The Red Symbol

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

THE MYSTERIOUS FOREIGNER

“

Hello! Yes—I’m Maurice Wynn. Who are you?”

“Harding. I’ve been ringing you up at intervals for hours. Carson’s ill, and you’re to relieve him. Come round for instructions to-night. Lord Southbourne will give them you himself. Eh? Yes, Whitehall Gardens. Ten-thirty, then. Right you are.”

I replaced the receiver, and started hustling into my dress clothes, thinking rapidly the while.

For the first time in the course of ten years’ experience as a special correspondent, I was dismayed at the prospect of starting off at a moment’s notice—to St. Petersburg, in this instance.

To-day was Saturday, and if I were to go by the quickest route—the Nord express—I should have three days’ grace, but the delay at this end would not compensate for the few hours saved on the journey. No, doubtless Southbourne would expect me to get off to-morrow or Monday morning at latest. He was—and is—the smartest newspaper man in England.

Well, I still had four hours before I was due at Whitehall Gardens; and I must make the most of them. At least I should have a few minutes alone with Anne Pendennis, on our way to the dinner at the Hotel Cecil,—the Savage Club “ladies” dinner, where she and my cousin Mary would be guests of Jim Cayley, Mary’s husband.

Anne had promised to let me escort her,—the Cayley’s brougham was a small one, in which three were emphatically a crowd,—and the drive from Chelsea to the Strand, in a hansom, would provide me with the opportunity I had been wanting for days past, of putting my fate to the test, and asking her to be my wife.

I had thought to find that opportunity to-day, at the river picnic Mary had arranged; but all my attempts to secure even a few minutes alone with Anne had failed; though whether she evaded me by accident or design I could not determine, any more than I could tell if she loved me. Sometimes, when she was kind, my hopes rose high, to fall below zero next minute.

“Steer clear of her, my boy,” Jim Cayley had said to me weeks ago, when Anne first came to stay with Mary. “She’s as capricious as she’s imperious, and a coquette to her finger-tips. A girl with hair and eyes like that couldn’t be anything else.”

I resented the words hotly at the time, and he retracted them, with a promptitude and good humor that disarmed me. Jim was a man with whom it was impossible to quarrel. Still, I guessed he had not changed his opinion of his wife’s guest, though he appeared on excellent terms with her.

As for Mary, she was different. She loved Anne,—they had been fast friends ever since they were school-girls together at Neuilly,—and if she did not fully understand her, at least she believed that her coquetry, her capriciousness, were merely superficial, like the hard, glittering quartz that enshrines and protects the pure gold,—and has to be shattered before the gold can be won.

Mary, I knew, wished me well, though she was far too wise a little woman to attempt any interference.

Yes, I would end my suspense to-night, I decided, as I wrestled with a refractory tie.

Ting ... ting ... tr-r-r-ing! Two short rings and a long one. Not the telephone this time, but the electric bell at the outer door of my bachelor flat.

Who on earth could that be? Well, he’d have to wait.

As I flung the tie aside and seized another, I heard a queer scratching noise outside, stealthy but distinct. I paused and listened, then crossed swiftly and silently to the open door of the bedroom. Some one had inserted a key in the Yale lock of the outer door, and was vainly endeavoring to turn it.

I flung the door open and confronted an extraordinary figure,—an old man, a foreigner evidently, of a type more frequently encountered in the East End than Westminster.

“Well, my friend, what are you up to?” I demanded.

The man recoiled, bending his body and spreading his claw-like hands in a servile obeisance, quaint and not ungraceful; while he quavered out what was seemingly an explanation or apology in some jargon that was quite unintelligible to me, though I can speak most European languages. I judged it to be some Russian patois....