The Popular Magazine/Volume 72/Number 1/The Crusader's Casket/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII.
JIMMY wrote the letter on a Hotel Danieli letterhead and then, after due thought, walked out, purchased plain paper and plain envelope at a shop and rewrote it. It ran:
Hon. Lemus, Harnway,
Venice.
My Dear Uncle: Certain circumstances have put me in a position concerning which I cannot at the moment confide; and I consider it not only sportsmanlike, but necessary, for me to warn you that I am involved in a conspiracy—and pledged to perform therein—directed against a certain possession of yours. I could not take this part without warning you that I must, for the time being at least, be regarded and treated as your enemy. For me not to warn you would be dishonorable. For me to tell you exactly what the conspiracy is would be equally dishonorable, because it would be a betrayal. If the day comes when I can win your forgiveness by confession, you will, I am certain, appreciate my predicament. Puzzling as this letter may seem, I feel that it is but fair, after having visited your house, to tell you frankly that you must be on your guard against me, or any with whom I am associated. I am, sir,
Most affectionately yours,
He tried to find other expressions less cryptic, weighed words and sentences, and then feeling that he had done his best, mailed it.
“I doubt if the old boy will ever forgive me if he learns the truth of this affair,” he ruminated after the letter was mailed, and half wished that he could recover it. “But Tommie wants that box and I've just got to help her get it. Her heart is set on it, and—confound the thing, anyhow! I wish old Yancey Powell had broken his arm before he ever got hold of it!”
He did not, however, make the most obvious and reasonable wish, that he had never met Miss Tommie Powell, his hereditary enemy by Kentucky feudal code. In fact, so recalcitrant to code was he that at that very hour of the morning he was eagerly waiting for her to appear for breakfast, and filled with a new idea for decorating her launch that he hoped might please her and prove his genius and fertility of invention. Between times he speculated curiously on what she had planned for Saturday night.
When she appeared, fresh, smiling, clad in summery white befitting the season and climate, and advanced to meet him, his heart thumped with the knowledge that she was glad to find him there and at least accepted him as a good comrade.
“Hello,” she said. “Wonder if I kept you waiting for breakfast? I'm lazy this morning. Had quite a party last night. Kept me up until all hours.”
“I was kept up rather late myself last night,” he admitted, making a dry private joke. “But all this is of no importance. I'm upset because you haven't yet confided your plans about how we are to get that silly casket.”
Her face lost its smile as the great pursuit recurred to her and she looked warily around as if apprehensive that his words had been overheard. He too looked but saw no one save Giuseppe loitering at a distance, and, out at the edge of the Schiavi wharf, Tomaso, with a bandage around his head, gravely watching him with a doglike fidelity.
She led the way inward to the breakfast room and to her accustomed table, and he followed. Perhaps as a subterfuge to avoid answering him she became engrossed in the bill of fare.
“That's got the same things on it that it had yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that—and so on,” he said, smiling at her. “Being blessed with a Kentucky appetite, you're going to take ham and eggs, the same as you did yesterday and the day before that, and the day”
“How do you know I am?” she retorted, throwing the card aside.
When she smiled he stubbornly, as was his way, reverted to his original point, the casket.
“See here,” she said, lifting her eyes to his—and for the moment they were troubled—“I've thought the whole thing over. You're mighty kind to listen to all my harassments, and all that—and if I didn't—well, like you, I'd jump at your offer to help because I'm going to try to do something that I've never done before and”
“Burglary,” he said, smiling, “is more than a profession. It's an art.”
She stopped and looked as if taken unawares, and he continued:
“Yes, thieving, for that's what it is, is the result of a highly needful youth, a growth and development in sordid surroundings, thievish environment, and the example of others. Now I've got an idea that you've not had many of these advantages in the profession. You're tackling a job that would appal an expert. You've got it in your very charming head that you are going to find a way to enter, burglarize or loot the palace of one Lemuel Harnway, ex-senator of the United States, who may in his time have done a bit of robbing himself, and therefore may know how to guard against it. I have volunteered in the enterprise and in a spasm of momentary weakness you consented to accept my assistance. Do you keep your word, or don't you?”
“I do, but I didn't say how best you could assist me, did I? Suppose I decided you could be of the most help by remaining here in the hotel? Or, if you are religiously inclined, suppose I suggested you go to some church and pray for my success?”
“Prayer as a help to burglary is something I never thought of,” he said with a grin. “Think of the poor but honest burglar's wife keeping prayerful vigil while her adored husband is out perilously earning their nightly bread and pãté de foie gras.”
An ominous silence followed his badinage and when, after a time, she lifted her eyes they were cold and angry.
“You talk as though I were a thief—all the time you speak of my enterprise that way. And I think I explained to you that I'm not, and that I'm trying to recover only that which rightfully belongs to me. If you can't accept my attitude, I certainly decline to accept your help or encouragement.”
“My dear girl,” he said, assuming a gravity that he did not at all feel, “I appreciate all your high motives. If I didn't, do you think I should suggest—nay, insist!—that if you plan to force Harnway's palace for the purpose of capturing that relic it must be myself and none other who does it?”
