Walker of the Secret Service

by Melville Davisson Post

“Let us find a seat somewhere,” he said, “and I will show you a map.”

They got out of the crowd, traversed the long hall that runs parallel to St. James’s Park, and entered the conservatory.

Walker followed. Dercum’s words had almost the sting of a blow. It was the verification of Lord Donald Muir’s anxiety. If love were blind, Walker reflected, it had surely the intuition of the saints. Dercum’s plan, the plan which Walker had considered academic and unlikely, was practical and on the way.

The Chief of the American Secret Service went on into the conservatory, through fringes of the gay crowd floating everywhere like gorgeous butterflies disentangled from the mass. He stopped beside an immense vase filled with Japanese chrysanthemums of a peculiar color, huge like a shock of hair on an immense stem. They entirely obscured him, and he did not move.

It was not in any definite plan that he had entered the conservatory and stopped behind this mass of flowers. He had been surprised, shocked by the swift verification of this boy’s fear, and he wished to reflect on it. It was not that he had followed to hear what Dercum said; the details of what he said would be now unimportant. It was the man’s intention alone that mattered, and this intention required no further explanatory word.

He felt a sudden and desperate anxiety. This girl, lovely and inexperienced, was entirely at Dercum’s will; as her guardian he would have exclusive control of her, and, with the man’s cleverness, what he wished he would accomplish. The English law, having put the girl into his charge, would not concern itself about intentions that could not be established. It would concern itself only with the overt act, and when Dercum resorted to that he would be beyond a running of the King’s writ.

Walker felt himself pressed for reflection, and he stopped here unmoving, without a plan. But as chance would have it, he stopped precisely at the place he would have selected if he had followed in determination to hear every word that Dercum was about to say. Sir Henry and the girl were just beyond him—beyond the screen of flowers, on a bench by the window. Their words, although under-uttered, came clearly to him; and in his vague reflection, the skill with which Dercum moved in his plan was conspicuously evident.

The man was getting the lure of a land of mystery into his story; he was deftly stimulating the girl’s fancy; he was calling her interest in her father’s adventures to his aid; he was making a wonder expedition out of this thing he had in mind. No element of thrill, or color, in this adventure was lacking.

Walker could almost see Dercum’s finger on the map. But the map would be only a property of the thing he was staging. He did not explain precisely where this river lay, or the route to it. But on some golden afternoon they would unship at a seaport, assemble a fantastic company and go into some lost country that would be like the Wood beyond the World, or the waste regions of some fairy kingdom. And they would go now, this very summer, when the London season had slacked a little.

Dercum was beginning to specify dates. Walker could not see him, but he knew that the bit of pencil moved on the map; he would arrange everything. From the few words of the girl, reaching him across the Japanese chrysanthemums, she was entranced. A butterfly entangled in illusions—she was ready to go, and she would go.