And what of the pale-faced girl in black who had given these letters to me, saying that my own heart would teach me where to place them?
I felt in my pockets for the letters where I had thrust them all crumpled and wet. They were there, and I decided to turn them over to the police. Then I thought of Cusick and the City Hall Park and these set my mind running on Jamison and my own work, — ah! I had forgotten that, — I had forgotten that I had sworn to stir Jamison’s cold, sluggish blood! Trading on his fiancée’s reported suicide, — or murder! True, he had told me that he was satisfied that the body at the Morgue was not Miss Tufft’s because the ring did not correspond with his fiancée’s ring. But what sort of a man was that! — to go crawling and nosing about morgues and graves for a full-page illustration which might sell a few extra thousand papers. I had never known he was such a man. It was strange too — for that was not the sort of illustration that the Weekly used; it was against all precedent — against the whole policy of the paper. He would lose a hundred subscribers where he would gain one by such work.
“The callous brute!” I muttered to myself, “I’ll wake him up — I’ll—”
I sat straight up on the bench and looked steadily at a figure which was moving toward me under the spluttering electric light.
It was the woman I had met in the Park.
She came straight up to me, her pale face gleaming like marble in the dark, her slim hands outstretched.
“I have been looking for you all day — all day,” she said, in the same low thrilling tones,— “I want the letters back; have you them here?”
“Yes,” I said, “I have them here, — take them in Heaven’s name; they have done enough evil for one day!”
She took the letters from my hand; I saw the ring, made of the double serpents, flashing on her slim finger, and I stepped closer, and looked her in the eyes.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I? My name is of no importance to you,” she answered.
“You are right,” I said, “I do not care to know your name. That ring of yours—”
“What of my ring?” she murmured.
“Nothing, — a dead woman lying in the Morgue wears such a ring. Do you know what your letters have done? No? Well I read them to a miserable wretch and he blew his brains out!”
“You read them to a man!”
“I did. He killed himself.”
“Who was that man?”
“Captain d’Yniol—”
With something between a sob and a laugh she seized my hand and covered it with kisses, and I, astonished and angry, pulled my hand away from her cold lips and sat down on the bench.
“You needn’t thank me,” I said sharply; “if I had known that, — but no matter. Perhaps after all the poor devil is better off somewhere in other regions with his sweetheart who was drowned, — yes, I imagine he is. He was blind and ill, — and broken-hearted.”
“Blind?” she asked gently.
“Yes. Did you know him?”
“I knew him.”
“And his swcetheart, Aline?”
“Aline,” she repeated softly,— “she is dead. I come to thank you in her name.”
“For what? — for his death?”
“Ah, yes, for that.”
“Where did you get those letters?” I asked her, suddenly.
She did not answer, but stood fingering the wet letters.
Before I could speak again she moved away into the shadows of the trees, lightly, silently, and far down the dark walk I saw her diamond flashing.
Grimly brooding, I rose and passed through the Battery to the steps of the Elevated Road.
These I climbed, bought my ticket, and stepped out to the damp platform. When a train came I crowded in with the rest, still pondering on my vengeance, feeling and believing that I was to scourge the conscience of the man who speculated on death.
And at last the train stopped at 28th Street, and I hurried out and down the steps and away to the Morgue.
When I entered the Morgue, Skelton, the keeper, was standing before a slab that glistened faintly under the wretched gas jets. He heard my footsteps, and turned around to see who was coming. Then he nodded, saying:
“Mr. Hilton, just take a look at this here stiff — I’ll be back in a moment — this is the one that all the papers take to be Miss Tufft, — but they’re all off, because this stiff has been here now for two weeks.”
I drew out my sketching-block and pencils.
“Which is it, Skelton?” I asked, fumbling for my rubber.
“This one, Mr. Hilton, the girl what’s smilin’. Picked up off Sandy Hook, too. Looks as if she was asleep, eh?”
“What’s she got in her hand — clenched tight? Oh, — a letter. Turn up the gas, Skelton, I want to see her face.”
The old man turned the gas jet, and the flame blazed and whistled in the damp, fetid air. Then suddenly my eyes fell on the dead.
