When Larry awoke the next morning, he blinked for several bewildered moments about his bedroom, so unlike his cell at Sing Sing and so unlike Hunt's helter-skelter studio down at the Duchess's which he had shared, before he realized that this big, airy chamber and this miracle of a bed on which he lay were realities and not a mere continuation of a dream of fantastic and body-flattering wealth.
Then his mind turned back a page in the book of his life and he lay considering the events of the previous evening: the scene with Barney and Old Jimmie and Maggie, their all denouncing him as a police stool-pigeon and a squealer, and Maggie's defiant departure to begin her long-dreamed-of career as a leading-woman and perhaps star in what she saw as great and thrilling adventures; his own enforced and frenzied flight; his strange method of reaching this splendid apartment; his meeting with the handsome, drink-befuddled young man in evening clothes; his meeting with the exquisitely gowned patrician Miss Sherwood, who had received him with the poise and frank friendliness of a democratic queen, and had immediately ordered him off to bed.
Strange, all of these things! But they were all realities. And in this new set of circumstances which had come into being in a night, what was he to do?
He recalled that Miss Sherwood had said that she and he would have their talk that morning. He pulled his watch from under his pillow. It was past nine o'clock. He looked about him for clothes, but saw only a bathrobe. Then he remembered Judkins carrying off his rain-soaked garments, with “Ring for me when you wake up, sir.”
Larry found an electric bell button dangling over the top of his bed by a silken cord. He pushed the button and waited. Within two minutes the door opened, and Judkins entered, laden with fresh garments.
“Good-morning, sir,” said Judkins. “Your own clothes, and some shirts and other things I've borrowed from Mr. Dick. How will you have your bath, sir—hot or cold?”
“Cold,” said the bewildered Larry.
Judkins disappeared into the great white-tiled bathroom, there was the rush of splashing water for a few moments, then silence, and Judkins reappeared.
“Your bath is ready, sir. I've laid out some of Mr. Dick's razors. How soon shall I bring you in your breakfast?”
“In about twenty minutes,” said Larry.
Exactly twenty minutes later Judkins carried in a tray, and set it on a table beside a window looking down into Park Avenue. “Miss Sherwood asked me to tell you she would see you in the library at ten o'clock, sir—where she saw you last night,” said Judkins, and noiselessly was gone.
Freshly shaven, tingling from his bath, with a sense of being garbed flawlessly, though in garments partly alien, Larry addressed himself to the breakfast of grapefruit, omelette, toast and coffee, served on Sevres china with covers of old silver. In his more prosperous eras Larry had enjoyed the best private service that the best hotels in New York had to sell; but their best had been coarse and slovenly compared to this. He would eat for a minute or two—then get up and look at his carefully dressed self in the full-length mirror—then gaze from his high, exclusive window down into Park Avenue with its stream of cars comfortably carrying their occupants toward ten o'clock jobs in Wall or Broad Streets—and then he would return to his breakfast. This was amazing—bewildering!
He was toward the end of his omelette when a knock sounded at his door. Thinking Judkins had returned, he called, “Come in”; but instead of Judkins the opening door admitted the belligerent young man in rumpled evening clothes of the previous night. Now he wore a silk dressing-gown of a flamboyant peacock blue, his feet showed bare in toe slippers, his wavy, yellowish hair had the tousled effect of a very recent separation from a pillow. A cigarette depended from the corner of his mouth.
Larry started to rise. But the young man arrested the motion with a gesture of mock imperativeness.
“Keep your seat, fair sir; I would fain have speech with thee.” He crossed and sat on a corner of Larry's table, one slippered foot dangling, and looked Larry over with an appraising eye. “Permit me to remark, sir,” he continued in his grand manner, “that you look as though you might be some one.”
“Is that what you wanted to tell me, Mr. Sherwood?” queried Larry.
The other's grand manner vanished and he grinned. “Forget the 'Mr. Sherwood,' or you'll make me feel not at home in my own house,” he begged with humorous mournfulness. “Call me Dick. Everybody else does. That's settled. Now to the reason for this visitation at such an ungodly hour. Sis has just been in picking on me. Says I was rude to you last night. I suppose I was. I'd had several from my private stock early in the evening; and several more around in jovial Manhattan joints where prohibition hasn't checked the flow of happiness if you know the countersign. The cumulative effect you saw, and were the victim of. I apologize, sir.”
“That's all right, Mr.—”
“Dick is what I said,” interrupted the other.
“Dick, then. It's all right. I understand.”
“Thanks. I'll call you Old Captain Nemo for short. Sis didn't tell me your name or anything about you, and she said I wasn't to ask you questions. But whatever Isabel does is usually one hundred percent right. She said I'd probably be seeing a lot of you, so I'll introduce myself. You'd learn all about me from some one else, anyhow, so you might as well learn about me from me and get an impartial and unbiased statement. Clever of me, ain't it, to beat 'em to it?”
Larry found himself smiling back into the ingratiating, irresponsible, boyish face. “I suppose so.”
