The night of Larry's unexpected call upon her at the Grantham, Maggie had pulled herself together and aided by the imposing Miss Grierson had done her best as ingenue hostess to her pseudo-cousin, Barney, and her pseudo-uncle, Old Jimmie, and to their quarry, Dick Sherwood, whom they were so cautiously stalking. But when Dick had gone, and when Miss Grierson had withdrawn to permit her charge a little visit with her relatives, Barney had been prompt with his dissatisfaction.
“What was the matter with you to-night, Maggie?” he demanded. “You didn't play up to your usual form.”
“If you don't like the way I did it, you may get some one else,” Maggie snapped back.
“Aw, don't get sore. If I'm stage-managing this show, I guess it's my business to tell you how to act the part, and to tell you when you're endangering the success of the piece by giving a poor performance.”
“Maybe you'd better get some one else to take my part right now.”
Maggie's tone and look were implacable. Barney moved uneasily. That was the worst about Maggie: she wouldn't take advice from any one unless the advice were a coincidence with or an enlargement of her own wishes, and she was particularly temperish to-night. He hastened to appease her.
“I guess the best of us have our off days. It's all right unless”—Barney hesitated, business fear and jealousy suddenly seizing him—“unless the way you acted tonight means you don't intend to go through with it?”
“Why shouldn't I go through with it?”
“No reason. Unless you acted as you did to-night because”—again Barney hesitated; again jealousy prompted him on—“because you've heard in some way from Larry Brainard. Have you heard from Larry?”
Maggie met his gaze without flinching. She would take the necessary measures in the morning with Miss Grierson to keep that lady from indiscreet talking.
“I have not heard from Larry, and if I had, it wouldn't be any of your business, Barney Palmer!”
He chose to ignore the verbal slap in his face of her last phrase. “No, I guess you haven't heard from Larry. And I guess none of us will hear from him—not for a long time. He's certainly fixed himself for fair!”
“He sure has,” agreed Old Jimmie.
Maggie said nothing.
“Seems to me we've got this young Sherwood hooked,” said Old Jimmie, who had been impatient during this unprofitable bickering. “Seems to me it's time to settle just how we're going to get his dough. How about it, Barney?”
“Plenty of time for that, Jimmie. This is a big fish, and we've got to be absolutely sure we've got him hooked so he can't get off. We've got to play safe here; it's worth waiting for, believe me. Besides, all the while Maggie's getting practice.”
“Seems to me we ought to make our clean-up quick. So that—so that—”
“See here—you think you got some other swell game you want to use Maggie in?”
Old Jimmie's shifty gaze wavered before Barney's glare.
“No. But she's my daughter, ain't she?”
“Yes. But who's running this?” Barney demanded. Thank Heavens, Old Jimmie was one person he did not have to treat like a prima donna!
“You are.”
“Then shut up, and let me run it!”
“You might at least tell if you've decided how you're going to run it,” persisted Old Jimmie.
“Will you shut up!” snapped Barney.
Old Jimmie said no more. And having asserted his supremacy over at least one of the two, Barney relented and condescended to talk, lounging back in his chair with that self-conscious grace which had helped make him a figure of increasing note in the gayer restaurants of New York.
It did not enter into Barney's calculations, present or for the future, to make Maggie the mistress of any man. Not that Barney was restrained by moral considerations. The thing was just bad business. Such a woman makes but comparatively little; and what is worse, if she chooses, she makes it all for herself. And Barney, in his cynical wisdom of his poor world, further knew that the average man enticed into this poor trap, after the woman has said yes, and after the first brief freshness has lost its bloom, becomes a tight-wad and there is little real money to be got from him for any one.
“It's like this: once we've got this Sherwood bird safely hooked,” expanded Barney with the air of an authority, flicking off his cigarette ash with his best restaurant manner, “we can play the game a hundred ways. But the marriage proposition is the best bet, and there are two best ways of working that.”
“Which d'you think we ought to use, Barney?” inquired Old Jimmie.
But Barney went on as if the older man had not asked a question. “Both ways depend upon Sherwood being crazy in love, and upon his coming across with a proposal and sticking to it. The first way, after being proposed to, Maggie must break down and confess she's married to a man she doesn't love and who doesn't love her. This husband would probably give her a divorce, but he's a cagy guy and is out for the coin, and if he smelled that she wanted to remarry some one with money he would demand a large price for her freedom. Maggie must further confess that she really has no money, and is therefore helpless. Then Sherwood offers to meet the terms of this brute of a husband. If Sherwood falls for this we shove in a dummy husband who takes Sherwood's dough—and a big bank roll it will be!—and that'll be the last Sherwood'll ever see of Maggie.”
