Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “Wan balmy day in May

  Th’ ould Nick come to the dure;

  Sez I ‘The divil’s to pay,

  An’ the debt comes harrd on the poor!’

  His eyes they shone like fire

  An’ he gave a horrid groan;

  Sez I to me sister Suke,

  ‘Suke!!!!

  Tell him I ain’t at home!’

  “He stood forninst the dure,

  His wings were wings of a bat,

  An’ he raised his voice to a roar,

  An’ the tail of him switched like a cat,

  ‘O wirra the day!’ sez I,

  ‘Ochone I’ll no more roam!’

  Sez I to me brother Luke,

  ‘Luke!!!!

  Tell him I ain’t at home!’”

  As he laid the bronze figure away and closed, locked and strapped the olive-wood box, an odd sensation crept over him as though somebody were overlooking what he was doing. Of course it could not be true, but so sudden and so vivid was the impression that he rose, opened the door, and glanced into the private washroom — even poked under the bed and the opposite sofa; and of course discovered that only a living skeleton could lie concealed in such spaces.

  His courage, except moral courage, had never been particularly tested. He was naturally quite fearless, even carelessly so, and whether it was the courage of ignorance or a constitutional inability to be afraid never bothered his mind because he never thought about it.

  Now, amused at his unusual fit of caution, he stretched himself out on his bed, still dressed, debating in his mind whether he should undress and try to sleep, or whether it were really worth while before he boarded the steamer.

  And, as he lay there, a cigarette between his lips, wakeful, his restless gaze wandering, he suddenly caught a glimpse of something moving — a human face pressed to the dark glass of the corridor window between the partly lowered shade and the cherry-wood sill.

  So amazed was he that the face had disappeared before he realised that it resembled the face of Ilse Dumont. The next instant he was on his feet and opening the door of the drawing-room; but the corridor between the curtained berths was empty and dark and still; not a curtain fluttered.

  He did not care to leave his doorway, either, with the box lying there on his bed; he stood with one hand on the knob, listening, peering into the dusk, still excited by the surprise of seeing her on the same train that he had taken.

  However, on reflection, he quite understood that she could have had no difficulty in boarding the midnight train for New York without being noticed by him; because he was not expecting her to do such a thing and he had paid no attention to the group of passengers emerging from the waiting room when the express rolled in.

  “This is rather funny,” he thought. “I wish I could find her. I wish she’d be friendly enough to pay me a visit. Scheherazade is certainly an entertaining girl. And it’s several hours to New York.”

  He lingered a while longer, but seeing and hearing nothing except darkness and assorted snores, he stepped into his stateroom and locked the door again.

  Sleep was now impossible; the idea of Scheherazade prowling in the dark corridor outside amused him intensely, and aroused every atom of his curiosity. Did the girl really expect an opportunity to steal the box? Or was she keeping a sinister eye on him with a view to summoning accomplices from vasty metropolitan deeps as soon as the train arrived? Or, having failed at Brookhollow, was she merely going back to town to report “progress backward”?

  He finished his mineral water, and, still feeling thirsty, rang, on the chance that the porter might still be awake and obliging.

  Something about the entire affair was beginning to strike him as intensely funny, and the idea of foreign spies slinking about Brookhollow; the seriousness with which this young girl took herself and her mission; her amateur attempts at murder; her solemn mention of the Turkish Embassy — all these excited his sense of the humorous. And again incredulity crept in; and presently he found himself humming Irwin’s immortal Kaiser refrain:

  “Hi-lee! Hi-lo! Der vinds dey blow Joost like die wacht am Rhine! Und vot iss mine belongs to me, Und vot iss yours iss mine!”

  There came a knock at his door; he rose and opened it, supposing it to be the porter; and was seized in the powerful grasp of two men and jerked into the dark corridor.

  One of them had closed his mouth with a gloved hand, crushing him with an iron grip around the neck; the other caught his legs and lifted him bodily; and, as they slung him between them, his startled eyes caught sight of Ilse Dumont entering his drawing-room.