“I'll shoot you the whole works at once. Name, Richard Livingston Sherwood. Years, twenty-four, but alleged not yet to have reached the age of discretion. One of our young flying heroes who helped save France and make the world safe for something or other by flapping his wings over the endless alkali of Texas. Occupation, gentleman farmer.”
“You a farmer!” exclaimed Larry.
“A gentleman farmer,” corrected Dick. “The difference between a farmer and a gentleman farmer, Captain Nemo, is that a gentleman farmer makes no profit on his crops. Now my friends say I'm losing an awful lot of money and am sowing an awfully big crop. And according to them, instead of practicing sensible crop rotation, I'm a foolish one-crop farmer—and my one crop is wild oats.”
“I see,” said Larry.
“Of course I do do a little something else on the side. Avocation. I'm in the brokerage business. But my chief business is looking after the Sherwood interests. You see, my mother—father died ten years before she did—my mother, being dotty about the innate superiority of the male, left me in control of practically everything, and I do as well by it as the more important occupation of farming will permit. Which completes the racy history of myself.”
“I'm sorry I can't reciprocate.”
“That's all right, Captain Nemo. There's plenty of time—and it doesn't make any difference, anyhow.” For all his light manner and careless chatter, Larry had a sense that Dick had been sizing him up all this while; that, in fact, to do this was the real purpose of the present call. Dick slipped to his feet. “If you're just now a bit shy on duds, as I understand you are, why, we're about the same size. Tell Judkins what you want, and make him give you plenty. What time you got?”
“Just ten o'clock.”
“By heck—time a farmer was pulling on his overalls and going forth to his dew-gemmed toil!”
“And time for me to be seeing your sister,” said Larry, rising.
“Come on. I'm a good seneschal, or major domo, or what you like—and I'll usher you into her highness's presence.”
A moment later Larry was pushed through the library door and Dick announced in solemn tone:
“Senorita—Mademoiselle—our serene, revered, and most high sister Isabel, permit us to present our newest and most charming friend, Captain Nemo.”
“Dick,” exclaimed Miss Sherwood, “get out of here and get yourself into some clothes!”
“Listen to that!” complained Dick. “She still talks to me as though I were her small brother. Next thing she'll be ordering me to wash behind my ears!”
“Get out, and shut the door after you!”
The reply was Dick's stately exit and the sharp closing of the door.
“Has Dick been talking to you about himself?” asked Miss Sherwood.
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
Larry gave the substance of the autobiography which Dick had volunteered.
“Part of that is more than the truth, part less than the truth,” Miss Sherwood remarked. “But this morning we were to have a real talk about your affairs, and let's get to the subject.”
She had motioned him to a chair beside the quaint old desk, and they were now sitting face to face. Isabel Sherwood looked as much the finished patrician as on the evening before, and with that easy, whimsical humor and the direct manner of the person who is sure of herself; and in the sober, disillusioning daylight she had no less of beauty than had seemed hers in the softer lighting of their first meeting. The clear, fresh face with its violet-blue eyes was gazing at him intently. Larry realized that she was looking into the very soul of him, and he sat silent during this estimate which he recognized she had the right to make.
“Mr. Hunt has written me the main facts about you, certainly the worst,” she said finally. “You need tell me nothing further, if you prefer not to do so; but it might be helpful if I knew more of the details.”
Larry felt that there was no information he was not willing to give this clear-eyed, charming woman; and so he told her all that had happened since his return from Sing Sing, including his falling in love with Maggie, the nature of their conflict, her departure into the ways of her ambition.
“You are certainly facing a lot of difficult propositions.” Miss Sherwood checked them off on her fingers. “The police are after you—your old friends are after you—you do not dare be caught. You want to clear yourself—you want to make a business success—you want to eradicate Maggie's present ambitions and remove her from her present influences.”
“That is the correct total,” said Larry.
“Certainly a large total! Of them all, which is the most important item?”
Larry considered. “Maggie,” he confessed. “But Maggie really includes all the others. To have any influence with her, I must get out of the power of the police, I must overcome her belief that I am a stool and a squealer, and I must prove to her that I can make a success by going straight.”
“Just so. And all these things you must do while a fugitive in hiding.”
“Exactly. Or else not do them.”
“H'm!... The most pressing thing, I judge, is to have a safe and permanent place to hide, and to have work which may lead to an opportunity to prove yourself a success.”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Hunt's O.K. on you would be sufficient, in any event, and he has given that O.K.,” Miss Sherwood said in her even voice. “Besides, my own judgment prompts me to believe in your truth and your sincerity. I have been thinking the matter over since I saw you last night. I therefore ask you to remain here, never leaving the apartment—”
“Miss Sherwood!” he ejaculated.
“And a little later, when we go out to our place on Long Island, you'll have more freedom. For the present you will be, to the servants and any other persons who may chance to come in, Mr. Brandon, a second cousin staying with us; and your explanation for never venturing forth can be that you are convalescing after an operation. Perhaps you can think of a plan whereby later on you might occasionally leave the house without too great risk to yourself.”
