The Black Bag by Louis Joseph Vance
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Louis Joseph Vance >> The Black Bag
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There fell a lull, Kirkwood watching the other and wondering what next
would happen. Calendar paced restlessly to and fro upon the narrow landing,
now stopping to incline an ear to catch some anticipated sound, now
searching with sweeping glances the black reaches of the Pool.
Finally, consulting his watch, "Almost ten," he announced.
"We're in time?"
"Can't say.... Damn! ... If that infernal boat would only show up--"
He was lifting the whistle to sound a second summons when a rowboat rounded
a projecting angle formed by the next warehouse down stream, and with
clanking oar-locks swung in toward the landing. On her thwarts two figures,
dipping and rising, labored with the sweeps. As they drew in, the man
forward shipped his blades, and rising, scrambled to the bows in order to
grasp an iron mooring-ring set in the wall. The other awkwardly took in his
oars and, as the current swung the stern downstream, placed a hand palm
downward upon the bottom step to hold the boat steady.
Calendar waddled to the brink of the stage, grunting with relief.
"The other man?" he asked brusquely. "Has he gone aboard? Or is this the
first trip to-night?"
One of the watermen nodded assent to the latter question, adding gruffly:
"Seen nawthin' of 'im, sir."
"Very good," said Calendar, as if he doubted whether it were very good or
bad. "We'll wait a bit."
"Right-o!" agreed the waterman civilly.
Calendar turned back, his small eyes glimmering with satisfaction. Fumbling
in one coat pocket he brought to light a cigar-case. "Have a smoke?" he
suggested with a show of friendliness. "By Heaven, I was beginnin' to get
worried!"
"As to what?" inquired Kirkwood pointedly, selecting a cigar.
He got no immediate reply, but felt Calendar's sharp eyes upon him while he
manoeuvered with matches for a light.
"That's so," it came at length. "You don't know. I kind of forgot for a
minute; somehow you seemed on the inside."
Kirkwood laughed lightly. "I've experienced something of the same sensation
in the past few hours."
"Don't doubt it." Calendar was watching him narrowly. "I suppose," he put
it to him abruptly, "you haven't changed your mind?"
"Changed my mind?"
"About coming in with me."
"My dear sir, I can have no mind to change until a plain proposition is
laid before me."
"Hmm!" Calendar puffed vigorously until it occurred to him to change the
subject. "You won't mind telling me what happened to you and Dorothy?"
"Certainly not."
Calendar drew nearer and Kirkwood, lowering his voice, narrated briefly the
events since he had left the Pless in Dorothy's company.
Her father followed him intently, interrupting now and again with
exclamation or pertinent question; as, Had Kirkwood been able to see the
face of the man in No. 9, Frognall Street? The negative answer seemed to
disconcert him.
"Youngster, you say? Blam' if I can lay my mind to _him_! Now if that
Mulready--"
"It would have been impossible for Mulready--whoever he is--to recover and
get to Craven Street before we did," Kirkwood pointed out.
"Well--go on." But when the tale was told, "It's that scoundrel, Mulready!"
the man affirmed with heat. "It's his hand--I know him. I might have had
sense enough to see he'd take the first chance to hand me the double-cross.
Well, this does for _him_, all right!" Calendar lowered viciously at the
river. "You've been blame' useful," he told Kirkwood assertively. "If
it hadn't been for you, I don't know where _I'd_ be now,--nor Dorothy,
either,"--an obvious afterthought. "There's no particular way I can show my
appreciation, I suppose? Money--?"
"I've got enough to last me till I reach New York, thank you."
"Well, if the time ever comes, just shout for George B. I won't be
wanting.... I only wish you were with us; but that's out of the question."
"Doubtless ..."
"No two ways about it. I bet anything you've got a conscience concealed
about your person. What? You're an honest man, eh?"
"I don't want to sound immodest," returned Kirkwood, amused.
"You don't need to worry about that.... But an honest man's got no business
in _my_ line." He glanced again at his watch. "Damn that Mulready! I wonder
if he was 'cute enough to take another way? Or did he think ... The fool!"