Old Jimmie nodded. “When it's worked right, that always brings home the kale.”
“The only question is,” continued Barney, “can Maggie put that stuff over? How about it, Maggie? Think you're good enough to handle a proposition like that?”
Looking the handsome Barney straight in the eyes, Maggie for the moment thought only of his desire to manage her and of the challenge in his tone. Larry and the appeal he had made to her were forgotten, as was also Dick Sherwood.
“Anything you're good enough to think up, Barney Palmer, I guess I'm good enough to put over,” she answered coolly.
And then: “What's the other way?” she asked.
“Old stuff. Have to be a sure-enough marriage. Sherwoods are big-time people, you know; a sister who's a regular somebody. After marriage, family permitted to learn truth—perhaps something much worse than truth. Family horrified. They pay Maggie a big wad for a separation—same as so many horrified families get rid of daughters-in-law they don't like. Which of the ways suits you best, Maggie?”
Maggie shrugged her shoulders with indifference. It suited her present mood to maintain her attitude of being equal to any enterprise.
“Which do you like best, Barney?” Old Jimmie asked.
“The second is safer. But then it's slower; and there would be lawyers' fees which would eat into our profits; and then because of the publicity we might have to wait some time before it would be safe to use Maggie again. The first plan isn't so complicated, it's quick, and at once we've got Maggie free to use in other operations. The first looks the best bet to me—but, as I said, we don't have to decide yet. We can let developments help make the actual decision for us.”
Barney did not add that a further reason for his objecting to the second plan was that he didn't want Maggie actually tied in marriage to any man. That was a relationship his hopes were reserving for himself.
Barney's inborn desire for acknowledged chieftainship again craved assertion and pressed him on to say:
“You see, Maggie, how much depends on you. You've got a whale of a chance for a beginner. I hope you take a big brace over to-night and play up to the possibilities of your part.”
“You take care of your end, and I'll take care of mine!” was her sharp retort.
Barney was flustered for a moment by his second failure to dominate Maggie. “Oh, well, we'll not row,” he tried to say easily. “We understand each other, and we're each trying to help the other fellow's game—that's the main point.”
The two men left, Jimmie without kissing his daughter good-night. This caused Maggie no surprise. A kiss, not the lack of it, would have been the thing that would have excited wonder in Maggie.
Barney went away well satisfied on the whole with the manner in which the affair was progressing, and with his management of it and of Maggie. Maggie was obstinate, to be sure; but he'd soon work that out of her. He was now fully convinced of the soundness of his explanation of Maggie's poor performance of that night: she had just had an off day.
As for Maggie, after they had gone she sat up long, thinking—and her thoughts reverted irresistibly to Larry. His visit had been most distracting. But she was not going to let it affect her purpose. If anything, she was more determined than ever to be what she had told him she was going to be, to prove to him that he could not influence her.
She tried to keep her mind off Larry, but she could not. He was for her so many questions. How had he escaped?—thrown off both police and old friends? Where was he now? What was he doing? And when and how was he going to reappear and interfere?—for Maggie had no doubt, now that she knew him to be in New York, that he would come again; and again try to check her.
And there was a matter which she no more understood than Larry, and this was another of her questions: Why had she gone into a panic and aided his escape?
Of course, she now and then thought of Dick Sherwood. She rather liked Dick. But thus far she regarded him exactly as her scheme of life had presented him to her: as a pleasant dupe who, in an exciting play in which she had the thrilling lead, was to be parted from his money. She was rather sorry for him; but this was business, and her sorrow was not going to interfere with what she was going to do.
Maggie Cameron, at this period of her life, was not deeply introspective. She did not realize what, according to other standards, this thing was which she was doing. She was merely functioning as she had been taught to function. And if any change was beginning in her, she was thus far wholly unconscious of it.
Larry's new problem was the most difficult and delicate dilemma of his life—this divided loyalty: to balk Maggie and the two men behind her without revealing the truth about Maggie to Dick, to protect Dick without betraying Maggie. It certainly was a trying, baffling situation.
He had no such foolish idea that he could change Maggie by exposing her. At best he would merely render her incapable of continuing this particular course; he would increase her bitterness and hostility to him. Anyhow, according to the remnants of his old code, that wouldn't be playing fair—particularly after her aiding his escape when he had been trapped.
Upon only one point was he clear, and on this he became more settled with every hour: whatever he did he must do with the idea of a fundamental awakening in Maggie. Merely to foil her in this one scheme would be to solve the lesser part of his problem; Maggie would be left unchanged, or if changed at all the change would be toward a greater hardness, and his major problem would be made more difficult of solution.
