée and looked round for a book, meaning to read herself sleepy. In the course of her search she happened to recognise her bandbox and conceive a desire to reassure herself as to the becomingness of its contents.

The hat she found therein was becoming enough, even if it wasn’t hers. The mistake was easily apparent and excusable, considering the confusion that had obtained on the pier at the time of their departure.

She wondered when Staff would learn the secret of his besetting mystery, and wondered too why Alison had wished to make a mystery of it. The joke was hardly apparent—though one’s sense of American humour might well have become dulled in several years of residence abroad.

Meanwhile, instinctively, Eleanor was trying on the hat before the long mirror set in the door of the closet. She admitted to herself that she looked astonishingly well in it. She was a sane and sensible young woman, who knew that she was exceedingly good looking and was glad of it in the same wholesome way that she was glad she had a good singing voice. Very probably the hat was more of a piece with the somewhat flamboyant if unimpeachable loveliness of Alison Landis; but it would seem hard to find a hat better suited to set off the handsome, tall and slightly pale girl that confronted Eleanor in the mirror.

It seemed surprisingly heavy, even for a hat of its tremendous size. She was of the opinion that it would make her head ache to wear it for many hours at a time. She was puzzled by its weight and speculated vaguely about it until, lifting it carefully off, her fingers encountered something hard, heavy and unyielding between the lining and the crown. After that it didn’t take her long to discover that the lining had been ripped open and resewn with every indication of careless haste. Human curiosity did the rest. Within a very few minutes the Cadogan collar lay in her hands and she was marvelling over it—and hazily surmising the truth: Staff had been used as a blind agent to get the pearls into the country duty-free.

Quick thoughts ran riot in Eleanor’s mind. Alison Landis would certainly not delay longer than a few hours before demanding her hat of Mr. Staff. The substitution would then be discovered and she, Eleanor Searle, would fall under suspicion—at least, unless she took immediate steps to restore the jewels.

She acted hastily, on impulse. One minute she was at the telephone, ordering a taxicab, the next she was hurriedly dressing herself in a tailor-made suit. The hour was late, but not too late—although (this gave her pause) it might be too late before she could reach Staff’s rooms. She had much better telephone him she was coming. Of course he would have a telephone—everybody has, in New York.

Consultation of the directory confirmed this assumption, giving her both his address and his telephone number. But before she could call up, her cab was announced. Nevertheless she delayed long enough to warn him hastily of her coming. Then she snatched up the necklace, dropped it into her handbag, replaced the hat in its bandbox and ran for the elevator.

It was almost half-past one by the clock behind the desk, when she passed through the office. She had really not thought it so late. She was conscious of the surprised looks of the clerks and pages. The porter at the door, too, had a stare for her so long and frank as to approach impertinence. None the less he was quick enough to take her bandbox from the bellboy who carried it and place it in the waiting taxi, and handed her in after it with civil care. Having repeated to the operator the address she gave him, the porter shut the door and went back to his post as the vehicle darted out from the curb.

Eleanor knew little of New York geography. Her previous visits to the city had been very few and of short duration. With the shopping district she was tolerably familiar, and she knew something of the district roundabout the old Fifth Avenue Hotel and the vanished Everett House. But with these exceptions she was entirely ignorant of the lay of the land: just as she was too inexperienced to realise that it isn’t considered wholly well-advised for a young woman alone to take, in the middle of the night, a taxicab whose chauffeur carries a companion on the front seat. If she had stopped to consider this circumstance at all, she would have felt comforted by the presence of the superfluous man, on the general principle that two protectors are better then one: but the plain truth is that she didn’t stop to consider it, her thoughts being fully engaged with what seemed more important matters.

The cab bounced across Amsterdam Avenue, slid smoothly over to Columbus, ran for a block or so beneath the elevated structure and swung into Seventy-seventh Street, through which it pelted eastward and into Central Park. Then for some moments it turned and twisted through the devious driveways, in a fashion so erratic that the passenger lost all grasp of her whereabouts, retaining no more than a confused impression of serpentine, tree-lined ways, chequered with lamplight and the soft, dense shadows of foliage, and regularly spaced with staring electric arcs.

The night had fallen black beneath an overcast sky; the air that fanned her face was warm and heavy with humidity; what little breeze there was, aside from that created by the motion of the cab, bore on its leaden wings the scent of rain.

