“In short,” said Jim, “the princess may be described as still at large?”
“Shut up about ‘the princess,’” Barry retorted. “At least I have found out that the woman didn’t lie. The house actually belongs to someone called John Brown.”
“Then, in private life, the--the lady--must be a Miss or a Mrs. Brown. Not a romantic name. But what did the realty sportsman tell you about this mysterious citizen Brown?”
“Very little. Said he had never seen him. And, for your enlightenment, there is no Mrs. Brown and no Miss Brown.”
“Odder and odder. Have you thought that she may have been the daily help bound for a fancy-dress orgy?”
“I have not.”
“Well, think about it. Sherlock Holmes would have thought about it at once. Another theory. Mr. Brown may be a bootlegger! A third theory----”
“I don’t want to hear it!”
Jim Sakers looked at Barry reproachfully.
“You are not tackling this thing in the light of pure reason,” he protested. “The proper method is to think of every possible solution, jot ’em all down, and then pick out the right one.”
“Go to blazes!” said Barry.
He had begun to cultivate a sort of New Jersey complex, and was forever driving out into the hills which had been the scene of his strange and unfortunate experience.
One afternoon he drove as far as the club from which he had been returning when the accident had occurred. He had no particular purpose in view, beyond that of travelling over the now familiar route. The golf course was thickly dotted with players, but none of his intimate set seemed to be in the clubhouse or on the tennis courts. He smoked a reflective pipe on the veranda, watching long drives and short drives from the first tee, and then set out for home again.
Rain threatened; indeed, was only checked by a high wind. And at a point in the descending road which seemed to be peculiarly familiar for some reason, he pulled up and sat staring as one who has seen an apparition.
A long-dormant memory awoke.
Through a rift in the driving clouds sunlight poured suddenly upon a building halfway down the slope beneath, surrounded by high walls and having a curious turretlike structure at one corner!
Good heavens! It was the house--her house; and he had first seen it under very similar conditions on the evening of his crash! The clouds swept on, and shadow came where there had been light--just as had happened before.
He had not dreamed it, after all. But, nevertheless, his first glimpse of the building had been in the nature of an omen. Considering the fact that it lay a mile or more back from the main road, his subsequently coming to disaster under its very walls was at least an amazing coincidence.
Automatically he took out his case and lighted a cigarette, all the time watching the mystery house nestling there far below in its enclosing gardens. Once he glanced away. It was to see what prospect offered of sunlight again flooding that part of the landscape. Even as he looked back, the desired effect came about. Some quality in the atmosphere seemed to bring out details very sharply; and the result was that effected by a reducing glass. He saw the house as through the lens of a camera.
Smoke from his newly lighted cigarette rose before his eyes. Abruptly he tossed the cigarette away, and watched--watched; eagerly, fixedly.
A tiny but clear-cut figure in the distance, a girl moved in the walled garden!
She appeared to be gathering flowers.… The shadow of a cloud crept across and across; until once more the picture was blotted out.
Barry’s heart gave a great leap. At crazy speed he swept down the valley road, taking one keen bend on two tires. Of his going he afterward remembered nothing. When, for the second time, he stepped upon the porch of “John Brown’s” house, he recalled the remark of a girl he had once overheard: “Barry Cumberland is picturesquely mad,” she had said.
“She was right,” he reflected and pressed the bell.
The place looked as it had looked before. All the windows were shaded. There was dust on the porch. No one answered his repeated ringing.
In a state bordering upon stupefaction, he went to that side path which led to the garden. He found only a barred gate, at which he stared in unbelieving wonder. Beyond, he could see the door where he had held his interview with the unrelenting caretaker. But all around was silence. To-day there was no rattling of pots and pans.
Could it be, as his father had hinted, that imagination was playing tricks with him? Had the vision at the window indeed been the outcome of an injury, and was this phantom of the garden an aftermath of it--a second illusion--a mirage? Back along the ill-kept road he walked to the barrier, where, heedless of possible loss, he had left the Rolls.
What ailed him? Was he going mad? Was his interest in this house and its occupants due to frustrated curiosity? If so, did this fully explain his waking and sleeping dreams of a dark-eyed girl in a cloudy robe, watching him from a high balcony?
Barry was taking Aunt Micky to dine that evening at a restaurant on Forty-seventh Street, which legitimately enjoyed the reputation of owning a good cellar. Jim Sakers was joining them, and bringing Jack Lorrimer. Jack was Barry’s cousin. She was very pretty, having missed the Cumberland nose. Following dinner, they were going to see the most improper play on Broadway. The event was in honour of Aunt Micky, who occasionally indulged in what she termed “a night of pure sin.”
Having dressed, Barry was sitting smoking in the library when she came down. He had been studying the figure of a slender priestess from the temple at Dendera.
“Well, young Cumberland,” came a deep female voice, “dreaming again?”
Barry turned--he was seated on the edge of the library table--and smiled at the speaker. Countess Colonna was a woman of medium height, sturdily built, and deep-chested, as were all the Cumberlands. Her crisp gray hair was closely bobbed; her unflinching steel-gray eyes looked out from under thick, dark eyebrows to tell the world that a dissolute husband had not crushed her spirit. She had been handsome in her youth. The Cumberland nose in a woman was not unattractive.
Her dress was somewhat masculine, consisting of a smart dinner jacket with white silk waistcoat--the latter cut moderately low--a short black skirt, black silk stockings, and chic black shoes. That she had hitherto refrained from wearing trousers Barry regarded as a concession, for which he was duly grateful.
“Hello, Micky,” he said--“all set?”
“Surely,” his aunt replied, lighting a very large cigarette and replacing the lighter in the pocket of her jacket. “I have always avoided your speak-easy, young Cumberland, because I don’t want to be mixed up in a raid. But, as I don’t care for whisky with dinner, I have fallen.”
