University of Virginia Library

49. CHAPTER XLIX.
A DETECTIVE IN FULL SCENT.

Immediately that Imogen Elconore raised her voice against the aggressions
of Mr. Sweet, he, to use his own phrase in describing the scene to a
brother detective, “set her loose quicker'n powder.”

He was smartly startled and even gravely scared. If one of the regulars
should came along, and should turn out not to be a friend of his, he might get
reported for disorderliness if he staid, and might catch a “locust” across his
head if he ran. There was even a chance—shadowy, it is true, but still disagreeable
to consider—of being dismissed from the “force.” Furthermore the
epithet which this girl had applied to him was alarming because so entirely
novel. He had been called a great many grievous names in the course of his
adventurous life. He had been called a scamp, a scoundrel, a rascal, and a
blackguard, with every conceivable accompaniment of supporting blasphemy.
But never before, so far as he could remember then or thereafter, had he been
addressed as “wretch.” It sounded like print; it was genteel and nobby and
highfalutin; it struck him as little less than solemn. With a sudden suspicion
that his Diana Vernon might be “a piece of muslin,” instead of “calico,” he
let go of her as promptly as if she were a red-hot poker, and commenced apologizing.

“Now, good gracious, don't!” he begged eagerly. “Don't cut up that
way. Why I don't care a curse about it, if you don't want it. No idea at all
of hurtin' your feelin's or frightenin' you. Why, just look at it. I'm not
holdin' you. You can run away if you want to.”

But Miss Jones did not want to run away. Like most women who are
apologized to, she perceived that she was mistress of the situation; and what
she desired was, not to escape from her lover, but to keep him and rule him.
She dropped upon a bench, breathed forth a sob or two, and forgivingly asked
Mr. Sweet to sit. That gentleman's secret opinion was that he was wasting
his time and had better go; but he could not break the enchantment which
falls upon male creatures when they are both repelled and invited; so he first
took a furtive chew of tobacco to clear his mind and then accepted the invitation.

“You think me very, very strange, no doubt,” sighed Imogen Eleonore by
way of rekindling the conversation.

“Ruther offish,” grimly assented the confounded officer of justice. “You're
what I call a case. You're a case as sure as my name is Sweet.”

“I thought your name was Livingstone,” exclaimed Miss Jones, drawing
away from him.

“So it is—Sweet Livingstone,” rejoined the able detective, promptly remedying
his mistake.

“But you said C. J. Livingstone, I thought.”

“No; beg pardon; S. J. Livingstone; that's what I said,” undauntedly
affirmed Sweet.

“Oh—excuse me,” murmured Imogen Eleonore. “Pardon my suspicious
nature. I cannot help it. My life has been a mystery—every day a tragedy.
Always, always, some boding cloud above me, sending down from its murky
bosom chilling snows of gloom, and blighting every verdant hour just when
life looked all tinted with hope. I have lost my trust; I know it. It is very
sad, and I struggle against it, but still I remain suspicious.”

“What is it all about?” inquired Sweet, somewhat bewildered by her sensational
rhetoric, and thinking that perhaps she could “let him into a case.”
“Just confide the whole business to me,” he exhorted in a confidential tone.
“Make a clean breast of it; do you good. I may be able to see a way to get
you out of it.”

Imogen Eleonore hesitated. On reflection it did not seem to her that what
tragedies there had been in her life were sufficiently incarnadined with calamity
nor sufficiently aglow with romance to arouse the sympathy of a Livingstone.
But she wanted to tell something which should make her appear
great and interesting to her listener. She began to talk of Nettie Fulton—a
few words only, she resolved—nothing that should unveil the secret.

“I will not weary you with my own sorrows,” she answered in a certain
deep tone of hers which she considered “thrilling—ah, thrilling!” “I have
nearly forgotten them of late in pitying the griefs of another. Such a mystery!
Imagine a lovely young girl, a girl scarcely yet of woman's years, seeking
shelter of me from the storms of this cruel world.”

