The Black Bag

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"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 attitude
of singular impassivity; within it, pausing with a foot lifted to the
doorstep, bag in hand, her head turned as she looked back, was Dorothy.

[Illustration: 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 glasses, 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 passed which you would hardly care to
hear."

Dorothy's hesitation was but transitory; Kirkwood was reassuring 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 gratitude and a little, half timid, half distant bow for
Brentwick, she passed 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 glasses, 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 assortment 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 carcass 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.

Sullenly extracting money from his pocket, he paid off his driver, and in
company with Stryker, trudged in morose silence down the street.

Brentwick touched Kirkwood's arm and drew him into the house.

XVIII

ADVENTURERS' LUCK

As the door closed, Kirkwood swung impulsively to Brentwick, with the
brief, uneven laugh of fine-drawn nerves.

"Good God, sir!" he cried. "You don't know--"

"I can surmise," interrupted the elder man shrewdly.

"You turned up in the nick of time, for all the world like--"

"Harlequin popping through a stage trap?"

"No!--an incarnation of the Providence that watches over children and
fools."

Brentwick dropped a calming hand upon his shoulder. "Your simile seems
singularly happy, Philip. Permit me to suggest that you join the child in
my study." He laughed quietly, with a slight nod toward an open door at the
end of the hallway. "For myself, I'll be with you in one moment."

A faint, indulgent smile lurking in the shadow of his white mustache, he
watched the young man wheel and dart through the doorway. "Young hearts!"
he commented inaudibly--and a trace sadly. "Youth!..."

Beyond the threshold of the study, Kirkwood paused, eager eyes searching
its somber shadows for a sign of Dorothy.

A long room and deep, it was lighted only by the circumscribed disk of
illumination thrown on the central desk by a shaded reading-lamp, and the
flickering glow of a grate-fire set beneath the mantel of a side-wall. At
the back, heavy velvet portieres cloaked the recesses of two long windows,
closed jealously even against the twilight. Aside from the windows, doors
and chimney-piece, every foot of wall space was occupied by towering
bookcases or by shelves crowded to the limit of their capacity with an
amazing miscellany of objects of art, the fruit of years of patient and
discriminating collecting. An exotic and heady atmosphere, compounded of
the faint and intangible exhalations of these insentient things, fragrance
of sandalwood, myrrh and musk, reminiscent whiffs of half-forgotten
incense, seemed to intensify the impression of gloomy richness and
repose...

By the fireplace, a little to one side, stood Dorothy, one small foot
resting on the brass fender, her figure merging into the dusky background,
her delicate beauty gaining an effect of elusive and ethereal mystery in
the waning and waxing ruddy glow upflung from the bedded coals.

"Oh, Philip!" She turned swiftly to Kirkwood with extended hands and a low,
broken cry. "I'm _so_ glad...."

A trace of hysteria in her manner warned him, and he checked himself upon
the verge of a too dangerous tenderness. "There!" he said soothingly,
letting her hands rest gently in his palms while he led her to a chair. "We
can make ourselves easy now." She sat down and he released her hands with a
reluctance less evident than actual. "If ever I say another word against my
luck--"

"Who," inquired the girl, lowering her voice, "who is the gentleman in the
flowered dressing-gown?"

"Brentwick--George Silvester Brentwick: an old friend. I've known him for
years,--ever since I came abroad. Curiously enough, however, this is the
first time I've ever been here. I called once, but he wasn't in,--a few
days ago,--the day we met. I thought the place looked familiar. Stupid of
me!"

"Philip," said the girl with a grave face but a shaking voice, "it was."
She laughed provokingly.... "It was so funny, Philip. I don't know why I
ran, when you told me to, but I did; and while I ran, I was conscious
of the front door, here, opening, and this tall man in the flowered
dressing-gown coming down to the gate as if it were the most ordinary thing
in the world for him to stroll out, dressed that way, in the evening. And
he opened the gate, and bowed, and said, ever so pleasantly, 'Won't you
come in, Miss Calendar?'--"

"He did!" exclaimed Kirkwood. "But how--?"

"How can I say?" she expostulated. "At all events, he seemed to know
me; and when he added something about calling you in, too--he said 'Mr.
Kirkwood '--I didn't hesitate."

"It's strange enough, surely--and fortunate. Bless his heart!" said
Kirkwood.

And, "Hum!" said Mr. Brentwick considerately, entering the study. He had
discarded the dressing-gown and was now in evening dress.

The girl rose. Kirkwood turned. "Mr. Brentwick--" he began.

But Brentwick begged his patience with an eloquent gesture. "Sir," he said,
somewhat austerely, "permit me to put a single question: Have you by any
chance paid your cabby?"