  It was a silent, fierce struggle through the corridor to the front platform of the vestibule train; it took both men to hold, overpower, and completely master him; but they tried to do this and, at the same time, lift the trap that discloses the car steps. And could not manage it.

  The instant Neeland realised what they were trying to do, he divined their shocking intention in regard to himself, and the struggle became terrible there in the swaying vestibule. Twice he nearly got at the automatic pistol in his breast pocket, but could not quite grasp it. They slammed him and thrashed him around between them, apparently determined to open the trap, fling him from the train, and let him take his chances with the wheels.

  Then, of a sudden, came a change in the fortunes of war; they were trying to drag him over the chain sagging between the forward mail-car and the Pullman, when one of them caught his foot on it and stumbled backward, releasing Neeland’s right arm. In the same instant he drove his fist into the face of his other assailant so hard that the man’s head jerked backward as though his neck were broken, and he fell flat on his back.

  Already the train was slowing down for the single stop between Albany and New York — Hudson. Neeland got out his pistol and pointed it shakily at the man who had fallen backward over the chain.

  “Jump!” he panted. “Jump quick!”

  The man needed no other warning; he opened the trap, scrambled and wriggled down the mail-car steps, and was off the train like a snake from a sack.

  The other man, bloody and ghastly white, crept under the chain after his companion. He was a well-built, good-looking man of forty, with blue eyes and a golden beard all over blood. He seemed sick from the terrific blow dealt him; but as the train had almost stopped, Neeland pushed him off with the flat of his foot.

  Drenched in perspiration, dishevelled, bruised, he slammed both traps and ran back into the dark corridor, and met Ilse Dumont coming out of his stateroom carrying the olive-wood box.

  His appearance appeared to stupefy her; he took the box from her without resistance, and, pushing her back into the stateroom, locked the door.

  Then, still savagely excited, and the hot blood of battle still seething in his veins, he stood staring wickedly into her dazed eyes, the automatic pistol hanging from his right fist.

  But after a few moments something in her naïve astonishment — her amazement to see him alive and standing there before her — appealed to him as intensely ludicrous; he dropped on the edge of the bed and burst into laughter uncontrolled.

  “Scheherazade! Oh, Scheherazade!” he said, weak with laughter, “if you could only see your face! If you could only see it, my dear child! It’s too funny to be true! It’s too funny to be a real face! Oh, dear, I’ll die if I laugh any more. You’ll assassinate me with your face!”

  She seated herself on the lounge opposite, still gazing blankly at him in his uncontrollable mirth.

  After a while he put back the automatic into his breast pocket, took off coat and waistcoat, without paying the slightest heed to her or to convention; opened his own suitcase, selected a fresh shirt, tie, and collar, and, taking with him his coat and the olive-wood box, went into the little washroom.

  He scarcely expected to find her there when he emerged, cooled and refreshed; but she was still there, seated as he had left her on the lounge.

  “I wanted to ask you,” she said in a low voice, “
did you kill them?”

  “Not at all, Scheherazade,” he replied gaily. “The Irish don’t kill; they beat up their friends; that’s all. Fist and blackthorn, my pretty lass, but nix for the knife and gun.”

  “How — did you do it?”

  “Well, I got tired having a ham-fisted Dutchman pawing me and closing my mouth with his big splay fingers. So I asked him to slide overboard and shoved his friend after him.”

  “Did you shoot them?”

  “No, I tell you!” he said disgustedly. “I hadn’t a chance in hot blood, and I couldn’t do it in cold. No, Scheherazade, I didn’t shoot. I pulled a gun for dramatic effect, that’s all.”

  After a silence she asked him in a low voice what he intended to do with her.

  “Do? Nothing! Chat affably with you until we reach town, if you don’t mind. Nothing more violent than that, Scheherazade.”

  The girl, sitting sideways on the sofa, leaned her head against the velvet corner as though very tired. Her small hands lay in her lap listlessly, palms up-turned.

