The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Girl in the Mirror, by Elizabeth Garver
Jordan, Illustrated by Paul Meylan
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Title: The Girl in the Mirror
Author: Elizabeth Garver Jordan
Release Date: March 2, 2010 [eBook #31471]
Language: English
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THE GIRL IN THE MIRROR
by
ELIZABETH JORDAN
Author of "The Wings of Youth," "May Iverson--Her Book,"
"Lovers' Knots," etc.
Illustrated by Paul Meylan
[Illustration: "Well, Princess," he said at last, still trying to speak
lightly]
[Illustration]
New York
The Century Co.
1919
Copyright, 1919, by
The Century Co.
Copyright, 1919, by
Today's Housewife
Published, October, 1919
TO
MRS. HENRY FERRE CUTLER
WITH HAPPY MEMORIES
OF FLORENCE
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I BARBARA'S WEDDING 3
II RODNEY LOSES A BATTLE 26
III LAURIE MEETS MISS MAYO 47
IV A PAIR OF GRAY EYES 66
V MR. HERBERT RANSOME SHAW 90
VI LAURIE SOLVES A PROBLEM 99
VII GRIGGS GETS AN ORDER 112
VIII SAMUEL PLAYS A NEW GAME 124
IX AN INVITATION 138
X THE LAIR OF SHAW 151
XI A BIT OF BRIGHT RIBBON 162
XII DORIS TAKES A JOURNEY 180
XIII THE HOUSE IN THE CEDARS 196
XIV LAURIE CHECKS A REVELATION 216
XV MR. SHAW DECIDES TO TALK 240
XVI BURKE MAKES A PROMISE 258
XVII LAURIE MAKES A CONFESSION 270
XVIII A LITTLE LOOK FORWARD 285
XIX "WHAT ABOUT LAURIE?" 296
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
"Well, Princess," he said at last, still trying to
speak lightly _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
"You see, what we were going to do isn't done
much nowadays" 64
"There is someone outside that door!" she
whispered 116
"What you been doin' to yerself?" he gasped 264
THE GIRL
IN THE MIRROR
THE GIRL IN THE MIRROR
CHAPTER I
BARBARA'S WEDDING
The little city of Devondale, Ohio, had shaken off for one night at
least the air of aristocratic calm that normally distinguished it from
the busy mill towns on its right and left. Elm Avenue, its leading
residence street, usually presented at this hour only an effect of
watchful trees, dark shrubbery, shaded lamps, and remote domestic peace.
Now, however, it had blossomed into a brilliant thoroughfare, full of
light, color, and movement, on all of which the December stars winked
down as if in intimate understanding.
Automobiles poured through the wide gates of its various homes and
joined a ceaseless procession of vehicles. Pedestrians, representing
every class of the city's social life, jostled one another on the
sidewalks as they hurried onward, following this vanguard. Overwrought
policemen barked instructions at chauffeurs and sternly reprimanded
daring souls who attempted to move in a direction opposite to that the
crowd was following. For the time, indeed, there seemed to be but one
destination which a self-respecting citizen of Devondale might properly
have in mind; and already many of the elect had reached this objective
and had comfortably passed through its wide doors, down its aisles, and
into its cushioned pews.
The Episcopal church of St. Giles was the largest as well as the most
fashionable of Devondale's houses of God, but it had its limitations. It
could not hold the entire population of the town and surrounding
counties. The chosen minority, having presented cards of admission at
the entrance, accepted with sedate satisfaction the comfortable seats
assigned to it. The uninvited but cheerful majority lingered out in the
frosty street, forming a crowd that increasingly blocked the avenue and
the church entrance, besides wrecking the nervous systems of traffic
men.
It was an interested, good-humored, and highly observant crowd, pressing
forward as each automobile approached, to watch with unashamed curiosity
the guests who alighted and made their way along the strip of carpet
stretching from curbstone to church. Devondale's leading citizens were
here, and the spectators knew them all, from those high personages who
were presidents of local banks down to little Jimmy Harrigan, who was
Barbara Devon's favorite caddie at the Country Club.
Unlike most of his fellow guests, Jimmy arrived on foot; but the crowd
saw his unostentatious advent and greeted him with envious badinage.
"Hi, dere, Chimmie, where's yer evenin' soot?" one acquaintance desired
to know. And a second remarked solicitously, "De c'rect ting, Chimmie,
is t' hold yer hat to yer heart as y' goes in!"
Jimmy made no reply to these pleasantries. The occasion was too big and
too novel for that. He merely grinned, presented his card of admission
in a paw washed clean only in spots, and accepted with equal equanimity
the piercing gaze of the usher and the rear seat to which that outraged
youth austerely conducted him.
There, round-eyed, Jimmy stared about him. He had never been inside of
St. Giles's before. It was quite possible that he would never find
himself inside of it again. He took in the beauty of the great church;
its blaze of lights; its masses of flowers; its whispering, waiting
throng; the broad white ribbon that set apart certain front pews for the
bride's special friends, including a party from New York. Jimmy knew all
about those friends and all about this wedding. His grimy little ears
were ceaselessly open to the talk of the town, and for weeks past the
town had talked of nothing but the Devons and Barbara Devon's
approaching wedding. Even now the townspeople were still talking of the
Devons, during the brief interval before the bridal party appeared.
In the pew just in front of Jimmy, Mrs. Arthur Lytton, a lady he
recognized as a ubiquitous member of the Country Club, was giving a few
intimate details of Miss Devon's life to her companion, who evidently
was a new-comer to the city.
"You see," Mrs. Lytton was murmuring, "this is really the most important
wedding we've ever had here. Barbara Devon owns most of Devondale, and
her home, Devon House, is one of the show places of the state. She
hasn't a living relative except her brother Laurie, and I fancy she has
been lonely, notwithstanding her hosts of friends. We all love her, so
we're glad to know she has found the right man to marry, especially as
we are not to lose her ourselves. She intends to live in Devon House
every summer."
The new-comer--a Mrs. Renway who had social aspirations--was politely
attentive.
"I met Laurence Devon at the Country Club yesterday," she said. "He's
the handsomest creature I've ever seen, I think. He's really _too_
good-looking; and they say there's some romantic story about him. Do you
know what it is?"
Her friend nodded.
"Mercy, yes! Every one does."
Observing the other's growing attention, she went on expansively:
"You see, Laurie was the black sheep of the family; so the Devons left
all their great fortune to Barbara and put Laurie in her care. That
infuriated him, of course, for he is a high-spirited youngster. He
promptly took on an extra shade of blackness. He was expelled from
college, and sowed whole crops of wild oats. He gambled, was always in
debt, and Barbara had to pay. For a long time she wasn't able to handle
the situation. They're both young, you know. She's about twenty-four,
and Laurie is a year younger. But last year she suddenly put her mind on
it and pulled him up in a rather spectacular way."
Mrs. Renway's eyes glittered with interest.
"Tell me how!" she begged.
The raconteur settled back into her pew, with the complacent expression
of one who is sure of her hearer's complete absorption in her words.
"Why," she said, "she made Laurie a sporting-proposition, and he
accepted it. He and she were to go to New York and earn their living for
one year, under assumed names and without revealing their identity to
anybody. They were to start with fifty dollars each, and to be wholly
dependent upon themselves after that was gone. Laurie was to give up
all his bad habits and buckle down to the job of self-support. For every
dollar he earned more than Barbara earned, she promised him five dollars
at the end of the year. And if he kept his pledges he was to have ten
thousand dollars when the experiment was over, whether he succeeded or
failed. He and Barbara were to live in different parts of the city, to
be ignorant of each other's addresses, and to see each other only
twice."
She stopped for breath. Her friend drove an urgent elbow into her side.
"Go on!" she pleaded. "What happened?"
"Something very unexpected," chuckled Mrs. Lytton. (For some reason,
Barbara's friends always chuckled at this point in the story.) "Barbara,
who is so clever," she went on, "almost starved to death. And Laurie,
the black sheep, after various struggles and failures fell in with some
theatrical people and finally collaborated with a successful playwright
in writing a play. Perhaps it was partly luck. But the play made a
tremendous hit, Laurie kept his pledges, and Barbara has had to pay him
a small fortune to meet her bargain!"
The hearer smiled sympathetically.
"That's splendid," she said, "for Laurie! But is the cure permanent, do
you think? The boy's so young, and so awfully good-looking--"
"I know," Mrs. Lytton looked ominous. "He is straight as a string so
far, and absorbed in his new work. But of course his future is on the
knees of the gods, for Barbara is going to Japan on her honeymoon, and
Laurie will be alone in New York the rest of the winter. Barbara found
her husband in New York," she added. "He's a broker there, Robert
Warren. That's what _she_ got out of the experiment! She met him while
she was working in the mailing-department of some business house, for
seven dollars a week--" Mrs. Lytton stopped speaking and craned her head
backward. "They're coming!" she whispered excitedly. "Oh, dear, I hope I
sha'n't cry! I always _do_ cry at weddings, and I _never_ know why."
From the crowd outside there rose a cheer, evidently at the bride's
appearance. The echoes of it accompanied her progress into the church.
"The mill people adore Barbara," whispered Mrs. Lytton. "She built a big
club-house for them two years ago, and she's the president of most of
their clubs."
In his seat behind her, Jimmy Harrigan, who had given his attention to
the conversation, sniffed contemptuously. If the dame in front was goin'
to talk about Miss Devon, why didn't she tell somethin' worth while? Why
didn't she tell, fer ins'ance, that Miss Devon played the best golf of
any woman in the club, and had beaten Mrs. Lytton to a frazzle in a
match last month? An' why didn't she say somethin' about how generous
Miss Devon was to caddies in the matter of skates and boxing-gloves and
clothes? And why didn't she say what a prince Laurie Devon was, instead
of all dat stale stuff what everybody knew?
But now Mrs. Lytton was exclaiming over the beauty of the bride, and
here Jimmy whole-heartedly agreed with her.
"How lovely she looks!" she breathed. "She's like Laurie, so stunning
she rather takes one's breath away! Oh, dear, I'm going to cry, I know I
am! And crying makes my nose actually purple!"
The excitement in the street had communicated itself to the dignified
assemblage in the church. The occupants of the pews were turning in
their seats. The first notes of the great pipe-organ rolled forth.
Friends who had known and loved Barbara Devon since she was a little
girl, and many who had known her father and mother before her, looked
now at the radiant figure she presented as she walked slowly up the
aisle on her brother's arm, and saw that figure through an unexpected
mist.
"What a pair!" whispered Mrs. Renway, who had a pagan love of beauty.
"They ought to be put in one of their own parks and kept there as a
permanent exhibit for the delight of the public. It's almost criminal
negligence to leave that young man at large," she darkly predicted.
"Something will happen if they do!"
Mrs. Lytton absently agreed.
"The bridegroom is very handsome, too," she murmured. "That stunning,
insolent creature who is acting as matron of honor, and looking bored to
death by it, is his sister, Mrs. Ordway, of New York. The first
bridesmaid is another New York friend, a Russian girl named Sonya
Orleneff, that Barbara met in some lodging-house. And _will_ you look at
the Infant Samuel!"
An expression of acute strain settled over the features of Mrs. Renway.
She hurriedly adjusted her eye-glasses.
"The _what?_" she whispered, excitedly. "Where? I don't see any infant!"
Mrs. Lytton laughed.
"Of course you don't! It's too small and too near the floor. It's a
thirty-months-old youngster Barbara picked up in a New York tenement.
She calls him the Infant Samuel, and she has brought him here with his
mother, to live on her estate. They say she intends to educate him. He's
carrying her train and he's dressed as a page, in tiny white satin
breeches and lace ruffles. Oh, _don't_ miss him!"
A little ripple stirred the assemblage. Three figures in the long
advancing line of the bridal party held the attention of observers. Two
were the bride and her brother. The third, stalking behind her, with her
train grasped in his tiny fists, his round brown eyes staring straight
ahead, and his fluffy brown hair flying out as if swept backward by an
eternal breeze, was obviously the Infant Samuel Mrs. Lytton had
mentioned.
From a rear pew the Infant's mother watched her offspring with pride and
shuddering apprehension. It was quite on the cards that he might
suddenly decide to leave the procession and undertake a brief side
excursion into the pews. But Samuel had been assured that he was "taking
a walk," and as taking a walk happened to be his favorite pastime he
kept manfully to this new form of diversion, even though it had features
that did not strongly appeal to him. His short legs wabbled, and his
tiny arms ached under the light weight of the bridal train, but
Something would happen if he let that train drop. He did not know quite
what this Something would be, but he abysmally inferred that it would be
extremely unpleasant. He held grimly to his burden.
Suddenly he forgot it. The air was full of wonderful sounds such as he
had never heard before. His eyes grew larger. His mouth formed the "O"
that expressed his deepest wonder. He longed to stop and find out where
the sounds came from, but the train drew him on and on. With an
unconscious sigh he accompanied the train; bad as things were, they
might have been worse, for he knew that somewhere in advance of him,
lost in a mass of white stuff, was the "Babs" he adored.
When the train stopped, he stopped. In response to an urgent suggestion
from some one behind him, he dropped it. In obedience to an equally
urgent inner prompting, he sat down on it and gazed around. The walk had
been rather a long one. Now the big house he was in was very still, save
for one voice, saying something to Babs. It was all strange and
unfamiliar, and Babs seemed far away. Nothing and nobody looked natural.
Samuel became increasingly doubtful about the pleasure of this walk. The
corners of his mouth went down.
A flower fell into his lap, and looking up he saw Sonya Orleneff smiling
at him. Even Sonya was a new Sonya, emerging from what Samuel dimly felt
to be pink clouds. But the eyes were hers, and the smile was hers, and
it was plain that she expected him to play with the pink flower. He
pulled it to pieces, slowly and absorbedly. The task took some time.
From it he passed to a close contemplation of a pink slippered foot
which also proved to be Sonya's, and then to a careful study of a black
pump and black silk sock that proved to be Lawwie's. Lawwie was smiling
down at Samuel, too, and Wobert was standing beside Babs, saying
something in a voice that wabbled.
Samuel sighed again. Perhaps by and by Lawwie would take him out for a
real walk in the snow. All this pink-and-white display around him might
be pretty, but there was nothing in it for a small boy. He gazed
appealingly at Sonya, who promptly hoisted him to his fat legs. The man
at the railing had stopped talking to Babs and the walk was resumed,
this time toward the door. Again that especially precious part of the
white stuff was in Samuel's keeping.
The sounds that now filled the air were more wonderful than ever. They
excited Samuel. His fat arms waved, and the light train waved with them.
A compelling hand, Sonya's, quieted them and it. There was absolutely
nothing a little boy could do in this queer walk. Gloomily but sedately
the Infant Samuel continued his promenade.
"Here he is," murmured Mrs. Lytton to her friend. "You can see him now,
can't you?"
Mrs. Renway gurgled happily. She could.
"Rodney Bangs, the playwright who collaborated with Laurie, is sitting
in the front pew," continued her informant, "and the fat little bald man
next to him is Jacob Epstein, the New York manager who put on their
play."
At the same moment Epstein was whispering to his companion, as the two
watched Barbara and her husband start down the aisle in the first little
journey of their married life.
"Say, Bangs, if ve could put this vedding into a play, just like they
done it here, ve could vake up Broadvay a little--ain't it?"
Bangs nodded, vaguely. His brown eyes were alternately on the bride and
on his chum and partner, her brother. He was conscious of an odd
depression, of an emotion, new and poignant, that made him understand
the tears of Barbara's women friends. Under the influence of this, he
spoke oracularly:
"Weddings are beastly depressing things. What the public wants to see is
something cheerful!"
Epstein nodded in his turn. His thoughts, too, were busy. Like many of
those around him, he was mentally reducing the spectacle he was watching
to terms that he could understand. A wedding conducted on this scale, he
estimated, probably represented a total cost of about ten thousand
dollars. But what was that to a bride with thirty or forty millions? It
was strange her family had left them all to her and none to the boy,
even if the boy had been a little wild. But the boy was all right now.
He'd make his own fortune if life and women and the devil would let him
alone. He had made a good start already. A few more successes like "The
Man Above" would make Epstein forget several failures he had already and
unwisely produced this season. If he could get Bangs and Devon to start
work at once, on another good play--
Epstein closed his eyes, lent his Jewish soul to the spell of the music,
and dreamed on, of Art and Dollars, of Dollars and Art.
A little later, in the automobile that whirled him and Epstein out to
the wedding-reception at Devon House, Rodney Bangs briefly developed the
wedding theme.
"I suppose the reason why women cry at weddings and men feel glum is
that they know what the bride's in for," he remarked, gloomily.
Epstein grunted. "You an' me is bachelors," he reminded the momentarily
cynical youth. "Ve should vorry!"
"What I'm worrying about is Laurie," Bangs admitted.
Epstein turned to him with awakened interest.
"Vell," he demanded, "what about Laurie? He's all right, ain't he?"
"His sister has always kept a collar and leash on Laurie," Bangs
reminded him, "and Laurie has needed them both. Now she's off for Japan
on a four-months' honeymoon. The leash and collar are off, too. It's
going to be mighty interesting and rather anxious business for us to
see what a chap like Laurie does with his new freedom. His nature hasn't
changed in a year, you see, though his circumstances have," he added,
slowly. "And all his promises to Barbara are off. His year of probation
is over."
Epstein grunted again. He was fond of saying that he loved Bangs and
Laurie as if they were the sons he had never had; but he was not given
to analysis of himself or others, and he had little patience with it.
His reply showed a tolerance unusual in him.
"Vell, ve keep an eye on him, don't ve?" he predicted.
Bangs frowned.
"We'll have to do it mighty carefully," he muttered. "If Devon catches
us at it, he won't leave us an eye to keep on anything!"
Epstein grunted again.
"Ve keep him busy," he suggested, eagerly. "Start him right avay on
another play. Eh? That's the idea!"
Bangs shook his head.
"That's it," he conceded. "But Laurie has decided that he won't work
again, just yet. He says he's tired and wants a few months' rest.
Besides, he thinks America will declare war before the winter's over.
He's going to volunteer as soon as it does, and he doesn't want any
loose ends dragging here, any half-finished plays, for example."
Epstein looked worried. This was serious news. Without allowing him time
to recover from it, Bangs administered a second jolt.
"And of course, in that case," he added simply, "I'd volunteer, too."
Under the double blow Epstein's head and shoulders went down. He knew in
that moment what even he himself had sometimes doubted, that his boasted
love for the boys was deep and sincere. Few fathers could have
experienced a more poignant combination of pride and pain than that
which shook him now. But he remained, as always, inarticulate.
"Oh, vell," he said vaguely, "I guess ve meet all that if it comes, eh?
Ve needn't go to it to-day."
At Devon House they found the congestion characteristic of
wedding-receptions. A certain line had been drawn at the church.
Seemingly no line at all had been drawn in the matter of guests at the
reception. All Barbara Devon's protégés were there, and they were many;
all the young folks in her clubs; all the old and new friends of her
crowded life. Each of the great and beautiful rooms on the main floor of
Devon House held a human frieze as a background for the throng of
new-comers that grew rather than lessened as the hours passed.
As Bangs and Epstein entered the main hall Laurie Devon saw them over
the heads of the crowd and hurried to meet them, throwing an arm across
the shoulder of each. He was in a mood both men loved and feared, a mood
of high and reckless exhilaration. He liked and approved of his new
brother-in-law. The memory of his own New York triumph was still fresh
enough to give him a thrill. He was devoted to his partners, and proud
of his association with them and their work. But most of all, and this
he himself would loyally have denied, deep in his heart he was exulting
fiercely over his coming freedom.
Laurie loved his sister, but he was weary of leading-strings. Henceforth
he could live his own life. It should be a life worth while, on that he
had decided, and it should continue free from the vices of gambling and
drinking, of which he was sure he had cured himself in the past year. He
had come into a full realization of the folly of these and of the glory
of the work one loves. He hadn't the least notion what he was going to
do with his independence, but a boundless delight filled him in the
prospect of it. Whatever life held he was convinced would be good.
Looking down from his slender height on the plump Epstein and the
stocky Bangs, he smiled into the sober face of each, and under the
influence of that smile their momentary solemnity fell from them like
dropped veils.
"Come and see Barbara," Laurie buoyantly suggested. "She wants to say
good-by to you, and to tell you how to tuck me into my crib every night.
She's going to slip away pretty soon, you know. Bob and I have got her
off in an alcove to get a few minutes' rest."
He led them to this haven, of which only fifty or sixty other guests
seemed aware, for the room was but comfortably filled. They found
Barbara sitting in a high-backed Spanish chair, against which, in her
bridal array and her extraordinary beauty, she made a picture that
unaccountably deepened the new depression in Rodney's soul. On her train
by the side of the chair, the Infant Samuel slumbered in peace, like an
exhausted puppy.
Warren, hovering near his wife, shook hands with the new-comers and
responded to their congratulations. Then, slipping his arm through
Laurie's, he drew him across the room to where his sister, Mrs. Ordway,
was languidly talking to several of the bride's old friends. He knew
that Barbara wanted a final and serious word with her brother's
partners. Laurie knew it, too, and winked at the pair like an impish
child as he permitted himself to be led away.
Young Mrs. Warren, whose title was still so new that she looked startled
when they addressed her by it, greeted them warmly and indicated the
sleeping Samuel with an apologetic smile.
"His mother is lost somewhere in the crowd," she explained. "He has had
two glasses of milk, four fat cakes, and three plates of ice-cream; and
he's either asleep or unconscious, I'm not sure which." Her manner
sobered. "I'm so glad to have a moment with you two," she said gently.
"You know what I want to talk about."
"We can guess it." Bangs smiled at her with the odd wistfulness his
smile always took on when he spoke to Barbara. To Bangs, Barbara had
become a temple at whose portal he removed his earth-stained shoes. "You
want us to look after Laurie," he added, quietly. "Well, you bet we're
going to do it."
She smiled again, this time the rare smile that warmed her face like a
light from within.
"Then I shall go away happy," she told them. "And there's nothing more
to be said; for of course you both understand that I don't distrust
Laurie. How could I, after he has been so wonderful all this year? It's
only--" she hesitated--"I suppose it's life I'm afraid of," she
confessed. "I never used to be. But--well, I learned in New York how
helpless we are, sometimes."
Rodney's nod was understanding.
"I know," he robustly agreed. "But it's going to be absolutely all
right. Be sure of that."
Epstein added his well-meaning but none too happily chosen bit.
"Laurie can't get into no scrape ve can't get him out of," he earnestly
assured Laurie's sister.
Barbara laughed. A circle of new-comers was forming around them.
"We'll let it go at that," she said, and extended a hand to each man.
"Good-by. I won't try to thank you. But--God bless you both!"
Under the influence of this final benediction, Epstein waddled over to
the corner where Warren, very pale, and Louise Ordway, very much bored,
stood surrounded by a group that included Sonya Orleneff. Firmly
detaching the bridegroom from this congenial assemblage, Epstein led him
to one side.
"Varren," he said solemnly, "I got to congratulate you all over again.
You got von voman in a million--No, you got von voman in eighty
million!"
Warren laughed, rather shakily. Over the heads of the crowd his eyes
caught his wife's and held them for an instant.
"Make it a million million," he suggested joyously, and led Epstein to
the supper room.
Laurie was there with Bangs and a group of friends, who, having
patronized young Devon a year ago, were endeavoring to wipe out the
memory of this indiscretion by an excess of friendly attention. Laurie's
brilliant eyes, filled with the excited glitter they had taken on
to-night, saw through the attempt and the situation. Both amused him. In
his clubs, or anywhere but here, he might have indulged himself to the
extent of having a little fun with these people. But not in his own
home, while he was acting as host at his sister's wedding. Here his
manner was perfect, though colored by the exhilaration of his mood.
"No," Warren and Epstein heard him say to Mrs. Lytton and Mrs. Renway,
"there's nothing I'd like better than to come, thank you. But I'm going
back to New York to-morrow. You see," he added, "this business of
marrying off a sister, and attending to all the details and seeing that
she conducts herself properly as long as she's in my care, is a bit of a
strain. I've got to get back to town and recuperate."
"I suppose you will rest your mind by writing another play?" gushed Mrs.
Renway.
Laurie shook his black head.
"Not a bit of it!" he asserted. "Don't even suggest such a thing before
Epstein, there. It sounds abhorrently like work."
Mrs. Renway's curiosity had a brief and losing struggle with her good
breeding.
"Then what _are_ you going to do?" she demanded coquettishly.
The young man pondered, as if considering the question for the first
time.
"Well," he said at last, "between you and me, I'm going in for
adventure. I intend to devote the next four months to discovering how
much excitement a worthy youth can crowd into his life if he makes a
business of going after the gay bird of adventure, and finding it, and
putting salt on its tail!"
The puzzled countenance of Mrs. Renway cleared.
"Oh, I see," she said brightly, "you're joking."
Laurie smiled and turned to greet a late guest who had come up behind
him. In the little group that had overheard him, three pairs of eyes met
in startled glances.
"Humph!" said Warren. "Hear that?"
"Nice prospect for us!" muttered Rodney Bangs.
Jacob Epstein looked harassed. A little later he joined the throng in
the main hall, and watched the showers of rice fall harmlessly from the
polished sides of Barbara's limousine as the bride and groom were
whirled away from the brilliant entrance of Devon House.
"She's gone," he said to Bangs as the two men turned and reëntered the
still crowded yet suddenly empty house. And he added solemnly, "Believe
me, Bangs, on that job she left us you an' me 've got our hands full!"
CHAPTER II
RODNEY LOSES A BATTLE
Rodney Bangs, author of "The Black Pearl" and co-author of "The Man
Above," was annoyed. When Mr. Bangs was annoyed he usually betrayed the
fact, for his was an open nature.
He was betraying it now. His clear, red-brown eyes were clouded. The
healthy pink of his youthful cheeks had deepened to an unbecoming flush.
His wide, engaging grin, the grin of a friendly bulldog, was lacking,
and his lips were set tight. Even his burnished red pomadour added to
the general pugnaciousness of his appearance. Standing up at its most
aggressive angle, it seemed to challenge the world.
Sitting on a low chair in the dressing-room of the bachelor apartment he
and Laurence Devon occupied together, Rodney drew on a shoe and stamped
his foot down into it with an emphasis that shook the floor. Devon,
fastening his tie before the full-length mirror set in the door leading
to their common bath-room, started at the sound, like a high-strung
prima donna. This was one of Laurie's temperamental mornings.
"What the devil's the matter with you, Bangs?" he demanded, but without
ill humor. "Can't you get on a shoe without imitating the recoil of a
seventy-five centimeter gun?"
Bangs grunted, drew on the other shoe, and drove his foot into it with
increased energy. Laurie looked at him, and this time there was a spark
in his black eyes. Very quietly he turned, crossed the small room, and,
planting himself in front of his chum, resentfully stared down at the
dynamic youth.
"What's the idea?" he demanded. "Are you deliberately trying to be
annoying?"
Rodney did not raise his head. His fingers were busy with a complicated
knot.
"Oh, shut up!" he muttered.
Laurie, his hands in his pockets, remained where he was. Under his
continued inspection, the fingers of Bangs grew clumsy. He fumbled with
the knot, and, having unfastened it, prolonged to the utmost the process
of lacing his shoes. He knew what must come as soon as he settled back
in his chair. It had been coming for days. He was in for an unpleasant
ten minutes. But the situation was one he had deliberately created as
the only possible way of bringing about a serious talk with his friend.
Now that it was here, he was anxious to make the most of it. With head
bent and thoughts busy he played for time.
At last, the shoes laced and his campaign mapped out, he sat up and met
Laurie's eyes. Their expression of antagonism, temporary though he knew
it to be, hurt him. Devon, when he had his own way, and he usually had
it, was a singularly sweet-tempered chap. Never before, throughout their
year of close association, had he looked at Bangs like that. Rodney knew
that he deserved the look. For days past he had deliberately subjected
his companion to a series of annoyances, small but intensely irritating.
"Well?" demanded Laurie. "What's the answer?"
"What answer?" Rodney was in the position of a small boy challenged to
combat in cold blood. He was experiencing some difficulty in working
himself up to the necessary heat for an engagement. But Laurie's next
words helped him out.
"You've been making a damned nuisance of yourself for the last week," he
said deliberately. "I want to know why."
Bangs squared his stocky shoulders and rose to his feet. His brown eyes
were below the level of his chum's black ones, but the two glances met
sharply and a flash passed between them. Under the force of his rising
excitement the voice of Rodney shook.
"The reason I've been a damned nuisance," he said curtly, "is because
you've been acting like an infernal fool, and I'm sick of it."
Laurie's lips tightened, but the other rushed on without giving him a
chance to reply. The moment was his. He must crowd into it all he had
not dared to say before and might not be given a chance to say again.
"Oh, I know what you'll say!" he cried. "It's none of my business, and
you're your own master, and all that sort of rot. And I know you're not
drinking, and God knows I'm not ass enough to take on any high moral
tone and try to preach to you, whatever you do. What gets my goat,
Devon, and the only thing I'm worrying about, is this damnable waste of
your time and mine."
Laurie grinned, and the grin infuriated Bangs. He whirled away from it.
A footstool impeded his progress, and he kicked it out of his way with
large abandon. It was his habit to rush about a room when he was talking
excitedly. He rushed about now; and Laurie lit a cigarette and watched
him, at first angrily, then with a growing tolerance born of memories of
scenes in their plays which Bangs had threshed out in much this same
manner. The world could never be wholly uninteresting while Rodney
pranced about in it, cutting the air with gestures like that.
"Here I am," snapped Rodney, "ready with my play, the best plot I've had
yet. You won't let me even mention it to you. Here's the new season.
Here's Epstein, sitting on our door-mat with a check-book in each hand,
waiting to put on anything we give him. You know he's lost a small
fortune this fall. You know it's up to us to give him a play that will
pull him out of the hole he's in. Here's Haxon, the best director in
town, marking time and holding off other managers in the hope that you
and I will get down to business. And here you are, the fellow we're all
counting on--" He stopped for breath and adjectives.
"Yes," Laurie politely prompted him. "Here I am. What about it? What am
I doing?"
"You know damned well what you're doing. You're loafing!" Bangs fired
the word at him as if it were a shell from a Big Bertha. "You're loafing
till it makes us all sick to look at you. We thought a week or two of it
would be enough, when you realized the conditions; but it's gone on for
a month; and, instead of getting tired, you're getting more and more
into the loafing habit. You abuse time till it shrieks in agony."
"Good sentence," applauded Laurie. "But don't waste it on me. Put it
into a play."
Bangs seemed not to hear him. He was standing by the room's one window,
now, staring unseeingly out of it, his hands deep in his pockets, taking
in the knowledge of the failure of his appeal. Under the realization of
this he tossed a final taunt at his partner over his shoulder.
"I can forgive the big blunders a man makes in his life," he muttered;
"but, by God, I haven't much patience with a chap that lies around and
shirks at a time like this!"
Laurie removed the half-smoked cigarette from his mouth, and not finding
an ash tray within reach, carefully crushed out its burning end against
the polished top of the dressing-case. He had grown rather pale.
"That will be about all, Bangs," he said quietly. "What you and Epstein
and Haxon don't seem to remember is just one thing. If you don't like
matters as they are, it's mighty easy to change them. It doesn't take
half a minute to agree to dissolve a partnership."
"I know." Bangs returned to his chair, and, dropping limply into it, his
hands still in his pockets, stared despondently at his outstretched
legs. "That's all it means to you," he went on, morosely. "Our
partnership is one in a thousand. It's based on friendship as well as on
financial interest. If I do say it, it represents a combination of
brains, ability, backing, and prospects that comes only once in a
lifetime, if it comes at all. Yet in one year you're sick of it, and
tired of work. You're ready to throw it all over, and to throw over at
the same time the men whose interests are bound up with yours. You're
dawdling in cabarets and roadhouses and restaurants, when you might be
doing Work--" Bangs's voice capitalized the word--"real work," he added
fiercely, "work other fellows would give their souls to be able to do."
He ended on a flat note, oddly unlike his usual buoyant tones, and sat
still as if everything had been said.
Laurie lit a fresh cigarette, drew in a mouthful of smoke, and exhaled
it in a series of pretty rings. In his brief college experience he had
devoted some time to acquiring this art. Admiringly watching the little
rings pass through the big rings, he spoke with studied carelessness.
"It was a pretty good scene, Bangs," he said, "and it showed careful
rehearsing. But it would be a lot more effective if you had a real
situation to base it on. As it is, you're making a devil of a row about
nothing. I worked like a horse all last year, and you know it. Now I'm
resting, or loafing, if you prefer to call it that, and"--he bit off the
words and fairly threw them at his friend--"it will save you and Epstein
and Haxon a lot of mental wear and tear if you will mind your own
business and let me alone."
Bangs raised his eyes and dropped them again.
"You _are_ our business," he somberly reminded his partner. "I've got so
I can't work without you," he added, with a humility new to him. "You
know that. And you know I've got the plot. It's ready--great Scott, it's
boiling in me! I'm crazy to get it out. And here I've got to sit around
watching you kill time, while you know and I know that you'd be a damn
sight happier if you were on the job. Good Lord, Laurie, work's the
biggest thing there is in life! Doesn't it mean anything at all to you?"
"Not just now." Laurie spoke with maddening nonchalance.
"Then there's something rotten in you."
Laurie winced, but made no answer. He hoped Bangs would go on talking
and thus destroy the echo of his last words, with which the silent room
seemed filled. But nothing came. Rodney's opportunity had passed, and he
was lost in depressed realization of its failure. Laurie strolled back
to the mirror, his forgotten tie dangling in his hand.
"We'll let it go at that," he said then. "Think things over, and make up
your mind what you want to do about the contract."
"All right."
Bangs replied in the same flat notes he had used a moment before, and
without changing his position; but the two words gave Laurie a shock. He
did not believe that either Rodney or Epstein would contemplate a
dissolution of their existing partnership; but an hour ago he would not
have believed that Rodney Bangs could say to him the things he had said
just now.
He was beginning to realize that he had tried his partners sorely in the
month that had passed since his return to town; and all for what? He
himself had brought out of the foolish experience nothing save a tired
nervous system, a sense of boredom such as he had not known for a year,
and, especially when he looked at Bangs, an acute mental discomfort
which introspective persons would probably have diagnosed as the pangs
of conscience. Laurie did not take the trouble to diagnose it. He merely
resented it as a grievance added to the supreme grievance based on the
fact that he had not yet even started on the high adventure he had
promised himself.
He was gloomily considering both grievances, and tying his tie with his
usual care, when something in the mirror caught and held his attention.
He looked at it, at first casually, then with growing interest. In the
glass, directly facing him, was a wide studio window. It was open,
notwithstanding the cold January weather, and a comfortable,
middle-aged, plump woman, evidently a superior type of caretaker, was
sitting on the sill, polishing an inner pane. The scene was as vivid as
a mirage, and it was like the mirage in that it was projected from some
point which itself remained unseen.
Laurie turned to the one window the dressing-room afforded--a double
French window, at his right, but a little behind him, and reaching to
the floor. Through this he could see across a court the opposite side of
his own building, but no such window or commonplace vision as had just
come to him. In his absorption in the phenomenon he called to Bangs, who
rose slowly, and, coming to his side, regarded the scene without much
interest.
"It's a cross projection from a house diagonally opposite us," he said,
after studying the picture a moment. "It must be that old red studio
building on the southwest corner of the square. If we had a room back of
this and looking toward the west, we could see the real window."
"As it is," said Laurie, "we've got a reserved seat for an intimate
study of any one who lives there. I wonder who has that studio?"
Bangs had no idea. He was grateful to the little episode, however, for
spreading over the yielding ground beneath his feet the solid strip on
which he had crossed back to his chum. He threw an arm across Laurie's
shoulders and looked into his face, with something in his expression
that reminded young Devon of a favorite collie he had loved and lost in
boyhood.
"All right now?" the look asked, just as the dog's look had asked it of
the little chap of ten, when something had gone wrong. Rodney's creed of
life was held together by a few primitive laws, the first of which was
loyalty. Already he was reproaching himself for what he had said and
done. Laurie carefully completed the tying of his tie, and turned to him
with his gayest smile.
"Hurry up and finish dressing," he cheerfully suggested, "and we'll go
out to breakfast. Since you insist on waiting 'round for me like Mary's
little lamb, I suppose I've got to feed you."
Rodney's wide grin responded, for the first time in many days. He
bustled about, completing his toilet, and ten minutes later the two
young men started out together with a lightness of spirit which each
enjoyed and neither wholly understood. Both had a healthy horror of
"sentimental stuff" and a gay, normal disregard of each other's feelings
in ordinary intercourse. But in the past half-hour, for the first time
in their association, they had come close to a serious break, and the
soul of each had been chilled by a premonitory loneliness as definite as
the touch of an icy finger. In the quick reaction they experienced now
their spirits soared exultantly. They breakfasted in a fellowship such
as they had not known since Barbara's marriage, the month before.