He cut off abruptly, seeming depressed by the thought that he might have
been outwitted; and, clasping hands behind his back, chewed savagely on his
cigar, watching the river. Kirkwood found himself somewhat wearied; the
uselessness of his presence there struck him with added force. He bethought
him of his boat-train, scheduled to leave a station miles distant, in an
hour and a half. If he missed it, he would be stranded in a foreign land,
penniless and practically without friends--Brentwick being away and all the
rest of his circle of acquaintances on the other side of the Channel. Yet
he lingered, in poor company, daring fate that he might see the end of the
affair. Why?
There was only one honest answer to that question. He stayed on because of
his interest in a girl whom he had known for a matter of three hours, at
most. It was insensate folly on his part, ridiculous from any point of
view. But he made no move to go.
The slow minutes lengthened monotonously.
There came a sound from the street level. Calendar held up a hand of
warning. "Here they come! Steady!" he said tensely. Kirkwood, listening
intently, interpreted the noise as a clash of hoofs upon cobbles.
Calendar turned to the boat.
"Sheer off," he ordered. "Drop out of sight. I'll whistle when I want you."
"Aye, aye, sir."
The boat slipped noiselessly away with the current and in an instant was
lost to sight. Calendar plucked at Kirkwood's sleeve, drawing him into the
shadow of the steps. "E-easy," he whispered; "and, I say, lend me a hand,
will you, if Mulready turns ugly?"
"Oh, yes," assented Kirkwood, with a nonchalance not entirely unassumed.
The racket drew nearer and ceased; the hush that fell thereafter seemed
only accentuated by the purling of the river. It was ended by footsteps
echoing in the covered passageway. Calendar craned his thick neck round the
shoulder of stone, reconnoitering the landing and stairway.
"Thank God!" he said under his breath. "I was right, after all!"
A man's deep tones broke out above. "This way. Mind the steps; they're a
bit slippery, Miss Dorothy."
"But my father--?" came the girl's voice, attuned to doubt.
"Oh, he'll be along--if he isn't waiting now, in the boat."
They descended, the man leading. At the foot, without a glance to right or
left, he advanced to the edge of the stage, leaning out over the rail as if
endeavoring to locate the rowboat. At once the girl appeared, moving to his
side.
"But, Mr. Mulready--"
The girl's words were drowned by a prolonged blast on the boatswain's
whistle at her companion's lips; the shorter one followed in due course.
Calendar edged forward from Kirkwood's side.
"But what shall we do if my father isn't here? Wait?"
"No; best not to; best to get on the _Alethea_ as soon as possible, Miss
Calendar. We can send the boat back."
"'Once aboard the lugger the girl is mine'--eh, Mulready?--to say nothing
of the loot!"
If Calendar's words were jocular, his tone conveyed a different impression
entirely. Both man and girl wheeled right about to face him, the one with a
strangled oath, the other with a low cry.
"The devil!" exclaimed this Mr. Mulready.
"Oh! My father!" the girl voiced her recognition of him.
"Not precisely one and the same person," commented Calendar suavely.
"But--er--thanks, just as much.... You see, Mulready, when I make an
appointment, I keep it."
"We'd begun to get a bit anxious about you--" Mulready began defensively.
"So I surmised, from what Mrs. Hallam and Mr. Kirkwood told me.... Well?"
The man found no ready answer. He fell back a pace to the railing, his
features working with his deep chagrin. The murky flare of the gas-lamp
overhead fell across a face handsome beyond the ordinary but marred by a
sullen humor and seamed with indulgence: a face that seemed hauntingly
familiar until Kirkwood in a flash of visual memory reconstructed the
portrait of a man who lingered over a dining-table, with two empty chairs
for company. This, then, was he whom Mrs. Hallam had left at the Pless; a
tall, strong man, very heavy about the chest and shoulders....
"Why, my dear friend," Calendar was taunting him, "you don't seem overjoyed
to see me, for all your wild anxiety! 'Pon my word, you act as if you
hadn't expected me--and our engagement so clearly understood, at that! ...
Why, you fool!"--here the mask of irony was cast. "Did you think for a
moment I'd let myself be nabbed by that yap from Scotland Yard? Were you
banking on that? I give you my faith I ambled out under his very nose! ...
