"Come over and meet them," he said. "That"s the cousin Miss West is visiting, Mrs. Dallas."
But I would not go. After he went I sat there alone, painfully conscious that I was being pointed out and stared at from the box. The abominable j.a.panese gave way to yet more atrocious performing dogs.
"How many offers of marriage will the young lady in the box have?" The dog stopped sagely at "none," and then pulled out a card that said eight. Wild shouts of glee by the audience. "The fools," I muttered.
After a little I glanced over. Mrs. Dallas was talking to McKnight, but She was looking straight at me. She was flushed, but more calm than I, and she did not bow. I fumbled for my hat, but the next moment I saw that they were going, and I sat still. When McKnight came back he was triumphant.
"I"ve made an engagement for you," he said. "Mrs. Dallas asked me to bring you to dinner to-night, and I said I knew you would fall all over yourself to go. You are requested to bring along the broken arm, and any other souvenirs of the wreck that you may possess.
"I"ll do nothing of the sort," I declared, struggling against my inclination. "I can"t even tie my necktie, and I have to have my food cut for me."
"Oh, that"s all right," he said easily. "I"ll send Stogie over to fix you up, and Mrs. Dal knows all about the arm. I told her."
(Stogie is his j.a.panese factotum, so called because he is lean, a yellowish brown in color, and because he claims to have been shipped into this country in a box.) The Cinematograph was finishing the program. The house was dark and the music had stopped, as it does in the circus just before somebody risks his neck at so much a neck in the Dip of Death, or the hundred-foot dive. Then, with a sort of shock, I saw on the white curtain the announcement: THE NEXT PICTURE IS THE DOOMED WASHINGTON FLIER, TAKEN A SHORT DISTANCE FROM THE SCENE OF THE WRECK ON THE FATAL MORNING OF SEPTEMBER TENTH. TWO MILES FARTHER ON IT MET WITH ALMOST COMPLETE ANNIHILATION.
I confess to a return of some of the sickening sensations of the wreck; people around me were leaning forward with tense faces. Then the letters were gone, and I saw a long level stretch of track, even the broken stone between the ties standing out distinctly. Far off under a cloud of smoke a small object was rushing toward us and growing larger as it came.
Now it was on us, a mammoth in size, with huge drivers and a colossal tender. The engine leaped aside, as if just in time to save us from destruction, with a glimpse of a stooping fireman and a grimy engineer. The long train of sleepers followed. From a forward vestibule a porter in a white coat waved his hand. The rest of the cars seemed still wrapped in slumber. With mixed sensations I saw my own car, Ontario, fly past, and then I rose to my feet and gripped McKnight"s shoulder.
On the lowest step at the last car, one foot hanging free, was a man. His black derby hat was pulled well down to keep it from blowing away, and his coat was flying open in the wind. He was swung well out from the car, his free hand gripping a small valise, every muscle tense for a jump.
"Good G.o.d, that"s my man!" I said hoa.r.s.ely, as the audience broke into applause. McKnight half rose: in his seat ahead Johnson stifled a yawn and turned to eye me.
I dropped into my chair limply, and tried to control my excitement. "The man on the last platform of the train," I said. "He was just about to leap; I"ll swear that was my bag."
"Could you see his face?" McKnight asked in an undertone. "Would you know him again?"
"No. His hat was pulled down and his head was bent I"m going back to find out where that picture was taken. They say two miles, but it may have been forty."
The audience, busy with its wraps, had not noticed. Mrs. Dallas and Alison West had gone. In front of us Johnson had dropped his hat and was stooping for it. "This way," I motioned to McKnight, and we wheeled into the narrow pa.s.sage beside us, back of the boxes. At the end there was a door leading into the wings, and as we went boldly through I turned the key.
The final set was being struck, and no one paid any attention to us. Luckily they were similarly indifferent to a banging at the door I had locked, a banging which, I judged, signified Johnson.
"I guess we"ve broken up his interference," McKnight chuckled.
Stage hands were hurrying in every direction; pieces of the side wall of the last drawing-room menaced us; a switchboard behind us was singing like a tea-kettle. Everywhere we stepped we were in somebody"s way. At last we were across, confronting a man in his shirt sleeves, who by dots and dashes of profanity seemed to be directing the chaos.
"Well?" he said, wheeling on us. "What can I do for you?"
"I would like to ask," I replied, "if you have any idea just where the last cinematograph picture was taken."
"Broken board - picnickers - lake?"
"No. The Washington Flier."
He glanced at my bandaged arm.
