# The Burglar (Stringer)

Extracted from the The Pall Mall Magazine, July 1910, pp. 49–60. Accompanying illustrations by A. C. Michael (UK, d. 1965) omitted.
THE BURGLAR.
BY ARTHUR STRINGER
Illustrated By A. C. Michael.
While this is primarily a story of suspense and intrigue, it ts also a study in the psychology of crime, and an elucidation, not without a moral, of a prevailing over-romantic attitude toward the criminal.
HE was trapped. His retreat had H been cut off. He had calculated the margin of safety with too fine a nicety, and here, at the last moment, they had him cornered.
Some one's hand had cautiously turned a key in the door, from the outside. There was no doubt about it. He was, to all intents and purposes, a prisoner within the four walls that surrounded him. He had heard the click of the lock-bar into its socket. It had clicked decisively, disquietingly, like the snap of a spring trap.
The second door, he knew, was out of the question. It had been closed and bolted from the first. The windows themselves were mullioned and grated with their deceivingly airy scroll-work of steel, shutting him in as securely as cage-bars shut in a Zoo captive. And those scrollwork gratings, opening as they did on the one-storied conservatory roof, were always kept locked. He could have told them that weeks ago, when he first began his study of their house.
This study had been a leisured and yet an elaborate one. It was Schlaum, alias Illinois Oscar, who six months before had tipped him off as to the obsolete rosewood-panelled wall-safe in the Alfred Duyster mansion. Schlaum had had the good fortune to enter the Duyster household as second-man. But an over-interrogative Central Office had learned of his intrusion and compelled him, first to a hasty migration, and later to an obligatory Middle-West exile, long before he could make his haul.
Yet he carried away with him, ironically enough, a duplicate key to the rosewood façaded wall-safe. The knowledge he had thus gained lay dormant in the mind of Gentleman Dan, alias Denver Daniel, alias Rambler Roberts, and when that worthy worked his bumper-riding way eastward with Sheeny Chi, and funds gave out, he decided to act on the tip that Schlaum had given him.
So for three weeks he had kept watch, quietly and unostentatiously, with a patience equalled only by that of the true fisherman. For three weeks he had studied the greystone house-front, the habits and movements of its owner, the location and character of its entrances, the coming and going of its servants, the hours of their retiring and rising, from the liveried coachman who “slept out” to the mild and thin-cheeked lady's-maid who dropped letters in the mail-box at the Avenue corner. And a fortified quietude of stone and brick, carrying as it did all the outward appearance of solidity, was translated for Gentleman Dan into something about as vulnerable as a ripe and succulent musk-melon.
“The other he retained in his right hand.”
For his weeks of careful observation equipped him with a rather serviceable fund of information. Added to this, divers sagacious deductions and certain more or less logical conclusions, it might be said that his twenty-day reconnaissance had furnished him with even a startling familiarity with regions wherein he had never set foot. It had confirmed his earlier impressions that the front of the building, with its unscreened street-door and its burglar-alarm circuit, was practically impregnable. It had served to decide him on an attack from the rear. To this end, when the chosen night arrived, a night when the master of the house was in Washington, and practically all the servants had been given a leave of absence, Gentleman Dan entered an onyx-pillared apartment-hotel one block below his actual point of attack. There he took an upholstered and many-mirrored elevator to the top floor, waited until the cage descended, and then cautiously made his escape by means of a rear window and a fire-escape. From this, with equal caution, he swung himself across a cat-teaser that surmounted the back area-fence of the Duyster lot, removing his coat and cushioning the iron spike-ends with it as he did so. Then he stood face to face with the frugal little apology of a conservatory. The soft leaded panes of this conservatory were extremely easy to cut out, and ten minutes of quiet and leisured work enabled him to push his way in between the rather sickly and attenuated tendrils of a Lord Penzance hybrid briar-rose. His crawling body crushed portions of the foliage as he wormed his way through it. In the darkness he could plainly sniff the briar smell. That smell was strangely suggestive of country lanes and woodland quietness; but it was quite lost on Gentleman Dan, for he had other things to think of. One of these was to discover the telephone wires. Another, when they were found, was to saw through them with the blade of his pocket-knife.