"Why--" faltered the younger man, with a flaming face. "I--why, no--that
is--"

The other quietly put his hand upon a bell-pull. A faint jingling sound was
at once audible, emanating from the basement.

"How much should you say you owe him?"

"I--I haven't a penny in the world!"

The shrewd eyes flashed their amusement into Kirkwood's. "Tut, tut!"
Brentwick chuckled. "Between gentlemen, my dear boy! Dear me! you are slow
to learn."

"I'll never be contented to sponge on my friends," explained Kirkwood in
deepest misery. "I can't tell when--"

"Tut, tut! How much did you say?"

"Ten shillings--or say twelve, would be about right," stammered the
American, swayed by conflicting emotions of gratitude and profound
embarrassment.

A soft-footed butler, impassive as Fate, materialized mysteriously in the
doorway.

"You rang, sir?" he interrupted frigidly.

"I rang, Wotton." His master selected a sovereign from his purse and handed
it to the servant. "For the cabby, Wotton."

"Yes sir." The butler swung automatically, on one heel.

"And Wotton!"

"Sir?"

"If any one should ask for me, I'm not at home."

"Very good, sir."

"And if you should see a pair of disreputable scoundrels skulking, in the
neighborhood, one short and stout, the other tall and evidently a seafaring
man, let me know."

"Thank you, sir." A moment later the front door was heard to close.

Brentwick turned with a little bow to the girl. "My dear Miss Calendar," he
said, rubbing his thin, fine hands,--"I am old enough, I trust, to call you
such without offense,--please be seated."

Complying, the girl rewarded him with a radiant smile. Whereupon, striding
to the fireplace, their host turned his back to it, clasped his hands
behind him, and glowered benignly upon the two. "Ah!" he observed in
accents of extreme personal satisfaction. "Romance! Romance!"

"Would you mind telling us how you knew--" began Kirkwood anxiously.

"Not in the least, my dear Philip. It is simple enough: I possess an
imagination. From my bedroom window, on the floor above, I happen to behold
two cabs racing down the street, the one doggedly pursuing the other. The
foremost stops, perforce of a fagged horse. There alights a young gentleman
looking, if you'll pardon me, uncommonly seedy; he is followed by a young
lady, if she will pardon me," with another little bow, "uncommonly pretty.
With these two old eyes I observe that the gentleman does not pay his
cabby. Ergo--I intelligently deduce--he is short of money. Eh?"

"You were right," affirmed Kirkwood, with a rueful and crooked smile.
"But--"

"So! so!" pursued Brentwick, rising on his toes and dropping back again;
"so this world of ours wags on to the old, old tune!... And I, who in my
younger days pursued adventure without success, in dotage find myself
dragged into a romance by my two ears, whether I will or no! Eh? And now
you are going to tell me all about it, Philip. There is a chair.... Well,
Wotton?"

The butler had again appeared noiselessly in the doorway.

"Beg pardon, sir; they're waiting, sir."

"The caitiffs, Wotton?"

"Yessir."

"Where waiting?"

"One at each end of the street, sir."

"Thank you. You may bring us sherry and biscuit, Wotton."

"Thank you, sir."

The servant vanished.

Brentwick removed his glasses, rubbed them, and blinked thoughtfully at the
girl. "My dear," he said suddenly, with a peculiar tremor in his voice,
"you resemble your mother remarkably. Tut--I should know! Time was when I
was one of her most ardent admirers."

"You--y-you knew my mother?" cried Dorothy, profoundly moved.

"Did I not know you at sight? My dear, you are your mother reincarnate, for
the good of an unworthy world. She was a very beautiful woman, my dear."

Wotton entered with a silver serving tray, offering it in turn to Dorothy,
Kirkwood and his employer. While he was present the three held silent--the
girl trembling slightly, but with her face aglow; Kirkwood half stupefied
between his ease from care and his growing astonishment, as Brentwick
continued to reveal unexpected phases of his personality; Brentwick himself
outwardly imperturbable and complacent, for all that his hand shook as he
lifted his wine glass.

"You may go, Wotton--or, wait. Don't you feel the need of a breath of fresh
air, Wotton?"

"Yessir, thank you, sir."

"Then change your coat, Wotton, light your pipe, and stroll out for half an
hour. You need not leave the street, but if either the tall thin blackguard
with the seafaring habit, or the short stout rascal with the air of mystery
should accost you, treat them with all courtesy, Wotton. You will be
careful not to tell either of them anything in particular, although I don't
mind your telling them that Mr. Brentwick lives here, if they ask. I am
mostly concerned to discover if they purpose becoming fixtures on the
street-corners, Wotton."

"Quite so, sir."