He considered many ways. He thought of seeing Maggie again, and once more appealing to her. That he vetoed, not because of the danger to himself, but because he knew Maggie would not see him; and if he again did break in upon her unexpectedly, in her obstinate pride she would heed nothing he said. He thought of seeing Barney and Old Jimmie and somehow so throwing the fear of God into that pair that they would withdraw Maggie from the present enterprise; but even if he succeeded in so hazardous an undertaking, again Maggie would be left unchanged. He thought of showing Miss Sherwood the hidden portrait of Maggie, of telling her all and asking her aid; but this he also vetoed, for it seemed a betrayal of Maggie.
He kept going back to one plan: not a plan exactly, but the idea upon which the right plan might be based. If only he could adroitly, with his hand remaining unseen, place Maggie in a situation where circumstances would appeal conqueringly to her best self, to her latent sense of honor—that was the idea! But cudgel his brain as he would, Larry could not just then develop a working plan whose foundation was that idea.
But even if Larry had had a brilliant plan it would hardly have been possible for him to have devoted himself to its execution, for two days after his visit to Maggie at the Grantham, the Sherwoods moved out to their summer place some forty miles from the city on the North Shore of Long Island; and Larry was so occupied with routine duties pertaining to this migration that at the moment he had time for little else. Cedar Crest was individual yet typical of the better class of Long Island summer residences. It was a long white building of many piazzas and many wings, set on a bluff looking over the Sound, with a broad stretch of silken lawn, and about it gardens in their June glory, and behind the house a couple of hundred acres of scrub pine.
On the following day, according to a plan that had been worked out between Larry and Miss Sherwood, Joe Ellison appeared at Cedar Crest and was given the assistant gardener's cottage which stood apart on the bluff some three hundred yards east of the house. He was a tall, slightly bent, white-haired man, apparently once a man of physical strength and dominance of character and with the outer markings of a gentleman, but now seemingly a mere shadow of the forceful man of his prime. As a matter of fact, Joe Ellison had barely escaped that greatest of prison scourges, tuberculosis.
The roses were given over to his care. For a few brief years during the height of his prosperity he had owned a small place in New Jersey and during that period had seemingly been the country gentleman. Flowers had been his hobby; so that now he could have had no work which would have more suited him than this guardianship of the roses. For himself he desired no better thing than to spend what remained of his life in this sunlit privacy and communion with growing things.
He gripped Larry's hand when they were first alone in the little cottage. “Thanks, Larry; I'll not forget this,” he said. He said little else. He did not refer to his prison life, or what had gone before it. He had never asked Larry, even while in prison together, about Larry's previous activities and associates; and he asked no questions now. Apparently it was the desire of this silent man to have the bones of his own past remain buried, and to leave undisturbed the graves of others' mistakes.
A retiring, unobtrusive figure, he settled quickly to his work. He seemed content, even happy; and at times there was a far-away, exultant look in his gray eyes. Miss Sherwood caught this on several occasions; it puzzled her, and she spoke of it to Larry. Larry understood what lay behind Joe's bearing, and since the thing had never been told to him as a secret he retold that portion of Joe's history he had recited to the Duchess: of a child who had been brought up among honorable people, protected from the knowledge that her father was a convict—a child Joe never expected to see and did not even know how to find.
Joe Ellison became a figure that moved Miss Sherwood deeply: content to busy himself in his earthly obscurity, ever dreaming and gloating over his one great sustaining thought—that he had given his child the best chance which circumstances permitted; that he had removed himself from his child's life; that some unknown where out in the world his child was growing to maturity among clean, wholesome people; that he never expected to make himself known to his child. The situation also moved Larry profoundly whenever he looked at his old friend, merging into a kindly fellowship with the earth.
But while busy with new affairs at Cedar Crest, Larry was all the while thinking of Maggie, and particularly of his own dilemma regarding Maggie and Dick. But the right plan still refused to take form in his brain. However, one important detail occurred to him which required immediate attention. If his procedure in regard to Hunt's pictures succeeded in drawing the painter from his hermitage, nothing was more likely than that Hunt unexpectedly would happen upon Maggie in the company of Dick Sherwood. That might be a catastrophe to Larry's unformed plan; it had to be forestalled if possible. Such a matter could not be handled in a letter, with the police opening all mail coming to the Duchess's house. So once more he decided upon a secret visit to the Duchess's house. He figured that such a visit would be comparatively without risk, since the police and Barney Palmer and the gangsters Barney had put upon his trail all still believed him somewhere in the West.
