Chapter 9

Disregarding his question, the girl's voice continued quickly: "I wanted to see my hat and opened the bandbox. It wasn't my hat--it's the one you described--the one that--"

"I know," he interrupted; "I know all about that now."

"Yes," she went on hurriedly, unheeding his words. "I admired and examined it. It--there's something else."

"I know," he said again; "the Cadogan collar."

"Oh!" There was an accent of surprise in her voice. "Well, I've ordered a taxi, and I'm going to bring it to you right away. The thing's too valuable--"

"Miss Searle--"

"I'm afraid to keep it here. I wanted to find out if you were up--that's why I called."

"But, Miss Searle--"

"The taxi's waiting now. I'll be at your door in fifteen minutes."

"But--"

"Good-bye."

He heard the click as she hung up the receiver; and nothing more. With an exclamation of annoyance he swung round from the desk.

"Somebody coming?" enquired Iff brightly.

Staff eyed him with overt distrust. "Yes," he said reluctantly.

"Miss Searle bringing the evanescent collar, eh?"

Staff nodded curtly.

"Plagued nuisance," commented Iff. "And me wanting to go to sleep the worst I ever did."

"Don't let this keep you up," said Staff.

"But," Iff remonstrated, "you can't receive a lady in here with me asleep on your divan."

"I don't intend to," Staff told him bluntly. "I'm going to meet the taxi at the door, get into it with her, and take that infernal necklace directly to Miss Landis, at her hotel."

"The more I see of you," said Mr. Iff, removing his coat, "the more qualities I discover in you to excite my admiration and liking. As in this instance when with thoughtfulness for my comfort"--he tore from his neck the water-soaked rag that had been his collar--"you combine a prudent, not to say sagacious foresight, whereby you plan to place the Cadogan collar far beyond my reach in event I should turn out to be a gay deceiver."

By way of response, Staff found his hat and placed it handily on the table, went to his desk and took from one of its drawers a small revolver of efficient aspect, unloaded and reloaded it to satisfy himself it was in good working order--and of a sudden looked round suspiciously at Mr. Iff.

The latter, divested of his clothing and swathed in a dressing-gown several sizes too large for him, fulfilled his host's expectations by laughing openly at these warlike preparations.

"I infer," he said, "that you wouldn't be surprised to meet up with Cousin Arbuthnot before sunrise."

"I'm taking no chances," Staff announced with dignity.

"Well, if you should meet him, and if you mean what you act like, _and_ if that gun's any good, _and_ if you know how to use it," yawned Mr. Iff, "you'll do me a favour and save me a heap of trouble into the bargain. _Good_ night."

He yawned again in a most business-like way, lay down, pulled a blanket up round his ears, turned his back to the light and was presently breathing with the sweet and steady regularity of a perfectly sound and sincere sleeper.

To make his rest the more comfortable, Staff turned off all the lights save that on his desk. Then he filled a pipe and sat down to envy the little man. The very name of sleep was music in his hearing, just then.

The minutes lagged on leaden wings. There was a great hush in the old house, and the street itself was quiet. Once or twice Staff caught himself nodding; then he would straighten up, steel his will and spur his senses to attention, waiting, listening, straining to catch the sound of an approaching taxi. He seemed to hear every imaginable night noise but that: the crash and whine of trolleys, the footsteps of a scattered handful of belated pedestrians, the infrequent windy roar of trains on the Third Avenue L, empty clapping of horses' hoofs on the asphalt ... the yowl of a sentimental tomcat ... a dull and distant grumble, vague, formless, like a long, unending roll of thunder down the horizon ... the swish and sough of waters breaking away from the flanks of the Autocratic ... and then, finally, like a tocsin, the sonorous, musical chiming of the grandfather's clock in the corner.

He found himself on his feet, rubbing his eyes, with a mouth dry as paper, a thumping heart, and a vague sense of emptiness in his middle.

Had he napped--slept? How long?... He stared, bewildered, groping blindly after his wandering wits....

