The Black Bag Part 47

"We'll have to drop off in a minute. The horse won't last.... They're in the same box. Well, I undertake to stand 'em off for a bit; you take the bag and run for it. Just as soon as I can convince them, I'll follow, but if there's any delay, you call the first cab you see and drive to the Pless. I'll join you there."

He stood up, surveying the neighborhood. Behind him the girl lifted her voice in protest.

"No, Philip, no!"

"You've promised," he said sternly, eyes ranging the street.

"I don't care; I won't leave you."

He shook his head in silent contradiction, frowning; but not frowning because of the girl's mutiny. He was a little puzzled by a vague impression, and was striving to pin it down for recognition; but was so thoroughly bemused with fatigue and despair that only with great difficulty could he force his faculties to logical reasoning, his memory to respond to his call upon it.

The hansom was traversing a street in Old Brompton--a quaint, prim by-way lined with dwellings singularly Old-Worldish, even for London. He seemed to know it subjectively, to have retained a memory of it from another existence: as the stage setting of a vivid dream, all forgotten, will sometimes recur with peculiar and exasperating intensity, in broad daylight. The houses, with their sloping, red-tiled roofs, unexpected gables, spontaneous dormer windows, gla.s.s panes set in leaded frames, red brick facades trimmed with green shutters and doorsteps of white stone, each sitting back, sedate and self-sufficient, in its trim dooryard fenced off from the public thoroughfare: all wore an aspect hauntingly familiar, and yet strange.

A corner sign, remarked in pa.s.sing, had named the spot "Aspen Villas"; though he felt he knew the sound of those syllables as well as he did the name of the Pless, strive as he might he failed to make them convey anything tangible to his intelligence. When had he heard of it? At what time had his errant footsteps taken him through this curious survival of Eighteenth Century London?

Not that it mattered when. It could have no possible bearing on the emergency. He really gave it little thought; the mental processes recounted were mostly subconscious, if none the less real. His objective attention was wholly preoccupied with the knowledge that Calendar's cab was drawing perilously near. And he was debating whether or not they should alight at once and try to make a better pace afoot, when the decision was taken wholly out of his hands.

Blindly staggering on, wilted with weariness, the horse stumbled in the shafts and plunged forward on its knees. Quick as the driver was to pull it up, with a cruel jerk of the bits, Kirkwood was caught unprepared; lurching against the dashboard, he lost his footing, grasped frantically at the unstable air, and went over, bringing up in a sitting position in the gutter, with a solid shock that jarred his very teeth.

For a moment dazed he sat there blinking; by the time he got to his feet, the girl stood beside him, questioning him with keen solicitude.

"No," he gasped; "not hurt--only surprised. Wait...."

Their cab had come to a complete standstill; Calendar's was no more than twenty yards behind, and as Kirkwood caught sight of him the fat adventurer was in the act of lifting himself ponderously out of the seat.

Incontinently the young man turned to the girl and forced the traveling-bag into her hands.

"Run for it!" he begged her. "Don't stop to argue. You promised--run! I'll come...."

"Philip!" she pleaded.

"Dorothy!" he cried in torment.

Perhaps it was his unquestionable distress that weakened her. Suddenly she yielded--with whatever reason. He was only hazily aware of the swish of her skirts behind him; he had no time to look round and see that she got away safely. He had only eyes and thoughts for Calendar and Stryker.

They were both afoot, now, and running toward him, the one as awkward as the other, but neither yielding a jot of their malignant purpose. He held the picture of it oddly graphic in his memory for many a day thereafter: Calendar making directly, for him, his heavy-featured face a dull red with the exertion, his fat head dropped forward as if too heavy for his neck of a bull, his small eyes bright with anger; Stryker shying off at a discreet angle, evidently with the intention of devoting himself to the capture of the girl; the two cabs with their dejected screws, at rest in the middle of the quiet, twilit street. He seemed even to see himself, standing stockily prepared, hands in his coat pockets, his own head inclined with a suggestion of pugnacity.

To this mental photograph another succeeds, of the same scene an instant later; all as it had been before, their relative positions unchanged, save that Stryker and Calendar had come to a dead stop, and that Kirkwood's right arm was lifted and extended, pointing at the captain.

So forgetful of self was he, that it required a moment's thought to convince him that he was really responsible for the abrupt transformation.

Incredulously he realized that he had drawn Calendar's revolver and pulled Stryker up short, in mid-stride, by the mute menace of it, as much as by his hoa.r.s.e cry of warning:

"Stryker--not another foot--"

With this there chimed in Dorothy's voice, ringing bell-clear from a little distance:

"Philip!"

Like a flash he wheeled, to add yet another picture to his mental gallery.

