What's Bred in the Bone (Murder Mystery Novel). Allen Grant

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      “Well, you guessed right, at any rate,” he went on, settling down in his seat once more, after boxing his snake, but this time face to face with her. “I’m working at a beautiful bit of fern and foliage—quite tropical in its way—in a wood hereabout; and I’ve introduced Sardanapalus, coiled up in the foreground, just to give life to the scene, don’t you know, and an excuse for a title. I mean to call it ‘The Rajah’s Rest.’ Behind, great ferns and a mossy bank; in front, Sardanapalus, after tiffin, rolled spirally round, and taking his siesta.”

      This meeting was a long-wished-for occasion. Elma had never before met a real live painter. Now, it was the cherished idea of her youth to see something some day of that wonderful non-existent fantastic world which we still hope for and dream about and call Bohemia. She longed to move in literary and artistic circles. She had fashioned to herself, like many other romantic girls, a rose-coloured picture of Bohemian existence; not knowing indeed that Bohemia is now, alas! an extinct province, since Belgravia and Kensington swallowed it bodily down, digested, and assimilated it. So this casual talk with the handsome young artist in the second-class carriage, on the Great Southern line, was to Elma as a charming and delightful glimpse of an enchanted region she could never enter. It was Paradise to the Peri. She turned the conversation at once, therefore, with resolute intent upon art and artists, determined to make the most while it lasted of this unique opportunity. And since the subject of self, with an attentive listener, is always an attractive one, even to modest young men like Cyril Waring—especially when it’s a pretty girl who encourages you to dilate upon it—why, the consequence was, that before many minutes were over, the handsome young man was discoursing from his full heart to a sympathetic soul about his chosen art, its hopes and its ideals, accompanied, by a running fire of thumb-nail illustrations. He had even got so far in the course of their intimacy as to take out the portfolio, which lay hidden under the seat—out of deference to his disguise as a stock-broker, no doubt—and to display before Elma’s delighted eyes, with many explanatory comments as to light and shade, or perspective and foreshortening, the studies for the picture he had just then engaged upon.

      By-and-by, as his enthusiasm warmed under Elma’s encouragement, the young artist produced Sardanapalus himself once more from his box, and with deftly persuasive fingers coiled him gracefully round on the opposite seat into the precise attitude he was expected to take up when he sat for his portrait in the mossy foreground.

      Elma couldn’t say why, but that creature fascinated her. The longer she looked at him the more intensely he interested her. Not that she was one bit afraid of him, as she might reasonably have expected to be, according to all womanly precedent. On the contrary, she felt an overwhelming desire to take him up in her own hands and stroke and fondle him. He was so lithe and beautiful; his scales so glistened! At last she stretched out one dainty gloved hand to pet the spotted neck.

      “Take care,” the painter cried, in a warning voice; “don’t be frightened if he springs at you. He’s vicious at times. But his fangs are drawn; he can’t possibly hurt you.”

      The warning, however, was quite unnecessary. Sardanapalus, instead of springing, seemed to recognise a friend. He darted out his forked tongue in rapid vibration, and licked her neat grey glove respectfully. Then, lifting his flattened head with serpentine deliberation, he coiled his great folds slowly, slowly, with sinuous curves, round the girl’s soft arm till he reached her neck in long, winding convolutions. There he held up his face, and trilled his swift, sibilant tongue once more with evident pleasure. He knew his place. He was perfectly at home at once with the pretty, olive-skinned lady. His master looked on in profound surprise.

      “Why, you’re a perfect snake-charmer,” he cried at last, regarding her with open eyes of wonder. “I never saw Sardanapalus behave like that with a stranger before. He’s generally by no means fond of new acquaintances. You must be used to snakes. Perhaps you’ve kept one? You’re accustomed of old to their ways and manners?”

      “No, indeed,” Elma cried, laughing in spite of herself, a clear little laugh of feminine triumph; for she had made a conquest, she saw, of Sardanapalus; “I never so much as touched one in all my life before. And I thought I should hate them. But this one seems quite tame and tractable. I’m not in the least afraid of him. He is so soft and smooth, and his movements are all so perfectly gentle.”

      “Ah, that’s the way with snakes, always,” Cyril Waring put in, with an admiring glance at the pretty, fearless brunette and her strange companion. “They know at once whether people like them or not, and they govern themselves accordingly. I suppose it’s instinct. When they see you’re afraid of them, they spring and hiss; but when they see you take to them by nature, they make themselves perfectly at home in a moment. They don’t wait to be asked. They’ve no false modesty. Well, then, you see,” he went on, drawing imaginary lines with his ticket on the sketch he was holding up, “I shall work in Sardanapalus just there, like that, coiled round in a spire. You catch the idea, don’t you?”

      As he spoke, Elma’s eye, following his hand while it moved, chanced to fall suddenly on the name of the station printed on the ticket with which he was pointing. She gave a sharp little start.

      “Warnworth!” she cried, flushing up, with some slight embarrassment in her voice; “why, that’s ever so far back. We’re long past Warnworth. We ran by it three or four stations behind; in fact, it’s the next place to Chetwood, where I got in at.”

      Cyril Waring looked up with a half-guilty smile as embarrassed as her own.

      “Oh yes,” he said quietly. “I knew that quite well. I’m down here often. It’s half-way between Chetwood and Warnworth I’m painting. But I thought—well, if you’ll excuse me saying it, I thought I was so comfortable and so happy where I was, that I might just as well go on a station or two more, and then pay the difference, and take the next train back to Warnworth. You see,” he added, after a pause, with a still more apologetic and penitent air, “I saw you were so interested in—well, in snakes, you know, and pictures.”

      Gentle as he was, and courteous, and perfectly frank with her, Elma, nevertheless, felt really half inclined to be angry at this queer avowal. That is to say, at least, she knew it was her bounden duty, as an English lady, to seem so; and she seemed so accordingly with most Britannic severity. She drew herself up in a very stiff style, and stared fixedly at him, while she began slowly and steadily to uncoil Sardanapalus from her imprisoned arm with profound dignity.

      “I’m sorry I should have brought you so far out of your way,” she said, in a studied cold voice—though that was quite untrue, for, as a matter of fact, she had enjoyed their talk together immensely. “And besides, you’ve been wasting your valuable time when you ought to have been painting. You’ll hardly get any work done now at all this morning. I must ask you to get out at the very next station.”

      The young man bowed with a crestfallen air. “No time could possibly be wasted,” he began, with native politeness, “that was spent—” Then he broke off quite suddenly. “I shall certainly get out wherever you wish,” he went on, more slowly, in an altered voice; “and I sincerely regret if I’ve unwittingly done anything to annoy you in any way. The fact is, the talk carried me away. It was art that misled me. I didn’t mean, I’m sure, to obtrude myself upon you.”

      And even as he spoke they whisked, unawares, into the darkness of a tunnel.

      CHAPTER II. — TWO’S COMPANY.

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