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

motor

to Chiltern: the night being fine and the road, I am told, exceptionally

good. Miss Dorothy, what do you think?”

 

Instinctively the girl looked to Kirkwood; then shifted her glance to their

host. “I think you are wonderfully thoughtful and kind,” she said simply.

 

“And you, Philip?”

 

“It’s an inspiration,” the younger man declared. “I can’t think of anything

better calculated to throw them off, than to distance them by motor-car. It

would be always possible to trace our journey by rail.”

 

“Then,” announced Brentwick, making as if to rise, “we had best go. If

neither my hearing nor Captain Stryker’s car deceives me, our fiery chariot

is panting at the door.”

 

A little sobered from the confident spirit of quiet gaiety in which they

had dined, they left the table. Not that, in their hearts, either greatly

questioned their ultimate triumph; but they were allowing for the element

of error so apt to set at naught human calculations. Calendar himself had

already been proved fallible. Within the bounds of possibility, their turn

to stumble might now be imminent.

 

When he let himself dwell upon it, their utter helplessness to give

Calendar pause by commonplace methods, maddened Kirkwood. With another

scoundrel it had been so simple a matter to put a period to his activities

by a word to the police. But he was her father; for that reason he must

continually be spared … Even though, in desperate extremity, she should

give consent to the arrest of the adventurers, retaliation would follow,

swift and sure. For they might not overlook nor gloze the fact that hers

had been the hands responsible for the theft of the jewels; innocent

though she had been in committing that larceny, a cat’s-paw guided by an

intelligence unscrupulous and malign, the law would not hold her guiltless

were she once brought within its cognizance. Nor, possibly, would the

Hallams, mother and son.

 

Upon their knowledge and their fear of this, undoubtedly Calendar was

reckoning: witness the barefaced effrontery with which he operated against

them. His fear of the police might be genuine enough, but he was never for

an instant disturbed by any doubt lest his daughter should turn against

him. She would never dare that.

 

Before they left the house, while Dorothy was above stairs resuming her

hat and coat, Kirkwood and Brentwick reconnoitered from the drawing-room

windows, themselves screened from observation by the absence of light in

the room behind.

 

Before the door a motor-car waited, engines humming impatiently,

mechanician ready in his seat, an uncouth shape in goggles and leather

garments that shone like oilskins under the street lights.

 

At one corner another and a smaller car stood in waiting, its lamps like

baleful eyes glaring through the night.

 

In the shadows across the way, a lengthy shadow lurked: Stryker, beyond

reasonable question. Otherwise the street was deserted. Not even that

adventitous bobby of the early evening was now in evidence.

 

Dorothy presently joining them, Brentwick led the way to the door.

 

Wotton, apparently nerveless beneath his absolute immobility, let them

out—and slammed the door behind them with such promptitude as to give

cause for the suspicion that he was a fraud, a sham, beneath his icy

exterior desperately afraid lest the house be stormed by the adventurers.

 

Kirkwood to the right, Brentwick to the left of Dorothy, the former

carrying the treasure bag, they hastened down the walk and through the gate

to the car.

 

The watcher across the way was moved to whistle shrilly; the other car

lunged forward nervously.

 

Brentwick taking the front seat, beside the mechanician, left the tonneau

to Kirkwood and Dorothy. As the American slammed the door, the car swept

smoothly out into the middle of the way, while the pursuing car swerved in

to the other curb, slowing down to let Stryker jump aboard.

 

Kirkwood put himself in the seat by the girl’s side and for a few moments

was occupied with the arrangement of the robes. Then, sitting back, he

found her eyes fixed upon him, pools of inscrutable night in the shadow of

her hat.

 

“You aren’t afraid, Dorothy?”

 

She answered quietly: “I am with you, Philip.”

 

Beneath the robe their hands met…

 

Exalted, excited, he turned and looked back. A hundred yards to the rear

four unwinking eyes trailed them, like some modern Nemesis in monstrous

guise.

XIX

I–-THE UXBRIDGE ROAD

 

At a steady gait, now and again checked in deference to the street traffic,

Brentwick’s motor-car rolled, with resonant humming of the engine, down

the Cromwell Road, swerved into Warwick Road and swung northward through

Kensington to Shepherd’s Bush. Behind it Calendar’s car clung as if towed

by an invisible cable, never gaining, never losing, mutely testifying to

the adventurer’s unrelenting, grim determination to leave them no instant’s

freedom from surveillance, to keep for ever at their shoulders, watching

his chance, biding his time with sinister patience until the moment when,

wearied, their vigilance should relax….

 

To some extent he reckoned without his motor-car. As long as they traveled

within the metropolitan limits, constrained to observe a decorous pace

in view of the prejudices of the County Council, it was a matter of no

difficulty whatever to maintain his distance. But once they had won through

Shepherd’s Bush and, paced by huge doubledeck trolley trams, were flying

through Hammersmith on the Uxbridge Road; once they had run through Acton,

and knew beyond dispute that now they were without the city boundaries,

then the complexion of the business was suddenly changed.

 

Not too soon for honest sport; Calendar was to have (Kirkwood would have

said in lurid American idiom) a run for his money. The scattered lights of

Southall were winking out behind them before Brentwick chose to give the

word to the mechanician.

