The Black Bag by Louis Joseph Vance

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He found them in the lost-luggage room.

A clerk helped him identify the articles and ultimately clucked with a
perfunctory note: "Sixpence each, please."

"I--ah--pardon?"

"Sixpence each, the fixed charge, sir. For every twenty-four hours or
fraction thereof, sixpence per parcel."

"Oh, thank you so much," said Kirkwood sweetly. "I will call to-morrow."

"Very good, sir. Thank you, sir."

"Five times sixpence is two-and-six," Kirkwood computed, making his way
hastily out of the station, lest a worse thing befall him. "No, bless your
heart!--not while two and eight represents the sum total of my fortune."

He wandered out into the night; he could not linger round the station till
dawn; and what profit to him if he did? Even were he to ransom his trunks,
one can scarcely change one's clothing in a public waiting-room.

Somewhere in the distance a great clock chimed a single stroke, freighted
sore with melancholy. It knelled the passing of the half-hour after
midnight; a witching hour, when every public shuts up tight, and gentlemen
in top-hats and evening dress are doomed to pace the pave till day (barring
they have homes or visible means of support)--till day, when pawnshops open
and such personal effects as watches and hammered silver cigar-cases may be
hypothecated.

Sable garments fluttering, Care fell into step with Philip Kirkwood; Care
the inexorable slipped a skeleton arm through his and would not be denied;
Care the jade clung affectionately to his side, refusing to be jilted.

"Ah, you thought you would forget me?" chuckled the fleshless lips by his
ear. "But no, my boy; I'm with you now, for ever and a day. 'Misery loves
company,' and it wouldn't be pretty of me to desert you in this extremity,
would it? Come, let us beguile the hours till dawn with conversation.
Here's a sprightly subject: What are you going to do, Mr. Kirkwood? _What
are you going to do?_"

But Kirkwood merely shook a stubborn head and gazed straight before him,
walking fast through ways he did not recognize, and pretending not to hear.
None the less the sense of Care's solicitous query struck like a pain into
his consciousness. What was he to do?

An hour passed.

Denied the opportunity to satisfy its beast hunger and thirst, humanity
goes off to its beds. In that hour London quieted wonderfully; the streets
achieved an effect of deeper darkness, the skies, lowering, looked down
with a blush less livid for the shamelessness of man; cab ranks lengthened;
solitary footsteps added unto themselves loud, alarming, offensive echoes;
policemen, strolling with lamps blazing on their breasts, became as
lightships in a trackless sea; each new-found street unfolded its
perspective like a canyon of mystery, and yet teeming with a hundred masked
hazards; the air acquired a smell more clear and clean, an effect more
volatile; and the night-mist thickened until it studded one's attire with
myriads of tiny buttons, bright as diamond dust.

Through this long hour Kirkwood walked without a pause.

Another clock, somewhere, clanged resonantly twice.

The world was very still....

And so, wandering foot-loose in a wilderness of ways, turning aimlessly,
now right, now left, he found himself in a street he knew, yet seemed not
to know: a silent, black street one brief block in length, walled with
dead and lightless dwellings, haunted by his errant memory; a street whose
atmosphere was heavy with impalpable essence of desuetude; in two words,
Frognall Street.

Kirkwood identified it with a start and a guilty tremor. He stopped
stock-still, in an unreasoning state of semi-panic, arrested by a silly
impulse to turn and fly; as if the bobby, whom he descried approaching him
with measured stride, pausing new and again to try a door or flash
his bull's-eye down an area, were to be expected to identify the man
responsible for that damnable racket raised ere midnight in vacant Number
9!

Oddly enough, the shock of recognition brought him to his
senses,--temporarily. He was even able to indulge himself in a quiet,
sobering grin at his own folly. He passed the policeman with a nod and a
cool word in response to the man's good-natured, "Good-night, sir." Number
9 was on the other side of the street; and he favored its blank and dreary
elevation with a prolonged and frank stare--that profited him nothing, by
the way. For a crazy notion popped incontinently into his head, and would
not be cast forth.

At the corner he swerved and crossed, still possessed of his devil of
inspiration. It would be unfair to him to say that he did not struggle to
resist it, for he did, because it was fairly and egregiously asinine; yet
struggling, his feet trod the path to which it tempted him.

"Why," he expostulated feebly, "I might's well turn back and beat that
bobby over the head with my cane!..."