“Yes. The risk comes from the police, and from some of my old friends and the gangsters they have enlisted. So long as they believe me in New York, they'll all be on the lookout for me every moment. If they believed me out of New York, they would all discontinue their vigilance. If—if—But perhaps you would not care to do so much.”
“Go on.”
“Would you be willing to write a letter to some friend in Chicago, requesting the friend to post an enclosed letter written by me?”
“Certainly.”
“My handwriting would be disguised—but a person who really knows my writing would penetrate the attempted disguise and recognize it as mine. My letter would be addressed to my grandmother requesting her to express my recent purchase of forfeited pledges to me in Chicago. A clever person reading the letter would be certain I was asking her to send me my clothes.”
“What's the point to that?”
“One detail of the police's search for me will be to open secretly, with the aid of the postal authorities, all mail addressed to my grandmother. They will steam open this letter about my clothes, then seal it and let it be delivered. But they will have learned that I have escaped them and am in Chicago. They will drop the hunt here and telegraph the Chicago police, And of course the news will leak through to my old friends, and they'll also stop looking for me in New York.”
“I see.”
“And enclosed in another letter written by you, I'll send an order, also to be posted in Chicago, to a good friend of mine asking him to call at the express office, get my clothes, and hold them until I call or send for them. When he goes and asks for the clothes, the Chicago police will get him and find the order on him. They'll have no charge at all against him, but they'll have further proof that I'm in Chicago or some place in the Middle West. The effect will be definitely to transfer the search from New York.”
“Yes, I see,” repeated Miss Sherwood. “Go ahead and do it; I'll help you. But for the present you've got to remain right here in the apartment, as I said. And later, when you think the letters have had their effect, you must use the utmost caution.”
“Certainly,” agreed Larry.
“Now as to your making a start in business. I suspect that my affairs are in a very bad shape. Things were left to my brother, as he told you. I have a lot of papers, all kinds of accounts, which he has brought to me and he's bringing me a great many more. I can't make head or tail of them, and I think my brother is about as much befuddled as I am. I believe only an expert can understand them. Mr. Hunt says you have a very keen mind for such matters. I wish you'd take charge of these papers, and try to straighten them out.”
“Miss Sherwood,” Larry said slowly, “you know my record and yet you risk trusting me with your affairs?”
“Not that I wouldn't take the risk—but whatever there is to steal, some one else has already stolen it, or will steal it. Your work will be to discover thefts or mistakes, and to prevent thefts or mistakes if you can. You see I am not placing any actual control over stealable property in you—not yet.... Well, what do you say?”
“I can only say, Miss Sherwood, that you are more than good, and that I am more than grateful, and that I shall do my best!”
Miss Sherwood regarded him thoughtfully for a long space. Then she said: “I am going to place something further in your hands, for if you are as clever as I think you are, and if life has taught you as much as I think it has, I believe you can help me a lot. My brother Dick is wild and reckless. I wish you'd look out for him and try to hold him in check where you can. That is, if this isn't placing too great a duty on you.”
“That's not a duty—it's a compliment!”
“Then that will be all for the present. I'll see you again in an hour or two, when I shall have some things ready to turn over to you.”
Back in his bedroom Larry walked exultantly to and fro. He had security! And at last he had a chance—perhaps the chance he had been yearning for through which he was ultimately to prove himself a success!...
He wondered yet more about Miss Sherwood. And again about her and Hunt. Miss Sherwood was clever, gracious, everything a man could want in a woman; and he guessed that behind her humorous references to Hunt there was a deep feeling for the big painter who was living almost like a tramp in the attic of the Duchess's little house. And Larry knew Miss Sherwood was the only woman in Hunt's life; Hunt had said as much. They were everything to each other; they trusted each other. Yet there was some wide breach between the two; evidently his own crisis had forced the only communication which had passed between the two for months. He wondered what that breach could be, and what had been its cause.
And then an idea began to open its possibilities. What a splendid return, if, somehow, he could do something that would help bring together these two persons who had befriended him!...
But most of the time, while he waited for Miss Sherwood to summon him again, he wondered about Maggie. Yes, as he had told Miss Sherwood, Maggie was the most important problem of his life: all his many other problems were important only in the degree that they aided or hindered the solution of Maggie. Where was she?—what was she doing?—how was he, in this pleasant prison which he dared not leave, ever to overcome her scorn of him, and ever to divert her from that dangerous career in which her proud and excited young vision saw only the brilliant and profitable adventure of high romance?
When Maggie rode away forever from the house of the Duchess with Barney Palmer and her father, after the denunciation of Larry by the three of them as a stool and a squealer, she was the thrilled container of about as many diversified emotions as often bubble and swirl in a young girl at one and the same time. There was anger and contempt toward Larry: Larry who had weakly thrown aside a career in which he was a master, and who had added to that bad the worse of being a traitor. There was the lifting sense that at last she had graduated; that at last she was set free from the drab and petty things of life; that at last she was riding forth into the great brilliant world in which everything happened—forth into the fascinating, bewildering Unknown.