His next task was to remove his shoes. They were fantastically narrow-toed, military-heeled shoes of patent leather. One of them he stowed away in his left coat pocket. The other he retained in his right hand. Time and much experience had taught him that a well-ironed shoe-heel makes a safe and effective weapon. He always made it a point, in fact, to carry neither firearms nor flashlight when doing “city” work. He had no hankering to be caught with the egregious “yegg” gun on his person. He had also come to learn that jimmies and black-jacks seldom paved the way to prompt acquittals, helpful as they might sometimes be in moments of stress. His favourite tool, to take the place of the ever-damnatory “L,” was the slightly-bent king-bolt of a wagon, with the end apparently worn to a point. This seemingly innocent and easily disowned vehicular necessity gave him excellent leverage, when it came to a matter of obstinate sashes and resisting doors, and at the same time carried with it none of those malodorous associations so prejudicial in the eyes of the law. In fact, Gentleman Dan took a pride in his eccentricities of equipment, just as he rejoiced in his idiosyncrasies of professional attire. He affected no black peaked cap and face mask, but clung always to the conventional Derby hat and an inconspicuous suit of blue serge, to say nothing of the somewhat dandified accessories of dogskin gloves.
So Gentleman Dan had advanced from the conservatory to another room equally dark, with a calmness and precision which only years of practice could make possible. It took but a moment or two of groping about this room to come to a second door. This, in turn, was opened with extreme caution. Once more utter darkness confronted the intruder. He stood in the centre of this darkness, listening, inhaling like an animal on the alert and with its nose “up wind.” Then he let his troubled gaze slowly circle the blackness that engulfed him.
He had almost completed the circle before he discovered the thin pencil of yellow light, low down on his left. It was nothing more than a faint crack of luminosity along what must have been a door-bottom. He tip-toed stealthily towards this door. Then he crouched low, with his ear close to the panel, to listen.
“It was the third blow that sent him down.”
It was at that precise moment that the door opened, suddenly and quite without warning. An oblong of light flooded the room. As it did so Gentleman Dan fell back with the outswinging door, until he was flat against the room wall. He could see a figure step out through the light, a ponderous figure in knee-breeches and stockings and a service-coat with silver buttons and yellow facings. It was nothing more than the Duyster butler with a pile of damask table-napkins over his arm. But even butlers have to be reckoned with.
Gentleman Dan waited a second or two, grasping his narrow-toed shoe as he did so. The door swung shut, and he heard the click of a light-switch.
He sprang forward the same moment that the light flooded the room, at the same moment that the startled butler's glance fell on his crouching figure.
The man in the anachronistic knee-breeches had scarcely time to cry out. Nothing more than a grunt escaped his lips. Then the well-aimed boot-heel descended on the white-fleshed, close-clipped head. It was the third blow that sent him down. The man with the boot watched him as he fell with a moan and a familiar convulsive movement or two of the body. Then he calmly and deliberately raised the boot-heel.
A fifth blow would have been unnecessary, after that fourth impact, directed with such well-chosen savagery, obliquely above the ear. The ponderous body in the silver buttons and. yellow-faced uniform no longer moved. Gentleman Dan dropped to his knee and promptly prised open the relaxed jaw, very much as a fish-dealer prises open a shell oyster. Then he knotted two of the damask table-napkins into a gag. Two minutes later the fallen servant was gagged and trussed, and rolled in half under the long table that stood in the centre of the room.
Gentleman Dan waited only long enough to glance about the four walls and switch off the lights. He surmised, in that hurried glance, that he was in the Duysters' dining-room. He made a quick mental note of the location of its doors, and passed on deeper into the strange house which lay so dark and still about him. It worried him a little to think he had to penetrate so deep into that unknown territory. For, like all adepts in his line, he never cared to operate far from the open; his ventures were as limited as those of a deep-sea diver. He knew that he had to be able to come up for air, every now and then, or his nerve would go back on him. This was especially true when he operated alone, without a “gay cat” or a “stick-up” to advise him of how the land lay. So Gentleman Dan, as he advanced, moved from room to room with all the caution at his command.
