The Black Bag - Louis Joseph Vance (best reads of all time txt) 📗

his pace he could make it easily, with time to spare.

 

Kirkwood mended his pace accordingly, but, contrary to the prediction, had

no time to spare at all. Even as he stormed the ticket-grating, the train

was thundering in at the platform. Therefore a nervous ticket agent passed

him out a first-class ticket instead of the third-class he had asked for;

and there was no time wherein to have the mistake rectified. Kirkwood

planked down the fare, swore, and sprinted for the carriages.

 

The first compartment whose door he jerked violently open, proved to be

occupied, and was, moreover, not a smoking-car. He received a fleeting

impression of a woman’s startled eyes, staring into his own through a thin

mesh of veiling, fell off the running-board, slammed the door, and hurled

himself towards the next compartment. Here happier fortune attended upon

his desire; the box-like section was untenanted, and a notice blown upon

the window-glass announced that it was “2nd Class Smoking.” Kirkwood

promptly tumbled in; and when he turned to shut the door the coaches were

moving.

 

A pipe helped him to bear up while the train was making its two other stops

in the Borough of Woolwich: a circumstance so maddening to a man in a

hurry, that it set Kirkwood’s teeth on edge with sheer impatience, and

made him long fervently for the land of his birth, where they do things

differently—where the Board of Directors of a railway company doesn’t

erect three substantial passenger dep�ts in the course of a mile and a half

of overgrown village. It consoled him little that none disputed with

him his lonely possession of the compartment, that he had caught the

Sheerness train, or that he was really losing no time; a sense of deep

dejection had settled down upon his consciousness, with a realization of

how completely a fool’s errand was this of his. He felt foredoomed to

failure; he was never to see Dorothy Calendar again; and his brain seemed

numb with disappointment.

 

Rattling and swaying, the train left the town behind.

 

Presently he put aside his pipe and stared blankly out at a reeling

landscape, the pleasant, homely, smiling countryside of Kent. A deeper

melancholy tinted his mind: Dorothy Calendar was for ever lost to him.

 

The trucks drummed it out persistently—he thought, vindictively:

“Lost!… Lost!… For ever lost!…”

 

And he had made—was then making—a damned fool of himself. The trucks had

no need to din that into his thick skull by their ceaseless iteration; he

knew it, would not deny it….

 

And it was all his own fault. He’d had his chance, Calendar had offered him

it. If only he had closed with the fat adventurer!…

 

Before his eyes field and coppice, hedge and homestead, stream and flowing

highway, all blurred and ran streakily into one another, like a highly

impressionistic water-color. He could make neither head nor tail of the

flying views, and so far as coherent thought was concerned, he could not

put two ideas together. Without understanding distinctly, he presently did

a more wise and wholesome thing: which was to topple limply over on the

cushions and fall fast asleep.

 

*

 

After a long time he seemed to realize rather hazily that the carriage-door

had been opened to admit somebody. Its smart closing bang shocked him

awake. He sat up, blinking in confusion, hardly conscious of more, to begin

with, than that the train had paused and was again in full flight. Then,

his senses clearing, he became aware that his solitary companion, just

entered, was a woman. She was seated over across from him, her back to the

engine, in an attitude which somehow suggested a highly nonchalant frame of

mind. She laughed, and immediately her speaking voice was high and sweet in

his hearing.

 

“Really, you know, Mr. Kirkwood, I simply couldn’t contain my impatience

another instant.”

 

Kirkwood gasped and tried to recollect his wits.

 

“Beg pardon—I’ve been asleep,” he said stupidly.

 

“Yes. I’m sorry to have disturbed you, but, you know, you must make

allowances for a woman’s nerves.”

 

Beneath his breath the bewildered man said: “The deuce!” and above it, in a

stupefied tone: “Mrs. Hallam!”

 

She nodded in a not unfriendly fashion, smiling brightly. “Myself, Mr.

Kirkwood! Really, our predestined paths are badly tangled, just now; aren’t

they? Were you surprised to find me in here, with you? Come now, confess

you were!”

 

He remarked the smooth, girlish freshness of her cheeks, the sense and

humor of her mouth, the veiled gleam of excitement in her eyes of the

changing sea; and saw, as well, that she was dressed for traveling,

sensibly but with an air, and had brought a small hand-bag with her.

 

“Surprised and delighted,” he replied, recovering, with mendacity so

intentional and obvious that the woman laughed aloud.

 

“I knew you’d be!… You see, I had the carriage ahead, the one you didn’t

take. I was so disappointed when you flung up to the door and away again!

You didn’t see me hanging half out the window, to watch where you went, did

you? That’s how I discovered that your discourtesy was unintentional, that

you hadn’t recognized me,—by the fact that you took this compartment,

right behind my own.”

 

She paused invitingly, but Kirkwood, grown wary, contented himself

with picking up his pipe and carefully knocking out the dottle on the

window-ledge.

 

“I was glad to see you,” she affirmed; “but only partly because you

were you, Mr. Kirkwood. The other and major part was because sight of you

confirmed my own secret intuition. You see, I’m quite old enough and wise

enough to question even my own intuitions.”

 

“A woman wise enough for that is an adult prodigy,” he ventured cautiously.

 

“It’s experience and age. I insist upon the age; I the mother of a

grown-up boy! So I deliberately ran after you, changing when we stopped

at Newington. You might’ve escaped me if I had waited until We got to

Queensborough.”

