The Black Bag by Louis Joseph Vance
VII
DIVERSIONS OF A RUINED GENTLEMAN--RESUMED
From the commanding elevation of the box, "Three 'n' six," enunciated thecabby, his tone that of a man prepared for trouble, acquainted withtrouble, inclined to give trouble a welcome. His bloodshot eyes blinkedtruculently at his alighted fare. "Three 'n' six," he iteratedaggressively.
An adjacent but theretofore abstracted policeman pricked up his ears andassumed 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 tothird-class waiting-rooms. Continuing to fumble through his pockets for anelusive sovereign purse, he looked up mildly at the man.
"All right, cabby," he said, with pacific purpose; "you'll get your fare inhalf 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 alifelike imitation of a rumpled parrot. "I 'ad trouble enough wif you atBermondsey Ol' Stairs, hover that quid you promised, didn't I? Sing it! Myheye!"
"Quid, cabby?" And then, remembering that he had promised the fellow asovereign for fast driving from Quadrant Mews, Kirkwood grinned broadly,eyes twinkling; for Mulready must have fallen heir to that covenant. "Butyou got the sovereign? You got it, didn't you, cabby?"
The driver affirmed the fact with unnecessary heat and profanity and anamendment to the effect that he would have spoiled his fare's sanguinaryconk had the outcome been less satisfactory.
The information proved so amusing that Kirkwood, chuckling, forbore toresent the manner of its delivery, and, abandoning until a more favorabletime the chase of the coy sovereign purse, extracted from one trouserpocket half a handful of large English small change.
"Three shillings, six-pence," he counted the coins into the cabby's grimyand bloated paw; and added quietly: "The exact distance is rather lessthan, four miles, my man; your fare, precisely two shillings. You may keepthe extra eighteen pence, for being such a conscientious blackguard,--ortalk it over with the officer here. Please yourself."
He nodded to the bobby, who, favorably impressed by the silk hat whichKirkwood, by diligent application of his sleeve during the cross-town ride,had managed to restore to a state somewhat approximating its erstwhileluster, 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 headtowards the vanishing four-wheeler.
"Right you are," agreed Kirkwood amiably, still tickled by the knowledgethat Mulready had been obliged to pay three times over for the ride thatended in his utter discomfiture. Somehow, Kirkwood had conceived no likingwhatever for the man; Calendar he could, at a pinch, tolerate for his senseof humor, but Mulready--! "A surly dog," he thought him.
Acknowledging the policeman's salute and restoring two shillings and afew fat copper pennies to his pocket, he entered the vast and echoingtrain-shed. In the act, his attention was attracted and immediately rivetedby the spectacle of a burly luggage navvy in a blue jumper in the act ofmaking off with a large, folding sign-board, of which the surface waslettered 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 Britishworking-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 tillmornin', sir."
"Oh-h!..."
Aimlessly Kirkwood drifted away, his mind a blank.
Sometime later he found himself on the steps outside the station, trying tostare out of countenance a glaring electric mineral-water advertisement onthe farther side of the Euston Road.
He was stranded....
Beyond the spiked iron fence that enhedges the incurving drive, the roar oftraffic, human, wheel and hoof, rose high for all the lateness of the hour:sidewalks groaning with the restless contact of hundreds of ill-shodfeet; the roadway thundering--hansoms, four-wheelers, motor-cars, dwarfedcoster-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 theradiance of some lurid and sinister moon. The voice of London sounded inKirkwood'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- andcigarette-cases, match-box, penknife--all the minutiae of pocket-hardwareaffected by civilized man; with old letters, a card-case, a square envelopecontaining his steamer ticket; but no sovereign purse. His small-changepocket held less than three shillings--two and eight, to be exact--and abrass key, which he failed to recognize as one of his belongings.
And that was all. At sometime during the night he had lost (or beencunningly bereft of?) that little purse of chamois-skin containing thethree golden sovereigns which he had been husbanding to pay his steamerexpenses, and which, if only he had them now, would stand between him andstarvation 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 softlya number of times, to get the exact flavor of it, and found it little tohis taste. And yet...
He thrust both hands deep in his trouser pockets and stared purposelesslyinto space, twisting his eyebrows out of alignment and crookedly protrudinghis lower lip.