She looked at him incredulously and then her mood softened.
“But you couldn't find it, because you don't even know where it is, and I do!” she remarked triumphantly.
He dared not offer an argument against this, but said, “I'm certain I could find where it's kept, if you were to tell me how it may be reached.”
“No,” she said, “I do appreciate your bravery and your generosity, but I couldn't direct you to it.”
Again he fell to the old arguments, warning her of the dangers, calling attention to the fact that any servant of the house would be justified in shooting her if she were surprised in her act; that she was contemplating a double felony, that of burglary and of attempting to carry from Italy an undeclared object of art.
“Well,” he said in desperation when he found her as immovable as ever in her determination, “I shall go with you.”
“I might consent to your going in the boat,” she yielded, displaying at least a certain amount of weakness and desire for support. “I can't entirely feel trust in Pietro. He's too impulsive. He isn't cool enough to be depended upon in a pinch. Although I think he is willing to defy the law when his dander is up, as we used to say down home.”
Jimmy smiled to himself and thought, “Defy the law? I should say he would. Don't I know! The young devil!”
He then comforted himself in the hope that within the thirty-six hours that must intervene before her desperate attempt could be made, she might weaken in her resolve, and wisely decided that his dissuasion must be masked lest open argument but strengthen her stubbornness.
Together they crossed over the Grand Canal to a little basin behind the Chiesa della Salute, where they found Pietro superintending the decoration of her launch. Jimmy met the guide's stare with a grin and complimented him on the work. He saw at once that the lights of the launch and the decorations had been so arranged that they did not interfere with each other. Furthermore, by a cunning manipulation, the decorations had been so arranged on nets that they could be stripped and discarded at an instant's notice.
“I don't quite get the idea, of course,” Jimmy said, with a note of interrogation in his voice, and looking an invitation at the girl to explain if she felt so inclined.
“Why, the idea is this,” she said. “We can travel with lights ablaze, and decorated like most craft will be for the water promenade up and down the Grand Canal to-morrow night. “Then, just at the time when every person in all Venice who can will be out somewhere on the canal, we move away into the smaller rios which at that time are certain to be empty. We put out our lights, carry through my project, and, if not interfered with, return to the canal, join in the merry throng with all lights and decorations beautifying ourselves, and no one the wiser. If, on the other hand, we have to disguise ourselves for some reason”
“In other words if you are interrupted, observed, shot at, or anything like that.”
“Yes, if anything unpleasant happens and we have to make a run for it we can strip our decorations in a moment and are thus effectually disguised because everybody will be seeking a launch that looks like a white-flower swan, which is what this will look like when it is finished.”
Jimmy had to admit the ingenuity of the plan, and was still hopeful that something would intervene to prevent her attempt. He was considering this when he discovered that he was without anything to smoke, and while Tommie was giving further directions walked across the tiny bridge at the end of the basin and into a cigar shop. His coming evidently was a surprise to a man who was dawdling therein, but who turned quickly as Jimmy entered. It was Giuseppe, and Jimmy resisted an impulse to seize him by the shoulder, whirl him around, and ask him if these meetings were merely coincidence, or whether he had been employed to watch his movements. The absurdity of such procedure kept him from so doing, but nevertheless he could not clear his mind of the suspicion that Giuseppe was much too frequently visible. And then he thought to himself: “Pshaw! That's what a guilty conscience does.”
But he made up his mind to test his suspicions in another way, and so returned to the launch, pleaded that he had forgotten an engagement, made an appointment for later in the day and slowly walked back past the cigar shop to give Giuseppe ample opportunity to follow him through the intricate lanes, narrow streets and unexpected market places and squares on that side of the canal. He doubled back, dodged unexpectedly, and after a half hour of playing the hare to a supposititious fox came to the conclusion that he had been mistaken. He decided to return for Tommie; but when he reached the bridge across the end of the basin and looked for her, both she and Pietro had disappeared. Also Giuseppe had gone.
Jimmy was annoyed because he had needlessly separated himself from Tommie for some hours, called himself many opprobrious kinds of an ass, and took a gondola across to the Hotel Regina where he sat under an awning and vainly tried to conceive some way of keeping the girl from carrying out her foolhardy plan. He thought of hiring the faithful Tomaso to slip around and wreck the engine of the launch at the last moment, and then decided that inasmuch as Tommie's motor engineer was almost certain to be on the watch that would prove impossible. Furthermore, that young motorist was a kinsman of Pietro's, so doubtless any attempt to bribe him would prove useless. He thought of writing an anonymous letter to his uncle, but concluded that not only would this be a betrayal of Tommie, but not playing the game. And, furthermore, he secretly admitted that inasmuch as she desired possession of that confounded casket, he really wished she might get it, or better yet, that he might be the means of getting it for her, thereby winning her undying gratitude.
And it was this last thought which finally caused him to cast all doubts and scruples aside and make his final choice.
“By the shades of Colonel Yancey Powell!” he mentally exclaimed. “She wants that box and I'm going to get it for her or at least keep her from being punished for her part of the game if she's caught.”