The Brass Bowl by Louis Joseph Vance
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Louis Joseph Vance >> The Brass Bowl
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"Oh, it's not that." Bannerman dismissed the troubles of Mr.
Graeme with an airy wave of a pudgy hand. "That's not my funeral,
nor yours.... Only I've been worried, of late, by your utterly
careless habits."
Maitland looked his consternation. "In heaven's name, what now?"
And grinned as he joined hands before him in simulated petition.
"Please don't read me a lecture just now, dear boy. If you've got
something dreadful on your chest wait till another day, when I'm
more in the humor to be found fault with."
"No lecture." Bannerman laughed nervously. "I've merely been
wondering what you have done with the Maitland heirlooms."
"What? Oh, those things? They're safe enough--_in_ the safe
out at Greenfields."
"To be sure! Quite so!" agreed the lawyer, with ironic heartiness.
"Oh, quite." And proceeded to take all Madison Square into his
confidence, addressing it from the window. "Here's a young man,
sole proprietor of a priceless collection of family heirlooms,--
diamonds, rubies, sapphires galore; and he thinks they're safe
enough _in_ a safe at his country residence, fifty miles from
anywhere! What a simple, trustful soul it is!"
"Why should I bother?" argued Maitland sulkily. "It's a good,
strong safe, and--and there are plenty of servants around," he
concluded largely.
"Precisely. Likewise plenty of burglars. You don't suppose a
determined criminal like Anisty, for instance, would bother
himself about a handful of thick-headed servants, do you?"
"Anisty?"--with a rising inflection of inquiry.
Bannerman squared himself to face his host, elbows on table.
"You don't mean to say you've not heard of Anisty, the great
Anisty?" he demanded.
"I dare say I have," Maitland conceded, unperturbed. "Name rings
familiar, somehow."
"Anisty,"--deliberately, "is said to be the greatest jewel thief
the world has ever known. He has the police of America and Europe
by the ears to catch him. They have been hot on his trail for the
past three years, and would have nabbed him a dozen times if only
he'd had the grace to stay in one place long enough. The man who
made off with the Bracegirdle diamonds, smashing a burglar-proof
vault into scrap-iron to get 'em--don't you remember?"
"Ye-es; I seem to recall the affair, now that you mention it,"
Maitland admitted, bored. "Well, and what of Mr. Anisty?"
"Only what I have told you, taken in connection with the
circumstance that he is known to be in New York, and that the
Maitland heirlooms are tolerably famous--as much so as your
careless habits, Dan. Now, a safe deposit vault--"
"Um-m-m," considered Maitland. "You really believe that Mr. Anisty
has his bold burglarious eye on my property?"
"It's a big enough haul to attract him," argued the lawyer
earnestly; "Anisty always aims high.... Now, _will_ you do
what I have been begging you to do for the past eight years?"
"Seven," corrected Maitland punctiliously. "It's just seven years
since I entered into mine inheritance and you became my
counselor."
"Well, seven, then. But will you put those jewels in safe
deposit?"
"Oh, I suppose so."
"But when?"
"Would it suit you if I ran out to-night?" Maitland demanded so
abruptly that Bannerman was disconcerted.
"I--er--ask nothing better."
"I'll bring them in town to-morrow. You arrange about the vault
and advise me, will you, like a good fellow?"
"Bless my soul! I never dreamed that you would be so--so--"
"Amenable to discipline?" Maitland grinned, boylike, and, leaning
back, appreciated Bannerman's startled expression with keen
enjoyment. "Well, consider that for once you've scared me. I'm
off--just time to catch the ten-twenty for Greenfields. Waiter!"
He scrawled his initials at the bottom of the bill presented him,
and rose. "Sorry, Bannerman," he said, chuckling, "to cut short a
pleasant evening. But you shouldn't startle me so, you know.
Pardon me if I run; I _might_ miss that train."
"But there was something else--"
"It can wait."
"Take a later train, then."
"What! With this grave peril hanging over me? _Im_possible!
'Night."
Bannerman, discomfited, saw Maitland's shoulders disappear through
the dining-room doorway, meditated pursuit, thought better of it,
and reseated himself, frowning.
"Mad Maitland, indeed!" he commented.
As for the gentleman so characterized, he emerged, a moment later,
from the portals of the club, still chuckling mildly to himself as
he struggled into a light evening overcoat. His temper, having run
the gamut of boredom, interest, perturbation, mystification, and
plain amusement, was now altogether inconsequential: a dangerous
mood for Maitland. Standing on the corner of Twenty-sixth Street
he thought it over, tapping the sidewalk gently with his cane.