Perhaps two-score feet up the sidewalk a gate stood open; just outside it a man of tall and slender figure, rigged out in a bizarre costume consisting mainly of a flowered dressing-gown and slippers, was waiting in an att.i.tude of singular impa.s.sivity; within it, pausing with a foot lifted to the doorstep, bag in hand, her head turned as she looked back, was Dorothy.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A costume consisting mainly of a flowered dressing-gown and slippers.]

As he comprehended these essential details of the composition, the man in the flowered dressing-gown raised a hand, beckoning to him in a manner as imperative as his accompanying words.

"Kirkwood!" he saluted the young man in a clear and vibrant voice, "put up that revolver and stop this foolishness." And, with a jerk of his head towards the doorway, in which Dorothy now waited, hesitant: "Come, sir--quickly!"

Kirkwood choked on a laugh that was half a sob. "Brentwick!" he cried, restoring the weapon to his pocket and running toward his friend. "Of all happy accidents!"

"You may call it that," retorted the elder man with a fleeting smile as Kirkwood slipped inside the dooryard. "Come," he said; "let's get into the house."

"But you said--I thought you went to Munich," stammered Kirkwood; and so thoroughly impregnated was his mind with this understanding that it was hard for him to adjust his perceptions to the truth.

"I was detained--by business," responded Brentwick briefly. His gaze, weary and wistful behind his gla.s.ses, rested on the face of the girl on the threshold of his home; and the faint, sensitive flush of her face deepened.

He stopped and honored her with a bow that, for all his fantastical attire, would have graced a beau of an earlier decade. "Will you be pleased to enter?" he suggested punctiliously. "My house, such as it is, is quite at your disposal. And," he added, with a glance over his shoulder, "I fancy that a word or two may presently be pa.s.sed which you would hardly care to hear."

Dorothy's hesitation was but transitory; Kirkwood was rea.s.suring her with a smile more like his wonted boyish grin than anything he had succeeded in conjuring up throughout the day. Her own smile answered it, and with a murmured word of grat.i.tude and a little, half timid, half distant bow for Brentwick, she pa.s.sed on into the hallway.

Kirkwood lingered with his friend upon the door-stoop. Calendar, recovered from his temporary consternation, was already at the gate, bending over it, fat fingers fumbling with the latch, his round red face, lifted to the house, darkly working with chagrin.

From his threshold, watching him with a slight contraction of the eyes, Brentwick hailed him in tones of cloying courtesy.

"Do you wish to see me, sir?"

The fat adventurer faltered just within the gateway; then, with a truculent swagger, "I want my daughter," he declared vociferously.

Brentwick peered mildly over his gla.s.ses, first at Calendar, then at Kirkwood. His glance lingered a moment on the young man's honest eyes, and swung back to Calendar.

"My good man," he said with sublime tolerance, "will you be pleased to take yourself off--to the devil if you like? Or shall I take the trouble to interest the police?"

He removed one fine and fragile hand from a pocket of the flowered dressing-gown, long enough to jerk it significantly toward the nearer street-corner.

Thunderstruck, Calendar glanced hastily in the indicated direction.

A blue-coated bobby was to be seen approaching with measured stride, diffusing upon the still evening air an impression of ineffably capable self-contentment.

Calendar's fleshy lips parted and closed without a sound. They quivered.

Beneath them quivered his a.s.sortment of graduated chins. His heavy and pendulous cheeks quivered, slowly empurpling with the dark tide of his apoplectic wrath. The close-clipped thatch of his iron gray mustache, even, seemed to bristle like hairs upon the neck of a maddened dog. Beneath him his fat legs trembled, and indeed his whole huge carca.s.s shook visibly, in the stress of his restrained wrath.

Suddenly, overwhelmed, he banged the gate behind him and waddled off to join the captain; who already, with praiseworthy native prudence, had fallen back upon their cab.

From his coign of strategic advantage, the comfortable elevation of his box, Kirkwood's cabby, whose huge enjoyment of the adventurers'

discomfiture had throughout been noisily demonstrative, entreated Calendar with lifted forefinger, bland affability, and expressions of heartfelt sympathy.

"Kebsir? 'Ave a kebsir, do! Try a ride be'ind a real 'orse, sir; don't you go on wastin' time on 'im." A jerk of a derisive thumb singled out the other cabman. "'E aren't pl'yin' you fair, sir; I knows 'im,--'e's a hartful g'y deceiver, 'e is. Look at 'is 'orse,--w'ich it aren't; it's a snyle, that's w'at it is. Tyke a father's hadvice, sir, and next time yer fairest darter runs awye with the dook in disguise, chyse 'em in a real kebsir, not a cheap imitashin.... Kebsir?... Garn, you 'ard-'arted--"

Here he swooped upwards in a dizzy flight of vituperation best unrecorded.

Calendar, beyond an absent-minded flirt of one hand by his ear, as who should shoo away a buzzing insect, ignored him utterly.