Barney and Old Jimmie talked to each other as the taxicab bumped through the cobbled streets, their talk being for the most part maledictions against Larry Brainard. But their words were meaningless sounds to the silent Maggie, all of whose throbbing faculties were just then merged into an excited endeavor to perceive the glorious outlines of the destiny toward which she rode. However, as the cab turned into Lafayette Place and rolled northward, her curiosity about the unknown became conscious and articulate.
“Where am I going?” she asked.
“First of all to a nice, quiet hotel.” It was Barney who answered; somehow Barney had naturally moved into the position of leader, and as naturally her father had receded to second place. “We've got everything fixed, Maggie. Rooms reserved, and a companion waiting there for you.”
“A companion!” exclaimed Maggie. “What for?”
“To teach you the fine points of manners, and to help you buy clothes. She's a classy bird all right. I advertised and picked her out of a dozen who applied.”
“Barney!” breathed Maggie. She was silent a dazed moment, then asked: “Just—just what am I going to do?”
“Listen, Maggie: I'll spill you the whole idea. I'd have told you before, but it's developed rather sudden, and I've not had a real chance, and, besides, I knew you'd be all for it. Jimmie and I have canned that stock-selling scheme for good—unless an easy chance for it develops later. Our big idea now is to put YOU across!” Barney believed that there might still remain in Maggie some lurking admiration for Larry, some influence of Larry over her, and to eradicate these completely by the brilliance of what he offered was the chief purpose of his further quick-spoken words. “To put you across in the biggest kind of a way, Maggie! A beautiful, clever woman who knows how to use her brains, and who has brainy handling, can bring in more money, and in a safer way, than any dozen men! And I tell you, Maggie, I'll make you a star!”
“Barney!... But you haven't told me just what I'm to do.”
“The first thing will be just a try-out; it'll help finish your education. I've got it doped out, but I'll not tell you till later. The main idea is not to use you in just one game, Maggie, but to finish you off so you'll fit into dozens of games—be good year after year. A big actress who can step right into any big part that comes her way. That's what pays! I tell you, Maggie, there's no other such good, steady proposition on earth as the right kind of woman. And that's what you're going to be!”
Maggie had heard much this same talk often before. Then it had been vague, and had dealt with an indefinite future. Now she was too dazzled by this picture of near events which the eager Barney was drawing to be able to make any comment.
“I'll be right behind you in everything, and so will Jimmie,” Barney continued in his exciting manner—“but you'll be the party out in front who really puts the proposition over. And we'll keep to things where the police can't touch us. Get a man with coin and position tangled up right in a deal with a woman, and he'll never let out a peep and he'll come across with oodles of money. Hundreds of ways of working that. A strong point about you, Maggie, is you have no police record. Neither have I, though the police suspect me—but, as I said, I'll keep off the stage as much as I can. I tell you, Maggie, we're going to put over some great stuff! Great, I tell you!”
Maggie felt no repugnance to what had been said and implied by Barney. How could she, when since her memory began she had lived among people who talked just these same things? To Maggie they seemed the natural order. At that moment she was more concerned by a fascinating necessity which Barney's flamboyant enterprise entailed.
“But to do anything like that, won't I need clothes?”
“You'll need 'em, and you'll have 'em! You're going to have one of the swellest outfits that ever happened. You'll make Paris ashamed of itself!”
“No use blowing the whole roll on Maggie's clothes,” put in Old Jimmie, speaking for the first time.
Barney turned on him caustically, almost savagely. “You're a hell of a father, you are—counting the pennies on his own daughter! I told you this was no piker's game, and you agreed to it—so cut out the idea you're in any nickel-in-the-slot business!”
Old Jimmie felt physical pain at the thought of parting from money on such a scale. His earlier plans concerning Maggie had never contemplated any such extravagance. But he was silenced by the dominant force behind Barney's sarcasm.
“Miss Grierson—she's your companion—knows what's what about clothes,” continued Barney to Maggie. “Here's the dope as I've handed it to her. You're an orphan from the West, with some dough, who's come to New York as my ward and Jimmie's and we want you to learn a few things. To her and to any new people we meet I'm your cousin and Jimmie is your uncle. You've got that all straight?”
“Yes,” said Maggie.
“You're to use another name. I've picked out Margaret Cameron for you. We can call you Maggie and it won't be a slip-up—see? If any of the coppers who know you should tumble on to you, just tell 'em you dropped your own name so's to get clear of your old life. They can't do anything to you. And tell 'em you inherited a little coin; that's why you're living so swell. They can't do anything about that either. ... Here's where we get out. Got a sitting-room, two bedrooms and a bath hired for you here. But we'll soon move you into a classier hotel.”
The taxi had stopped in front of one of the unpretentious, respectable hotels in the Thirties, just off Fifth Avenue, and Maggie followed the two men in. This hotel did, indeed, in its people, its furnishings, its atmosphere, seem sober and commonplace after the Ritzmore; but at the Ritzmore she had been merely a cigarette-girl, a paid onlooker at the gayety of others. Here she was a real guest—here her great life was beginning! Maggie's heart beat wildly.
