Framed at the Benefactors Club/Chapter 2

MOMENTARY hush of expectancy fell like a pall over the company gathered at No. 17 as Ogilvie entered. Spencer's sable coat was wrapped about him in loose, luxurious folds, with the light of the swinging kerosene lamp, in the doorless, octagonal outer hall, stabbing tiny points of gold into the russet-black fur as the draft from the entrance door jerked his coat apart and exposed the lining. He noted in passing the man with the bulbous nose, the great hairy hands, and the exotic, spade-shaped red beard behind the cashier's desk, who looked at him and then turned away. Immediately—the hush of expectancy had lasted only a few seconds—the talk that filled the place like the droning of bees broke forth again; it even rose to a higher note as the hat-check boy—a snobbish anomaly for this part of town, Ogilvie reflected—took the ulster and handed it to a brown-eyed, high-colored, sweet-faced girl who presided over the clothes rack that stood beyond the outer hall, with a rapid stream of clipped, metallic Balkan jargon.

Ogilvie did not miss the strange, almost pitying look in the girl's fine brown eyes as she took the coat, seemed to finger it for a moment as if enjoying the soft feel of it, and then said to him in guttural, broken English:

“Check, sir! Yes, sir—right check!”

Ogilvie held out his hand. “All right,” he said, “let's have the check!”

“But”—the girl shook her head and glanced over at the man with the red beard as if appealing to him—“you have the check, sir!”

“I have not, my dear!”

The girl seemed flustered.

“S'bog s'bogpie,” she exclaimed, calling on some Slav deity for help; “you have, you have”

Blaine Ogilvie laughed. He had always been an easy-going man, had always disliked arguments and quarrels.

“All right, all right,” he replied, “have it your own way. Anyhow, that coat is valuable, and I want it back, check or no check. I have witnesses, eh?” He smiled at the red-bearded man, who smiled back with a flash of small, even white teeth.

“Yes, sir,” said the girl dully, rather hopelessly. “Oh, yes, sir”

He tried to dovetail these impressions, between the moment he entered and the moment he sat down and asked for a drink—into a compendious whole—tried to riddle out their keynote.

His first reaction was emphatically tame. He felt disappointed. He had been keyed. up to expect something, if not thrilling or bloodcurdling, at least startlingly unconventional or intriguing, and all he saw was an old-fashioned restaurant, harking back, as Spencer had told him, to the days of Aaron Burr and the young Republic. It seemed like an archaic “saloon bar” of colonial days, with its two or three dozen oaken, strong-backed chairs, that stood against the farther wall, each fitted with an occupant, its black settle near the bar, redolent of a former generation when, doubtless, it had been filled by a pompous landlord holding forth, clay pipe in hand, on the comparative virtues of king or parliament. There was the neat, sanded floor, the small, round window high up on the wall with a wheel ventilator in one of the panes, a few quaint pictures in flat mahogany frames, a gayly painted Hadley dower chest, and quite a collection of Spode plates and old English flip glasses.

Altogether a charming, peaceful place—redolent, Ogilvie thought smilingly, of lavender and lace and potent rum toddies. As the outer door clicked in the lock he felt as if the New York that he knew, the brassy, hustling New York of motley, cosmopolitan throngs and hooting motor drays and elevated cars booming along their steely spider's web had been shuttered off, had been sucked back into an air pocket of time.

A purse-mouthed, crane-necked waiter—fully as much of an antique as the rest of the place, with his gray Dundreary whiskers and green baize apron and elastic gaiters—hovered about. Ogilvie gave his order, and, after he was served, lit a cigar and settled comfortably in his chair. Then, unhurriedly, he turned to study the occupants of the restaurant.

The latter were now paying no attention to him. They seemed the pleasant, bromidic folk of the neighborhood, small tradesmen and chauffeurs and skilled mechanics, talking in undertones unexcitedly, without gestures, sipping their innocuous drinks and puffing at well-blackened brier pipes and ten-cent cheroots. Some were playing checkers.

Among them only a few men stood out as types rather out of the ordinary. Thinking of Martyn Spencer's cryptic remarks, of the twenty thousand dollars, the unknown, mysterious reason for his being here, thinking finally of the signal code of knocks which had opened to him the outer door, Blaine Ogilvie studied these men more closely.

He tried to classify them logically in his coolly observant brain—for future reference, as he put it; although he added to himself that he would give a good half of the twenty thousand dollars to know what exactly this reference might eventually point to—the reference, the explanation, and the end, the solution

What end? End of what?