"Now you may go.... Wotton," continued his employer as the butler took
himself off as softly as a cat, "grows daily a more valuable mechanism. He
is by no means human in any respect, but I find him extremely handy to
have round the house.... And now, my dear," turning to Dorothy, "with your
permission I desire to drink to the memory of your beautiful mother and to
the happiness of her beautiful daughter."

"But you will tell me--"

"A number of interesting things, Miss Calendar, if you'll be good enough to
let me choose the time. I beg you to be patient with the idiosyncrasies
of an old man, who means no harm, who has a reputation as an eccentric to
sustain before his servants.... And now," said Brentwick, setting aside his
glass, "now, my dear boy, for the adventure."

Kirkwood chuckled, infected by his host's genial humor. "How do you know--"

"How can it be otherwise?" countered Brentwick with a trace of asperity.
"Am I to be denied my adventure? Sir, I refuse without equivocation. Your
very bearing breathes of Romance. There must be an adventure forthcoming,
Philip; otherwise my disappointment will be so acute that I shall be
regretfully obliged seriously to consider my right, as a householder, to
show you the door."

"But Mr. Brentwick--!"

"Sit down, sir!" commanded Brentwick with such a peremptory note that the
young man, who had risen, obeyed out of sheer surprise. Upon which his host
advanced, indicting him with a long white forefinger. "Would you, sir,"
he demanded, "again expose this little lady to the machinations of that
corpulent scoundrel, whom I have just had the pleasure of shooing off my
premises, because you choose to resent an old man's raillery?"

"I apologize," Kirkwood humored him.

"I accept the apology in the spirit in which it is offered.... I repeat,
now for the adventure, Philip. If the story's long, epitomize. We can
consider details more at our leisure."

Kirkwood's eyes consulted the girl's face; almost imperceptibly she nodded
him permission to proceed.

"Briefly, then," he began haltingly, "the man who followed us to the door
here, is Miss Calendar's father."

"Oh? His name, please?"

"George Burgoyne Calendar."

"Ah! An American; I remember, now. Continue, please."

"He is hounding us, sir, with the intention of stealing some property,
which he caused to be stolen, which we--to put it bluntly--stole from him,
to which he has no shadow of a title, and which, finally, we're endeavoring
to return to its owners."

"My dear!" interpolated Brentwick gently, looking down at the girl's
flushed face and drooping head.

"He ran us to the last ditch," Kirkwood continued; "I've spent my last
farthing trying to lose him."

"But why have you not caused his arrest?" Brentwick inquired.

Kirkwood nodded meaningly toward the girl. Brentwick made a sound
indicating comprehension, a click of the tongue behind closed teeth.

"We came to your door by the merest accident--it might as well have been
another. I understood you were in Munich, and it never entered my head that
we'd find you home."

"A communication from my solicitors detained me," explained Brentwick. "And
now, what do you intend to do?"

"Trespass as far on your kindness as you'll permit. In the first place,
I--I want the use of a few pounds with which to cable some friends in New
York, for money; on receipt of which I can repay you."

"Philip," observed Brentwood, "you are a most irritating child. But I
forgive you the faults of youth. You may proceed, bearing in mind, if you
please, that I am your friend equally with any you may own in America."

"You're one of the best men in the world," said Kirkwood.

"Tut, tut! Will you get on?"

"Secondly, I want you to help us to escape Calendar to-night. It is
necessary that Miss Calendar should go to Chiltern this evening, where she
has friends who will receive and protect her."

"Mm-mm," grumbled their host, meditative. "My faith!" he commented, with
brightening eyes. "It sounds almost too good to be true! And I've been
growing afraid that the world was getting to be a most humdrum and
uninteresting planet!... Miss Calendar, I am a widower of so many years
standing that I had almost forgotten I had ever been anything but a
bachelor. I fear my house contains little that will be of service to a
young lady. Yet a room is at your disposal; the parlor-maid shall show you
the way. And Philip, between you and me, I venture to remark that hot water
and cold steel would add to the attractiveness of your personal appearance;
my valet will attend you in my room. Dinner," concluded Brentwick with
anticipative relish, "will be served in precisely thirty minutes. I shall
expect you to entertain me with a full and itemized account of every phase
of your astonishing adventure. Later, we will find a way to Chiltern."

Again he put a hand upon the bell-pull. Simultaneously Dorothy and Kirkwood
rose.

"Mr. Brentwick," said the girl, her eyes starred with tears of gratitude,
"I don't, I really don't know how--"

"My dear," said the old gentleman, "you will thank me most appropriately
by continuing, to the best of your ability, to resemble your mother more
remarkably every minute."

"But I," began Kirkwood----.