After that everything was plain sailing. He followed his path to the wall-safe as casually as a pilot follows a well-charted waterway. He knew when to veer and turn, and when to stop. Then came a moment or two of quiet exploration, another moment or two of cautious prying, the insertion of Schlaum's duplicate key, and the job was done. All that remained was to gather in the wealth that lay at his finger-tips, tie it up in a somewhat soiled yellow silk handkerchief—for among his own ilk Gentleman Dan was always spoken of as a “natty dresser”—and make his get-away. There had been no noise, for a good burglar, he held, should work as quietly as a good motor. There had been no interruption, there had not been a misstep, from first to last. He had his haul in his hand, and a clear path of escape behind him.
Then the beguiling thought of an empty boudoir or two above stairs had come to him. It had all seemed so easy. The coast was so obviously clear and the hallway so invitingly darkened; so he groped his padded way up the wide staircase, depending now largely on his sense of smell.
It was his nose, once the stairs lay behind him, that caused the intruder to turn to the last room on his right, pervaded as it was with its subtle yet indisputable atmosphere of femininity, its indescribable perfumes of refinement, its vague odours of cosmetics and cut flowers. And he was busily at work exploring the top drawer of a hard-wood cheffonnier when the door had been quietly closed and the turn of a key had sounded in the lock.
It was then that Gentleman Dan awoke to the disturbing consciousness that he was trapped, miserably and meanly trapped with his “swag” on. A wave of abject and unnerving fear went through him, as he stood there in the silence, trying to peer through the darkness with straining and quick-moving eyes. Then he quickly stooped and slipped his feet into his shoes. Effective as a boot-heel might be for secret assault, it was a very poor weapon of defence in open combat, and Gentleman Dan wanted to be quite ready for flight, should the chance come.
Then the quietness was broken by a sound. It was the sound of a step, light and quick, but unmistakably a step. Gentleman Dan retreated involuntarily, until his back was against the wall.
Then came a second sound, even more startling. It was the snap of an electric switch. The sound was followed by the instant flowering of soft-tinted globes, filling the room with light.
Then Gentleman Dan actually laughed a little; for in front of him was a woman, in a cloud-like dressing-gown of white, with ribbons of pale rose at the throat and sleeve-ends. She was still a young woman, midway between the twenties and thirties. Her skin, where the loose-fitting gown fell away from her throat and arms, was white and soft, like a child's; her eyes at the moment were unusually large. The unstudied disarray of her hair, as she stood there with one hand resting on a polished teak-wood table, only added to her attractiveness. Even Gentleman Dan could see that she was a beautiful woman,
But her appearance did not especially interest him. His attention was fixed on the magazine-revolver which she held in her right hand as she stood facing him. Yet, intently as he watched this, he also observed that his involuntary laugh of relief had startled and puzzled her. He realised disconcertingly that she was not openly afraid of him. It was almost curiosity that he saw written in her wide-eyed stare. And he saw, to his infinite relief, that she was not going to shoot. He was absurdly afraid of women; they were to be abhorred even more than house-dogs. It was always women who, armed with the bravery of utter ignorance, faced firearms as indifferently as a child would face a rattlesnake. It was always a woman who clung screaming to a burglar, forgetting that one finger-pressure could snuff her out, just as it was always a woman who clawed and scratched like a wild cat until she was either choked into quietness or pounded into “insensibility. And this woman, knowing who and what he was, had deliberately locked herself in with him.
So Gentleman Dan, being a man of reasonable wit, first ceremoniously doffed his black Derby hat and then repeated his laugh. He caught at his cue like an actor. He promptly and unequivocally became an actor, for all his career had been histrionic. He compelled himself to laugh aloud, as unconcernedly and as merrily as the situation would allow for. He moved forward a little as he laughed, carelessly, off-handedly.