Mr. Sweet pricked up his ears. Ignoramus and dunce as he was, he was
an eager, unforgetting detective, and he thought instantly of the youthful
refugee from Sea Lodge. He awaited the remainder of the story curiously but
in sagacious silence.

“She is passing fair—too fair for the sun to shine upon rudely—much less
the wind and the rain,” pursued Miss Jones. “Ah, such pearly tints and azure
eyes and golden hair, and a mouth sweet with the roses of eighteen, yet tremulous
and imploring, ever imploring with sorrow!”

“The very gal!” guessed the detective, hearkening like a spy of the Council
of Ten.

“Her tale?” sighed Imogen Eleonore, who, as we remember, knew next
to nothing of Nestoria's history. “Ah, no! That I may not breathe. Let the
wings of obscurity that brood over it brood there forever.”

“What a pity!” groaned Mr. Sweet. “Very handsome young girl, you
say, and ruther little, and fair complexioned. How I do admire golden hair,
to be sure!”

“You have described her,” said Miss Jones, flattered by this preference of
his for golden hair, her own being of the “red, red gold,” as the ballads say.

“Been with you long?” ventured Sweet.

“Only about three months—three months of grief and of pity—three months
of sorrow and sympathy.”

The detective wanted to jump up on the stone seat and crow. It was three
months since Nestoria Bernard had vanished; the description of her which he
carried in his pocket-book tallied exactly with this Diana Vernon's description
of her mysterious protégée; and he trusted that he had within his reach the
key to the Wetherel case, with all the “money that was in it.” In his heart
he cursed himself and blessed himself for the luckiest of men; and he renewed
his attentions to Miss Jones as respectfully as if she were Astor or Vanderbilt.
It was not eager wooing; his soul was intent now upon other things
than love; he did not so much as try to obtain a kiss. But he brought about
an agreement that they two should write to each other under their assumed
names, and that before long they should meet again—“ah, yes, once again.”

“Come, won't you let me go along with you?” he begged as she rose to
leave him. “I just want to see where you put up. Won't try to crowd in,
'pon honor. All I want is to walk by the house now and then, and look at it
and think you're there.”

“Ah, never!” shuddered Imogen Eleonore. “I have those who watch
me and whom I stand in awe of,” she added, remembering Lehming and John
Bowlder, and converting them into overbearing caitiffs by an effort of her
fancy.

“But your handsome little friend that's in trouble—I do want to give her a
lift,” suggested Sweet.

It was an unlucky remark; he had spoken several times already of that
handsome friend; had been disagreeably desirous to know whether she “wasn't
mighty pretty.” Miss Jones, smitten with jealousy, as also with a creditable
fear of exposing Nettie Fulton's mysterious secret, became all the more determined
not to exhibit to her admirer the dingy poverty of her lodgings.

“No!” she insisted with unmistakable spunk. “Never will I quit this
spot until you promise as a gentleman not to follow me.”

“Oh, well, I give it up, I promise,” said Sweet. “Word of a gentleman,”
he added, grinning under his slouched hat.

The moment she left him he summoned a newspaper urchin, clapped a
half dollar into his dirty fist, and whispered, “Follow that bit of muslin home,
and come back here and tell me the street and number, and I'll give you another
fifty.”

The boy departed, and the detective walked up and down awaiting his return,
shivering in the increasing frostiness of the November blast, but bearing
it patiently by the aid of an occasional curse.

The very next morning, as Walter Lehming sat before the fire in his study,
swallowed up and almost hidden by a high-backed chair, he heard a masculine
step in the hall which he at first supposed was John Bowlder's, and then a
voice inquiring through his partially open door, “Was any coals ordered
here?”

“No, my good man,” he replied, without looking around. “None in this
room.”

“It war a young lady what ordered 'em,” continued the voice. “Light
complected young lady, with blue eyes an' golden hair.”

Lehming got out of his chair, walked to the door and confronted a preternaturally
grimy coalheaver, who recoiled a little on seeing him, touched his
ragged hat and mumbled, “Beg pardon, sir.”

“I know that no fuel is wanted on this floor,” said the young man staring

hard at the blackened features of the intruder, for this description of Nestoria
disquieted him. “There is certainly some mistake.”