 

Quietly the latter threw in the clutch for the third speed—and the fourth.

The car leaped forward like a startled race-horse. The motor lilted merrily

into its deep-throated song of the open road, its contented, silken humming

passing into a sonorous and sustained purr.

 

Kirkwood and the girl were first jarred violently forward, then thrown

together. She caught his arm to steady herself; it seemed the most natural

thing imaginable that he should take her hand and pass it beneath his

arm, holding her so, his fingers closed above her own. Before they had

recovered, or had time to catch their breath, a mile of Middlesex had

dropped to the rear.

 

Not quite so far had they distanced Calendar’s trailing Nemesis of the four

glaring eyes; the pursuers put forth a gallant effort to hold their place.

At intervals during the first few minutes a heavy roaring and crashing

could be heard behind them; gradually it subsided, dying on the wings of

the free rushing wind that buffeted their faces as mile after mile was

reeled off and the wide, darkling English countryside opened out before

them, sweet and wonderful.

 

Once Kirkwood looked back; in the winking of an eye he saw four faded disks

of light, pallid with despair, top a distant rise and glide down into

darkness. When he turned, Dorothy was interrogating him with eyes whose

melting, shadowed loveliness, revealed to him in the light of the far,

still stars, seemed to incite him to that madness which he had bade himself

resist with all his strength.

 

He shook his head, as if to say: They can not catch us.

 

His hour was not yet; time enough to think of love and marriage (as if he

were capable of consecutive thought on any other subject!)—time enough to

think of them when he had gene back to his place, or rather when he should

have found it, in the ranks of bread-winners, and so have proved his right

to mortal happiness; time enough then to lay whatever he might have to

offer at her feet. Now he could conceive of no baser treachery to his

soul’s-desire than to advantage himself of her gratitude.

 

Resolutely he turned his face forward, striving with all his will and might

to forget the temptation of her lips, weary as they were and petulant with

waiting; and so sat rigid in his time of trial, clinging with what strength

he could to the standards of his honor, and trying to lose his dream

in dreaming of the bitter struggle that seemed likely to be his future

portion.

 

Perhaps she guessed a little of the fortunes of the battle that was being

waged within him. Perhaps not. Whatever the trend of her thoughts, she did

not draw away from him…. Perhaps the breath of night, fresh and clean and

fragrant with the odor of the fields and hedges, sweeping into her face

with velvety caress, rendered her drowsy. Presently the silken lashes

drooped, fluttering upon her cheeks, the tired and happy smile hovered

about her lips….

 

In something less than half an hour of this wild driving, Kirkwood roused

out of his reverie sufficiently to become sensible that the speed was

slackening. Incoherent snatches of sentences, fragments of words and

phrases spoken by Brentwick and the mechanician, were flung back past his

ears by the rushing wind. Shielding his eyes he could see dimly that the

mechanician was tinkering (apparently) with the driving gear. Then, their

pace continuing steadily to abate, he heard Brentwick fling at the man a

sharp-toned and querulously impatient question: What was the trouble? His

reply came in a single word, not distinguishable.

 

The girl sat up, opening her eyes, disengaging her arm.

 

Kirkwood bent forward and touched Brentwick on the shoulder; the latter

turned to him a face lined with deep concern.

 

“Trouble,” he announced superfluously. “I fear we have blundered.”

 

“What is it?” asked Dorothy in a troubled voice.

 

“Petrol seems to be running low. Charles here” (he referred to the

mechanician) “says the tank must be leaking. We’ll go on as best we can and

try to find an inn. Fortunately, most of the inns nowadays keep supplies of

petrol for just such emergencies.”

 

“Are we—? Do you think—?”

 

“Oh, no; not a bit of danger of that,” returned Brentwick hastily. “They’ll

not catch up with us this night. That is a very inferior car they have,—so

Charles says, at least; nothing to compare with this. If I’m not in error,

there’s the Crown and Mitre just ahead; we’ll make it, fill our tanks, and

be off again before they can make up half their loss.”

 

Dorothy looked anxiously to Kirkwood, her lips forming an unuttered query:

What did he think?

 

“Don’t worry; we’ll have no trouble,” he assured her stoutly; “the

chauffeur knows, undoubtedly.”

 

None the less he was moved to stand up in the tonneau, conscious of the

presence of the traveling bag, snug between his feet, as well as of the

weight of Calendar’s revolver in his pocket, while he stared back along the

road.

 

There was nothing to be seen of their persecutors.

 

The car continued to crawl. Five minutes dragged out tediously. Gradually

they, drew abreast a tavern standing back a distance from the road,

embowered in a grove of trees between whose ancient boles the tap-room

windows shone enticingly, aglow with comfortable light. A creaking

sign-board, much worn by weather and age, swinging from a roadside post,

confirmed the accuracy of Brentwick’s surmise, announcing that here stood

the Crown and Mitre, house of entertainment for man and beast.

 

Sluggishly the car rolled up before it and came to a dead and silent halt.

Charles, the mechanician, jumping out, ran hastily up the path towards the

inn. In the car Brentwick turned again, his eyes curiously bright in the

starlight, his forehead quaintly furrowed, his voice apologetic.

 

“It may take