“Splendid,” replied Barry, laughing. “We shall make you a complete sinner yet.”
“I aim to be,” said Aunt Micky, “on my ‘night.’ The night over, there isn’t a better citizen in the United States than Michael Colonna.”
“There isn’t a better sport in the world,” added Barry affectionately. “Pity you never married again, Micky.”
“Don’t be a damn’ fool!” was the reply.
As they came down the steps to the street:
“Hello!” said Barry, “why have we got the big car?”
“John has taken the other,” his aunt replied.
She wore a French cape, red-lined, with which in the high wind she was struggling valiantly.
“Where has he gone?” Barry asked, as Hemingway held open the door of the car.
“He is dining with the man Danbazzar,” Aunt Micky answered, getting in.
“That means he’s spending money,” Barry mused as he dropped down upon the seat beside her. “What is it this time? A scarab or half the side of a temple?”
“Can’t say.” His aunt shrugged her shoulders. “Don’t like Danbazzar. Fascinating man, but don’t like him.”
“Oddly enough, I have never met him,” Barry said. “But I know he has done business with Dad for years.”
Presently the car pulled up before an ordinary-looking chop house, and Barry jumped out, helping Aunt Micky to alight. She stared in through the open windows, beyond which rows of tables might be seen, some already occupied; she glanced up at the signboard and looked into the narrow doorway.
“Hardly Ritzy,” she commented.
“Not to look at,” Barry admitted. “But the wine is bon; so are the liqueurs.”
“Ah, well,” his aunt mused, “sin leads our footsteps into strange bypaths.”
They went in. Barry had reserved a table to which a very gentlemanly Irishman conducted them.
“Haven’t my friends arrived, Pat?” Barry inquired.
“No, Mr. Cumberland. But you are a shade early.”
Barry glanced at his watch and then at the clock.
“You are right,” he agreed. “What about two special cocktails?”
“Precisely,” his aunt inquired, ignoring all offers of assistance and throwing her cavalry cloak across the back of a chair--“precisely what is a ‘special cocktail’?”
“It is clearly indicated to-night,” Barry assured her.
“Then let it be brought,” said Aunt Micky.
The cocktails had just been served and Barry was studying the menu when Jim appeared in the open doorway, staring from table to table in quest of his party. Beside him stood a pretty girl wearing a very modern dance frock, a fragment of silvery gauze. Barry stood up, waving, and Aunt Micky shaded her eyes with her hand, a mannerism indicating disapproval. She drew a deep breath as the new arrivals approached, Jack Lorrimer observed of many observers.
“H’m,” she murmured--“silver currency coming in again. Young Lorrimer has a dollar in front, a dollar behind and no change. Barry, the girl’s nude!”
“Shut up, Micky!” said her embarrassed nephew. “Hello, Jack! Hello, Jim! They are bringing your cocktails.”
When everyone was seated, Aunt Micky shaded her eyes again, surveying Jack from shingled nut-brown hair downward to the table edge.
“Are you liking my frock,” the girl asked, “or hating it?”
“Neither,” was the reply. “I am looking for it.”
Jim applauded softly, and Jack turned to Barry for sympathy, leaning forward so that two curly heads were very close together.
“Do you see anything wrong with me?” she pleaded.
Jim watched in tragic disapproval, then rested his hand upon Aunt Micky’s shoulder.
“Look at them!” he said--“admired, self-satisfied--pink and white. Micky, we brunettes must hang together!”
The dinner turned out a great success.
Aunt Micky followed a routine on these occasions: drinking red wine because of its pleasing resemblance to blood, eating a prodigious quantity of celery, taking the blue-plate item in the menu regardless of its constitution, and winding up with rum omelette in flames, because it was “so hellish.”
The notorious play bored her.
“I am going home to read in bed,” she declared, as they waited outside the theatre for the car. “I shall read The Sorrows of Satan, by Marie Corelli.”
They dropped her at the Cumberland town house, an old-fashioned mansion in one of those sections of the big city where a few historic families still linger. A tired-looking person was smoking a slightly used cigar and supporting the iron post which decorated a neighbouring corner. As the door closed and Barry came down to reënter the car, the weary man saluted him.
“Bloated capitalist,” Jim murmured; “living in constant terror of the honest but starving burglar. Your wretched treasures guarded night and day by detectives----”
“Yes,” said Barry, laughing, and directing Hemingway through the tube. “It seems funny to me. Because I can’t imagine the most hard-working burglar staggering away with a couple of hundred-weights of granite sphinx on his back.”
“I much prefer the detective’s life,” Jim continued irrepressibly. “The detective’s life is the life for me. ‘All forms of shadowing undertaken. Divorce and blackmail our specialties. Order your armed guards by telephone. One to five thousand--in uniform--at a moment’s notice. Our watchword: Shoot to Kill. Telegraphic address: Confidence, New York’----”
“For the love of Mike,” Jack implored, “be quiet for five minutes!”
The car threaded its way through Fifth Avenue, and, at the very moment of its turning into that thoroughfare sacred to prohibitive prices, a traffic signal checked them. A French limousine shot past ahead, its occupants clearly visible. They were two; and as the man was seated on the off-side, Barry had never a glimpse of his features. But the girl wore a curious black veil, of a fashion neither Oriental nor Spanish.
She had apparently just raised it, but dropped it again swiftly on seeing another car so near. Yet she failed to veil quickly enough to prevent Barry obtaining a glimpse of her face. He uttered a loud cry. To the astonishment of his friends--even Jim was silenced--he wrenched open the door and leaped out into the street!
He ran three or four paces and stood there like a madman, right in the traffic fairway, glaring after the retreating car! Its number was indistinguishable. He turned, staring back at Hemingway, who was regarding him with deep concern.