If Bangs had indulged in any dream of a change of life in Laurie,
however, following this reconciliation, the next few days destroyed the
tender shoots of that hope. Laurie's manner retained its pleasant
camaraderie, but work and he met as strangers and passed each other by.
The routine of his days remained what they had been during the past five
weeks. He gadded about, apparently harmlessly, came home at shocking
hours, and spent most of the bracing January days wrapped in a healthful
slumber that infuriated Bangs, who wandered in and out of their
apartment like an unhappy ghost. On the rare occasions when he and
Rodney lunched or dined together, Laurie was entirely good-humored and
when Epstein was with them seemed wholly impervious to any hints thrown
out, none too subtly, by his producing partner.
"Listen, Laurie," said that disgusted individual, almost a month after
the new year had been ushered in, "the new year's here. That's a good
time for a young fella to get busy again on somethin' vorth while. Ain't
I right?"
Laurie suppressed a yawn and carefully struck off with his little finger
the firm ash of an excellent cigarette. He was consuming thirty or
forty cigarettes a day, and his nerves were beginning to show the effect
of this indulgence.
"I believe it is," he courteously agreed. "It has been earnestly
recommended to the young as a good time to start something."
"Vell," Epstein's voice took on the guttural notes of his temperamental
moments, "don't that mean nothin' to you?"
Laurie grinned. He had caught the quick look of warning Bangs shot at
the producer and it amused him.
"Not yet," he said. "Not till I've had my adventure."
Epstein sniffed.
"The greatest adventure in life," he stated dogmatically, "is to make a
lot of money. I tell you vy. Because then you got all the other
adventures you can handle, trying to hold on to it!"
Bangs, who was developing a new and hitherto unsuspected vein of tact,
encouraged Epstein to enlarge on this congenial theme. He now fully
realized that Devon would go his own gait until he wearied of it, and
that no argument or persuasion could enter his armor-clad mind. The
position of Bangs was a difficult one, for while he was accepting and
assimilating this unpleasant fact, Epstein and Haxon--impatient men by
temperament and without much training in self-control--were getting
wholly out of patience and therefore out of hand. Haxon, indeed, was for
the time entirely out of hand, for he had finally started the rehearsals
of a new play which, he grimly informed Bangs, would make "The Man
Above" look like a canceled postage-stamp.
Bangs repeated the comment to his chum the next morning, during the late
dressing-hour which now gave them almost their only opportunity for a
few words together. He had hoped it would make an impression, and he
listened with pleasure to a sharp exclamation from Laurie, who chanced
to be standing before the door mirror in the dressing-room, brushing his
hair. The next instant Bangs realized that it was not his news which had
evoked the tribute of that exclamation.
"Come here!" called Laurie, urgently. "Here's something new; and, by
Jove, isn't she a beauty!"
Bangs interrupted his toilet to lounge across the room. Looking over
Laurie's shoulder, his eyes found the cynosure that held the gaze of his
friend. The wide-open studio window was again reflected in the mirror,
but with another occupant.
This was a girl, young and lovely. She appeared in the window like a
half-length photograph in a frame. Her body showed only from above the
waist. Her elbows were on the sill. Her chin rested in the hollows of
her cupped hands. Her wavy hair, parted on one side and drawn softly
over the ears in the fashion of the season, was reddish-gold. Her eyes
were brown, and very thoughtful. Down-dropped, they seemed to stare at
something on the street below, but the girl's expression was not that of
one who was looking at an object with interest. Instead, she seemed lost
in a deep and melancholy abstraction.
Laurie, a hair-brush in each hand, stared hard at the picture.
"Isn't she charming!" he cried again.
Bangs's reply revealed a severely practical side of his nature.
"She'll have a beastly cold in the head if she doesn't shut that
window," he grumpily suggested. But his interest, too, was aroused. He
stared at the girl in the mirror with an attention almost equal to
Laurie's.
As they looked, she suddenly stirred and moved backward, as if occultly
warned of their survey. They saw her close the window, and, drawing a
chair close to it, sit down and stare out through the pane, still with
that intent, impersonal expression. Bangs strolled back to the
dressing-case and resumed his interrupted toilet. Laurie, fumbling
vaguely with his brushes, kept his eyes on the girl in the mirror.
"Do you suppose we could see her if we went out on the street?" he
asked, suddenly.
"Her? Oh, you mean that girl?" With difficulty Bangs recalled his
thoughts from Haxon's new play. "No, I don't think so," he decided. "You
see, we're up on the tenth floor, so she must be fairly high up, too."
"She's a wonder." Laurie was still gazing into the mirror. "Prettiest
girl I've ever seen, I think," he reflected aloud.
Bangs snorted.
"She's probably a peroxide," he said. "Even if she isn't, she can't hold
a candle to your sister."
"Oh, Barbara--" Laurie considered the question of Barbara's beauty as if
it were new to him. "Babs is good-looking," he handsomely conceded. "But
there's something about this girl that's unusual. Perhaps it's her
expression. She doesn't look happy."
Bangs sighed with ostentation.
"If you want to study some one that isn't happy, look at me," he invited
warmly. "If that play of mine isn't out of me pretty soon, I'll have to
have an operation!"
Laurie made no reply to this pathetic prediction, and Bangs sadly shook
his head and concluded his toilet, meditating gloomily the while on the
unpleasant idiosyncrasies of every one he knew. To see Devon turn
suddenly into a loafer upset all his theories as well as all his plans.
Laurie, for some reason, dawdled more than usual that morning. It was
after eleven before he went to breakfast. An hour earlier Bangs departed
alone for their pet restaurant.
The girl in the mirror remained at her window for a long time, and
Laurie watched her in growing fascination. It was not until she rose and
disappeared that he felt moved to consider so sordid a question as that
of food.
He joined Bangs just as that youth was finishing his after-breakfast
cigar. Even under its soothing influence, he was in the mood of combined
exasperation and depression with which his friends were becoming
familiar.
"If we had begun work as soon as we got back to town after your sister's
wedding," he told Laurie, "we'd have had two acts ready by now, in the
rough."
"No reason why you shouldn't have four acts ready, so far as I can see,"
murmured Laurie, cheerfully attacking his grape-fruit. "All you've got
to do is to write 'em."
Bangs's lips set.
"Not till I've talked 'em over with you and got your ideas," he
declared, positively. "If you'd just let me give you an outline--"
Laurie set down his cup.
"Do I get my breakfast in peace, or don't I?" he demanded, coldly.
"You do, confound you!"
Bangs bit off the end of a fresh cigar and smoked it in stolid silence.
He was a person of one idea. If he couldn't talk about the play, he
couldn't talk at all. He meditated, considering his characters, his
situations, his partner's and his own position, in a mental jumble that
had lately become habitual and which was seriously affecting his nerves.
Laurie, as he ate, chatted cheerfully and at random, apparently avoiding
with care any subject that might interest his partner. Bangs rose
abruptly.
"Well, I'm off," he said. "See you at dinner time, I suppose."
But Laurie, it appeared, had engagements. He was taking a party of
friends out to Gedney Farms that evening, in his new car, and they might
decide to stay there for a day or two. Also, though he did not confide
this fact to Bangs, he had an engagement for the afternoon, at a place
where the card rooms were quiet and elegant and the stakes high.
He had been there half a dozen times, and had played each time. He had
been able to keep himself in hand. In fact, a great part of the
fascination of the game now lay in the study of its effect on himself
and its test of his new-born will power. Thus far, he had played exactly
as much as he had planned to play, and had secretly exulted in the fact.
What he intended, he told himself, was to learn to do things in
moderation; neither to fear them nor to let them master him.
The attraction of these diversions filled his mind. He quite forgot the
girl in the mirror, and it was no thought of her that drew him back to
New York that night. The plans of his guests had changed, that was all.
The change brought him home at eleven o'clock. Bangs was in his own
room, finding in sleep a wall of unconsciouness that separated him from
his troubles. Laurie decided upon the novel pleasure of a long night of
slumber for himself.
He fell asleep with surprising ease, and immediately, as it seemed, he
saw the girl in the mirror. She was walking toward him, through what
appeared to be a heavy fog. Her hands were outstretched to him, and he
hurried to meet her; but even as he did so the fog closed down and he
lost her, though he seemed to hear her voice, calling him from somewhere
far away.
He awoke late in the morning with every detail of the dream vivid in his
mind, so vivid, indeed, that when he approached the mirror after his
morning plunge, it seemed almost a continuation of the dream to find the
girl there.
He stopped short with a chuckle. The curtains of his French window were
drawn apart, and in the mirror he saw the reflection of the girl as she
stood in profile near her own uncurtained window and slowly dressed her
hair.
It was wonderful hair, much more wonderful down than up. Laurie, who had
a sophisticated notion that most of the hair on the heads of girls he
knew had been purchased as removable curls and "transformations," stared
with pleasure at the red-gold mass that fell down over the girl's white
garment. Then, with a little shock, he realized that the white garment
was a nightdress. It was evident that, high in her lonely room, the girl
thought herself safe from observation and was quietly making her toilet
for the morning.
Well, she should be safe. With a quick jerk, Laurie drew together the
heavy curtains that hung at the sides of the long window. Then, smiling
a little, he slowly dressed. His thoughts dwelt on the girl. It was odd
that she should be literally projected into his life in that unusual
fashion. He had never had any such experience before, nor had he heard
of one just like it. It was unique and pleasant. It was especially
pleasant to have her so young and so charming to look at. She might have
been a disheveled art student, given to weird color effects, or an
austere schoolma'am, or some plump and matter-of-fact person who set
milk bottles on the sill and spread wet handkerchiefs to dry on the
window-panes. As it was, all that disturbed him was her expression. He
wished he knew her name and something more about her. His thoughts were
full of her.
Before he left the room he parted the curtains again to open the window
wide, following his usual program. As he did so he glanced into his
mirror. He saw her open window, but it was lifeless. Only his own
disappointed face confronted him.
CHAPTER III
LAURIE MEETS MISS MAYO
Laurie thought much that day about the girl in the mirror, and he was
again home at eleven that night, to the wonder of Mr. Bangs, who freely
expressed his surprise.
"Something pleasant been coming your way?" he tactfully asked.
Laurie evaded the question, but he felt that something definitely
pleasant had come his way. This something was a new interest, and he had
needed a new interest very much. He hoped he would dream of the girl
that night, but as he and Bangs unwisely consumed a Welsh rabbit before
they went to bed, he dreamed instead of something highly unpleasant, and
was glad to be awakened by the clear sunlight of a brilliant January
day.
After breakfast he strolled across the square into the somber hall of
the studio building on its southwest corner. The hall was empty, but he
found and rang a bell at the entrance of a dingy elevator shaft. The
elevator descended without haste. When it had reached the floor, the
colored youth in charge of it inhospitably filled its doorway and
regarded the visitor with indifference. This young man was easy to look
at, but he was no one he knew.
Laurie handed him a dollar and the youth's expression changed, first to
one of surprise, then to the tolerance of a man who is wise and is
willing to share his wisdom. The visitor went at once to the point of
his visit.
"A young lady lives here," he began. "She is very pretty, and she has
reddish hair and brown eyes. She has a studio in one of the upper
floors, at the front of the house. What's her name?"
The boy's face showed that he had instantly recognized the description,
but he pondered dramatically.
"Dat young lady?" he then said. "Dat young lady mus' be Miss Mayo, in
Twenty-nine, on de top flo'. She jes' moved in here las' Tuesday."
"Where does she come from, and what does she do?"
The boy hesitated. What did all this mean? And was he giving up too much
for a dollar? Laurie grinned at him understandingly.
"I don't know her," he admitted, "and I don't expect to. I'd like to
know something about her--that's all."
The youth nodded. He had the air of accepting an apology.
"I reckon she come fum some fur'n place. But I dunno what she _do_," he
reluctantly admitted. "Mebbe she ain't doin' nothin' yit. She's home
mos' de time. She don' go out hardly 'tall. Seems like she don' know
many folks."
He seemed about to say more, but stopped. For a moment he obviously
hesitated, then blurted out what he had in mind.
"One t'ing got me guessin'," he muttered doubtfully. "Dat young lady,
she don' seem t' _eat_ nothin'!"
"What do you mean?" Laurie stared at him.
The boy shuffled his feet. He was on uncertain ground.
"Why, jes' what I said," he muttered, defensively. "Folkses here either
eats _in_ or dey eats _out_. Ef dey eats in, dey has stuff _sent_
in--rolls an' eggs an' milk and' stuff like dat. Ef dey eats out, dey
_goes_ out, reg'lar, to meals. But Miss Mayo she don' seem to eat in
_or_ out. Nothin' comes in, an' she don' go out 'nough to eat reg'lar. I
bin studyin' 'bout it consider'ble," he ended; and he looked
unmistakably relieved, as if he had passed on to another a burden that
was too heavy to carry alone.
Laurie hesitated. The situation was presenting a new angle and a wholly
unexpected one. It began to look as if he had come on a sentimental
errand and had stumbled on a tragedy. Certainly he had blundered into
the private affairs of a lady, and was even discussing these affairs
with an employee in the building where she lived. That thought was
unpleasant. Yet the boy's interest was clearly friendly, and the visitor
himself had invited revelations about the new lodger. Still, not such
revelations as these! He frankly did not know what to make of them or
how to act.
There was a chance that the boy might be all wrong in his inferences,
although this chance, Laurie mentally admitted, was slight. He knew the
shrewdness of this youth's type, the precocious knowledge of human
nature that often accompanies such training and environment as he had
had. Probably he suspected even more than he had revealed. Something
must be done.
Laurie drew a bill from his pocket
"How soon can you leave the elevator?" he asked.
"'Bout one o'clock."
"All right. Now here's what I want you to do. Take this money, go over
to the Clarence restaurant, and buy a good lunch for that lady. Get some
hot chicken or chops, buttered rolls, vegetables, and a bottle of milk.
Have it packed nicely in a box. Have them put in some fresh eggs and
extra rolls and butter for her breakfast. Deliver the box at her door as
if it came from some one outside. Do that and keep the change.
Understand?"
"Yaas, sah!" The boy's eyes and teeth were shining.
"All right. Go to it. I'll drop in later this afternoon for your
report."
Laurie turned and walked away. Even yet the experience did not seem
real. It was probably all based on some foolish notion of the youth's;
and yet he dared not assume that it was a foolish notion. He had the
dramatist's distaste for drama anywhere except in its legitimate place,
on the stage; but he admitted that sometimes it did occur in life. This
might be one of those rare occasions.
Whatever it was, it haunted him. He lunched with Bangs that day, and was
so silent that Bangs was moved to comment.
"If you were any one else," he remarked, "I'd almost think you were
thinking!"
Laurie disclaimed the charge, but his abstraction did not lift. By this
time his imagination was hard at work. He pictured the girl in the
mirror as stretched on her virginal cot in the final exhaustion of
starvation; and the successful effort to keep away from the studio
building till four o'clock called for all his will power. Suppose the
boy blundered, or wasn't in time. Suppose the girl really had not eaten
anything since last Tuesday! These thoughts, and similar ones, obsessed
him.
At four he strolled into the studio hall, wearing what he hoped was a
detached and casual air. To his annoyance, the elevator and its operator
were lost in the dimness of the upper stories, and before they descended
several objectionable persons had joined Laurie, evidently expecting to
be taken to upper floors themselves. This meant a delay in his
tête-à-tête with the boy, and Laurie turned upon the person nearest him,
an inoffensive spinster, a look of such intense resentment that it
haunted that lady for several days.
When the elevator finally appeared, he entered it with the others who
were waiting. He looked aloofly past the elevator boy as he did so, and
that young person showed himself equal to the situation by presenting to
this new-comer a stolid ebony profile. But when the lift had reached the
top floor and discharged its passengers, the two conspirators lent
themselves to the drama of their rôles.
"Well?" asked Laurie eagerly. "Did you get it?"
"Yaas, sah."
"What happened?"
The boy stopped his descending car midway between two floors. He had no
intention of having his scene spoiled. He bulged visibly under the news
he had to impart. "I got de stuff you said, and I lef' it at dat young
lady's do'," he began impressively.
"Yes."
"When I looked de nex' time, it was gone."
"Good! She had taken it in." Laurie drew a breath of relief.
"No, sah. Dat ain't all." The boy's tone dripped evil tidings. "She
brung it back!"
"What!" His passenger was staring at him in concern.
"Yaas, sah. De bell rung fum her flo', an' when I got up de young lady
was standin' dere wid dat basket in her hand."
He paused to give Laurie the effect of the tableau, and saw by his
visitor's expression that he had got it fully.
"Yes? Go on!"
"She look at me mighty sharp. She got brown eyes dat look right _thoo_
you," he interpolated briskly. "Den she say, 'Sam, who done lef' dat
basket at my do'?' I say, 'I done it, miss. It was lef' in de hall, an'
de ca'd got yo' name on it. Ain't you order it?' I say.
"'No,' she say, 'dis yere basket ain't fo' me. Take it, an' ef you
cain't find out who belong to it, eat dis yere lunch yo'self.'"
He paused. Laurie's stunned silence was a sufficient tribute to his
eloquence, but Sam had not yet reached his climax. He introduced it now,
with fine effect.
"Bimeby," he went on unctuously, "I took dat basket back to her. I say,
'Miss Mayo,' I say, 'I done foun' out 'bout dat basket. 'T was lef' by a
lady artis' here what got a tergram an' went away sudden. She want dat
food et, so she sent it to you.'"
Laurie regarded him with admiration.
"That was pretty good for extemporaneous lying," he commented. "I
suppose you can do even better when you take more time to it. What did
the lady say?"
Sam shook a mournful head.
"She jes' look at me, an' she kinda smile, an' den she say, 'Sam, dis
yere basket 'noys me. Ef de lady wants it et, Sam, you eat it yo'self."
He paused. "I et it," he ended, solemnly.
Laurie's lips twitched under conflicting emotions, but he closed the
interview with a fair imitation of indifference.
"Oh, well," he said carelessly, "you must have been mistaken about the
whole thing. Evidently Miss Mayo, if that's her name, wasn't as hungry
as you were."
The boy nodded and started the car on its downward journey. As his
passenger got off on the ground floor, he gave him a new thought to
carry away with him.
"She'd bin cryin', dough," he muttered. "Her eyes was all red."
Laurie stopped and regarded him resentfully.
"Confound you!" he said, "What did you tell me that for? _I_ can't do
anything about it!"
The boy agreed, hurriedly. "No, sah," he assured him. "You cain't. I
cain't, neither. None of us cain't," he added as an afterthought.
Laurie slowly walked away. His thoughts scampered around and around,
like squirrels in a cage. The return of the basket, of course, might
mean either of two conditions--that the girl was too proud to accept
help, or that she was really in no need of it. Laurie had met a few art
students. He knew that, hungry or not, almost any one of them would
cheerfully have taken in that basket and consumed its contents. He had
built on that knowledge in providing it. If the girl _had_ taken it in,
the fact would have proved nothing. Her refusal to touch it was
suspicious. It swung the weight of evidence toward the elevator boy's
starvation theory.
Laurie's thoughts returned to that imaginative youth. He saw him
consuming the girl's luncheon, and a new suspicion crossed his mind.
Perhaps the whole business was a bit of graft. But his intelligence
rejected that suggestion. If this had been the explanation, the boy
would not have concluded the episode so briskly. He had got the strange
young man where he might have "kept him going" for days and made a good
income in the process. As it was, there seemed nothing more to do. And
yet--and yet--how the deuce could one let the thing drop like that? If
the girl was really in straits--
Thus the subconscious argument went on and on. It worried Laurie. He was
not used to such violent mental exercise. Least of all was he in the
habit of disturbing himself about the affairs of others. But this affair
was different. The girl was so pretty! Also, he had recurrent visions of
his sister Barbara in the position of his mysterious neighbor. Barbara
might easily have gone through such an experience during last year's
test in New York. In that same experiment Laurie himself had learned how
slender is the plank that separates one from the abyss that lies beneath
the world's workers.
He dined alone that night and it was well he did so. His lack of
appetite would certainly have attracted the attention of Bangs or any
other fellow diner, and Bangs would as certainly have commented upon it.
Also, he passed a restless night, troubled by vaguely depressing dreams.
The girl was in them, but everything was as hopelessly confused as his
daytime mental processes had been.
The next morning he deliberately kept away from the mirror until he was
fully dressed, but he dressed with a feeling of tenseness and urgency he
would have found it difficult to explain. He only knew that to-day he
meant to do something definite, something that would settle once for all
the question that filled his mind. But what could he do? That little
point was still unsettled. Knock at the girl's door, pretend that it was
a blunder, and trust to inspiration to discover in the brief encounter
if anything was wrong? Or put money in an envelop and push it under her
door? If he did that, she would probably give the money to Sam, as she
had given him the food.
What to do? Laurie proceeded with his toilet, using the dressing-case
and carefully avoiding the long mirror. He experienced an odd
unwillingness to look into that mirror this morning, based partly on
delicacy--he remembered the nightdress--but more on the fear of
disappointment. If he saw her, it would be an immense relief. If he
didn't, he'd fancy all sorts of things, for now his imagination was
running away with him.
When he was fully dressed he crossed the room in three strides and
stopped before the mirror with a suddenness that checked him half-way in
the fourth.
Miss Mayo's window was open. He could see that. He could see more than
that, and what he saw sent him rushing through the study and out into
the hall of the big apartment building, where he furiously rang the
elevator bell. He had not stopped for his hat and coat, but he had
caught a vision of Bangs's astonished face and half of his startled
exclamation, "What the dev--"
The elevator came and Laurie leaped into it.
"Down," he said briefly.
The operator was on his way up to the twelfth floor, but something in
the expression of his passenger made him change his plans. Also it
accelerated his movements. The car descended briskly to the ground
floor, from which point the operator was privileged to watch the
progress of the temperamental Mr. Devon, who had plunged through the
main entrance of the building and across the square without a word to
the hall attendants, or a backward glance.
As he reached the studio building Laurie recalled himself to a memory of
the conventions. He entered without undue haste, and sought the door of
the waiting lift. It was noon, and an operator he had not seen before
was on duty.
"Top floor," directed Laurie, and stepped into the car. The operator
hesitated. He did not remember this tenant, but he must belong to the
house, as he wore no hat or coat. Probably he was a new-comer, and had
run down-stairs to mail an important letter, as the old building held no
mail-chute. While these reflections passed slowly through his mind, his
car rose as slowly. To the mentally fuming young man at his side its
progress was intolerably deliberate. He held himself in, however, and
even went through the pantomime of pausing in the top-floor hall to
search a pocket as if for a latch-key.
Satisfied, the attendant started the elevator on its descent, and as it
sank from sight Laurie looked around him for Number Twenty-nine. He
discovered it in an eye-flash, on the door at the right. The next
instant he had reached this door and was softly turning the knob.
The door did not yield. He had not expected it to give, and he knew
exactly what he meant to do. He stepped back a few feet, then with a
rush hurled his shoulder against the wood with the full force of his
foot-ball training in the effort. The lock yielded, and under the force
of his own momentum the visitor shot into the room. Then, recovering his
equilibrium, he pushed the door into place and stood with his back
against it, breathing heavily and feeling rather foolish.
He was staring at the girl before him, who had risen at his entrance.
Her expression was so full of astonished resentment, and so lacking in
any other emotion, that for a sickening moment he believed he had made
an idiot of himself, that he had not really seen what he thought he had
seen in the glass. A small table separated him from the girl. Still
staring at her, in the long seconds that elapsed before either spoke, he
saw that she had swept her right hand behind her back, in a swift,
instinctive effort to hide what it held. His self-possession returned.
He had not been mistaken. He smiled at her apologetically.
"I beg your pardon," he said. "I'm afraid I frightened you."
"You did." She spoke tensely, the effect of overstrained nerves
revealing itself in her low voice. "What do you mean by it? What are you
doing here?"
Laurie's brilliant eyes were on hers as she spoke, and held them
steadily. Under his expression, one that few had seen on his face, her
look of antagonism softened a little. He advanced slowly to the table
between them.
"It will take a few minutes to explain," he said. Then, as she waited,
he suddenly formed his plan, and followed the good old Devon principle
of going straight to the point.
"I live diagonally across the square," he said quietly, "and I can see
into your window from one of mine. So it happened that just now I--I saw
what you were going to do."
For an instant she stood very still, looking at him, as if not quite
taking in the meaning of his words. In the next her face and even her
neck crimsoned darkly as if under the rush of a wave of angry
humiliation. When she spoke her voice shook.
"You forget," she said, "that you have no right either to look into my
room or to interfere with what you see there."
"I know," he told her, humbly, "and I beg your pardon again. The looking
in was an accident, the merest chance, which I will explain to you
later. The interference--well, I won't apologize for that. Surely you
realize that it's--friendly."
For the first time her eyes left his. She looked around the room as if
uncertain what to do or say.
"Perhaps you mean it so," she muttered at last. "But I consider
it--impertinent."
A change was taking place in her. The fire that had flamed up at his
entrance was dying out, leaving her with the look of one who is cowed
and almost beaten. Even her last words lacked assurance. Watching her in
puzzled sympathy, Laurie for the first time wished himself older and
wiser than he was. How could he handle a situation like this? Neither
then nor later did he ask himself how he would have handled it on the
stage.
For a moment the two young things gazed at each other, in helplessness
and irresolution on his side, in resentful questioning on hers. Even in
the high tension of the moment Laurie subconsciously took in the picture
she made as she stood there, defying him, with her back to the wall of
life.
She was very lovely, more lovely than in the mirror; for now he was
getting the full effect of her splendid coloring, set off by the gown
she wore, a thing of rich but somber shades, lit up by a semi-barbaric
necklace of amber and gold, that hung almost to her knees.
Yes, the girl was a picture against the unforgetable background of that
tragic situation. But what he admired most of all was the dignity that
shone through her panic and her despair. She was up in arms against him.
And yet, if he had not come, if that vision had not flashed into his
mirror five minutes ago, she might now have been lying a huddled,
lifeless thing on the very spot where she stood so proudly. At the
thought his heart shook. The right words came to him at last.
"I've had--impulses--like yours," he said. "I've had them twice.
Fortunately, both times there was some one around to talk me out of
them." He had caught her attention. She showed that by the way she
looked at him. "The argument that impressed me most," he went on, "was
that it's quitting the game. You don't look as if you were a quitter,"
he ended, thoughtfully.
The girl's eyes blazed. He had aroused her once more, and he was glad of
it. He didn't know at all what to do or say, but he dimly felt that
almost any emotion in her would be better than the lethargy she had just
revealed.
"I'm not a quitter!" she cried. "But I've got dignity enough to leave a
place where I'm not wanted, even if that place happens to be the world.
Go away!" she added fiercely. "Go away and leave me alone!"
Resting one hand on the table between them, he held out the other.
"Come, let me have that," he suggested, imperturbably. "Then we'll talk
things over. I'll try to make you realize what I was made to realize
myself--that we were both on the wrong track. I'll tell you what others
think who are wiser than we are."
As she did not move, he added, more lightly: "You see, what we were
going to do isn't done much nowadays. It's all out of date. Come," he
repeated, gently, "let me have it."
With a movement of irritation the girl swept her hand forward and
tossed on the table between them the small revolver she had been
holding.
"Take it," she said, almost indifferently. And she added, "Another time
will do as well."
He picked up the little weapon and put it into his pocket.
"There isn't going to be any other time," he predicted buoyantly. "Now,
slip into a coat while I run across the street and get my hat and coat
and order a taxicab. We're going out to luncheon, and to tell each other
the stories of our lives, with all the grim and gory details."
"I don't know you," muttered the girl. She had dropped into a chair
beside the table, and was sitting with her chin in her hand, in what
seemed a characteristic attitude, watching him with an expression he
could not analyze.
Laurie seemed surprised. "Why, so you don't!" he agreed. "But you're
going to now. We're going to know each other awfully well before we get
through. In the meantime, you can see by the merest glance at me how
young and harmless I am. Where's the coat?"
He turned and began a vague, masculine search for it. The girl wavered.
His rising spirits were contagious, and it was clear that she dreaded
being left alone.
[Illustration: "You see, what we were going to do isn't done much
nowadays"]
"I warn you," she said at last, "that if you have anything to do with
me you will be sorry for it."
Laurie stopped his search, and, turning, gave her one of his straight
looks.
"Why?" he demanded.
"Because I'm in a net," she said. "And every one who tries to help me
gets caught in it, too. Oh, don't smile! You won't smile afterward."
He picked up a coat he discovered in a corner, and held it for her to
slip into.
"I like nets," he remarked lightly, "especially if they're
bright-colored, large, roomy, comfortable nets. We'll have some great
times in ours. Come along."
She shrugged her shoulders, and in the gesture slipped into the garment.
"I'll go," she said, in a low voice. "But don't forget that I warned
you!"
CHAPTER IV
A PAIR OF GRAY EYES
On their way to the restaurant Laurie had selected he chatted to his
companion in his buoyant, irresponsible fashion, but he had put through
the details of the episode with tact and delicacy. He knew that in front
of a club two doors away from the studio building a short line of
taxicabs was always waiting, with the vast patience of their kind. A
gesture brought one of these to the door, and when it had squawked its
way around the corner, the girl remained in its shelter until Laurie had
briefly reëntered his own building and emerged again, wearing his coat
and hat.
To the selection of the restaurant he gave careful thought. They drove
to a quiet place where the food and service were excellent, while the
prices were an effective barrier against a crowd. When he and his
companion were seated on opposite sides of a table in an isolated
corner, Laurie confided his order to the waiter, urged that willing
individual to special haste, and smiled apologetically at the lady.
"I'm hungry," he said briskly. "I haven't had any breakfast this
morning. Don't be surprised if I seem to absorb most of the nourishment
in the place."
He studied her as he spoke. It was easy to do so, for she seemed almost
to have forgotten him and her surroundings. She sat drooping forward a
little in her pet attitude, with her elbows on the table, and her chin
in her hand, staring through the window with the look he had seen in the
mirror. The lethargy he dreaded again enveloped her like a garment.
His heart sank. Here was something more than the victim of a mad but
temporary impulse. Here was a victim of a sick soul, or of a burden
greater than she could bear, or perhaps of both. He decided that
whatever her trouble might be, it was no new or passing thing. Every
curve in her despondent figure, every line in her worn, lovely face,
suggested a vast weariness of flesh and spirit. He had not seen those
lines in the mirror, and he looked at them now with understanding and
solemn eyes, as he had looked at the new lines in his sister's face when
Barbara had been passing through the worst of her ordeal last year.
In this moment of realization he almost forgot the girl's beauty,
though, indeed, it was not easy to forget. It seemed enhanced rather
than dimmed by the haze of melancholy that hung over it, and certainly
there was nothing dim in the superb red-gold coloring of her hair. Her
eyes seemed red-gold, too, for they were reddish-brown with flecks of
yellow light in them, quite wonderful eyes. He told himself that he had
never seen any just like them. Certainly he had rarely seen anything to
equal the somber misery of their expression. There was a remoteness in
them which repelled sympathy, and which was intensified by the haughty
curve of the girl's short upper lip. She was proud, proud as the devil,
Laurie told himself. Again, and very humbly, he wondered how he was to
handle a situation and a personality so outside his own experience. In
truth, he was afraid. Though he did not know it, and perhaps would have
vigorously denied it, Laurie still looked at women through stained-glass
windows.
When the food came, her expression changed. She shot a quick look at
him, a glance at once furtive and suspicious, which he saw but ignored.
He had dismissed the waiter and was serving her himself. In the simple
boyish friendliness of his manner she evidently found reassurance, for
she suddenly sat up and began her breakfast.
Laurie exhaled the breath he had been holding. Up till the last moment
he had feared that she might see through his subterfuge in taking her
there, and even now refuse the food he offered. But if in that fleeting
instant she felt doubt, it had died as it was born. She drank her coffee
slowly and ate her eggs and toast as deliberately, but her
characteristic air of intense preoccupation had departed. She looked at
her companion as if she really saw him. Also, she apparently felt the
stirring of some sense of obligation and need of response to this
friendly stranger. She was answering him now, and once at least she
almost smiled.
Watching the little twitch of her proud and perfect upper lip, Laurie
felt his heart-beats quicken. She was a wonder, this girl; and with his
delight in her beauty and her pride came another feeling, almost as new
as his humility--an overwhelming sympathy for and a desire to help
another.
These sentiments served as needed balance to his spirits, which, as
always, mounted dangerously when he was interested. He held himself down
with difficulty.
This was no time for the nonsense that he loved to talk. One doesn't
rescue a lady from suicide and then try to divert her mind with innocent
prattle. One gives her a decent time to pull herself together, and then,
with tact and sympathy, one gets to the roots of her trouble, if one
can, and helps to destroy them. Despite his limited experience with
drama off the stage, Laurie knew this. Because he was very young and
very much in earnest, and was talking to a young thing like himself,
though in that hour she seemed so much older, he instinctively found the
right way to approach the roots.
They had finished breakfast, and he had asked and received permission to
smoke. When he had lighted his cigarette and exhaled his first
satisfying puff of smoke, not in rings this time, he took the cigarette
from his mouth, and with his eyes on its blazing end expressed his
thought with stark simplicity.
"When we were over in your studio," he said, "I admitted that twice in
my life I had tried to--make away with myself. Only two other persons in
the world know that, but I'd like to tell you about it, if you don't
mind."
She looked at him. There were strange things in the look, things that
thrilled him, and other things he subconsciously resented, without
understanding why. When she spoke there was a more personal note in her
voice than it had yet held.
"You?" she asked; and she added almost lightly, "That seems absurd."
"I know."
Laurie spoke with the new humility he had found only to-day.
"You think that because I'm so young I couldn't have been desperate
enough for that. But--you're young, too."
He was looking straight at her as he spoke. Her eyes, a little hard and
challenging, softened, then dropped.
"That's different," she muttered.
He nodded.
"I know the causes were different enough," he agreed. "But the feeling
back of them, that pushes one up against such a proposition, must be
pretty much the same sort of thing. Anyway, it makes me understand; and
I consider that it gives me a claim on you, and the privilege of trying
to help you."
Her eyes were still cast down, and suddenly she flushed, a strange, dark
flush that looked out of place on the pure whiteness of her skin. She
had the exaggerated but wholesome pallor of skin that often goes with
reddish hair and red-brown eyes. It does not lend itself becomingly to
flushes, and this deep flush lingered, an unwelcome visitor, throughout
her muttered, almost ungracious words.
"Oh, please don't talk about it," she said, brusquely. "It's no use. I
know you mean to be kind, but you can't do anything."
"Oh, but that's just where you're wrong." Laurie spoke with a cheerful
assurance he did not feel. "If I hadn't been there myself, I'd talk all
sorts of twaddle to you, and do more harm than good; and I'd probably
let you go on thinking you were facing a trouble that no one could help.
Instead of that, you and I are going to hold your bugaboo up to the
light, and see just what it is and how small it is. And then--" he smiled
at her--"we're going to get rid of it together."
She echoed his words, vaguely, as if not knowing quite what to say.
"Get rid of it?"
"Yes. Tell me what it is, and I'll show you how it can be downed."
She pushed back her chair, as if anxious to put a greater distance
between them.
"No," she exclaimed, nervously, "it's impossible; I can't talk about
it." Then, in an obvious effort to side-track the issue, "You said you
wanted to tell me about your--experience."
"I do, but it isn't a nice story. Fortunately, it won't take long." He
spoke reluctantly. It was not easy to hook two such memories out of the
darkest pool of his life and hold them up to a stranger.
"Oh, I was a young idiot," he rushed on, "and I suppose I hadn't the
proper start-off. At least I like to think there's some excuse for me.
My father and mother died when I was in knickerbockers, and I grew up
doing very much as I pleased. I--made a bad job of it. Before I was
twenty-one I was expelled from college and I had worked up a pretty
black reputation. Then I gambled and lost a lot of money I didn't have,
and it began to look as if about the only safe place for me was the
family vault.
"I made two efforts to get there. The first time a wise old doctor
stopped me and never told any one about it. The second time one of my
chums took a hand in the game. I don't know why they did it. I don't
suppose either my pal or the doctor thought I was worth saving. But they
talked to me like Dutch uncles, and my chum kept at it till I gave him
my word that I'd never attempt anything of the sort again."
"You were just an unhappy boy," she said, as if thinking aloud, "with
all life before you and many friends to back you up."
"And you," he suggested, "are just an unhappy girl with all life before
you. I don't know anything about your friends, but I'll wager you've got
a lot of them."
