Two days later Tom and I returned from our “business trip” to the Continent. I quite prided myself on the way our luggage was labeled. It had just the right knock-about, piebald look. We drove up in a four-wheeler, Handsome Harry on the box, and Maud opened the door for us. For the next few days we were quiet and kept indoors. We spent the time peacefully in the kitchen, breaking the settings of the diamonds and reading about the robbery in the papers. As soon as things simmered down, Tom was to take the stones across to Holland, where they would be distributed. We threw away the settings, and put the diamonds in a small box of chamois-skin that I pinned to my corset with a safety-pin.
That was the way things were—untroubled as a summer sea—till ten days after our return, when I began to get restive. I had had what they call in America “a strenuous time” at Burridge’s, working like a slave all day, with not a soul to speak to but a parcel of ignorant servant women, and I wanted livening up. I longed for the light and noise of Piccadilly, the crowd and the restaurants; but what I wanted particularly was to go to the theater and see a play called “The Forgiven Prodigal.”
Maud and Tom raised a clamor of disapproval: What was the use of running risks? did I think, because I’d been in Chicago for nearly a year, that I was forgotten? did I think the men in Scotland Yard who knew me were all dead? did I think the excitement of the Castlecourt robbery was over and done? I yawned at them, and then told them, with a gentle smile, that they were a “pusillanimous pair.” There might be many men in Scotland Yard who knew me, and that, as they say in Chicago, “is all the good it would do them.” They couldn’t arrest me for sitting peacefully at a theater looking at a play. As for connecting me with Sara Dwight, I would give any one a hundred pounds who, when I was dressed and had my war-paint on, would find in me a single suggestion of the late housemaid at Burridge’s. So I talked them down; and if I didn’t convince them of the reasonableness of my arguments, I at least managed to soothe their fears.
I dressed myself with especial care, and when the last rite of my toilet was accomplished looked critically in the glass to see if anything of Sara Dwight remained. The survey contented me. Sara’s mother, if there be such a person, would have denied me. I was all in black, a sweeping, spangly dress I had bought in New York, cut low, and my neck is not my weak point, especially when crême des violettes has been rubbed over it. My hair was waved (Maud does it very well, much better than she cooks, I regret to say), and dressed high, with a small red wreath of geraniums round it. Nose powdered to a probable, ladylike whiteness, a touch of rouge, a tiny mouche near the corner of one eye, and long, black gloves—and, presto change! I wore no jewels—their owners might recognize them. One could hardly say I “wore” the Castlecourt diamonds, which were fastened to my corset with a safety-pin. They were rather uncomfortable, but they were the only thing about me that were.
As I stood in front of the glass putting on finishing touches, Maud left the room, and went to the drawing-room to watch for Handsome Harry, who was to drive our hansom. I did not like taking a hired driver, and, thank goodness, I didn’t! I was putting a last soupçon of scarlet on my lips, when she came back, stepping softly, and with her eyes round and uneasy looking.
“I don’t know whether I’m nervous,” she says, “but there’s a man just gone by in a hansom, and he leaned out and looked hard at our windows.”
“I hope it amused him,” I said, looking critically at my lips, to see if they were not a little too incredibly ruddy. “It’s a harmless and innocent way of passing the time, so we mustn’t be hard on him if it doesn’t happen to be very intellectual. Come, help me on with my cloak, and don’t stand there like Patience on a monument staring at thieves.”
I was irritated with Maud, trying to upset my peace of mind that way. She’d had any amount of good times while I’d been at Burridge’s with my nose to the grindstone. And here she was, the first time I’d got a chance to have a spree, looking like a depressed owl and talking like the warning voice of Conscience! As she silently held up my cloak and I thrust my hand in the sleeve, I said, over my shoulder:
“And you needn’t go upsetting Tom by telling him about strange men in hansoms who stare up at our front windows. I want to have a good time this evening, not feel that I’m sitting by a guilty being who jumps every time he’s spoken to as if the curse of Cain was on him.”
Maud said nothing, and I shook myself into my cloak and swept out to the hall, where Tom was waiting.