Then a voice, clear noted and crisp, brought him up short. It was the woman with the automatic revolver who spoke.
“Don't move!” she cried. “Don't move, or I shall have to shoot you!”
She raised her right hand as she spoke. He could see the gleam of a diamond or two on her fingers. He could also see that she was holding the gun quite steadily, and that its barrel was pointing directly at his body. He would have preferred having it point at his head, where the chances of a hit were so much smaller. But he had an active and wholesome fear of that automatic revolver. He knew its power of spraying lead very much as a garden-hose sprays water. He would have been willing to chance a stray bullet or two, but the thought of a steady stream of projectiles directed at him with one finger-movement made him wince. And women, he knew, were always fools with firearms.
Yet he could not fathom why she had confronted him. He could not get at the bottom of that strange encounter. He could not make her out. So intuitively, for his mind was neither an analytical nor a constructive one, he felt the necessity of meeting her on her own ground, of combating her with her own weapon of mystification. So he folded his arms and gazed at her, with an assumption of admiring whimsicality, of merriment, of careless inquiry. But under his folded arms he could feel his heart thumping like a trip-hammer. He was not exactly trembling; it was a more nervous and mule-like twitching of the muscles that ran through his gaunt body. So he stood there, awaiting the next move, for the simple reason that all he could do was to wait.
It was the woman with the pale rose ribbons who made the first move. She came several steps closer to him. But the revolver was still balanced in her right hand.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded in her clear and confident voice. It was a well-modulated voice, with just the slightest tremolo of excitement in it. It was also an authoritative voice. It was the voice of a woman who was used to being answered invariably with promptness and usually with honesty.
“What are you doing here?” she repeated, this time more peremptorily. Yet at that precise moment Louise Duyster was experiencing a distinctly odd and thrilling sensation along the nape of her softly rounded neck. For she knew she was face to face with a burglar. She realised that the situation had its dangers. But what those dangers were she could not see. The primordiality of such perils were incomprehensible to her. She had never been driven to a realisation of the complexity of the social machinery which surrounded her. She knew that a bell-ring brought service, that a telephone-call brought companionship, that a word of alarm brought immediate protection. All life's procedure and tradition had made her existence an upholstered one, cushioning and muffling her against every discommoding shock. Seldom indeed had her dependence on others been brought home to her. There was even a tingle of delight in the thought that for once she was acting unaided and alone, that she was looking danger in the face without peering across footlights to find it, and then finding it only second-handed. The situation translated itself into romance. It was worth the risk. Its novelty appealed to her. So she continued to face her undecipherable opponent with the naive interest of a puzzled child. Then, for the third time, she calmly inquired the meaning of his presence there.
“Curiosity alone, madam!” was Gentleman Dan's unexpected answer, as he once more essayed his theatrically profound bow. For the man facing the pistol was crafty enough to guess at her more obvious emotions. And he, too, was not without his vanities. He knew that his profession, with its unerring instinct of nomenclature, had not called him “Gentleman Dan” for nothing. It was true he had begun life as an iron-worker, that he had laboured as a plumber's assistant, that he had been a travelling mechanic and a strike-breaker long before he had turned his hand to the calling of the “keister-cracker” and the “yeggman.” His spare figure was not ill-proportioned. About his lean and pallid face was a look which might easily have been construed as asceticism, and prolonged spells of solitary confinement had not detracted from an air of wistfulness which clung about his hungry-looking eyes. At odd times, too, his calling had imposed on him the careful study of persons in higher walks of life. His two years as a Middle-West “bank-sneak” had made it necessary for him to simulate the bearing and speech of the man of means. He had also acquired a flashy fastidiousness of apparel and certain graces of the person after a lean and dull and otherwise unprofitable winter in a Cleveland barber-shop. And during a season or two as a summer hotel waiter, where the monotony of tray-wielding was varied by numerous exercises of the pickpocket's adeptness, he had come more or less in touch with men and women who made ordinary concessions to the amenities of social intercourse. So he waited with a certain touch of almost disinterested curiosity, to see just how the woman with the pale rose ribbons would receive his Chesterfieldian sally.