"The announcement says two miles," McKnight put in, "but we should like to know whether it is railroad miles, automobile miles, or policeman miles."
"I am sorry I can"t tell you," he replied, more civilly. "We get those pictures by contract. We don"t take them ourselves."
"Where are the company"s offices?"
"New York." He stepped forward and grasped a super by the shoulder. "What in blazes are you doing with that gold chair in a kitchen set? Take that piece of pink plush there and throw it over a soap box, if you haven"t got a kitchen chair."
I had not realized the extent of the shock, but now I dropped into a chair and wiped my forehead.
The unexpected glimpse of Alison West, followed almost immediately by the revelation of the picture, had left me limp and unnerved. McKnight was looking at his watch.
"He says the moving picture people have an office down-town. We can make it if we go now."
So he called a cab, and we started at a gallop. There was no sign of the detective. "Upon my word,"
Richey said, "I feel lonely without him."
The people at the down-town office of the cinematograph company were very obliging. The picture had been taken, they said, at M-, just two miles beyond the scene of the wreck. It was not much, but it was something to work on. I decided not to go home, but to send McKnight"s j.a.p for my clothes, and to dress at the Incubator. I was determined, if possible, to make my next day"s investigations without Johnson. In the meantime, even if it was for the last time, I would see Her that night. I gave Stogie a note for Mrs. Klopton, and with my dinner clothes there came back the gold bag, wrapped in tissue paper.
CHAPTER XVI THE SHADOW OF A GIRL
Certain things about the dinner at the Dallas house will always be obscure to me. Dallas was something in the Fish Commission, and I remember his reeling off fish eggs in billions while we ate our caviar. He had some particular stunt he had been urging the government to for years - something about forbidding the establishment of mills and factories on river-banks - it seems they kill the fish, either the smoke, or the noise, or something they pour into the water. Mrs. Dallas was there, I think. Of course, I suppose she must have been; and there was a woman in yellow: I took her in to dinner, and I remember she loosened my clams for me so I could get them. But the only real person at the table was a girl across in white, a sublimated young woman who was as brilliant as I was stupid, who never by any chance looked directly at me, and who appeared and disappeared across the candles and orchids in a sort of halo of radiance.
When the dinner had progressed from salmon to roast, and the conversation had done the same thing - from fish to scandal - the yellow gown turned to me. "We have been awfully good, haven"t we, Mr.
Blakeley?" she asked. "Although I am crazy to hear, I have not said "wreck" once. I"m sure you must feel like the survivor of Waterloo, or something of the sort."
"If you want me to tell you about the wreck," I said, glancing across the table, "I"m sorry to be disappointing, but I don"t remember anything."
"You are fortunate to be able to forget it." It was the first word Miss West had spoken directly to me, and it went to my head.
"There are some things I have not forgotten," I said, over the candles. "I recall coming to myself some time after, and that a girl, a beautiful girl - "
"Ah!" said the lady in yellow, leaning forward breathlessly. Miss West was staring at me coldly, but, once started, I had to stumble on.
"That a girl was trying to rouse me, and that she told me I had been on fire twice already." A shudder went around the table.
"But surely that isn"t the end of the story," Mrs. Dallas put in aggrievedly. "Why, that"s the most tantalizing thing I ever heard."
"I"m afraid that"s all," I said. "She went her way and I went mine. If she recalls me at all, she probably thinks of me as a weak-kneed individual who faints like a woman when everything is over.
"What did I tell you?" Mrs. Dallas a.s.serted triumphantly. "He fainted, did you hear? when everything was over! He hasn"t begun to tell it."
I would have given a lot by that time if I had not mentioned the girl. But McKnight took it up there and carried it on.
"Blakeley is a regular geyser," he said. "He never spouts until he reaches the boiling point. And by that same token, although he hasn"t said much about the Lady of the Wreck, I think he is crazy about her.
In fact, I am sure of it. He thinks he has locked his secret in the caves of his soul, but I call you to witness that he has it nailed to his face. Look at him!"
I squirmed miserably and tried to avoid the startled eyes of the girl across the table. I wanted to choke McKnight and murder the rest of the party.
"It isn"t fair," I said as coolly as I could. "I have my fingers crossed; you are five against one."
"And to think that there was a murder on that very train," broke in the lady in yellow. "It was a perfect crescendo of horrors, wasn"t it? And what became of the murdered man, Mr. Blakeley?"
McKnight had the sense to jump into the conversation and save my reply.
"They say good Pittsburgers go to Atlantic City when they die," he said. "So - we are reasonably certain the gentleman did not go to the seash.o.r.e."