  “Are you really tired?” he asked.

  “Yes, a little.”

  He took the two pillows from his bed and placed them on the sofa.

  “You may lie down if you like, Scheherazade.”

  “Won’t you need them?”

  “Sunburst of my soul, if I pillow my head on anything while you are in the vicinity, it will be on that olive-wood box!”

  For the first time the faintest trace of a smile touched her lips. She turned, settled the pillows to her liking, and stretched out her supple figure on the sofa with a slight sigh.

  “Shall I talk to you, Scheherazade, or let you snuggle into the chaste arms of Morpheus?”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “Is it a talk-fest, then?”

  “I am listening.”

  “Then, were the two recent gentlemen who so rudely pounced upon me the same gentlemen who so cheerfully chased me in an automobile when you made red fire?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was betting on it. Nice-looking man — the one with the classical map and the golden Frick.”

  She said nothing.

  “Scheherazade,” he continued with smiling malice, “do you realise that you are both ornamental and young? Why so young and murderous, fair houri? Why delight in manslaughter in any degree? Why cultivate assault and battery? Why swipe the property of others?”

  She closed her eyes on the pillow, but, as he remained silent, presently opened them again.

  “I asked them not to hurt you,” she said irrelevantly.

  “Who? Oh, your strenuous friends with the footpad technique? Well, they obeyed you unwillingly.”

  “Did they hurt you?”

  “Oh, no. But the car-wheels might have.”

  “The car-wheels?”

  “Yes. They were all for dumping me down the steps of the vestibule. But I’ve got a nasty disposition, Scheherazade, and I kicked and bit and screamed so lustily that I disgusted them and they simply left the train and concluded to cut my acquaintance.”

  It was evident that his good-humoured mockery perplexed her. Once or twice the shadow of a smile passed over her dark eyes, but they remained uncertain and watchful.

  “You really were astonished to see me alive again, weren’t you?” he asked.

  “I was surprised to see you, of course.”

  “Alive?”

  “I told you that I asked them not to really hurt you.”

  “Do you suppose I believe that, after your pistol practice on me?”

  “It is true,” she replied, her eyes resting on him.

  “You wished to reserve me for more pistol practice?”

  “I have no — enmity — for you.”

  “Oh, Scheherazade!” he protested, laughing.

  “You are wrong, Mr. Neeland.”

  “After all I did to you?”

  To his surprise a bright blush spread over her face where it lay framed by the pillows; she turned her head abruptly and lay without speaking.

  He sat thinking for a few minutes, then leaning forward from where he sat on the bed’s edge:

  “After a man’s been shot at and further intimidated with a large, unpleasantly rusty Kurdish dagger, he is likely to proceed without ceremony. All the same, I am sorry I had to humiliate you, Scheherazade.”

  She lay silent, unstirring.

  “A girl would never forgive that, I know,” he said. “So I shall look for a short shrift from you if your opportunity ever comes.”

  The girl appeared to be asleep. He stood up and looked down at her. The colour had faded from the one cheek visible. For a while he listened to her quiet breathing, then, the imp of perversity seizing him, and intensely diverted by the situation, he bent over her, touched her cheek with his lips, put on his hat, took box and suitcase, and went out to spend the remaining hour or two in the smoking room, leaving her to sleep in peace.

  But no sooner had he closed the door on her than the girl sat straight up on the sofa, her face surging in colour, and her eyes brilliant with starting tears.

  When the train arrived at the Grand Central Station, in the grey of a July morning, Neeland, finding the stateroom empty, lingered to watch for her among the departing passengers.

  But he lingered in vain; and presently a taxicab took him and his box to the Cunard docks, and deposited him there. And an hour later he was in his cabin on board that vast ensemble of machinery and luxury, the Cunarder Volhynia, outward bound, and headed straight at the dazzling disc of the rising sun.

  And thought of Scheherazade faded from his mind as a tale that is told.