Dorothy, my dear," turning impatiently from Mulready, "where's that bag?"
The girl withdrew a puzzled gaze from Mulready's face, (it was apparent to
Kirkwood that this phase of the affair was no more enigmatic to him than to
her), and drew aside a corner of her cloak, disclosing the gladstone bag,
securely grasped in one gloved hand.
"I have it, thanks to Mr. Kirkwood," she said quietly.
Kirkwood chose that moment to advance from the shadow. Mulready started and
fixed him with a troubled and unfriendly stare. The girl greeted him with a
note of sincere pleasure in her surprise.
"Why, Mr. Kirkwood! ... But I left you at Mrs. Hallam's!"
Kirkwood bowed, smiling openly at Mulready's discomfiture.
"By your father's grace, I came with him," he said. "You ran away without
saying good night, you know, and I'm a jealous creditor."
She laughed excitedly, turning to Calendar. "But _you_ were to meet me at
Mrs. Hallam's?"
"Mulready was good enough to try to save me the trouble, my dear. He's an
unselfish soul, Mulready. Fortunately it happened that I came along not
five minutes after he'd carried you off. How was that, Dorothy?"
Her glance wavered uneasily between the two, Mulready and her father. The
former, shrugging to declare his indifference, turned his back squarely
upon them. She frowned.
"He came out of Mrs. Hallam's and got into the four-wheeler, saying you had
sent him to take your place, and would join us on the _Alethea_."
"So-o! How about it, Mulready?"
The man swung back slowly. "What you choose to think," he said after a
deliberate pause.
"Well, never mind! We'll go over the matter at our leisure on the
_Alethea_."
There was in the adventurer's tone a menace, bitter and not to be ignored;
which Mulready saw fit to challenge.
"I think not," he declared; "I think not. I'm weary of your addle-pated
suspicions. It'd be plain to any one but a fool that I acted for the best
interests of all concerned in this matter. If you're not content to see it
in that light, I'm done."
"Oh, if you want to put it that way, 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 top-coat 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 down-stream, 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, six-pence," 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, rumbling, C.-P. motor-vans,
struggling for place and progress. For St. Pancras never sleeps.
The misty air swam luminous with the light of electric signs as with the
radiance of some lurid and sinister moon. The voice of London sounded in
Kirkwood's ears, like the ominous purring of a somnolent brute beast,
resting, gorged and satiated, ere rising again to devour. To devour--
Stranded!...
Distracted, he searched pocket after pocket, locating his watch, cigar- and
cigarette-cases, match-box, penknife--all the minutiae of pocket-hardware
affected by civilized man; with old letters, a card-case, a square envelope
containing his steamer ticket; but no sovereign purse. His small-change
pocket held less than three shillings--two and eight, to be exact--and a
brass key, which he failed to recognize as one of his belongings.
And that was all. At sometime during the night he had lost (or been
cunningly bereft of?) that little purse of chamois-skin containing the
three golden sovereigns which he had been husbanding to pay his steamer
expenses, and which, if only he had them now, would stand between him and
starvation and a night in the streets.
And, searching his heart, he found it brimming with gratitude to Mulready,
for having relieved him of the necessity of settling with the cabby.
"Vagabond?" said Kirkwood musingly. "Vagabond?" He repeated the word softly
a number of times, to get the exact flavor of it, and found it little to
his taste. And yet...
He thrust both hands deep in his trouser pockets and stared purposelessly
into space, twisting his eyebrows out of alignment and crookedly protruding
his lower lip.
If Brentwick were only in town--But he wasn't, and wouldn't be, within the
week.
"No good waiting here," he concluded. Composing his face, he reëntered the
station. There were his trunks, of course. He couldn't leave them standing
on the station platform for ever.
He found the luggage-room and interviewed a mechanically courteous
attendant, who, as the result of profound deliberation, advised him to try
his luck at the lost-luggage room, across the station. He accepted the
advice; it was a foregone conclusion that his effects had not been conveyed
to the Tilbury dock; they could not have been loaded into the luggage van
without his personal supervision. Still, anything was liable to happen when
his unlucky star was in the ascendant.
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