Should he or should he not carry out his intention as declared to
Bannerman, and go to Greenfields that same night? Or should he
keep his belated engagement with Cressy's party?
An errant cabby, cruising aimlessly but hopefully, sighted
Maitland's tall figure and white shirt from a distance, and bore
down upon him with a gallant clatter of hoofs.
"Kebsir?" he demanded breathlessly, pulling in at the corner.
Maitland came out of his reverie and looked up slowly. "Why yes,
thank you," he assented amiably.
"Where to, sir?"
Maitland paused on the forward deck of the craft and faced about,
looking the cabby trustfully in the eye. "I leave it to you," he
replied politely. "Just as you please."
The driver gasped.
"You see," Maitland continued with a courteous smile, "I have two
engagements: one at Sherry's, the other with the ten-twenty train
from Long Island City. What would you, as man to man, advise me to
do, cabby?"
"Well, sir, seein' as you puts it to me straight," returned the
cabby with engaging candor, "I'd go home, sir, if I was you, afore
I got any worse."
"Thank you," gravely. "Long Island City depôt, then, cabby."
Maitland extended himself languidly upon the cushions. "Surely,"
he told the night, "the driver knows best--he and Bannerman."
The cab started off jogging so sedately up Madison Avenue that
Maitland glanced at his watch and elevated his brows dubiously;
then with his stick poked open the trap in the roof.
"If you really think it best for me to go home, cabby, you'll have
to drive like hell," he suggested mildly.
"Yessir!"
A whip-lash cracked loudly over the horse's back, and the hansom,
lurching into Thirty-fourth Street on one wheel, was presently
jouncing eastward over rough cobbles, at a regardless pace which
roused the gongs of the surface cars to a clangor of hysterical
expostulation. In a trice the "L" extension was roaring overhead;
and a little later the ferry gates were yawning before them. Again
Maitland consulted his watch, commenting briefly: "In time."
Yet he reckoned without the ferry, one of whose employees
deliberately and implacably swung to the gates in the very face of
the astonished cab-horse, which promptly rose upon its hind legs
and pawed the air with gestures of pardonable exasperation. To no
avail, however; the gates remained closed, the cabby (with
language) reined his steed back a yard or two, and Maitland,
lighting a cigarette, composed himself to simulate patience.
Followed a wait of ten minutes or so, in which a number of
vehicles joined company with the cab; the passenger was vaguely
aware of the jarring purr of a motor-car, like that of some huge
cat, in the immediate rear. A circumstance which he had occasion
to recall ere long.
In the course of time the gates were again opened. The bridge
cleared of incoming traffic. As the cabby drove aboard the boat,
with nice consideration selecting the choicest stand of all, well
out upon the forward deck, a motor-car slid in, humming, on the
right of the hansom.
Maitland sat forward, resting his forearms on the apron, and
jerked his cigarette out over the gates; the glowing stub
described a fiery arc and took the water with a hiss. Warm whiffs
of the river's sweet and salty breath fanned his face gratefully,
and he became aware that there was a moon. His gaze roving at
will, he nodded an even-tempered approbation of the night's
splendor: in the city a thing unsuspected.
Never, he thought, had he known moonlight so pure, so silvery and
strong. Shadows of gates and posts lay upon the forward deck like
stencils of lamp-black upon white marble. Beyond the boat's
bluntly rounded nose the East River stretched its restless, dark
reaches, glossy black, woven with gorgeous ribbons of reflected
light streaming from pier-head lamps on the further shore.
Overhead, the sky, a pallid and luminous blue around the low-swung
moon, was shaded to profound depths of bluish-black toward the
horizon. Above Brooklyn rested a tenuous haze. A revenue cutter, a
slim, pale shape, cut across the bows like a hunted ghost. Farther
out a homeward-bound excursion steamer, tier upon tier of
glittering lights, drifted slowly toward its pier beneath the new
bridge, the blare of its band, swelling and dying upon the night
breeze, mercifully tempered by distance.
Presently Maitland's attention was distracted and drawn, by the
abrupt cessation of its motor's pulsing, to the automobile on his
right. He lifted his chin sharply, narrowing his eyes, whistled
low; and thereafter had eyes for nothing else.
The car, he saw with the experienced eye of a connoisseur, was a
recent model of one of the most expensive and popular foreign
makes: built on lines that promised a deal in the way of speed,
and furnished with engines that were pregnant with multiplied
horse-power: all in all not the style of car one would expect to
find controlled by a solitary woman, especially after ten of a
summer's night.