She shook her head.
"Not one," she said, slowly. "I mean, not one I dare to call on, now."
"I like that! You've got me to call on, right here."
This time she really smiled at him. It was a pathetic little smile, but
both lips and eyes took part in it. He waited, but she said no more. He
began to fear that his confidence had been given to no purpose.
Evidently she had no intention of making a confession in return. He
resumed his attack from a new angle.
"You've been disappointed in something or some one," he said. "Oh," as
she made a gesture, "don't think I'm belittling it! I know it was
something big. But the finish you chose wasn't meant to be, or it would
have come off. You see that, don't you? The very sun in its course took
pains to show you to me in time to stop it. That means something, Miss
Mayo."
She seemed slightly startled.
"It is Miss Mayo, isn't it? That's the name the elevator boy gave me,
yesterday."
"It will do." She spoke absently, already on the trail of another
thought. Suddenly she caught it.
"Then you brought the basket, or sent it?" she cried. "It was _you!_ How
dared you!"
She had half risen from her chair. Bending across the table, he gently
pushed her back into it.
"Sit down," he said, imperturbably.
She hesitated, and he repeated the command, this time almost curtly.
Under the new tone she obeyed.
"I'm going to tell you something," he went on. "I've exhausted my
slender resources of experience and tact. I don't know what any one else
would do in this situation; but I do know what I'm going to do myself.
And, what is a lot more important, I know what you're going to do."
She laughed, and he winced at the sound.
"That's easy," she said. "I'm going to finish the act you interrupted."
"Oh, no, you're not!"
Her lips set.
"Do you imagine you can prevent me?"
"I know I can."
His quiet assurance impressed her.
"How?" she asked, half mockingly.
"Very easily. I can take you from this restaurant to the nearest police
station, and have you locked up for attempted suicide. You know, it's a
crime here."
The word they had both avoided was out at last. Although he had spoken
it very softly, its echoes seemed to fill the big room. She shrank back
and stared at him, her hands clutching the sides of her chair.
"You wouldn't dare!"
"Wouldn't I? I'll do it in exactly fifteen minutes, unless you give me
your word that you will never make another attempt of the kind." He took
his watch out of his pocket and laid it on the table between them.
"It's exactly quarter-past twelve," he said. "At half-past--"
"Oh!--and I thought you were kind!"
There was horror in the brown eyes now and an antagonism that hurt him.
"Would it be kinder to let you go back to that studio and--"
She interrupted.
"How dare you interfere in my affairs! Who gave you the right?"
"Fate gave me the right. I'm its chosen specialist on the job, and you
may take my word for it, my dear girl, the job's going to be done, and
done up brown."
He lit a fresh cigarette.
"It will be mighty unpleasant for you," he went on, thoughtfully.
"There's the publicity, you know. Of course, all the newspapers will
have your pictures--"
"Oh!"
"And a lot of romantic stories--"
"Oh--you--you--"
"But of course you can avoid all that," he reminded her, "by giving me
your promise."
She choked back her rising fury, and made an obvious effort at
self-control.
"If I agree to these terms of yours," she asked, between her teeth, "may
I be sure that you will leave me in peace and that I shall not see you
again?"
He looked at her reproachfully.
"Dear me, no! Why, you'll have to see me every day. I've got to look
after you for a while." At her expression his tone changed. "You see,"
he said, with smiling seriousness, "you have shown that just for the
present you can't be trusted to guide your own actions. So I'm going to
'stick around,' and guide them for a few days, until I am sure you are
yourself again!"
"This--" again she choked on the words--"this is intolerable!"
"Oh, I don't think so. You can see for yourself that I mean well, and
that I'm going to be a harmless sort of watch-dog. Also, you can depend
on me to go off duty as soon as it's safe. But for the present you're
going to have a guardian; and it's up to you to decide whether that
guardian shall be Laurence Devon, very much at your service, or the
police force of the city of New York."
She had her chin in her hands now, in her characteristic pose, and was
regarding him without resentment. When she finally spoke, it was without
resentment, too, but coldly, as one states an unpalatable fact.
"You," she said, "are a fool."
Laurie flushed, then smiled.
"That is not a new theory," he admitted.
"Two hours ago," she said, "I warned you that it would be dangerous for
you to interfere in my affairs. Did I not?"
"You did."
"I warn you again. It may be a matter of life or death. Put your watch
in your pocket, pay your bill, and take me home. Then go away and forget
me."
Laurie glanced at the watch.
"We have used up eight minutes since I gave you your choice," he
reminded her.
"You are like a child," she muttered, "spinning his top over a
powder-magazine."
Laurie frowned a little.
"Too melodramatic," he murmured.
"I tell you," she said fiercely, "you are acting like a fool! If you
interfere with me you will be drawn into all sorts of trouble, perhaps
into tragedy, perhaps even into disgrace."
"You're forgetting the net," he reminded her, "the nice net you
mentioned this morning, with room for two. Also--" again he looked at the
watch--"you're overlooking the value of time. See how fast these little
hands are moving. The nearest police station is only two blocks away.
Unless you give me that promise, you will be in it in--" he made a
calculation--"in just about four minutes."
She seemed to come to a decision.
"Listen to me," she said, rapidly. "I cannot be frank with you--"
"I've noticed that," Laurie interpolated, "with regret."
She ignored the interruption.
"But I can tell you this much. I am not alone in my--trouble. Others are
involved. They are--desperate. It is because of them that I--you
understand?"
Laurie shook his head. He did not understand, at all; but vague and
unpleasant memories of newspaper stories about espionage and foreign
spies suddenly filtered through his mind.
"It sounds an awful mess," he said frankly. "If it's got anything to do
with German propaganda--"
She interrupted with a gesture of impatience.
"No, no!" she cried. "I am not a German or a propagandist, or a pacifist
or a spy. That much, at least, I can tell you."
"Then that's all right!" Laurie glanced at his watch again. "If you had
been a German spy," he added, "with a little round knob of hair on the
back of your head and bombs in every pocket, I couldn't have had much
to do with you, I really couldn't. But as you and your companions are
not involved in that kind of thing, I am forced to remind you that
you'll be headed toward the station in just one minute."
"I hate you!" she said between her teeth.
He shook his head at her. "Oh, no, you don't!" he said kindly. "But I
see plainly that you're a self-willed young person. Association with me,
and the study of my poise, will do a lot for you. By the way, you have
only thirty seconds left."
"Do you want to be killed?"
She hissed the words at him.
"Good gracious, no!" Laurie spoke absently, his eyes on the watch.
"Twenty seconds," he ended.
"Do you want to be maimed or crippled, or--or kidnapped?"
He looked up in surprise.
"I don't know why you imagine I have such lurid tastes," he said,
discontentedly. "Of course I don't want any of those things. My nature
is a quiet one, and already I'm dreading the excitement of taking you to
the station. But now I must ask you to put on your gloves and button up
your coat for our little journey."
"The journey you make with me," she said, with deep meaning, "may be a
long and hard one."
He stood up.
"I wouldn't miss it for the world," he told her. "But we'll have to
postpone it. Our journey to the station comes first."
She sat still, looking at him.
"I know your type now," she said suddenly. "You live in your little
groove, and you think that nothing happens in the world except what you
see under your nose."
"Something awfully unpleasant is going to happen under my nose right
now," announced her companion, disconsolately. "Come along, please. It's
time to start."
She stood up, faced him for a second, and then dropped back into her
chair with a gesture of finality. Her expression had changed back to the
lethargy of her first moments in the restaurant.
"Very well," she said. "Have it your way." She added significantly,
"This may be the last time you have your way about anything!"
"You have a depressing outlook," grumbled Laurie, contentedly sitting
down again. "It isn't playing the game to spoil my triumph with such
predictions as that, especially as I'm going to have my way about a lot
of things right now. I have your word," he added.
"Yes."
"Good! Now I'll give you my program. First of all, I'm going to be a
brother to you; and I don't think," he ended thoughtfully, "that I've
ever offered to be a brother to any girl before."
"You're a nice boy," she said abruptly.
He smiled at her.
"A nice boy, though a fool. I hoped you would notice that. You'll be
dazzled by my virtues before you're through with me." He went on
conversationally: "The reason I've never offered to be a brother to any
girl before is that I've got a perfectly good sister of my own. Her one
fault is that she's always bossed me. I warn you from the start of our
relations that I'm going to be the boss. It will be the first time I've
ever bossed any one, and I'm looking forward to it a lot."
The faintest suggestion of a smile touched her short upper lip. Above
it, her red-brown eyes had softened again. She drew a deep breath.
"It's strange," she said. "You've let me in for all sorts of things you
don't realize. And yet, somehow, I feel, for the time at least, as if I
had been lying under the weight of the world and some one had lifted the
wretched thing off me."
"Can't you, by a supreme effort of the imagination, fancy that I lifted
it off?" suggested Laurie, mildly.
This time she really smiled.
"I can," she conceded. "And without any effort at all," she added
somberly, "I can fancy us both under it again."
He shook his head.
"That won't do!" he declared. "The lid is off. You've just admitted it.
You feel better for having it off. So do I. As your big brother, and
self-appointed counselor, I choose this opportunity to tell you what
you're going to do."
She pursed her lips at him. It was the gesture of a rebellious child.
Her entire manner had changed so suddenly that Laurie felt a
bewilderment almost equal to his satisfaction in it. For the first time
throughout the interview he experienced the thrill she had given him in
the mirror.
"Yes?" she prompted.
"In the first place--" He hesitated. The ground that stretched between
them now was firmer, but still uncertain. One false step might lose him
much of what he had gained. "There's the question of your future," he
went on, in a brisk, matter-of-fact tone. "I spent two months last year
looking for a job in New York. I was about down to my last cent before I
found it. It occurred to me that, perhaps, you--" He was beginning to
flounder.
"That I am out of work?" she finished, calmly. "You are right."
Laurie beamed at her. Surely his way was clear now!
"I had a streak of luck last year," he resumed. "I collaborated on a
play that people were foolish enough to like. Ever since that, money has
poured in on me in the most vulgar way. I clink when I walk. Dollars
ooze from my pockets when I make a gesture. Last week, at the bank, the
cashier begged me to take some of my money away and do something with
it. He said it was burdening the institution. So, as your adopted
brother, I'm going to start a bank-account for you," he ended, simply.
"Indeed you are not!"
"Indeed I am!"
"I agreed to live. I did not agree to--what is it you Americans say?--to
sponge!"
He ignored all but one phrase of the reply.
"What do you mean by that?" he demanded with quickened interest. "Aren't
you an American?"
She bit her lip.
"N-o--not wholly."
"What, then?"
She hesitated.
"I can't tell you that just yet," she said at last.
"Oh-h!" Laurie pursed his lips in a noiseless whistle. The girl's voice
was musically English, and though her accent was that of London, up
till now she had spoken as colloquially as any American. Indeed, her
speech was much like his sister's. He was puzzled.
"Why didn't you tell me this before?"
"That I am not wholly American?" She was smiling at him ironically, but
he remained serious.
"Yes. And--oh, a lot of things! Of course you know I am all at sea about
you."
The familiar shadow fell over her face.
"When one is within an hour or two of the next world," she asked
indifferently, "why should one tell anybody anything?"
"How long have you been in America?"
"All my life, off and on."
This at least was reassuring. He imagined he saw a gleam of light. The
girl had declared that she was not a spy, nor involved in war
propaganda; but it was quite possible, he reasoned, that she was
enmeshed in some little web of politics, of vast importance to her and
her group, of very little importance to any one else.
"I suppose," he suggested cheerfully, "that net you've said so much
about is a political net?"
They had been speaking throughout in low tones, inaudible at any other
table. Their nearest fellow diners were two middle-aged women at least
thirty feet away. But she started violently under his words. She made a
quick gesture of caution, and, turning half-around, swept the room with
a frightened glance. Laurie, his cigarette forgotten in his fingers,
watched her curiously, taking in her evident tension, her slowly
returning poise, and at last the little breath of relief with which she
turned back to him.
"I wish I could tell you all you want to know," she said, "but--I can't.
That's all there is to it. So please let us change the subject."
His assurance returned.
"You're not a crowned head or an escaped princess or anything of that
kind, are you?" he asked politely.
This time she really laughed, a soft, low gurgle of laughter, joyous and
contagious.
"No."
"Then let's get back to our bank-account. We have plenty of time to run
over to the Fifth Avenue branch of the Corn Exchange Bank before the
closing-hour. What color of check-book do you prefer?"
"I told you," she declared with sudden seriousness, "that my bargain did
not include sponging."
For the first time in the somewhat taxing interview her companion's good
humor deserted him.
"My dear girl," he said, almost impatiently, "don't beat the devil
around the bush! You've got to live till we can find the right work for
you, and that may take some time. You have intelligence enough to see
that I'm neither a gay Lothario nor a Don Juan. In your present state of
mind you're not fit to decide anything. Make up your mind, once for all,
that I'm going to decide for you. It will save us both some trouble."
He stopped. He had discovered that she was not listening to him. She was
sitting absolutely still, her head a little turned. Her lips were
slightly parted, and her eyes, wide and staring, were fixed on some one
across the room.
Laurie's eyes followed hers. They focused on a man sitting alone at a
little table. It was clear that he had just entered, for a waiter stood
by his side, and the new-comer was giving judicious attention to the
bill of fare.
He was a harmless-looking person, of medium height and rather more than
medium stoutness, carelessly dressed in a blue-serge suit. His
indifference to dress was further betrayed by the fact that his
ready-made black four-in-hand tie had slipped the mooring of a white
bone stud, leaving that useful adjunct of the toilet open to the eyes of
the world. His face was round, smooth-shaven, and rather pale. He had
dark brown hair, surprisingly sleek, and projecting, slightly veiled
gray eyes, which blinked near-sightedly at the menu. Altogether he was a
seemingly worthy person, to whom the casual observer would hardly have
given a second glance.
While the two pairs of eyes across the room stared at him, he confided
his order to the waiter. It seemed a brief order, for the brow of the
latter clouded as he wrote it down and detachedly strolled off. The
new-comer leaned back in his chair, and, as he did so, glanced around
the room. His projecting eyes, moving indifferently from table to table,
suddenly rested, fixed, on the girl. They showed interest but no
surprise. He bowed with a half-smile--an odd smile, bland, tolerant, and
understanding. Then, disregarding her lack of response, he fixed his
eyes on the wall facing him and waited patiently for his luncheon to be
served.
Laurie's attention returned to the girl. She was facing him again, but
her eyes looked past him as if he were not there.
"He has found me, even here," she muttered. "Of course he would. He
always does."
Laurie looked at her.
"Do you mean," he asked crisply, "that that chap across the room is
following you around?"
She looked at him, as if abruptly recalled to the fact of his presence.
Her eyes dropped.
"Yes," she muttered, dully. "I may escape him for a time, but he always
learns where I am. He will catch me when he chooses, and roll me about
under his paws for a while, and then--perhaps--let me go again."
"That sounds like a certain phase of domestic life," commented Laurie.
"Is he by any chance your husband?"
Her eyes held a rising anger.
"He is not," she said. "I am not married."
Laurie dropped his dead cigarette into the ash tray, and rose with a
sigh.
"It's all very confusing," he admitted, "and a digression from the main
issue. But I'm afraid I shall have to go to the exertion of reasoning
with him."
She started up, but before she could protest or restrain him, he had
left her and crossed the room to the stranger's table.
CHAPTER V
MR. HERBERT RANSOME SHAW
The man in the shabby blue-serge suit detached his absent gaze from the
opposite wall, and looked up quickly when Laurie stopped at his side. He
was clearly surprised, but courteous. He half rose from his chair, but
the new-comer waved him back and dropped easily into the vacant seat
opposite him. He was smiling. The man in blue serge was not. He looked
puzzled, though vaguely responsive. A third person, watching the two,
might almost have thought the episode the casual reunion of men who
frequently lunched together.
Laurie leaned forward in his chair, rested one elbow on the table, and,
opening his cigarette-case, extended it to the stranger. The latter
rejected it with a slight bow.
"Thank you, but not before lunch," he said, quietly. His voice and
manner were those of an educated man. The quality of his tone was
slightly harsh.
Laurie lit a cigarette, blew out the match, and looked straight into
the stranger's projecting gray eyes. He had acted impulsively. Now that
he was here, he was anxious to put the job over concisely, firmly, but,
above all, neatly. There must be nothing done that would attract the
attention of the few persons in the big room.
"I came over here," he said casually, "to mention to you that you are
annoying the lady I am with. I want to mention also that the annoyance
must stop."
The glance of the stranger held. Laurie observed with interest that the
veiled look of the projecting eyes had changed a little. The change did
not add to the stranger's charm.
"Before I answer you, tell me one thing," he said, formally. "By what
right do you act as the lady's protector?"
Laurie hesitated an instant. The question was embarrassing.
"Has she authorized you to act?"
"In a way, but--"
"How long have you known her? How well do you know her?"
Command of the interview was slipping from the younger man. He
resolutely resumed it.
"Look here," he said, firmly, "I came to this table to tell you
something, but I will decide what that is to be. I am not here to answer
questions. It is enough for you to know that circumstances have given
me the right to protect the lady from annoyance. I want to make it clear
to you that I shall exercise that right. Hereafter you are to let her
alone. Do you understand? Absolutely alone. You are not to follow her,
not to enter places where she is, not to bow to her, nor to be where she
can see you," he recklessly ended.
The stranger looked at him through the light veil which seemed again to
have fallen over the projecting eyes.
"I should really like to know," he said, "when and where you met her. I
saw you starting off together in the taxicab, but I am not quite sure
whether your first encounter occurred this morning."
"And you won't be." Laurie stood up. "I've warned you," he said curtly.
"I don't know how well you understand our laws in this country, but I
fancy you know enough of them to realize that you cannot shadow a lady
without getting into trouble."
"She admitted that?" The stranger appeared to experience a tepid glow of
emotion. "She must know you better than I thought," he added
reflectively. "Doris is not the type to pour her confidence into every
new ear," he mused, seeming to forget the other's presence in his
interest in this revelation.
"Have I made myself quite clear?"
Laurie was staring at him with a mingling of resentment and interest.
The other nodded.
"You have, my young friend," he said, with sudden seriousness, "and now
I, too, will be clear. In return for one warning, I will give you
another. Keep out of matters that do not concern you."
Laurie grinned at him.
"You forget that I have made this matter my concern," he said, lightly.
"Try to remember that."
The other man rose. His manner had changed to a sort of impatient
weariness.
"Get her out of here," he said abruptly. "You are beginning to irritate
me, you two. Take her home, and then keep away from her, unless you are
looking for trouble."
He delivered the last words so clearly and menacingly that the waiter
who had appeared with his luncheon heard them and fell back a step.
Looking into the veiled eyes, Laurie also felt a sense of recoil. The
fellow was positively venomous. There was something serpentlike in the
dull but fixed look of those goggling eyes, in the forward thrust of the
smooth brown head.
"I've said my say," he retorted. "If I ever catch you around that
studio, or in any way annoying the lady, I'll thrash you within an inch
of your life; and then I'll turn what's left of you over to the
authorities. Understand?"
He nodded and strolled back to Miss Mayo's table. For an instant the
other man stood looking after him, as if tempted to follow. Then, with a
shrug, he dropped into his chair and began the luncheon the waiter had
placed before him.
Laurie found the girl standing by the table, ready for the street, her
coat fastened, her gloves buttoned.
"Oh, how could you!" she gasped. "What did he say?"
Laurie summoned the waiter with a gesture and asked for his account.
"Sit down a minute," he suggested, "and tell me who he is."
"Not here," she urged. "I couldn't breathe here. Hurry, please. Let us
get away!"
She was so obviously in earnest that he yielded. He paid the bill, which
the waiter had ready, accepted that appreciative servitor's help with
his overcoat, and escorted his guest from the room.
"But, for heaven's sake, don't run!" he laughed. "Do you want the
creature to think we're flying before him?"
She flushed and moderated her pace. Side by side, and quite
deliberately, they left the restaurant, while the stranger watched them
with his dull, fixed gaze. He seemed to have recovered his temper, but
it was also plain that the little encounter had given him something to
think about. When he resumed his luncheon he ate slowly and with an air
of deep abstraction, as if working out some grave problem.
"What's his name?" asked Laurie, as he helped Miss Mayo into a waiting
taxicab.
She looked startled. Indeed, his most casual questions seemed to startle
her and put her, in a way, on her guard.
"Shaw," she answered, unwillingly.
"Is it spelled P-s-h-a-w?"
Laurie asked the question with polite interest. Then, realizing that in
her preoccupation she did not follow this flight of his mercurial
spirits, he sobered. "It's a perfectly good name," he conceded, "but
there must be more of it. What's the rest?"
"He calls himself Herbert Ransome Shaw."
Laurie made a mental note of the name.
"I shall call him Bertie," he firmly announced, "to show you how
unimportant he really is. By the way,"--a sudden memory struck him--"he
told me your name--Doris."
He added the name so simply that he seemed to be calling her by it. A
faint shadow of her elusive smile touched her lips.
"I like it--Doris," Laurie repeated, dreamily.
"I am so glad," she murmured.
He ignored the irony in her tone.
"I suppose you have several more, like our friend Bertie, but you
needn't tell them to me. If I had to use them every time I spoke to you,
it might check my inspiration. Doris will do very nicely. Doris, Doris!"
"Are you making a song of it?"
"Yes, a hymn."
She looked at him curiously.
"You're a queer boy. I can't quite make you out. One minute you're
serious, and the next--"
"If you're puzzled over me, picture my mental turmoil over you."
"Oh--me?" With a gesture she consigned herself to the uttermost ends of
the universe.
The taxicab had stopped. They had reached the studio building without
observing the fact. The expression on the features of the chauffeur
suggested that if they wanted to sit still all day they could do it, but
that it would not be his personal choice. Doris held out her hand.
"Good-by," she said gently. "And thank you. I'm really
more--appreciative--than I seem."
Laurie's look expressed more surprise than he had ever really
experienced over anything.
"But we haven't settled matters!" he cried. "We're going to the bank--"
"We are not."
She spoke with sharp decision. Then, relenting at the expression of his
face, she touched the heavy gold-and-amber chain around her neck.
"I can pawn this," she said briefly. "It didn't seem worth while before,
but as I've got to go on, I promise you I will do it. I will do it
to-day," she added hurriedly, "this afternoon, if you wish. It is
valuable. I can get enough on it to keep me for a month."
"Till we find that job for you," he suggested, brightening.
She agreed, with a momentary flash of her wonderful smile.
"And you will let me drop in this evening and take you to dinner?"
"No, thank you. But--" again she relented--"you may come in for an hour
at eight."
"I believe you _are_ a crowned head," murmured Laurie, discontentedly.
"That's just the way they do in books. When I come I suppose I must
speak only when I'm spoken to. And when you suddenly stand up at nine,
I'll know the audience is over."
She laughed softly, her red-brown eyes shining at him. Her laughter was
different from any other laughter he had ever heard.
"Good-by," she repeated.
He helped her out of the cab and escorted her into the studio building,
where he rang the elevator bell and waited, hat in hand, until the car
came down. When it arrived, Sam was in it. Before it stopped he had
recognized the waiting pair through the open ironwork of the door. To
Laurie, the elevator and Sam's jaw seemed to drop in unison.
The next instant the black boy had resumed his habitual expression of
indifference to all human interests. Dead-eyed, he stared past the two
young things. Dead-eared, he ignored their moving lips. But there was
fellowship in the jocund youth of all three. In an instant when Laurie
stepped back into the hall as the car shot upward, the eyes of negro and
white man flashed a question and an answer:
In Sam's: "You done took her out an' fed her?"
In Laurie's: "You bet your boots I did!"
CHAPTER VI
LAURIE SOLVES A PROBLEM
Laurie walked across the square to his own rooms. A sudden gloom had
fallen upon him. He saw himself sitting in his study, gazing remotely at
his shoes, until it was time to dress for the evening and his formal
call on Doris.
The prospect was not attractive. He hoped Bangs would be at home. If so,
perhaps he could goad him into one of the rages in which Bangs was so
picturesque; but he was not sure of even this mild diversion. Rodney had
been wonderfully sweet-tempered the past three days, though preoccupied,
as if in the early stages of creative art. Laurie half suspected that he
had begun work on his play. The suspicion aroused conflicting emotions
of relief and half-jealous regret. Why couldn't the fellow wait till
they could go at it together? He ignored the fact that already the
fellow had waited six weeks.
Bangs was not at home. The square, flat-topped mahogany desk at which
the two young men worked together blinked up at Laurie with the
undimmed luster of a fine piece of furniture on which the polisher
alone had labored that morning. Without taking the trouble to remove his
hat and coat, Laurie dropped into a chair and tried to think things out.
But the process of thinking eluded him, or, rather, his mind shied at it
as a skittish horse might shy if confronted on a dark road with shapes
vaguely familiar yet mysterious.
Frankly, he couldn't make head or tail of this mess Doris seemed to be
in. His memory reminded him that such "messes" existed. He had heard and
read of all sorts of plots and counter-plots, in which all types of
humans figured. His imagination underscored the memory. But, someway,
Doris--he loved to repeat the name even to himself--someway Doris was
not the type that figured in such plots.
Also, there were other things hard to understand. She had let herself
starve for four days, though she wore around her neck a chain that she
admitted represented a month's support. And this fellow, Herbert Ransome
Shaw--where the devil did he come in? A fellow with a name like that and
with snaky eyes like his was capable of anything. And yet--
Young Devon had the intolerance of American youth for the things outside
his personal experience. The sort of thing Doris was hinting at didn't
happen here; that was all there was to it. What _was_ happening seemed
pretty clear. The girl was, or fancied herself, in the power of an
unscrupulous scamp who was using that power for some purpose of his own.
If that was it--and this thing, Laurie handsomely admitted, really did
happen sometimes--it ought to be fairly easy for an athletic chap of
twenty-four to put an end to it. He recalled the look in Shaw's
projecting eyes, the snakelike forward thrust of his sleek head; and an
intense desire seized him to get his hands on the fellow's throat and
choke him till his eyes stuck out twice as far as they did now. If that
were duty, then duty would be a delight.
Having reached this edifying point in his reflections, he rose. Why
delay? Perhaps he could find the chap somewhere. Perhaps the waiter at
the restaurant where they had lunched knew where he lived. But, no, of
course not. It was not the kind of restaurant his sort patronized. Shaw
had simply followed him and Doris there; that was all there was to it.
He, Laurie, would have to wait for another encounter. Meantime he might
run around to the club and box for an hour. He had been getting a bit
out of condition this month. A bout with McDonald, the club trainer,
would do him good. Or, by Jove, he'd go and see Louise Ordway!
He had promised his new brother-in-law, Bob Warren, to keep an eye on
Bob's sister while Warren and Barbara were in Japan, and Laurie had kept
the promise with religious fidelity and very real pleasure. He immensely
liked and admired Mrs. Ordway, who seemed, strangely, to be always at
home of late. He had formed the habit of running in several times a
week. Louise not only talked, but, as Laurie expressed it, "she said
things." He had spent with her many of the afternoons and evenings Bangs
checked up to the cabarets.
He glanced at his watch. For an hour he had been impersonating a
gentleman engaged in profound meditation, with the sole result that he
had decided to go to see Louise. It was quite possible he could enlist
her interest in Doris. Now, that was an inspiration! Perhaps Mrs. Ordway
would understand Doris. Every woman, he vaguely believed, understood all
other women. He smoothed his hair, straightened his tie, and hurried
off.
He found Mrs. Ordway reclining on a _chaise longue_ before an open fire,
in the boudoir in which his sister Barbara had spent so many hours of
the past year, playing the invalid to sleep. She wore a superb Mandarin
coat, of soft and ravishing tints, and her love for rich colors was
reflected in the autumnal tones of her room and even in the vari-colored
flames of her driftwood fire. To Louise these colors were as definite
as mellow trumpet-tones. She had responded to them all her life. She was
responding to them still, now that she lay dying among them. Something
in their superb arrogance called forth an answering note from her own
arrogant soul.
She greeted her brother's young brother-in-law with the almost
disdainful smile she now turned on everything, but which was softened a
little for him. Ignorant of the malady that was eating her life away, as
indeed all her friends were ignorant of it, save Barbara and her
doctors, Laurie delighted in the picture she made. He showed his delight
as he dropped into a chair by her side. They fell at once into the
casual banter that characterized their intercourse.
"I wonder why I ever leave here?" he mused aloud, as the clock struck
six. He had been studying with a slight shock the changes that had taken
place in the few days since he had seen her. For the first time the
suspicion crossed his mind that she might be seriously ill. Throughout
their talk he had observed things, trifles, perhaps, but significant,
which, if they had occurred before, had escaped him.
Susanne, Mrs. Ordway's maid, though modestly in the background, was
rarely out of sight; and a white-capped nurse, till now an occasional
and illusive vision in the halls, blew in and out of the sick-room like
a breeze, bringing liquids in glasses, which the patient obediently
swallowed. Laurie, his attention once caught, took it all in. But his
face gave no hint of his new knowledge, and the eyes of Louise still met
his with the challenge they turned on every one these days--a challenge
that definitely forbade either understanding or sympathy.
"The real problem is why you ever come." She spoke lightly, but looked
at him with genuine affection. Laurie was one of her favorites, her
prime favorite, indeed, next to Bob and Barbara. He smiled at her with
tender significance.
"You know why I come."
"I do," she agreed, "perfectly. I know you're quite capable of flirting
with me, too, if I'd let you, you absurd boy. Laurie,"--for a moment or
two she was almost serious--"why don't you fall in love?"
"And this from you?"
"Don't be foolish. You know I like your ties," she interpolated kindly.
"But, really, isn't there some one?"
Laurie turned his profile to her, pulled a lock of hair over his brow,
clasped his hands between his knees, and posed esthetically.
"Do you know," he sighed, "I begin to think that, just possibly,
perhaps, there's a slight chance--that there is!"
"Be serious. Tell me about her."
"Well, she's a girl." He produced this confidence with ponderous
solemnity. "She lives across the square from me," he added.
"Things brighten," commented Louise, drily. "Go on."
"She's mysterious. I don't know who she is, or anything about her. But I
know that she's in trouble."
"Of course she is! I have never known a mysterious maiden that wasn't,"
commented the woman of the world. "What's her particular variety of
trouble?"
Laurie reflected.
"That's hard to say," he brought out at last. "But it appears to be
mixed up with an offensive person in a crumpled blue suit who answers to
the name of Herbert Ransome Shaw. Have you ever heard of him?"
Louise wrinkled her fastidious nose.
"Never, I'm happy to say. But he doesn't sound attractive. However, tell
me all about them. There seems a good chance that they may get you into
trouble."
"That's what she said."
"It's the one gleam of intelligence I see in the situation," commented
his candid friend. "Is she pretty?"
"As lovely in her way as you are. Think you could help her any?"
wheedled Laurie.
"I doubt it. I'm too selfish to be bothered with girls who are in
trouble. I'll tell you who _can_ help her--Sonya Orleneff."
"Of course!" Laurie beamed at her. "Wonder why I didn't think of that."
"Probably because it was so obvious. Sonya is in town, as it happens,
stopping at the Warwick. She has brought the Infant Samuel to New York
to have his adenoids cut out. Samuel made a devastating visit here this
morning. He's getting as fat as a little pig, and when he walks he puffs
like a worn-out automobile going up a steep grade. He came up my stairs
on 'low,' and I'm sure they heard him on the avenue. I almost offered
him a glass of gasolene. But he is a lamb," she added reflectively.
Oddly enough, Samuel, late of New York's tenements, was another of her
favorites.
Laurie was following his own thoughts. Sonya was in town! Then, however
complicated his problem, it was already as good as solved.
"My dinner will be up soon," suggested Louise. "Are you dining with me?"
He glanced at his watch, reproachfully shook his head at it, and rose.
"Three hours of me are all you can have this time. But I'll probably
drop around about dawn to-morrow."
"Nice boy!" Her hot hand caught his and held it. "Laurie, if--if--I
should send for you suddenly sometime--you'd come and--stand by?"
All the gaiety was wiped from his face. His brilliant black eyes, oddly
softened, looked into her haughty blue ones with sudden understanding.
"You bet I will! Any time, anything! You'll remember that? Send for me
as if I were Bob. Perhaps you've forgotten it," he added, more lightly,
"but I happen to be your younger brother."
For a moment her face twisted. The mask of her arrogance fell from it.
"Bob didn't know," she said. "If he had felt the least suspicion he
wouldn't have gone so far, or for so long. I thought I had three or four
months--"
Laurie bent and kissed her cheek.
"I'm coming in every day," he said, and abruptly left the room.
In the lower hall he stopped to take in the full real realization of
what he had discovered. Louise, superb, arrogant, beautiful Louise, was
really ill, desperately ill. A feeling of remorse mingled with his sense
of shock. He had believed her a sort of nervous hypochondriac. He had so
resented her excessive demands on Barbara that it was only since he had
seen much of her in this last month that he had been able
whole-heartedly to like and admire her.
As he stood silent, he became conscious of another presence--an august,
impressive one, familiar in the past but veiled now, as it were, in a
midst of human emotion. It was Jepson, the butler. He coughed humbly.
"Hexcuse me, sir," he faltered. "But Mrs. Hordway h'ain't quite so well
lately, sir. 'Ave you hobserved that?"
Laurie nodded. "I noticed it to-day," he admitted.
"She's losin' strength very fast, sir. Hall of us 'as seen it. Cook says
she don't eat nothink. And Susanne and the nurse says it's 'ard work to
get 'er from the bed to 'er chair--"
Laurie checked these revelations.
"Has the doctor been here to-day?"
"Yessir, two of 'em 'ave been 'ere. Doctor Speyer comes hevery day. This
morning 'e brought Doctor Hames again. Hit's very hupsetting, sir, with
'er brother away and hall."
The man was genuinely anxious. Laurie tried to reassure him.
"She may be better in a day or two," he said, more buoyantly than he
felt. "But I'll come in every day. And here's my telephone number. If
anything goes wrong, call me up immediately. Leave a message if I'm not
there."
"Yessir. Thank you, sir." Jepson was pathetically grateful and relieved.
He had the English servant's characteristic need of sanction and
authority.
When Laurie reached his rooms, he called Sonya on the telephone. Like
Jepson, he was feeling rather overwhelmed by his responsibilities. It
was a relief to hear Sonya's deep, colorful voice.
"Didn't know you were here till just now," he told her. "I'm coming to
see you in the morning. I want to talk to you about a lot of things."
"Including Mrs. Ordway?" suggested Sonya.
"Yes. You saw her to-day. You noticed--"
"Of course. Samuel is to be operated on to-morrow. I'll send him back to
Devon House with his mother in a few days, as soon as he can safely
travel, and I shall stay right here."
"That's splendid of you!"
"It's what Barbara and Mr. Warren would wish. And Mrs. Ordway, too, I
think, though she would never suggest it."
"I'm sure it is."
Laurie hung up the receiver with a nervous hand. To a youth of
twenty-four it is a somewhat overpowering experience to discover that
destiny is especially busy over the affairs of two women for whom he
has assumed a definite responsibility. As he turned from the instrument
its bell again compelled his attention. He took up the receiver, and the
voice of a girl came to his ear. A week or two ago he had rather liked
that voice and its owner, a gay, irresponsible, good-hearted little
creature who pranced in the front row of an up-town pony ballet. Now he
listened to it with keen distaste.
"Hello, Laurie," it twittered. "Is that you? This is Billie. Listen. I
gotta plan. A bunch of us is goin' out to Gedney to supper to-night.
We're goin' to leave right after the show. Are you on?"
Laurie got rid of the fair Billie. He did it courteously but very
firmly. A rather unusual degree of firmness was necessary, for Miss
Billie was not used to having her invitations refused. She accepted the
phenomenon with acute unwillingness and very lingeringly.
Bangs was not at home, to divert his chum's mind with his robust
conversation. As he dressed for his call on Doris, the sharp contrasts
of life struck Laurie with the peculiar force with which they hit the
young and the inexperienced.
But were they really contrasts? On the one side were Louise, dying, and
Doris, seemingly eager to die. On the other were Billie and her
friends--foolish little butterflies, enjoying their brief hour in the
secret garden of life, eternally chattering about "good times," playing
they were happy, perhaps even thinking they were happy, but infinitely
more tragic figures than Louise and Doris. Yet a week ago he had thought
they amused him!
Pondering on these and other large problems, he absently removed the
bloom from three fresh white ties.
CHAPTER VII
GRIGGS GETS AN ORDER
At eight o'clock Laurie found Doris sitting under the shade of a
reading-lamp in her studio, deep in the pages of a sophisticated French
novel and radiating an almost oppressive atmosphere of well-being.