The windows, that had been black oblongs in the illuminated walls, were filled with a cool and shapeless tone of grey. He reeled (rather than walked) to one of them and looked out.

The street below was vacant, desolate and uncannily silent, showing a harsh, unlovely countenance like the jaded mask of some sodden reveller, with bleary street-lamps for eyes--all mean and garish in the chilly dusk that foreruns dawn.

Hastily Staff consulted his watch.

Four o'clock!

It occurred to him that the watch needed winding, and he stood for several seconds twisting the stem-crown between thumb and forefinger while stupidly comprehending the fact that he must have been asleep between two and three hours.

Abruptly, in a fit of witless agitation, he crossed to the divan, caught the sleeper by the shoulder and shook him till he wakened--till he rolled over on his back, grunted and opened one eye.

"Look here!" said Staff in a quaver--"I've been asleep!"

"You've got nothing on me, then," retorted Iff with pardonable asperity. "All the same--congratulations. Good _night_."

He attempted to turn over again, but was restrained by Staff's imperative hand.

"It's four o'clock, and after!"

"I admit it. You might be good enough to leave a call for me for eleven."

"But--damn it, man!--that cab hasn't come--"

"I can't help that, can I?"

"I'm afraid something has happened to that girl."

"Well, it's too late to prevent it now--if so."

"Good God! Have you no heart, man?" Staff began to stride distractedly up and down the room. "What am I to do?" he groaned aloud.

"Take unkie's advice and go bye-bye," suggested Iff. "Otherwise I'd be obliged if you'd rehearse that turn in the other room. I'm going to sleep if I have to brain you to get quiet."

Staff stopped as if somebody had slapped him: the telephone bell was ringing again.

He flung himself across the room, dropped heavily into the chair and snatched up the receiver.

A man's voice stammered drowsily his number.

"Yes," he almost shouted. "Yes--Mr. Staff at the 'phone. Who wants me?"

"Hold the wire."

He heard a buzzing, a click; then silence; a prolonged _brrrrp_ and another click.

"Hello?" he called. "Hello?"

His heart jumped: the voice was Miss Searle's.

"Mr. Staff?"

It seemed to him that he could detect a tremor in her accents, as if she were both weary and frightened.

"Yes, Miss Searle. What is it?"

"I wanted to reassure you--I've had a terrible experience, but I'm all right now--safe. I started--"

Her voice ceased to vibrate over the wires as suddenly as if those same wires had been cut.

"Yes?" he cried after an instant. "Yes, Miss Searle? Hello, hello!"

There was no answer. Listening with every faculty at high tension, he fancied that he detected a faint, abrupt sound, like a muffled sob. On the heels of it came a click and the connection was broken.

In his anxiety and consternation he swore violently.

"Well, what's the trouble?"

Iff stood at his side, now wide-awake and quick with interest. Hastily Staff explained what had happened.

"Yes," nodded the little man. "Yes, that'd be the way of it. She had trouble, but managed to get to the telephone; then somebody grabbed her--"

"Somebody! Who?" Staff demanded unreasonably.

"I don't really know--honest Injun! But there's a smell of garlic about it, just the same."

"Smell of garlic! Are you mad?"

"Tush!" said Mr. Iff contemptuously. "I referred poetically to the fine Italian hand of Cousin Arbuthnot Ismay. Now if I were you, I'd agitate that hook until Central answers, and then ask for the manager and see if he can trace that call back to its source. It oughtn't to be difficult at this hour, when the telephone service is at its slackest."

X

DEAD O' NIGHT

Beneath a nature so superficially shallow that it shone only with the reflected lustre of the more brilliant personalities to which it was attracted, Mrs. Ilkington had a heart--sentiment and a capacity for sympathetic affection. She had met Eleanor Searle in Paris, and knew a little more than something of the struggle the girl had been making to prepare herself for the operatic stage. She managed to discover that she had no close friends in New York, and shrewdly surmised that she wasn't any too well provided with munitions of war--in the shape of money--for her contemplated campaign against the army of professional people, marshalled by indifferent-minded managers, which stood between her and the place she coveted.