 

Again she paused in open expectancy. Kirkwood, perplexed, put the pipe in

his pocket, and assumed a factitious look of resignation, regarding her

askance with that whimsical twist of his eyebrows.

 

“For you are going to Queensborough, aren’t you, Mr. Kirkwood?”

 

“Queensborough?” he echoed blankly; and, in fact, he was at a loss to

follow her drift. “No, Mrs. Hallam; I’m not bound there.”

 

Her surprise was apparent; she made no effort to conceal it. “But,” she

faltered, “if not there—”

 

“‘Give you my word, Mrs. Hallam, I have no intention whatever of going to

Queensborough,” Kirkwood protested.

 

“I don’t understand.” The nervous drumming of a patent-leather covered

toe, visible beneath the hem of her dress, alone betrayed a rising tide of

impatience. “Then my intuition was at fault!”

 

“In this instance, if it was at all concerned with my insignificant

affairs, yes—most decidedly at fault.”

 

She shook her head, regarding him with grave suspicion. “I hardly know:

whether to believe you. I think….”

 

Kirkwood’s countenance displayed an added shade of red. After a moment, “I

mean no discourtesy,” he began stiffly, “but—”

 

“But you don’t care a farthing whether I believe you or not?”

 

He caught her laughing eye, and smiled, the flush subsiding.

 

“Very well, then! Now let us see: Where are you bound?”

 

Kirkwood looked out of the window.

 

“I’m convinced it’s a rendezvous…?”

 

Kirkwood smiled patiently at the landscape.

 

“Is Dorothy Calendar so very, very beautiful, Mr. Kirkwood?”—with a trace

of malice.

 

Ostentatiously Kirkwood read the South Eastern and Chatham’s framed card

of warning, posted just above Mrs. Hallam’s head, to all such incurable

lunatics as are possessed of a desire to travel on the running-boards of

railway carriages.

 

“You are going to meet her, aren’t you?”

 

He gracefully concealed a yawn.

 

The woman’s plan of attack took another form. “Last night, when you told me

your story, I believed you.”

 

He devoted himself to suppressing the temptingly obvious retort, and

succeeded; but though he left it unspoken, the humor of it twitched the

corners of his mouth; and Mrs. Hallam was observant. So that her next

attempt to draw him out was edged with temper.

 

“I believed you an American but a gentleman; it appears that, if you ever

were the latter, you’ve fallen so low that you willingly cast your lot with

thieves.”

 

Having exhausted his repertoire of rudenesses, Kirkwood took to twiddling

his thumbs.

 

“I want to ask you if you think it fair to me or my son, to leave us in

ignorance of the place where you are to meet the thieves who stole our—my

son’s jewels?”

 

“Mrs. Hallam,” he said soberly, “if I am going to meet Mr. Calendar or Mr.

Mulready, I have no assurance of that fact.”

 

There was only the briefest of pauses, during which she analyzed this;

then, quickly, “But you hope to?” she snapped.

 

He felt that the only adequate retort to this would be a shrug of his

shoulders; doubted his ability to carry one off; and again took refuge in

silence.

 

The woman abandoned a second plan of siege, with a readiness that did

credit to her knowledge of mankind. She thought out the next very

carefully, before opening with a masked battery.

 

“Mr. Kirkwood, can’t we be friends—this aside?”

 

“Nothing could please me more, Mrs. Hallam!”

 

“I’m sorry if I’ve annoyed you—”

 

“And I, too, have been rude.”

 

“Last night, when you cut away so suddenly, you prevented my making you a

proposal, a sort of a business proposition….”

 

“Yes—?”

 

“To come over to our side—”

 

“I thought so. That was why I went.”

 

“Yes; I understood. But this morning, when you’ve had time to think it

over—?”

 

“I have no choice in the matter, Mrs. Hallam.” The green eyes darkened

ominously. “You mean—I am to understand, then, that you’re against us,

that you prefer to side with swindlers and scoundrels, all because of a—”

 

She discovered him eying her with a smile of such inscrutable and sardonic

intelligence, that the words died on her lips, and she crimsoned,

treasonably to herself. For he saw it; and the belief he had conceived

while attending to her tissue of fabrication, earlier that morning, was

strengthened to the point of conviction that, if anything had been stolen

by anybody, Mrs. Hallam and her son owned it as little as Calendar.

 

As for the woman, she felt she had steadily lost, rather than gained,

ground; and the flash of anger that had colored her cheeks, lit twin

beacons in her eyes, which she resolutely fought down until they faded to

mere gleams of resentment and determination. But she forgot to control

her lips; and they are the truest indices to a woman’s character and

temperament; and Kirkwood did not overlook the circumstance that their

specious sweetness had vanished, leaving them straight, set and hard, quite

the reverse of attractive.

 

“So,” she said slowly, after a silent time, “you are not for Queensborough!

The corollary of that admission, Mr. Kirkwood, is that you are for

Sheerness.”

 

“I believe,” he replied wearily, “that there are no other stations on this

line, after Newington.”

 

“It follows, then, that—that I follow.” And in answer to his perturbed

glance, she added: “Oh, I’ll grant that intuition is sometimes a poor

guide. But if you meet George Calendar, so shall I. Nothing can prevent

that. You can’t hinder me.”

 

Considerably amused, he chuckled. “Let us talk of other things, Mrs.

Hallam,” he suggested pleasantly. “How is your son?”

 

At this