But at the moment his hand was in his change pocket, feeling over that same
brass door-key which earlier he had been unable to account for, and he was
informing himself how very easy it would have been for the sovereign purse
to have dropped from his waistcoat pocket while he was sliding on his ear
down the dark staircase. To recover it meant, at the least, shelter for
the night, followed by a decent, comfortable and sustaining morning meal.
Fortified by both he could redeem his luggage, change to clothing more
suitable for daylight traveling, pawn his valuables, and enter into
negotiations with the steamship company for permission to exchange his
passage, with a sum to boot, for transportation on another liner. A most
feasible project! A temptation all but irresistible!

But then--the risk.... Supposing (for the sake of argument) the customary
night-watchman to have taken up a transient residence in Number 9;
supposing the police to have entered with him and found the stunned man on
the second floor: would the watchman not be vigilant for another nocturnal
marauder? would not the police now, more than ever, be keeping a wary eye
on that house of suspicious happenings?

Decidedly, to reënter it would be to incur a deadly risk. And yet,
undoubtedly, beyond question! his sovereign purse was waiting for him
somewhere on the second flight of stairs; while as his means of clandestine
entry lay warm in his fingers--the key to the dark entry, which he had by
force of habit pocketed after locking the door.

He came to the Hog-in-the-Pound. Its windows were dim with low-turned
gas-lights. Down the covered alleyway, Quadrant Mews slept in a dusk but
fitfully relieved by a lamp or two round which the friendly mist clung
close and thick.

There would be none to see....

Skulking, throat swollen with fear, heart beating like a snare-drum,
Kirkwood took his chance. Buttoning his overcoat collar up to his chin
and cursing the fact that his hat must stand out like a chimney-pot on a
detached house, he sped on tiptoe down the cobbled way and close beneath
the house-walls of Quadrant Mews. But, half-way in, he stopped, confounded
by an unforeseen difficulty. How was he to identify the narrow entry of
Number 9, whose counterparts doubtless communicated with the mews from
every residence on four sides of the city block?

The low inner tenements were yet high enough to hide the rear elevations of
Frognall Street houses, and the mist was heavy besides; otherwise he had
made shift to locate Number 9 by ticking off the dwellings from the corner.
If he went on, hit or miss, the odds were anything-you-please to one that
he would blunder into the servant's quarters of some inhabited house,
and--be promptly and righteously sat upon by the service-staff, while the
bobby was summoned.

Be that as it might--he almost lost his head when he realized this--escape
was already cut off by the way he had come. Some one, or, rather, some two
men were entering the alley. He could hear the tramping and shuffle of
clumsy feet, and voices that muttered indistinctly. One seemed to trip over
something, and cursed. The other laughed; the voices grew more loud. They
were coming his way. He dared no longer vacillate.

But--which passage should he choose?

He moved on with more haste than discretion. One heel slipped on a cobble
time-worn to glassy smoothness; he lurched, caught himself up in time to
save a fall, lost his hat, recovered it, and was discovered. A voice,
maudlin with drink, hailed and called upon him to stand and give an account
of himself, "like a goo' feller." Another tempted him with offers of drink
and sociable confabulation. He yielded not; adamantine to the seductive
lure, he picked up his heels and ran. Those behind him, remarking with
resentment the amazing fact that an intimate of the mews should run away
from liquor, cursed and made after him, veering, staggering, howling like
ravening animals.

For all their burden of intoxication, they knew the ground by instinct and
from long association. They gained on him. Across the way a window-sash
went up with a bang, and a woman screamed. Through the only other entrance
to the mews a belated cab was homing; its driver, getting wind of the
unusual, pulled up, blocking the way, and added his advice to the uproar.

Caught thus between two fires, and with his persecutors hard upon him,
Kirkwood dived into the nearest black hole of a passageway and in sheer
desperation flung himself, key in hand, against the door at the end. Mark
how his luck served him who had forsworn her! He found a keyhole and
inserted the key. It turned. So did the knob. The door gave inward. He fell
in with it, slammed it, shot the bolts, and, panting, leaned against its
panels, in a pit of everlasting night but--saved!--for the time being, at
all events.

Outside somebody brushed against one wall, cannoned to the other, brought
up with a crash against the door, and, perforce at a standstill, swore from
his heart.

"Gorblimy!" he declared feelingly. "I'd 'a' took my oath I sore'm run in
'ere!" And then, in answer to an inaudible question: "No, 'e ain't. Gorn
an' let the fool go to 'ell. 'Oo wants 'im to share goo' liker? Not I!..."