The meal was over at last, and once in the drawing-room it was clear we hung heavy on the hostess"
hands. "It is so hard to get people for bridge in September," she wailed. "there is absolutely n.o.body in town. Six is a dreadful number."
"It"s a good poker number," her husband suggested.
The matter settled itself, however. I was hopeless, save as a dummy; Miss West said it was too hot for cards, and went out on a balcony that overlooked the Mall. With obvious relief Mrs. Dallas had the card-table brought, and I was face to face with the minute I had dreaded and hoped for for a week.
Now it had come, it was more difficult than I had antic.i.p.ated. I do not know if there was a moon, but there was the urban subst.i.tute for it - the arc light. It threw the shadow of the balcony railing in long black bars against her white gown, and as it swung sometimes her face was in the light. I drew a chair close so that I could watch her.
"Do you know," I said, when she made no effort at speech, "that you are a much more formidableperson to-night, in that gown, than you were the last time I saw you?"
The light swung on her face; she was smiling faintly. "The hat with the green ribbons!" she said. "I must take it back; I had almost forgotten."
"I have not forgotten - anything." I pulled myself up short. This was hardly loyalty to Richey. His voice came through the window just then, and perhaps I was wrong, but I thought she raised her head to listen.
"Look at this hand," he was saying. "Regular pianola: you could play it with your feet."
"He"s a dear, isn"t he?" Alison said unexpectedly. "No matter how depressed and downhearted I am, I always cheer up when I see Richey."
"He"s more than that," I returned warmly. "He is the most honorable fellow I know. If he wasn"t so much that way, he would have a career before him. He wanted to put on the doors of our offices, Blakeley and McKnight, P. B. H., which is Poor But Honest."
>From my comparative poverty to the wealth of the girl beside me was a single mental leap. From that wealth to the grandfather who was responsible for it was another.
"I wonder if you know that I had been to Pittsburg to see your grandfather when I met you?" I said.
"You?" She was surprised.
"Yes. And you remember the alligator bag that I told you was exchanged for the one you cut off my arm?" She nodded expectantly. "Well, in that valise were the forged Andy Bronson notes, and Mr.
Gilmore"s deposition that they were forged."
She was on her feet in an instant. "In that bag!" she cried. "Oh, why didn"t you tell me that before?
Oh, it"s so ridiculous, so - so hopeless. Why, I could - "
She stopped suddenly and sat down again. "I do not know that I am sorry, after all," she said after a pause. "Mr. Bronson was a friend of my father"s. I - I suppose it was a bad thing for you, losing the papers?"
"Well, it was not a good thing," I conceded. "While we are on the subject of losing things, do you remember - do you know that I still have your gold purse?"
She did not reply at once. The shadow of a column was over her face, but I guessed that she was staring at me.
"You have it!" She almost whispered.
"I picked it up in the street car," I said, with a cheerfulness I did not feel. "It looks like a very opulent little purse."
Why didn"t she speak about the necklace? For just a careless word to make me sane again!
"You!" she repeated, horror-stricken. And then I produced the purse and held it out on my palm. "I should have sent it to you before, I suppose, but, as you know, I have been laid up since the wreck."
We both saw McKnight at the same moment. He had pulled the curtains aside and was standing looking out at us. The tableau of give and take was unmistakable; the gold purse, her outstretched hand, my own att.i.tude. It was over in a second; then he came out and lounged on the balcony railing.
"They"re mad at me in there," he said airily, "so I came out. I suppose the reason they call it bridge is because so many people get cross over it."
The heat broke up the card group soon after, and they all came out for the night breeze. I had no more words alone with Alison.
I went back to the Incubator for the night. We said almost nothing on the way home; there was a constraint between us for the first time that I could remember. It was too early for bed, and so we smoked in the living-room and tried to talk of trivial things. After a time even those failed, and we sat silent. It was McKnight who finally broached the subject.
"And so she wasn"t at Seal Harbor at all."
"No."
"Do you know where she was, Lollie?"
"Somewhere near Cresson."
"And that was the purse - her purse - with the broken necklace in it?"
"Yes, it was. You understand, don"t you, Rich, that, having given her my word, I couldn"t tell you?" "I understand a lot of things," he said, without bitterness.
We sat for some time and smoked. Then Richey got up and stretched himself. "I"m off to bed, old man," he said. "Need any help with that game arm of yours?"
"No, thanks," I returned.
I heard him go into his room and lock the door. It was a bad hour for me. The first shadow between us, and the shadow of a girl at that.
CHAPTER XVII AT THE FARM-HOUSE AGAIN