Nevertheless the lone occupant of this car was a woman. And there
was that in her bearing, an indefinable something,--whether it lay
in the carriage of her head, which impressed one as both spirited
and independent, or in an equally certain but less tangible air of
self-confidence and reliance,--to set Mad Maitland's pulses
drumming with excitement. For, unless indeed he labored gravely
under a misapprehension, he was observing her for the second time
within the past few hours.
Could he be mistaken, or was this in truth the same woman who had
(as he believed) made herself free of his rooms that evening?
In confirmation of such suspicion he remarked her costume, which
was altogether worked out in soft shades of grey. Grey was the
misty veil, drawn in and daintily knotted beneath her chin, which
lent her head and face such thorough protection against prying
glances; of grey suede were the light gauntlets that hid all save
the slenderness of her small hands; and the wrap that, cut upon
full and flowing lines, cloaked her figure beyond suggestion, was
grey. Yet even its ample drapery could not dissemble the fact that
she was quite small, girlishly slight, like the woman in the
doorway; nor did aught temper her impersonal and detached
composure, which had also been an attribute of the woman in the
doorway. And, again, she was alone, unchaperoned, unprotected....
Yes? Or no? And, if yes: what to do? Was he to alight and accost
her, accuse her of forcing an entrance to his rooms for the sole
purpose (as far as ascertainable) of presenting him with the
outline of her hand in the dust of his desk's top?... Oh, hardly!
It was all very well to be daringly eccentric and careless of the
world's censure; but one scarcely cared to lay one's self open
either to an unknown girl's derision or to a sound pummeling at
the hands of fellow passengers enraged by the insult offered to an
unescorted woman....
The young man was still pondering ways and means when a dull bump
apprised him that the ferry-boat was entering the Long Island City
slip. "The devil!" he exclaimed in mingled disgust and dismay,
realizing that his distraction had been so thorough as to permit
the voyage to take place almost without his realizing it. So that
now--worse luck!--it was too late to take any one of the hundred
fantastic steps he had contemplated half seriously. In another two
minutes his charming mystery, so bewitchingly incarnated, would
have slipped out of his life, finally and beyond recall. And he
could do naught to hinder such a finale to the adventure.
Sulkily he resigned himself to the inevitable, waiting and watching,
while the boat slid and blundered clumsily, paddle-wheels churning
the filthy waters over side, to the floating bridge; while the
winches rattled, and the woman, sitting up briskly in the driver's
seat of the motor-car, bent forward and advanced the spark; while
the chain fell clanking and the car shot out, over the bridge,
through the gates, and away, at a very considerable, even if lawful,
rate of speed.
Whereupon, writing _Finis_ to the final chapter of Romance,
voting the world a dull place and life a treadmill, anathematizing
in no uncertain terms his lack of resource and address, Maitland
paid off his cabby, alighted, and to that worthy's boundless
wonder, walked into the waiting-room of the railway terminus
without deviating a hair's-breadth from the straight and
circumscribed path of the sober in mind and body.
The ten-twenty had departed by a bare two minutes. The next and
last train for Greenfields was to leave at ten-fifty-nine.
Maitland with assumed nonchalance composed himself upon a bench in
the waiting-room to endure the thirty-seven minute interval. Five
minutes later an able-bodied washerwoman with six children in
quarter sizes descended upon the same bench; and the young man in
desperation allowed himself to be dispossessed. The news-stand
next attracting him, he garnered a fugitive amusement and two
dozen copper cents by the simple process of purchasing six "night
extras," which he did not want, and paying for each with a
five-cent piece. Comprehending, at length, that he had irritated
the news-dealer, he meandered off, jingling his copper-fortune in
one hand, lugging his newspapers in the other, and made a
determined onslaught upon a slot machine. The latter having
reluctantly disgorged twenty-four assorted samples of chewing-gum
and stale sweetmeats, Maitland returned to the washerwoman, and
sowed dissension in her brood by presenting the treasure-horde to
the eldest girl with instructions to share it with her brothers
and sisters.
It is difficult to imagine what folly might next have been
recorded against him had not, at that moment, a ferocious and
inarticulate howl from the train-starter announced the fact that
the ten-fifty-nine was in waiting.