Joining his companion he departed, leaving behind him a trail of
sulphur-tainted air. The mews quieted gradually.

Indoors Kirkwood faced unhappily the enigma of fortuity, wondering: Was
this by any possibility Number 9?

The key had fitted; the bolts had been drawn on the inside; and while
the key had been one of ordinary pattern and would no doubt have proven
effectual with any one of a hundred common locks, the finger of probability
seemed to indicate that his luck had brought him back to Number 9.

In spite of all this, he was sensible of little confidence; though this
were truly Number 9, his freedom still lay on the knees of the gods, his
very life, belike, was poised, tottering, on a pinnacle of chance.

In the end, taking heart of desperation, he stooped and removed his shoes;
a precaution which later appealed to his sense of the ridiculous, in view
of the racket he had raised in entering, but which at the moment seemed
most natural and in accordance with common sense. Then rising, he held his
breath, staring and listening. About him the pitch darkness was punctuated
with fading points of fire, and in his ears was a noise of strange
whisperings, very creepy--until, gritting his teeth, he controlled his
nerves and gradually realized that he was alone, the silence undisturbed.

He went forward gingerly, feeling his way like a blind man on strange
ground. Ere long he stumbled over a door-sill and found that the walls
of the passage had fallen away; he had entered a room, a black cavern of
indeterminate dimensions. Across this he struck at random, walked himself
flat against a wall, felt his way along to an open door, and passed through
to another apartment as dark as the first.

Here, endeavoring to make a circuit of the walls, he succeeded in throwing
himself bodily across a bed, which creaked horribly; and for a full minute
lay as he had fallen, scarce daring to think. But nothing followed, and he
got up and found a shut door which let him into yet a third room, wherein
he barked both shins on a chair; and escaped to a fourth whose atmosphere
was highly flavored with reluctant odors of bygone cookery, stale water and
damp plumbing--probably the kitchen. Thence progressing over complaining
floors through what may have been the servants' hall, a large room with
a table in the middle and a number of promiscuous chairs (witness his
tortured shins!), he finally blundered into the basement hallway.

By now a little calmer, he felt assured that this was really Number 9,
Frognall Street, and a little happier about it all, though not even
momentarily forgetful of the potential police and night-watchman.

However, he mounted the steps to the ground floor without adventure and
found himself at last in the same dim and ghostly hall which he had entered
some six hours before; the mockery of dusk admitted by the fan-light was
just strong enough to enable him to identify the general lay of the land
and arrangement of furniture.

More confidently with each uncontested step, he continued his quest.
Elation was stirring his spirit when he gained the first floor and moved
toward the foot of the second flight, approaching the spot whereat he was
to begin the search for the missing purse. The knowledge that he lacked
means of obtaining illumination deterred him nothing; he had some hope
of finding matches in one of the adjacent rooms, but, failing that, was
prepared to ascend the stairs on all fours, feeling every inch of their
surface, if it took hours. Ever an optimistic soul, instinctively inclined
to father faith with a hope, he felt supremely confident that his search
would not prove fruitless, that he would win early release from his
temporary straits.

And thus it fell out that, at the instant he was thinking it time to begin
to crawl and hunt, his stockinged feet came into contact with something
heavy, yielding, warm--something that moved, moaned, and caused his hair to
bristle and his flesh to creep.

We will make allowances for him; all along he had gone on the assumption
that his antagonist of the dark stairway would have recovered and made off
with all expedition, in the course of ten or twenty minutes, at most, from
the time of his accident. To find him still there was something entirely
outside of Kirkwood's reckoning: he would as soon have thought to encounter
say, Calendar,--would have preferred the latter, indeed. But this fellow
whose disability was due to his own interference, who was reasonably to be
counted upon to raise the very deuce and all of a row!

The initial shock, however shattering to his equanimity, soon, lost effect.
The man evidently remained unconscious, in fact had barely moved; while the
moan that Kirkwood heard, had been distressingly faint.

"Poor devil!" murmured the young man. "He must be in a pretty bad way, for
sure!" He knelt, compassion gentling his heart, and put one hand to the
insentient face. A warm sweat moistened his fingers; his palm was fanned by
steady respiration.