Considering all this, Mrs. Ilkington had suggested, with an accent of insistence, that Eleanor should go to the hotel which she intended to patronise--wording her suggestion so cunningly that it would be an easy matter for her, when the time came, to demonstrate that she had invited the girl to be her guest. And with this she was thoughtful enough to select an unpretentious if thoroughly well-managed house on the West Side, in the late Seventies, in order that Eleanor might feel at ease and not worry about the size of the bill which she wasn't to be permitted to pay.

Accordingly the two ladies (with Mr. Bangs tagging) went from the pier directly to the St. Simon, the elder woman to stay until her town-house could be opened and put in order, the girl while she looked round for a spinster's studio or a small apartment within her limited means.

Promptly on their arrival at the hotel, Mrs. Ilkington began to run up a telephone bill, notifying friends of her whereabouts; with the result (typical of the New York idea) that within an hour she had engaged herself for a dinner with theatre and supper to follow--and, of course, had managed to have Eleanor included in the invitation. She was one of those women who live on their nerves and apparently thrive on excitement, ignorant of the meaning of rest save in association with those rest-cure sanatoriums to which they repair for a fortnight semi-annually--or oftener.

Against her protests, then, Eleanor was dragged out in full dress when what she really wanted to do was to eat a light and simple meal and go early to bed. In not unnatural consequence she found herself, when they got home after one in the morning, in a state of nervous disquiet caused by the strain of keeping herself keyed up to the pitch of an animated party.

Insomnia stared her in the face with its blind, blank eyes. In the privacy of her own room, she expressed a free opinion of her countrymen, conceiving them all in the guise of fevered, unquiet souls cast in the mould of Mrs. Ilkington.

Divesting herself of her dinner-gown, she slipped into a négligée and looked round for a book, meaning to read herself sleepy. In the course of her search she happened to recognise her bandbox and conceive a desire to reassure herself as to the becomingness of its contents.

The hat she found therein was becoming enough, even if it wasn't hers. The mistake was easily apparent and excusable, considering the confusion that had obtained on the pier at the time of their departure.

She wondered when Staff would learn the secret of his besetting mystery, and wondered too why Alison had wished to make a mystery of it. The joke was hardly apparent--though one's sense of American humour might well have become dulled in several years of residence abroad.

Meanwhile, instinctively, Eleanor was trying on the hat before the long mirror set in the door of the closet. She admitted to herself that she looked astonishingly well in it. She was a sane and sensible young woman, who knew that she was exceedingly good looking and was glad of it in the same wholesome way that she was glad she had a good singing voice. Very probably the hat was more of a piece with the somewhat flamboyant if unimpeachable loveliness of Alison Landis; but it would seem hard to find a hat better suited to set off the handsome, tall and slightly pale girl that confronted Eleanor in the mirror.

It seemed surprisingly heavy, even for a hat of its tremendous size. She was of the opinion that it would make her head ache to wear it for many hours at a time. She was puzzled by its weight and speculated vaguely about it until, lifting it carefully off, her fingers encountered something hard, heavy and unyielding between the lining and the crown. After that it didn't take her long to discover that the lining had been ripped open and resewn with every indication of careless haste. Human curiosity did the rest. Within a very few minutes the Cadogan collar lay in her hands and she was marvelling over it--and hazily surmising the truth: Staff had been used as a blind agent to get the pearls into the country duty-free.

Quick thoughts ran riot in Eleanor's mind. Alison Landis would certainly not delay longer than a few hours before demanding her hat of Mr. Staff. The substitution would then be discovered and she, Eleanor Searle, would fall under suspicion--at least, unless she took immediate steps to restore the jewels.

She acted hastily, on impulse. One minute she was at the telephone, ordering a taxicab, the next she was hurriedly dressing herself in a tailor-made suit. The hour was late, but not too late--although (this gave her pause) it might be too late before she could reach Staff's rooms. She had much better telephone him she was coming. Of course he would have a telephone--everybody has, in New York.