Boarding the train in a thankful spirit, Maitland settled himself
as comfortably as he might in the smoker and endeavored to find
surcease of ennui in his collection of extras. In vain: even a
two-column portrait of Mr. Dan Anisty, cracksman, accompanied by a
vivacious catalogue of that notoriety's achievements in the field
of polite burglary, hardly stirred his interest. An elusive
resemblance which he traced in the features of Mr. Anisty, as
presented by the Sketch-Artist-on-the-Spot, to some one whom he,
Maitland, had known in the dark backwards and abysm of time,
merely drew from him the comment: "Homely brute!" And he laid the
papers aside, cradling his chin in the palm of one hand and
staring for a weary while out of the car window at a reeling and
moonsmitten landscape. He yawned exhaustively, his thoughts astray
between a girl garbed all in grey, Bannerman's earnest and
thoughtful face, and the pernicious activities of Mr. Daniel
Anisty, at whose door Maitland laid the responsibility for this
most fatiguing errand....
The brakeman's wolf-like yelp--"Greenfields!"--was ringing in his
ears when he awoke and stumbled down aisle and car-steps just in
the nick of time. The train, whisking round a curve cloaked by a
belt of somber pines, left him quite alone in the world, cast
ruthlessly upon his own resources.
An hour had elapsed; it was now midnight; the moon rode high, a
cold white disk against a background of sapphire velvet, its
pellucid rays revealing with disheartening distinctness the
inanimate and lightless roadside hamlet called Greenfields; its
general store and postoffice, its _soi-disant_ hotel, its
straggling line of dilapidated habitations, all wrapped in silence
profound and impenetrable. Not even a dog howled; not a belated
villager was in sight; and it was a moral certainty that the local
livery service had closed down for the night.
Nevertheless, Maitland, with a desperation bred of the prospective
five-mile tramp, spent some ten valuable minutes hammering upon
the door of the house infested by the proprietor of the livery
stable. He succeeded only in waking the dog, and inasmuch as he
was not on friendly terms with that animal, presently withdrew at
discretion and set his face northwards upon the open road.
It stretched before him invitingly enough, a ribbon winding
silver-white between dark patches of pine and scrub-oak or fields
lush with rustling corn and wheat. And, having overcome his
primary disgust, as the blood began to circulate more briskly in
his veins, Maitland became aware that he was actually enjoying the
enforced exercise. It could have been hardly otherwise, with a
night so sweet, with airs so bland and fragrant of the woods and
fresh-turned earth, with so clear a light to show him his way.
He stepped out briskly at first, swinging his stick and watching
his shadow, a squat, incredibly agitated silhouette in the golden
dust. But gradually and insensibly the peaceful influences of that
still and lovely hour tempered his heart's impatience; and he
found himself walking at a pace more leisurely. After all, there
was no hurry; he was unwearied, and Maitland Manor lay less than
five miles distant.
Thirty minutes passed; he had not covered a third of the way, yet
remained content. By well-remembered landmarks, he knew he must be
nearing the little stream called, by courtesy, Myannis River; and
in due course, he stepped out upon the long wooden structure that
spans that water. He was close upon the farther end when--upon a
hapchance impulse--he glanced over the nearest guard-rail, down at
the bed of the creek. And stopped incontinently, gaping.
Stationary in the middle of the depression, hub-deep in the
shallow waters, was a motor-car; and it, beyond dispute, was
identical with that which had occupied his thoughts on the
ferry-boat. Less wonderful, perhaps, but to him amazing enough, it
was to discover upon the driver's seat the girl in grey.
His brain benumbed beyond further capacity for astonishment, he
accepted without demur this latest and most astounding of the
chain of amazing coincidences which had thus far enlivened the
night's earlier hours; and stood rapt in silent contemplation,
sensible that the girl had been unaware of his approach, deadened
as his footsteps must have been by the blanket of dust that
carpeted both road and bridge deep and thick.
On her part she sat motionless, evidently lost in reverie, and
momentarily, at least, unconscious of the embarrassing predicament
which was hers. So complete, indeed, seemed her abstraction that
Maitland caught himself questioning the reality of her.... And
well might she have seemed to him a pale little wraith of the
night, the shimmer of grey that she made against the shimmer of
light on the water,--a shape almost transparent, slight, and
unsubstantial--seeming to contemplate, and as still as any
mouse....
Looking more attentively, it became evident that her veil was now
raised. This was the first time that he had seen her so. But her
countenance remained so deeply shadowed by the visor of a mannish
motoring-cap that the most searching scrutiny gained no more than
a dim and scantily satisfactory impression of alluring loveliness.
Maitland turned noiselessly, rested elbows on the rail, and,
staring, framed a theory to account for her position, if not for
her patience.
On either hand the road, dividing, struck off at a tangent, down
the banks and into the river-bed. It was credible to presume that
the girl had lost control of the machine temporarily and that it,
taking the bit between its teeth, had swung gaily down the incline
to its bath.