Subconsciously, he resented this. His mood was keyed to tragedy. But he
returned her half-serious, half-mocking smile with one as enigmatic,
shook hands with grave formality, and surveyed with mild interest a
modest heap of bank-notes of small denominations that lay on the table,
catching the room's high lights. Following his glance, Doris nodded
complacently.
"I left them there for you to see," she remarked.
"Did the kind gentleman under the three balls give you all that?"
"He did. Count it."
Laurie frowned.
"Don't be so arrogant about your wealth. It's fleeting. Any copy-book
will tell you so."
She opened a small drawer in the table, swept the bills into it, and
casually closed it. Laurie stared.
"Are you going to leave it there? Just like that?"
She looked patient.
"Why not?"
"I begin to understand why you are sometimes financially cramped."
He took the bills, smoothed them out flat, rolled back the rug to the
edge of the table, laid the money under it, and carefully replaced the
rug.
"That's the place to put it," he observed, with calm satisfaction. "No
one connected with a studio ever lifts a rug. Bangs and I used to throw
our money under the furniture, and pick it up as we needed it; but
others sometimes reached it first. This way is better. How lovely you
look!" he added. As he spoke he comfortably seated himself on the other
side of the reading-lamp, and moved the lamp to a point where it would
not obstruct his view of her.
She did look lovely. She had put on an evening gown, very simply made,
but rich in the Oriental coloring she loved. She was like Louise in
that. Laurie's thoughts swung to the latter's sick-room, and his
brilliant young face grew somber. The girl lounging in the big chair
observed the sudden change in his expression. She pushed a box of
cigarettes toward him.
"Smoke if you like," she said, indifferently. "All my friends do."
He caught the phrase. Then she had friends!
"Including Herbert Ransome Shaw?" he asked, as he lit a match.
"Don't include him among my friends! But--he was here this afternoon."
"He was!" In his rising interest Laurie nearly let the match go out.
"What did he want?"
"To warn me to have nothing to do with you."
"I like his infernal cheek!"
Laurie lit the cigarette and puffed at it savagely. Then, rising, he
drew his chair forward and sat down facing her.
"See here," he said quietly, "you'd better tell me the whole story. I
can't help you much if I'm kept in the dark. But if you'll let me into
things--And before I forget it," he interrupted himself to interject, "I
want to bring a friend of mine to call on you. She will be a tower of
strength. She's a Russian, and one of the best women I know."
She listened with a slight smile.
"What's her name?"
"Miss Orleneff, Sonya Orleneff, a great pal of my sister's and an
all-round good sort. I'd like to bring her in to-morrow afternoon. Will
five be convenient?"
"No." She spoke now with the curtness of the morning. "In no
circumstances," she added, decisively.
"But--why?"
He was dazed. If ever a knight errant worked under greater difficulties
than these, Laurie told himself, he'd like to know the poor chap's name.
"I have no wish to meet Miss Orleneff."
"But she's an ideal person for you to know, experienced, sympathetic,
and understanding. She did a lot for my sister last year. I must tell
you all about that sometime. She could do more for you--"
"Mr. Devon!" The finality of her tone brought him up short. "We must
understand each other."
"I should like nothing better." He, too, was suddenly formal.
"This morning you projected yourself into my life."
"Literally," he cordially agreed.
"I am grateful to you for what you did and what you wish to do. But I
will not meet any more strangers. I will not meet Miss Orleneff, or any
one else. Is that clear?"
"Oh, perfectly!" Laurie sighed. "Of course you're a crowned head," he
mused aloud. "I had forgotten. Would you like my head on a charger, or
anything like that?"
She studied him thoughtfully.
"Almost from the first," she said, "and except for an occasional minute
or two, you have refused to be serious. That interests me. Why is it?
Aren't you willing to realize that there are real troubles in the world,
terrible troubles, that the bravest go down under?"
"Of course." He was serious now. He had begun to realize that fully.
"It's my unfortunate manner, I suppose," he defended himself. "I've
never taken anything seriously for very long. It's hard to form the
habit, all of a sudden."
"You will have to take me seriously."
He made a large gesture of acceptance.
"All right," he promised. "That brings us back to where we were. Tell me
the truth. If there's anything in it that really menaces you, you'll
find me serious enough."
Before answering, she rose and opened the studio door, on which, he
observed with approval, a strong new lock and an inside bolt had already
been placed. He saw her peer up and down the hall. Then she closed and
bolted the door, and returned to her chair. The precaution brought
before him a mental vision of Herbert Ransome Shaw prowling about the
dim corridors. He spoke incredulously.
[Illustration: "There is someone outside that door!" she whispered]
"Are you really afraid of that chap?"
"I have good reason to be," she said quietly. She sat down in her chair
again, rested her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands, in the
pose already so familiar to him, and added quietly, "He is the source of
all my present trouble."
She stopped and turned her head to listen.
"Do you hear anything moving in the hall?" she asked, almost in a
whisper.
"No. Shall I look?"
She shook her head. "Don't unbolt the door."
"You're nervous. I'm sure there's nothing there. Please go on," he
urged. "Our little friend Bertie--"
Seeing her expression, he stopped short. "Forgive me," he said, humbly.
"But the plain truth is, it's awfully hard for me to take that fellow
seriously. Oh, I know he's venomous," he conceded, "but I can't help
feeling that he hasn't as much power over you as you think he has."
He realized that she was listening, but not to him.
"There _is_ some one outside that door!" she whispered.
Laurie leaped to the door as noiselessly as a cat, unbolted it, and
flung it open. The hall was empty. He had an instantaneous impression
that something as silent as a moving shadow had vanished around the
staircase at the far end, but when he reached the spot he saw nothing
save the descending iron spirals of successive stairways. He returned to
his companion, smiling reassuringly.
"It's our nerves," he said. "In a few minutes more I shall be worrying
about Bertie, myself."
"Bolt the door again," she directed.
He obeyed. She went on as if there had been no interruption to their
talk.
"It isn't what he is," she admitted. "He himself is nothing, as you say.
It's what is back of him that--that frightens me! Why don't you smoke?"
she interrupted herself to ask.
Laurie automatically selected and lit another cigarette.
"I know what's going to be back of Bertie pretty soon," he darkly
predicted. "Whoever he is, and whatever he is doing, he has a big jolt
coming to him, and it's coming fast."
He laid down the cigarette and turned to her with his most charming
expression, a wonderfully sweet smile, half shy, wholly boyish. Before
this look, any one who loved Laurence Devon was helpless.
"Come," he said gently, "tell me the whole story. You know it's not
curiosity that makes me ask. But how can I help you when I'm working in
the dark?"
As she hesitated, his brilliant eyes, so softened now, continued to hold
hers.
"And I want to help you," he added. "I want that privilege more than I
want anything else in the world."
For a long moment she sat still, as if considering his words, her eyes
on her hands, folded in her lap. The strange, deep flush he had noticed
once before again stained her face. At last she straightened up with a
quick movement, throwing back her shoulders as if to take on again some
burden they had almost cast off.
"I am sorry to seem so mysterious," she said, "and so unresponsive. I
will tell you this much, and it is more than I ought to say. In the
situation we are in I am in his power, horribly so. He can crush me at
any time he chooses."
"Then why doesn't he?"
The gentleness of her caller's voice softened the brusqueness of his
words.
"Because--" She stopped again. For the first time she had become
embarrassed and self-conscious. She made her climax in a rush: "Lately
he insists that he has fallen in love with me!"
Laurie uttered an ejaculation. It was not a pretty one, but it nicely
fitted the emergency.
"He has hoped that to save myself, and others, I will marry him, the
contemptible, crawling snake!"
The listener was impressed by her comparison. Certainly there was
something ophidian about Shaw. He himself had noticed it.
"Then, for the time being, you're really safe?" he suggested.
"No. His patience is exhausted. He is beginning to realize that I'd
rather die."
"The police can stop all this nonsense." But Laurie spoke without his
customary authority.
"Don't imagine that. The police know nothing about this matter, and they
never will." A sudden thought struck her and she rose almost with a
spring. He rose, too, staring at her in bewilderment. She caught his
shoulders and held them tightly, in a grip wholly free from
self-consciousness.
"If you warn the police," she said swiftly; "if you draw them into this,
you will ruin everything. You will do me a harm that could never be
undone. Give me your word that you won't. Please, _please_!"
She was almost shaking him now. Under the clasp of her hands on his
shoulders Laurie paled a little, but his black eyes held hers steadily.
"Of course I promise," he said, slowly, "as you make such a point of
it."
She removed her hands and stepped back.
"Please go now."
"So soon? Why, I've only just come!"
"I know--but I'm tired."
There was no mistaking the sincerity of this. It was a poignant outcry.
Clearly, she was at the breaking-point. He took both her hands.
"This whole experience gives me the oddest feeling," he told her gently.
"In one way, I seem to be dreaming it. Under it all there's a conviction
that I'm on the track of the mystery; that everything will be cleared
up, for us both, in another minute or two. It's merely an instinct. I
can't explain it. But one thing I know. Sooner or later--sooner, I
hope--I shall be able to work it out for you."
She seemed suddenly to remember that he was holding her hands. Flushing,
she gently withdrew them. Then she turned, and with a brusque gesture
walked away from him.
"I'm sorry I got you into this!" she cried.
"Don't worry about me." He smiled at her from the door he was holding
open. "May I come and take you to lunch to-morrow?"
"Not to-morrow. The next day, perhaps."
"We've got to look for that job, you know."
"With all this?" She indicated with the toe of her slipper a significant
spot on the rug.
Laurie regarded the slipper with approval. It was a beautiful slipper,
on a charming foot. It so diverted his mind from the main issue of the
conversation that he was in the elevator and half-way down to the ground
floor before he recalled that issue. He was not disturbed. Doris had
enough to go on with; and certainly he himself had sufficient scope for
thought in the revelations she had just made.
As he walked down the outer steps of the studio building and emerged on
the sidewalk, a figure detached itself from the shadow of a low iron
fence and stealthily followed him. It was a short figure, overcoated out
of recognition. It carried its hands in its pockets, and its head was
thrust forward in a peculiar way. It kept a dozen feet behind him, until
he reached the pretentious entrance of the apartment building where he
dwelt.
Here, in the glaring light of two huge electric globes, conveniently
held aloft for him by a pair of bronze warriors, Laurie turned suddenly,
warned by the inner sense that tells us we are watched. The figure
behind ducked modestly into the background, but not until he had
recognized the round face and projecting eyes of Herbert Ransome Shaw.
Laurie checked a passionate impulse to hurl himself upon that lurking
and unpleasant shape. Slowly but surely he was learning self-control.
Martin, the elevator operator, and Griggs, the night hall man, were
already bidding him good evening and regarding him with friendly and
interested eyes. To see him suddenly fall upon and beat a shabby
stranger would surprise and pain them, besides unpleasantly stirring up
the neighborhood. A better opportunity would present itself, or could be
made.
In the meantime, however, he must convey to Herbert Ransome Shaw some
idea of the utter contempt in which he held him. Taking Griggs
confidentially by the arm, Laurie pointed out the skulking shadow.
"See that?" he asked in ringing tones.
Griggs was a Goliath in proportions and deliberate in his movements. He
took his time to discover the object young Devon indicated. In the
shadow the object stirred restlessly.
"Yessir," Griggs then said, uncertainly. "It's--it's a man, sir."
"Is it?" asked Laurie with interest, and still in loud, clear tones.
"I'm afraid you're mistaken. But whatever it is, _step_ on it!"
He entered the elevator after this crisp instruction, and was wafted up
to his rooms. The hall man moved hesitatingly down the building's three
steps to the sidewalk. One never knew exactly what young Devon was
getting at. Still, if he really wanted Griggs to step on anything--
Griggs stopped. A slight sensation of disappointment swept over him. He
was a conscientious man who desired to do his duty. But there was
absolutely nothing for him to step on, except the snow-covered and
otherwise inoffensive pavement.
CHAPTER VIII
SAMUEL PLAYS A NEW GAME
The next morning Laurie awoke from troubled dreams with a vague feeling
that life was getting a rise out of him, a feeling that the absent
morning greeting of Rodney Bangs did not help to dissipate.
Without realizing it, young Devon had rather sunned himself in the
adulation of his chum. When this adulation was removed, he missed it;
and for the present, at least, there was no question that adulation was
lacking.
Not that Bangs failed in any of the outward forms of friendship, but his
manner had changed. He was increasingly preoccupied. When Laurie spoke,
Bangs had the effect of coming to him from a long distance, and even of
having one foot extended, as it were, for the return journey.
The two young men breakfasted together, for the first time in several
days; and over their coffee and cigarettes Laurie confided to his friend
his new anxiety about Mrs. Ordway.
Bangs at once became human. Indeed, he showed a degree of solicitude
that surprised his friend. It was suddenly clear that Rodney was vastly
interested in Louise. He had even ventured to call on her, though Laurie
did not yet know this; for the first call was made, as it happened, on
the afternoon of the day when the two young men had indulged in their
first serious quarrel.
Bangs, usually the most modest and self-conscious of youths, had
abruptly lost his shyness under the urge of a need to talk about his
chum to some one who would understand. And Louise had understood, quite
surprisingly. Recalling the long talk he and she had had, the help she
had given him, the plans they had made, Rodney grew very serious.
"It's lucky Sonya's in town," he said, when this further fact had been
revealed. "Let's go over to the hotel and see her right after breakfast.
Perhaps we ought to cable to Warren. Sonya will know."
He spoke with such studied carelessness that Laurie flashed a sudden
look at him. Under it Bangs flushed to the roots of his burnished
pompadour.
"Well, well," murmured Laurie, "this _is_ interesting! Odd I didn't
notice it before."
Whatever "it" was, he gave his whole attention to it now. Leaning
forward, he ostentatiously studied Bangs, with an expression at once
indulgent and amazed.
"A flush on his cheek, too," he mused aloud.
"Shut up!" Bangs clenched his teeth, while the flush deepened.
"Easily irritated; respiration slightly irregular, all the familiar
symptoms."
"For God's sake, Laurie, don't be an ass!" begged Bangs.
"All the familiar symptoms--of a heavy cold," murmured Laurie,
sympathetically. "A hot bath and a dose of quinine might help at this
stage. But if it gets worse--" Laurie reflected, anxiously shaking his
head--"if it gets worse I'll send for Sonya," he finished brightly.
He rose, dodged the roll Rodney hurled at him, and strolled out of the
room, opening the door again to add an afterthought that suddenly
occurred to him.
"Don't risk your life by going to the hotel, old man," he added, kindly.
"Take your quinine, and I will call on Sonya."
"She'll tell us whether or not to cable for Warren," repeated Bangs,
with great dignity.
But Sonya, when she came into her hotel sitting-room an hour later, did
not immediately solve this problem. For the moment her mind was wholly
on the Infant Samuel, who was to have his adenoids cut out that morning,
and who had been encouraged to look forward to the experience as a new
delight. While they were expressing fitting interest, Samuel himself
entered the room, alone, but with all the effect of a juvenile
procession. By the left leg he dragged his most cherished possession, a
battered and dim-featured rag doll. Hospitably greeting the two young
men, he solemnly presented the doll to Bangs.
"What's this?" asked Rodney, with a friendly impulse to adapt his
conversation to the young.
"Hullen," affirmed Samuel, "Hullen, R. J."
"What does that mean?" Bangs appealed to Sonya.
"It's the doll's name. He gave it to her himself. 'Hullen,' I suppose,
means Helen, and Mr. Warren's initials, you know, are R. J. Evidently
Samuel liked the sound of them."
Samuel retrieved Hullen R. J.
"Hullen R. J. go hos'tl wiv Sammy," he further announced.
"She will," corroborated Sonya. "He never stirs without her, and she
sleeps in his bed every night."
Laurie turned a shocked gaze on Samuel, and Sonya laughed, then gulped.
"I'm horribly nervous this morning," she admitted. "I wish it were over.
You see, a certain cherub isn't going to like matters at all after they
really begin at the hos'tl. And his mother will be more of a burden than
a help."
Bangs had an inspiration.
"Suppose I go with you," he suggested. "Then if you need a strong man to
hold the cherub--"
"Two strong men," corrected Laurie. "Do you imagine that I'm going to
desert Samuel in his hour of need? Besides, I've got to keep an eye on
Bangs," he added sweetly, and was rewarded by a glare from that
overwrought young man.
"Noticed anything odd about Bangs lately?" Laurie asked Sonya.
She turned on Rodney the dark gaze of her serene eyes.
"Why, no."
"You will," Laurie predicted, with a mournful shake of the head. "Watch
him closely, and call on me if there are alarming symptoms that you
don't understand."
Bangs rushed into confused speech.
"He thinks I've got a cold," he gulped. "His nonsense, of course.
Nothing in the world the matter with me. Er--how soon do we start?"
Laurie, helpless with laughter, rolled the ecstatic Samuel on the floor.
Samuel's voice took on an added note of jubilation. Sonya, his mother,
Hullen R. J., "Lawwie" and "Misser Bangs" all going with him to the
hos'tl--it was almost too much pleasure! Samuel became slightly
intoxicated.
"He wants to sing," remarked Laurie, with masculine understanding of a
fellow heart. "All right, old man," he encouraged. "How about that
beautiful hymn I taught you at Bab's wedding?"
With considerable help Samuel recalled the ditty:
"Hey, hey, ve gangsall here,
Whalahaloo we care,
Whalahaloo we care,
Now--_wow_--wow--WOW--_WOW_!"
"Laurie!"
Sonya spoke with sudden austerity. "It's a relief from his mental
strain," Laurie explained. "Any doctor will tell you that."
* * * * *
In the hos'tl, however, things assumed a different aspect. Still firmly
holding Hullen R. J. by the leg, and keeping a steadfast eye on the
surgeon, Samuel took in his immediate surroundings with a dawning
suspicion in his soul. Having two men throw lights on his face and look
down his throat had lost its novelty, though Sonya had assured him that
wonderful views were to be seen there which he alone could reveal. Also,
the men seemed hurried, and didn't want to look at Hullen R. J.'s
throat, though Samuel warmly recommended this variety in the
entertainment.
In short, the situation had become sinister. The smiles around him were
dreadful-looking things, all except Laurie's. With an appalling howl
Samuel detached himself from the surgeon's grasp and fled to Laurie, who
picked him up and held him firmly and comfortably in his lap until a
lady in white came with something nice for Samuel to smell.
The next thing Samuel knew was that he was in bed in a strange room. He
gulped and discovered that his throat was sore. He sat up, distended his
mouth for a yell, and then very slowly closed it.
From every corner of the room familiar figures were hastening to his
side. The lady in white, Sonya, and his mother all reached him at the
same moment. On the pillow beside him Hullen R. J. awaited the honor of
his attention like a perfect lady. No howls from her, as Sonya
immediately pointed out. As she thus soothed, Sonya was kissing him. The
lady in white was offering him something pleasant to drink. His mother
was patting his back.
For a long instant Samuel took in the gratifying fact of these
activities. Then he assorted his features, grabbed Hullen R. J.,
exchanged his yell for a large smile, and permitted himself to be waited
on. Deep in his masculine consciousness he had realized that his world
was normal again.
Bangs and Laurie walked up Fifth Avenue together, stopping at a
florist's to purchase the man's entire supply of roses for Mrs. Ordway.
Bangs also discovered some masses of poinsettia and chrysanthemums that,
as he said, "looked like her." Laden with these spoils, they took a
taxicab to the Ordway house, where they found Jepson exuding an
atmosphere of reassurance.
Yessir, Mrs. Hordway seemed better. She 'ad a more restful night, han'
Susanne said was quite bright this morning. Hof course she'd see Mr.
Devon, hand prob'bly Mr. Bangs, halso. Jepson would harsk at once.
Jepson moved ponderously away to do so, while Rodney, opening his big
box in the hall, drew out the poinsettia and chrysanthemums and
proceeded to arrange them in a gorgeous armful. Bangs had unexpected
taste in color and arrangement, as Epstein's stage-directors had
discovered in the past. Laurie watched him with polite interest.
"Making a picture of yourself, aren't you?" he asked. "Going into the
sick-room with your little hands full of flowers?" But even as he
scoffed he was unwrapping his own flowers. Bangs was right. The act of
handing a pasteboard box to a sick friend lacked esthetic value.
Jepson returned with a cordial message. Mrs. Ordway would be charmed to
see both young men, but she received only one visitor at a time. Would
Mr. Bangs come up now? And perhaps Mr. Devon would drop in again during
the afternoon or evening.
Rodney grasped his floral offerings and mounted the stairs two steps at
a time. He was excited and his brown eyes showed it. It was most awfully
good of Mrs. Ordway to let him come up in this informal way. Standing by
the _chaise longue_ where she lay, he told her so, his auburn head
shining among the flowers he carried, like a particularly large
chrysanthemum. Then, selecting some empty vases, he sat down on the
floor beside her and began to arrange his flowers, while she watched
him, at first with surprise, then with growing admiration.
Rodney had no social airs and graces, no parlor tricks. If he had been
formally sitting on a chair, holding his hat, he would have been a
self-conscious and unhappy young man. As it was, with hands and eyes
busy, and wholly at his ease, he talked his exuberant best.
"How about Laurie's romance?" Louise asked at once.
Bangs told her about the vision in the mirror. As he did so, luncheon
was served, and he was casually invited to share it. Susanne, moving
shuttle-like between the table in the sick-room and the dumb-waiter in
the upper hall, presently confided to a young footman a surprising piece
of news, which he in turn confided to the incredulous Jepson. Young Mr.
Bangs, who was lunching with Mrs. Ordway, must be as amusing as young
Mr. Devon himself. He had actually made the mistress laugh both times he
came. She was laughing now, as Susanne had not heard her laugh for
weeks. To be sure, this was one of her good days. But it wasn't easy to
amuse Mrs. Ordway at any time.
Jepson summed up the situation in an oracular utterance:
"Henny one that's a friend of Mr. Devon's his hall right."
When Rodney was leaving, Jepson's mistress expressed the same thought to
her guest in a different way.
"Come often," she said. "You have given me a new interest. I don't think
you can quite realize what that means to me."
When Sonya arrived at five that afternoon, she found Jepson still
exuding reassurance. With two doctors within call, a nurse in the house,
and Mr. Devon and Miss Orleneff to telephone to at a moment's notice,
"nothink much could 'appen." So reasoned Jepson. He beamed approvingly
on Sonya, informed her that Mr. Devon was in the sick-room now, and
waved her through the hall with an effect of benediction.
She found Laurie just leaving, and they had a moment's chat on the upper
landing. Mrs. Ordway, he told her, was rather restless this afternoon,
but she seemed better than she had been yesterday. However, he didn't
like her looks at all, and he fancied the nurse was disturbed. Suppose
Sonya sounded Louise about cabling for Warren? Surely Warren would want
to know, Laurie thought.
For the moment Laurie's striking good looks were slightly dimmed. He was
hollow-eyed, almost haggard. Things were coming just a bit too fast for
him. The habit of carrying the burden of others had been taken on too
suddenly. Under the strain of it, his untrained mental muscles ached.
It was the irony of fate that Sonya, looking at him with the clear brown
eyes that were so much softer than Bangs's, and so much less beautiful
than Doris's, should misinterpret his appearance, his emotion, and his
reaction from the high spirits of the morning. He was again going the
pace, she decided; and, mingled with her pity for him, rose the scorn of
a strong soul that was the absolute master of the body in which it
dwelt.
His newly aroused perception carried some hint of this scorn to the boy,
covered though it was by the friendliness of Sonya's manner. The
knowledge added to his wretchedness. He had a childish desire to
explain, but he conquered it and hurried away. Some day, if not now,
Sonya would understand.
What he himself did not understand was the long stride he had taken in
the moment when he felt and resented her unspoken criticism. Heretofore
his attitude had been one of expressed and sincere indifference to the
opinions others held of him. He wanted them to like him, but he didn't
care a hang whether or not they approved of him. Now, suddenly, he
wanted Sonya's respect as well as her liking. The discovery added to his
mental confusion.
If Sonya, when she entered the sick-room, was shocked by the change in
the appearance of her new friend, she showed no sign of it. Sitting down
beside the _chaise longue_, she entered briskly upon a description of
the recent experiences of Samuel. When she left the hospital the house
surgeon was obediently endeavoring to look down the throat of Hullen R.
J., and every nurse on Samuel's floor was scuttering in and out of his
room. Nevertheless the Infant, though graciously accepting these
attentions, had demanded and received Sonya's personal assurance that
the particular game of the morning was not to be repeated. There was an
unpleasant element in that game which grown-ups might not notice but
which he, Samuel, had caught on to.
Louise laughed and expressed a hope that Samuel would now be able to
breathe without disturbing his neighbors. Sonya came to the real purpose
of her visit.
"He and his mother are going back to Devon House Saturday," she said,
"but I've got to stay in New York for a few months, on account of my
literary galumphings. I wondered if you--if it would be convenient for
you--to put me up. I hate hotels and--"
Louise lay silent for a moment. Then she reached out and took Sonya's
hand.
"Yes, you unskilful prevaricator," she said. "You may come--and see me
through."
Sonya held the hand tightly in her own.
"There's one thing more," she went on, hesitatingly. "Laurie and Mr.
Bangs and I wondered if perhaps you wouldn't feel more comfortable if
Mr. Warren came home. You know he himself would want to--"
Louise closed her eyes.
"Yes," she said, "Bob would want to, if he knew."
She was silent for so long that Sonya began to think she was not to have
the answer to her question. Perhaps Mrs. Ordway was leaving the decision
to her.
But to leave to others decisions that concerned herself was not Louise
Ordway's habit. Instead, she was fighting a battle in which the lifelong
devotion of a supremely self-centered nature was struggling with a
new-born unselfishness. Though new-born, it was strong, as the invalid's
next words showed.
"If I were calling him back from anything but his honeymoon," she said
at last, "I'd do it. But he's utterly happy. His letters show that, in
every line. I want him to stay so, as long as he can. I want his
honeymoon to be long drawn out and perfect." Her manner changed.
"I have an idea that perhaps, after all, I'll be here when he gets
back," she added more lightly. "Life still has its interests. But, if I
happen not to be here, tell him why I didn't cable."
"I will tell him," Sonya promised.
Neither of them referred to the subject again.
CHAPTER IX
AN INVITATION
That evening Laurie walked across the square to Doris's studio with a
decision in his stride which definitely expressed his mental attitude.
He had come to the conclusion that something must be done. What this
something would be was still hazy in his mind, but the first step at
least seemed clear. Doris must move.
He was so convinced of the urgency of this step that he brought up the
subject almost before the greetings of guest and hostess were over.
Tossing his hat and coat on a convenient chair, he stood facing Doris,
his hands in his pockets, his black eyes somber.
"We've got to get you out of this, you know," he abruptly announced.
Her eyes, which had brightened at his entrance, grew as somber as his
own. Without replying, she turned, walked across the room to the window,
and stood looking down into the street.
"Is he there?" she asked at last, and without moving her head.
"Shaw? Great Scott, no! At least I didn't see him. I suppose he takes a
few hours off now and then, during the twenty-four; doesn't he?"
"Oh, yes, he comes and goes, sometimes secretly, sometimes openly. I did
not see him at all to-day until late this afternoon. Then he took up his
post across the street just opposite this window, and stood there for
almost an hour."
Laurie ground his teeth.
"What does he expect to gain by that performance?"
"Several things, I suppose. For one, he wants to get on my nerves; and
he does," she added somberly, and still without turning.
Laurie made a vague tour around the room and brought up by her side.
"You know," he confessed, "I haven't really taken this thing in yet.
Even now, this minute, it doesn't seem possible to me that Shaw could do
you any real harm."
She nodded. "I know. Why should it? Even to me it is like a nightmare
and I keep hoping to wake up. There are hours, even days, when I
convince myself that it isn't real." She stopped. "It must be very hard
for any one else to understand," she ended, when he did not speak.
"Nevertheless," admitted Laurie, "I can't forget it. I can't think of
anything else."
She took this as naturally as she had taken his first remark.
"It's going to be very hard for you. I was wrong to draw you into it. I
am realizing that more and more, every minute."
"You couldn't help yourself," he cheerfully reminded her. "Now that I am
in it, as I've warned you before, I intend to run things. It seems to me
that the obvious course for you is to move. After you're safely hidden
somewhere, I think I can teach Herbert Ransome Shaw a lesson that won't
react on you."
She shook her head.
"If I moved, how long do you think it would take him to find me?"
"Weeks, perhaps months."
Again she shook her head.
"I moved here a few days ago. He appeared exactly forty-eight hours
later. If I moved from here it would only mean going through the game of
hare and hounds again."
"But--" he began. She interrupted him.
"I've reached the point where I can't endure that any more." For the
first time her voice broke. "Can't you imagine what that sort of thing
would be? To get up in the morning and wonder if this is the day I'll
see him under my window? To go to bed at night and ask myself if he is
lurking in the shadows below, or across the street, or perhaps outside
my very door? To know that sooner or later he will be there, that his
coming is as inevitable as death itself--" She broke off.
"I sometimes think I'd rather see a boa-constrictor crawling into my
room than see Shaw down on the sidewalk," she ended. "And yet--I know
you can understand this--there's a queer kind of relief in the knowledge
that at last, and finally, he has got me."
She whirled to face Laurie and threw out her hands. There was nothing
theatrical in the gesture, merely an effect of entire finality.
"We have come to the end of things," she finished. "Since you would not
have them end my way, they must end his way. Whatever happens, I shall
not run and hide any more."
For a moment silence hung like a substance between them. Then the
visitor resolutely shook off the effect of her words.
"I promise you I will get to the bottom of this," he quietly told her.
"In the meantime, will you try to forget it, for a little while? You
know you said you could do that, occasionally."
He was clearing the table as he spoke. Now he proceeded to unpack a
basket he had sent over an hour before by Griggs, and which, he
observed, had not been opened. Dropping back into her big chair, she
watched him with an odd look. If he had seen this look it would have
sorely puzzled him, for it held not only interest but an element of
apprehension, even of fear.
"In the past two days," she said, after an interval, "you have sent me
five baskets of food, four baskets of fruit, six boxes of candy, and
three boxes of flowers. What do you suppose becomes of them all?"
"I know what becomes of the flowers." He cast an appreciative glance
around the transformed room. "And I hope," he mildly added, "that you
eat the food."
She broke into her rare laugh, soft, deep-throated, and contagious.
Under it his spirits rose dizzyingly.
"You are feeding half the people in this building," she said, "not to
mention Sam and his home circle. Sam has absorbed roast chicken, cold
partridge, quail, and sweetbreads till he is getting critical. He asked
me this morning if I shouldn't like ham and eggs for a change!"
Laurie felt slightly aggrieved.
"Do you mean to say that you're not eating any of the stuff yourself?"
he demanded.
"Oh, I eat three meals a day. But I don't keep boarders, you know; so I
give the rest to Sam to distribute. He feeds several dozen art students,
I infer, and staggers home every night under the burden of what's
left."
"There won't be anything left this night."
She had risen now and was helping to set the little table. Laurie looked
at her with shining eyes. One of her rapid changes of mood had taken
place, and she was entering into the spirit of the impromptu supper as
cheerfully as if it were a new game and she a child. She had become a
wholly different personality from the tragic-eyed girl who less than ten
minutes ago had somberly announced that she was making her last stand in
life. Again, as often before, Laurie felt overwhelmed by the rush of
conflicting emotions she aroused.
"Shall we have this big bowl of roses in the center, or the four little
bowls at the corners?" she asked absorbedly.
As she spoke, she studied the flowers with her head on one side. For the
moment, it was clear, the question she had asked was the most vital in
the world.
"The little ones," decided the guest. "The big one might shut off some
of you from my devouring eyes." He was mixing ingredients in a
chafing-dish as he spoke, and he wore the trying air of smug complacency
that invariably accompanies that simple process.
"No," he objected, as she tried to help him, "I will do the brain-work.
Your part is to be feminine and rush briskly back and forth, offering me
things I don't want. And at the last moment," he added gloomily, "you
may tell me that there isn't a lemon in the place." He looked about with
the hopelessness of a great artist facing the failure of his
chef-d'oeuvre. "I forgot the lemons."
She went across the room to a small closet. Even in the strain of the
moment he observed the extraordinary grace and swiftness of her
movements. She was very slender, very lithe, and she moved like a flash
of light.
"Fancy my being caught without a lemon!" she scoffed, as she returned
with the fruit. "Your brain-work stops abruptly sometimes, doesn't it?"
She handed him the lemons with a little gesture expressing amusement,
triumph, and a dash of coquetry. Laurie's eyes glowed as he looked at
her. For the second time, in her actual presence, a sharp thrill shot
through him. Oh, if she were always like this!--gay, happy, without that
incredible, unbelievable background of tragedy and mystery! He turned
his mind resolutely from the intruding thought. This hour at least was
hers and his. It should be prolonged to the last moment.
What he longed for was to hear her talk, but that way, he knew, lay
disaster to the little supper in swift-returning memory. If she began to
talk, the forbidden topic, now dormant, would uncoil its hideous length
and hiss. He must hold her attention to other things.
He plunged at random into chatter. For the first time he told her about
Bangs, his chum, and about Epstein, their manager; about their plays and
their experiences in rehearsals and on the road. Being very young and
slightly spoiled, he experienced some chagrin in the discovery that she
seemed alike ignorant of the men and the plays. Worse yet, she seemed
not even aware that she should have known who Bangs and Epstein were.
She did not recall having heard the title of "The Black Pearl." She was
not only unaware that "The Man Above" had broken all box-office records;
she seemed unconscious that it had ever been written. Observing his
artless surprise, she gravely explained. "I have been interested in
other things," she reminded him.
The forbidden topic was stirring, stretching. To quiet it, Laurie leaped
into the comedy scenes of "The Man Above." They delighted her. Her soft,
delicious laughter moved him to give her bits from "The Black Pearl,"
and, following these, the big scenes from the latter play. This last
effort followed the supper; and Laurie, now in his highest spirits,
added to his effects by the use of a brilliant afghan, and by much
raising and lowering of the light of the reading-lamp.
He was a fine mimic. He became by turns the star, the leading lady, the
comedian, and the "heavy" of the big play. It was only when he had
stopped for a moment's rest, and Doris demanded a description of the
leading lady's gowns, now represented by the afghan, that his ingenuity
failed.
"They're so beautiful that most people think I made them," he said,
serenely. "But I didn't, really, so I can't give you any details, except
that they're very close-fitting around the feet."
He was folding up the afghan as he spoke, and he stopped in the act,
leaving one end dangling on the floor. From the street below the sound
of a whistle came up to him, sharp and penetrating, repeating over and
over the same musical phrase, the opening notes of the Fifth Symphony.
At first he thought the notes were whistled by some casual passer-by.
Then, glancing at the girl's face, he knew better. The sharp, recurrent
phrase was a signal.
He finished folding the afghan, and carefully replaced it on the divan
from which he had borrowed it. As he did so, he prattled on. He had
suddenly decided not to hear that signal. Doris, sitting transfixed and
staring at him, slowly became convinced that he had not heard it.
He glanced at his watch.
"A shocking hour!" he ejaculated. "Ten o'clock. If I go now, may I come
back for breakfast?"
"You may not." She made an effort to speak lightly.
"To take you to luncheon, then, at one?"
"No, please."
He shook his head at her.
"This is not the atmosphere of hospitality I am used to, but I shall
come anyway. I'll be here at one. In the meantime, I suddenly realize
that we are not using all of our opportunities. We must change that."
He looked around as he spoke, and, finding what he sought, picked it up.
It was a small scarf, a narrow bit of Roman silk carrying a vivid
stripe. He held this before her.
"Something may happen some day, and you may want me in a hurry," he
said. "I have observed with regret that you have no telephone in this
room, but we can get on without one. My mirror reflects your window, you
know," he added a little self-consciously. "If you need me, hang up this
scarf. Just drape it over this big window-catch. If I ever see it, I'll
come prancing across the square like a knight to your rescue."
"Thank you."
She gave him her hand and the enigmatic smile that always subtly but
intensely annoyed him. There was something in that smile which he did
not understand, but he suspected that it held an element of amused
understanding. So might Doris, years hence, smile at her little son.
"She thinks I'm a reed," Laurie reflected as he waited in the outer hall
for the elevator. "I don't blame her. I've been a perfectly good reed
ever since I met her friend Bertie."
His thoughts, thus drawn to Shaw, dwelt on that ophidian personality.
When the elevator arrived he was glad to recognize the familiar face of
Sam.
"Yaas, sah," that youth affably explained, with a radiant exhibition of
teeth, "it's Henry's night _off_, so I has to be _on_."
They were alone in the car. Laurie, lighting a cigarette, asked a casual
question.