Up in her sitting-room Barney introduced her to Miss Grierson, then departed with a significant look at Old Jimmie, saying he would return presently and leaving Old Jimmie behind. Old Jimmie withdrew into a corner, turned to the racing part of the Evening Telegram, which, with the corresponding section of the Morning Telegraph, was his sole reading, and left Maggie to the society of Miss Grierson.
Maggie studied this strange new being, her hired “companion,” with furtive keenness; and after a few minutes, though she was shyly obedient in the manner of an untutored orphan from the West, she had no fear of the other. Miss Grierson was a large, flat-backed woman who was on the descending slope of middle age. She was really a “gentlewoman,” in the self-pitying and self-praising sense in which those who advertise themselves as such use that word. She was all the social forms, all the proprieties. She was deferentially autocratic; her voice was monotonously dignified and cultured; and she was tired, which she had a right to be, for she had been in this business of being a gentlewomanly hired aunt to raw young girls for over a quarter of a Century.
To the tired but practical eye of Miss Grierson, here was certainly a young woman who needed a lot of working over to make into a lady. And though weary and unthrillable as an old horse, Miss Grierson was conscientious, and she was going to do her best.
Maggie made a swift survey of her new home. The rooms were just ordinary hotel rooms, furnished with the dingy, wholesale pretentiousness of hotels of the second rate. But they were the essence of luxury compared to her one room at the Duchess's with its view of dreary back yards. These rooms thrilled her. They were her first material evidence that she was now actually launched upon her great adventure.
Maggie had dinner in her sitting-room with Old Jimmie and Miss Grierson—and of that dinner, mediocre and sloppy, and chilled by its transit of twelve stories from the kitchen, Miss Grierson, by way of an introductory lesson, made an august function, almost diagrammatic in its educational details. After the dinner, with Miss Grierson's slow and formal aid, which consisted mainly in passages impressively declaimed from her private book of decorum, Maggie spent two hours in unpacking her suitcase and trunk, and repacking her scanty wardrobe in drawers of the chiffonier and dressing-table; a task which Maggie, left to herself, could have completed in ten minutes.
Maggie was still at this task in her bedroom when she heard Barney enter her sitting-room. “He got away,” she heard him say in a low voice to Old Jimmie.
She slipped quickly out of her bedroom and closed the door behind her. An undefined something had suddenly begun to throb within her.
“Who got away, Barney?” she demanded in a hushed tone.
Her look made Barney think rapidly. He was good at quick thinking, was Barney. He decided to tell the truth—or part of it.
“Larry Brainard.”
“Got away from what?” she pursued.
“The police. They were after him on some charge. And some of his pals were after him, too. They were out to get him because he had squealed on Red Hannigan and Jack Rosenfeldt. Both parties were closing in on him at about the same time. But Larry got a tip somehow, and made his get-away.”
“When did it happen?”
“Must have happened a little time after we all left the Duchess's.”
“But—but, Barney—how did you learn it so soon?”
“Just ran into Officer Gavegan over on Broadway and he told me,” lied Barney. He preferred not to tell her that he had been upon the scene with Little Mick and Lefty Ed; for the third figure which Larry had descried through the misty shadows had indeed been Barney Palmer. Also Barney preferred not to tell what further subtle share he had had in the causes for Larry's flight.
“Do you think he—he made a safe get-away?”
“Safe for a few hours. Gavegan told me they'd have him rounded up by noon to-morrow.” Barney was more conscious of Maggie's interest than was Maggie herself, and again was desirous of destroying it or diverting it. “Generally I'm for the other fellow against the police. But this time I'm all for the coppers. I hope they land Larry—he's got it coming to him. Remember that he's a stool and a squealer.”
And swiftly Barney switched the subject. “Let's be moving along, Jimmie.”
He drew Maggie out into the hall, to make more certain that Miss Grierson would not overhear. “Well, Maggie,” he exulted, “haven't I made good so far in my bargain to put you over?”
“Yes.”
“Of course we're going slow at first. That's how you've got to handle big deals—careful. But you'll sure be a knock-out when that she-undertaker in there gets you rigged out in classy clothes. Then the curtain will go up on the real show—and it's going to be a big show—and you'll be the hit of the piece!”
With that incitement to Maggie's imagination Barney left her; and Old Jimmie followed, furtively giving Maggie a brief, uncertain look.
A block away from the hotel Barney parted from Old Jimmie. For a space Barney thought of his partner. Barney had quick eyes which were quite capable of taking in two things at once; and while he had seen the excited glow his final speech had brought back into Maggie's face, he had also caught that swift look of uncertainty in the lean, cunning face of Old Jimmie: a look of one who is eager to go on, yet sees himself frustrated by his own eagerness. To Barney it was a puzzling, suspicious look.
As Barney made his way toward a harbor of refreshment he wondered about Old Jimmie—not in the manner Larry had wondered about a father bringing his daughter up into crooked ways—but he wondered what kind of a man beneath his shrewd, yielding, placating manner Old Jimmie really was, how far he was to be trusted, whether he was in this game on the level or whether he was playing some very secret hand of his own. Though he had known and worked with Old Jimmie for years, Barney had never been admitted to the inner chambers of the older man's character. He sensed that there were hidden rooms and twisting passages; and of this much he was certain, that Old Jimmie was sly and saturnine.