Rigid, scarcely breathing, I stared at the ring, made of two twisted serpents set with a great diamond, — I saw the wet letters crushed in her slender hand, — I looked, and — God help me! — I looked upon the dead face of the girl with whom I had been speaking on the Battery!
“Dead for a month at least,” said Skelton, calmly.
Then, as I felt my senses leaving me, I screamed out, and at the same instant somebody from behind seized my shoulder and shook me savagely — shook me until I opened my eyes again and gasped and coughed.
“Now then, young feller!” said a Park policeman bending over me, “if you go to sleep on a bench, somebody’ll lift your watch!”
I turned, rubbing my eyes desperately.
Then it was all a dream — and no shrinking girl had come to me with damp letters, — I had not gone to the office — there was no such person as Miss Tufft, — Jamison was not an unfeeling villain, — no, indeed! — he treated us all much better than we deserved, and he was kind and generous too. And the ghastly suicide! Thank God that also was a myth, — and the Morgue and the Battery at night where that pale-faced girl had — ugh!
I felt for my sketch-block, found it; turned the pages of all the animals that I had sketched, the hippopotami, the buffalo, the tigers — ah! where was that sketch in which I had made the woman in shabby black the principal figure, with the brooding vultures all around and the crowd in the sunshine — ? It was gone.
I hunted everywhere, in every pocket. It was gone.
At last I rose and moved along the narrow asphalt path in the falling twilight.
And as I turned into the broader walk, I was aware of a group, a policeman holding a lantern, some gardeners, and a knot of loungers gathered about something, — a dark mass on the ground.
“Found ’em just so,” one of the gardeners was saying, “better not touch ’em until the coroner comes.”
The policeman shifted his bull’s-eye a little; the rays fell on two faces, on two bodies, half supported against a park bench. On the finger of the girl glittered a splendid diamond, set between the fangs of two gold serpents. The man had shot himself; he clasped two wet letters in his hand. The girl’s clothing and hair were wringing wet, and her face was the face of a drowned person.
“Well, sir,” said the policeman, looking at me; “you seem to know these two people — by your looks—”
“I never saw them before,” I gasped, and walked on, trembling in every nerve.
For among the folds of her shabby black dress I had noticed the end of a paper, — my sketch that I had missed!
THE MAN AT THE NEXT TABLE.
“Awed and afraid I cross the border-land.
Oh, who am I that I dare enter here Where the great artists of the world have trod?”
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX.
THE MAN AT THE NEXT TABLE.
“The caricaturist is a freebooter. Public tolerance grants him letters of marque....”
MARMADUKE HUMPHREY.
“Ainsi rien ne se passe, rien de vraiment immortel et d’éternel
lement doux que dans notre âme.”
I.
IT was high noon in the city of Antwerp. From slender steeples floated the mellow music of the Flemish bells, and in the spire of the great cathedral across the square the cracked chimes clashed discords until my ears ached.
When the fiend in the cathedral had jerked the last tuneless clang from the chimes, I removed my fingers from my ears and sat down at one of the iron tables in the court. A waiter with his face shaved blue, brought me a bottle of Rhine wine, a tumbler of cracked ice, and a siphon.
“Does Monsieur desire anything else?” he inquired.
“Yes — the head of the cathedral bell-ringer; bring it with vinegar and potatoes,” I said, bitterly. Then I began to ponder on my great-aunt and the Crimson Diamond.
The white walls of the Hotel St. Antoine rose in a rectangle around the sunny court, casting long shadows across the basin of the fountain. The strip of blue overhead was cloudless. Sparrows twittered under the eaves; the yellow awnings fluttered, the flowers swayed in the summer breeze, and the jet of the fountain splashed among the water plants. On the sunny side of the piazza the tables were vacant; on the shady side, I was lazily aware that the tables behind me were occupied, but I was indifferent as to their occupants, partly because I shunned all tourists, partly because I was thinking of my great-aunt.
