The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 2

THE OX-BLOOD VASE

It was a week later, and well after two, in the dullest ebb of earth's deadest hour, when Benson lifted the portiere and stepped into my room.

I put down the book at which my brain had been scratching like a dog scratching at a closed door. It was a volume of Gautier's _nouvelles_.

I had just reached that mildly a.s.suaging point in _Une Nuit de Cleopatre_ where the mysterious arrow, whistling through the palace window of a queen bored almost to extinction, buries itself quivering in the cedar wainscoting above her couch.

But the incident, this time, seemed to have lost its appeal. The whole thing sounded very empty and old, very foolish and far-away. The thrill of drama, I cogitated, is apt to leak out of a situation when it comes to one over a circuit of two thousand moldering years. So I looked up at my servant a little listlessly and yet a little puzzled by what was plainly a studied calmness of appearance.

"Benson, why aren't you in bed?"

"If you will pardon me, sir," began the intruder, "I've a gentleman here."

He was so extraordinarily cool about it that I rose like a fish at the flash of something unusual.

"At this time of night?" I inquired.

"Yes, sir."

"But what _kind_ of gentleman, Benson?"

Benson hesitated; it was the sort of hesitation that is able to translate silence into an apology.

"I think, sir, it's a burglar."

"A what?" I demanded, incredulously.

"The fact is, sir, I 'appened to hear him at the lock. When he forced the door, sir, not being able to work the lock, I was waiting for him."

The dropped aspirate was an unfailing sign of mental disturbance in Benson. I closed my book and tossed it aside. It was only drama of the second dimension, as old and musty as a mummy. And here, apparently, was adventure of the first water, something of my own world and time.

"This sounds rather interesting, Benson. Be so good as to show the gentleman up."

I sat down, with a second look at the dragging hands of the little French clock on my mantel. But Benson still seemed a trifle ill at ease.

"I--I took the liberty of tying him up a bit, sir," explained that astute old dissembler, "being compelled, as it were, to use a bit of force."

"Of course. Then untie him as much as necessary, and fetch him here.

And you might bring up a bottle of _Lafitte_ and a bite to eat. For two, if you please."

"Yes, sir," he answered. But still he hesitated.

"The revolver, sir, is in the cabinet-drawer on your left."

There were times when old Benson could almost make me laugh; times when the transparencies of his obliquities converted them into something almost respectable.

"We won't need the revolver, Benson. What I most need I fancy is amus.e.m.e.nt, distraction, excitement, anything--anything to get me through this endless h.e.l.l of a night."

I could feel my voice rise on the closing words, like the uprear of a terrified racehorse. It was not a good sign. I got up and paced the rug, like a castaway pacing some barren and empty island. But here, I told myself, was a timely footprint. I waited, as breathless as a Crusoe awaiting his Friday.

I waited so long that I was beginning to dread some mishap. Then the portiere parted for the second time, and Benson led the burglar into the room.

I experienced, as I looked at him, a distinct sense of disappointment.

He was not at all what I expected. He wore no black mask, and was neither burly nor ferocious. The thing that first impressed me was his slenderness--an almost feline sort of slenderness. The fact I next remarked was that he was very badly frightened, so frightened, in fact, that his face was the tint of a rather soiled white glove. It could never have been a ruddy face. But its present startling pallor, I a.s.sumed, must have been largely due to Benson's treatment, although I was still puzzled by the look of abject terror which gave the captive's eyes their animal-like glitter. He stood before me for all the world as though a hospital interne had been practising abstruse bandaging feats on his body, so neatly and yet so firmly had the redoubtable Benson hobbled him and swathed his arms in a half-dozen of my best Irish linen table-napkins. Over these, again, had been wound and buckled a trunk-strap. Benson had not skimped his job. His burglar was wrapped as securely as a butcher wraps a boned rib-roast.

My hope for any diverting talk along the more picturesque avenues of life was depressingly short-lived. The man remained both sullen and silent. His sulky speechlessness was plainly that of a low order of mind menaced by vague uncertainties and mystified by new surroundings.

Blood still dripped slowly down the back of his soiled collar, where Benson's neat whelp had abraded the scalp.

Yet his eyes, all the time, were alert enough. They seemed to take on a wisdom that was uncanny, the inarticulate wisdom of a reptile, bewildering me, for all their terror, with some inner sense of vicious security. To fire questions at him was as futile as throwing pebbles at an alligator. He had determined, apparently, not to open his lips; though his glance, all this time, was never an idle or empty one. I gave up, with a touch of anger.

"Frisk him," I told the waiting Benson. As that underworld phrase was new to those respectable Anglian ears, I had to translate it. "See if he's carrying a gun. Search his pockets--every one of them."

This Benson did, with an affective mingling of m.u.f.fled caution and open repugnance. He felt from pocket to pocket, as gingerly as small boys feel into ferret holes, and with one eye always on the colorless and sphinx-like face beside him.