Well, he would be on guard that Old Jimmie didn't put anything over on your obliging servant, Barney Palmer!
This was the era of legal prohibition, but thus far Barney had not been severely discommoded by the action of the representatives of America's free institutions in Washington, for Barney knew his New York. In an ex-saloon on Sixth Avenue, which nominally sold only the soft drinks permitted by the wise men of the Capital, Barney leaned at his ease upon the bar and remarked: “Give me some of the real stuff, Tim, and forget that eye-dropper the boss bought you last week.” Barney had a drink of the real stuff, and then another drink, in the measuring of neither of which had an eye-dropper been involved.
After that, much heartened, he put two dollars upon the bar and went his way. His course took the dapper Barney into three of the gayest restaurants in the Times Square section; and in these Barney paused long enough to speak to a few after-theater supper-parties. For this was the hour when Barney paid his social calls; he was very strict with himself upon this point. Barney was really by way of being a rising figure in this particular circle of New York society composed of people who had or believed they had an interest in the theater, of expensively gowned women the foreground of whose lives was most attractive, but whose background was perhaps wisely kept out of the picture, and of moneyed young men who gloried in the idea that they were living the life. These social calls from gay table to gay table, at all of which Barney was welcome—for here Barney showed only his most attractive surfaces, his most brilliant facets—were in truth a very important part of Barney's business.
A little later, alone at a corner table in a quieter restaurant, Barney was eating his supper and making an inventory of his prospects. He was in a very exultant mood. The whiskey he had drunk had given broad wings to his self-satisfaction; and what he was now sipping from his tea-cup—it was not tea, for Barney was on the proper terms with his waiter here—this draught from his tea-cup tipped these broad wings at a yet more soaring angle.
Yes, he had certainly put it over so far. And Maggie would certainly prove a winner. Those fair women he had chatted with as he had moved from table to table, why, they'd be less than dirt compared to Maggie when Maggie was rigged out and readied up and the stage was set. And it had been he, Barney Palmer, who had been the first to discover Maggie's latent possibilities!
He had an eye beyond mere surfaces, had Barney. He had used women in the past in putting over many of his more private transactions (and had done so partly for the reason that using women so was eminently “safe”—this despite his violent outburst of sneering disdain at Larry when the latter had spoken of safety): some of them professional sharpers, some unscrupulous actresses of the lower flight—such women as he had just chatted with in the restaurants where he had made his brief visits. But such, he now recognized, were rather BLASEES, rather too obvious. They were the blown rose. But Maggie was fresh, and once she was properly broken in, she would be his perfect instrument. Yes, perfect!
Barney's plans soared on. Some day, when it fitted in just right with his plans, he was going to marry Maggie, It was only recently that he had seen her full charms, and still more recently that he had determined upon marriage. That decision had materially altered certain details of the career Barney had blue-printed for himself. Barney had long regarded marriage as an asset for himself; a valuable resource which he must hold in reserve and not liquidate, or capitalize, until his own market was at its peak. He knew that he was good-looking, an excellent dancer, that he had the metropolitan finish. He had calculated that sometime some rich girl, perhaps from the West, who did not know the world too well, would fall under the spell of his charms; and he would marry her promptly while she was still infatuated, before she could learn too much about him. Such had been Barney's idea of marriage for himself; which is very similar to ideas held by thousands of gentlemen, young and otherwise, in this broad land of ours, who consider themselves neither law-breakers nor adventurers.
But that was all changed now. Now it was Maggie, though Maggie in pursuit of their joint advantage might possibly first have to go through the marriage ceremony with some other man. Of course, a very, very rich man! Barney already had this man marked. He hoped, though, they would not have to go so far as marriage. However, he was willing to wait his proper turn. As he had told Maggie, you could not put over a big thing in a hurry.
As for Larry, he'd certainly handled that business in swell fashion! He'd certainly put a crimp in what had been developing between Larry and Maggie. And he'd get Larry in time, too. The drag-net was too large and close of mesh for Larry to hope to escape it. The word he'd slipped that boob Gavegan had sure done the business! And the indirect way he had tipped off the police about Red Hannigan and Jack Rosenfeldt and had then made his pals think Larry had squealed—that was sure playing the game, too! Jack and Red would get off easy—there was nothing on them; but little old Barney Palmer had certainly used his bean in the way he had set the machinery of the police and the under-world in motion against Larry!
While other occupants of the cafe, particularly the women, stole looks at the handsome, flawlessly dressed, interesting-looking Barney, Barney had yet another of those concoctions which the discreet waiter served in a tea-cup. He'd done a great little job, you bet! Not another man in New York could have done better. He was sure going to put Maggie across! And in doing so, he was going to do what was right by yours truly.
All seemed perfect in Barney's world....