Immeasurably perplexed, the American rose, slipped on his shoes and
buttoned them, thinking hard the while. What ought he to do? Obviously
flight suggested itself,--incontinent flight, anticipating the man's
recovery. On the other hand, indubitably the latter had sustained such
injury that consciousness, when it came to him, would hardly be reinforced
by much aggressive power. Moreover, it was to be remembered that the one
was in that house with quite as much warrant as the other, unless Kirkwood
had drawn a rash inference from the incident of the ragged sentry. The two
of them were mutual, if antagonistic, trespassers; neither would dare
bring about the arrest of the other. And then--and this was not the least
consideration to influence Kirkwood--perhaps the fellow would die if he got
no attention.

Kirkwood shut his teeth grimly. "I'm no assassin," he informed himself, "to
strike and run. If I've maimed this poor devil and there are consequences,
I'll stand 'em. The Lord knows it doesn't matter a damn to anybody, not
even to me, what happens to me; while _he_ may be valuable."

Light upon the subject, actual as well as figurative, seemed to be the
first essential; his mind composed, Kirkwood set himself in search of it.
The floor he was on, however, afforded him no assistance; the mantels were
guiltless of candles and he discovered no matches, either in the wide and
silent drawing-room, with its ghastly furniture, like mummies in their
linen swathings, or in the small boudoir at the back. He was to look either
above or below, it seemed.

After some momentary hesitation, he went up-stairs, his ascent marked by a
single and grateful accident; half-way to the top he trod on an object that
clinked underfoot, and, stooping, retrieved the lost purse. Thus was he
justified of his temerity; the day was saved--that is, to-morrow was.

The rooms of the second-floor were bedchambers, broad, deep, stately,
inhabited by seven devils of loneliness. In one, on a dresser, Kirkwood
found a stump of candle in a china candlestick; the two charred ends of
matches at its base were only an irritating discovery, however--evidence
that real matches had been the mode in Number 9, at some remote date.
Disgusted and oppressed by cumulative inquisitiveness, he took the
candle-end back to the hall; he would have given much for the time and
means to make a more detailed investigation into the secret of the house.

Perhaps it was mostly his hope of chancing on some clue to the mystery of
Dorothy Calender--bewitching riddle that she was!--that fascinated his
imagination so completely. Aside from her altogether, the great house that
stood untenanted, yet in such complete order, so self-contained in its
darkened quiet, intrigued him equally with the train of inexplicable events
that had brought him within its walls. Now--since his latest entrance--his
vision had adjusted itself to cope with the obscurity to some extent; and
the street lights, meagerly reflected through the windows from the bosom of
a sullen pall of cloud, low-swung above the city, had helped him to piece
together many a detail of decoration and furnishing, alike somber and
richly dignified. Kirkwood told himself that the owner, whoever he might
be, was a man of wealth and taste inherited from another age; he had found
little of meretricious to-day in the dwelling, much that was solid and
sedate and homely, and--Victorian.... He could have wished for more; a box
of early Victorian vestas had been highly acceptable.

Making his way down-stairs to the stricken man--who was quite as he had
been--Kirkwood bent over and thrust rifling fingers into his pockets,
regardless of the wretched sense of guilt and sneakishness imparted by the
action, stubbornly heedless of the possibility of the man's awakening to
find himself being searched and robbed.

In the last place he sought, which should (he realized) have been the
first, to wit, the fob pocket of the white waistcoat, he found a small gold
matchbox, packed tight with wax vestas; and, berating himself for crass
stupidity--he had saved a deal of time and trouble by thinking of this
before--lighted the candle.

As its golden flame shot up with scarce a tremor, preyed upon by a
perfectly excusable concern, he bent to examine the man's countenance....
The arm which had partly hidden it had fallen back into a natural position.
It was a young face that gleamed pallid in the candlelight--a face unlined,
a little vapid and insignificant, with features regular and neat, betraying
few characteristics other than the purely negative attributes of a
character as yet unformed, possibly unformable; much the sort of a face
that he might have expected to see, remembering those thin and pouting lips
that before had impressed him. Its owner was probably little more than
twenty. In his attire there was a suspicion of a fop's preciseness, aside
from its accidental disarray; the cut of his waistcoat was the extreme of
the then fashion, the white tie (twisted beneath one ear) an exaggerated
"butterfly," his collar nearly an inch too tall; and he was shod with pumps
suitable only for the dancing-floor,--a whim of the young-bloods of London
of that year.

"I can't make him out at all!" declared Kirkwood. "The son of a gentleman
too weak to believe that cubs need licking into shape? Reared to man's
estate, so sheltered from the wicked world that he never grew a bark?...
The sort that never had a quarrel in his life, 'cept with his tailor?...
Now what the devil is _this_ thing doing in this midnight mischief?...
Damn!"