Accordingly, a few nights after they had settled at Cedar Crest, he motored into New York in a roadster Miss Sherwood had placed at his disposal, and after the necessary precautions he entered Hunt's studio. The room was dismantled, and Hunt sat among his packed belongings smoking his pipe.
“Well, young fellow,” growled Hunt after they had shaken hands, “you see you've driven me from my happy home.”
“Then Mr. Graham has been to see you?”
“Yes. And he put up to me your suggestion about a private exhibition. And I fell for it. And I've got to go back among the people I used to know. And wear good clothes and put on a set of standardized good manners. Hell!”
“You don't like it?”
“I suppose, if the exhibition is a go, I'll like grinning at the bunch that thought I couldn't paint. You bet I'll like that! You, young fellow—I suppose you're here to gloat over me and to try to collect your five thousand.”
“I never gloat over doing such an easy job as that was. And I'm not here to collect my bet. As far as money is concerned, I'm here to give you some.” And he handed Hunt the check made out to “cash” which Mr. Graham had sent him for the Italian mother.
“Better keep that on account of what I owe you,” advised Hunt.
“I'd rather you'd hold it for me. And better still, I'd rather call the bet off in favor of a new bargain.”
“What's the new proposition for swindling me?”
“You need a business nursemaid. What commission do you pay dealers?”
“Been paying those burglars forty per cent.”
“That's too much for doing nothing. Here's my proposition. Give me ten per cent to act as your personal agent, and I'll guarantee that your total percentage for commissions will be less than at present, and that your prices will be doubled. Of course I can't do much while the police and others are so darned interested in me, so if you accept we'll just date the agreement from the time I'm cleared.”
“You're on, son—and we'll just date the agreement from the present moment, A.D.” Again Hunt gripped Larry's hand. “You're all to the good, Larry—and I'm not giving you half enough.”
That provided Larry with the opening he had desired. “You can make it up to me.”
“How?”
“By helping me out with a proposition of my own. To come straight to the point, it's Maggie.”
“Maggie?”
“I guess you know how I feel there. She's got a wrong set of ideas, and she's fixed in them—and you know how high-spirited she is. She's out in the world now, trying to put something crooked over which she thinks is big. I know what it is. I want to stop her, and change her. That's my big aim—to change her. The only way I can at this moment stop what she is now doing is by exposing her. And mighty few people with a wrong twist are ever set right by merely being exposed.”
“I guess you're right there, Larry.”
“What I want is a chance to try another method on Maggie. If she's handled right I think she may turn out a very different person from what she seems to be—something that may surprise both of us.”
Hunt nodded. “That was why I painted her picture. Since I first saw her I've been interested in how she was going to come out. She might become anything. But where do I fit in?”
“She's flying in high company. It occurred to me that, when you got back to your own world, you might meet her, and in your surprise you might speak to her in a manner which would be equivalent in its effect to an intentional exposure. I wanted to put you on your guard and to ask you to treat her as a stranger.”
“That's promised. I won't know her.”
“Don't promise till you know the rest.”
“What else is there to know?”
“Who the sucker is they're trying to trim.” Larry regarded the other steadily. “You know him. He's Dick Sherwood.”
“Dick Sherwood!” exploded Hunt. “Are you sure about that?”
“I was with Maggie the other night when Dick came to have supper with her; he didn't see me. Besides, Dick has told me about her.”
“How did they ever get hold of Dick?”
“Dick's the easiest kind of fish for two such smooth men as Barney and Old Jimmie when they've got a clever, good-looking girl as bait, and when they know how to use her. He's generous, easily impressed, thinks he is a wise man of the world and is really very gullible.”
“Have they got him hooked?”
“Hard and fast. It won't be his fault if they don't land him.”
The painter gazed at Larry with a hard look. Then he demanded abruptly:
“Show Miss Sherwood that picture of Maggie I painted?”
“No. I had my reasons.”
“What you going to do with it?”
“Keep it, and pay you your top price for it when I've got the money.”
“H'm! Told Miss Sherwood what's doing about Dick?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I thought of doing it, then I decided against it. For the same reason I just gave you—that it might lead to exposure, and that exposure would defeat my plans.”
“You seem to be forgetting that your plan leaves Dick in danger. Dick deserves some consideration.”
“And I'm giving it to him,” argued Larry. “I'm thinking of him as much as of Maggie. Or almost as much. His sister and friends have pulled him out of a lot of scrapes. He's not a bit wiser or better for that kind of help. And it's not going to do him any good whatever to have some one step in and take care of him again. He's been a good friend to me, but he's a dear fool. I want to handle this so he'll get a jolt that will waken him up—make him take his responsibilities more seriously—make him able to take care of himself.”