And while Barney sat exulting over triumphs already achieved and those inevitably to be achieved, Maggie lay in her new bed dreaming exultant dreams of her own: heedless of the regular snoring which resounded in the adjoining room—for the excellent Miss Grierson, while able to keep her every act in perfect form while in the conscious state, unfortunately when unconscious had no more control of the goings-on of her mortal functions than the lowliest washwoman. Maggie's flights of fancy circled round and round Larry. She stifled any excuses or insurgent yearnings for him. He'd deserved what he had got. Already, contrary to his predictions, she had made a tremendous advance into her brilliant future. She would show him! Yes, she would show him! Oh, but she was going to do things!
But while she dreamed thus, shaping a magnificent destiny—an independent, self-engineered young woman, so very, very confident of the great future she was going to achieve through the supremacy of her own will and her own abilities—no slightest surmise came into her mind that Barney Palmer was making plans by which her will was to count as naught and by which he was to be the master of her fate, and that the furtive, yielding Old Jimmie was also dreaming a patient dream in which she was to be a mere chess-piece which was to capture a long-cherished game.
And yet, after all, Maggie's dreams, aside from the peculiar twist life had given them, were fundamentally just the ordinary dreams of youth: of willful confident youth, to whom but a small part of the world has yet been opened, who in fact does not yet half know its own nature.
No prison could have been more agreeable—that is, no prison from which Maggie was omitted—than this in which Larry was now confined. He had the run of the apartment; Dick Sherwood outfitted him liberally with clothing from his superabundance of the best; Judkins and the other servants treated him as the member of the family which they had been informed he was; the lively Dick, with his puppy-like friendliness, asked never an uncomfortable question, and placed Larry almost on the footing of a chum; and the whimsically smiling Miss Sherwood treated Larry exactly as she might have treated any well-bred gentleman and in every detail made good on her promise to give him a chance. In fact, in all his life Larry had never lived so well.
As for Miss Sherwood's aunt, a sister of Miss Sherwood's mother and a figure of pale, absent-minded dignity, she kept very much to her own sitting-room. She was a recent convert to the younger English novelists, and was forced to her seclusion by the amazing fecundity with which they kept repopulating her reading-table. Larry she accepted with a hazy, preoccupied politeness, eager always to get back to the more substantial characters of her latest fiction.
Of course Miss Sherwood did not make of Larry a complete confidant. For all her smiling, easy frankness, he knew that there were many doors of her being which she never unlocked for him. What he saw was so interesting that he could not help being interested about the rest. Of course many details were open to him. She was an excellent sportswoman; a rare dancer; there were many men interested in her; she dined out almost every other evening at some social affair blooming belatedly in May (most of her friends were already settled in their country homes, and she was still in town only because her place on Long Island was in disorder due to a two months' delay in the completion of alterations caused by labor difficulties); she had made a study of beetles; she had a tiny vivarium in the apartment and here she would sit studying her pets with an interest and patience not unlike that of old Fabre upon his stony farm. Also, as Larry learned from her accounts, there was a day nursery on the East Side whose lack of a deficit was due to her.
All in all she was a healthy, normal, intelligent, unself-sacrificing woman who belonged distinctly to her own day; who gave a great deal to life, and who took a great deal from life.
Often Larry wished she would speak of Hunt. He was curious about Hunt, of whom he thought daily; and such talk might yield him information about the blustering, big-hearted painter who was gypsying it down at the Duchess's. But as the days passed she never mentioned Hunt again; not even to ask where he was or what he was doing. She was adhering very strictly to the remark she had made the night Larry came here: “I don't want to know until he wants me to know.” And so Hunt remained the same incomplete picture to Larry; the painter was indubitably at home in such surroundings as these, and he was at home as a roistering, hard-working vagabond at the Duchess's—but all the vast spaces between were utterly blank, except for the sketchy remarks Hunt had made concerning himself.
Larry had guessed that hurt pride was the reason for Hunt's vanishment from the world which had known him. But he knew hurt pride was not Miss Sherwood's motive for making no inquiries. Anger? No. Jealousy? No. Some insult offered her? No. Larry went through the category of ordinary motives, of possible happenings; but he could find none which would reconcile her very keen and kindly feeling for Hunt with her abstinence from all inquiries.
From his first day in his sanctuary Larry spent long hours every day over the accounts and documents Miss Sherwood had put in his hands. They were indeed a tangle. Originally the Sherwood estate had consisted of solid real-estate holdings. But now that Larry had before him the records of holdings and of various dealings he learned that the character of the Sherwood fortune had altered greatly. Miss Sherwood's father had neglected the care of this sober business in favor of speculative investment and even outright gambling in stocks; and Dick, possessing this strain of his father, and lacking his father's experience, had and was speculating even more wildly.
Larry had followed the market since he had been in a broker's office almost ten years earlier, so he knew what stock values had been and had some idea of what they were now. The records, and some of the stock Larry found in the safe, recalled the reputation of the elder Sherwood. He had been known as a spirited, daring man who would buy anything or sell anything; he had been several times victimized by sharp traders, some of these out-and-out confidence men. Studying these old records Larry remembered that the elder Sherwood a dozen years before had lost a hundred thousand in a mining deal which Old Jimmie Carlisle had helped manipulate.
