CHAPTER VIII
“It’s the Blue Pear,” she said, hesitatingly, wondering how to begin—“which, of course, means nothing to you.”
“And just what is it, please?”
“The Blue Pear, Jim, is a diamond. It’s a diamond that you and I, in some way or another, have got to get back!”
“To get back? Then when did we lose it?”
“I lost it. That’s what I’ve got to tell you.”
“Well, first tell me what it is,” he said, wondering at her seeming gaiety, not comprehending her nervous rebound from depression to exhilaration.
“It’s a very odd diamond, and a very big diamond, only tinted with a pale blue coloring the same as the Hope Diamond is tinged with yellow. That’s how it came to get its name. But the odd thing about it is that, when it was cut in Amsterdam, rather than grind away a fifteen-carat irregularity, it was left in a sort of pear-shape. Even before it was mounted by Lalique, it sold in Paris for well over six thousand pounds. Later, in Rio de Janeiro, it brought something like seven thousand pounds. There it was given to a French actress by a Spanish-American coffee-king. It was an African stone, in the first place.”
“But what’s all this geography for?” asked Durkin.
“Wait, dear heart, and you’ll understand. The coffee-king quarrelled with the Paris woman. This woman, though, smuggled the stone back to France with her. It was sold there, a few months later, for about one-fourth its market value. Still later it was bought for a little under six thousand pounds, by the late Earl of Warton, who gave it to his younger daughter, Lady Margaret Singford, when she married young Cicely—Sir Charles Cicely, who was wounded the first year of the war, you remember. Well, Sir Charles didn’t like the setting—it had been made into a marquise ring of some sort—so he took it to Rene Lalique’s work-shop in Paris, and had it mounted after his own ideas.”
“But who is Lalique?”
“A French l’art nouveau goldsmith—the Louis Tiffany of the Continent. But I’ve a lot to tell you, Jim, and only a little time to do it in, so we shall have to cut out these details. Lalique made a pendant out of the Blue Pear, hung on a thin gold stem, between little leaves of beaten gold, with diamond dew-drops on them. Well, four weeks ago the Blue Pear was stolen from Lady Margaret’s jewel case. No, Jim, thank you, not by me; but if you’ll wait, I’ll try to explain.
“I hardly know what made me do it—it was ennui, and being lonesome, I suppose. Perhaps it was the money,—a little. But, you see, when Albert, my innocently wayward young cousin, got mixed up with young Singford, I found out a thing or two about that less innocent gentleman. It started me thinking; and thinking, of course, started me acting.”
He nodded, as a sign that he was following her.
“I had detective-agency cards printed, and went straight to the Cicelys. Lady Margaret wouldn’t see me; she sent down word that the reward of three hundred pounds was still open, and that there was no new information. But I saw her at last—I shan’t explain just how. Before very long I found out something further, and rather remarkable—that Lady Margaret wanted to drop the case altogether, and was trying to blind Scotland Yard and the police. And that made me more determined.
“Before the end of the week, I found out that young Singford, Lady Margaret’s brother, had been mixed up in a row at Monaco, had made a mess of things, later, at Oxford, and had decided to try ranching in the Canadian North-West. I had already booked my passage on the Celtic, but the whole thing then meant too much for me, and, when I found young Singford was sailing that week on the Majestic, I succeeded in getting a berth on that steamer. Jim, as soon as I saw that wretched boy on deck, I knew that I had guessed right, or almost right. Oh, I know them, I know them! I suppose it’s because, in the last year or two, I have come in contact with so many of them. But there he was, as plain as day, a criminal with stage-fright, a beginner without enough nerve to face things out. I rather think he may have been a nice boy at one time. And I know just how easy it is, once you make the first little wrong turn, to keep on and on and on, until you daren’t turn back, even if you had the chance to.”
“And you took pity on him?” inquired Durkin, “or did you merely vivisect him at a distance?”
“Not altogether—but first I must tell you of the second dilemma. Before we sailed, and the first day out, I thought it best to keep to my cabin. You can understand why, of course. After all, this is such a little world, when you know the Central Office might be after you!”
“Or some old business friend?”