"There's a plump person in blue serge who hangs around here a good
deal," he remarked, indifferently. "Does he live in the building?"
"The one wid eyes what sticks out?"
"That's the one."
Sam's jaw set.
"No, sah, dat party don' live yere. An' ef he don' stop hangin' 'round
yere, somethin's gwine t' happen to dat man," he robustly asserted.
"What's he after?"
"I dunno. I only seen him twicet. Las' time he was sneakin' fum de top
flo'. But I cert'n'y don' like dat man's looks!"
Nothing more was to be learned from Sam. Laurie thoughtfully walked out
into the square. He had taken not more than a dozen steps when a voice,
strange yet unpleasantly familiar, accosted him.
"Good-evening, Mr. Devon," it said.
Laurie turned sharply. Herbert Ransome Shaw was walking at his side,
which was as it should be. It was to meet and talk with Herbert Ransome
Shaw that he had so abruptly ended his call.
"Look here," he said at once, "I want a few words with you."
"Exactly." Shaw spoke with suave affability. "It is to have a few words
that I am here."
"Where can we go?"
Shaw appeared to reflect.
"Do you mind coming to my rooms?" Laurie hesitated. "I live quite near,
and my quarters, though plain, are comfortable."
Anger surged up in the young man beside him. There was something almost
insulting in Shaw's manner as he uttered the harmless words, and in the
reassuring yet doubtful intonation of his voice.
"Confound him!" Laurie told himself. "The hound is actually hinting that
I'm afraid to go!" Aloud, he said brusquely, "All right."
"You have five minutes to spare? That's capital!"
Shaw was clearly both surprised and pleased. He strode forward with
short steps, rapid yet noiseless, and Laurie adapted his longer stride
to his companion's. He, too, was content. Now, at last, he reflected, he
was through with mysteries, and was coming to a grip with something
tangible.
CHAPTER X
THE LAIR OF SHAW
The walk was not the brief excursion Herbert Ransome Shaw had promised.
It was fifteen minutes before he stopped in front of a tall building,
which looked like an out-of-date storehouse, and thrust a latch-key into
a dingy door. The bolt was old and rusty. Shaw fumbled with it for half
a minute before it yielded. Then it grudgingly slipped back, and Laurie
followed his guide into a dark hall, which was cold and damp.
"They don't heat this building." The voice of Shaw came out of the
darkness. He had closed the door and was standing by Laurie's side,
fumbling in his pocket for something which proved to be a match-box.
"They don't light it, either," he explained, unnecessarily, as the blaze
of his match made a momentary break in the gloom. "But it's quite
comfortable in my room," he added reassuringly. "I have an open fire
there."
As he spoke he led the way down the long hall with his noiseless,
gliding steps. Laurie, following close behind him, reflected that the
place was exactly the sort the ophidian Shaw would choose for a lair, a
long black hole, ending in--what?
The match had gone out and he could see nothing. He kept close to his
guide. He almost expected to hear the creature's scales rattle as it
slid along. But snakes like warmth, and this place--Laurie shivered in
the chill and dampness of it. The next instant Shaw pushed open a door
and, standing back, waved his guest into a lighted room.
On first inspection it was a wholly reassuring room, originally intended
for an office and now turned into a combination of office and
living-apartment. A big reading-lamp with an amber shade, standing on a
flat writing-desk, made a pleasant point of illumination. Real logs,
large and well seasoned, burned with an agreeable crackle in the
old-fashioned fireplace. Before this stood two easy-chairs, comfortably
shabby; and at the arm of one of them a small table held a decanter,
glasses, a siphon, and a box of cigars.
As he took in these familiar details, Devon's features unconsciously
relaxed. He was very young, and rather cold, and the quick reaction from
the emotions he had experienced in the outer hall was a relief. Also,
Shaw's manner was as reassuring as his homely room. He dropped the
visitor's coat and hat on a worn leather couch, which seemingly served
him as a bed, and waved a hospitable hand toward an easy-chair.
Simultaneously, he casually indicated a figure bending over a table on
the opposite side of the room.
"My secretary," he murmured.
The figure at the table rose and bowed, then sat down again and
continued its apparent occupation of sorting squares of paper into a
long, narrow box. In the one glance Laurie gave it, as he returned the
other's bow with a casual nod, he decided that the "secretary" was
arranging a card-catalogue. But why the dickens should Shaw have a
secretary? On the other hand, why shouldn't he?
Laurie began to feel rather foolish. For a few moments, in that hall, he
had actually been on the point of taking Shaw seriously; and an
aftermath of this frame of mind had led him to turn a suspicious regard
on a harmless youth whose occupation was as harmless as he himself
looked. Laurie mentally classified the "secretary" as a big but meek
blond person, who changed his collars and cuffs every Wednesday and
Sunday, and took a long walk in the country on Sunday afternoons.
However, the fellow had pursuing eyes. Evidently his work did not need
his whole attention, for his pale blue eyes kept returning to the guest.
Once Laurie met them straight, and coolly stared them down. After this
they pursued him more stealthily. He soon forgot them and their owner.
Despite Shaw's hospitable gestures, Laurie was still standing. He had
chosen a place by the mantel, with one elbow resting upon it; and from
this point of vantage his black eyes slowly swept the room, taking in
now all its details--a type-writer, a letter-file, a waste-paper basket
that needed emptying, a man's worn bedroom slipper coyly projecting from
under the leather couch, a litter of newspapers.
It was all so reassuringly ordinary that he grinned to himself. Whatever
hold this little worm had on Doris--Shaw had even ceased to be a snake
at this point in Laurie's reflections--would be loosed after to-night;
and then she could forget the episode that had troubled her, whatever it
was.
At precisely this point in his meditations Laurie's eyes, having
completed a tour of the room and returned to the fireplace, made two
discoveries. The first was that the room had no windows. The second, and
startling one, was that it contained Doris's photograph. The photograph
stood on the mantel, in a heavy silver frame. It was a large print and a
good one. The girl's eyes looked straight into his. Her wonderful upper
lip was curved in the half-smile that was so familiar and so baffling.
"Well," the smile asked, "what do you think of it all, now that you are
here? Still a bit confusing, isn't it? For you didn't expect to find
_me_ here, seemingly so much at home; did you?"
In the instant when his eyes had found the photograph, Laurie had been
about to light the inevitable cigarette. The discovery arrested his hand
and held him for an instant, motionless. Then, with fingers that
trembled, he completed the interrupted action, threw the match into the
fire, and with blind eyes stared down into the flames.
In that instant he dared not look at Shaw. He was shaken by an emotion
that left him breathless and almost trembling. What was Doris's
photograph doing in this man's room? In the momentary amazement and fury
that overwhelmed him at the discovery, he told himself that it would not
have been much worse to find her actual presence here.
All this had taken but a moment. Shaw, hospitably busy with his decanter
and siphon, had used the interval to fill two glasses, and was now
offering one to his guest.
"No, thanks." Laurie spoke with abrupt decision.
"No?" Shaw looked pained. Then he smiled a wide smile, and Laurie,
seeing it and the man's pointed teeth, mentally changed him again from
the worm to the serpent. He understood Shaw's mental process. The fellow
thought he was afraid to drink the mixture. But what did it matter what
the fellow thought?
"Perhaps, then, you will have a cigar, and sit down comfortably for our
chat?"
Shaw himself set the example by dropping into one of the easy-chairs and
lighting a fat Perfecto. His smooth brown head rested in what seemed an
accustomed hollow of the chair back. His wide, thin lips were pursed in
sybaritic enjoyment of his cigar. He stretched himself in the warmth of
the fire, sleek, torpid, and loathsome.
"Mr. Shaw."
"Y-e-s."
Still standing, with his elbow braced against the mantel, the visitor
tossed his cigarette into the fire and looked down into his host's
projecting eyes. It appeared that Shaw roused himself with difficulty
from the gorged comfort of the moment. There was a perceptible interval
before he gave his guest his whole attention. Then he straightened in
his chair, and the projecting eyes took on their veiled but watchful
look.
"Yes," he repeated, more briskly.
In the brief interval Laurie had planned his little campaign. He would
address this creature as man to man; for perhaps, after all, there was
more of the man in him than he revealed.
"I am going to ask you to be frank with me."
"Yes?" Shaw let it go at that.
"When we met on the street it appeared that you were as anxious as I am
for this interview. Will you tell me at once why you brought me here,
and what you wish to say?"
"Willingly." Shaw flicked the ash off his cigar, and kept his eyes on
its lighted end as he went on: "I brought you here because I want you
out of the way."
"Why?"
"Because, my temperamental young friend, you are a nuisance. You are
interfering with my plans. I can't be bothered with you."
The sudden spark that in the old days would have warned Devon's friends
of an impending outburst appeared now in his black eyes, but he kept his
temper.
"Would you mind confiding these plans to me?" he suggested. "They would
interest me, profoundly."
Shaw shook his sleek brown head.
"Oh, I couldn't do that," he said, with an indulgent smile. "But I have
a proposition to make to you. Perhaps you will listen to it, instead."
"I'll listen to it," Laurie promised.
"It is short and to the point. Give me your word that you will stop
meddling in Miss Mayo's affairs, which are also my affairs," he added
parenthetically, "and that you will never make an effort to see her
again. As soon as you have given me this promise, I will escort you to
the front door and bid you an eternal farewell, with great pleasure."
"I'm looking forward to that pleasure, myself," confessed the visitor.
"But before we throw ourselves into the delights of it, suppose you
outline the other side of your proposition. I suppose it _has_ another
side."
Shaw frowned at his cigar.
"It doesn't sound pretty," he confessed, with regret.
"I'll judge of that. Let's have it."
"Well,"--Shaw sighed, dropped the cigar into the tray at his elbow, and
sat up to face the young man with an entire change of manner--"The rest
of it," he said, calmly, "is this. Unless you make that promise we can't
have the farewell scene we are both looking forward to so eagerly."
"You mean--" Laurie was staring at him incredulously--"you mean you
don't intend to let me leave here?"
Shaw shrugged deprecating shoulders.
"Oh, surely! But not immediately."
His guest turned and addressed the fire.
"I never listened to such nonsense in my life," he gravely assured it.
Shaw nodded.
"It does seem a little melodramatic," he conceded. "I tried to think of
something better, something less brusque, as it were. But the time was
so short; I really had no choice."
"What do you mean by that?" Laurie had again turned to face him.
"Exactly what I say. Think it over. Then let me have your decision."
Laurie moved closer to him.
"Get up," he commanded.
Shaw looked surprised.
"I am very comfortable here."
"_Get up!_" The words came out between the young man's clenched teeth.
Shaw again shrugged deprecating shoulders. Then, with another of his
wide, sharp-toothed grins, he rose and faced his visitor. At the desk
across the room the big blond secretary rose, also, and fixed his pale
blue eyes on his employer.
"Now," said Laurie, "tell me what the devil you are driving at, and what
all this mystery means."
"What an impulsive, high-strung chap you are!" Shaw was still grinning
his wide grin.
"You won't tell me?"
"Of course I won't! I've told you enough now to satisfy any reasonable
person. Besides, you said you had something to say to me."
He was deliberately goading the younger man, and Laurie saw it. He saw,
too, over Shaw's shoulder, the tense, waiting figure of the secretary.
He advanced another step.
"Yes," he said, "I've got three things to say to you. One is that you're
a contemptible, low-lived, blackmailing hound. The second is that before
I get through with you I'm going to choke the truth out of your fat
throat. And the third is that I'll see you in hell before I give you any
such promise as you ask. Now, I'm going."
He walked over to the couch and picked up his hat and coat. The
secretary unostentatiously insinuated himself into the center of the
room. Shaw alone remained immovable and unmoved. Even as Laurie turned
with the garments in his hands, Shaw smiled his wide smile and encircled
the room with a sweeping gesture of one arm.
"Go, then, by all means, my young friend," he cried jovially, "but
_how_?"
Laurie's eyes followed the gesture. He had already observed the absence
of windows. Now, for the first time, with a sudden intake of breath, he
discovered a second lack. Seemingly, there was no exit from the room. Of
course there was a door somewhere, but it was cleverly concealed,
perhaps behind some revolving piece of furniture; or possibly it was
opened by a hidden spring. Wherever it was, it could be found. In the
meantime, his manoeuver had given him what he wanted--more space in
which to fight two men. With a sudden movement Shaw picked up the
silver-framed photograph, and ostentatiously blew the dust off it. This
done, he held it out and looked at it admiringly.
"You will stay here, but you will not be alone," he promised, with his
wide, sharp-toothed grin. "This will keep you company. See how the
charming lady smiles at the prospect--"
He dropped the picture, which fell with a crash on the tiled flooring
around the fireplace. The glass broke and splintered. Shaw gasped and
gurgled under the strangling hold of the powerful fingers on his throat.
Lamp and table were overturned in the struggle that carried the three
men half a dozen times across the room and back.
Laurie, fighting two opponents with desperate fury, could still see
their forms and Shaw's bulging eyes in the firelight. Then he himself
gasped and choked. Something wet and sweet was pressed against his face.
He heard an excited whisper:
"Hold on! Be careful there. Not too much of that!"
A moment more and he had slipped over the edge of the world and was
dropping through black space.
CHAPTER XI
A BIT OF BRIGHT RIBBON
When Laurie opened his eyes blackness was still around him, a blackness
without a point of light. But as his mind slowly cleared, the picture he
saw in his last conscious moment flashed across his mental vision--the
dim, firelit room, the struggling, straining figures of Shaw and the
blond secretary. He heard again the hissed caution, "Not too much of
that!"
He sat up, dizzily. There _had_ been "too much of that." He felt faint
and mildly nauseated. His hands, groping in the darkness, came in
contact with a brick floor; or was it the tiling around the fireplace?
He did not know. He decided to sit quite still for a moment, until he
could pull himself together.
His body felt stiff and sore. There must have been a dandy fight in that
dingy old room, he reflected with satisfaction. Perhaps the other two
men were lying somewhere near him in the darkness. Perhaps they, too,
were knocked out. He hoped they were. But no, of course not. Again he
remembered the hurried caution, "Not too much of that."
He decided to light a match and see where he was, and he fumbled in his
pockets with the first instinct of panic he had known. If those brutes
had taken his match-box! But they hadn't. He opened it carefully, still
with a lingering suggestion of the panic. If he had been a hero of
romance, he reasoned, with a dawning grin, that box would have held
exactly one match; and he would have had to light that one very slowly
and carefully. Then, at the last instant, the feeble flicker would have
gone out, leaving it up to him to invent some method of manufacturing
light.
As it was, however, his fat match-box was comfortably filled, and his
cigarette-case, which he eagerly opened and examined by touch, held
three, no, four cigarettes. That was luck! His spirits rose, singing.
Now for a light!
He lit a match, held it up, looked around him, and felt himself grow
suddenly limp with surprise. He had expected, of course, to find himself
in Shaw's room. Instead, he was in a cellar, which resembled that room
only in the interesting detail that it appeared to have no exit. With
this discovery, his match went out. He lit another, and examined his new
environment as carefully as he could in the brief interval of
illumination it afforded.
The cellar was a perfectly good one, as cellars go. It was a small,
square, hollow cube in the earth, not damp, not especially cold, and not
evil-smelling. Its walls were brick. So was its floor, which was covered
with clean straw, a discovery that made its present occupant suddenly
cautious in handling his matches. He had no wish to be burned alive in
this underground trap. The place was apparently used as a sort of
store-room. There was an old trunk in it, and some broken-down pieces of
furniture. The second match burned out.
Affluent though he was in matches, it was no part of the young man's
plan to burn his entire supply at one sitting, as it were. For half an
hour he crouched in the darkness, pondering. Then, as an answer to
certain persistent questions that came up in his mind, he lit a third
match. He greatly desired to know where lay the outlet to that cellar,
and in this third illumination he decided that he had found it. There
must be some sort of a trap-door at the top, through which he had been
dropped or lowered. Those wide seams in the whitewashed ceiling must
mean the cracks due to a set-in door. Undoubtedly that door had been
bolted. Also, even assuming that it was not fastened, the ceiling was
fully eight feet above him. There was no ladder, there were no stairs.
His third match burned out.
In the instant of its last flicker he saw something white lying on the
straw beside him. He promptly lit another match, and with rising
excitement picked up the sheet of paper and read the three-line
communication scrawled in pencil upon it:
Out to-morrow. Flash-light, candles, cigarettes, and matches in box
at your left. Blankets in corner. Be good.
The recipient of this interesting document read it twice. Then, having
secured the box at his left--a discarded collar box, judging by its
shape and labels--he drew forth the flash-light, the cigarettes, the
matches, and the candles it contained. Lighting one of the candles, he
stuck it securely on a projecting ledge of the wall. By its wan light,
aided by the electric flash, he took a full though still dazed inventory
of his surroundings. The ophidian Shaw had puzzled him again.
He had handled Shaw very roughly for a time. He could still feel--and he
recalled the sensation with great pleasure--the thick, slippery neck of
the creature, and the way it had squirmed when he got his fingers into
it. Yet the serpent evidently bore no malice. Or--a searing thought
struck Laurie--having things his own way, he could afford to be
generous. In other words, he was now perfecting his plans, while he,
Laurie, was out of the way.
The promise of release to-morrow could mean, of course, only one
thing--that those plans, whatever they were, would be carried out by
then. And yet--and yet-- The boy put his head between his hands and
groaned. What was happening to Doris? Surely nothing could happen that
night! Or could it? And what would it be? Only a fool would doubt Shaw's
power and venom after such an experience as Laurie had just had, and
yet--Even now the skeptical interrogation-point reared itself in the
young man's mind.
One fact alone was clear. He must get out of this. But how? Flash-light
in hand, he made the short tour of the cellar, examining and tapping
every inch of the wall, the masonry, and the floor-work. Could he pile
up the furniture and so reach the door in the ceiling? He could not. The
articles consisted of the small, battered trunk, a legless,
broken-springed cot, and a clock whose internal organs had been removed.
Piled one on the other, they would not have borne a child's weight.
Laurie decided that he was directly under Shaw's room. Perhaps the
creature was there now. Perhaps he would consent to a parley. But shouts
and whistles, and a rain of small objects thrown up against the
trap-door produced no response.
He began to experience the sensations of a trapped animal. So vivid were
these, and so overpowering, as he measured his helplessness against the
girl's possible need of him, that he used all his will power in
overcoming them. Resolutely he reminded himself that he must keep cool
and steady. He would leave nothing undone that could be done. He would
shout at intervals. Perhaps sooner or later some night-watchman would
hear him. He would reach that trap-door if the achievement were humanly
possible. But first, last, and all the time he would keep cool.
When he had exhausted every resource his imagination suggested, he sat
in the straw, smoking and brooding, his mind incessantly seeking some
way out of his plight. At intervals he shouted, pounded, and whistled.
He walked the floor, and reëxamined it and the cellar walls. He looked
at his watch. It was three o'clock in the morning. He was exhausted, and
his body still ached rackingly.
Very slowly he resigned himself to the inevitable. Morning would soon
come. He must sleep till then, to be in condition for the day. He found
Shaw's blankets, threw himself on the straw, and fell into a slumber
full of disturbing dreams. In the most vivid of these he was a little
boy, at school; and on the desk before him a coiled boa-constrictor,
with Shaw's wide and sharp-toothed grin, ordered him to copy on his
slate an excellent photograph of Doris.
He awoke with a start, and in the next instant was on his feet. He had
heard a sound, and now he saw a light falling from above. He looked up.
A generous square opening appeared in the ceiling, and leading down from
it was the gratifying vision of a small ladder. Up the ladder Laurie
sprang with the swiftness of light itself. Subconsciously he realized
that if he was to catch the person who had opened that door and dropped
that ladder, he must be exceedingly brisk about it. But quick as he was,
he was still too slow. With a grip on each side of the opening, and a
strong swing, he lifted himself into the room above. As he had expected,
it held no occupant. What he had not expected, and what held him staring
now, was that it held not one stick of furniture.
Bare as a bone, bleak as a skeleton, it had the effect of grinning at
him with Shaw's wide white grin.
His first conscious reflection was the natural one that it was not
Shaw's room. He had been carried to another building. This room had a
window, which, of course, might have been concealed behind the
letter-files. Yet, bare as it was, it looked familiar. There was the
fireplace, with its charred logs. There, yes, there were the splinters
of the glass that had protected Doris's photograph. And, final
convincing evidence, there, forgotten in a corner, was the worn bedroom
slipper he had noticed under the couch the night before.
With eyes still bewildered, still incredulous, he stared around the
empty room. Before him yawned an open door, showing an uninviting vista
of dingy hall. He stepped across its threshold, and looked down the
winding passage of the night before. But why hadn't he seen the door? He
moved back into the empty room. A glance explained the little mystery.
The room had been freshly papered, door and all. The surface of the door
had been made level with the wall. When it was closed there was no
apparent break in the pattern of the wall-paper.
If there had been a chair in the room, young Mr. Devon would have sat
down at this point. His body wanted to sit down. In fact, it almost
insisted upon doing so. But just as he was relaxing in utter
bewilderment, he received another gentle shock. Above the old-fashioned
mantel was a narrow, set-in mirror, and in this mirror Laurie caught a
glimpse of the features of a disheveled young ruffian, staring fixedly
at him. He had time to stiffen perceptibly over this vision before he
realized that the disheveled ruffian was himself, a coatless, collarless
self, with shirt torn open, cuffs torn off, hair on end, features
battered and dirty, and bits of straw clinging to what was left of his
clothing.
For a long moment Laurie gazed at the figure in the glass, and as he
gazed his mingled emotions shook down into connected thought. Yes, there
_had_ been a dandy fight in this room last night, and he had the
satisfaction of knowing that his two opponents must have come out of it
as disheveled as himself. He had "had them going." Beyond doubt he could
have handled them both but for their infernal chloroform. Again he
recalled, with pleasure, the feeling of Shaw's thick, slippery neck as
it choked and writhed under the grip of his fingers. Incidentally he had
landed two blows on the secretary's jaw, sending him first into a corner
and the next time to the floor. It was soon after the second blow that
the episode of the chloroform occurred.
Straightening up, he began the hurried and elemental toilet which was
all the conditions permitted. He removed the pieces of straw from his
clothing, smoothed his hair, straightened his garments to conceal as
much of the damage to them as possible, and gratefully put on his coat,
which lay neatly folded on the floor, with his silk hat resting smugly
upon it. It required some courage to go out into the clear light of a
January morning in patent-leather pumps and wearing a silk hat. He would
find some one around the place from whom he could borrow a hat and get
the information he needed about the late tenants of this extraordinary
office. He looked at his watch. It was half-past seven. He had slept
later than he had realized. He had slept while Doris was in peril. The
reminder both appalled and steadied him.
With a last look around the dismantled room, he closed its door behind
him and went out into the winding hall. He hurried up and down its
length, poking his head into empty store-rooms and dusty offices, but
finding no sign of life.
At last a cheerful whistle in the lower regions drew him down a flight
of stairs to what appeared to be an underground store-room. Here a
bulky, overalled individual, looming large in the semi-darkness, stopped
in his labor of pushing about some boxes, and regarded Laurie with
surprise.
"Are you the watchman?" asked the latter, briskly.
"I am, that."
"Were you here last night?"
"I was."
"Was any one else here?"
"Divil a wan."
"Did you hear any noise during the night?"
"Divil a bit."
"Were you asleep?"
"I was," admitted the watchman, simply. His voice was Hibernian, and
rich with tolerant good humor.
"I want to make a trade with you." The new-comer held out his silk hat.
"Will you give me your hat, or any old hat you've got around the place,
for this?"
"I will," said the watchman calmly. Though good-humored, he seemed a man
of few words. "And who might you be?" he added.
"I came in last night with Mr. Shaw, and I spent the night here. When I
woke up," added Laurie drily, "I found that my host had moved."
The watchman sadly shook his head.
"You're a young lad," he said, with friendly sympathy. "'Tis a pity
you've got into these habits."
Laurie grinned at him. He had discovered that his money, like his watch,
was safe in his pockets. Taking out a bill, he showed it to his
companion.
"Do you like the looks of that?" he inquired.
"I do," admitted the watchman, warmly.
"Tell me all you know about Shaw, and take it for your trouble."
"I will," promptly agreed the other, "but 'tis not much you'll get for
your money, for 'tis little enough I know. The man you're talkin' about,
I suppose, is the fat fella with eyes you could hang yer hat on, that
had the back room on the ground floor."
"That's the one."
"Then all I know is, he moved in three days ago, and he moved out two
hours ago. What he did between-times I don't know. But he paid for the
room for a month in advance, so nobody's mournin' his loss."
"Didn't he say why he was going, or where?"
"Divil a word did he say. He was in a hurry, that lad. He had a gang of
three men with him, and they had the place empty in ten minutes. I lent
'em a hand, an' he give me a dollar, and that's the last I saw of him."
A sudden thought struck the watchman. "Where was you all the time?" he
asked with interest.
"In the cellar."
The watchman nodded, understandingly.
"You're too young for that sort of thing, me boy. Now, I'm no teetotaler
meself," he went on argumentatively. "A glass once in a while is all
right, if a man knows whin to stop. But--"
"How about that hat?" interrupted the restive victim of this homily.
"Have you got one handy?"
"I have."
The watchman disappeared into a shadowy corner and returned with a
battered derby.
"An' a fine grand hat it is!" he earnestly assured the new owner, as he
handed it over.
Laurie took the hat and put it on his head, where, being too small for
him, it perched at a rakish angle. He dropped the bank-note into his own
silk hat, and handed them to his companion, who accepted them without
visible emotion. Evidently, brief though his stay in the building had
been, Herbert Ransome Shaw had accustomed its watchman to surprises.
Laurie's last glimpse of the man as he hurried away showed him, with
extreme efficiency and the swift simultaneous use of two well-trained
hands, putting the silk hat on his head and the bill in his pocket.
Laurie rushed through the early East Side streets. He was not often
abroad at this hour, and even in his anxiety it surprised him to
discover how many were abroad so early in the morning. The streets
seemed full of pretty girls, hastening to factories and offices, and of
briskly stepping men and women, representing types that also would
ordinarily catch the attention of the young playwright. But now he had
neither thought nor eyes for them.
His urgent needs were first the assurance that Doris was safe, and next
the privacy of his own rooms, a bath, and a change of clothing.
Obviously, he could not present himself to Doris in the sketchy ensemble
he presented now; or could he? He decided that he could, and must. To
remain in his present state of suspense a moment longer than he need do
was unthinkable.
In a surprisingly short time he was in the studio building, facing the
man Sam had called Henry, a yawning night elevator man who regarded him
and his questions with a pessimism partly due to the lack of sleep and
fatigue. These combined influences led him to make short work of getting
rid of this unkempt and unseasonable caller.
"No, sah," he said. "Miss Mayo don' receive no callers at dis yere hour.
No, sah, Sam don' come on tell eight o'clock. No, sah, I cain't take no
messages to no ladies what ain't out dey beds yit. I got to perteck dese
yere folks, I has," he ended austerely.
The caller peeled a bill from his ever-ready roll, and the face of the
building's guardian angel changed and softened.
"P'raps I could jes' knock on Miss Mayo's do'," he suggested after a
thought-filled interval.
"That's all I want," agreed Laurie. "Knock at her door and ask her if
Mr. Devon may call at nine and take her out to breakfast. Tell her he
has something very important to say to her."
"Yaas, sah."
The guardian was all humility. He accepted the bill, and almost
simultaneously the elevator rose out of sight. The interval before its
return was surprisingly short, but too long for the nerves of the
caller. Laurie, pacing the lower hall, filled it with apprehensions and
visions which drove the blood from his heart. He could have embraced
Henry when the latter appeared, wearing an expansively reassuring grin.
"Miss Mayo she say, 'Yaas,'" he briefly reported.
Under the force of the nervous reaction he experienced, Laurie actually
caught the man's arm.
"She's there?" he jerked out. "You're sure of it?"
"Yaas, sah." Henry spoke soothingly. By this time he had made a
diagnosis of the caller's condition which agreed with that of the
night-watchman Laurie had just interviewed.
"She say, 'Yaas,'" he repeated. "I done say what you tol' me, and she
say, 'Tell de genman, Yaas,' jes' like dat."
"All right." Laurie nodded and strode off. For the first time he was
breathing naturally and freely. She was there. She was safe. In a little
more than an hour he would see her. In the meantime his urgent needs
were a bath and a change of clothing. As soon as he was dressed he would
go back to the studio building and keep watch in the corridors until she
was ready. Then, after breakfast, he would personally conduct her to
the security of Louise Ordway's home. Louise need not see her, if she
did not feel up to it, but she would surely give her asylum after
hearing Laurie's experiences of the night.
That was his plan. It seemed a good one. He did not admit even to
himself that under the air of sang-froid he wore as a garment, every
instinct in him was crying out for the sound of Doris's voice. Also, as
he hurried along, he was conscious that a definite change was taking
place in his attitude toward Herbert Ransome Shaw. Slowly, reluctantly,
but fully, he had now accepted the fact that "Bertie" represented a
force that must be reckoned with.
He inserted the latch-key into the door of his apartment with an inward
prayer that Bangs would not be visible, and for a moment he hoped it had
been granted. But when he entered their common dressing-room he found
his chum there, in the last stages of his usual careful toilet. He
greeted Laurie without surprise or comment, in the detached, absent
manner he had assumed of late, and Laurie hurried into the bath-room and
turned on the hot water, glad of the excuse to escape even a
tête-à-tête.
That greeting of Bangs's added the final notes to the minor symphony
life was playing for him this morning. As he lay back in the hot water,
relaxing his stiff, bruised body, the thought came that possibly he and
Rodney were really approaching the final breaking-point. Bangs was not
ordinarily a patient chap. He was too impetuous and high-strung for
that. But he had been wonderfully patient with this friend of his heart.
If it were true that the friendship was dying under the strain put upon
it, and Laurie knew how possible this was, and how swift and intense
were Bangs's reactions, life henceforth, however full it might be, would
lack an element that had been singularly vital and comforting. He tried
to think of what future days would be without Bangs's exuberant
personality to fill them with work and color; but he could not picture
them; and as the effort merely added to the gloom that enveloped him, he
abandoned it and again gave himself up to thoughts of Doris.
As he hurried into his clothes a strong temptation came to him to tell
Bangs the whole story. Then Bangs would understand everything, and he,
Laurie, would have the benefit of Rodney's advice and help in untying
Doris's tangle.
Doris! Again she swam into the foreground of his consciousness with a
vividness that made his senses tingle. He was sitting on a low chair,
lacing his shoes, and his fingers shook as he finished the task. He
dressed with almost frantic haste, urged on by a fear that, despite his
efforts, was shaping itself into a mental panic. Then, hair-brushes in
hand, he faced his familiar mirror, and recoiled with an exclamation.
Doris was not there, but her window was, and hanging from its center
catch was something bright that caught his eye and instantaneous
recognition.
It was a small Roman scarf, with a narrow, vivid stripe.
CHAPTER XII
DORIS TAKES A JOURNEY
Within five minutes he was in the studio building across the square,
frantically punching the elevator bell. Outwardly he showed no signs of
the anxiety that racked him, but presented to Sam, when that
appreciative youth stopped his elevator at the ground floor, the
sartorial perfection which Sam always vastly admired and sometimes
dreamed of imitating. But for such perfection Sam had no eyes to-day.
At this early hour--it was not much more than half-past eight--he had
brought down only two passengers, and no one but Laurie was waiting for
the upward journey. When the two tenants of the building had walked far
enough toward its front entrance to be out of ear-shot, Sam grasped
Laurie's arm and almost dragged him into the car. As he did so, he
hissed four words.
"She gone, Mist' Devon!"
"Gone! Where? When?"
Laurie had not expected this. He realized now that he should have done
so. His failure to take in the possibility of her going was part of his
infernal optimism, of his inability even now to take her situation at
its face-value. Sam was answering his questions:
"'Bout eight, jes' after Henry went and I come on. An aut'mobile stop in
front de do', an' dat man wid de eyes he come in. I try stop him fum
takin' de car, but he push me on one side an' order me up, like he was
Wilson hisself. So I took him to de top flo'. But when we got dere an'
he went to Miss Mayo's do', I jes' kep' de car right dere an' watch
him."
"Good boy! What happened?"
"He knock an' nuffin' happen. Den he call out, 'Doris, Doris,' jes' like
dat, an' she come an' talk to him; but she didn't open de do'."
"Could you hear what else he said?"
"No, sah. After dat he whisper to her, hissin' like a snake."
Laurie set his teeth. Even Sam felt the ophidian in Shaw.
"Go on," he ordered.
"Den I reckon Miss Mayo she put on a coat, an' dat man wait. I t'ought
he was gwine leave, an' I sho' was glad. But he stood dere, waitin' an'
grinnin' nuff to split his haid."
Laurie recognized the grin.
"'Bout two-three minutes she come out," Sam went on. "She had a big fur
coat an' a veil on. She look awful pale, an' when dey got in de el'vator
she didn' say a word. Dey wasn' nobody else in de car, an' it seem lak I
couldn't let her go off no-how, widout sayin' somethin'. So I say, 'You
gwine away, Miss Mayo?' De man he look at me mighty cold an' hard, an'
she only nod."
"Didn't she speak at all?"
"No, sah. She ain't say a word. She jes' stood stiff an' still, an' he
took her out to de car, an' dey bofe got in."
"Was it a limousine, a closed car?"
"Yaas, sah."
"Did the man himself drive it?"
"No, sah. He sat inside wid Miss Mayo. The man what drove it was
younger."
"What did he look like?"
"I couldn't see much o' him. He had a big coat on, an' a cap. But his
hair was yallah."
Laurie recognized the secretary.
"Which way did they go?"
"East."
They were standing on the top landing by this time, and Laurie strode
forward.
"I'll take a look around her rooms. Perhaps she left some message."
Sam accompanied him, and though he had not desired this continued
companionship, Laurie found a certain solace in it. In his humble way
this black boy was Doris's friend. He was doing his small part now to
help her, if, as he evidently suspected, there was something sinister in
her departure.
Entering the familiar studio, Laurie looked around it with a pang.
Unlike the quarters of Shaw, it remained unchanged. The room, facing
north as it did, looked a little cold in the early light, but it was
still stamped with the impress of its former occupant. The flowers he
had given her only yesterday hung their heads in modest welcome, and
half a dozen eye-flashes revealed half a dozen homely little details
that were full of reassurance. Here, open and face down on the
reading-table, was a book she might have dropped that minute. There was
the long mirror before which she brushed her wonderful hair and, yes,
the silver-backed brushes with which she brushed it. On the
writing-table were a pencil and a torn sheet of paper, as if she had
just dashed off a hurried note.
In short, everything in the room suggested that the owner, whose
presence still hung about it, might return at any instant. And yet,
there in the window, where he had half jokingly told her to place it,
hung the brilliant symbol of danger which he himself had selected.
He walked over and took it from the latch. In doing this, he discovered
that only half the scarf hung there, and that one end was jagged, as if
roughly and hastily cut off. He put the scarf into his pocket. As he did
so, his pulses leaped. Pinned to its folds was a bit of paper, so small
and soft that even the inquisitive eye of Sam, following his every
motion, failed to detect it. Laurie turned to the black boy.
"We'd better get out of here," he suggested, trying to speak carelessly
and leading the way as he spoke. "Miss Mayo may be back at any moment."
Sam's eyes bulged till they rivaled Shaw's.
"You don' t'ink she gone?" he stammered.
"Why should we think she has gone?" Laurie tried to grin at him.
"Perhaps she's merely taking an automobile ride, or an early train for a
day in the country. Certainly nothing here looks as if she had gone away
for good. People usually pack, don't they?"
Sam dropped his eyes. His face, human till now, took on its familiar,
sphinxlike look. He followed "Mist' Devon" into the elevator in silence,
and started the car on its downward journey. But as his passenger was
about to depart with a nod, Sam presented him with a reflection to take
away with him.
"She didn' _look_ lak no lady what was goin' on no excu'sion," he
muttered, darkly.
Laurie rushed back to his rooms with pounding heart and on the way
opened and read at a glance his first note from Doris. It was written in
pencil, seemingly on a scrap of paper torn from the pad he had seen on
her desk.
Long Island, I _think_. An old house, on the Sound, somewhere near
Sea Cliff. Remember your promise. _No police._
That was all there was to it. There was no address, no signature, no
date. The writing, though hurried, was clear, beautiful, and full of
character. In his rooms, he telephoned the garage for his car, and read
and reread the little note. Then, still holding it in his hand, he
thought it over.