Larry found hundreds and hundreds of thousands of stock in the safe that were just so much waste paper, and he found records of other hundreds of thousands in safety deposit vaults that had no greater value. The real estate, the more solid and to the male Sherwoods the less interesting part of the fortune, had long been in the care of agents; and since Larry was prohibited from going out and studying the condition and true value of these holdings, he had to depend upon the book valuations and the agents' reports and letters. Upon the basis of these valuations he estimated that some holdings were returning a loss, some a bare one and a half per cent, and some running as high as fifteen per cent. Larry found many complaints from tenants; some threatening letters from the Building Department for failure to make ordered alterations to comply with new building laws; and some rather perfunctory letters of advice and recommendation from the agents themselves.
From Miss Sherwood Larry learned that the agents were old men, friends of her father since youth; that they had both made comfortable fortunes which they had no incentive to increase. Larry judged that there was no dishonesty on the part of the agents, only laxity, and an easy adherence to the methods of their earlier years when there had not been so much competition nor so many building laws. All the same Larry judged that the real-estate holdings were in a bad way.
Larry liked the days and days of this work, although the farther he went the worse did the tangle seem. It was the kind of work for which his faculties fitted him, and this was his first chance to use his faculties upon large affairs in an honest way. Thus far his work was all diagnostic; cure, construction, would not come until later—and perhaps Miss Sherwood would not trust him with such affairs. This investigation, this checking up, involved no risk on her part as she had frankly told him. The other would: it would mean at least partial control of property, the handling of funds.
Miss Sherwood had many sessions with him; she was interested, but she confessed herself helpless in this compilation and diagnosis of so many facts and figures. Dick was prompt enough to report his stock transactions, and he was eager enough to discuss the probable fluctuation of this or that stock; but when asked to go over what Larry had done, he refused flatly and good-humoredly to “sit in any such slow, dead game.”
“If my Solomon-headed sister is satisfied with what you're doing, Captain Nemo, that's good enough for me,” he would say. “So forget that stuff till I'm out of sight. Open up, Captain—what do you think copper is going to do?”
“I wish you could be put on an operating-table and have your speculative streak knifed out of you, Dick. That oil stock you bought the other day—why, a blind man could have seen it was wild-cat. And you were wiped out.”
“Oh, the best of 'em get aboard a bad deal now and then.”
“I know. But I've been tabulating all your deals to date, and on the total you're away behind. Better leave the market absolutely alone, Dick, and quit taking those big chances.”
“You've got to take some big chances, Captain Nemo”—Dick had clung to the title he had lightly conferred on Larry the morning he had come in to apologize—“or else you'll never make any big winnings. Besides, I want a run for my money. Just getting money isn't enough. I want a little pep in mine.”
Larry saw that these talks on the unwisdom of speculation he was giving Dick were not in themselves enough to affect a change in Dick. Mere words were colorless and negative; something positive would be required.
Larry hesitated before he ventured upon another matter he had long considered. “Excuse my saying it, Dick. But a man who's trying to do as much in a business way as you are, particularly since it's plain speculation, can't afford to go to after-theater shows three times a week and to late suppers the other four nights. Two and three o'clock is no bedtime hour for a business man. And that boot-legged booze you drink when you're out doesn't help you any. I know you think I'm talking like a fossilized grand-aunt—but all the same, it's the straight stuff I'm handing you.”
“Of course it's straight stuff—and you're perfectly all right, Captain Nemo.” With a good-natured smile Dick clapped him on the shoulder. “But I'm all right, too, and nothing and nobody is going to hurt me. Got to have a little fun, haven't I? As for the booze, I'm merely making hay while the sun shines. Soon there'll be no sun—I mean no booze.”
Larry dropped the subject. In his old unprincipled, days his practice had been much what he had suggested to Dick; as little drink as possible, and as few late nights as possible. He had needed all his wits all the time. In this matter of hilarious late hours, as in the matter of speculation, Larry recognized words alone, however good, would have little effect upon the pleasure-loving, friendly, likable Dick. An event, some big experience, would be required to check him short and bring him to his senses.
While Larry was keeping at this grind something was happening to Larry of which he was not then conscious: something which was part of the big development in him that was in time to lead him far. A confidence man is essentially a “sure-thing” gambler. It had been Larry's practice, before the law had tripped him up, to study every detail of an enterprise he was planning to undertake, to know the psychology of the individuals with whom he was dealing, to eliminate every perceivable uncertainty: that was what had made almost all of his deals “sure things.” Strip a clever knave of all intent or inclination for knavery, and leave all his other qualities and practices intact and eager, and you have the makings of a “sure-thing” business man:—a man who does not cheat others, and who takes precious care that his every move is sound and forward-looking. Aside from the moral element involved, the difference between the two is largely a difference in percentage: say the difference between a thousand per cent profit and six per cent profit. The element of trying to play a “safe thing” still remains.
This transformation of character, under the stimulus of hard, steady work upon a tangled thing which contained the germ of great constructive possibilities for some one, was what was happening unconsciously to Larry.