If Brentwick were only in town--But he wasn't, and wouldn't be, within theweek.
"No good waiting here," he concluded. Composing his face, he reentered thestation. There were his trunks, of course. He couldn't leave them standingon the station platform for ever.
He found the luggage-room and interviewed a mechanically courteousattendant, who, as the result of profound deliberation, advised him to tryhis luck at the lost-luggage room, across the station. He accepted theadvice; it was a foregone conclusion that his effects had not been conveyedto the Tilbury dock; they could not have been loaded into the luggage vanwithout his personal supervision. Still, anything was liable to happen whenhis unlucky star was in the ascendant.
He found them in the lost-luggage room.
A clerk helped him identify the articles and ultimately clucked with aperfunctory note: "Sixpence each, please."
"I--ah--pardon?"
"Sixpence each, the fixed charge, sir. For every twenty-four hours orfraction 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 wayhastily out of the station, lest a worse thing befall him. "No, bless yourheart!--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 tilldawn; 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 st
Sable garments fluttering, Care fell into step with Philip Kirkwood; Carethe 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 hisear. "But no, my boy; I'm with you now, for ever and a day. 'Misery lovescompany,' 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? _Whatare 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 intohis consciousness. What was he to do?
An hour passed.
Denied the opportunity to satisfy its beast hunger and thirst, humanitygoes off to its beds. In that hour London quieted wonderfully; the streetsachieved an effect of deeper darkness, the skies, lowering, looked downwith 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 aslightships in a trackless sea; each new-found street unfolded itsperspective like a canyon of mystery, and yet teeming with a hundred maskedhazards; the air acquired a smell more clear and clean, an effect morevolatile; and the night-mist thickened until it studded one's attire withmyriads 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 notto know: a silent, black street one brief block in length, walled withdead and lightless dwellings, haunted by his errant memory; a street whoseatmosphere was heavy with impalpable essence of desuetude; in two words,Frognall Street.
Kirkwood identified it with a start and a guilty tremor. He stoppedstock-still, in an unreasoning state of semi-panic, arrested by a sillyimpulse to turn and fly; as if the bobby, whom he descried approaching himwith measured stride, pausing now and again to try a door or flashhis bull's-eye down an area, were to be expected to identify the manresponsible for that damnable racket raised ere midnight in vacant Number9!
Oddly enough, the shock of recognition brought him to hissenses,--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 acool word in response to the man's good-natured, "Good-night, sir." Number9 was on the other side of the street; and he favored its blank and drearyelevation with a prolonged and frank stare--that profited him nothing, bythe way. For a crazy notion popped incontinently into his head, and wouldnot be cast forth.
At the corner he swerved and crossed, still possessed of his devil ofinspiration. It would be unfair to him to say that he did not struggle toresist it, for he did, because it was fairly and egregiously asinine; yetstruggling, his feet trod the path to which it tempted him.
"Why," he expostulated feebly, "I might's well turn back and beat thatbobby over the head with my cane!..."
But at the moment his hand was in his change pocket, feeling over that samebrass door-key which earlier he had been unable to account for, and he wasinforming himself how very easy it would have been for the sovereign purseto have dropped from his waistcoat pocket while he was sliding on his eardown the dark staircase. To recover it meant, at the least, shelter forthe night, followed by a decent, comfortable and sustaining morning meal.Fortified by both he could redeem his luggage, change to clothing moresuitable for daylight traveling, pawn his valuables, and enter intonegotiations with the steamship company for permission to exchange hispassage, with a sum to boot, for transportation on another liner. A mostfeasible project! A temptation all but irresistible!
But then--the risk.... Supposing (for the sake of argument) the customarynight-watchman to have taken up a transient residence in Number 9;supposing the police to have entered with him and found the stunned man onthe second floor: would the watchman not be vigilant for another nocturnalmarauder? would not the police now, more than ever, be keeping a wary eyeon that house of suspicious happenings?
Decidedly, to reenter it would be to incur a deadly risk. And yet,undoubtedly, beyond question! his sovereign purse was waiting for himsomewhere on the second flight of stairs; while as his means of clandestineentry lay warm in his fingers--the key to the dark entry, which he had byforce of habit pocketed after locking the door.
