The Black Bag

L >> Louis Joseph Vance >> The Black Bag

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Yet he suspected something of its power; he knew that this was altogether
an insane proceeding, and that the lure that led him on was Dorothy
Calendar. A strange dull light glowed in his weary eyes, on the thought of
her. He'd go through fire and water in her service. She was costing him
dear, perhaps was to cost him dearer still; and perhaps there'd be for
his guerdon no more than a "Thank you, Mr. Kirkwood!" at the end of the
passage. But that would be no less than his deserts; he was not to forget
that he was interfering unwarrantably; the girl was in her father's hands,
surely safe enough there--to the casual mind. If her partnership in her
parent's fortunes were distasteful, she endured it passively, without
complaint.

He decided that it was his duty to remind himself, from time to time,
that his main interest must be in the game itself, in the solution of
the riddle; whatever should befall, he must look for no reward for his
gratuitous and self-appointed part. Indeed he was all but successful in
persuading himself that it was the fascination of adventure alone that drew
him on.

Whatever the lure, it was inexorable; instead of doing as a sensible person
would have done--returning to London for a long rest in his hotel room, ere
striving to retrieve his shattered fortunes--Philip Kirkwood turned up the
village street, intent only to find the railway station and catch the first
available train for Sheerness, were that an early one or a late.

A hapchance native whom he presently encountered, furnished minute
directions for reaching the Dockyard Station of the Southeastern and
Chatham Rail-way, adding comfortable information to the effect that the
next east-bound train would pass through in ten minutes; if Kirkwood would
mend 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 to-wards 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 depots 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 re-collect 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 juncture the brakes began to shriek and grind upon the wheels.
The train slowed; it stopped; and the voice of a guard could be heard
admonishing passengers for Queensborough Pier to alight and take the branch
line. In the noise the woman's response was drowned, and Kirkwood was
hardly enough concerned for poor Freddie to repeat his question.

When, after a little, the train pulled out of the junction, neither found
reason to resume the conversation. During the brief balance of the journey
Mrs. Hallam presumably had food for thought; she frowned, pursed her lips,
and with one daintily gloved forefinger followed a seam of her tailored
skirt; while Kirkwood sat watching and wondering how to rid himself of her,
if she proved really as troublesome as she threatened to be.

Also, he wondered continually what it was all about. Why did Mrs. Hallam
suspect him of designing to meet Calendar at Queensborough? Had she
any tangible ground for believing that Calendar could be found in
Queensborough? Presumably she had, since she was avowedly in pursuit of
that gentleman, and, Kirkwood inferred, had booked for Queensborough.
Was he, then, running away from Calendar and his daughter to chase a
will-o'-the-wisp of his credulous fancy, off Sheerness shore?

Disturbing reflection. He scowled over it, then considered the other side
of the face. Presuming Mrs. Hallam to have had reasonably dependable
assurance that Calendar would stop in Queensborough, would she so readily
have abandoned her design to catch him there, on the mere supposition that
Kirkwood might be looking for him in Sheerness? That did not seem likely
to one who esteemed Mrs. Hallam's acumen as highly as Kirkwood did. He
brightened up, forgot that his was a fool's errand, and began again to
project strategic plans into a problematic future.

A sudden jolt interrupted this pastime, and the warning screech of the
brakes informed that he had no time to scheme, but had best continue on the
plan of action that had brought him thus far--that is, trust to his star
and accept what should befall without repining.

He rose, opened the door, and holding it so, turned.

"I regret, Mrs. Hallam," he announced, smiling his crooked smile, "that
a pressing engagement is about to prohibit my 'squiring you through the
ticket-gates. You understand, I'm sure."

His irrepressible humor proved infectious; and Mrs. Hallam's spirit ran as
high as his own. She was smiling cheerfully when she, too, rose.

"I also am in some haste," she averred demurely, gathering up her hand-bag
and umbrella.