“Huh!” grunted Hunt. “You've certainly picked out a few man-sized jobs for yourself: to make a success of the straight life for yourself—to come out ahead of the police and your old pals—to make Maggie love the Ten Commandments—to put me across—to make Dick into a level-headed citizen. Any other little item you'd like to take on?”
Larry ignored the irony of the question. “Some of those things I'm going to do,” he said confidently. “And any I see I'm going to fail in, I'll get warning to the people involved. But to come back to your promise: are you willing to give your promise now that you know all the facts?”
Hunt pulled for a long moment at his pipe. Then he said almost gruffly:
“I guess you've guessed that Isabel Sherwood is about the most important person in the world to me?”
That was the nearest Hunt had ever come to telling that he loved Miss Sherwood. Larry nodded.
“I'm in bad there already. Suppose your foot slips and everything about Dick goes wrong. What'll be my situation when she learns I've known all along and have just stood by quietly and let things happen? See what I'll be letting myself in for?”
“I do,” said Larry, his spirits sinking. “And of course I can understand your decision not to give your promise.”
“Who said I wouldn't give my promise?” demanded Hunt. “Of course I give my promise! All I said was that the weather bureau of my bad toe predicts that there's likely to be a storm because of this—and I want you to use your brain, son, I want you to use your brain!”
He upreared his big, shag-haired figure and gripped Larry's hand. “You're all right, Larry—and here's wishing you luck! Now get to hell out of here before Gavegan and Casey drop in for a cup of tea, or your old friends begin target practice with their hip artillery. I want a little quiet in which to finish my packing.
“And say, son,” he added, as he pushed Larry through the door, “don't fall dead at the sight of me when you see me next, for I'm likely to be walking around inside all the finery and vanity of Fifth Avenue.”
Larry came down the stairway from Hunt's studio in a mood of high elation. Through Hunt's promise of cooperation he had at least made a start in his unformed plan regarding Maggie. Somehow, he'd work out and put across the rest of it.
Then Hunt's prediction of the trouble that might rise through his silence recurred to Larry. Indeed, that was a delicate situation!—containing all kinds of possible disasters for himself as well as for Hunt. He would have to be most watchful, most careful, or he would find himself entangled in worse circumstances than at present.
As he came down into the little back room, his grandmother was sitting over her interminable accounts, each of which represented a little profit to herself, some a little relief to many, some a tragedy to a few; and many of which were in code, for these represented transactions of a character which no pawnshop, particularly one reputed to be a fence, wishes ever to have understood by those presumptive busy-bodies, the police. When Larry had first entered, she had merely given him an unsurprised “good-evening” and permitted him to pass on. But now, as he told her good-night and turned to leave, she said in her thin, monotonous voice:
“Sit down for a minute, Larry. I want to talk to you.”
Larry obeyed. “Yes, grandmother.”
But the Duchess did not at once speak. She held her red-rimmed, unblinking eyes on him steadily. Larry waited patiently. Though she was so composed, so self-contained, Larry knew her well enough to know that what was passing in her mind was something of deep importance, at least to her.
At length she spoke. “You saw Maggie that night you hurried away from here?”
“Yes, grandmother. Have you heard from her since the?—or from Barney or Old Jimmie?”
The Duchess shook her head. “Do you mind telling me what happened that night—and what Maggie's doing?”
Larry told her of the scene in Maggie's suite at the Grantham, told of the plan in which Maggie was involved and of his own added predicament. This last the Duchess seemingly ignored.
“Just about what I supposed she was doing,” she said. “And you tried again to get her to give it up?”
“Yes.”
“And she refused?”
“Yes.” And he added: “Refused more emphatically than before.”
The Duchess studied him a long moment. Then: “You're not trying to make her give that up just because you think she's worth saving. You like her a lot, Larry?”
“I love her,” Larry admitted.
“I'm sorry about that, Larry.” There was real emotion in the old voice now. “I've told you that you're all I've got left. And now that you've at last started right, I want everything to go right with you. Everything! And Maggie will never help things go right with you. Your love for her can only mean misery and misfortune. You can't change her.”
Larry came out with the questions he had asked himself so frequently these last days. “But why did her manner change so when she heard Barney and the others? Why did she help me escape?”