Consultation of the directory confirmed this assumption, giving her both his address and his telephone number. But before she could call up, her cab was announced. Nevertheless she delayed long enough to warn him hastily of her coming. Then she snatched up the necklace, dropped it into her handbag, replaced the hat in its bandbox and ran for the elevator.

It was almost half-past one by the clock behind the desk, when she passed through the office. She had really not thought it so late. She was conscious of the surprised looks of the clerks and pages. The porter at the door, too, had a stare for her so long and frank as to approach impertinence. None the less he was quick enough to take her bandbox from the bellboy who carried it and place it in the waiting taxi, and handed her in after it with civil care. Having repeated to the operator the address she gave him, the porter shut the door and went back to his post as the vehicle darted out from the curb.

Eleanor knew little of New York geography. Her previous visits to the city had been very few and of short duration. With the shopping district she was tolerably familiar, and she knew something of the district roundabout the old Fifth Avenue Hotel and the vanished Everett House. But with these exceptions she was entirely ignorant of the lay of the land: just as she was too inexperienced to realise that it isn't considered wholly well-advised for a young woman alone to take, in the middle of the night, a taxicab whose chauffeur carries a companion on the front seat. If she had stopped to consider this circumstance at all, she would have felt comforted by the presence of the superfluous man, on the general principle that two protectors are better then one: but the plain truth is that she didn't stop to consider it, her thoughts being fully engaged with what seemed more important matters.

The cab bounced across Amsterdam Avenue, slid smoothly over to Columbus, ran for a block or so beneath the elevated structure and swung into Seventy-seventh Street, through which it pelted eastward and into Central Park. Then for some moments it turned and twisted through the devious driveways, in a fashion so erratic that the passenger lost all grasp of her whereabouts, retaining no more than a confused impression of serpentine, tree-lined ways, chequered with lamplight and the soft, dense shadows of foliage, and regularly spaced with staring electric arcs.

The night had fallen black beneath an overcast sky; the air that fanned her face was warm and heavy with humidity; what little breeze there was, aside from that created by the motion of the cab, bore on its leaden wings the scent of rain.

A vague uneasiness began to colour the girl's consciousness. She grew increasingly sensitive to the ominous quiet of the hour and place: the stark, dark stillness of the shrouded coppices and thickets, the emptiness of the paths. Once only she caught sight of a civilian, strolling in his shirt-sleeves, coat over his arm, hat in hand; and once only she detected, at a distance, the grey of a policeman's tunic, half blotted out by the shadow in which its wearer lounged at ease.

And that was far behind when, abruptly, with a grinding crash of brakes, the cab came from full headlong tilt to a dead halt within twice its length. She pitched forward from the seat with a cry of alarm, only saving herself a serious bruising through the instinct that led her to thrust out her hands and catch the frame of the forward windows.

Before she could recover, the chauffeur's companion had jumped out and run ahead, pausing in front of the hood to stoop and stare. In another moment he was back with a report couched in a technical jargon unintelligible to her understanding. She caught the words "stripped the gears" and from them inferred the irremediable.

"What is the matter?" she asked anxiously, bending forward.

The chauffeur turned his head and replied in a surly tone: "We've broken down, ma'm. You can't go no farther in this cab. I'll have to get another to tow us back to the garage."

"Oh," she cried in dismay, "how unfortunate! What am I to do?"

"Guess you'll have to get out 'n' walk back to Central Park West," was the answer. "You c'n get a car there to C'lumbus Circle. You'll find a-plenty taxis down there."

"You're quite sure--" she began to protest.

"Ah, they ain't no chanst of this car going another foot under its own power--not until it's been a week 'r two in hospital. The only thing for you to do 's to hoof it, like I said."

"That's dead right," averred the other man. He was standing beside the body of the cab and now unlatched the door and held it open for her. "You might as well get down, if you're in any great hurry, ma'm."

Eleanor rose, eyeing the man distrustfully. His accent wasn't that of the kind of man who is accustomed to saying "ma'm." His back was toward the nearest lamp post, his face in shadow. She gained no more than a dim impression of a short, slender figure masked in a grey duster buttoned to the throat, and, above it, a face rendered indefinite by a short, pointed beard and a grey motor-cap pulled well down over the eyes....