A raised platform shot in beside the carriage, and the speed was so
sensibly moderated that the train seemed to be creeping rather than
running. Kirkwood flung the door wide open and lowered himself to the
running-board. The end of the track was in sight and--a man who has been
trained to board San Francisco cable-cars fears to alight from no moving
vehicle. He swung off, got his balance, and ran swiftly down the platform.

A cry from a bystander caused him to glance over his shoulder; Mrs. Hallam
was then in the act of alighting. As he looked the flurry of skirts
subsided and she fell into stride, pursuing.

Sleepy Sheerness must have been scandalized, that day, and its gossips have
acquired ground for many, an uncharitable surmise.

Kirkwood, however, was so fortunate as to gain the wicket before the
employee there awoke to the situation. Otherwise, such is the temper of
British petty officialdom, he might have detained the fugitive. As it was,
Kirkwood surrendered his ticket and ran out into the street with his luck
still a dominant factor in the race. For, looking back, he saw that Mrs.
Hallam had been held up at the gate, another victim of British red-tape;
her ticket read for Queensborough, she was attempting to alight one station
farther down the line, and while undoubtedly she was anxious to pay the
excess fare, Heaven alone knew when she would succeed in allaying the
suspicions and resentment of the ticket-taker.

"That's good for ten minutes' start!" Kirkwood crowed. "And it never
occurred to me--!"

Before the station he found two hacks in waiting, with little to choose
between them; neither was of a type that did not seem to advertise its
pre-Victorian fashioning, and to neither was harnessed an animal that
deserved anything but the epithet of screw. Kirkwood took the nearest for
no other reason than because it was the nearest, and all but startled the
driver off his box by offering double-fare for a brisk pace and a simple
service at the end of the ride. Succinctly he set forth his wants, jumped
into the antiquated four-wheeler, and threw himself down upon musty, dusty
cushions to hug himself over the joke and bless whatever English board of
railway, directors it was that first ordained that tickets should be taken
up at the end instead of the outset of a journey.

It was promptly made manifest that he had further cause for gratulation.
The cabby, recovering from his amazement, was plying an indefatigable whip
and thereby eliciting a degree of speed from his superannuated nag, that
his fare had by no means hoped for, much less anticipated. The cab rocked
and racketed through Sheerness' streets at a pace which is believed to be
unprecedented and unrivaled; its passenger, dashed from side to side, had
all he could do to keep from battering the vehicle to pieces with his head;
while it was entirely out of the question to attempt to determine whether
or not he was being pursued. He enjoyed it all hugely.

In a period of time surprisingly short, he saw, from fleeting glimpses of
the scenery to be obtained through the reeling windows, that they were
threading the outskirts of the town; synchronously, whether by design or
through actual inability to maintain it, the speed was moderated. And in
the course of a few more minutes the cab stopped definitely.

Kirkwood clambered painfully out, shook himself together and the bruises
out of his bones, and looked fearfully back.

Aside from a slowly settling cloud of dust, the road ran clear as far as he
could see--to the point, in fact, where the town closed in about it.

He had won; at all events in so much as to win meant eluding the
persevering Mrs. Hallam. But to what end?

Abstractedly he tendered his lonely sovereign to the driver, and without
even looking at it, crammed the heavy weight of change into his pocket; an
oversight which not only won him the awe-struck admiration of the cabby,
but entailed consequences (it may be) he little apprehended. It was with an
absentminded nod that he acquiesced in the man's announcement that he might
arrange about the boat for him. Accordingly the cabby disappeared; and
Kirkwood continued to stare about him, eagerly, hopefully.

He stood on the brink of the Thames estuary, there a possible five miles
from shore to shore; from his feet, almost, a broad shingle beach sloped
gently to the water.

On one hand a dilapidated picket-fence enclosed the door-yard of a
fisherman's cottage, or, better, hovel,--if it need be accurately
described--at the door of which the cabby was knocking.

The morning was now well-advanced. The sun rode high, a sphere of tarnished
flame in a void of silver-gray, its thin cold radiance striking pallid
sparks from the leaping crests of wind-whipped waves. In the east a wall
of vapor, dull and lusterless, had taken body since the dawn, masking the
skies and shutting down upon the sea like some vast curtain; and out of the
heart of this a bitter and vicious wind played like a sword.

