When Maggie sped away from Cedar Crest in the low seat of the roadster beside the happy Dick, she felt herself more of a criminal than at any time in her life, and a criminal that miraculously was making her escape out of an inescapable set of circumstances.
Beyond her relief at this escape she did not know these first few minutes what she thought or felt. Too much had happened, and what had happened had all turned out so differently from what she had expected, for her to set in orderly array this chaos of reactions within herself and read the meaning of that afternoon's visit. She managed, with a great effort, to keep under control the outer extremities of her senses, and thus respond with the correct “yes” or “no” or “indeed” when some response from her was required by Dick's happy conversation.
Near Roslyn they swung off the turnpike into an unfrequented, shady road. Dick steered to one side beneath a locust-tree and silenced the motor.
“Why are you stopping?” she asked in sudden alarm.
“So we can talk without a piece of impertinent machinery roaring interruptions at us,” replied Dick with forced lightness. And then in a voice he could not make light: “I want to talk to you about—about my sister. Isn't she splendid?”
“She is!” There was no wavering of her thoughts as Maggie emphatically said this.
“I'm mighty glad you like her. She certainly liked you. She's all the family I've got, and since you two hit it off so well together I hope—I hope, Maggie—”
And then Dick plunged into it, stammeringly, but earnestly. He told her how much he loved her, in old phrases that his boyish ardor made vibrantly new. He loved her! And if she would marry him, her influence would make him take the brace all his friends had urged upon him. She'd make him a man! And she could see how pleased it would make his sister. And he would do his best to make Maggie happy—his very best!
The young super-adventuress—she herself had mentally used the word “adventuress” in thinking of herself, as being more genteel and mentally aristocratic than the cruder words by which Barney and Old Jimmie and their kind designated a woman accomplice—this young super-adventuress, who had schemed all this so adroitly, and worked toward it with the best of her brain and her conscious charm, was seized with new panic as she listened to the eager torrent of his imploring words, as she gazed into the quivering earnestness of his frank, blue-eyed face. She wished she could get out of the machine and run away or sink through the floor-boards of the car. For she really liked Dick.
“I'm—I'm not so good as you think,” she whispered. And then some unsuspected force within her impelled her to say: “Dick, if you knew the truth—”
He caught her shoulders. “I know all the truth about you I want to know! You're wonderful, and I love you! Will you marry me? Answer that. That's all I want to know!”
He had checked the confession that impulsively had surged toward her lips. Silent, her eyes wide, her breath coming sharply, she sat gazing at him.... And then from out the portion of her brain where were stored her purposes, and the momentum of her pride and determination, there flashed the realization that she had won! The thing that Barney and Old Jimmie had prepared and she had so skillfully worked toward, was at last achieved! She had only to say “yes,” and either of those two plans which Barney had outlined could at once be put in operation—and there could be no doubt of the swift success of either. Dick's eager, trusting face was guarantee that there would come no obstruction from him.
She felt that in some strange way she had been caught in a trap. Yes, what they had worked for, they had won! And yet, in this moment of winning, as elements of her vast dizziness, Maggie felt sick and ashamed—felt a frenzied desire to run away from the whole affair. For Maggie, cynical, all-confident, and eighteen, was proving really a very poor adventuress.
“Please, Maggie”—his imploring voice broke in upon her—“won't you answer me? You like me, don't you?—you'll marry me, won't you?”
“I like you, Dick,” she choked out—and it was some slight comfort to her to be telling this much of the truth—“but—but I can't marry you.”
“Maggie!” It was a cry of surprised pain, and the pain in his voice shot acutely into her. “From the way you acted toward me—I thought—I hoped—” He sharply halted the accusation which had risen to his lips. “I'm not going to take that answer as final, Maggie,” he said doggedly. “I'm going to give you more time to think it over—more time for me to try. Then I'll ask you again.”
That which prompted Maggie's response was a mixture of impulses: the desire, and this offered opportunity, to escape; and a faint reassertion of the momentum of her purpose. For with one such as Maggie, the set purposes may be seemingly overwhelmed, but death comes hard.
“All right,” she breathed rapidly. “Only please get me back as quickly as you can. I'm to have dinner with my—my cousin, and I'll be very late.”
Dick drove her into the city in almost unbroken silence and left her at the great doors of the Grantham, abustle with a dozen lackeys in purple livery. She stood a moment and watched him drive away. He really was a nice boy—Dick.
As she shot up the elevator, she thought of a hitherto forgotten element of that afternoon's bewildering situation. Barney Palmer! And Barney was, she knew, now up in her sitting-room, impatiently waiting for her report of what he had good reason to believe would prove a successful experience. If she told the truth—that Dick had proposed, just as they had planned for him to do—and she had refused him—why, Barney—!
She seemed caught on every side!
Maggie got into her suite by way of her bedroom. She wanted time to gather her wits for meeting Barney. When Miss Grierson told her that her cousin was still waiting to take her to dinner, she requested her companion to inform Barney that she would be in as soon as she had dressed. She wasted all the time she legitimately could in changing into a dinner-gown, and when at length she stepped into her sitting-room she was to Barney's eye the same cool Maggie as always.
Barney rose as she entered. He was in smart dinner jacket; these days Barney was wearing the smartest of everything that money could secure. There was a shadow of impatience on his face, but it was instantly dissipated by Maggie's self-composed, direct-eyed beauty.
“How'd you come out with Miss Sherwood?” he whispered eagerly.
“Well enough for her to kiss me good-bye, and beg me to come again.”
