The Black Bag by Louis Joseph Vance (best manga ereader .TXT) đź“–
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“I was told that my great-uncle’s collection of jewels had been my mother’s
property. He had in life a passion for collecting jewels, and it had been
his whim to carry them with him, wherever he went. When he died in Frognall
Street, they were in the safe by the head of his bed. I, in my grief, at
first forgot them, and then afterwards carelessly put off removing them.
“To come back to my father: Night before last we were to call on Mrs.
Hallam. It was to be our last night in England; we were to sail for the
Continent on the private yacht of a friend of my father’s, the next
morning…. This is what I was told—and believed, you understand.
“That night Mrs. Hallam was dining at another table at the Pless, it seems.
I did not then know her. When leaving, she put a note on our table, by my
father’s elbow. I was astonished beyond words…. He seemed much agitated,
told me that he was called away on urgent business, a matter of life and
death, and begged me to go alone to Frognall Street, get the jewels and
meet him at Mrs. Hallam’s later…. I wasn’t altogether a fool, for I began
dimly to suspect, then, that something was wrong; but I was a fool, for I
consented to do as he desired. You understand—you know—?”
“I do, indeed,” replied Kirkwood grimly. “I understand a lot of things now
that I didn’t five minutes ago. Please let me think…”
But the time he took for deliberation was short. He had hoped to find a way
to spare her, by sparing Calendar; but momentarily he was becoming more
impressed with the futility of dealing with her save in terms of candor,
merciful though they might seem harsh.
“I must tell you,” he said, “that you have been outrageously misled,
swindled and deceived. I have heard from your father’s own lips that Mrs.
Hallam was to pay him two thousand pounds for keeping you out of England
and losing you your inheritance. I’m inclined to question, furthermore, the
assertion that these jewels were your mother’s. Frederick Hallam was the
man who followed you into the Frognall Street house and attacked me on the
stairs; Mrs. Hallam admits that he went there to get the jewels. But he
didn’t want anybody to know it.”
“But that doesn’t prove—”
“Just a minute.” Rapidly and concisely Kirkwood recounted the events
wherein he had played a part, subsequent to the adventure of Bermondsey Old
Stairs. He was guilty of but one evasion; on one point only did he slur the
truth: he conceived it his honorable duty to keep the girl in ignorance of
his straitened circumstances; she was not to be distressed by knowledge of
his distress, nor could he tolerate the suggestion of seeming to play for
her sympathy. It was necessary, then, to invent a motive to excuse his
return to 9, Frognall Street. I believe he chose to exaggerate the
inquisitiveness of his nature and threw in for good measure a desire
to recover a prized trinket of no particular moment, esteemed for its
associations, and so forth. But whatever the fabrication, it passed muster;
to the girl his motives seemed less important than the discoveries that
resulted from them.
“I am afraid,” he concluded the summary of the confabulation he had
overheard at the skylight of the Alethea’s cabin, “you’d best make up your
mind that your father—”
“Yes,” whispered the girl huskily; and turned her face to the window, a
quivering muscle in the firm young throat alone betraying her emotion.
“It’s a bad business,” he pursued relentlessly: “bad all round. Mulready,
in your father’s pay, tries to have him arrested, the better to rob him.
Mrs. Hallam, to secure your property for that precious pet, Freddie,
connives at, if she doesn’t instigate, a kidnapping. Your father takes her
money to deprive you of yours,—which could profit him nothing so long as
you remained in lawful possession of it; and at the same time he conspires
to rob, through you, the rightful owners—if they are rightful owners. And
if they are, why does Freddie Hallam go like a thief in the night to secure
property that’s his beyond dispute?… I don’t really think you owe your
father any further consideration.”
He waited patiently. Eventually, “No-o,” the girl sobbed assent.
“It’s this way: Calendar, counting on your sparing him in the end, is going
to hound us. He’s doing it now: there’s Hobbs in the next car, for proof.
Until these jewels are returned, whether to Frognall Street or to young
Hallam, we’re both in danger, both thieves in the sight of the law. And
your father knows that, too. There’s no profit to be had by discounting the
temper of these people; they’re as desperate a gang of swindlers as ever
lived. They’ll have those jewels if they have to go as far as murder—”
“Mr. Kirkwood!” she deprecated, in horror.
He wagged his head stubbornly, ominously. “I’ve seen them in the raw.
They’re hot on our trail now; ten to one, they’ll be on our backs before we
can get across the Channel. Once in England we will be comparatively safe.
Until then … But I’m a brute—I’m frightening you!”
“You are, dreadfully,” she confessed in a tremulous voice.
“Forgive me. If you look at the dark side first, the other seems all the
brighter. Please don’t worry; we’ll pull through with flying colors, or my
name’s not Philip Kirkwood!”
“I have every faith in you,” she informed him, flawlessly sincere. “When
I think of all you’ve done and dared for me, on the mere suspicion that I
needed your help—”
“We’d best be getting ready,” he interrupted hastily. “Here’s Brussels.”