"You, my dear Philip, can thank me best by permitting me to enjoy myself;
which I am doing thoroughly at the present moment. My pleasure in being
invited to interfere in your young affairs is more keen than you can well
surmise. Moreover," said Mr. Brentwick, "so long have I been an amateur
adventurer that I esteem it the rarest privilege to find myself thus on the
point of graduating into professional ranks." He rubbed his hands, beaming
upon them. "And," he added, as a maid appeared at the door, "I have already
schemed me a scheme for the discomfiture of our friends the enemy: a scheme
which we will discuss with our dinner, while the heathen rage and imagine a
vain thing, in the outer darkness."

Kirkwood would have lingered, but of such inflexible temper was his host
that he bowed him into the hands of a man servant without permitting him
another word.

"Not a syllable," he insisted. "I protest I am devoured with curiosity, my
dear boy, but I have also bowels of compassion. When we are well on with
our meal, when you are strengthened with food and drink, then you may
begin. But now--Dickie," to the valet, "do your duty!"

Kirkwood, laughing with exasperation, retired at discretion, leaving
Brentwick the master of the situation: a charming gentleman with a will of
his own and a way that went with it.

He heard the young man's footsteps diminish on the stairway; and again
he smiled the indulgent, melancholy smile of mellow years. "Youth!" he
whispered softly. "Romance!... And now," with a brisk change of tone as
he closed the study door, "now we are ready for this interesting Mr.
Calendar."

Sitting down at his desk, he found and consulted a telephone directory;
but its leaves, at first rustling briskly at the touch of the slender and
delicate fingers, were presently permitted to lie unturned,--the book
resting open on his knees the while he stared wistfully into the fire.

A suspicion of moisture glimmered in his eyes. "Dorothy!" he whispered
huskily. And a little later, rising, he proceeded to the telephone....

An hour and a half later Kirkwood, his self-respect something restored by
a bath, a shave, and a resumption of clothes which had been hastily but
thoroughly cleansed and pressed by Brentwick's valet; his confidence and
courage mounting high under the combined influence of generous wine,
substantial food, the presence of his heart's mistress and the
admiration--which was unconcealed--of his friend, concluded at the
dinner-table, his narration.

"And that," he said, looking up from his savory, "is about all."

"Bravo!" applauded Brentwick; eyes shining with delight.

"All," interposed Dorothy in warm reproach, "but what he hasn't told--"

"Which, my dear, is to be accounted for wholly by a very creditable
modesty, rarely encountered in the young men of the present day. It was, of
course, altogether different with those of my younger years. Yes, Wotton?"

Brentwick sat back in his chair, inclining an attentive ear to a
communication murmured by the butler.

Kirkwood's gaze met Dorothy's across the expanse of shining cloth; he
deprecated her interruption with a whimsical twist of his eyebrows.
"Really, you shouldn't," he assured her in an undertone. "I've done nothing
to deserve..." But under the spell of her serious sweet eyes, he fell
silent, and presently looked down, strangely abashed; and contemplated the
vast enormity of his unworthiness.

Coffee was set before them by Wotton, the impassive, Brentwick refusing
it with a little sigh. "It is one of the things, as Philip knows," he
explained to the girl, "denied me by the physician who makes his life happy
by making mine a waste. I am allowed but three luxuries; cigars, travel
in moderation, and the privilege of imposing on my friends. The first I
propose presently, to enjoy, by your indulgence; and the second I shall
this evening undertake by virtue of the third, of which I have just availed
myself."

Smiling at the involution, he rested his head against the back of the
chair, eyes roving from the girl's face to Kirkwood's. "Inspiration to
do which," he proceeded gravely, "came to me from the seafaring picaroon
(Stryker did you name him?) via the excellent Wotton. While you were
preparing for dinner, Wotton returned from his constitutional with the news
that, leaving the corpulent person on watch at the corner, Captain Stryker
had temporarily, made himself scarce. However, we need feel no anxiety
concerning his whereabouts, for he reappeared in good time and a
motor-car. From which it becomes evident that you have not overrated their
pertinacity; the fiasco of the cab-chase is not to be reenacted."

Resolutely the girl repressed a gasp of dismay. Kirkwood stared moodily
into his cup.

"These men bore me fearfully," he commented at last.

"And so," continued Brentwick, "I bethought me of a counter-stroke. It is
my good fortune to have a friend whose whim it is to support a touring-car,
chiefly in innocuous idleness. Accordingly I have telephoned him and
commandeered the use of this machine--mechanician, too.... Though not a
betting man, I am willing to risk recklessly a few pence in support of my
contention, that of the two, Captain Stryker's car and ours, the latter
will prove considerably the most speedy....

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