He came to the Hog-in-the-Pound. Its windows were dim with low-turnedgas-lights. Down the covered alleyway, Quadrant Mews slept in a dusk butfitfully relieved by a lamp or two round which the friendly mist clungclose 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 chinand cursing the fact that his hat must stand out like a chimney-pot on adetached house, he sped on tiptoe down the cobbled way and close beneaththe house-walls of Quadrant Mews. But, half-way in, he stopped, confoundedby an unforeseen difficulty. How was he to identify the narrow entry ofNumber 9, whose counterparts doubtless communicated with the mews fromevery residence on four sides of the city block?
The low inner tenements were yet high enough to hide the rear elevations ofFrognall Street houses, and the mist was heavy besides; otherwise he hadmade 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 thathe would blunder into the servant's quarters of some inhabited house,and--be promptly and righteously sat upon by the service-staff, while thebobby was summoned.
Be that as it might--he almost lost his head when he realized this--escapewas already cut off by the way he had come. Some one, or, rather, some twomen were entering the alley. He could hear the tramping and shuffle ofclumsy feet, and voices that muttered indistinctly. One seemed to trip oversomething, and cursed. The other laughed; the voices grew more loud. Theywere 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 cobbletime-worn to glassy smoothness; he lurched, caught himself up in time tosave 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 accountof himself, "like a goo' feller." Another tempted him with offers of drinkand sociable confabulation. He yielded not; adamantine to the seductivelure, he picked up his heels and ran. Those behind him, remarking withresentment the amazing fact that an intimate of the mews should run awayfrom liquor, cursed and made after him, veering, staggering, howling likeravening animals.
For all their burden of intoxication, they knew the ground by instinct andfrom long association. They gained on him. Across the way a window-sashwent up with a bang, and a woman screamed. Through the only other entranceto the mews a belated cab was homing; its driver, getting wind of theunusual, 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 sheerdesperation flung himself, key in hand, against the door at the end. Markhow his luck served him who had forsworn her! He found a keyhole andinserted the key. It turned. So did the knob. The door gave inward. He fellin with it, slammed it, shot the bolts, and, panting
Outside somebody brushed against one wall, cannoned to the other, broughtup with a crash against the door, and, perforce at a standstill, swore fromhis 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. Gornan' 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 ofsulphur-tainted air. The mews quieted gradually.
Indoors Kirkwood faced unhappily the enigma of fortuity, wondering: Wasthis by any possibility Number 9?
The key had fitted; the bolts had been drawn on the inside; and whilethe key had been one of ordinary pattern and would no doubt have proveneffectual with any one of a hundred common locks, the finger of probabilityseemed to indicate that his luck had brought him back to Number 9.
In spite of all this, he was sensible of little confidence; though thiswere truly Number 9, his freedom still lay on the knees of the gods, hisvery 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 viewof the racket he had raised in entering, but which at the moment seemedmost natural and in accordance with common sense. Then rising, he held hisbreath, staring and listening. About him the pitch darkness was punctuatedwith fading points of fire, and in his ears was a noise of strangewhisperings, very creepy--until, gritting his teeth, he controlled hisnerves and gradually realized that he was alone, the silence undisturbed.
He went forward gingerly, feeling his way like a blind man on strangeground. Ere long he stumbled over a door-sill and found that the wallsof the passage had fallen away; he had entered a room, a black cavern ofindeterminate dimensions. Across this he struck at random, walked himselfflat against a wall, felt his way along to an open door, and passed throughto another apartment as dark as the first.
Here, endeavoring to make a circuit of the walls, he succeeded in throwinghimself bodily across a bed, which creaked horribly; and for a full minutelay as he had fallen, scarce daring to think. But nothing followed, and hegot up and found a shut door which let him into yet a third room, whereinhe barked both shins on a chair; and escaped to a fourth whose atmospherewas highly flavored with reluctant odors of bygone cookery, stale water anddamp plumbing--probably the kitchen. Thence progressing over complainingfloors through what may have been the servants' hall, a large room witha table in the middle and a number of promiscuous chairs (witness histortured 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 evenmomentarily forgetful of the potential police and night-watchman.