“That was because, deep down, she really loves you. That's the worst part of it: you both love each other.” The Duchess slowly nodded her head. “You both love each other. If it wasn't for that I wouldn't care what you tried to do. But I tell you again you can't change her. She's too sure of herself. She'll always try to make you goher way—and if you don't, you'll never get a smile from her. And because you love each other, I'm afraid you'll give in and go her way. That's what I'm afraid of. Won't you just cut her out of your life, Larry?”
It had been a prodigiously long speech for the Duchess. And Larry realized that the emotion behind it was a thousand times what showed in the thin voice of the bent, gestureless figure.
“For your sake I'm sorry, grandmother. But I can't.”
“Then it's only fair to tell you, Larry,” she said in a more composed tone which expressed a finality of decision, “that if there's ever anything I can do to stop this, I'll do it. For she's bad for you—what with her stiff spirit—and the ideas Old Jimmie has put into her—and the way Old Jimmie has brought her up. I'll stop things if I can.”
Larry made no reply. The Duchess continued looking at him steadily for a long space. He knew she was thinking; and he was wondering what was passing through that shrewd old brain, when she remarked:
“By the way, Larry, I just remembered what you told me of that old Sing Sing friend—Joe Ellison. Have you heard from him recently?”
“He's out, and he's working where I am.”
“Yes? What's he doing?”
“He's working there as a gardener.”
Again she was silent a space, her sunken eyes steady With thought. Then she said:
“From the time he was twenty till he was thirty I knew Joe Ellison well—better than I've ever told you. He knew your mother when she was a girl, Larry. I wish you'd ask him to come in to see me. As soon as he can manage it.”
Larry promised. His grandmother said no more about Maggie, and presently Larry bade her good-night and made his cautious way, ever on the lookout for danger, to where he had left his roadster, and thence safely out to Cedar Crest. But the Duchess sat for hours exactly as he had left her, her accounts unheeded, thinking, thinking, thinking over an utterly impossible possibility that had first presented itself faintly to her several days before. She did not see how the thing could be; and yet somehow it might be, for many a strange thing did happen in this border world where for so long she had lived. When finally she went to bed she slept little; her busy conjectures would not permit sleep. And though the next day she went about her shop seemingly as usual, she was still thinking.
That night Joe Ellison came. They met as though they had last seen each other but yesterday.
“Good-evening, Joe.”
“Glad to see you, Duchess.”
She held out to him a box of the best cigars, which she had bought against his coming, for she had remembered Joe Ellison's once fastidious taste regarding tobacco. He lit one, and they fell into the easy silence of old friends, taking up their friendship exactly where it had been broken off. As a matter of fact, Joe Ellison might have been her son-in-law but for her own firm attitude. He had known her daughter very much better than her words to Larry the previous evening had indicated. Not only had Joe known her while a girl down here, but much later he had learned in what convent she was going to school and there had been surreptitious love-making despite convent rules and boundaries—till the Duchess had learned what was going on. She had had a square out-and-out talk with Joe; the romance had suddenly ended; and later Larry's mother had married elsewhere. But the snuffed-out romance had made no difference in the friendship between the Duchess and Joe; each had recognized the other as square, as that word was understood in their border world.
To Joe Ellison the Duchess was changed but little since twenty-odd years ago. She had seemed old even then; though as a youth he had known old men who had talked of her beauty when a young woman and of how she had queened it among the reckless spirits of that far time. But to the Duchess the change in Joe Ellison was astounding. She had last seen him in his middle thirties: black-haired, handsome, careful of dress, powerful of physique, dominant, fiery-tempered, fearless of any living thing, but with these hot qualities checked into a surface appearance of unruffled equanimity by his self-control and his habitual reticence. And now to see him thin, white-haired, bent, his old fire seemingly burned to gray ashes—the Duchess, who had seen much in her generations, was almost appalled at the transformation.
At first the Duchess skillfully guided the talk among commonplaces.
“Larry tells me you're out with him.”
“Yes,” said Joe. “Larry's been a mighty good pal.”
“What're you going to do when you get back your strength?”
“The same as I'm doing now—if they'll let me.”
And after a pause: “Perhaps later, if I had the necessary capital, I'd like to start a little nursery. Or else grow flowers for the market.”
“Not going back to the old thing, then?”
Joe shook his white head. “I'm all through there. Flowers are a more interesting proposition.”
“Whenever you get ready to start, Joe, you can have all the capital you want from me. And it will cost you nothing. Or if you'd rather pay, it'll cost you the same as at a bank—six per cent.”
“Thanks. I'll remember.” Joe Ellison could not have spoken his gratitude more strongly.
The Duchess now carefully guided the talk in the direction of the thing of which she had thought so constantly.