It did not impress her. At least, she gave no outward sign of being impressed. She merely looked at him with wondering contempt.
“You're a thief!” she declared. He wondered suddenly just how much she had discovered below-stairs, just how much she actually knew. One glimpse of that gagged and trussed butler would put a stop to the whole business.
“Scarcely a thief!” he had the temerity to correct her. She tried to cut him short with a gesture. But he went blandly on: “For, as you see, I have taken nothing!”
“But you intended to take something!” was her quick retort. He had already measured the distance between them, and was watching every movement of her hands, waiting for his chance.
“But, madam, if that was my mission, why should I have taken nothing?” He swept his arm about the richly laden dresser with its arctic glitter of cut-glass and silver. “And with all this wealth lying so close about me?”
He knew, at once, that she had not discovered the broken safe and the butler. A puzzled look crossed her face. She was examining him more intently.
He played his next card by forcing a wistful and melancholy smile to his lips: it was a smile which had done considerable misleading in its time. He was helped out not a little by his etiolated appearance. Certain photophobiac habits of life, not to mention that facial peculiarity known as “prison-pallor,” succeeded in lending to his countenance a beguiling air of delicacy.
“'Why did you want the Romney?' the woman in white was asking him.”
The woman in white gave a sudden and audible gasp.
“I know!” she cried; “it's the Romney! You came after the Romney!”
Now Gentleman Dan was not quite sure what a Romney was. So he decided to say nothing. Yet something expectant in her face, something almost pleasurable, led him to feel that it would be bad policy to enlighten her as to the error of her belief. She wanted to believe it was the Romney. Of that he was sure. So he closed his lips, with the sigh of a stoic, and did his best to look inscrutable.
He watched her as she crossed the room to the push-button. But she was very clever about it, much cleverer than he had expected. Never once did she forget the revolver in her fingers or take her eyes from his face. He could even hear the prolonged purr of the bell, subterranean and muffled, as she stood with her finger against the button. He wondered, with a nauseating sinking of the diaphragm, if there was any one besides the trussed butler who was expected to answer that summons. He could hear his heart beat as the seconds dragged away. But no one came to the door.
It was soon plain to the eye that this fact was causing Louise Duyster some concern. She watched her opponent, with sidelong intentness, as she waited, and shot a sudden question at him over her shoulder, a little contemptuously.
“How did you intend getting it away? And how were you going to tell it from the Gainsborough copy? Or the Corot?”
Gentleman Dan was at once enlightened. The Romney was a picture. He had once “yegged it” with an old Adam Worth gang forger who at different times had spoken of “Little Adam's” coup against another Gainsborough. So light came to him. He saw that she was demanding largeness of him, that she was raising him above petty thievery into the realms of the romantic. He had no wish to disillusionize her. So he remained adequately inscrutable of face. In the meantime, however, he was frenziedly sounding for his biggest and most impressive words. Then he once more forced his calm and quizzical smile.
“Might not even I have some slight appreciation of Art?” he mildly inquired, with a pretence at a calmness which was very far from him.
“How refreshing!” murmured the woman in white. Her tone was dangerously near a scoffing one, yet there was a note of curiosity in it. She crossed slowly to a dark-wooded writing-table. On this stood a desk telephone-transmitter. She quickly lifted the instrument to the farther end of the table. But her eyes never left the face of the man who was watching her, even when her left hand lifted the green-corded wire and “plugged in” on the wall-extension. He could see that it was a familiar movement with her. He could also see her lift the receiver from the hook, speak into the instrument, and then impatiently rattle the receiver-hook again. He watched her, still smiling, for he knew there would be no answer to her call. He could afford to be nonchalant.
