One Wonderful Night: A Romance of New York
the Great White Way. As it happened, a stranger in New York could not
have entered the city's main thoroughfare at any point better
calculated to bewilder and astound than the very corner where Curtis
had picked up the cab. On both sides, from the level of the street to
a height often measurable in hundreds of feet, nearly every building
blazed with electric signs. Many of the devices seemed to be alive.
Horses galloped, either in Roman stadium or modern polo-ground; a
girl's skirts were fluttered by a rain-storm; a giant's hand, with
unerring skill, bowled a ball at ten-pins in a bowling alley; the names
of theaters, of hotels, of drugs, of patent foods, of every known
variety of caterer for human needs and amusements, flickered, and
winked, and stared, at the passer-by from ground floor to attic--while
each and all--horses, skirts, rain-drops, hand, ball, pins, and
names--glowed in every known shade of color from every known form of
electric lamp.
The glare of this advertisers' paradise was so overpowering that even
the marvel-surfeited citizens who crowded the sidewalks would gather in
dense groups at a corner, thence to watch and take in the dazzling
significance of some sign new to their vision. Curtis noticed many
such assemblies before the taxi sped out of the magic area which ends
at 42nd Street; but it was all novel to him; he could not discuss the
contrast between last week's glorification of Somebody's Pickles and
to-night's triumph of Everybody's Whisky, and he was almost bemused by
the display, which provided such a bizarre anti-climax to the terrible
drama he had just witnessed.
It was a positive relief, therefore, when the vehicle bowled swiftly
into a quiet cross street, and he was vouchsafed only fleeting glimpses
of broad avenues where fresh multitudes of lamps again bade defiance to
the night.
In one place, an illuminated dial showed that the hour was eight
o'clock, and the curiously simple fact of noting the time roused him to
a perception of all that had happened since he strolled out of the
dining-room of the Central Hotel. He smiled dourly when he remembered
the mislaid key. Did it still repose in the bedroom? Or had a
housemaid found it, and restored it to a numbered hook in the office?
Had not that immaculately dressed clerk said he would find Number 605
"a comfortable, quiet room"? Well, it might be all that, yet Curtis
could hardly help dwelling on the thought that had he been put in any
other cell of the human beehive called the Central Hotel it was highly
probable he would not now be flying across New York on a self-imposed
mission so nebulous, so ill-defined, that already his orderly brain was
beginning to doubt the logic which inspired it.
Was it too late to draw back? To this handy automobile city distances
were negligible quantities, and he would rejoin the detectives before
they could have any reason to suspect him even of carelessness in
withholding from their ken the new and important fact revealed by the
accidental change of overcoats.
And, yes--by Jove!--it would be assumed that _his_ overcoat was the
dead man's, though, indeed, certain papers in the pockets would soon
show that there was a blunder somewhere, because the John D. Curtis
mentioned therein necessarily figured as the chief witness in the case
now being worked up against three unknown malefactors. Oddly enough,
it was contemporaneous with this thought that the queer similarity of
his own name to that of the unfortunate Frenchman first dawned on him.
John D. Curtis and Jean de Courtois were, as names, particularly as the
names of two men of different nationalities, sufficiently alike to
invite comment. Well, that being so, there was all the more reason why
the identity of poor Jean de Courtois should be established beyond
doubt, and this reflection appealed so strongly that, when the cab
stopped, Curtis was once more reconciled to the policy hurriedly
arrived at while he was standing at the corner of Broadway and 27th
Street.
He opened the door, alighted, glanced up at a rather imposing block of
flats, and said to the driver:
"Is this 1000 West 59th Street?"
"Yes, sir. Quite a bunch of people live here," was the answer.
"I take it, then, that the lady I wish to see occupies one of the
flats?"
The driver smiled broadly, for it seemed to him that the naive
statement sounded rather funny.
"I guess that's about the size of it," he said.
Curtis smiled, too. This needless blurting out of confidences to a
cabman was the one folly essential to a complete restoration of his
wits.
"Wait for me," he said. "I may be only a minute or two, and I shall
want you to take me right back to the point I came from."
The man nodded, and turned to set the time index of the taximeter. A
few steps led up to a spacious doorway, and Curtis passed through a
revolving door. Halfway along a well-lighted passage he saw an
elevator sign, and found an attendant sitting there.
"I believe that Miss Grandison lives here?" he said.
"Second floor--Number 10--take you up?" was the time-saving reply.
"Yes, but I am not anxious to see Miss Grandison herself. I would
prefer to speak to some male relative."
The attendant looked puzzled; perhaps he was wishful to make smooth the
way for a visitor who was obviously a gentleman, but the problem
offered by Curtis's request presented difficulties, and he fell back on
his official instructions.
"Sorry, but you must explain matters to the maid at Number 10," he
said, quite civilly, and Curtis was soon pressing an electric bell at
the door of the flat itself.
A neatly dressed girl appeared. Her out-of-doors costume suggested
that she was either just going out or just returned, and Curtis,
unaccustomed to the domestic problem as it exists in New York, fancied
that she ranked above the level of a house-maid.