Most old ladies are eccentric, but there is a limit, and my great-aunt had overstepped it. I had believed her to be wealthy; — she died bankrupt. Still, I knew there was one thing she did possess, and that was the famous “Crimson Diamond.” Now, of course, you know who my great-aunt was.
Excepting the Koh-i-noor, and the Regent, this enormous and unique stone was, as everybody knows, the most valuable gem in existence. Any ordinary person would have placed that diamond in a safe-deposit. My great-aunt did nothing of the kind. She kept it in a small velvet bag, which she carried about her neck. She never took it off, but wore it dangling openly on her heavy silk gown.
In this same bag she also carried dried catnip leaves of which she was inordinately fond. Nobody but myself, her only living relative, knew that the Crimson Diamond lay among the sprigs of catnip in the little velvet bag.
“Harold,” she would say, “do you think I’m a fool? If I place the Crimson Diamond in any safe-deposit vault in New York, somebody would steal it sooner or later.” Then she would nibble a sprig of catnip and peer cunningly at me. I loathed the odour of catnip and she knew it. I also loathed cats. This also she knew and of course surrounded herself with a dozen. Poor old lady! On the 1st day of March, 1896, she was found dead in her bed in her apartments at the Waldorf. The doctor said she died from natural causes. The only other occupant of her sleeping room was a cat. The cat fled when we broke open the door, and I heard that she was received and cherished by some people in a neighboring apartment.
Now, although my great-aunt’s death was due to purely natural causes, there was one very startling and disagreeable feature of the case. The velvet bag, containing the Crimson Diamond, had disappeared. Every inch of the apartment was searched, the floors torn up, the walls dismantled, but the Crimson Diamond had vanished. Chief of Police Conlin detailed four of his best men on the case, and as I had nothing better to do, I enrolled myself as a volunteer. I also offered $25,000 reward for the recovery of the gem. All New York was agog.
The case seemed hopeless enough, although there were five of us after the thief. McFarlane was in London, and had been for a month, but Scotland Yard could give him no help, and the last I heard of him he was roaming through Surrey after a man with a white spot in his hair. Harrison had gone to Paris. He kept writing me that clues were plenty and the scent hot, but as Dennet, in Berlin, and Clancy, in Vienna, wrote me the same thing, I began to doubt these gentlemen’s ability.
“You say,” I answered Harrison, “that the fellow is a Frenchman, and that he is now concealed in Paris; but Dennet writes me by the same mail that the thief is undoubtedly a German, and was seen yesterday in Berlin. To-day I received a letter from Clancy, assuring me that Vienna holds the culprit, and that he is an Austrian from Trieste. Now for Heaven’s sake,” I ended, “let me alone and stop writing me letters until you have something to write about.”
The night clerk of the Waldorf had furnished us with our first clue. On the night of my aunt’s death he had seen a tall, grave-faced man, hurriedly leave the hotel. As the man passed the desk, he removed his hat and mopped his forehead, and the night clerk noticed that in the middle of his head there was a patch of hair, as white as snow.
We worked this clue for all it was worth, and, a month later, I received a cable dispatch from Paris, saying that a man, answering to the description of the Waldorf suspect, had offered an enormous crimson diamond for sale to a jeweller in the Palais Royal. Unfortunately the fellow took fright and disappeared before the jeweller could send for the police, and since that time, McFarlane in London, Harrison in Paris, Dennet in Berlin, and Clancy in Vienna, had been chasing men with white patches on their hair until no gray-headed patriarch in Europe was free from suspicion. I myself had sleuthed it through England, France, Holland and Belgium, and now I found myself in Antwerp at the Hotel St. Antoine without a clue that promised anything except another outrage on some respectable white-haired citizen. The case seemed hopeless enough, unless the thief tried again to sell the gem. Here was our only hope, for, unless he cut the stone into smaller ones, he had no more chance of selling it than he would have had if he had stolen the Venus of Milo and peddled her about the rue de Seine. Even were he to cut up the stone, no respectable gem collector or jeweller would buy a crimson diamond without first notifying me; for although a few red stones are known to collectors, the colour of the Crimson Diamond was absolutely unique, and there was little probability of an honest mistake.