“That was precisely what I thought, only a good deal harder, when I was sat down to dinner, the second day out, and glanced across the table. You remember my telling you about my first experiences in America, when I was a shrinking and pink-cheeked young English governess, and never knew a bold thought or a dishonest act? Do you remember my describing the woman—it’s always a woman who is hard on another woman!—who accused me of—of having designs on her husband? Her husband, a miserable, oily little Hebrew diamond-merchant who twice insulted me on the stairs of his own house, when I had to swallow it without a word! Well, it was that woman who sat across the table from me. They had put me at the Captain’s table—my London gown, you see, looks uncommonly well. But there was that woman, a little more faded and wizened and wrinkled, looking at me with those beady old hawk eyes of hers; and I knew there was trouble ahead.
“A war-correspondent, who had been nice to me, had brought up about everybody at our table worth while, and introduced them to me, that night before going down. So, when I saw that yellow face and those hawk eyes, I knew I had to think hard and fast.”
“‘Are you not the young woman,’ she said, in a sort of frappé of nasal indignation, ‘are you not the young woman whom I once employed as a governess and discharged for misconducting herself with—er—with the other servants?’
“I was so busy trying to be cool that I didn’t bother thinking out an answer. I did want to say, though, that it was not a servant, but her own devoted and anointed husband. I kept on talking to the Captain, deciding to ignore her icily. But that yellow hag deliberately repeated her question, and I heard the war-correspondent gasp out an indignant ‘My God, madam!’ and saw the Captain’s face growing redder and redder. So I went on and asked the Captain if intoxication was becoming commoner on the high seas. Then she began to splutter and tremble. I kept looking at her as languidly as ever, and a steward had to help her away.
“But she knew that she was right. And she knew that I knew she knew. Though I had all the men on my side, and the Captain cheerfully saw to it that she was moved down to the tail end of the Doctor’s table, among the commercial travellers and the school-ma’ms, I knew well enough that she was only waiting for her chance.
“It didn’t change the face of things, but it upset me, and made me more cautious in the way I handled young Singford. In some way, I felt a bit sorry for the poor chap, I thought a little sympathy might perhaps soften him, and make him tell me something worth while. But he had too much good old English backbone for that. And, although he told me I was the best woman he ever knew, and a little more solemn nonsense like that, I at last had to go for him very openly. It was a moonlight night—the sea-air was as soft as summer. We were standing by the rail, looking out over the water. Then I made the plunge, and very quietly told him I knew two things, that he had stolen his sister’s diamond pendant, and that for three days he had been thinking about committing suicide.
“I watched his hand go up to his breast-pocket—the moon was on his terrified young face—and I came a little nearer to him, for I was afraid of something—I tried to tell him there was no use jumping overboard, and none whatever in throwing the Blue Pear into the Atlantic. That would only make things past mending, forever. Besides, he was young, and his life was still before him. I talked to him—well, I believe I cried over him a little, and finally, without a word, he reached in under his coat, and there, in the moonlight, handed me the Blue Pear. I gave him my word of honor it would be taken back to his sister, and even lent him twenty pounds—and you can imagine how little I had left!”
Durkin looked up, as though to ask a question, but she silenced him with her uplifted hand.
“That was the night we came up the Bay. I slipped down to my cabin, and turned on the electric light. Then I opened the little case, and looked at my pendant. You know I never liked diamonds, they always seemed so cold and hard and cruel—well, as though the tears of a million women had frozen into one drop. But this Blue Pear—oh, Jim, it was beautiful!”
“It was?—Good heavens, you don’t mean—?”
“Shhhh! Not so loud! Yes, that is just it. There I stood trying it in the light, feasting on it, when a voice said behind me, a voice that made my hair creep at the roots, ‘A very unsafe stone to smuggle, young lady!’ And there, just inside my door, stood the yellow hag. She had stolen down, I suppose, to nose among my luggage a bit. I could have shaken her—I almost did try it.
“We stood staring at each other; it was the second battle of the kind between us on board that ship. I realized she had rather the upper hand in this one. I never saw such envy and greed and cruelty in a human face, as she ogled that stone.
“It seemed to intoxicate her—she was drunk to get her hands on it—and she had enough of her own, too. So, once more, I had to think as fast as I could, for I knew that this time she would be relentless.