"Is Miss Grandison in?" he asked.
"I'll inquire, sir. What name shall I say?"
It was a noncommittal answer, so he changed ground in the next question.
"I would prefer not to meet Miss Grandison herself if it is in any way
possible to interview a relative of hers, or a friend," he said.
This colorless statement, intended to be reassuring, seemed to have
such an alarming effect on the girl that he hastened to add:
"I am here with reference to Monsieur Jean de Courtois."
His hearer smiled, and her manner changed from fright to friendliness.
Indeed, if he had not been so wrapped up in the highly disagreeable
task which lay before him, he could hardly have failed to notice that
she welcomed, rather than resented, the visit of a smart looking young
man to the establishment.
"Oh, come in, do," she said, glancing up at him with demure but very
bright eyes. "Why didn't you say at once that you had been sent by Mr.
de Courtois, without trying to scare me stiff by talking about
relatives?"
He obeyed, and he closed the door.
"I really meant what I said," he persisted. "Something has happened to
prevent Monsieur de Courtois coming here this evening----"
"Not coming! Then there will be no wedding!"
Her voice was subdued, but she put such distress, such perplexity, into
her words that at any other time Curtis would have marveled at the
gamut of emotion which the feminine temperament was capable of. Still,
he had to risk even a mild display of hysteria, so he went on quietly:
"You will understand now why I would rather meet some person other than
Miss Grandison."
"But who is there to meet? She is alone. I do believe I am the only
living being she knows in New York, except Mr. de Courtois. . . . Why
can't he come? What is keeping him? Has he met with an
accident? . . . Oh, I can see by your face that he is hurt--or he has
been kidnapped! Yes, that's it, for sure! And that dear young lady
will be trapped like a bird in a cage! . . . Miss Hermione! Miss
Hermione! Here is someone come to tell you that Mr. de Courtois has
been spirited away. . . . Oh dear, to think that this should be the
end of all our planning and contriving!"
During this crescendo of excited and scarcely intelligible utterances
the girl had first backed away from Curtis, and then turned, running to
open, without knocking, a door on the right of the extreme end of a
corridor which divided the suite into two sections.
Curtis did not attempt to stop her. Whatsoever the outcome, he was
committed now to an undertaking from which there was no retreat. He
half expected that the maid, whose disjointed outburst betokened, at
least, that she was her mistress's trusted confidante, would reappear
from the room into which she had vanished. But he was mistaken, doubly
mistaken, since the mental picture he had formed of Hermione Beauregard
Grandison was utterly falsified by the slight, elegant, girlish figure
which presented itself before his astonished eyes. Somehow, those
superfine Christian names and that aristocratic surname had prepared
him for a rather magnificent person, young, probably, because the dead
man might be of his own age within a year, but decidedly impressive.
He had gone so far as to imagine her an actress, of the sinuous,
well-rounded type, who would address him in a deep contralto, and, if
and when she fainted, would sink gracefully on to a couch correctly
placed for scenic effect.
The reality took his breath away.
He saw a girl, not a day older than twenty, dressed in a simple costume
of brown cloth, and wearing a hat, veil, and gloves of harmonizing
tints. The veil had been hurriedly lifted above the brim of the hat,
and a pair of what seemed to be intensely dark violet eyes gazed at him
from a small-featured, pallid face from which every vestige of color
had fled.
"Is this thing true?" she said, halting timidly within a few feet of
him. "Perhaps Marcelle has misunderstood you. Who sent you?--Monsieur
de Courtois himself, I suppose?"
Her voice, so wistful, so pleading, perfect in cadence yet almost
childlike in its evident anxiety to be reassured, reached uncharted
depths in his soul. At once he began to ask himself why this mere girl
should be exposed to the impish trick which fate had played on her,
and, in the same breath, he was conscious of a fierce anger against the
ghouls who had contrived it.
"Are you Miss Grandison?" he asked, rather to gain time than because of
any doubt as to her personality.
"Yes. And you?"
"My name is Curtis--John D. Curtis. I only landed in New York three
hours ago."
He added the explanatory sentence in order to clear the ground, as it
were, for the strange and horrible story he had to tell, but its effect
was curious in the extreme. The girl's white face blanched to that wan
hue which personal fear lends to distress.
"Where have you come from?" she gasped.
"From Pekin."
"From Pekin!"
"Yes. I have been traveling without pause during the past eight weeks."
By this time he had ascertained two certain facts about Hermione
Beauregard Grandison. In the first place, she was the prettiest and
most graceful creature he had ever met; in the second, she had all the
hall-marks of good breeding and high social caste. His brain was so
busy over these discoveries that he disregarded the really remarkable
way in which the object of his visit had been shelved for the moment.
It might reasonably be expected that the disconsolate lady would be
concerned mainly as to the fate of the missing bridegroom, but the
mistress evidently shared the maid's disquietude about Curtis himself.
And, precisely as in the case of Marcelle, Miss Grandison's face showed
relief when it became manifest that he was a complete stranger.
"Pray forgive me for questioning you in this manner," she said, with a
rapid reversion to a conventional air that disconcerted her hearer in a