Thinking of all these things I sat sipping my Rhine wine in the shadow of the yellow awnings. A large white cat came sauntering by and stopped in front of me to perform her toilet until I wished she would go away. After a while she sat up, licked her whiskers, yawned once or twice, and was about to stroll on, when, catching sight of me, she stopped short and looked me squarely in the face. I returned the attention with a scowl because I wished to discourage any advances towards social intercourse which she might contemplate; but after a while her steady gaze disconcerted me, and I turned to my Rhine wine. A few minutes later I looked up again. The cat was still eyeing me.
“Now what the devil is the matter with the animal,” I muttered, “does she recognize in me a relative?”
“Perhaps,” observed a man at the next table.
“What do you mean by that?” I demanded.
“What I say,” replied the man at the next table.
I looked him full in the face. He was old and bald and appeared weak-minded. His age protected his impudence. I turned my back on him. Then my eyes fell on the cat again. She was still gazing earnestly at me.
Disgusted that she should take such pointed public notice of me, I wondered whether other people saw it; I wondered whether there was anything peculiar in my own personal appearance. How hard the creature stared. It was most embarrassing.
“What has got into that cat?” I thought.
“It’s sheer impudence. It’s an intrusion, and I won’t stand it!” The cat did not move. I tried to stare her out of countenance. It was useless. There was aggressive inquiry in her yellow eyes. A sensation of uneasiness began to steal over me — a sensation of embarrassment not unmixed with awe. All cats looked alike to me, and yet there was something about this one that bothered me — something that I could not explain to myself, but which began to occupy me.
She looked familiar — this Antwerp cat. An odd sense of having seen her before — of having been well acquainted with her in former years slowly settled in my mind, and, although I could never remember the time when I had not detested cats, I was almost convinced that my relations with this Antwerp tabby had once been intimate if not cordial. I looked more closely a
t the animal. Then an idea struck me, — an idea which persisted and took definite shape in spite of me. I strove to escape from it, to evade it, to stifle and smother it; an inward struggle ensued which brought the perspiration in beads upon my cheeks, — a struggle short, sharp, decisive. It was useless — useless to try to put it from me, — this idea so wretchedly bizarre, so grotesque and fantastic, so utterly inane, — it was useless to deny that the cat bore a distinct resemblance to my great-aunt!
I gazed at her in horror. What enormous eyes the creature had!
“Blood is thicker than water,” said the man at the next table.
“What does he mean by that?” I muttered, angrily swallowing a tumbler of Rhine wine and seltzer. But I did not turn. What was the use?
“Chattering old imbecile,” I added to myself, and struck a match, for my cigar was out; but as I raised the match to relight it, I encountered the cat’s eyes again. I could not enjoy my cigar with the animal staring at me, but I was justly indignant, and I did not intend to be routed. “The idea! forced to leave for a cat!” I sneered, “we will see who will be the one to go!” I tried to give her a jet of seltzer from the siphon, but the bottle was too nearly empty to carry far. Then I attempted to lure her nearer, calling her in French, German, and English, but she did not stir. I did not know the Flemish for “cat.”
“She’s got a name, and won’t come,” I thought. “Now, what under the sun can I call her?”
“Aunty,” suggested the man at the next table.
I sat perfectly still. Could that man have answered my thoughts? — for I had not spoken aloud. Of course not — it was a coincidence, — but a very disgusting one.
“Aunty,” I repeated mechanically, “aunty, aunty — good gracious, how horribly human that cat looks!” Then somehow or other, Shakespeare’s words crept into my head and I found myself repeating: “the soul of his grandam might happily inhabit a bird; the soul of his grandam might happily inhabit a bird; the soul of — nonsense!” I growled— “it isn’t printed correctly! One might possibly say, speaking in poetical metaphor, that the soul of a bird might happily inhabit one’s grandam—” I stopped short, flushing painfully. “What awful rot!” I murmured, and lighted another cigar. The cat was still staring; the cigar went out. I grew more and more nervous. “What rot!” I repeated. “Pythagoras must have been an ass, but I do believe that there are plenty of asses alive to-day who swallow that sort of thing.”
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 1075