The result of that search was quite encouraging. From one pocket came an ugly, short-barreled Colt. From another came two skeleton keys and a few inches of copper wire bent into a coil. From still another came a small electric flashlight. Under our burglar's coat, with one end resting in his left-hand waistcoat pocket, was a twenty-inch steel "jimmy." It was a very attractive tool, not unlike a long and extremely slender stove lifter, with a tip-tilted end. I found it suggestive of tremendous leverage-power, tempting one to test its strength. It proved as inviting to the hand as a golfer's well-balanced "driver."

From the right-hand waistcoat pocket Benson produced a lady's gold watch, two finger rings, a gold barrette, and a foot or two of old-fas.h.i.+oned locket chain, of solid gold. There was nothing to show who the owner of this jewelry might be.

"I suppose you just bought this at Tiffany's?" I inquired. But the needle of antiphrasis had no effect on his indurated hide. His pa.s.sivity was beginning to get on my nerves. He might have been a wax figure in the Eden Musee, were it not for those reptiliously alert and ever exasperating eyes. I stood up and confronted him.

"I want to know where this stuff came from."

The white-faced burglar still looked at me out of those sullen and rebellious blinkers of his. But not a word pa.s.sed his lips.

"Then we'll investigate a little farther," I said, eying his somewhat protuberant breast-bone. "Go on with the search, Benson, and get everything." For it was plain that our visitor, before honoring us that night, had called at other homes.

I watched Benson with increased interest as his fastidiously exploring hand went down inside the burglar's opened waistcoat. I saw him feel there, and as he did so I caught a change of expression on our prisoner's face. He looked worried and hara.s.sed by this time; he seemed to have lost his tranquil and snake-like a.s.surance. His small, lean head with the pathetically eager eyes took on a rat-like look. I knew then the end toward which my mind had been groping. The man was not snake-like. He was rat-like. He was a cornered rat. Rat seemed written all over him.

But at that moment my eyes went back to Benson, for I had seen his hand bringing away a small vase partly wrapped in a pocket-handkerchief.

This handkerchief was extremely dirty.

I took the vase from his hand, drawing away the rag that screened it.

Only by an effort, as I did so, was I able to conceal my surprise. For one glance at that slender little column of _sang-de-boeuf_ porcelain told me what it was. There was no possibility of mistake. One glimpse of it was enough. It was from the Gubtill collection. For once before my fingers had caressed the same glaze and the same tender contours.

Once before, and under vastly different circ.u.mstances, I had weighed that delicate tube of porcelain in my contemplative hands.

I sat back and looked at it more carefully. I examined the crackled groundwork, with its brilliant mottled tones, and its pale ruby shades that deepened into crimson. I peered down at the foot of enameled white with its slowly deepening tinge of pale green. Then I looked up at the delicate lip, the lip that had once been injured and artfully banded with a ring of gold. It was a vase of the K'angs.h.i.+ Period, a rare and beautiful specimen among the Lang Yao monochromes. And history said that thirty years before it had been purchased from the sixth Prince of Pekin, and had always been known as "The Flame."

Both Anthony Gubtill and I had bid for that vase. Our contest for it had been a spirited one, and had even been made the subject of a paragraph or two in the morning papers. But an inexplicably reckless mood had overtaken that parsimonious old collector, and he had won, though the day after the Graves sale I had been a member of that decorously appreciative dinner party which had witnessed its installation between a rather valuable peach-bloom amphora of haricot-red groundwork, with rose spots accentuated by the usual clouds of apple-green, and a taller and, to my mind, much more valuable ashes-of-roses cylindrical Lang Yao with a carved ivory base. We had looked on the occasion as somewhat of an event, for such things naturally are not picked up every day. So the mere sight of the vase took me back to the Gubtill home, to that rich and s.p.a.cious house on lower Fifth Avenue where I had spent not a few happy evenings. And that in turn took my thoughts back to a certain Volpi sale and an old Italian table-cover of blue velvet. From the table-cover they flashed on to Mary Lockwood and the remembered loveliness of her face as we stood side by side staring down at the gold galloon along the borders of that old vestment. Then I drew memory up short, with a wince, as I suddenly realized that the wanderer had been penetrating into strictly forbidden paths.

I put the vase down on my table and turned away from it, not caring to betray my interest in it, nor to give to the rat-like eyes still watching me any inkling of my true feelings. Yet the thought of such beauty being in the hands of a brute like that sickened me. I was angered by the very idea that such grace and delicacy should be outraged by the foul rags and the even fouler touch of a low-browed sneakthief. I resented the outrage, just as any normal mind would resent a jungle ape's abduction of a delicate child.

I turned and looked the criminal up and down. I noticed, for the first time, that his face was beaded with sweat.

"Might I inquire just what you intend doing with this?" I asked, gazing back, against my will, at the fragile little treasure known as The Flame.

The man moved uneasily, and for the first time. For the first time, too, he spoke.

"Give it to its owner," he said.

"And who is its owner?"