Why she lingered there, however, was less patent. The water, as
has been indicated, was some inches below the tonneau; it did not
seem reasonable to assume that it should have interfered with
either running-gear or motor....
At this point in Maitland's meditations the grey girl appeared to
have arrived at a decision. She straightened up suddenly, with a
little resolute nod of her head, lifting one small foot to her
knee, and fumbled with the laces of her shoe.
Maitland grasped her intention to abandon the machine, with her
determination to wade! Clearly this would seem to demonstrate that
there had been a breakdown, irreparable so far as frail feminine
hands were concerned.
One shoe removed, its fellow would follow, and then.... Out of
sheer chivalry, the involuntary witness was moved to earnest
protest.
"Don't!" he cried hastily. "I say, don't wade!"
Her superb composure claimed his admiration. Absolutely ignorant
though she had been of his proximity, the voice from out of the
skies evidently alarmed her not at all. Still bending over the
lifted foot, she turned her head slowly and looked up; and "Oh!"
said a small voice tinged with relief. And coolly knotting the
laces again, she sat up. "I didn't hear you, you know."
"Nor I see you," Maitland supplemented unblushingly, "until a
moment ago. I--er--can I be of assistance?"
"Can't you?"
"Idiot!" said Maitland severely, both to and of himself. Aloud: "I
think I can."
"I hope so,"--doubtfully. "It's very unfortunate. I ... was running
rather fast, I suppose, and didn't see the slope until too late.
_Now_," opening her hands in a gesture ingenuously charming
with its suggestion of helplessness and dependence, "I don't know
what _can_ be the matter with the machine."
"I'm coming down," announced Maitland briefly. "Wait."
"Thank you, I shall."
She laughed, and Maitland could have blushed for his inanity;
happily he had action to cloak his embarrassment. In a twinkling
he was at the water's edge, pausing there to listen, with
admirable docility, to her plaintive objection: "But you'll get
wet and--and ruin your things. I can't ask that of you."
He chuckled, by way of reply, slapping gallantly into the shallows
and courageously wading out to the side of the car. Whereupon he
was advised in tones of fluttered indignation:
"You simply _wouldn't_ listen to me! And I _warned_ you!
Now you're soaking wet and will certainly catch your death of
cold, and--and what can _I_ do? Truly, I am sorry...."
Here the young man lost track of her remark. He was looking up
into the shadow of the motoring-cap, discovering things; for the
shadow was set at naught by the moon luster that, reflected from
the surface of the stream, invested with a gentle and glamorous
radiance the face that bent above him. And he caught at his breath
sharply, direst fears confirmed: she was pretty indeed--perilously
pretty. The firm, resolute chin, the sensitive, sweet line of
scarlet lips, the straight little nose, the brows delicately
arched, the large, alert, tawny eyes with the dangerous sweet
shadows beneath, the glint as of raw copper where her hair caught
the light--Maitland appreciated them all far too well; and
clutched nervously the rail of the seat, trying to steady himself,
to re-collect his routed wits and consider sensibly that it all
was due to the magic of the moon, belike; the witchery of this
apparition that looked down into his eyes so gravely.
"Of course," he mumbled, "it's too beautiful to endure. Of course
it will all fade, vanish utterly in the cold light of day...."
Above him, perplexed brows gathered ominously. "I beg pardon?"
"I--er--yes," he stammered at random.
"You--er--what?"
Positively, she was laughing at him! He, Maitland the exquisite,
Mad Maitland the imperturbable, was being laughed at by a mere
child, a girl scarcely out of her teens. He glanced upward, caught
her eye a-gleam with merriment, and looked away with much vain
dignity.
"I was saying," he manufactured, "that I did not mind the wetting
in the least. I'm happy to be of service."
"You weren't saying anything of the sort," she contradicted
calmly. "However...." She paused significantly.
Maitland experienced an instantaneous sensation as of furtive
guilt, decidedly the reverse of comfortable. He shuffled uneasily.
There was a brief silence, on her part expectant, on his, blank.
His mental attitude remained hopeless: for some mysterious reason
his nonchalance had deserted him in the hour of his supremest
need; not in all his experience did he remember anything like
this--as awkward.
The river purled indifferently about his calves; a vagrant breeze
disturbed the tree-tops and died of sheer lassitude; Time plodded
on with measured stride. Then, abruptly, full-winged inspiration
was born out of the chaos of his mind. Listening intently, he
glanced with covert suspicion at the bridge: it proved untenanted,
inoffensive of mien; nor arose there any sound of hoof or wheel
upon the highway. Again he looked up at the girl; and found her in
thoughtful mood, frowning, regarding him steadily beneath level
brows.
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