His attitude, in fact, was more and more piquing the woman at the writing-table. It surprised her that he should make no movement towards escape. It puzzled her that he should betray no desire for a prompt and unequivocal freedom. She even ceased to worry over the fact that her 'phone-call remained unanswered. She did not altogether regret that they were to be a little longer alone. The entire experience was so novel, so dramatic, so rich in possibilities for future recountal!
It relieved Gentleman Dan to see that she was vaguely titillating in the situation, that she was studying him with that same confident curiosity with which a beribboned and over-petted lap-dog regards an intruding and unkempt street cur. Louise Duyster had even inwardly remarked that her visitor's linen was not quite immaculate. She was debating if it would be seemly to offer him some of her husband's. Instead, she asked him if he wouldn't prefer sitting down.
He thanked her, punctiliously, and after an uncertain glance about the room, chose a chair and sat in it. But in that glance he had done more than look for a seat. He had quietly estimated certain distances and weighed certain chances.
“Why did you want the Romney?” the woman in white was asking of him.
“For no particular reason,” he answered.
“Then why did you come here after it? Why did you take such risks to get it?” Her conception of the criminal was an ardent, imaginative one, She knew the type only through the pink-tinted glasses of Broadway's politer melodramas.
“Let's call it the pure love of the game!” he suavely suggested. He could see the flash of appreciation in her clear and wide-opened eyes. She was trying to put herself in his place. He wasn't the sort of sneak-thief who carried off rings and silverware. He was above that. There was something appealing in the thought of trying to capture an old master. It took on the spirit of a hazardous adventure.
“How could you have carried it away?” she asked, with her inconsequential abruptness.
“Very simply,” he told her, remembering certain things which he had picked up in his earlier days. 'You simply take a pocket-knife and run it along the inside of the picture-frame. Then you roll up the canvas. And, providing you meet no radiant ladies in white, you walk away with it under your arm!”
“How interesting!” said the wondering woman at the writing-table. “And would you mind telling me if you—er, if you always choose a more or less costly painting as the object of your attack?”
“I rather run to Art!” he said, with his calm and modest smile.
She laughed this time, quite openly, careless with a splendid contempt. That laugh made him look up with a start.
“Art for Art's sake, as it were!” she suggested.
Still again he wondered why she was so sure of herself, why she should be so offhanded and at home.
“I suppose it's really a sort of intoxication?” she was inventively asking him—“a sort of passion, like gambling, or smoking? A sort of craving for excitement? A hunger to take big risks, just for the sake of the risk?”
Gentleman Dan agreed with her that it was, even while he knew it was caused by a different sort of hunger, the sort of hunger that a decent fifteen-cent meal could usually knock galley-west! He smiled a little at the rhapsodical thought that his activities were in any way identified with glory. He had his rooming-house cot to pay for, his drinks to buy, his grafting “bulls” to appease. He knew there wasn't much glory in it. He might have told her that no “slough grafter” and “con man” takes to the game for the game's sake, but is driven into it as cattle are driven into a stockyard corral. He knew they were all starved and lashed and hounded into it, as rats are harried into a sewer. He was in it because he had to eat, because he had to keep warm, because he had to wear clothes, when he had lost the trick of earning them. But he had no intention of pricking her pretty bubbles of illusion. He noticed that she was smiling again, with the ironic deference of an assured superiority.
“Isn't it true that gentlemen of your calling read the society columns to find out people's movements? What jewels they are wearing, and all that sort of thing?”
Gentleman Dan was able to return her ironic smile.
“I was not altogether ignorant of the fact, madam, that your husband had occasion to take this afternoon's train for Washington.”
“That's very interesting!” she said, with meditative impersonality. Her earnest and inquiring eyes were once more studying his face, his long, melancholy, almost contemplative face that so reminded her of Dürer's portrait of himself.
“And I was equally aware of the fact that there are several imperfect stones in the third strand of your dog-collar. One stone, in fact, is not genuine.”
“How do you know that?”
“I have no personal or active interest in such things, of course. But I think your jeweller will confirm my opinion to-morrow, if you care to consult him.”