Two things were horribly clear. Shaw's "plan" had matured. He had taken
Doris away. And--this was the staggering phase of the episode--she
seemed to have gone willingly. At least she had made no protest, though
a mere word, even a look of appeal from her, would have enlisted Sam's
help, and no doubt stopped the whole proceeding. Why hadn't she uttered
that word? The answer to this, too, seemed fairly clear. Doris had
become a fatalist. She had ceased to hide or fight. She was letting
things go "his way," as she had declared she would do.
Down that dark avenue she had called "his way" Laurie dared not even
glance. His mind was too busy making its agile twists in and out of the
tangle. Granting, then, that she had gone doggedly to meet the ultimate
issue of the experience, whatever that might be, she had nevertheless
appealed to him, Laurie, for help. Why? And why did she know
approximately where she was to be taken?
Why? Why? Why? Again and again the question had recurred to him, and
this time it dug itself in.
Despite his love for her (and he fully realized that this was what it
was), despite his own experience of the night before, he had hardly been
able to accept the fact that she was, must be, in actual physical
danger. When, now, the breath of this realization blew over him, it
checked his heart-beats and chilled his very soul. In the next instant
something in him, alert, watchful, and suspicious, addressed him like an
inner voice.
"Shaw will threaten," this voice said. "He will fight, and he will even
chloroform. But when it comes to a show-down, to the need of definite,
final action of any kind, he simply won't be there. He is venomous, he'd
_like_ to bite, but he has no fangs, and he knows it."
The vision of Shaw's face, when he had choked him during the struggle of
last night, again recurred to Laurie. He knew now the meaning of the
look in those projecting eyes. It was fear. Though he had carried off
the rest of the interview with entire assurance, during that fight the
creature had been terror-stricken.
"He'll have reason for fear the next time I get hold of him," Laurie
reflected, grimly. But that fear was of him, not of Doris. What might
not Doris be undergoing, even now?
He went to the little safe in the wall of his bedroom, and took from it
all the ready money he found there. Oh, if only Rodney were at home! But
Mr. Bangs had gone out, the hall man said. He also informed Mr. Devon
that his car was at the door.
The need of consulting Rodney increased in urgency as the difficulties
multiplied. Laurie telephoned to Bangs's favorite restaurant, to
Epstein's office, to Sonya's hotel. At the restaurant he was suavely
assured that Mr. Bangs was not in the place. At the office the voice of
an injured office boy informed him that there wasn't never nobody there
till half-past nine. Over the hotel wire Sonya's colorful tones held
enough surprise to remind Laurie that he could hardly hope that even
Rodney's budding romance would drive him to the side of the lady so
early in the morning.
He hung up the receiver with a groan of disgust, and busied himself
packing a small bag and selecting a greatcoat for his journey. Also, he
went to a drawer and took out the little pistol he had taken away from
Doris in the tragic moment of their first meeting.
Holding it in his hand, he hesitated. Heretofore, throughout his short
but varied life, young Devon had depended upon his well-trained fists to
protect him from the violence of others. But when those others were the
kind who went in for chloroform--and this time there was Doris to think
of. He dropped the revolver into his pocket, and shot into the elevator
and out on the ground floor with the expedition to which the operator
was now becoming accustomed.
His car was a two-seated "racer," of slender and beautiful lines. As he
took his place at the wheel, the machine pulsated like a living thing,
panting with a passionate desire to be off. Laurie's wild young heart
felt the same longing, but his year in New York had taught him respect
for its traffic laws and this was no time to take chances. Carefully,
almost sedately, he made his way to Third Avenue, then up to the
Queensboro Bridge, and across that mighty runway to Long Island. Here
his stock of patience, slender at the best, was exhausted. With a deep
breath he "let her out" to a singing speed of sixty miles an hour.
A cloud had obscured the sun, quite appropriately, he subconsciously
felt, and there were flakes of snow in the air. As he sped through the
gray atmosphere, the familiar little towns he knew seemed to come
forward to meet him, like rapidly projected pictures on a screen.
Flushing, Bayside, Little Neck, Manhasset, Roslyn, Glenhead, one by one
they floated past. He made the run of twenty-two miles in something
under thirty minutes, to the severe disapproval of several policemen,
who shouted urgent invitations to him to slow down. One of these was so
persistent that Laurie prepared to obey; but just as the heavy hand of
the law was about to fall, its representative recognized young Devon,
and waved him on with a forgiving grin. This was not the first time
Laurie had "burned up" that stretch of roadway.
At the Sea Cliff station he slowed up; then, on a sudden impulse,
stopped his car at the platform with sharp precision and entered the
tiny waiting-room. From the ticket window a pretty girl looked out on
him with the expression of sudden interest feminine eyes usually took on
when this young man was directly in their line of vision. With uncovered
curly head deferentially bent, he addressed her. Had she happened to
notice a dark limousine go by an hour or so before, say around half-past
eight or nine o'clock? The girl shook her head. She had not come on
duty until nine, and even if such a car had passed she would hardly have
observed it, owing to the frequency of the phenomenon and her own
exacting responsibilities.
Laurie admitted that these responsibilities would claim all the
attention of any mind. But was there any one around who might have seen
the car, any one, say, who made a specialty of lounging on the platform
and watching the pulsations of the town's life in this its throbbing
center? No, the girl explained, there were no station loafers around
now. The summer was the time for them.
Then perhaps she could tell him if there were any nice old houses for
rent near Sea Cliff, nice old houses, say, overlooking the Sound, and a
little out of the town? Laurie's newly acquired will power was proving
its strength. With every frantic impulse in him crying for action, for
knowledge, for relief from the intolerable tension he was under, he
presented to the girl the suave appearance of a youth at peace with
himself and the hour.
The abrupt transitions of the gentleman's interest seemed to surprise
the lady. She looked at him with a suspicion which perished under the
expression in his brilliant eyes. What he meant, Laurie soberly
explained, was the kind of house that might appeal to a casual tourist
who was passing through, and who had dropped into the station and there
had suddenly realized the extreme beauty of Sea Cliff. The girl
laughed. She was a nice girl, he decided, and he smiled back at her; for
now she was becoming helpful.
Yes, there was the Varick place, a mile out and right on the water's
edge. And there was the old Kiehl place, also on the Sound. These were
close together and both for rent, she had heard. Also, there was a house
in the opposite direction, and on the water's edge. She did not know the
name of that house, but she had observed a "To Let" sign on it last
Sunday, when she was out driving. Those were all the houses she knew of.
She gave him explicit instructions for reaching all three, and the
interview ended in an atmosphere of mutual regard and regret. Indeed,
the lady even left her ticket office to follow the gentleman to the door
and watch the departure of his chariot.
Laurie raced in turn to the Varick place and the Kiehl place. Shaw, he
suspected, had probably rented some such place, just as he had rented
the East Side office. But a very cursory inspection of the two old
houses convinced him that they were tenantless. No smoke came from their
chimneys, no sign of life surrounded them; also, he was sure, they were
not sufficiently remote from other houses to suit the mysterious Shaw.
The third house on his list was more promising in appearance, for it
stood austerely remote from its neighbors. But on its soggy lawn two
soiled children and a dog played in care-free abandon, and from the side
of the house came the piercing whistle of an underling cheerily engaged
in sawing wood and shouting cautions to the children. Quite plainly, the
closed-up, shuttered place was in charge of a caretaker, whose offspring
were in temporary possession of its grounds. Laurie inspected other
houses, dozens of them. He made his way into strange, new roads. Nowhere
was there the slightest clue leading to the house he sought.
It was one o'clock in the afternoon when, with an exclamation of actual
anguish, he swung his car around for the return journey to the station.
For the first time the hopelessness of his mission came home to him.
There must be a few hundred houses on the Sound near Sea Cliff. How was
he to find the right one?
Perhaps that girl had thought of some other places, or could direct him
to the best local real-estate agents. Perhaps he should have gone to
them in the first place. He felt dazed, incapable of clear thought.
As the car swerved his eye was caught by something bright lying farther
up the road, in the direction from which he had just turned. For an
instant he disregarded it. Then, on second thought, he stopped the
machine, jumped out, and ran back. There, at the right, by the wayside,
lay a tiny jagged strip of silk that seemed to blush as he stared down
at it.
Slowly he bent, picked it up, and, spreading it across his palm,
regarded it with eyes that unexpectedly were wet. It was a two-inch bit
of the Roman scarf, hacked off, evidently, by the same hurried scissors
that had severed the end in his pocket. He realized now what that
cutting had meant. With her hare-and-hounds' experience in mind, Doris
had cut off other strips, perhaps half a dozen or more, and had
undoubtedly dropped them as a trail for him to pick up. Possibly he had
already unseeingly passed several. But that did not matter. He was on
the right track now. The house was on this road, but farther up.
He leaped into the car again and started back. He drove very slowly,
forcing the reluctant racer to crawl along, and sweeping every inch of
the roadside with a careful scrutiny, but he had gone more than a mile
before he found the second scent. This was another bit of the vivid
silk, dropped on a country road that turned off the main road at a sharp
angle. With a heartfelt exclamation of thanksgiving, he turned into this
bypath.
It was narrow, shallow-rutted, and apparently little used. It might stop
anywhere, it might lead nowhere. It wound through a field, a meadow, a
bit of deep wood, through which he saw the gleam of water. Then, quite
suddenly, it again widened into a real road, merging into an avenue of
trees that led in turn to the entrance of a big dark-gray house, in a
somber setting of cedars.
Laurie stopped his car and thoughtfully nodded to himself. This was the
place. He felt that he would have recognized it even without that
guiding flame of ribbon. It was so absolutely the kind of place Shaw's
melodramatic instincts would lead him to choose.
There was the look about it that clings to houses long untenanted, a
look not wholly due to its unkempt grounds and the heavy boards over its
windows. It had been without life for a long, long time, but somewhere
in it, he knew, life was stirring now. From a side chimney a thin line
of smoke curled upward. On the second floor, shutters, newly unbolted,
creaked rustily in the January wind. And, yes, there it was; outside of
one of the unshuttered windows, as if dropped there by a bird, hung a
vivid bit of ribbon.
Rather precipitately Laurie backed his car to a point where he could
turn it, and then raced back to the main road. His primitive impulse had
been to drive up to the entrance, pound the door until some one
responded, and then fiercely demand the privilege of seeing Miss Mayo.
But that, he knew, would never do. He must get rid of the car, come back
on foot, get into the house in some manner, and from that point meet
events as they occurred.
Facing this prospect, he experienced an incredible combination of
emotions--relief and panic, recklessness and caution, fear and elation.
He had found her. For the time being, he frantically assured his
trembling inner self, she was safe. The rest was up to him, and he felt
equal to it. He was intensely stimulated; for now, at last, in his ears
roared the rushing tides of life.
CHAPTER XIII
THE HOUSE IN THE CEDARS
Less than half a mile back, along the main road, Laurie found a country
garage, in which he left his car. It was in charge of a silent but
intelligent person, a somewhat unkempt and haggard middle-aged man, who
agreed to keep the machine out of sight, to have it ready at any moment
of the day or night, and to accept a handsome addition to his regular
charge in return for his discretion. He was only mildly interested in
his new patron, for he had classified him without effort. One of them
college boys, this young fella was, and up to some lark.
Just what form that lark might take was not a problem which stirred
Henry Burke's sluggish imagination. Less than twenty hours before his
seventh had been born; and his wife was delicate and milk was seventeen
cents a quart, and the garage business was not what it had been. To the
victim of these obsessing reflections the appearance of a handsome youth
who dropped five-dollar bills around as if they were seed potatoes was
in the nature of a miracle and an overwhelming relief. His mind
centered on the five-dollar bills, and his lively interest in them
assured Laurie of Burke's presence in the garage at any hour when more
bills might possibly be dropped.
While he was lingeringly lighting a cigarette, Laurie asked a few
questions. Who owned the big house back there in the cedar grove, on the
bluff overlooking the Sound? Burke didn't know. All he knew, and freely
told, was that it had been empty ever since he himself had come to the
neighborhood, 'most two years ago.
Was it occupied now? No, and Burke was sure of that. Only two days
before he himself had driven past it and had noted its continued
closed-up, deserted appearance. It was a queer place, anyhow, he added;
one couldn't get to it from the main road, but had to follow a blind
path, which he himself had blundered into by chance, when he was
thinking about something else. He had heard, he now recalled, that it
was owned by some New Yorker who didn't like noise.
Laurie strolled out of the garage with a well-assumed air of
indifference to the perplexities of life, but his heart was racked by
them. As he hesitated near the entrance, uncertain which way to turn, he
saw that behind the garage there was a tool shed, and following the side
path which led to this, he found in the rear of the shed a workman's
bench, evidently little used in these cold January days. Tacitly, it
invited the discoverer to solitude and meditation, and Laurie gratefully
dropped upon it, glad of the opportunity to escape Burke's eye and
uninterruptedly think things out. But the daisied path of calm
reflection was not for him then.
Theoretically, of course, his plan would be to wait until night and
then, sheltered by the darkness, to approach the house, like a hero of
melodrama, and in some way secure entrance. But even as this ready-made
campaign presented itself, a dozen objections to it reared up in his
mind. The first, of course, was the delay. It was not yet two o'clock in
the afternoon, and darkness would not fall until five, even unwisely
assuming that it would be safe to approach the place as soon as darkness
came. In three hours all sorts of things might happen; and the prospect
of marking time during that interval, while his unbridled imagination
ran away with him, was one Laurie could not face.
On the other hand, what could he do in broad daylight? If he were seen,
as he almost certainly would be, Shaw, careless now, perhaps, in his
fancied security, would take precautions which might make impossible the
night's work of rescue. That, of course, assuming that Shaw was still at
the house among the cedars.
Was he? Laurie pondered that problem. Undoubtedly he had personally
taken Doris there, he and the secretary. But the chances seemed about
even that, having done this, he would leave her, for the day at least,
either in charge of the secretary or of some caretaker. In that case--in
that case--
The young man sprang to his feet. He would waste no more time in
speculation. He would _know_, and at once, who was in that house with
Doris. He swung back to the garage with determination in his manner, and
entered the place so unexpectedly that Burke, who had fancied him a mile
away, started at the sight of him. Then, with a contented smile, he
stilled his nerves and kept his eyes on the bill the visitor held before
him.
"See here," said the latter, "I want to do a tramp act."
"Sure you do!" Burke promptly acquiesced.
"Can you find me some ragged trousers and an old coat and cap? The worse
they look, the better I'll like it. And while you're about it, get me
some worn-out shoes or boots. How soon can you have them here?"
"I--I dunno." Burke was looking somewhat overwhelmed. "You're pretty
big," he mentioned. "Nothin' o' mine 'd fit you."
"Great Scott!" exploded the other. "I don't want 'em to _fit_! I'm not
going to a pink tea in them."
"But you want to get 'em _on_, don't you?" Burke demanded, with some
coldness.
"I do."
"Well, look at yerself; young fella, and then look at me."
Laurie obeyed the latter part of the injunction. The father of seven was
at least five inches shorter than he, and his legs and shoulders were
small in proportion. No coat or trousers he wore could possibly go on
the young Hercules before him.
"Oh, well," urged the latter, impatiently, "get some, somewhere. Here.
Take a run into town. Use my car if you like. Or go to some one you know
who's about my size. Only, mum's the word."
Five-dollar bills were in the air, fluttering before the eyes of the
garage-owner like leaves in Vallambrosa. He clutched them avidly.
"And hurry up," added his impatient patron. "Let's see you back here in
five minutes."
"Who'll look after the garage? Not that any one's likely to stop," the
proprietor gloomily admitted.
"I'll look after it. Come, get a move on!"
"Oh, all right! But I can't be back in no five minutes, nor in thirty
minutes, neither. I gotta go over to Nick Swanson's. He's about your
size."
"All right, all right! Go to it."
The impatient youth was fairly shooing him out of his own garage, but
with the sweet memory of those five-dollar bills to sustain him, Burke
was patient, even good-humored. One thing he could say about them
college lads: they was usually ready to pay well for their nonsense.
With a forgiving grin he hurried off.
Left alone, Laurie removed his coat and cap, searched the garage
successfully for grease, oil, waste, and shoe-blacking, and then,
establishing himself in front of a broken mirror in Burke's alleged
office, removed his collar and effected a startling transformation in
the appearance of his head, face, hands, and shirt.
Beginning in his college days, and continuing throughout his more recent
theatrical experiences, the art of make-up had increasingly interested
him. The people in his plays owed something to his developing skill, and
even one of the leading ladies had humbly taken suggestions from him.
But never in any stage dressing-room had young Mr. Devon secured a more
extraordinary change than the one he produced now, with the simple aids
at hand.
When Burke returned he found his garage in charge of an unwashed,
unkempt, unprepossessing young ruffian whom he stared at for a full
minute before he accepted him as the man he had left there. The ragged
trousers, the spotted "reefer" buttoned high around the neck, the dirty
cap pulled over the eyes, and the wholly disreputable broken shoes Burke
had brought with him completed the transformation of an immaculate young
gentleman into a blear-eyed follower of the open road.
Clad in these garments, Laurie took a few preliminary shuffles around
the garage, while the owner, watching him, slapped his thigh in
approval. So great was his interest in the "act," indeed, that when the
impersonator left the garage and started off, Burke showed a strong
desire to follow him and see the finish of the performance, a desire
that recalled for a fleeting instant the determined personality of the
young gentleman hidden under the tramp disguise.
At the last moment before leaving, Laurie took from his pocket the tiny
revolver he had brought with him, and holding it in his palm, studied it
in silence. Should he take it, or shouldn't he? He hesitated. Then habit
mastered caution. He dropped it among the discarded heap of clothes, and
picked up in its stead a small screw-driver, which he put into his
ragged pocket. That particular tool looked as if it might be useful.
Lounging up the country road, with his cold, bare, dirty hands in the
pockets of the borrowed reefer, he looked about with assurance. He
believed that in this unexpected guise, he could meet even Shaw and get
away with it; but he meant to be very careful and take no unnecessary
chances.
He cut across half a dozen fields, climbed half a dozen fences, was
fiercely barked at by a dozen dogs, more or less, and finally reaching
the grounds of the house in the cedars, approached it from the rear in
exactly the half-sneaking, half-cocky manner in which the average tramp
would have drawn near a shuttered house from one of whose chimneys smoke
was rising. It was a manner that nicely blended the hope of a hand-out
with the fear of a rebuff. Once he fancied he saw something moving among
the trees. He ducked back and remained quiet for some time. Then,
reassured by the continued silence, he emerged, sauntered to the back
entrance, and after a brief preliminary study of the shuttered windows,
assailed the door with a pair of grimy knuckles.
He had expected a long delay, possibly no response at all. But the door
opened as promptly as if some one had been standing there awaiting his
signal, and on its threshold a forbidding-looking woman, haglike as to
hair and features but cleanly dressed, stood regarding him with strong
disapproval. In the kitchen range back of her a coal fire was burning. A
tea-kettle bubbled domestically on its top, and cheek by jowl with this
a big-bellied coffee-pot exhaled a delicious aroma.
The entire tableau was so different from anything Laurie had expected
that for an instant he stared at the woman, speechless and almost
open-mouthed. Then the smell of the coffee gave him his cue. He suddenly
remembered that he had eaten nothing that day, and the fact gave a
thrill of sincerity to the professional whine in which he made his
request.
"Say, lady," he begged urgently, "I'm down an' out. Gimme a cup o'
cawfee, will yuh?"
Her impulse, he saw clearly, had been to close the door in his face.
Already her hand was automatically responding to it. But he whipped off
his dirty cap and, shivering on the door-step, looked at her with
Laurie's eyes, whose beauty no amount of disguise could wholly conceal.
There was real appeal in them now. Much, indeed almost everything,
depended on what this creature would do in the next minute. She
hesitated.
"I ain't had a mouthful since yesterday," croaked the visitor,
pleadingly and truthfully.
"Well, wait there a minute. I'll bring you a cup of coffee."
She turned from the door and started to close it, evidently expecting
him to remain outside, but he promptly followed her in, and her face,
hardening into quick anger, softened a little as she saw him cowering
over the big hot stove and warming his dirty hands. In silence she
filled a cup with coffee, cut a thick slice from a loaf of bread,
buttered it, and set the collation on the kitchen table.
"Hurry up and eat that," she muttered, "and then clear out. If any one
saw you here, I'd get into trouble."
Laurie grunted acquiescence and wolfed the food. He had not sat down,
and now, as he ate, his black eyes swept the room while he planned his
next move. Drying on a stout cord back of the stove were several
dish-towels. They gave him his first suggestion. His second came when he
observed that his hostess, evidently reassured by his haste, had turned
her back to him, and, bending a little, was examining the oven.
Noiselessly setting down the cup and the bread, he crept behind her,
and, seizing her in one powerful arm, covered her mouth with his free
hand. He could not wholly stifle the smothered shriek she gave.
For the next moment he had his hands full. Despite her wrinkles and her
gray hair, she was a strong woman, and she fought with a violence and a
false strength due to overwhelming fury and terror. It was so difficult
to control her without hurting her that all his strength was taxed. But
at last he brought her slowly down into a chair under the row of
dish-towels, and seizing two of these useful articles, as well as the
cord that held them, securely bound and gagged her. As he did so he
dropped his rôle and looked soberly into her furious eyes.
"Look here," he told her. "I'm not going to hurt you; be sure of that.
But I've got something to say, and I want you to stop struggling and
listen to it."
Under his quiet tones some of the frenzy died out of the eyes staring up
at him.
"I'm here to get Miss Mayo," he went on. "She's in the house, isn't she?
If she is, nod." There was a long moment of hesitation. At last the head
nodded. "Is there any one else in the house?" The head shook negatively.
"Is there no one here but you and Miss Mayo?" Laurie could hardly take
in this good luck, but again the head shook negatively. "Where is she?
Upstairs?"
The head nodded. He stepped back from the bound figure.
"All right," he said cheerfully. "Now I'm going to unbind you and let
you take me up to her. As a precaution, I shall leave the bandage on
your mouth and hands. But, being a sensible woman, of course you realize
that you have absolutely nothing to fear, unless you give us trouble. If
you try to do that, I shall have to lock you into a closet for a few
hours."
As he spoke he was unfastening the cord.
"Lead on," he invited, buoyantly.
There was an instant when he thought the struggle with her would begin
all over. He saw her draw herself together as if to spring. But she was
evidently exhausted by her previous contest. She was also subdued. She
rose heavily, and, taking her time to it, slowly led the way out of the
kitchen and along a hall to the front of the house.
"No tricks, remember," warned Laurie, keeping close behind her. "Play
fair, and I'll give you a year's salary when I take Miss Mayo out of
this."
She turned now and looked at him, and there was venom in the glance.
Violently and negatively, she shook her head.
"Don't you want the money?" he interrupted, deeply interested in this
phenomenon. "I'm glad to have met you," he politely added. "You're an
unexpected and a brand-new type to me."
She was walking forward again, with no sign now that she heard his
voice. Reaching a wide colonial staircase that led to the second floor,
she started the ascent, but so slowly that the young man behind her
uttered another warning.
"No tricks, remember," he repeated, cheerfully. "I'm afraid you're
planning to start something. I believe you're capable of falling
backward, and bowling me over like a ten-pin. But don't you do it. A
dark, musty closet is no place for a kind-hearted, sensible woman to
spend twenty-four hours in."
She ignored that, too, but now she moved more quickly, and her
companion, close at her heels, found himself in an upper hall,
approaching a door at the front of the house. Before this door his guide
now planted herself, with much of the effect of a corner-stone settling
into place.
Keeping a careful eye on her, he stretched out a long arm and tapped at
the panel. There was no answer. He tapped again. Still no answer. He
glanced at the enforcedly silent woman beside him, and something in her
eyes, a gleam of triumph or sardonic amusement, or both, was tinder to
his hot spirit.
"Have you led me to the wrong door?" he asked. He spoke very quietly,
but the tone impressed the woman. The gleam faded from her eyes. Hastily
she shook her head.
"If you have--" He nodded at her thoughtfully. Then he raised his voice.
"Doris," he called. "Doris!"
He heard a movement inside the room, an odd little cry, half
exclamation, half sob, and hurried steps approaching. The next minute
her voice came to him, in breathless words, with a tremor running
through them.
"Is it you?" she gasped. "Oh, is it you?"
"Yes, open the door."
"I can't. It's locked."
He stared at the unyielding wood before him.
"You mean they've locked you in?"
"Yes. Of course."
It would be, of course, Laurie reflected. That was Shaw's melodramatic
method.
"We'll change all that, in a minute." He stepped back from the door.
"What are you going to do?" The voice inside was anxious.
"Break it down, if necessary. Breaking down doors to get to you is my
specialty. You haven't forgotten that, I hope." He turned to the woman
beside him. "Have you the key to this?" She shook her head. "If you
have, you may as well hand it over," he suggested. "I shall certainly
break down the door if you don't; and it's a perfectly good door, with a
nice polish on it."
He saw her hesitate. Then, sullenly, she nodded.
"You have it, after all?" He spoke with the natural relief of an
indolent young man spared an arduous job. Again she nodded. "Where is
it?" She could make no movement with her bound hands, but with an
eye-flash she indicated the side of her gown. "In your pocket? Good.
I'll get it."
He got it, as he spoke. Holding it in his hand, he again addressed his
reluctant companion.
"When I unlock the door, you will go in first, and walk over to the
nearest corner and stand there with your back to the room. Also, here's
my last warning: I should be very sorry to do anything that would hurt
or inconvenience you. If you behave yourself I will soon take off that
gag. If you don't, I shall certainly lock you up. In either case, you
can't accomplish anything. So take your choice."
He unlocked the door, and the deliberate figure preceded him into the
room. In the next instant he saw nothing in the world but the eyes of
Doris, fixed on his. Then he knew that he was holding her hands, and
listening to her astonished gasp as she took in his appearance.
"My disguise," he explained. "I couldn't ride up as publicly as young
Lochinvar, though I wanted to. So I got this outfit." He turned around
for her inspection, deliberately giving her and himself time to pull up
under the strain of the meeting. At the first glimpse of her all his
assurance had returned. He was excited, triumphant. But as he again met
her eyes, something in their expression subdued him.
"It took longer to get here than I expected, but of course you knew I
was on the way," he said.
Her response was unexpected. Dropping into a low chair, she buried her
face in her hands and burst into a passion of tears. Aghast, he stared
at her, while from the corner the hag stared at them both. Laurie
dropped on his knees beside Doris and seized her hands, his heart
shaking under a new fear.
"They've been frightening you," he muttered, and was surprised by the
intensity of his terror and anger as he spoke. "Don't cry. They'll pay
for it."
She shook her head. "It isn't that," she sobbed at last.
"Then what is it?"
"I've brought you here. And I--I think it was a horrible thing to do.
I--I can't forgive myself."
Laurie groped vaguely amidst sensations of relief and the mental
confusion with which, someway, she always filled him.
"You're--all right, aren't you? And you expected me, didn't you?"
"Yes, but--Oh, don't make me talk! Let me cry."
She was crying as she spoke, rackingly, and every sob tore his heart.
Again, as so often before, he felt dazed and helpless before the puzzle
she presented. Yet, as always, there seemed nothing to do but obey her,
since she, and not he, invariably held the key to the strange situations
in which she placed him. Her tears made him feel desperate, yet he dared
not continue to hold her hands, and he did not know what to say. Rising,
but keeping his position beside her, he waited for her to grow calmer,
and as he waited he subconsciously took in the room.
It was a big front chamber, furnished as a sitting-room. Its broad
windows, with their cushioned window-seats, faced east. Besides the
window, it had two exits, the door by which he had entered, and another
door, half open, apparently leading into a bedroom. Its comfortable
easy-chairs were covered with gay chintz, its curtains were of the same
material, its reading-table held books and newspapers, and in its big
open fireplace fat logs were blazing. Shaw "did" his prisoners well.
Laurie remembered the cigarettes, matches, and blankets so thoughtfully
provided for himself. Like Shaw's own room, the chamber breathed simple
comfort. It was impossible to take in the thought of anything sinister
in connection with it until one observed the gagged woman in the corner,
and remembered the locked door.
"Well, Princess," he said at last, still trying to speak lightly, "this
isn't much of a donjon tower, is it?"
Her sobs, hysterical and due to overwrought nerves, had given place to
occasional sharp catches of the breath, like those uttered by a little
child whose "crying-spell" is almost over. She did not speak, but she
put out her hand to him, and he took it and held it closely, conscious
of a deep thrill as the small palm touched his.
"I want to talk to you," he said gently, "but I'd feel a lot more
comfortable if our chaperon were a little more remote. Can we put her
into this inner room?"
Doris nodded, and he waved the woman across the threshold of the
bedroom. She would be safe there. He had observed that the windows of
the inner room were still barred and shuttered. Seemingly, in all the
big house, this up-stairs sitting-room alone had opened its heart to the
sun.
"Are you really alone in the house?" he asked.
"Yes, I think so; I'm almost sure of it."
"Then there's no mad rush about leaving?"
"No--I--I think not."
He observed her hesitation but ignored it. He drew two big chairs close
to the open fire, and, leading Doris to one, seated her in it, and took
the other himself, turning it to face hers. As he did so, she recoiled.
"You look so dreadful!" she explained with a shudder.
"I suppose I do. But forget that and tell me something. When did Shaw
leave?"
"Within half an hour of the time he brought me here."
"When is he coming back?"
"To-night, I think."
"And he's left you here alone, with no one around but this woman?"
Laurie asked, incredulously. Here was another situation hard to
understand.
"His secretary is somewhere around, a wretched jackal that does what
he's told."
"Oh!" This was news. "Where is he?"
"Out in the garage. He has a room there. I heard him say he had no sleep
last night, and that he expected to get some to-day."
Laurie rose.
"I'll take a look around and see where he is," he suggested. "We can't
have him catching on to my little visit and telephoning to Shaw, you
know."
As he spoke he was walking toward the door that led into the hall, and
now he confidently put out his hand and turned the knob. His expression
changed. He gave the knob a violent twist, then, setting his shoulder
against the jamb, tried to wrench the door open. It did not yield.
Doris, watching him wide-eyed, was the first to speak.
"Locked?" she whispered.
"Locked," corroborated Laurie. He nodded thoughtfully. Several things,
small in themselves, which had puzzled him, were clearing up. Among
others, the housekeeper's persistent efforts to gain time were now
explained. Shaw had not been so careless as he had seemed. The meek
blond secretary with the pursuing eyes and the chloroforming habit was
certainly in the house.
CHAPTER XIV
LAURIE CHECKS A REVELATION
Laurie shook his head.
"That was rather stupid of him," he remarked, mildly. "It's almost as
easy to force open a locked door from the inside as from the outside."
"I know." Doris was again breathless. "But in the meantime he's
telephoning to Shaw."
"I don't think so." Laurie, his hands in his pockets, was making a
characteristic turn around the room. "What has he to gain by
telephoning? Shaw's coming back anyway in a few hours; and in the
meantime the secretary has got me safely pocketed, or thinks he has. I
have an idea he'll stand pat. You see, he doesn't know about my talent
for opening locked doors."
He strolled back to the door as he spoke and examined the lock. Then,
appreciatively, he drew from his pocket the screw-driver he had
thoughtfully brought from the garage.
"I fancied this might be useful. It will take me just about four minutes
to open that door," he announced. "So get on your things and be ready
to start in a hurry."
"Do you imagine that we can get away now, in broad daylight?" She seemed
dazed by the suggestion.
"Why not? You want to get out of here, don't you?"
"Yes--I--of course I do!"
"You don't seem very sure of it."
Laurie was smiling down at her with his hands still in his pockets, but
there was an expression in his eyes she had never seen there before, an
expression keen, cold, almost but not quite suspicious.
"Yes, but--you don't understand. Shaw has other men on watch, two of
them."
"Where?"
"In the grounds. One in the front and the other in the back."
The new-comer mentally digested this unwelcome information.
"If we wait till it's dark," said the girl, "we'll have a better
chance."
"Unless Shaw gets back in the meantime." He was still watching her with
that new look in his eyes. Then, briskly, he returned to his interest in
the doorlock.
"In any case," he casually remarked, "we don't want to be jailed here."
She said no more, but sat watching him as he worked, deftly and
silently. In little more than the time he had predicted he opened the
door and held it wide.
"Any time you would like to pass out," he invited, then checked himself
and vanished in the dimness of the hall. The girl left behind heard the
sounds of running feet, of a sharp scuffle, of a few words spoken in a
high, excited voice. Then Laurie reëntered the room, pushing the
secretary before him. At present the youth looked anything but meek. His
blond hair was on end, his tie was under one ear, his pale eyes were
bright with anger, and he moved spasmodically, propelled by jerks from
behind.
"I don't like this young man," said Laurie, conversationally. "I never
have. So I'm going to put him where for a few hours he can't annoy us.
Is there a good roomy closet on this floor? If there is, kindly lead us
to it."
"Say, hold on!" cried the blond youth, in outraged tones. "I'm sick of
this."
"Shut up." Laurie shook him gently. "And cheer up. You're going to have
a change. Lead on, please."
Thus urged, and further impelled, the secretary obediently led the way
to a closet at the far end of the upper hall. It was fairly commodious,
and full of garments hanging on pegs and smelling oppressively of
camphor. It afforded an electric-light fixture, and Laurie, switching on
the light, emphasized this advantage to the reluctant new occupant, who
unwisely put up a brief and losing fight on its threshold.
"You may read if you like," Laurie affably suggested, when this had been
suppressed. "I'll bring you some magazines. You may even smoke. Mr. Shaw
and I always treat our prisoners with the utmost courtesy. You don't
smoke? Excellent! Safer for the closet, and a fine stand for a worthy
young man to take. Now, I'll get the magazines for you."
He did so, and the blond secretary accepted them with a black scowl.
"I'm afraid," observed Laurie regretfully, "he has an ungrateful
nature."
He locked the door on the infuriated youth, pocketed the key, and faced
Doris, who had followed the brief procession. The little encounter had
restored his poise.
"What next?" he asked, placidly.
Her reply was in the nature of a shock.
"I'd like to have you wash up."
He raised his eyebrows.
"And spoil my admirable disguise? However, if you insist, I suppose I
can get most of the effect again with ashes, if I have to. Where's a
bath-room?"
She indicated a door, and returned to her room. He made his ablutions
slowly and very thoughtfully. There were elements in this new twist of
the situation which did not tally with any of his former hypotheses.
Doris, too, was doing some thinking on her own account. When he returned
to the sitting-room she wore the air of one who has pondered deeply and
has come to a conclusion.
"What do your friends call you?" she abruptly asked.
"All kinds of things," admitted the young man. "I wouldn't dare to
repeat some of them." Under the thoughtful regard of her red-brown eyes
his manner changed. "My sister calls me Laurie," he added soberly.
"May I?"
"By all means, if you'll promise _not_ to be a sister to me."
"Then--Laurie--"
"I like that," he interrupted.
"So do I. Laurie--I--I'm going to tell you something."
He waited, watching her; and under the renewed friendliness of his black
eyes she stopped and flushed, her own eyes dropping before his. As if to
gain time she changed her position in the chair where she sat, and
leaned forward, an elbow on its arm, her chin in one hand, her gaze on
the fire. His perception sharpened to the knowledge that something
important was coming, and that it was something she was afraid to tell.
She had keyed herself up to it, but the slightest false move on his part
might check the revelation. Therefore, though every impulse in him
responded to her first intimate use of his name, he dropped negligently
into the chair facing hers, tenderly embraced his knees with both arms,
and answered with just the right accent of casual interest and
interrogation.
"Yes?" he said.
"Please smoke." Again she was playing for time. "And--and don't look at
me," she added, almost harshly. "I--I think I can get it out better if
you don't."
His answer was to swing his chair around beside hers, facing the blazing
logs, and to take out his case and light a cigarette.
"I'm going to tell you everything," she said in a low tone.
"I'm glad of that."
"I'm going to do it," she went on slowly, "for two reasons. The first is
that--that you've lost faith in me."
This brought his eyes around to hers in a quick glance. "You're wrong
about that."
She shook her head. "Oh, no, I'm not. You showed it almost from the
moment you came, and there was an instant when you thought that my
suggestion to wait till dark to get away meant a--a sort of ambush."
He made no reply to this, and she said urgently, "Didn't you? Come, now.
Confess."
He reflected for a moment.
"The idea did cross my mind," he admitted, at last. "But it didn't
linger. For one reason, it was impossible to reconcile it with Shaw's
desire to keep me out of the way. That, and this, are hard to
understand. But no harder to understand," he went on, "than that you
should willingly come here and yet send for me, and then quite obviously
delay our leaving after I get here."
Again her eyes dropped before his brilliant, steady glance.
"I know," she muttered, almost inaudibly. "It's all--horrible. It's
infinitely worse than you suspect. And that's why I'm going to tell you
the truth, big as the cost may be to me."