“By the way, Joe, Larry told me something about you I'd never heard before—that you had been married, and had a child.”
“Yes. You didn't hear because I wasn't telling anybody about it when it happened, and it never came out.”
“Mind telling me about it, Joe?”
He pulled at his perfecto while assembling his facts; and then he made one of the longest speeches Joe Ellison—“Silent Joe” some of his friends had called him in the old days—was ever known to utter. But there was reason for its length; it was an epitome of the most important period of his life.
“I had a nice little country place over in Jersey for three or four years. It all happened there. No one knew me for what I was; they took me for what I pretended to be, a small capitalist whose interests required his taking occasional trips. Nice neighbors. That's where I met my wife. She was fine every way. That's why I kept all that part of my life from my pals; I was afraid they might leak and the truth would spoil everything. My wife was an orphan, niece of the widow of a broker who lived out there. She never knew the truth about me. She died when the baby was born. When the baby was a year and a half my big smash came, and I went up the river. But I was never connected up with the man who lived over in Jersey and who suddenly cancelled his lease and moved away.”
The Duchess drew nearer to the heart of her thoughts.
“Was the baby a boy or girl, Joe?”
“Girl.”
The Duchess did not so much as blink. “How old would she be by this time?”
“Eighteen.”
“What was her name?”
“Mary—after her mother. But of course I ordered it to be changed. I don't know what her name is now.”
The Duchess pressed closer.
“What became of her, Joe?”
A glow began to come into the somber eyes of Joe Ellison. “I told you her mother was a fine woman, and she never knew anything bad about me. I wanted my girl to grow up like her mother. I wanted her to have as good a chance as any of those nice girls over in Jersey—I wanted her never to know any of the lot I've known—I wanted her never to have the stain of knowing her father was a crook—I wanted her never to know even who her father was.”
“How did you manage it?”
“Her mother had left a little fortune, about twenty-five thousand—twelve or fifteen hundred a year. I turned the money and the girl over to my best pal—and the squarest pal a man ever had—the only one I'd let know about my Jersey life. I told him what to do. She was an awfully bright little thing; at a year and a half, when I saw her last, she was already talking. She was to be brought up among nice, simple people—go to a good school—grow up to be a nice, simple girl. And especially never to know anything about me. She was to believe herself an orphan. And my pal did just as I ordered. He wrote me how she was getting on till about four years ago, then I had news that he was dead and that the trust fund had been transferred to a firm of lawyers, though I wasn't given the name of the lawyers. That doesn't make any difference since she's getting the money just the same.”
“What was your pal's name, Joe?”
“Jimmie Carlisle.”
The Duchess had been certain what this name would be, but nevertheless she could not repress a start.
“What's the matter?” Joe asked sharply. “Did you know him?”
“Not in those days,” said the Duchess, recovering her even tone. “Though I got to know him later. By the way,” she added casually, “did Jimmie Carlisle have any children of his own?”
“Not before I went away. He wasn't even married.”
There was now no slightest doubt left in the Duchess's mind. Maggie was really Joe Ellison's daughter.
Joe Ellison went on, the glow of his sunken eyes becoming yet more exalted. He was almost voicing his thoughts to himself alone, for his friendship with the Duchess was so old that her presence was no inhibition. His low words were almost identical in substance with what Larry had told—a summary of what had come to be his one great hope and dream, the nearest thing he had to a religion.
“Somewhere, in a nice place, my girl is now growing up like her mother. Clean of everything I was and I knew. She must be practically a woman now. I don't know where she is—there's now no way for me to learn. And I don't want to know. And I don't want her ever to know about me. I don't ever want to be the cause of making her feel disgraced, or of dragging her down from among the people where she belongs.”
The Duchess gave no visible sign of emotion, but her ancient heart-strings were set vibrating by that tense, low-pitched voice. She had a momentary impulse to tell him the truth. But just then the Duchess was a confusion of many conflicting impulses, and the balance of their strength was for the moment against telling. So she said nothing.
Their talk drifted back to commonplaces, and presently Joe Ellison went away. The Duchess sat motionless at her desk, again thinking—thinking—thinking; and when Joe Ellison was back in his gardener's cottage at Cedar Crest and was happily asleep, she still sat where he had left her. During her generations of looking upon life from the inside, she had seen the truth of many strange situations of which the world had learned only the wildest rumors or the most respectable versions; but during the long night hours, perhaps because the affair touched her so closely, this seemed to her the strangest situation she had ever known. A father believing with the firm belief of established certainty that his daughter had been brought up free from all taint of his own life, carefully bred among the best of people. In reality the girl brought up in a criminal atmosphere, with criminal ideas implanted in her as normal ideas, and carefully trained in criminal ways and ambitions. And neither father nor daughter having a guess of the truth.