As the moments passed he became conscious of a queer, eerie sensation, like a clay-cold hand gently caressing his spine. It was uncomfortable. He tried to convince himself that it was a draft, the wintry wind booming through the cracked old walls. But he knew that he was lying to himself; knew that it was fear—fear of the unknown—the grayest, most tragic fear in the world! He watched his left hand that held the cigar. It trembled. Then he shook the feeling off suddenly, physically, with a jerk and heave of his broad shoulders, as a cat shakes off raindrops. He turned again to study the few people who seemed to stand out from among the rest of the crowd.

There was, of course, the man behind the cashier's desk, with the spade-shaped, flame-colored beard and the bulbous, large-pored nose. He seemed slightly nervous, shuffling with his finger tips the pages of the ledger in front of him, occasionally looking up in the direction of the door as if waiting for somebody to come. There was also the brown-eyed girl—doubtless belonging to some Slav race—who presided over the clothes rack. She gave a little guilty start as her glance crossed Ogilvie's. Then she turned her back on him and slumped down on her stool, facing the door. The boy in the outer hall, too, was staring at the door, standing quite motionless, tense, like a pointer at bay.

For a second or two Blaine Ogilvie felt fascinated by the grouping of the three figures; it seemed both tragic and incongruous, like a tableau out of some cheap melodrama.

Then he looked away from them and toward the other occupants of the room whom he had decided to observe.

Not far from the black settle by the bar a party of three were sitting around one of the oaken tables, framed on either side by other groups, prosy, uninteresting, small tradesmen or mechanics, as Ogilvie had decided. But these three men were of a different stamp. They sat very quietly, very silently. There was something inhuman about their quietude. One seemed like an elderly roué, handsome in a way, yet amorphous, washed over by the pitiless hand of time and vice. He was smoking a straw-colored cigarette in a ten-inch holder of clear green jade. At his left was a tall, thin man with extraordinarily long arms, the cleaverlike sharpness of his face emphasized by the supercilious upsweep of a heavy black mustache. The third was a youth, not over twenty, dressed in an expensive but foppish manner, with his bench-made brogues, buckskin spats, and a hairy, greenish Norfolk jacket opening over a Tattersall waistcoat of an extravagant pattern. The canary diamond in his purple necktie, if genuine, was worth a small fortune.

In the center of the room, paying not the slightest attention to the click of the counters at the next table, where some men were playing checkers, a man sat alone, a little hunchback whose pear-shaped head just protruded above the table rim. His face was distinguished by an immense hooked nose, a grave brow curving over a tragic, portentous gaze—the look of a mad prophet—and his dome was surmounted incongruously, ludicrously, by a cap in a check of violent magenta and pea green, set far back on the perspiring head. There was something about him that reminded Ogilvie of the Old Testament; not racially, but rather civilizationally—something like the bitter, pitiless logic of the ancient Hebrew annals.

And, finally, at Ogilvie's elbow were two men. One was tall, with a bald, pink head; the face itself, through a trick of the flickering shadows of the swinging kerosene lamps, was indistinct, wiped over with brown and ruby and muddy orange, all but the eyes that, beneath curiously straight and heavy brows, stared hard and shiny blue into vacancy arrestingly expressive of a certain contempt, tinged by a certain pity. The other man would have escaped Ogilvie's notice had it not been for his companion. For he seemed just an average New York business man, spotlessly neat from the exact parting in his honey-colored hair to the gray, herring-bone tweeds that fitted him without a wrinkle. His face was round like a baby's, with a nose inclined to be snub, and his fingers, drumming delicately on the table, were plump and excessively well kept.

There appeared to be nobody else in the restaurant worth considering or studying. Ogilvie tried to determine what these-men were whom he had picked out, what they represented—socially, financially, or politically—in the vast macrocosm of New York, Presently, as he watched and thought and weighed, it became clear to him that there was between these men, from table to table, an undercurrent of mutual understanding, expressed by an occasional glance, a faint gesture, even the ghost of a cough. And then suddenly—and it was this which caused fear to rush back upon him—he seemed to notice, to feel more than notice, that all the other people in the room, whom he had dismissed as harmless denizens of the neighborhood, were also involved in this baffling, silent network of mutual understanding, of waiting for something to happen—what—and to whom?

What were these people expecting? Why had they admitted him? What was Martyn Spencer's connection with it all? The three thoughts tumbled over each other, then drew together, blended, crystallized into a third: Why was he here? Because Martyn Spencer had paid him twenty thousand dollars. The answer was obvious. But obvious, too, was the fact that he had earned it. For he had come here, and there was nothing in the agreement between him and Spencer that he had to remain here any specific length of time.