It was marvellous! As marvellous as crystal-gazing and spirit-rapping! Louise Duyster's eyes were bright with something more than interest, with something more than amusement. She was luxuriating in a new world, without even stepping from her boudoir. She was face to face with all the excitement of the slumming-party without the inconvenience of leaving her own white and golden walls. It was drama enough for a month. And she could see that she was quite herself by this time. A spirit of genial audacity crept over her. He was almost a gentleman. He had not been rude. He had been very nice about it. She even began to wonder what ill-luck had started him in such a life. At the precise moment she was wondering this, Gentleman Dan was wondering how she would look when they happened to find that dog-collar of hers in his pocket.
Suddenly she looked up at him with one of her engaging smiles.
“I wonder if you're hungry? If you wouldn't enjoy a bite of supper—with me?” Her last two words were an hesitating afterthought, an impulse of recklessness which sent a tingle up and down her delicate body. Deep in her own mind she was already dramatising future narratives of her adventure, over tables quietly prepared for bridge for four.
“That would be a very great pleasure!” replied Gentleman Dan, with a fervour that was not altogether affectation. For he felt that this new move would give him the chance he was watching and waiting for. And he had been worried by the thought that time was passing, precious time. But now there was sure to be an unguarded moment, a moment when he could turn the tables on her
Then he remembered the butler. He sickened a little at the thought that she might make him go below with her and stand face to face with discovery.
He looked up at her searchingly, wondering how he could withdraw, how he could avoid this unpalatable meal. But he did not speak. For a sudden sound sent a cold sweat over his startled body. It was the sound of a knock, quick and light, on the closed door.
“Come in!” cried the woman at the table, in her clear-noted soprano. The next moment she remembered the locked door, and was quickly crossing the room, her white drapery fluttering about her like a silver-birch tree shaken with wind. Gentleman Dan watched her turn the key in the lock and then recross the room to her old position beside the writing-table.
As she did so a second woman stepped quietly into the room. She wore a brown hat and veil, but her hands were at her head removing these, even as she stepped hurriedly in through the door. The natural pallor of her face was reddened a little, either by running or a high wind. There was a look of anxiety in her eyes as they passed from the woman at the writing-table to the strangely dressed man opposite her, and then back to the woman again. For a second or two no one spoke.
But Gentleman Dan was watching this later intruder with all his eyes. He knew, the moment the veil was off the thin-cheeked face, that the newcomer was the Duysters' maid, the lady's-maid who should have been visiting with her sister in Brooklyn.
“I tried to telephone, ma'am,” she began, with troubled deference. “I tried and tried, but they couldn't get the house!”
“Yes?” said the woman at the writing-table.
“So I thought it best to come back, right away. I didn't know but what something was wrong!”
Again the maid's eyes travelled questioningly to the strange figure in the chair. “I—I thought something might have happened, ma'am!”
Gentleman Dan was crafty enough to feel that the woman in white was not altogether overjoyed at this unlooked-for deliverance. There was something almost like annoyance on her face. But he watched every move and glance between mistress and maid, to make sure no secret message was being given and taken.
“There is no need for alarm, Clements,” the unruffled lady of the house explained. “Nothing has happened!”
She may have been explanatory, but Gentleman Dan could see that she would never be apologetic. He also began to see that he had not quite reached the end of his rope, as he had feared. She was actually lying for him: she was trying to shield him.
“I want you to bring up something to eat; cold meat and things; and a bottle of Burgundy!”
“In this room, ma'am?” inquired the bewildered maid.
“To this room, please,” was the quiet answer. “And dishes for two!”
Still again Gentleman Dan thought of the butler, and still again he realised how closely peril hung over him. All he could do was to wait his chance. And when it came there would be no dilly-dallying.
He did not move until the door closed behind the departing maid. Then he turned to his persecutor, for, little as she imagined it, she was indeed persecuting him.
“What do you intend to do?” he asked, with a quaver of anxiety in his voice. It was hard for him to keep his dignity, to sustain the rôle.
