I turned where I stood, and was about to pass diffidently on, when one of the most unexpected things that can come to a man at midnight happened to me.
Out of a clear sky, without a note or movement of warning, there suddenly fell at my feet a heavy bundle.
Where it came from I had no means of telling. The house above me was as silent and dark as a tomb. The street was as empty as a church. Had the thing been a meteor out of a star-lit sky, or a wildcat leaping from a tree-branch, it could not have startled me more.
I stood looking at it, in wonder, as it lay beside the very area-railing on which my hand had rested. Then I stepped back and leaned in over this railing, more clearly to inspect the mystery. Whatever it was, it had fallen with amazingly little noise. There was no open window to explain its source. There had been no wind to blow it from an upper-story sill. There was no movement to show that its loss had been a thing of ponderable import. Yet there it lay, a mystery which only the deep hours of the night, when the more solemnly imaginative faculties come into play, could keep from being ridiculous.
I stood there for several minutes blinking down at it, as though it were a furred beast skulking in a corner. Then I essayed a movement which, if not above the commonplace, was equally related to common sense. I stepped in through the railing and picked up the parcel. I turned it over several times. Then I sat down on the stone steps and deliberately untied the heavy cord that baled it together.
I now saw why I had thought of that falling bundle as an animal's leap. It was completely wrapped in what I took to be a Russian-squirrel motor-coat. The tightly tied fur had padded the parcel's fall.
Enclosed in that silk-lined garment I found a smaller bundle, swathed about with several lengths of what seemed to be Irish point lace. Inside this again were other fragments of lacework. Through these I thrust my exploring fingers with all the alert curiosity of a child investigating a Christmas-tree cornucopia.
There, in the heart of the parcel, I found a collection which rather startled me. The first thing I examined was a chamois bag filled with women's rings, a dozen or more of them, of all kinds. I next drew out a Florentine repoussé hand-bag set with turquoises and seed-pearls, and then a moonstone necklace, plainly of antique Roman workmanship. Next came a black and white Egyptian scarab, and then, of all things, a snuff-box. It was oval and of gold, enameled en plein with a pastoral scene swarming with plump pink Cupids. Even in that uncertain light it required no second glance to assure me that I was looking down at a rare and beautiful specimen of Louis XV jeweler's art. Then came a small photograph in an oval gold frame. The remainder of the strange collection was made up of odds and ends of jewelry and a leather-covered traveling-clock stamped with gilt initials.
I did not take the time to look more closely over this odd assortment of valuables, for it now seemed clear that I had stumbled on something as disturbing as it was unexpected. The only explanation of an otherwise inexplicable situation was that a house-breaker was busily operating somewhere behind the gray-stone wall which I faced.
The house behind that wall seemed to take on no new color at this discovery. Its inherent sobriety, its very rectangularity of outline, appeared a contradiction of any claim that it might be harboring a figure either picturesque or picaresque. It was no old mansion stained with time, dark with memories and tears. It carried no atmosphere of romance, no suggestion of old and great adventures, of stately ways and noble idlers, of intrigues and unremembered loves and hates, of silence and gloom touched with the deeper eloquence of unrecorded history. It was nothing more than a new and narrow and extremely modern house, in the very heart of a modern New York, simple in line and as obvious in architecture as the warehouses along an old-world water-front, as bare of heart as it was bald of face, a symbol of shrill materialities, of the day of utility. It could no more have been a harbor for romance, I told myself, than the stone curb in front of it could be translated into a mountain-precipice threaded with brigand-paths.