“‘No, I shan’t smuggle it,’ I said, in answer to her look.
“‘You pay duty—a thousand, two thousand dollars!’ she gasped at me, still keeping her eyes on the stone, flashing there in the light. ‘Given to you,’ she almost hissed, ‘by some loving father whose child you guided into the paths of wisdom? Oh, I know you, you lying huzzy! It’s mine!’ she cried, like a baby crying for the moon, ‘it’s mine! You—you stole it from me!’”
She paused, at the memory of the scene, and Durkin stirred uneasily on the seat.
“What made the fool say that?” he demanded.
“Why, she meant that she could claim it, and intended to claim it, insinuating that she would see that it was declared at the wharf, if I kept it, and arguing that I might as well lose it quietly to her, as to the Treasury officers. I knew in a flash, then, that she didn’t know what the Blue Pear was. I closed the little gun-metal case with a snap. Then I put it, Blue Pear and all, in her hand. She turned white, and asked me what I meant.
“‘I am going to give it to you—for a while, at least,’ I said, as coolly as I could, making a virtue, of course, of what I knew was going to be a necessity.
“She looked at me open-mouthed. Then she tore open the case, looked at the stone, weighed it in her fingers, gasped a little, held it to the light again, and turned and looked at me still once more.
“‘This pendant was stolen!’ she cried, with sudden conviction. She looked at the stone again—she couldn’t resist it.
“‘You might call it the Robin’s Egg, when you have it re-cut,’ I told her.
“She gave a jump—that was what she was thinking of, the shrewd old wretch. She shoved the case down in her lean old breast.
“‘Then you will smuggle it in for me?’ I asked her.
“‘Yes, I’ll get it through, if I have to swallow it!’
“‘And you will keep it?’ I asked; and I laughed, I don’t know why.
“‘You remember my house?’ she cried, with a start.
“‘Like a book!’ I told her.
“‘But still I’ll keep it!’ she declared.
“It was a challenge, a silly challenge, but I felt at that moment that this was indeed a plunge back into the old ways of life. But, to go on. She didn’t seem to realize that keeping the Blue Pear was like trying to conceal a white elephant, or attempting to hide away a Sierra Nevada mountain. Then that cruel old avaricious, over-dressed, natural-born criminal had her turn at laughing, a little hysterically, I think. And, for a minute or two, I felt that all the world had gone mad, that we were only two gray gibbering ghosts talking in the enigmas of insanity, penned up in throbbing cages of white enamelled iron.
“I followed her out of the cabin, and walked up and down alone in the moonlight, wondering if I had done right. At the wharf, I fully intended to risk everything and inform on her, then cable to the Cicelys. But she must have suspected something like that—my stewardess had already told me there were two Treasury Department detectives on board—and got her innings first. For I found myself quietly taken in charge, and my luggage gone over with a microscope—to say nothing of the gentle old lady who massaged me so apologetically from head to foot, and seemed a bit put out to find that I had nothing more dutiable than an extra pair of French gloves.”
“Had you expected this beforehand?” interposed Durkin.
“Yes, the stewardess had told me there was trouble impending—that’s what made me afraid about the Blue Pear. Just as I got safely through Customs, though, I caught sight of the yellow hag despatching her maid and luggage home in a taxi-cab, while she herself sailed away in another,—I felt so sure she was going straight to her husband’s store, Isaac Ottenheimer & Company, the jeweller and diamond man on Fifth Avenue, you know, that I scrambled into a taxi and told the driver to follow my friend to Ottenheimer’s. When we pulled up there, I drew the back curtains down and watched through a quarter-inch crack. The woman came out again, looking very relieved and triumphant. And that’s the whole story—only,—”
She did not finish the sentence, but looked at Durkin, who was slowly and dubiously rubbing his hands together, with the old, weary, half-careless look all gone from his studious face.
He glanced back at the woman beside him admiringly, lost himself in thought for a moment, and then laughed outright.
“You’re a dare-devil, Frank, if there ever was one!” he cried; then he suddenly grew serious once more.
“No, it’s not daring,” she answered him. “The true name of it is cowardice!”