“What do you intend to do?” equivocated his companion in deception.
He sat in deep thought for a moment or two. Then he forced a nonchalant smile to his lips. “Since you are safe and the Romney is safe, I assume it would not be unreasonable to make the triangle a complete one!”
Still again the woman laughed. “I see you don't trust me,” she said, and her glance was without enmity.
“Pardon me!” murmured the burglar. “I trust you completely, implicitly. You are a brave woman, And all truly brave women are generous.”
She was glad he hadn't spoken of her appearance, that he hadn't dragged in the odious personal factor, That would have made it quite different. She could see he had the fine taste to attempt no uncouth coquetries—Gentleman Dan, indeed, had never been a “moll-buzzer”—and she was not without a vague gratitude for the impersonality of his address. Something about the look of patience, of humility, of suffering, on his thin face touched her into a gush of pity. A quick little thrill of impulse ran through her body. She put the revolver on the table. She knew that she could trust her instincts. The world had not used him honestly. He had never been given a chance.
“I'm going to trust you!” she said, with sudden conviction. 'I'm going to trust you, because I know you're a gentleman at heart.”
Then she deliberately opened the writing-table drawer, placed the revolver in it, and deliberately closed it.
Gentleman Dan did not move. He was too puzzled to stir. There was something so incomprehensible about the entire situation that he could not even think. He was not used to studying high-spirited women at close range. He was not adroit in tracing the intricacies of super-feminine psychology.
Then reason came back to him. He bowed a deep bow of gratitude. But all the while he was wondering just when the maid below-stairs was going to stumble on the butler and give the alarm. He knew his chances were every second growing slimmer and slimmer.
“She fell full length on the floor, and lay there without a word.”
The intoxication of another benignant impulse was sweeping through the woman at the writing-table. She glanced towards the door, almost guiltily. “I'm going to give you some money,” she said. “Enough to keep you from—enough to make you avoid—er—danger like this. Then I want you to come to me here, to-morrow afternoon. For I think I can help you. I know I can help you!”
A miraculous dull flush crept up through Gentleman Dan's thin-blooded face. Only a thief, a professional thief, could have comprehended the source of his shame, his humiliation. But the woman in white saw that flush, and she at once knew that she had not been mistaken. He was really a man of sensibilities, of finer feelings.
Then a sullen joy suddenly took the place of Gentleman Dan's shame, for he saw that the woman had risen and was crossing the room to her dressing-table. She was actually leaving the accursed revolver shut up in the drawer. He rose to his feet with an apparent murmur of protest.
The woman, stooping over the low dressing-table, stopped him with a gesture of her white hand. She took up a gold-meshed purse and opened it. As she did so Gentleman Dan's trained ear caught the sound of a muffled call from below-stairs. It was then that he wheeled about and faced the woman in white.
She saw him coming, and looked up as he stepped towards her. Her muslin-clouded body was still a little stooped over the low-topped dressing-table, and the purse was still in her hand.
Then, even before she could see the movement, the bony, clenched first of the burglar struck like a mallet on her face.
She went down, with a look of startled wonder still in her eyes, a look of inarticulate protest against treatment which she could in no way understand. She fell full length on the floor, and lay there without moving.
Gentleman Dan turned her over with his foot. Then he stooped and caught up the gold-meshed purse, which her fallen body had first hidden from sight. Then he tore the rings from her limp fingers, snatched up the little jewelled watch from the writing-table as he crossed the room, switched out the lights, and dodged into the darkness of the hall outside. He darted for the stairs and went down the wide staircase three steps at a time, for the lower newel-post lights were now burning. Then he wheeled about, before an open door on his right where he could see clothes hanging in a deep hall-closet. He picked out a hat of English felt, made sure it fitted him, threw an Oxford-grey paddock-coat over his arm, and walked sedately and quietly out of the front door, down the grey stone steps, and round the corner into the Avenue.
Copyright 1910 by Arthur Stringer.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1950, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 73 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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