But there was nothing to do but accept the situation. An accident was an accident--unpleasant but irreparable. There was no alternative; she could do nothing but adopt the chauffeur's suggestion. She stepped out, turning back to get her bandbox.

"Beg pardon, ma'm. I'll get that for you."

The man by the door interposed an arm between Eleanor and the bandbox.

She said, "Oh no!" and attempted to push past his arm.

Immediately he caught her by the shoulder and thrust her away with staggering violence. She reeled back half a dozen feet. Simultaneously she heard the fellow say, sharply: "All right--go ahead!" and saw him jump upon the step. On the instant, the cab shot away through the shadows, the door swinging wide while Eleanor's assailant scrambled into the body.

Before she could collect herself the car had disappeared round a curve in the roadway.

Her natural impulse was to scream, to start a hue-and-cry: "Stop thief!" But the strong element of common-sense in her make-up counselled her to hold her tongue. In a trice she comprehended precisely the meaning of the passage. Somebody else--somebody aside from herself, Staff and Alison Landis--knew the secret of the bandbox and the smuggled necklace, and with astonishing intuition had planned this trap to gain possession of it. She was amazed to contemplate the penetrating powers of inference and deduction, the cunning and resource which had not only in so short a time fathomed the mystery of the vanished necklace, but had discovered the exchange of bandboxes, had traced the right one to her hotel and possession, had divined and taken advantage of her impulse to return the property to its rightful owner without an instant's loss of time. And with this thought came another, more alarming: in a brace of minutes the thieves would discover that the necklace had been abstracted from the hat and--men of such boldness wouldn't hesitate about turning back to run her down and take their booty by force.

It was this consideration that bade her refrain from crying out. Conceivably, if she did raise an alarm, help might be longer in coming than the taxicab in returning. They had the hat and bandbox, and were welcome to them, for all of her, as long as she retained the real valuables. Her only chance lay in instant and secret flight, in hiding herself away in the gloomy fastnesses of these unknown pleasure-grounds, so securely that they might not find her.

She stood alone in the middle of a broad road. There was nobody in sight, whichever way she looked. On one hand a wide asphalt path ran parallel with the drive; on the other lay a darksome hedge of trees and shrubbery. She hesitated not two seconds over her choice, and in a third was struggling and forcing a way through the undergrowth and beneath the low and spreading branches whose shadows cloaked her with a friendly curtain of blackness.

Beyond--she was not long in winning through--lay a broad meadow, glimmering faintly in the glow of light reflected from the bosoms of low, slow-moving clouds. A line of trees bordered it at a considerable distance; beneath them were visible patches of asphalt walk, shining coldly under electric arcs.

Having absolutely no notion whatever of where she was in the Park, after some little hesitation she decided against attempting to cross the lawn and turned instead, at random, to her right, stumbling away in the kindly penumbra of trees.

She thanked her stars that she had chosen to wear this dark, short-skirted suit that gave her so much freedom of action and at the same time blended so well with the shadows wherein she must skulk....

Before many minutes she received confirmation of her fears in the drone of a distant motor humming in the stillness and gaining volume with every beat of her heart. Presently it was strident and near at hand; and then, standing like a frozen thing, not daring to stir (indeed, half petrified with fear) she saw the marauding taxicab wheel slowly past, the chauffeur scrutinising one side of the way, the man in the grey duster standing up in the body and holding the door half open, while he raked with sweeping glances the coppice wherein she stood hiding.

But it did not stop. Incredible though it seemed, she was not detected. Obviously the men were at a loss, unable to surmise which one she had chosen of a dozen ways of escape. The taxicab drilled on at a snail's pace for some distance up the drive, then swung round and came back at a good speed. As it passed her for the second time she could hear one of its crew swearing angrily.

Again the song of the motor died in the distance, and again she found courage to move. But which way? How soonest to win out of this strange, bewildering maze of drives and paths, crossing and recrossing, melting together and diverging without apparent motive or design?