The Brass Bowl | Page 8

In the course of time the gates were again opened. The bridge cleared
of incoming traffic. As the cabby drove aboard the boat, with nice
consideration selecting the choicest stand of all, well out upon the
forward deck, a motor-car slid in, humming, on the right of the hansom.
Maitland sat forward, resting his forearms on the apron, and jerked his
cigarette out over the gates; the glowing stub described a fiery arc and
took the water with a hiss. Warm whiffs of the river's sweet and salty
breath fanned his face gratefully, and he became aware that there was a
moon. His gaze roving at will, he nodded an even-tempered
approbation of the night's splendor: in the city a thing unsuspected.
Never, he thought, had he known moonlight so pure, so silvery and
strong. Shadows of gates and posts lay upon the forward deck like
stencils of lamp-black upon white marble. Beyond the boat's bluntly
rounded nose the East River stretched its restless, dark reaches, glossy
black, woven with gorgeous ribbons of reflected light streaming from
pier-head lamps on the further shore. Overhead, the sky, a pallid and
luminous blue around the low-swung moon, was shaded to profound
depths of bluish-black toward the horizon. Above Brooklyn rested a
tenuous haze. A revenue cutter, a slim, pale shape, cut across the bows
like a hunted ghost. Farther out a homeward-bound excursion steamer,
tier upon tier of glittering lights, drifted slowly toward its pier beneath
the new bridge, the blare of its band, swelling and dying upon the night
breeze, mercifully tempered by distance.
Presently Maitland's attention was distracted and drawn, by the abrupt
cessation of its motor's pulsing, to the automobile on his right. He lifted
his chin sharply, narrowing his eyes, whistled low; and thereafter had
eyes for nothing else.

The car, he saw with the experienced eye of a connoisseur, was a recent
model of one of the most expensive and popular foreign makes: built
on lines that promised a deal in the way of speed, and furnished with
engines that were pregnant with multiplied horse-power: all in all not
the style of car one would expect to find controlled by a solitary
woman, especially after ten of a summer's night.
Nevertheless the lone occupant of this car was a woman. And there was
that in her bearing, an indefinable something,--whether it lay in the
carriage of her head, which impressed one as both spirited and
independent, or in an equally certain but less tangible air of
self-confidence and reliance,--to set Mad Maitland's pulses drumming
with excitement. For, unless indeed he labored gravely under a
misapprehension, he was observing her for the second time within the
past few hours.
Could he be mistaken, or was this in truth the same woman who had (as
he believed) made herself free of his rooms that evening?
In confirmation of such suspicion he remarked her costume, which was
altogether worked out in soft shades of grey. Grey was the misty veil,
drawn in and daintily knotted beneath her chin, which lent her head and
face such thorough protection against prying glances; of grey suede
were the light gauntlets that hid all save the slenderness of her small
hands; and the wrap that, cut upon full and flowing lines, cloaked her
figure beyond suggestion, was grey. Yet even its ample drapery could
not dissemble the fact that she was quite small, girlishly slight, like the
woman in the doorway; nor did aught temper her impersonal and
detached composure, which had also been an attribute of the woman in
the door-way. And, again, she was alone, unchaperoned, unprotected....
Yes? Or no? And, if yes: what to do? Was he to alight and accost her,
accuse her of forcing an entrance to his rooms for the sole purpose (as
far as ascertainable) of presenting him with the outline of her hand in
the dust of his desk's top?... Oh, hardly! It was all very well to be
daringly eccentric and careless of the world's censure; but one scarcely
cared to lay one's self open either to an unknown girl's derision or to a
sound pummeling at the hands of fellow passengers enraged by the
insult offered to an unescorted woman....
The young man was still pondering ways and means when a dull bump
apprised him that the ferry-boat was entering the Long Island City slip.

"The devil!" he exclaimed in mingled disgust and dismay, realizing that
his distraction had been so thorough as to permit the voyage to take
place almost without his realizing it. So that now--worse luck!--it was
too late to take any one of the hundred fantastic steps he had
contemplated half seriously. In another two minutes his charming
mystery, so bewitchingly incarnated, would have slipped out of his life,
finally and beyond