"Wait a minute," he interrupted. "Let's get this straight. You're
telling me, aren't you, that any revelation you make now will react on
you. Is that it?"
"Yes."
"You will be the chief sufferer by it?"
"Yes."
"Will it help you any to have me understand? Will it straighten out the
trouble you're in?"
She considered her answer.
"The only help it will give me will be to know that you do understand,"
she said at last; "to know that--that--you're not suspecting things
about me."
"And it will make things hard for you, otherwise, to have me know?" he
persisted.
"Yes." This time her answer was prompt. "It will end everything I am
trying to do, and destroy what I have already done."
Laurie threw his half-burned cigarette into the fire, as if to lend
greater emphasis to his next words.
"That settles it," he announced. "I won't listen to you."
She turned to look at him.
"But you must," she faltered. "I'm all ready to tell you. I've been
working myself up to it ever since you came."
"I know. I've watched the process, and I won't have another word." He
lit a second cigarette, drew in a mouthful of smoke, and sent it forth
again in a series of widening rings. "Your conversation is extremely
uninteresting," he explained; "and look at the setting we've got for
something romantic and worth while. This cozy room, this roaring
fire,"--he interrupted himself to glance through the nearest window--"a
ripping old snow-storm outside, that's getting worse every minute, and
the exhilarating sense that though we're prisoners, we've already taken
two perfectly good prisoners of our own; what more could one ask to make
an afternoon in the country really pleasant?"
He stopped, for she was crying again, and the sight, which had taxed his
strength an hour earlier, overtaxed it now. She overwhelmed him like a
breaker. He rose, and going close to her, knelt beside her chair.
"Doris," he begged, brokenly. "Don't, don't cry! I can't tell you how it
makes me feel. I--I can stand anything but that." He seized her hands
and tried to pull them away from her face. "Look at me," he urged. "I've
got all sorts of things to say to you, but I won't say them now. This
isn't the time or the place. But one thing, at least, I want you to
know. I _do_ trust you. I trust you absolutely. And whatever happens,
whatever all this incredible tangle may mean, I shall always trust you."
She wiped her eyes and looked into his, more serious in that moment than
she had ever seen them.
"I will stop," she promised, with a little catch in her voice. "But
please don't think I'm a hysterical fool. I'm not crying because I'm
frightened, but because--because--Laurie, you're so splendid!"
For a moment his hands tightened almost convulsively on hers. In the
next instant he rose to his feet, walked to the fireplace, and with an
arm on the mantel, stood partly turned away from her, looking into the
fire. He dared not look at her. In that moment he was passionately
calling on the new self-control which had been born during the past
year; and, at his call, it again awoke in him, ready for its work. This,
he had just truly said to Doris, was not the time nor the place to tell
her what was in his heart. Only a cad would take advantage of such an
opportunity. He had said enough, perhaps too much. He drew a deep breath
and was himself.
"I told you you'd find all sorts of unexpected virtues in me," he
lightly announced; and it was the familiar Laurie who smiled down at
her. "There are dozens more you don't dream of. I'll reveal them to you
guardedly. They're rather overwhelming."
She smiled vaguely at his chatter, but it was plain that she was
following her own thoughts.
"The most wonderful thing about you," she said, "is that through this
whole experience, you've never, for one single instant, been 'heroic.'
You're not the kind to 'emote'!"
"Great Scott!" gasped Laurie, startled. "I should hope not!"
He could look at her now, and he did, his heart filled with the
satisfying beauty of her. She was still leaning forward a little in the
low chair, with her hands unconventionally clasped around one knee, and
her eyes staring into the fire. A painter, he reflected, would go mad
over the picture she made; and why not? He himself was going mad over
it, was even a little light-headed.
She wore again the gown she had worn the first day he saw her, and the
memory of that poignant hour intensified the emotion of this one. Taking
her in, from the superb masses of hair on her small head to the
glittering buckles on her low house-shoes, Laurie knew at last that
whoever and whatever this girl might be, she was the one whose
companionship through life his hungry heart demanded. He loved her. He
would trust her, blindly if he must, but whatever happened fully and for
all time.
There had been a long silence after his last words, but when she spoke
it was as if there had been no interval between his chatter and her
response.
"Almost any other man would have been 'heroic,'" she went on. "Almost
any other man would have been excited and emotional at times, and then
would have been exacting and difficult and rebellious over all the
mystery, and the fact that I couldn't explain. I've set that pace
myself," she confessed. "I haven't always been able to take things
quietly and--and philosophically. The wonderful thing about you is that
you've never been overwhelmed by any situation we've been in together.
You've never even seemed to take them very seriously. And yet, when it
came to a 'show-down,' as Shaw says, you've been right there, always."
He made no answer to this. His mind was caught and held by the phrase
"as Shaw says." So she and Shaw had talked him over! He recalled the
silver-framed photograph of her on Shaw's mantel, the photograph whose
presence had made him see red; and a queer little chill went down his
spine at this reminder of their strange and unexplained association.
Then, resolutely, he again summoned his will and his faith, and became
conscious that she was still speaking.
"You're the kind," she said, "that in the French Revolution, if you had
been a victim of it, would have gone to the guillotine with a smile and
a jest, and would have seen in the experience only a new adventure."
At that, he shook his head.
"I don't know," he said slowly, and with the seriousness he had shown
her once or twice before. "Death is a rather important thing. I've been
thinking about it a good deal lately."
"_You_ have!" In her astonishment, she straightened in her chair. "Why?"
"Well," he hesitated, "I haven't spoken about it much, but--the truth
is, I'm taking the European war more seriously than I have seemed to. I
think America will swing into the fight in a month or two more; I really
don't see how we can keep out any longer. And I've made up my mind to
volunteer as soon as we declare war."
"Oh, Laurie!"
That was all she said, but it was enough. Again he turned away from her
and looked into the fire.
"I want to talk to you about it sometime," he went on. "Not now, of
course. I'm going in for the aviation end. That's my game."
"Yes, it would be," she corroborated, almost inaudibly.
"I've been thinking about it a lot," he repeated. There was an intense,
unexpected relief in this confidence, which he had made to no one else
but Bangs, and to him in only a casual phrase or two. "That's one reason
why it has been hard for me to get down to work on a new play, as Bangs
and Epstein have been hounding me to do. I was afraid I couldn't keep
my mind on it. All I can think of, besides you--" he hesitated, then
went on rather self-consciously--"are those fellows over there and the
tremendous job they're doing. I want to help. I'm going to help. But I'm
not going into it with any illusions about military bands and pretty
uniforms and grand-stand plays. It's the biggest job in the world
to-day, and it's got to be done. But what I see in it in the meantime
are blood and filth and stench and suffering and horror and a limitless,
stoical endurance. And--well, I know I'm going. But I can't quite see
myself coming home."
Save for his revelation on the morning they met, this was the longest
personal confidence Laurence Devon had ever made to another human being
except his sister Barbara. At its end, as she could not speak, he
watched her for a moment in silence, already half regretting what he had
said. Then she rose with a fiercely abrupt movement, and going to the
window stood looking at the storm. He followed her and stood beside her.
"Laurie," she said suddenly.
"Yes?"
"I can't stand it."
"Can't stand it?"
He repeated her words almost absently. His eyes were on a stocky figure
moving among the trees below. It kept in constant motion and, he
observed with pleasure, it occasionally stamped its feet and swung its
arms as if suffering from the cold.
"I can't stand this situation."
"Then we must clear it up for you." He spoke reassuringly, his eyes
still on the active figure. "Is that one of our keepers, down there?"
She nodded.
"He has instructions to watch the front entrance and windows. There's
another man watching the rear."
"He didn't watch very closely," he reminded her. "See how easily I got
in." He studied the moving figure. "Doris," he said slowly, "I'd bet a
thousand dollars against one doughnut that if I walked out of the house
and up to that fellow, he'd run like a rabbit. I don't know why I think
so, but I do."
She shook her head.
"Oh, no, he wouldn't!"
"What makes you think he wouldn't?"
"Because I heard Shaw give him his orders for just that contingency."
Her companion took this in silence.
"May I ask what they were?" he said at last.
"No, I can't tell you."
"I hope he hasn't a nice little bottle of chloroform in his overcoat
pocket, or vitriol," murmured Laurie, reflectively. "By the way," he
turned to her with quickened interest, "something tells me it's long
after lunch-time. Is there any reason why we shouldn't eat?"
She smiled.
"None whatever. The ice-box contains all the things a well regulated
ice-box is supposed to hold. I overheard Shaw and his secretary
discussing their supplies."
"Good! Then we'll release Mother Fagin long enough to let her cook some
of them."
He strolled to the bedroom door. On a chair facing it the woman sat and
gazed at him with her fierce eyes.
"Would you like a little exercise?" he politely inquired. There was no
change of expression in the hostile face. "Because if you would," he
went on, "and if you'll give me your word not to cry out, give any kind
of alarm or signal, or start anything whatever, I'll take that bandage
off your mouth, and let you cook lunch for us and for yourself."
The fierce eyes set, then wavered. He waited patiently. At last the head
nodded, and he expeditiously untied the bandage.
"The very best you've got, please," he instructed. "And I _hope_ you can
cook. If you can't, I'll have to do it myself. I'm rather gifted that
way."
"I can cook," avowed the old woman, sullenly.
"Good work! Then go on your joyous way. But if you feel an impulse to
invite into your kitchen any of the gentlemen out in the grounds, or to
release the secretary, restrain it. They wouldn't like it in here. They
wouldn't like it at all."
A strange grimace twisted the woman's sardonic features. He interpreted
it rightly.
"I'm glad you agree with me," he said. "Now, brook-trout, please, and
broiled chickens, and early strawberries and clotted cream."
She looked at him with a return of the stoic expression that was her
habitual one.
"We ain't got any of those things," she declared.
"We ain't?" Her guest was pained. "What have we got?"
"We got ham and eggs and lettuce and milk and coffee and squash pie."
He sighed.
"They will do," he said resignedly. "Do you think you could have them
ready in five minutes?"
The luncheon was a cheerful meal, for Laurie made it so. When it was
finished he went to the kitchen window, opened it, and carefully
arranged several hot ham sandwiches in a row.
"For the birdies," he explained. "For the cold little birdies out in the
grounds."
He even chirped invitingly to the "birdies," but these latter,
throughout his visit, showed a coy reluctance to approach the house. He
caught another odd grimace on the features of the old woman, who was
now washing the dishes.
"We won't confine you to any one room this afternoon," he told her.
"Wander where your heart leads you. But remember, you're on parole. Like
ourselves, you must forego all communication with the glad outer world.
And leave the secretary where he is, unless you want him hurt."
"This storm will be a good thing for us," he mentioned to Doris, when
they had returned to the up-stairs sitting-room. "It will be dark soon
after four, and the snow will cover our footsteps. But I'm inclined to
think," he added, reflectively, "that before we start I'd better go out
and truss up those two birds in the grounds."
She showed an immediate apprehension.
"No, no! you mustn't think of that!" she cried. "Promise me you won't."
He shrugged his shoulders.
"As you wish, of course. But if they interfere when we're getting
started, surely you'll let me rock them to sleep, won't you?"
"I--I don't know. Something may happen! Oh, I wish you hadn't come!" She
was clearly in a panic, a genuine one. It seemed equally clear that her
nerves, under the recent strain put upon them, were in a bad way. All
this was Shaw's work, and as he realized it Laurie's expression changed
so suddenly that the girl cried out: "What is it? What's the matter?"
He answered, still under the influence of the feeling that had shaken
him.
"I was just thinking of our friend Bertie and of a little bill he's
running up against the future. Sooner or later, and I rather think it
will be sooner, Bertie's going to pay that bill."
She did not move, but gave him a look that made him thoughtful. It was
an odd, sidelong look, frightened, yet watchful. He remembered that once
or twice before she had given him such a look. More than anything else
that had happened, this glance chilled him. It was not thus that the
woman he loved should look at him.
Suddenly he heard her gasp, and the next instant the silence of the room
was broken by another voice, a voice of concentrated rage with a snarl
running through it.
"So you're here, are you?" it jerked. "By God, I'm sick of you and of
your damned interference!"
He turned. Shaw was standing just inside the door. But he was not the
sleek, familiar, torpid figure of recent encounter. He seemed mad clean
through, fighting mad. His jaws were set; his sleek head and heavy
shoulders were thrust forward as if he were ready to spring, and his
protuberant eyes had lost their haze and held a new and unpleasant
light.
But, angry though he appeared, Herbert Ransome Shaw was taking no
chances in this encounter with his undesired guest. Behind him shone the
now smug countenance of the blond secretary, and on each side he was
flanked by another man. Powerful fellows these two seemed, evidently
Italian laborers, gazing at the scene uncomprehendingly, but ready for
any work their master set them. In stupefaction, Laurie stared at the
tableau, while eight eyes unwinkingly stared back at him. Then he
nodded.
"Well, Bertie," he said pleasantly, "you're outdoing even yourself in
the size of this delegation. Four to one. Quite some odds." His voice
changed. "You contemptible coward! Why don't you take me on alone? Have
you got your chloroform cone?"
The complexion of Shaw, red with cold, darkened to an apoplectic purple.
"You'll soon find out what we've got," he barked, "and what's coming to
you. Now, are you going to put up a fight against four, or will you go
quietly?"
"I think," said Laurie thoughtfully, "I'd rather go quietly. But just
where is it I'm going?"
"You'll soon know." Shaw was carrying a coil of rope, light but strong,
and now he tossed it to one of the Italians.
"Tie him up," he curtly ordered.
"Oh, no," said Laurie, backing a step. "Tut, tut! I wouldn't advise
that. I really wouldn't. It would be one of those rash acts you read
about."
Something in his voice checked the forward stride of the Italian with
the rope. He hesitated, glancing at Shaw. With a gesture, the latter
ordered the two men through the door.
"Wait just outside," he directed. He turned to Laurie. "Out you go!" he
ordered brusquely.
Laurie hesitated, glancing at Doris, but he could not meet her eye. At
the window, with her back to the room, she stared out at the storm. Even
in that moment her attitude stunned him. Also, he felt an unconquerable
aversion to anything in the nature of a struggle before her. Perhaps,
once outside the room, he could take on those ruffians, together or in
turn.
Without another word, he crossed the threshold into the hall. Before him
hurried the two Italians. Behind him crowded Shaw and the secretary. He
walked forward perhaps six strides. Then, as the side railing of the
stairway rose beside him, he saw his opportunity. He struck out right
and left with all his strength, flooring one of the Italians and
sending the second helpless against the wall. In the next instant he had
leaped over the slender rail of the stairway, landed half-way down the
stairs, and made a jump for the front door.
As he had expected, the door was locked. Shaw, if he had entered that
way, had not been too hurried to attend to this little detail. Laurie
had just time to brace his back against it when the four men were upon
him.
The ten minutes that followed were among the most interesting of young
Devon's life. He had always liked a good fight, and this episode in the
great dim hall brought out all that was bloodthirsty and primitive in
him. For in the room above was Doris, and these men, whoever they were,
stood in the way of her freedom and happiness.
If he could have taken them on one by one he could have snapped their
necks in turn, and he would have done so without compunction. As it was,
with four leaping at him simultaneously, he called on all his reserve
strength, his skill in boxing, and the strategy of his foot-ball days.
His first blow sent the blond secretary to the floor, where he lay
motionless. After that it was hard to distinguish where blows fell. What
Devon wanted and was striving to reach was the throat of Shaw, but the
slippery thing eluded him.
He fought on with hands and feet, even drawing, against these odds, on
the _savate_ he had learned in Paris. Blood flowed from his nose, his
ear and his lip. Shaw's face was bleeding, too, and soon one of the
Italians had joined the meek young secretary in his slumbers on the
floor. Then Laurie felt his head agonizingly twisted backward, heard the
creak of a rusty bolt, and, in the next instant, was hurled headlong
through the suddenly opened door, to the snow-covered veranda.
As he pulled himself up, crouching for a return spring, Shaw, disheveled
and breathless on the threshold, jerkily addressed him.
"Try it again if you like, you young devil," he panted, "but remember
one thing: the next time you won't get off so easily."
The door slammed, and again the bolt shot into place. Laurie listened.
No sound whatever came from the inner hall. The old house was again
apparently dead, after its moments of fierce life. He slowly descended
the steps, and, bracing himself against the nearest tree, stared at the
house, still gasping from the effects of the struggle.
He was out of it, but he had left Doris behind. The fact sickened him.
So did the ignominy of his departure. He was not even to be followed.
His absence was all the gang desired. His impulse was to force the door
and again face the four of them. But he realized that he could
accomplish nothing against such odds, and certainly, as a prisoner in
the house, trussed up with Shaw's infernal rope, he would be of no use
to either Doris or himself. He decided to return to the garage and get
his car and the weapon he had left there. Then, if the four still wanted
to fight, he would show them something that might take the spirit out of
them.
Having arrived at this sane conclusion, he turned away from the silent
house, and, hatless and coatless as he was, hurriedly made his way
through the heavy snow-drifts toward the public road.
CHAPTER XV
MR. SHAW DECIDES TO TALK
At the garage he found Burke faithful to his trust and with an alert eye
out for more five-dollar bills. The proprietor temporarily lost sight of
these, however, in his sudden and vivid interest in the new patron's
appearance.
Laurie answered his questions with a word that definitely checked the
further development of curiosity. Then, huddling over the stove, and
warming his icy, soaked feet, he curtly outlined his intentions. He was
going to change back into his own clothes, he explained, and he would
want his car at five o'clock sharp. This, he intimated, would give Burke
a little more than half an hour in which to get his mental processes
started again and to have the car ready.
Burke whistled inaudibly. Obviously the joke the lad had played had not
panned out to the young man's taste. Burke was sorry for that. His
experience had been that with these young "rounders" generosity went
hand in hand with success and its attendant exhilaration; and that when
depression set in, as it obviously had done in this instance, a sudden
paralysis numbed the open palm.
However, even granting that this was so, he had already been largely
overpaid for anything he had done or might still be expected to do. He
nodded his response to the young man's instructions, and though he was
not a subtle person, he succeeded in conveying at the same time a sense
of his sympathy with the natural annoyance of a high-spirited practical
joker whose joke had plainly miscarried. Ordinarily his attitude would
have amused Devon, but Laurie was far from his sense of humor just now.
Still whistling softly, Burke departed, to make a final inspection of
the car, leaving Laurie the sole occupant of the cramped and railed-in
corner that represented the private office.
That young man was in the grip of a characteristic Devon rage, and as he
rapidly got back into his own clothing his fury mounted until the blood
pounded at his temples. He dared not let himself sum up the case against
Shaw, though the manner in which he had been kicked out savored strongly
of contempt. Evidently Shaw didn't care where he was, so long as he was
outside of the house.
Neither dared he sum up the case against Doris, though he could not for
a moment banish from his mind the picture of her as she had stood with
her back to him and his four assailants. Why had she stood thus?
Because she was indifferent to any fate that befell him? Or because she
was numbed by her own misery? Crowding forward with these questions was
a sick fear for her, alone in that sinister house with four thugs and an
old hag whose sole human quality seemed to be a sardonic sense of humor
exercised at his, Laurie's, expense.
What might happen to her? What might be happening even now? And what
assurance had he that even if he again succeeded in entering the house,
a very remote possibility, he could accomplish anything against Shaw and
his companions? Oh, if only he had waited and brought Rodney with him!
Together, he felt, the two of them could have met and overcome a
regiment of men like Shaw and his secretary.
A wild impulse came to him to take Burke with him in his second effort,
but an appraising look at that seedy individual checked it. He was
convinced that Burke could neither fight nor keep his mouth shut. Owing
to his promise to Doris, police help, of course, was out of the
question. No, he must go back alone. But this time there would be no
semi-ignominious departure. He would either bring Doris away, or he
would remain there with her. And if Shaw wanted trouble, he'd get it,
and it would be the real thing.
That afternoon, on his first visit to The Cedars, his new instinct of
caution had made him leave behind him the little revolver he had
brought. He knew his own hot temperament too well to risk carrying it,
and he had an arrogant faith in his own physical strength which, as a
rule, had been justified. Now, however, he retrieved the weapon, and
with a sudden tightening of the lips dropped it into his overcoat
pocket.
When he was dressed he went out to look over his car. Burke, who was
evidently fascinated by the slender racer, rose from an admiring
inspection of the engine as its owner approached.
"She's ready any minute now," he reported. "She's had gas, oil, and air,
and I've put on the chains. Thought you'd want 'em, in this storm."
Laurie nodded and glanced out at the window. The storm had developed
into a blizzard. His optimism, somewhat numbed in the past hour,
reasserted itself to suggest that nature was helping him to meet the
odds against him in the old house down the road. He glanced at his
watch. It was not yet quite five, but certainly there was darkness
enough for his purposes. He could safely take the car into the side wood
road near The Cedars, and leave it there among the trees until he needed
it. He handed Burke his final offering, the size of which wholly
dispelled that philosopher's pessimistic forebodings. Jumping into his
car, he backed it out into the storm.
"Hey, there! what about these clo'es?" demanded Burke, indicating with a
thumb the abandoned heap of garments in the office.
"Eat 'em," briefly advised the occupant of the disappearing car. Burke
shook his head. Garage men are used to hectic human types and strange
happenings, but this particular type and incident were new to Burke. He
was also interested in the discovery that the young fella wasn't going
to New York, now that his joke was played. He was going straight up the
road, in the wrong direction, and driving like the devil. Well, anyway,
Burke had made a tidy bit on that joke, whatever it was. Gazing
affectionately at the latest crisp bill, he thought of his wife and the
seventh, and nobly decided to forgive them both.
Laurie, his hot head cooled by the storm that beat against him, raced
through the gathering darkness. He had the road to himself. In weather
like this no one was abroad who could stay at home. He turned off into
the country road, already deep in snow-drifts, and swept on, through the
little wood whose leafless birches now looked unfamiliar, even spectral,
in the increasing gloom. Save for the soft purr of his engine, his
progress made no sound. He drove as far as he dared, then stopped the
car off the road, in a clear space among the trees, and continued his
way on foot. He must leave the car there, and take the chance of having
it discovered. In the storm and darkness that chance seemed very remote.
He plunged on toward the house, knee-deep, now, in the drifts that swept
across the narrow road. Soon the building was visible in its somber
setting, and as he stared at its dim outlines his heart leaped. In the
right-hand corner, on the second floor, a light showed faintly through
drawn shades. The sight filled him with an overwhelming relief. Until he
saw it, he had not realized how great his inner panic had been. He
stopped, drew a deep breath, and stood staring up at it.
The rest of the house looked black and uninhabited, but somewhere within
it, he was sure, Shaw and the blond secretary watched and waited. To the
Italians he gave no thought. He was convinced that neither of them cared
to come alone to close quarters with him; and this conviction was so
strong that the prompt retreat of the fellow with the rope had not
surprised him, either at the moment or in retrospect, though both men
had fought well under Shaw's eyes. If the Italians were again on guard
in the grounds, it would be his job to choke them off before they could
warn Shaw of his presence. Warning Shaw, he hoped, was about all they
were good for.
His plan, fully made, was very simple. He had no intention of risking
another encounter if it could be avoided. His purpose was to get Doris
out of that house, back to New York, and in Louise Ordway's care with
the least possible difficulty and delay. That done, he could take up his
little affair with Shaw. Even against the blond secretary he felt no
personal rancor. The youth with the pursuing eyes and the chloroform was
merely a wretched pawn in Shaw's game.
In Shaw's game! The phrase stuck, burning into his consciousness like
the vitriol he believed the beast would use if he dared. What _was_
Shaw's game? Why was he so smugly sure of it? And why, oh, why, _why_,
was Doris seemingly numb to its danger, yet anxious for his help? For
the first time he gave definite shape to a reflection that for hours had
been trying to catch his attention, and from which he had restively
turned. It was this:
When those four men, headed by Shaw, had entered that upper room, Doris
had not been surprised. She had expected them. Moreover, she had not
been really afraid. Instead, she had worn a look of flaming anger and of
sudden resolution. She had stepped forward as if to speak. Her very
lips had been parted for speech. Then, Shaw had looked at her, and
slowly she had turned away and stood staring out at the window, her back
to the room and its tableau. In short, with one glance of his veiled,
protruding eyes, Shaw had conquered her, and Laurie himself had seen,
what no one could have made him believe, her instantaneous and complete
submission.
It was this revelation which had added the smoke barrage of doubt to the
situation, clouding his faculties and temporarily stifling his faith. In
the face of this, how could he still trust? Yet he had promised to
trust, to believe, "whatever happened." Those had been his own words,
and she had wept and told him he was "wonderful"!
The deep breath he had drawn ended in a sigh. He was fighting more than
one storm, and in this instant he felt an indescribable weariness of
soul and body. But not for a second did he hesitate in the course he had
decided on. Later, when Doris was safe, perhaps things would clear up.
For the moment there was one thing, and one alone, to be done.
The trees around the house made the approach under their cover a fairly
easy one. However, he moved slowly, missing no precaution. He hardly
believed the zeal of the Italians would keep them out in the storm, but
they might have rigged up some sort of shelter, or, more probably, they
might be doing sentry-work at some of those dark windows.
Clinging close to the trees, he skirted the house, then approached it
from the rear, and slipped along the side of the building, hugging the
wall. As he noiselessly moved he listened, but no sound came from
inside. When he reached the front right wing he stopped, and, looking
up, verified his swift impressions of the afternoon.
A wide veranda swung around the front and side of this wing, supported
by substantial pillars, up any one of which he knew he could climb like
a cat. The roof of the veranda opened on the low French front windows of
the up-stairs sitting-room. There was no question that within a few
moments he himself could enter that sitting-room.
The real question, and again he carefully considered it, was how, once
in the room, he could get the girl out of it. _She_ could not climb
railings and slide down pillars. There was a window on the rear end of
the wing, above what plainly served in summer-time as a veranda
dining-room. This end of the veranda was glassed in, and over it a
trellis afforded a support for frozen vines that now shivered in the
storm. If he could get Doris out at that window, he might be able to get
her down to the ground with the help of the trellis. But from what room
did the window open, and how much of the upper hall would they have to
traverse before reaching it? Not much, he fancied.
Again he looked around, and listened. There was no sound or motion, save
those caused by the storm. The next instant he was climbing the pillar
toward the dimly lighted window. The ascent was not so easy as he had
pictured it. To his chagrin, he made several unsuccessful efforts before
he finally drew himself over the top of the veranda roof, and, lying
flat in the snow, slowly recovered the breath exhausted by his efforts.
Lying thus, and stretching out an arm, he could almost touch the nearest
window with his fingers, almost, but not quite. Still lying flat, he
dragged himself a yard farther. His head was now in line with the
window, but the close-drawn shade shut out all but the suggestion of the
inner light. He hesitated a moment, then, very cautiously, tapped on the
frosty pane.
There was no response. He tapped again, and then a third time, twice in
succession and more compellingly. This time he thought he heard a
movement in the room, but he was not sure.
He waited a moment, then softly signaled again. There was no question
now about the movement in the room. He heard it distinctly, heard it
approach the window, heard it cease, then saw the curtain slowly drawn.
The face of Doris looked out, at first vaguely, as if she had fancied
the noise some manifestation of the storm. But in the next instant she
glanced down, saw him, and obviously checked an exclamation. In another
moment she had opened the window, and without straightening up he had
slipped across the sill.
Neither spoke. Laurie was looking about the room, reassuringly empty,
save for those two. He closed the window, drew the shade, and became
conscious that she held his hand and was drawing him urgently toward the
fire. At the same time she answered his unasked question.
"They're all down in the kitchen, I think. Listen!"
She opened the door leading to the hall, and, going out, leaned over the
stair-rail.
"Yes, they're still there," she reported when she came back. "All but
one of the Italians. They're eating now, and after that I _think_
they're planning to leave."
"Where's the hag?"
"Waiting on them."
She spoke detachedly, almost dully. As in the morning, she was not
surprised; but to-night there was in her manner a suggestion of
repressed excitement which it had not held before.
"Have you a heavy coat?" he asked her.
"Yes."
"Get it and put it on, quick. Don't waste any time." He indicated the
buckled house-shoes she still wore. "And put on some real shoes, if you
have them."
Without replying, she disappeared. He followed her into the bedroom in
which, during the hours of his presence that afternoon, the hag had
found uneasy asylum. He indicated a door.
"Where does that lead?"
"Into a bath-room."
"There's a back window over the veranda. What room does that mean?"
"A bedroom off the hall."
"Good!"
She followed his thought. "But I don't think we can risk that. One of
the Italians is patrolling the hall. That's why they haven't locked the
door. I caught a glimpse of him just now, coming toward the foot of the
stairs."
He stared at her frowningly, then, walking to the bed, stripped it with
an arm-swing and seized the sheets.
"Then it's simply a question of lowering you from the front," he cried,
curtly. "I'll lower you as far as I can, and we'll have to risk a drop
of a few feet. Snow's safe."
As he spoke, he was hurriedly tearing and roping the sheets. "Used to do
this at school when I was a kid," he explained. "Quite like old times.
Now get on the coat and shoes, please."
She needed the reminder. She was staring at this visitor, who had the
face of the man she knew and the voice and manner of a stranger. All
trace of young Devon's debonair indifference was gone. He had the cold
eyes and set jaw of a determined man, busy at some task which would
assuredly be done, but his air of detachment equaled her own.
When she was ready, and still with his new air of businesslike
concentration on the job in hand, he adjusted the linen ropes, and after
a preliminary survey of the grounds, led her through the window and out
on the veranda roof. Here he briefly told her what to do, suiting action
to words with entire efficiency, and assuming her unquestioning
obedience as a matter of course.
The lowering was not the simple exercise he had expected, any more than
the upward climb had been. Light as she was, it was clear that her
unsupported weight would be a heavy drag upon a body resting insecurely
on a slippery roof with nothing more substantial than snow and ice to
cling to. But eventually she was down, a little shaken but unhurt, and
he was beside her.
"Now, let's see how fast you can run," he suggested; and for the first
time his whispered voice held a ring of the youth she knew. "Shaw's
watchers may suddenly begin to watch, or even to see something."
She responded to his changed tone with an uncontrollable gasp of relief,
which he attributed to excitement.
"Don't worry. All right now, I think," he said, with an immediate return
to curtness. It steadied her as no other attitude on his part could have
done.
"Can you drive a Pierce Arrow?" he asked, as they plunged ahead through
the snow-drifts.
"Yes."
"That's fine. That's great. I was afraid you couldn't." This was Laurie
again. He went on urgently. "If we're stopped or separated, do exactly
as I say. Don't lose an instant. Rush to my car. It's over there, among
the trees. See?--there at the right. It's turned toward the road." He
indicated the spot. "Get in, go to the left at the first turn, drive
full speed to a garage a quarter of a mile down the main road. No matter
what happens, don't stop till you reach it. Go into the garage, and wait
half an hour for me. If I'm not there then, drive on to New York and go
to this address." He gave her a penciled slip he had prepared. "Mrs.
Ordway is a good friend of mine. She'll take you in and look after you.
Will you do that?"
"Yes." The word was so low that he had to bend his head to catch it.
His voice softened still more.
"Don't worry. It will be all right. Only, some way, I can't believe that
Shaw is letting us off as easily as this."
She stumbled, but he caught her. For a moment he supported her, and in
that moment, under the sense of her nearness and dearness and
helplessness, the hardness of the past hour disappeared. He did not
understand her. Perhaps he would never understand her. But whatever she
was, she was all right.
Half leading, half carrying her, he got her to the car and into it. He
had actually raised one foot to follow her when something stirred in the
shadows near them, and the familiar, squat figure of Shaw stepped forth.
Though in his sudden appearance he had followed the dramatic instinct
that seemed so strong in him, he had wholly lost the effect of unleashed
fury he had worn in the afternoon. He was even smiling with an
affectation of good-humored tolerance. He had the air of a man who, with
the game in his hands, can afford to be patient and affable.
"Oh, come now," he said easily, "don't leave us quite so soon! Since
you've come back for another visit, we've decided to keep you a while.
You know, I warned you of that."
Laurie made a sign to Doris, which she instantly obeyed. Even before the
indolent voice had finished speaking, she was at the wheel and the car
had started. Shaw, springing forward with goggling eyes and dropped jaw,
found his way blocked by a man as new to him as he had been to Doris, a
Laurence Devon who all in an instant had taken on the black rage he
himself had dropped. In the hands of this stranger was a revolver which
neatly covered Shaw's plump chest. Before this apparition, Shaw backed
away precipitately.
"Stand exactly where you are." Devon's voice was very quiet, but there
was a quality in it which added to the icy chill of the night. "I know
you're not alone, but if any of your pals shows himself, I'll shoot him
dead. If you move or utter one word, or cry out, I'll kill you. Do you
understand?"
Shaw did understand. The look in his protruding eyes proved that. Those
eyes shifted wildly, turning this way and that, as if in search of the
help which lurked among those spectral trees. He himself stood as
motionless as one of them, and as he stood he moistened his thin lips
with the tip of a trembling tongue.
"Now," said Laurie, "I'm going to have the truth. I'm going to have it
all, and I'm going to have it quick. If you don't tell it, I'll kill
you. Probably I shall kill you anyway. But first you will answer two
questions. What power have you got over Miss Mayo? And what are you
trying to do?"
Shaw hesitated. Again his protruding eyes turned wildly to the right and
left, as if in search of help. Still holding the revolver in his right
hand, Laurie slowly reached out his left and seized the other's throat
in the grip of his powerful young fingers.
"Keep still," he warned, as the other started to raise his hands. "You
think the game isn't up, but it is. Now talk, and talk quick."
He tightened his grip on the thick, slippery throat. "I'm enjoying
this," he rasped. "If you were anything but the snake you are, I'd give
you a fighting chance. But a creature that uses chloroform and hires
three thugs to help him in his dirty jobs--"
He increased the pressure on the thick neck. Shaw's face began to
purple. His eyes bulged horribly. He choked, and with the act gave up.
"Hold on," he gurgled. "Listen."
The pressure on his throat slightly relaxed. With eyes closed, he
collapsed against the nearest tree-trunk. Laurie followed him, expecting
some treacherous move; but all the fight seemed out of the serpent. He
was clutching at his coat and collar as if not yet able to breathe.
"I've had enough of this," he finally gasped out. "I'll tell you
everything."
Even as he spoke, Laurie observed that one of the clutching, clawing
hands had apparently got hold of what it was seeking.
* * * * *
Doris, feeling her way through the blackness of the storm on the
unfamiliar country road, heard above the wind the sound of a sharp
explosion which she thought meant a blown-out tire. She did not stop.
Before her, only a short distance away, was the garage to which she was
hastening and where she was to wait for Laurie. To go on meant to take a
chance, but she had been ordered not to stop. There was a certain
exhilaration in obeying that order. Crouched over the wheel, with head
bent, and guessing at the turns she could not see, she pressed on
through the storm.
CHAPTER XVI
BURKE MAKES A PROMISE
Burke, dozing over the fire in his so-called office, was aroused from
his dreams by the appearance of a vision. For a moment he blinked at it
doubtfully. Then into his eyes came a dawning intelligence, slightly
tinged with reproach.
Burke was an unimaginative man, who did not like to be jarred out of his
routine. Already that day several unusual incidents had occurred; and
though, like popular tales, they ended happily, they had been almost too
great a stimulus to thought. Now here was another, in the form of a
girl, young and beautiful, and apparently blown into his presence on the
wings of the wild storm that was raging.
Somewhat uncertainly, Mr. Burke arose and approached the vision, which,
standing at the threshold of his sanctum, thereupon addressed him in
hurried but reassuring human tones.
"I've had a blow-out," the lady briefly announced. "Will you put on a
'spare,' please, and take a look at the other shoes?"
This service, she estimated, would take half an hour of the proprietor's
time, if he moved with the customary deliberation of his class, and
would, of course, make superfluous any explanation of her wait in the
garage, and of her nervousness, if he happened to be sufficiently
observant to notice that.
It was really fortunate that the blow-out had occurred. Surely within
the half-hour Laurie would have rejoined her. If he did not, she frankly
conceded to herself, she would go mad with suspense. There was a limit
to what she could endure, and that limit had been reached. Thirty
minutes more of patience and courage and seeming calm covered the last
draft she could make on a nervous system already greatly overtaxed.
Burke drew his worn office chair close to the red-hot stove, and was
mildly pained by the lady's failure to avail herself of the comfort thus
offered. Instead, she threw off her big coat, and, drawing the chair to
the corner farthest from the stove, seated herself there and with hands
that shook took up the local newspaper which was the live wire between
Burke and the outer world. Her intense desire for solitude was apparent
even to his dull eye.