  CHAPTER XVII

  A WHITE SKIRT

  It was in mid-ocean that Neeland finally came to the conclusion that nobody on board the Volhynia was likely to bother him or his box.

  The July weather had been magnificent — blue skies, a gentle wind, and a sea scarcely silvered by a comber.

  Assorted denizens of the Atlantic took part in the traditional vaudeville performance for the benefit of the Volhynia passengers; gulls followed the wake to mid-ocean; Mother Carey’s chickens skimmed the baby billows; dolphins turned watery flip-flaps under the bows; and even a distant whale consented to oblige.

  Everybody pervaded the decks morning, noon, and evening; the most squeamish recovered confidence in twenty-four hours; and every constitutional lubber concluded he was a born sailor.

  Neeland really was one; no nausea born from the bad adjustment of that anatomical auricular gyroscope recently discovered in man ever disturbed his abdominal nerves. Short of shipwreck, he enjoyed any entertainment the Atlantic offered him.

  So he was always on deck, tranquilly happy and with nothing in the world to disturb him except his responsibility for the olive-wood box.

  He dared not leave it in his locked cabin; he dared not entrust it to anybody; he lugged it about with him wherever he went. On deck it stood beside his steamer chair; it dangled from his hand when he promenaded, exciting the amazement and curiosity of others; it reposed on the floor under the table and beneath his attentive feet when he was at meals.

  These elaborate precautions indicated his wholesome respect for the persistence of Scheherazade and her friends; he was forever scanning his fellow-voyagers at table, in the smoking room, and as they strolled to and fro in front of his steamer chair, trying to make up his mind concerning them.

  But Neeland, a clever observer of externals, was no reader of character. The passenger list never seemed to confirm any conclusions he arrived at concerning any of the passengers on the Volhynia. A gentleman he mistook for an overfed broker turned out to be a popular clergyman with outdoor proclivities; a slim, poetic-looking youth who carried a copy of “Words and Wind” about the deck travelled for the Gold Leaf Lard Company.

  Taking them all in all, Neeland concluded that they were as harmless a collection of reconcentrados as he had ever observed; and he was strongly tempted to leave the box in his locked stateroom.
/>   He decided to do so one afternoon after luncheon, and, lugging his box, started to return to his stateroom with that intention, instead of going on deck, as usual, for a postprandial cigarette.

  There was nobody in the main corridor as he passed, but in the short, carpeted passage leading to his stateroom he caught a glimpse of a white serge skirt vanishing into the stateroom opposite to his, and heard the door close and the noise of a key turned quickly.

  His steward, being questioned on the first day out, had told him that this stateroom was occupied by an invalid gentleman travelling alone, who preferred to remain there instead of trusting to his crutches on a temperamental deck.

  Neeland, passing the closed and curtained door, wondered whether the invalid had made a hit, or whether he had a relative aboard who wore a white serge skirt, white stockings and shoes, and was further endowed with agreeable ankles.

  He fitted his key to his door, turned it, withdrew the key to pocket it; and immediately became aware that the end of the key was sticky.

  He entered the stateroom, however, and bolted the door, then he sat down on his sofa and examined his fingers and his door key attentively. There was wax sticking to both.

  When he had fully digested this fact he wiped and pocketed his key and cast a rather vacant look around the little stateroom. And immediately his eye was arrested by a white object lying on the carpet between the bed and the sofa — a woman’s handkerchief, without crest or initials, but faintly scented.

  After he became tired of alternately examining it and sniffing it, he put it in his pocket and began an uneasy tour of his room.

  If it had been entered and ransacked, everything had been replaced exactly as he had left it, as well as he could remember. Nothing excepting this handkerchief and the wax on the key indicated intrusion; nothing, apparently, had been disturbed; and yet there was the handkerchief; and there was the wax on the end of his door key.

  “Here’s a fine business!” he muttered to himself; and rang for his steward.

  The man came — a cockney, dense as his native fog — who maintained that nobody could have entered the stateroom without his knowledge or the knowledge of the stewardess.