It was so. Lights, in little clusters and long, wheeling lines, were
leaping out of the darkness and flashing back as the train rumbled through
the suburbs of the little Paris of the North. Already the other passengers
were bestirring themselves, gathering together wraps and hand luggage, and
preparing for the journey’s end.
Rising, Kirkwood took down their two satchels from the overhead rack,
and waited, in grim abstraction planning and counterplanning against the
machinations in whose wiles they two had become so perilously entangled.
Primarily, there was Hobbs to be dealt with; no easy task, for Kirkwood
dared not resort to violence nor in any way invite the attention of the
authorities; and threats would be an idle waste of breath, in the case of
that corrupt and malignant, little cockney, himself as keen as any needle,
adept in all the artful resources of the underworld whence he had sprung,
and further primed for action by that master rogue, Calendar.
The train was pulling slowly into the station when he reluctantly abandoned
his latest unfeasible scheme for shaking off the little Englishman,
and concluded that their salvation was only to be worked out through
everlasting vigilance, incessant movement, and the favor of the blind
goddess, Fortune. There was comfort of a sort in the reflection that
the divinity of chance is at least blind; her favors are impartially
distributed; the swing of the wheel of the world is not always to the
advantage of the wrongdoer and the scamp.
He saw nothing of Hobbs as they alighted and hastened from the station, and
hardly had time to waste looking for him, since their train had failed to
make up the precious ten minutes. Consequently he dismissed the fellow from
his thoughts until—with Brussels lingering in their memories a garish
vision of brilliant streets and glowing caf�s, glimpsed furtively
from their cab windows during its wild dash over the broad mid-city,
boulevards—at midnight they settled themselves in a carriage of the Bruges
express. They were speeding along through the open country with a noisy
clatter; then a minute’s investigation sufficed to discover the mate of the
Alethea serenely ensconced in the coach behind.
The little man seemed rarely complacent, and impudently greeted Kirkwood’s
scowling visage, as the latter peered through the window in the coach-door,
with a smirk and a waggish wave of his hand. The American by main strength
of will-power mastered an impulse to enter and wring his neck, and returned
to the girl, more disturbed than he cared to let her know.
There resulted from his review of the case but one plan for outwitting Mr.
Hobbs, and that lay in trusting to his confidence that Kirkwood and Dorothy
Calendar would proceed as far toward Ostend as the train would take
them—namely, to the limit of the run, Bruges.
Thus inspired, Kirkwood took counsel with the girl, and when the train
paused at Ghent, they made an unostentatious exit from their coach, finding
themselves, when the express had rolled on into the west, upon a station
platform in a foreign city at nine minutes past one o’clock in the
morning—but at length without their shadow. Mr. Hobbs had gone on to
Bruges.
Kirkwood sped his journeyings with an unspoken malediction, and collected
himself to cope with a situation which was to prove hardly more happy for
them than the espionage they had just eluded. The primal flush of triumph
which had saturated the American’s humor on this signal success, proved but
fictive and transitory when inquiry of the station attendants educed the
information that the two earliest trains to be obtained were the 5:09 for
Dunkerque and the 5:37 for Ostend. A minimum delay of four hours was to be
endured in the face of many contingent features singularly unpleasant to
contemplate. The station waiting-room was on the point of closing for the
night, and Kirkwood, already alarmed by the rapid ebb of the money he had
had of Calendar, dared not subject his finances to the strain of a night’s
lodging at one of Ghent’s hotels. He found himself forced to be cruel to
be kind to the girl, and Dorothy’s cheerful acquiescence to their sole
alternative of tramping the street until daybreak did nothing to alleviate
Kirkwood’s exasperation.
It was permitted them to occupy a bench outside the station. There the
girl, her head pillowed on the treasure bag, napped uneasily, while
Kirkwood plodded restlessly to and fro, up and down the platform, communing
with the Shade of Care and addling his poor, weary wits with the problem
of the future,—not so much his own as the future of the unhappy child for
whose welfare he had assumed responsibility. Dark for both of them, in his
understanding To-morrow loomed darkest for her.
Not until the gray, formless light of the dawn-dusk was wavering over the
land, did he cease his perambulations. Then a gradual stir of life in the
city streets, together with the appearance of a station porter or two,
opening the waiting-rooms and preparing them against the traffic of the
day, warned him that he must rouse his charge. He paused and stood over
her, reluctant to disturb her rest, such as it was, his heart torn with
compassion for her, his soul embittered by the cruel irony of their estate.
If what he understood were true, a king’s ransom was secreted within the
cheap, imitation-leather satchel which served her for a pillow. But it
availed her nothing for her comfort. If what he believed were true, she was
absolute mistress of that treasure of jewels; yet that night she had been
forced to sleep on a hard, uncushioned bench, in the open air, and this
morning he must waken her to the life of a hunted thing. A week ago she had
had at her command every luxury known to the civilized world; to-day she
was friendless, but for his inefficient, worthless self, and in
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