It was most exasperating, the incongruity of the boy's appearance assorted
with his double rôle of persecutor of distressed damsels and nocturnal
house-breaker!

Kirkwood bent closer above the motionless head, with puzzled eyes striving
to pin down some elusive resemblance that he thought to trace in those
vacuous features--a resemblance to some one he had seen, or known, at some
past time, somewhere, somehow.

"I give it up. Guess I'm mistaken. Anyhow, five young Englishmen out of
every ten of his class are just as blond and foolish. Now let's see how bad
he's hurt."

With hands strong and gentle, he turned the round, light head. Then, "Ah!"
he commented in the accent of comprehension. For there was an angry looking
bump at the base of the skull; and, the skin having been broken, possibly
in collision with the sharp-edged newel-post, a little blood had stained
and matted the straw-colored hair.

Kirkwood let the head down and took thought. Recalling a bath-room on the
floor above, thither he went, unselfishly forgetful of his predicament if
discovered, and, turning on the water, sopped his handkerchief until it
dripped. Then, returning, he took the boy's head on his knees, washed the
wound, purloined another handkerchief (of silk, with a giddy border)
from the other's pocket, and of this manufactured a rude but serviceable
bandage.

Toward the conclusion of his attentions, the sufferer began to show signs
of returning animation. He stirred restlessly, whimpered a little, and
sighed. And Kirkwood, in consternation, got up.

"So!" he commented ruefully. "I guess I am an ass, all right--taking all
that trouble for you, my friend. If I've got a grain of sense left, this is
my cue to leave you alone in your glory."

He was lingering only to restore to the boy's pockets such articles as he
had removed in the search for matches,--the match-box, a few silver coins,
a bulky sovereign purse, a handsome, plain gold watch, and so forth. But
ere he concluded he was aware that the boy was conscious, that his eyes,
open and blinking in the candlelight, were upon him.

They were blue eyes, blue and shallow as a doll's, and edged with long,
fine lashes. Intelligence, of a certain degree, was rapidly informing them.
Kirkwood returned their questioning glance, transfixed in indecision, his
primal impulse to cut-and-run for it was gone; he had nothing to fear from
this child who could not prevent his going whenever he chose to go; while
by remaining he might perchance worm from him something about the girl.

"You're feeling better?" He was almost surprised to hear his own voice put
the query.

"I--I think so. Ow, my head!... I say, you chap, whoever you are, what's
happened?... I want to get up." The boy added peevishly: "Help a fellow,
can't you?"

"You've had a nasty fall," Kirkwood observed evenly, passing an arm
beneath the boy's shoulder and helping him to a sitting position. "Do you
remember?"

The other snuffled childishly and scrubbed across the floor to rest his
back against the wall.

"Why-y ... I remember fallin'; and then ... I woke up and it was all dark
and my head achin' fit to split. I presume I went to sleep again ... I say,
what're you, doing here?"

Instead of replying, Kirkwood lifted a warning finger.

"Hush!" he said tensely, alarmed by noises in the street. "You don't
suppose--?"

He had been conscious of a carriage rolling up from the corner, as well as
that it had drawn up (presumably) before a near-by dwelling. Now the rattle
of a key in the hall-door was startlingly audible. Before he could move,
the door itself opened with a slam.

Kirkwood moved toward the stair-head, and drew back with a cry of disgust.
"Too late!" he told himself bitterly; his escape was cut off. He could run
up-stairs and hide, of course, but the boy would inform against him and....

He buttoned up his coat, settled his hat on his head, and moved near the
candle, where it rested on the floor. One glimpse would suffice to show him
the force of the intruders, and one move of his foot put out the light;
then--_perhaps_--he might be able to rush them.

Below, a brief pause had followed the noise of the door, as if those
entering were standing, irresolute, undecided which way to turn; but
abruptly enough the glimmer of candlelight must have been noticed. Kirkwood
heard a hushed exclamation, a quick clatter of high heels on the parquetry,
pattering feet on the stairs, all but drowned by swish and ripple of silken
skirts; and a woman stood at the head of the flight--to the American an
apparition profoundly amazing as she paused, the light from the floor
casting odd, theatric shadows beneath her eyes and over her brows, edging
her eyes themselves with brilliant light beneath their dark lashes, showing
her lips straight and drawn, and shimmering upon the spangles of an evening
gown, visible beneath the dark cloak which had fallen back from her white,
beautiful shoulders.

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