Indeed it was a strange situation! A situation charged with all kinds of unforeseeable results.
The Duchess now understood the unfatherly disregard Old Jimmie had shown for the ordinary welfare of Maggie. Not being her father, he had not cared. Superficially, at least, Jimmie Carlisle must have been a much more plausible individual twenty years earlier, to have won the implicit trust of Joe Ellison and to have become his foremost friend. She understood one reason why Old Jimmie had always boarded Maggie in the cheapest and lowest places; his hidden cupidity had thereby been pocketing about a thousand dollars a year of trust money for over sixteen years.
But there was one queer problem here to which the Duchess could not at this time see the answer. If Jimmie Carlisle had wished to gratify his cupidity and double-cross his friend, why had he not at the very start placed Maggie in an orphanage where she would have been neither charge nor cost to him, and thus have had the use of every penny of the trust fund? Why had he chosen to keep her by him, and train her carefully to be exactly what her father had most wished her not to be? There must have been some motive in the furtive, tortuous mind of Old Jimmie, that now would perhaps forever remain a mystery.
Of course she saw, or thought she saw, the reason for the report of Old Jimmie's death to Joe Ellison. That report had been sent to escape an accounting.
As she sat through the night hours the Duchess for the first time felt warmth creep over her for Maggie. She saw Maggie in the light of a victim. If Maggie had been brought up as her father had planned, she might now be much the girl her father dreamed her. But Old Jimmie had entered the scheme of things. Yes, the audacious, willful, confident Maggie, bent on conquering the world in the way Old Jimmie and later Barney Palmer had taught her, was really just a poor misguided victim who should have had a far different fate.
And now the Duchess came to one of the greatest problems of her life. What should she do? Considering the facts that Joe Ellison wished the life of a recluse and desired to avoid all talk of the old days, the chances were that he would never happen upon the real state of affairs. Only she and Old Jimmie knew the essentials of the situation—and very likely Jimmie did not yet know that the friend who had once trusted him was now a free man. She felt as though she held in her hands the strings of destiny. Should she tell the truth?
She pondered long. All her considerations were given weight according to what she saw as their possible effect upon Larry; for Larry was the one person left whom she loved, and on him were fixed the aspirations of these her final years. Therefore her thoughts and arguments were myopic, almost necessarily specious. She wanted to see justice done, of course. But most of all she wanted what was best for Larry. If she told the truth, it might result in some kind of temporary breakdown in Maggie's attitude which would bring her and Larry together. That would be disastrous. If not disastrous at once, certainly in the end. Maggie was a victim, and undoubtedly deserved sympathy. But others should not be sacrificed merely because Maggie had suffered an injury. She had been too long under the tutelage of Old Jimmie, and his teachings were now too thoroughly the fiber of her very being, for her to alter permanently. She might change temporarily under the urge of an emotional revelation; but she would surely revert to her present self. There was no doubt of that.
And the Duchess gave weight to other considerations—all human, yet all in some measure specious. Joe Ellison was happy in his dream, and would be happy in it all the rest of his life. Why tell the truth and destroy his precious illusion?—especially when there was no chance to change Maggie?
And further, she recalled the terrific temper that had lived within the composed demeanor of Joe Ellison. The fires of that temper could not yet be all burned out. If she told the truth, told that Jimmie Carlisle was still alive, that might be just touching the trigger of a devastating tragedy—might be disaster for all. What would be the use when no one would have been benefited?
And so, in the wisdom of her old head and the entanglements of her old heart, the Duchess decided she would never tell. And that loving, human decision she was to cling to through the stress of times to come.
But even while she was thus deciding upon a measure to checkmate them both, Larry was pacing his room at Cedar Crest, at last excitedly evolving the elusive plan which was to bring Maggie to her senses and also to him; and Maggie, all unconscious of this new element which had entered as a potential factor in her existence, all unconscious of how far she had been guided from the course which had been charted for her, was lying awake at the Grantham after a late party at which Dick Sherwood had been her escort, and was exulting pridefully over the seemingly near consummation of the plan that was to show Larry Brainard how wrong he was and that was to establish her as the cleverest woman in her line—better even than Barney or Old Jimmie believed her.
And thus separate wills each strove to direct their own lives and other lives according to their own separate plans; little thinking to what extent they were all entangled in a common destiny; and thinking not at all of the further seed that was being sown for the harvest-time of the whirlwind.