Burke sighed. In his humble way he was a gallant man, and it would have
been pleasant to exchange a few remarks with this visitor from another
sphere. Undoubtedly they would have found interests in common. This, it
will be remembered, was January, 1917, three months before America's
entry into the world war, and women able to drive motors were
comparatively rare. Any girl who could drive a car in a storm like this,
and through the drifts of country roads--Mr. Burke, having reluctantly
removed himself from the lady's presence, was now beside her car, and at
this point in his reflections he uttered an exclamation and his jaw
dropped.
"It's the lad's car!" he ejaculated slowly, and for a moment stood
staring at it. Then, still slowly, he nodded.
It was the lad's car, which, only a short time before, he himself had
put in perfect order for a swift run to New York. Now this girl had it,
but 'twas easy to see why. He had been wrong in his college-prank
theory. Here was something more serious and much more interesting. Here
was a love-affair. And, he handsomely conceded, it was going on between
a pair of mates the like of which wasn't often seen. In her way the girl
was as fine a looker as the boy, and that, Mr. Burke decided, was "going
some, for them both."
As his meditations continued he was cursorily glancing at the tires,
looking for the one that had sustained the blow-out. He was not greatly
surprised to find every tire perfect. There had been plenty of
mysteries in the lad's conduct, and this was merely another trifle to
add to the list. Undoubtedly the lady had her reasons for insisting on a
blow-out, and if she had, it was no affair of his. Also, the price for
changing that tire would be a dollar, and Mr. Burke was always willing
to pick up a dollar.
Whistling softly but sweetly, he removed a rear shoe, replaced it with
one of the "spares" on the car's rack, and solemnly retested the others.
The task, as Doris had expected, took him almost half an hour. When it
was completed he lounged back to the lady and assured her that the car
was again ready for service.
The lady hesitated. There was no sign of Laurie, and she dared not
leave. Yet on what pretext could she linger? With the manner of one who
has unlimited time at her disposal, she demanded her bill, a written
one, and paid it. Then, checking herself on a casual journey toward the
big coat, she showed a willingness to indulge in that exchange of
friendly points of view for which Burke's heart had longed.
The exchange was not brilliant, but Burke made the most of it. No, he
told her, they didn't often have storms as bad as this. One, several
years ago, had blocked traffic for two days, but that was very unusual.
He hoped the young lady knew the roads well. It wasn't easy driving
when you couldn't see your hand before your face. He hoped she wasn't
nervous about getting back; for now he had discovered that she was
intensely nervous about something.
With a gallant effort at ease, the lady took up the theme of the storm
and embroidered it in pretty colors and with much delicate fancy. When
the pattern was getting somewhat confused, she suddenly asked a leading
question.
"Which shoe blew out?"
Burke stared at her. He wished he knew what was expected of him. Did she
want the truth, or didn't she? He realized that momentarily she was
becoming more excited. He had not missed her frequent glances through
the window, up the road, and he knew that for the past five minutes she
had been listening for something wholly unconnected with his words. In
reality Doris was in the grip of an almost unconquerable panic. What had
happened? Why didn't Laurie come?
Burke decided to let her have the truth, or part of the truth. She'd get
it anyway, if she examined the replaced "spare" on the car's rack.
"There wasn't no blow-out," he stated, defensively.
"There wasn't! What do you mean?"
He saw that she was first surprised, then startled, then, as some
sudden reflection came to her, actually appalled.
"I mean that there wasn't no blow-out."
"No blow-out? Then--then--what did I hear?" She asked the question of
Burke, and, as she asked it, recoiled suddenly, as if he had struck her.
"P'raps you got a back-fire," he suggested, reassuringly. "You come down
the steep hill up there, didn't you?"
Doris pulled herself together, shrugged her shoulders, and resolutely
smiled at him. She knew the difference between the sound of a blow-out
and the back-firing of an irritated engine. But some abysmal instinct
made her suddenly cautious, though with that same instinct her inner
panic developed. _What had she heard?_
"I put on a 'spare,' anyway," Burke was saying. "The rear right looked a
little weak, so I changed it."
He was tacitly explaining the bill he had submitted, but Doris did not
hear him. _What had she heard?_ Insistently the question repeated itself
in her mind. She turned dizzily, and went back for the coat. As she did
so she heard Burke's voice.
"Why--hel-lo!"
Even in that moment she observed its modulation. It had begun on a note
of cheery surprise and ended on one of sharp concern. Turning, she saw
Laurie.
He had nodded to Burke, and was obviously trying to speak naturally.
"All ready?" he asked.
The remark was addressed to them both, but he looked at neither. There
was an instant of utter silence during which they took him in, Burke
with insistent, goggling eyes, Doris with one quick glance,
soul-searching and terror-filled. Burke spoke first.
"What you been doin' to yerself?" he gasped.
The question was inevitable. Laurie was hatless and disheveled. His coat
was torn, and across one pallid cheek ran a deep cut, freshly bleeding.
"Fell," he said, tersely.
He was breathing hard, as if he had been running. He had not yet looked
at Doris, but now he abruptly swung into the little office and emerged,
bringing her coat. Without a word, he held it for her. In equal silence,
she slipped into it. He retrieved the cap from the pile of discarded
garments still lying on the office floor, put it on, and indicated the
waiting car.
"Get in," he commanded.
She obeyed and he followed her, taking his place at the wheel.
"You're hurt," she almost whispered. "Shall I drive?"
[Illustration: "What you been doin' to yerself?" he gasped]
"No--Burke!"
The word was like a pistol shot.
"Y-yessir!" Burke was stammering. In his excitement he was hardly
conscious that another bill had found its way into his hand, but his
hand had automatically reached for and closed on it.
"Keep your mouth shut."
"Y-yessir."
"Keep it shut till to-morrow morning. You haven't seen anything or
anybody at all to-day. Understand?"
"Y-yessir."
"After to-night you can talk about me all you like. But you're to forget
absolutely that you ever saw the lady. Is that clear?"
"Y-yessir!"
"Thank you. Good-by."
He started the car and swung it out into the storm. As it went Burke saw
the girl catch the boy's arm and heard something that sounded partly
like a cry and partly like a sob.
"Laurie!"
"H-ush!"
The car was tearing through the storm and drifts at fifty miles an hour,
and this time it was headed down the road for New York.
Burke's eyes followed it, as far as he could see it, which was not far.
Then he retreated to the "office," and, dropping heavily into his desk
chair, stared unseeingly at a calendar on the wall.
"That lad's been up to somethin'," he muttered. "I wonder what my dooty
is."
It was a long moment before he remembered to open his hand and look at
the bill he was holding. As he did so his eyes widened. The bill was a
large one. It amounted to much more than the combined value of the bills
dropped into that willing palm during the day. Briskly and efficiently
it solved the little problem connected with Mr. Burke's "dooty." With a
quick look around him, he thrust it into his pocket.
"I ain't really _seen_ nothin'," he muttered, "an' I ain't sure of
nothin', anyhow."
* * * * *
"What has happened? Oh, Laurie, what has happened?"
For a time Laurie did not answer. Then she felt rather than saw his face
turn toward her in the darkness.
"Doris."
"Yes."
"Will you do something for me?"
"Yes, Laurie, anything."
"Then don't speak till we reach New York. When we get to your studio
I'll tell you everything. Will you do that?"
"But--Laurie--"
"Will--you--do--it?" The voice was not Laurie's. It was the harsh,
grating voice of a man distraught.
"Yes, of course."
Silence settled upon them like a substance, a silence broken only by the
roar of the storm and the crashing of wind-swept branches of the trees
that lined the road. The car's powerful search-lights threw up in
ghostly shapes the covered stumps and hedges they passed and the masses
of snow that beat against them. Subconsciously the girl knew that this
boy beside her, driving with the recklessness of a lost soul, was merely
guessing at a road no one could have seen, but in that half-hour she had
no thought for the hazards of the journey. Her panic had grown till it
filled her soul.
She wanted to cry out, to shriek, but she dared not. The compelling soul
in the rigid figure beside her held her silent. Her nerves began to play
strange tricks. She became convinced that the whole experience was a
nightmare, an incredible one from which she would wake if that terrible
figure so close to her, and yet so far away, would help her. But it
wouldn't. Perhaps it never would. The nightmare must go on and on. Soon
all sense of being in a normal world had left her.
Once, in a frantic impulse of need of human contact, she laid her hand
on the arm nearest her, over the wheel. The next instant she withdrew it
with a shudder. For all the response she had found she might have
touched a dead man. Something of the look of a dead man, too, was in the
boy's face and eyes as he bent forward, motionless as a statue, his
features like stone and his eyes as unhuman as polished agate, staring
fixedly at the road before them.
A low-bending, ice-covered branch whipped her face and she shrieked,
fancying it the touch of dead fingers. Several times huge shapes from
the roadside seemed to spring at them, but their progress was too swift
even for spectral shapes. Or was it?
It was on a stretch of road through the woods that the obsession in her
mind took its final and most hideous form. Close behind them, and
ringing in their ears, she fancied she heard a cry in the voice of Shaw.
It was not Shaw's human voice. She would not have known it in a human
world. It had passed through the great change; but it was recognizable,
because she, too, had passed through some great change. Recognizable,
too, was the sound of Shaw's running feet, though she had never heard
them run, and though they were running so lightly on the top of the
snow.
He was just behind them, she thought. If she turned she knew she would
see him, not as she had known him, plump, sleek, living and loathsome,
but stark, rigid, and ready for his grave, yet able to pursue; and the
new, unearthly light of his bulging eyes seemed burning into her back.
She groaned, but the groan brought no response from the tense figure
beside her. The only sounds were the howls of the wind, the frenzied
protests of the tortured trees, and the fancied hail of a dead man,
coming closer and closer.
CHAPTER XVII
LAURIE MAKES A CONFESSION
The lights of Long Island City greeted them with reassuring winks
through the snow. Seeing these, Doris drew a deep breath. She had let
her nerves run away with her, she subconsciously felt. Now, rising from
the depths of her panic to a realization of contact with a living world,
as they crossed the bridge to Manhattan, seeing hurrying men and women
about her, hearing the blasts of motor horns and the voices of motor
drivers, she fiercely assured herself that she had been an hysterical
fool.
In the first moments of reaction she even experienced a sense of
personal injury and almost of resentment toward her companion. He had
put her through the most horrible half-hour of her life. It seemed that
no service he had rendered could compensate her for such suffering. On
the other hand, he _had_ brought her safely back to New York, as he had
promised to do. Surely, it was not for her to cavil at the manner in
which he had done it. Something, of course, had happened, probably a
racking fight between the two men. Laurie was exhausted, and was showing
it; that was all.
With their arrival at her studio, his manner did not change. He assisted
her from the car, punctiliously escorted her to the elevator, and left
her there.
"I have some telephoning to do," he explained. "I shall not leave the
building, and I expect to be with you again in about fifteen minutes.
With your permission, I am asking my two partners to meet me in your
studio, Rodney Bangs and Jacob Epstein. What I have to tell must be told
to all three of you, and"--his voice caught in a queer fashion--"it is a
thing I don't want to tell more than once. I think I can get them right
away. They'll probably be in their rooms, dressing for dinner. May they
come here?"
"Of course."
Her panic was returning. His appearance in the lighted hall was nothing
short of terrifying, and not the least uncanny feature was his own utter
unconsciousness of or indifference to it.
"Thanks. Then I'll wait for them down here, and bring them up to your
studio when they come."
He left her with that, and Henry, the night elevator man, who went on
duty at six o'clock, indifferently swung the lever and started his car
upward.
In the studio, with her door shut against the world, Doris again
resolutely took herself and her nerves in hand. She summoned endless
explanations of Laurie's manner and appearance, explanations which,
however, turn and twist them as she would, always left something
unexplained.
There was, she realized, a strong probability that he had forced the
truth from Shaw. But even the truth would not make Laurie look and act
like that. Or would it? She tried to believe it would. Anything would be
better than the thing she feared. She set her teeth; then, springing
from the chair into which she had dropped, she turned on the studio
lights and busied herself with preparations for her visitors. She simply
dared not let her thoughts run on.
Five minutes passed--ten--fifteen--twenty. Save during the half-hour of
that return journey from Sea Cliff, she had never known such dragging,
horror-filled moments. A dozen times she fancied she heard the elevator
stop at her floor, and the sound of voices and footsteps approach. A
dozen times she went to her windows and wildly gazed out on the storm.
As she stared, she prayed. It was the same prayer, over and over.
"Dear God, please don't let it be that way!" The aspiration was the
nearest she dared come to putting into words the terror that shook her
heart.
The second fifteen minutes were almost up when she really heard the
elevator stop. Quick footsteps approached her door, but there were no
voices. The three men, if they were coming, were coming in utter
silence. Before they had time to rap she had opened the door and stood
back to let them enter. As they passed her she looked into their faces,
and as she looked the familiar sense of panic, now immeasurably
intensified, again seized her in its grip.
Laurie, usually the most punctilious of men, made on this occasion an
omission extraordinary for him. He did not present his partners to their
hostess. But not one of the three noticed that omission. Rodney Bangs,
pale but carrying himself with a palpable effort at control, shouldered
his way into the room in his characteristic fashion, as if he were
meeting and hurling back a foot-ball rush. Epstein, breathless and
obviously greatly excited, actually stumbled over the threshold in his
unseeing haste. Laurie, slowly following the two, alone wore some
resemblance to a normal manner. He was very serious but quite calm.
He took off his coat, methodically folded it, and laid it on a near-by
chair. To the brain back of each of the three pairs of eyes watching
him, the same thought came. He had something appalling to tell them,
and, cool as he seemed, he dared not tell it. He was playing for time.
The strain of even the brief delay was too much for Epstein's
endurance. High-strung, his nerves on edge, almost before Laurie had
turned he sputtered forth questions like bullets from a machine-gun.
"Vell! vell!" he demanded, "vot's it all about? Vot's it mean? Over the
telephone you say you got to see us this minute. You say you got into
trouble, big trouble. Vell, vot trouble? Vot is it?"
Laurie looked at him, and something in the look almost spiked the big
gun. But Epstein was a man of action, and, notwithstanding his
nervousness, a man of some nerve. The expression in the boy's black eyes
had stunned him, but with only an instant's hesitation he finished what
he had meant to say.
"I guess it ain't nothing ve can't fix up," he jerked out, trying to
speak with his usual assurance. "I guess ve fix it up all right."
Laurie shook his head. None of the thirty minutes he had spent on the
ground floor had been devoted to improving his appearance. His black
curly hair, usually as shining as satin, was rough, matted, dirty.
Across his left cheek the sinister cut still ran, raw, angry-looking,
freshly irritated by the ice-laden wind.
"Sit down," he said, wearily. All the life had gone out of his voice. It
had an uncanny effect of monotony, as if pitched on two flat notes. To
those three, who knew so well the rich beauty of his speaking tones,
this change in them was almost more alarming than the change in his
looks.
They sat down, as he had directed, but not an eye in the room moved from
his face. Epstein, still wearing his hat and heavy coat, had dropped
into the big chair by the reading-lamp and was nervously gnawing his
under lip. Bangs had mechanically tossed his hat toward a corner as he
came in. He took a chair as mechanically, and sat very still, his back
to the window, his eyes trying vainly to meet his friend's. Doris had
moved to the upper corner of the couch, where she crouched, elbows on
knees, chin on hands, staring at a spot on the floor. Though in the
group, she seemed alone, and felt alone.
Walking over to the mantel, Laurie rested an elbow heavily upon it, and
for the first time looked squarely from one to the other of his friends.
As he looked, he tried to speak. They saw the effort and its failure,
and understood both. With a gesture of hopelessness, he turned his back
toward them, and stood with sagging muscles and eyes fixed on the empty
grate. Epstein's nerves snapped.
"For God's sake, Devon," he begged, "cut out the vaits! Tell us vot you
got on your chest, and tell it quick."
Laurie turned and once more met his eyes. Under the look Epstein's
oblique eyes shifted.
"I'm going to," Laurie said quietly and still in those new, flat tones.
"That's why I've brought you here. But--it's a hard job. You see,"--his
voice again lost its steadiness--"I've got to hurt you--all of
you--most awfully. And--and that's the hardest part of this business for
me."
Doris, now staring up at him, told herself that she could not endure
another moment of this tension. She dared not glance at either of the
others, but she heard Epstein's heavy breathing and the creak of Rodney
Bangs's chair as he suddenly changed his position. Again it was Epstein
who spoke, his voice rising on a shriller note.
"Vell! vell! Get it out! I s'pose you done something. Vot you done?"
For the first time Laurie's eyes met those of Doris. The look was so
charged with meaning that she sat up under it as if she had received a
shock. Yet she was not sure she understood it. Did he want her to help
him? She did not know. She only knew now that the thing she had feared
was here, and that if she did not speak out something in her head would
snap.
"He killed Herbert Shaw," she almost whispered.
For a long moment there was utter silence in the room, through which the
words just spoken seemed to scurry like living things, anxious to be out
and away. Laurie, his eyes on the girl, showed no change in his
position, though a spasm crossed his face. Epstein, putting up one fat
hand, feebly beat the air with it as if trying to push back something
that was approaching him, something intangible but terrible. Bangs alone
seemed at last to have taken in the full meaning of the curt
announcement. As if it had galvanized him into movement, he sprang to
his feet and, head down, charged the situation.
"What the devil is she talking about?" he cried out. "Laurie! What does
she mean?"
"She told you." Laurie spoke as quietly as before, but without looking
up.
"You--mean--it's--true?"
Rodney still spoke in a loud, aggressive voice, as if trying to awaken
himself and the others from a nightmare.
"Take it in," muttered Laurie. "Pull yourselves up to it. I had to."
An uncontrollable shudder ran over him. As if his nerve had suddenly
given way, he dropped his head on his bent arm. For another interval
Bangs stood staring at him in a stupefaction through which a slow tremor
ran.
"I--I _can't_ take it in," he stammered at last.
"I know. That's the way I felt."
Laurie spoke without raising his head. Bangs, watching him, saw him
shudder again, saw that his legs were giving under him, and that he was
literally holding to the mantel for support. The sight steadied his own
nerves. He pushed his chair forward, and with an arm across the other's
shoulder, forced him down into it.
"Then, in God's name, why are we wasting time here?" he suddenly
demanded. "Your car's outside. I'll drive you--anywhere. We'll get out
of the country. We'll travel at night and lie low in the daytime. Pull
yourself together, old man." Urgently, he grasped the other's shoulder.
"We've got things to do."
Laurie shook his head. He tried to smile. There was something horrible
in the resulting grimace of his twisted mouth.
"There were only two things to do," he said doggedly. "One was to tell
you three. I've done that. The other was to tell the district attorney.
I've done that, too."
Bangs recoiled, as if from a physical blow. Epstein, who had slightly
roused himself at the prospect of action, sank back into a stunned,
goggling silence.
"You've told him!" gasped Rodney, when he could speak.
"Yes." Laurie was pulling himself together. "We're friends, you know,
Perkins and I," he went on, more naturally. "I've seen a good deal of
him lately. He will make it as easy as he can. He has taken my parole.
I've got--till morning." He let them take that in. Then, very simply, he
added, "I have promised to be in my rooms at eight o'clock."
Under this, like a tree-trunk that goes down with the final stroke of
the ax, Rodney Bangs collapsed.
"My God!" he muttered. "My--God!" He fell into the nearest chair and sat
there, his head in his shaking hands.
As if the collapse of his friend were a call to his own strength, Laurie
suddenly sat up and took himself in hand.
"Now, listen," he said. "Let's take this sensibly. We've got to thresh
out the situation, and here's our last chance. I want to make one thing
clear. Shaw was pure vermin. There's no place for his sort in a decent
world, and I have no more regret over--over exterminating him than I
would have over killing a snake. Later, Miss Mayo will tell you why."
Under the effect of the clear, dispassionate voice, almost natural
again, Epstein began to revive.
"It was self-defense," he croaked, eagerly. He caught at the idea as if
it were a life-line, and obviously began to drag himself out of a pit
with its help. "It was self-defense," he repeated. "You vas fighting, I
s'pose. That lets you out."
"No," Laurie dully explained, "he wasn't armed. I thought he was. I
thought he was drawing some weapon. He had used chloroform on me once
before. I was mistaken. But no jury will believe that, of course."
His voice changed and flatted again. His young figure seemed to give in
the chair, as if its muscles sagged under a new burden. For a moment he
sat silent.
"We may as well face all the facts," he went on, at last. "The one thing
I won't endure is the horror of a trial."
"But you'll get off," choked Epstein. "It's self-defense--it's--it's--"
"Or a brain storm, or temporary insanity!" Laurie interrupted. "No, old
chap, that isn't good enough. No padded cell for me! And I'm not going
to have my name dragged through the courts, and the case figuring in the
newspapers for months. I've got a reason I think you will all admit is a
good one." Again his voice changed. "That would break my sister's
heart," he ended brokenly.
At the words Bangs uttered an odd sound, half a gasp and half a groan.
Epstein, again in his pit of wretchedness, caught it.
"Now you see the job ve done!" he muttered. "Now you see how ve looked
after him, like she told us to!"
Bangs paid no attention to him.
"What are you going to do?" he heavily asked Laurie.
"I'll tell you, on one condition--that you give me your word, all three
of you, not to try in any way to interfere or to prevent it. You
couldn't, anyway, so don't make the blunder of trying. You know what I'm
up against. There's only one way out."
He looked at them in turn. Doris and Epstein merely stared back, with
the effect of not taking in what he was saying. But Bangs recoiled.
"No, by God!" he cried. "No! No!"
Laurie went on as if he had not spoken.
"I promised Perkins to be in my rooms at eight o'clock to-morrow
morning," he muttered, and they had to strain their ears to catch the
words. "I did _not_ promise to be--alive."
This time it was Doris who gasped out something that none of them heard.
For a moment Laurie sat silent in his chair, watching her with a strange
intentness. Then, in turn, his black eyes went to the faces of Bangs and
Epstein. Huddled in the big chair he occupied, the manager sat looking
straight before him, his eyes set in agony, his jaw dropped. He had the
aspect of a man about to have a stroke. Bangs sat leaning forward,
staring at the floor. The remaining color had left his face. He appeared
to have wholly forgotten the presence of others in the room. He was
muttering something to himself, the same thing over and over and over:
"And it's all up to us. It's--all--up--to us."
For an interval which none of the three ever forgot, Laurie watched the
tableau. Then, rising briskly, he ostentatiously stretched himself, and
in loud, cheerful tones answered Rodney's steady babble.
"Yes, old chap, it's all up to you," he said. "So what do you think of
this as a climax for the play?"
Grinning down at his pal, he waited for a reply. It did not come.
Epstein was still unable to speak or move. Doris seemed to have heard
the words without taking them in. But at last Bangs rose slowly, groped
his way to his chum as if through a fog, and catching him by the
shoulders looked wildly into his eyes.
"You mean--you mean," he stuttered at last,
"that--that--this--was--all--a--hoax?"
"Of course it was," Laurie admitted, in his gayest voice. "It was the
climax of the hoax you have played on me. An hour ago Shaw confessed to
me how you three arranged this whole plot of Miss Mayo's adventure, so
that I should be kept out of mischief and should think I was having an
adventure myself. I thought a little excitement was due you in return.
How do you like my climax, anyhow? Pretty fair, I call it."
He stopped short. Rodney had loosened his grip on his shoulders and
stumbled to a chair. Now, his arm on its back and his head on his arm,
his body shook with the relentless convulsion of a complete nervous
collapse. Epstein had produced a handkerchief and was feebly wiping his
forehead. Doris seemed to have ceased to breathe. Laurie walked over to
her, took her hands, and drew them away from her face. Even yet, she
seemed not to understand.
"I'm sorry," he said, very gently. "I've given you three an awful jolt.
But I think you will all admit that there was something coming to you.
You've put me through a pretty bad week. I decided you could endure half
an hour of reprisal."
None of the three answered. None of the three could. But, in the
incandescent moments that followed, the face of Epstein brightened
slowly, like a moon emerging from black clouds. Bangs alone, who had
best borne the situation up till now, was unable to meet the reaction.
In the silence of the little studio he wept on, openly and gulpingly and
unrestrainedly, as he had not wept since he was a little boy.
CHAPTER XVIII
A LITTLE LOOK FORWARD
"So Shaw told you!" muttered Epstein a few moments later.
"You bet he did!" Laurie blithely corroborated. "He had to, to save his
skin. But he was pretty game, I'll give him credit for that. I had to
fire one shot past his head to convince him that I meant business.
Besides, as I've said, I thought he was reaching for something. I
suppose I was a little nervous. Anyway, we clenched again,
and--well--I'd have killed him, I guess, if he hadn't spoken."
He smiled reminiscently. All three were tactfully ignoring Bangs, who
had walked over to the window and by the exercise of all his will-power
was now getting his nerves under control.
"Shaw didn't do the tale justice, he hadn't time to," Laurie continued,
"and I was in such a hurry to get back to Miss Mayo that I didn't ask
for many details. But on the way to the garage it occurred to me that I
had a chance for a come-back that would keep you three from feeling too
smug and happy over the way I had gulped down your little plot. So I
planned it, and I rather think," he added complacently, "that I put it
over."
"Put it over!" groaned Epstein. "Mein Gott, I should think you did put
it over! You took twenty years off my life, young man; that's von sure
thing."
He spoke with feeling, and his appearance bore out his words. Even in
these moments of immense relief he looked years older than when he
entered the room.
"You'll revive." Laurie turned to Rodney, who was now facing them. "All
right, old man?"
"I guess so," gulped Rodney. There was no self-consciousness in his
manner. He had passed through blazing hell in the last twenty minutes,
and he did not care who knew it.
"Then," urged Laurie, seeking to divert him, "you may give me the
details Shaw had to skip. How the dickens did you happen to start this
frame-up, anyhow?"
"How much did Shaw tell you?" Rodney tried to speak naturally.
"That the whole adventure was a plant you and Epstein had fixed up to
keep me out of mischief," Laurie repeated, patiently. "He explained that
you had engaged a company to put it over, headed by Miss Mayo, who is a
friend of Mrs. Ordway, and who has a burning ambition to go on the
stage. He said you promised her that if she made a success of it, she
was to have the leading rôle in our next play. That's about all he told
me."
He did not look at Doris as he spoke, and she observed the omission,
though she dared not look at him. Also, she caught the coldness of his
rich young voice. She hid her face in her hands.
"That's all I know," ended Laurie. "But I want to know some more. Whose
bright little idea was this, in the first place?"
"Mrs. Ordway's."
"Louise's!" Unconsciously Laurie's face softened.
"Yes. I went to see her one day," Bangs explained, "and I mentioned that
we couldn't get any work out of you till you'd had the adventure you
were insisting on. Mrs. Ordway said, 'Well, why don't you give him an
adventure?' That," confessed Rodney, "started me off."
"Obviously," corroborated his friend. "So it was Louise's idea. Poor
Louise! I hope she got some fun out of it."
"You bet she did!" corroborated Bangs, eagerly. "I kept her posted every
day. She said it was more fun than a play, and that it was keeping her
alive."
"Humph! Well, go on. Tell me how it started." Laurie was smiling. If the
little episode just ended had been, as it were, a bobolink singing to
Louise Ordway during her final days on earth, it was not he who would
find fault with the bird or with those who had set it singing.
"The day we saw the caretaker in the window across the park," continued
Rodney, "and I realized how interested you were, it occurred to me that
we'd engage that studio and put Miss Mayo into it. Miss Mayo lives in
Richmond, Virginia, and she had been making a big hit in amateur
theatricals. She wanted to get on the legitimate stage, as Shaw told
you; so Mrs. Ordway suggested that Epstein and I try her out--"
"Never mind all that!" interrupted Laurie. "Perhaps later Miss Mayo will
tell me about it herself."
Bangs accepted the snub without resentment.
"Epstein thought it was a corking idea," he went on, "especially as we
expected to try out some of the scenes I have in mind for the new play.
But the only one you let us really get over was the suicide scene in the
first act. You balled up everything else we attempted," he ended with a
sigh.
Laurie smiled happily.
"Were your elevator boys in on the secret?" he asked Doris.
"No, of course not."
"Now, what I meant to do was this--" Rodney spoke briskly. He was
recovering poise with extraordinary rapidity. His color was returning,
his brown eyes were again full of life. And, as always when his thoughts
were on his work, he was utterly oblivious to any other interest. "The
second act was to be--"
He stopped and stared. Epstein had risen, had ponderously approached
him, and had resolutely grasped him by one ear.
"Rodney," said the manager, with ostentatious subtlety, "you don't know
it, but you got a date up-town in five minutes."
His voice and manner enlightened the obtuse Mr. Bangs.
"Oh, er--yes," stammered that youth, confusedly, and reluctantly got to
his feet.
"Wait a minute," said Laurie. "Before you fellows go, there's one more
little matter we've got to straighten out." They turned to him, and at
the expression of utter devotion on the two faces the sternness left
young Devon's eyes. "I was pretty mad about this business for a few
minutes after Shaw explained it," he went on. "You folks didn't have
much mercy, you know. You fooled me to the top of my bent. But now I
feel that we've at least broken even."
"Even! Mein Gott!" repeated Epstein with a groan. "You've taken ten
years--"
"You've got back ten already," the young man blithely reminded him.
"That's fine! As I say, we're even. But from this time on, one thing
must be definitely understood: Henceforth I'm not in leading-strings of
any kind, however kindly they are put on me. If this association is to
continue, there must be no more practical jokes, no more supervision, no
more interference with me or my affairs. Is that agreed?"
"You bet it is!" corroborated Epstein. Again he wiped his brow. "I can't
stand the pace you fellas set," he admitted.
Bangs nodded. "That's agreed. You're too good a boomerang for little
Rodney."
"For my part," continued Laurie, "I promise to get to work on the new
play, beginning next Monday."
"You will!" the two men almost shouted.
"I will. I've got to stand by Louise for the next two or three months,
and we'll write the play while I'm doing it. Then, whether America
enters the war this spring or not, I'm going to France. But we'll talk
over all that later. Are you off?"
He ushered them to the door.
"And it's all right, boy?" Epstein asked wistfully. "You know how vell
ve meant. You ain't got no hard feelings about this?"
"Not one." Laurie wrung his hand. Then, with an arm across Rodney's
shoulders, he gave him a bearish hug. "I'll see you a little later," he
promised.
Rodney suddenly looked self-conscious.
"Perhaps then you'll give me a chance to tell you some news," he
suggested, with a mixture of triumph and embarrassment. Epstein's
knowing grin enlightened Laurie.
"Sonya?" he asked eagerly.
"Yep. Great, isn't it?"
Laurie stared at him.
"By Jove, you _have_ been busy!" he conceded. "Between manufacturing a
frame-up for me, and winning a wife, you must have put in a fairly full
week even for you." His arm tightened round his chum's shoulders. "I'm
delighted, old man," he ended, seriously. "Sonya is the salt of the
earth. Tell her she has my blessing."
When he reëntered the room he found Doris standing in its center,
waiting for him. Something in her pose reminded him of their first
moments together in that familiar setting. She had carried off the
original scene very well. Indeed, she had carried off very well most of
the scenes she had been given.
"You'll be a big hit in the new play," he cheerfully remarked, as he
came toward her.
"Laurie--" Her voice trembled. "You have forgiven the others. Can't you
forgive me?"
"There's nothing to forgive," he quietly told her. "You saw a chance and
you took it. In the same conditions, I suppose any other girl would have
done the same thing. It's quite all right, and I wish you the best luck
in the world. We'll try to make the new play worthy of you."
He held out his hand, but she shrank away from it.
"You're _not_ going to forgive me!" she cried. "And--I don't blame you!"
She walked away from him, and, sinking into the chair Epstein had so
recently vacated, sat bending forward, her elbow resting on its broad
arm, her chin in her hand. It was the pose he knew so well and had loved
so much.
"I don't blame you," she repeated. "What I was doing was--horrible. I
knew it all the time, and I tried to get out of it the second day. But
they wouldn't let me."
She waited, but he did not speak.
"Can't you understand?" she went on. "I've hated it from the start. I've
hated deceiving you. You see--I--I didn't know you when I began. I
thought it was just a good joke and awfully interesting. Then, when I
met you, and you were so stunning, always, I felt like a beast. I told
them I simply couldn't go on, but they coaxed and begged, and told me
what it would mean to you as well as to me-- They made a big point of
that."
He took his favorite position by the mantel and watched her as she
talked.
"Don't feel that way," he said at last. "You were playing for big
stakes. You were justified in everything you said and did."
"I hated it," she repeated, ignoring the interruption. "And to-day, this
afternoon, I tried to tell you everything. Don't you remember?"
"Yes, I remember." He spoke as he would to a child, kindly and
soothingly. "Don't worry about it any more," he said. "You'll forget all
this when we begin rehearsing."
She sprang to her feet.
"I don't want the play!" she cried passionately. "I wouldn't appear in
it now under any conditions. I don't want to go on the stage. It was
just a notion, an impulse. I've lost it, all of it, forever. I'm going
back home, to my own people and my--own Virginia, to--to try to forget
all this. I'm going to-morrow."
"You're excited," said Laurie, soothingly. He took her hands and held
them. "I've put you through a bad half-hour. You understand, of course,
that I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't been made to realize that your
whole thought, throughout this experiment, has been of the play, and
only of the play."
She drew back and looked at him.
"What do you mean?"
"Why--" It was hard to explain, but he blundered on. "I mean that, for a
little time, I was fool enough to hope that--that--some day you might
care for me. For of course you know, you've known all along--that
I--love you. But when I got the truth--"
"You haven't got the truth." She was interrupting him, but her face had
flashed into flame. "You haven't had it for one second; but you're going
to get it now. I'm not going to let our lives be wrecked by any silly
misunderstanding."
She stopped, then rushed on.
"Oh, Laurie, can't you see? The only truth that counts between us is
that I--I--adore you! I have from the very first--almost from the day
you came here--Oh, it's dreadful of you to make me say all this!"
She was sobbing now, in his arms. For a long moment he held her very
close and in utter silence. Like Bangs, but in a different way, he was
feeling the effects of a tremendous reaction.
"You'll make a man of me, Doris," he said brokenly, when he could speak.
"I'm not afraid to let you risk the effort. And when I come back from
France--"
"When you come back from France you'll come back to your wife," she told
him steadily. "If you're going, I'll marry you before you go. Then I'll
wait and pray, and pray and wait, till you come again. And you will come
back to me," she whispered. "Something makes me sure of it."
"I'll come back," he promised. "Now, for the first time, I am sure of
that, too."
Four hours later Mr. Laurence Devon, lingeringly bidding good night to
the lady of his heart, was surprised by a final confidence.
"Laurie," said Doris, holding him fast by, one button as they stood
together on the threshold of the little studio, "do you know my real
reason for giving up my ambition to go on the stage?"
"Yes. Me," said young Mr. Devon promptly and brilliantly. "But you
needn't do it. I'm not going to be the ball-and-chain type of husband."
"I know. But there are reasons within the reason." She twisted the
button thoughtfully. "It's because you're the real actor in the family.
When I remember what you did to the three of us in that murder scene,
and so quietly and naturally, without any heroics--"
She broke off. "There are seven million things about you that I love,"
she ended, "but the one I think I love the best of all is this: even in
your biggest moments, Laurie darling, you never, never 'emote'!"
CHAPTER XIX
"WHAT ABOUT LAURIE?"
From the _New York Sun_, January 7, 1919:--
"Among the patients on the hospital ship _Comfort_, which arrived
yesterday with nine hundred wounded soldiers on board, was Captain
Laurence Devon, of the American Flying Forces in France.
"Captain Devon was seriously injured in a combat with two German planes,
which occurred only forty-eight hours before the signing of the
armistice. He brought down both machines and though his own plane was on
fire and he was badly wounded, he succeeded in reaching the American
lines. He has since been in the base hospital at C----, but is now
convalescent.
"Captain Devon is an American 'ace,' with eleven air victories
officially to his credit. He was awarded the French _Croix de Guerre_
and the American Distinguished Service Medal for extraordinary heroism
on August 9, 1918, when he went to the assistance of a French aviator
who was fighting four Fokker planes. In the combat the four German
machines were downed and their pilots killed. The Frenchman was badly
hurt but eventually recovered.
"Captain Devon is well known in American social and professional life.
He is the only son of the late Horace Devon, of Devondale, Ohio, and the
brother-in-law of Robert J. Warren, of New York. Before the war he was a
successful playwright. Just before sailing for France last year, he
married Miss Doris Mayo, daughter of the late General Frederick Mayo, of
Richmond, Virginia. On reaching his New York home to-day he will see for
the first time his infant son, Rodney Jacob Devon."
* * * * *
Transcriber's note:
Inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation are as in the original.
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