A vague uneasiness began to colour the girl’s consciousness. She grew increasingly sensitive to the ominous quiet of the hour and place: the stark, dark stillness of the shrouded coppices and thickets, the emptiness of the paths. Once only she caught sight of a civilian, strolling in his shirt-sleeves, coat over his arm, hat in hand; and once only she detected, at a distance, the grey of a policeman’s tunic, half blotted out by the shadow in which its wearer lounged at ease.

And that was far behind when, abruptly, with a grinding crash of brakes, the cab came from full headlong tilt to a dead halt within twice its length. She pitched forward from the seat with a cry of alarm, only saving herself a serious bruising through the instinct that led her to thrust out her hands and catch the frame of the forward windows.

Before she could recover, the chauffeur’s companion had jumped out and run ahead, pausing in front of the hood to stoop and stare. In another moment he was back with a report couched in a technical jargon unintelligible to her understanding. She caught the words “stripped the gears” and from them inferred the irremediable.

“What is the matter?” she asked anxiously, bending forward.

The chauffeur turned his head and replied in a surly tone: “We’ve broken down, ma’m. You can’t go no farther in this cab. I’ll have to get another to tow us back to the garage.”

“Oh,” she cried in dismay, “how unfortunate! What am I to do?”

“Guess you’ll have to get out ’n’ walk back to Central Park West,” was the answer. “You c’n get a car there to C’lumbus Circle. You’ll find a-plenty taxis down there.”

“You’re quite sure—” she began to protest.

“Ah, they ain’t no chanst of this car going another foot under its own power—not until it’s been a week ’r two in hospital. The only thing for you to do ’s to hoof it, like I said.”

“That’s dead right,” averred the other man. He was standing beside the body of the cab and now unlatched the door and held it open for her. “You might as well get down, if you’re in any great hurry, ma’m.”

Eleanor rose, eyeing the man distrustfully. His accent wasn’t that of the kind of man who is accustomed to saying “ma’m.” His back was toward the nearest lamp post, his face in shadow. She gained no more than a dim impression of a short, slender figure masked in a grey duster buttoned to the throat, and, above it, a face rendered indefinite by a short, pointed beard and a grey motor-cap pulled well down over the eyes....

But there was nothing to do but accept the situation. An accident was an accident—unpleasant but irreparable. There was no alternative; she could do nothing but adopt the chauffeur’s suggestion. She stepped out, turning back to get her bandbox.

“Beg pardon, ma’m. I’ll get that for you.”

The man by the door interposed an arm between Eleanor and the bandbox.

She said, “Oh no!” and attempted to push past his arm.

Immediately he caught her by the shoulder and thrust her away with staggering violence. She reeled back half a dozen feet. Simultaneously she heard the fellow say, sharply: “All right—go ahead!” and saw him jump upon the step. On the instant, the cab shot away through the shadows, the door swinging wide while Eleanor’s assailant scrambled into the body.

Before she could collect herself the car had disappeared round a curve in the roadway.

Her natural impulse was to scream, to start a hue-and-cry: “Stop thief!” But the strong element of common-sense in her make-up counselled her to hold her tongue. In a trice she comprehended precisely the meaning of the passage. Somebody else—somebody aside from herself, Staff and Alison Landis—knew the secret of the bandbox and the smuggled necklace, and with astonishing intuition had planned this trap to gain possession of it. She was amazed to contemplate the penetrating powers of inference and deduction, the cunning and resource which had not only in so short a time fathomed the mystery of the vanished necklace, but had discovered the exchange of bandboxes, had traced the right one to her hotel and possession, had divined and taken advantage of her impulse to return the property to its rightful owner without an instant’s loss of time. And with this thought came another, more alarming: in a brace of minutes the thieves would discover that the necklace had been abstracted from the hat and—men of such boldness wouldn’t hesitate about turning back to run her down and take their booty by force.

It was this consideration that bade her refrain from crying out. Conceivably, if she did raise an alarm, help might be longer in coming than the taxicab in returning. They had the hat and bandbox, and were welcome to them, for all of her, as long as she retained the real valuables. Her only chance lay in instant and secret flight, in hiding herself away in the gloomy fastnesses of these unknown pleasure-grounds, so securely that they might not find her.

She stood alone in the middle of a broad road. There was nobody in sight, whichever way she looked. On one hand a wide asphalt path ran parallel with the drive; on the other lay a darksome