However, he mounted the steps to the ground floor without adventure andfound himself at last in the same dim and ghostly hall which he had enteredsome six hours before; the mockery of dusk admitted by the fan-light wasjust strong enough to enable him to identify the general lay of the landand 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 movedtoward the foot of the second flight, approaching the spot whereat he wasto begin the search for the missing purse. The knowledge that he lackedmeans of obtaining illumination deterred him nothing; he had some hopeof finding matches in one of the adjacent rooms, but, failing that, wasprepared to ascend the stairs on all fours, feeling every inch of theirsurface, if it took hours. Ever an optimistic soul, instinctively inclinedto father faith with a hope, he felt supremely confident that his searchwould not prove fruitless, that he would win early release from histemporary straits.
And thus it fell out that, at the instant he was thinking it time to beginto crawl and hunt, his stockinged feet came into contact with somethingheavy, yielding, warm--something that moved, moaned, and caused his hair tobristle and his flesh to creep.
We will make allowances for him; all along he had gone on the assumptionthat his antagonist of the dark stairway would have recovered and made offwith all expedition, in the course of ten or twenty minutes, at most, fromthe time of his accident. To find him still there was something entirelyoutside of Kirkwood's reckoning: he would as soon have thought to encountersay, Calendar,--would have preferred the latter, indeed. But this fellowwhose disability was due to his own interference, who was reasonably to becounted 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 themoan that Kirkwood heard, had been distressingly faint.
"Poor devil!" murmured the young man. "He must be in a pretty bad way, forsure!" He knelt, compassion gentling his heart, and put one hand to theinsentient face. A warm sweat moistened his fingers; his palm was fanned bysteady respiration.
Immeasurably perplexed, the American rose, slipped on his shoes andbuttoned them, thinking hard the while. What ought he to do? Obviouslyflight suggested itself,--incontinent flight, anticipating the man'srecovery. On the other hand, indubitably the latter had sustained suchinjury that consciousness, when it came to him, would hardly be reinforcedby much aggressive power. Moreover, it was to be remembered that the onewas in that house with quite as much warrant as the other, unless Kirkwoodhad drawn a rash inference from the incident of the ragged sentry. The twoof them were mutual, if antagonistic, trespassers; neither would darebring about the arrest of the other. And then--and this was not the leastconsideration to influence Kirkwood--perhaps the fellow would die if he gotno attention.
Kirkwood shut his teeth grimly. "I'm no assassin," he informed himself, "tostrike 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, noteven to me, what happens to me; while _he_ may be valuable."
Light upon the subject, actual as well as figurative, seemed to be thefirst essential; his mind composed, Kirkwood set himself in search of it.The floor he was on, however, afforded him no assistance; the mantels wereguiltless of candles and he discovered no matches, either in the wide andsilent drawing-room, with its ghastly furniture, like mummies in theirlinen swathings, or in the small boudoir at the back. He was to look eitherabove or below, it seemed.
After some momentary hesitation, he went up-stairs, his ascent marked by asingle and grateful accident; half-way to the top he trod on an object thatclinked underfoot, and, stooping, retrieved the lost purse. Thus was hejustified 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, Kirkwoodfound a stump of candle in a china candlestick; the two charred ends ofmatches at its base were only an irritating discovery, however--evidencethat real matches had been the mode in Number 9, at some remote date.Disgusted and oppressed by cumulative inquisitiveness, he took thecandle-end back to the hall; he would have given much for the time andmeans 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 ofDorothy Calender--bewitching riddle that she was!--that fascinated hisimagination so completely. Aside from her altogether, the great house thatstood untenanted, yet in such complete order, so self-contained in itsdarkened quiet, intrigued him equally with the train of inexplicable eventsthat had brought him within its walls. Now--since his latest entrance--hisvision had adjusted itself to cope with the obscurity to some extent; andthe street lights, meagerly reflected through the windows from the bosom ofa sullen pall of cloud, low-swung above the city, had helped him to piecetogether many a detail of decoration and furnishing, alike somber andrichly dignified. Kirkwood told himself that the own
Making his way down-stairs to the stricken man--who was quite as he hadbeen--Kirkwood bent over and thrust rifling fingers into his pockets,regardless of the wretched sense of guilt and sneakishness imparted by theaction, stubbornly heedless of the possibility of the man's awakening tofind himself being searched and robbed.