The next moment his heart was in his mouth; he had recognized Mr.
Sweet's bloodshot eye. It was not merely bloodshot, it was peculiar in another
respect; there was a strange roundness and openness about it; the lids
exposed the whole pupil. It was the man's weak point as a detective, and,
knowing it, he generally kept his eyelids drooped when in disguise; but on
this occasion he was so surprised by the appearance of a relative of the Wetherels
that for a moment he forgot the precaution. Lehming, a sensitive creature,
and gifted with that acute observation of physical characteristics which a
writer of fiction is apt to have or to acquire, had noticed this singularity of
Sweet's optics the very first time that he saw him, and had never forgotten it.

What should he do? Dwarfish, fragile, and gentle, he had no aptitude for
physical emergencies, though brave and ready enough in the conflicts of the
soul. He simply stood still and stared silently at the detective, calm enough
in outward appearance, but speechless with alarm.

“Beg pardon, sir—some mistake,” mumbled the spy, turning and walking
slowly down stairs. He was glad to get away; wondered if he had been recognized
by Lehming; hoped not. He had, he thought, discovered something,
as for instance that the girl was probably in the house, and that one of
the Wetherel set was there also, very likely watching over her.

Well, he disappeared, to the great joy of Lehming for one instant and to
his great terror in the next. Had the fellow gone to the police-office for a
search warrant, and would he return immediately to take Nestoria to prison?
Or had he only guessed at her hiding-place, so that for the next day or two they
would see him lurking about the house in various unclean disguises—the ugly,
stealthy, pitiless forerunner of the fate which he would be sure at last to bring?
Dismayed and perplexed, Lehming stood for some time motionless, now
hearkening to see if the boding step of the detective were not reascending the
stairways, now cudgelling his meditative gentle soul in vain for some prompt
stratagem whereby to deliver Nestoria, and meanwhile half wishing that he
were a veteran criminal, so that he might know how to deal with this guilty
and risky situation. He could not resolve to let the girl be seized, although
that would have been the easiest step to take, and, as he keenly felt, the right
step. She had quite mastered him. Her patience, her endurance, her heroic
will, and, more than all else perhaps, her beauty and other graciousness, had
made him her slave. Good and intelligent as he was, he had come to submit
both his conscience and his judgment to her. He must help to hide her until
she should be willing to hide no longer.

But how should he save her from this new peril? If he told her that she
was watched by a policeman, she would probably run away as soon as night
fell; she would once more become a friendless waif on the great, pitiless
ocean of life; she might sink under its billows into some undiscoverable cavern
of ruin. He decided at last that he must act without consulting her, and force a
rescue upon her before she could suspect and evade it. And hereupon his weakness
in practical affairs showed itself; he found that he could not devise and
execute unassisted. He could think of nothing better than to seek Mrs. Dinneford,
reveal to her the whereabouts and the danger of Nestoria, and ask her
help. On this errand he set forth, with the conscience and mien of a criminal,
the most wretched good man in New York, if a good man he can be called.
He quitted the tenement house by a back way, crossing a narrow yard full

of rubbish and heaps of coal, forcing open with much difficulty the neglected
gate of a partition fence, stealing with the air of a thief through a low grocery
store, and tottering out upon a narrow and filthy alley.

The Dinnefords he found packing up and preparing to leave New York for
a season, in order to escape from Count Poloski's expected persecutions, and
from the evil fame of that humiliating betrothal. His heart sank within him,
for he inferred that they would not, and indeed could not, stay to aid him.
Nevertheless, he thought it best to tell his tale. The two impulsive, warm-hearted
women at once forgot themselves; they were so unselfish and noble
that they brought the tears into the young man's eyes.

“Thank God!” exclaimed Mrs. Dinneford, half laughing and half sobbing.
“The lost sheep is found. Let us rejoice and make merry.” Then, turning
anxiously to her daughter, “What will you do, Alice?”

“I will stay here and cuddle Nestoria,” returned the girl, forgetful of her
own troubles, excited, elated, and gay. “Walter, do hurry and bring her.”