Very well, he thought, the next thing for him to do was to leave the place. He got up unhurriedly, and was about to cross to the entrance hall when the little hunchback in the checked cap spoke two words slowly, without the slightest emphasis:

“Don't go!”

“Why not?” Ogilvie turned and stared at the speaker.

“Because it would be so very useless, wouldn't it?”

The words were quite simple, quite gentle. The hunchback had not moved, nor had any of the other occupants of the room, who continued to converse in low undertones, playing checkers, sipping their drinks, puffing at their pipes and cigars.

But, somehow, through the mists of Ogilvie's apprehension, floated down the knowledge that he was standing on the brink of a catastrophe, a catastrophe of which he knew neither the beginning nor the end. Somehow, he knew that, whatever the reasons for their keeping him here, they would not let him go until their object, whatever it was, had been attained. It seemed inevitable, like fate, and a curious, helpless lassitude swept over him. He realized instinctively that it would do no earthly good to argue with these people. He had never seen them before, nor had they seen him, as far as he knew. And yet they were evidently acting according to.a carefully preconceived plan. Too, he sensed that, for all the hunchback's gentle voice, for all the general air of excessive quietude and peace that pervaded the room like a subtle, insidious perfume, it would be useless to bluff, as useless to show fight.

The odds were against him, and he felt more than ever sure of it when, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that half a dozen men had risen and were approaching him very quietly, very unobtrusively, one stepping close up to him and asking him in flat, low accents to kindly sit down again.

Ogilvie obeyed. He sat down with a little bow in the direction of the hunchback.

“Very well, sir,” he said and lit his second cigar. “I fail to see, however, what”

“It's really quite useless,” said the hunchback.

“Quite, quite useless,” echoed the red-bearded man with a curious sigh.

“No use arguing—you mean—asking questions?” suggested Blaine Ogilvie.

“Exactly!” replied the hunchback. “Isn't that so?”

He turned to the company, gathering eyes like a hostess, and there came a rumbling, affirmative chorus:

“Yes—yes”

Blaine Ogilvie shrugged his shoulders. His thoughts were in a daze. The whole situation seemed unreal and negative. Momentarily he wondered if it were all a dream, from which he would awaken presently to find himself in bed, with the young sun streaming in through the window.

He smoked on in silence. When, a few seconds later, there was the roar of an automobile outside, followed by the code signal of knocks at the street door, he was more conscious of relief than of heightening fear. He looked up curiously as the door opened and admitted two men. One was short and stocky and rather ordinary, assisting a second man who seemed ill. The sick man was walking with evident effort, leaning heavily on a rubber-tipped stick, the feet dragging haltingly and painfully, the bent body huddled in a thick coat, the hat pulled down over the forehead.

He stood still for a second, blinking short-sightedly against the yellow light. A thin smile curled his bloodless lips.

“Is this the place, Hillyer?” he asked, turning to the man who was with him.

“Yes, Monro,” replied the other, helping him off with his overcoat.

“And—when—do you suppose” commenced the first man rather anxiously. “Though I really don't hope that”

“Now, please! Sit down first, Monro! You need rest,” interrupted the other, assisting him into a chair not far from Ogilvie's.

The latter felt completely mystified as well as disappointed. It was all so quiet, so well bred, so unexciting and unhurried. He was steadily becoming less intrigued than frankly bored. A faint suspicion came to him that the whole thing was nothing except a well-staged hoax, a practical joke of sorts.

He turned in his chair and motioned to the green-aproned waiter. The latter approached at a dignified, shuffling run.

“Yes, sir?” he inquired civilly.

“Bring me another”

Ogilvie did not finish the sentence.

For there came with utter, dramatic suddenness a crimson flash and a grim, cruel roar—a high-pitched cry cut off in mid-air—the dull sound of a falling body.

Instinctively he turned in his chair. Startled, frightened, he rose and stared wide-eyed.

“Oh”

Through the pall of silence that had dropped over the restaurant, Ogilvie's choked exclamation cut with extraordinary distinctness.

There, curled up like a sleeping dog, in front of his chair, one arm flung wide, the other stretched up and out, with the fingers bent stiffly, convulsively, as if trying to claw at life, to snatch back the breath of it from the black abyss of oblivion, lay the second of the two men who had come in a few moments earlier, the one who had seemed ill. Something trickled slowly from a neatly drilled bullet hole in his left temple, staining his cheek, his chin, his collar a rich crimson. He was dead. There was no doubt of it.

Murder—thought Blaine Ogilvie. And, if premeditated murder, why had they kept him here? What was supposed to be his connection with it, or, if not his personally, Martyn Spencer's?