In the last place he sought, which should (he realized) have been thefirst, to wit, the fob pocket of the white waistcoat, he found a small goldmatchbox, packed tight with wax vestas; and, berating himself for crassstupidity--he had saved a deal of time and trouble by thinking of thisbefore--lighted the candle.
As its golden flame shot up with scarce a tremor, preyed upon by aperfectly 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, betrayingfew characteristics other than the purely negative attributes of acharacter as yet unformed, possibly unformable; much the sort of a facethat he might have expected to see, remembering those thin and pouting lipsthat before had impressed him. Its owner was probably little more thantwenty. In his attire there was a suspicion of a fop's preciseness, asidefrom its accidental disarray; the cut of his waistcoat was the extreme ofthe then fashion, the white tie (twisted beneath one ear) an exaggerated"butterfly," his collar nearly an inch too tall; and he was shod with pumpssuitable only for the dancing-floor,--a whim of the young-bloods of Londonof that year.
"I can't make him out at all!" declared Kirkwood. "The son of a gentlemantoo weak to believe that cubs need licking into shape? Reared to man'sestate, 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 assortedwith his double role of persecutor of distressed damsels and nocturnalhouse-breaker!
Kirkwood bent closer above the motionless head, with puzzled eyes strivingto pin down some elusive resemblance that he thought to trace in thosevacuous features--a resemblance to some one he had seen, or known, at somepast time, somewhere, somehow.
"I give it up. Guess I'm mistaken. Anyhow, five young Englishmen out ofevery ten of his class are just as blond and foolish. Now let's see how badhe'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 lookingbump at the base of the skull; and, the skin having been broken, possiblyin collision with the sharp-edged newel-post, a little blood had stainedand matted the straw-colored hair.
Kirkwood let the head down and took thought. Recalling a bath-room on thefloor above, thither he went, unselfishly forgetful of his predicament ifdiscovered, and, turning on the water, sopped his handkerchief until itdripped. Then, returning, he took the boy's head on his knees, washed thewound, purloined another handkerchief (of silk, with a giddy border)from the other's pocket, and of this manufactured a rude but serviceablebandage.
Toward the conclusion of his attentions, the sufferer began to show signsof returning animation. He stirred restlessly, whimpered a little, andsighed. And Kirkwood, in consternation, got up.
"So!" he commented ruefully. "I guess I am an ass, all right--taking allthat trouble for you, my friend. If I've got a grain of sense left, this ismy cue to leave you alone in your glory."
He was lingering only to restore to the boy's pockets such articles as hehad 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. Butere 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, hisprimal impulse to cut-and-run for it was gone; he had nothing to fear fromthis child who could not prevent his going whenever he chose to go; whileby remaining he might perchance worm from him something about the girl.
"You're feeling better?" He was almost surprised to hear his own voice putthe query.
"I--I think so. Ow, my head!... I say, you chap, whoever you are, what'shappened?... 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 armbeneath the boy's shoulder and helping him to a sitting position. "Do youremember?"
The other snuffled childishly and scrubbed across the floor to rest hisback against the wall.
"Why-y ... I remember fallin'; and then ... I woke up and it was all darkand 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'tsuppose--?"
He had been conscious of a carriage rolling up from the corner, as well asthat it had drawn up (presumably) before a near-by dwelling. Now the rattleof 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 runup-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 thecandle, where it rested on the floor. One glimpse would suffice to show himthe 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 thoseentering were standing, irresolute, undecided which way to turn; butabruptly enough the glimmer of candlelight must have been noticed. Kirkwoodheard 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 silkenskirts; and a woman stood at the head of the flight--to the American anapparition profoundly amazing as she paused, the light from the floorcasting odd, theatric shadows beneath her eyes and over her brows, edgingher eyes themselves with brilliant light beneath their dark lashes, showingher lips straight and drawn, and shimmering upon the spangles of an eveninggown, visible beneath the dark cloak which had fallen back from her white,beautiful shoulders.