To the north, Shoeburyness loomed vaguely, like a low-drifted bank of
cloud. Off to the right the Nore Lightship danced, a tiny fleck of warm
crimson in a wilderness of slatey-blue waters, plumed with a myriad of
vanishing white-caps.

Up the shelving shore, small, puny wavelets dashed in impotent fury, and
the shingle sang unceasingly its dreary, syncopated monotone. High and dry,
a few dingy boats lay canted wearily upon their broad, swelling sides,--a
couple of dories, apparently in daily use; a small sloop yacht, dismantled
and plainly beyond repair; and an oyster-smack also out of commission.
About them the beach was strewn with a litter of miscellany,--nets, oars,
cork buoys, bits of wreckage and driftwood, a few fish too long forgotten
and (one assumed) responsible in part for the foreign wealth of the
atmosphere.

Some little distance offshore a fishing-boat, catrigged and not more than
twenty-feet over all, swung bobbing at her mooring, keen nose searching
into the wind; at sight of which Kirkwood gave thanks, for his adventitious
guide had served him well, if that boat were to be hired by any manner of
persuasion.

But it was to the farther reaches of the estuary that he gave more
prolonged and most anxious heed, scanning narrowly what shipping was there
to be seen. Far beyond the lightship a liner was riding the waves with
serene contempt, making for the river's mouth and Tilbury Dock. Nearer
in, a cargo boat was standing out upon the long trail, the white of riven
waters showing clearly against her unclean freeboard. Out to east a little
covey of fishing-smacks, red sails well reefed, were scudding before
the wind like strange affrighted water-fowl, and bearing down past a
heavy-laden river barge. The latter, with tarpaulin battened snugly down
over the cockpit and the seas dashing over her wash-board until she seemed
under water half the time, was forging stodgily Londonwards, her bargee at
the tiller smoking a placid pipe.

But a single sailing vessel of any notable tonnage was in sight; and when
he saw her Kirkwood's heart became buoyant with hope, and he began to
tremble with nervous eagerness. For he believed her to be the _Alethea_.

There's no mistaking a ship brigantine-rigged for any other style of craft
that sails the seas.

From her position when first he saw her, Kirkwood could have fancied she
was tacking out of the mouth of the Medway; but he judged that, leaving the
Thames' mouth, she had tacked to starboard until well-nigh within hail of
Sheerness. Now, having presumably, gone about, she was standing out toward
the Nore, boring doggedly into the wind. He would have given a deal for
glasses wherewith to read the name upon her bows, but was sensible of no
hampering doubts; nor, had he harbored any, would they have deterred him.
He had set his heart upon the winning of his venture, had come too far,
risked far too much, to suffer anything now to stay his hand and stand
between him and Dorothy Calendar. Whatever the further risks and hazards,
though he should take his life in his hands to win to her side, he would
struggle on. He recked nothing of personal danger; a less selfish passion
ran molten in his veins, moving him to madness.

Fascinated, he fixed his gaze upon the reeling brigantine, and for a space
it was as if by longing he had projected his spirit to her slanting deck,
and were there, pleading his case with the mistress of his heart....

Voices approaching brought him back to shore. He turned, resuming his mask
of sanity, the better to confer with the owner of the cottage and boats--a
heavy, keen-eyed fellow, ungracious and truculent of habit, and chary of
his words; as he promptly demonstrated.

"I'll hire your boat," Kirkwood told him, "to put me aboard that
brigantine, off to leeward. We ought to start at once."

The fisherman shifted his quid of tobacco from cheek to cheek, grunted
inarticulately, and swung deliberately on his heel, displaying a bull neck
above a pair of heavy shoulders.

"Dirty weather," he croaked, facing back from his survey of the eastern
skies before the American found out whether or not he should resent his
insolence.

"How much?" Kirkwood demanded curtly, annoyed.

The man hesitated, scowling blackly at the heeling vessel, momentarily
increasing her distance from shore. Then with a crafty smile, "Two pound',"
he declared.

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