“I've got to hand it to you, Maggie! You're sure some swell actress—you've sure got class!” His dark eyes gleamed on her with half a dozen pleasures: admiration of what she was in herself—admiration of what she had just achieved—anticipation of results, many results—anticipation of what she was later to mean to him in a personal way. “If you can put it over on a swell like Miss Sherwood, you can put it over on any one!” He exulted. “As soon as we clean up this job in hand, we'll move on to one big thing after another!”
And then out came the question Maggie had been bracing herself for: “How about Dick Sherwood? Did he finally come across with that proposal?”
“No,” Maggie answered steadily.
“No? Why not?” exclaimed Barney sharply. “I thought that was all that was holding him back—waiting for his sister to look you over and give you her O.K.?”
Maggie had decided that her air of cool, indifferent certainty was the best manner to use in this situation with Barney. So she shrugged her white shoulders.
“How can I tell what makes a man do something, and what makes him not do it?”
“But did he seem any less interested in you than before?” Barney pursued.
“No,” replied Maggie.
“Then maybe he's just waiting to get up his nerve. He'll ask you, all right; nothing there for us to worry about. Come on, let's have dinner. I'm starved.”
On the roof of the Grantham they were excellently served; for Barney knew how to order a dinner, and he knew the art, which is an alchemistic mixture of suave diplomacy and the insinuated power and purpose of murder, of handling head-waiters and their sub-autocrats. Having no other business in hand, Barney devoted himself to that business which ran like a core through all his businesses—paying court to Maggie. And when Barney wished to be a courtier, there were few of his class who could give a better superficial interpretation of the role; and in this particular instance he was at the advantage of being in earnest. He forced the most expensive tidbits announced by the dinner card upon Maggie; he gallantly and very gracefully put on and removed, as required by circumstances, the green cobweb of a scarf Maggie had brought to the roof as protection against the elements; and when he took the dancing-floor with her, he swung her about and hopped up and down and stepped in and out with all the skill of a master of the modern perversion of dancing. Barney was really good enough to have been a professional dancer had his desires not led him toward what seemed to him a more exciting and more profitable career.
Maggie, not to rouse Barney's suspicions, played her role as well as he did his own. And most of the other diners, a fraction of the changing two or three hundred thousand people from the South and West who choose New York as the best of all summer resorts, gazed upon this handsome couple with their intricate steps which were timed with such effortless and enviable accuracy, and excitedly believed that they were beholding two distinguished specimens of what their home papers persisted in calling New York's Four Hundred.
Maggie got back to her room with the feeling that she had staved off Barney and her numerous other dilemmas for the immediate present. Her chief thought in the many events of the day had been only to escape her dangers and difficulties for the moment; all the time she had known that her real thinking, her real decisions, were for a later time when she was not so driven by the press of unexpected circumstances. That less stressful time was now beginning.
What was she to do next? What were to be her final decisions? And what, in all this strange ferment, was likely to germinate as possible forces against her?
She mulled these things over for several days, during which Dick came to see her twice, and twice proposed, and was twice put off. She had quiet now, and was most of the time alone, but that clarity which she had expected, that quickness and surety of purpose which she had always believed to be unfailingly hers, refused to come.
She tried to have it otherwise, but the outstanding figure in her meditations was Larry. Larry, who had not exposed her at the Sherwoods', and whose influence had caused Hunt also not to expose her—Larry, who without deception was on a familiar footing at the Sherwoods' where she had been received only through trickery—Larry, a fugitive in danger from so many enemies, perhaps after all undeserved enemies—Larry, who looked to be making good on his boast to achieve success through honesty—Larry, who had again told her that he loved her. She liked Dick Sherwood—she really did. But Larry—that was something different.
And thus she thought on, drawn this way and that, and unable to reach a decision. But with most people, when in a state of acute mental turmoil, that which has been most definite in the past, instinct, habit of mind, purpose, tradition, becomes at least temporarily the dominant factor through the mere circumstance that it has existed powerfully before, through its comparative stability, through its semi-permanence. And so with Maggie. She had for that one afternoon almost been won over against herself by the workings of Larry's secret diplomacy. Then had come the natural reaction. And now in her turmoil, in so far as she had any decision, it was instinctively to go right ahead in the direction in which she had been going.
But on the sixth day of her uncertainty, just after Dick had called on her and she had provisionally accepted an invitation to Cedar Crest for the following afternoon, a danger which she had half seen from the start burst upon her without a moment's warning. It came into her sitting-room, just before her dinner hour, in the dual form of Barney and Old Jimmie. The faces of both were lowering.
“Get rid of that boob chaperon of yours!” gritted Barney. “We're going to have some real talk!”
Maggie stepped to the connecting door, sent Miss Grierson on an inconsequential errand, and returned.
“You're looking as pleasant as if you were sitting for a new photograph, Barney. What gives you that sweet expression?”
“You'll cut out your comic-supplement stuff in just one second,” Barney warned her. “We both saw young Sherwood awhile ago as he was leaving the Grantham, and he told us everything!”
Persiflage did indeed fail Maggie. “Everything?” she exclaimed. “What's everything?”
“He told us about proposing to you almost a week ago, and about your refusing him. And you lied to us—kept us sitting round, wasting our time—and all the while you've been double-crossing us!”
Those visitors from South and West, especially the women, who a few nights before on the roof had regarded Barney as the perfect courtier, would not have so esteemed him if they had seen him at the present moment. He seized Maggie's wrists, and all the evil of his violent nature glared from his small bright eyes.
“Damn you!” he cried. “Jimmie, she's yours, and a father's got a right to do anything he likes to his own daughter. Give it to her proper if she don't come across with the truth!”
Jimmie stepped closer to her and bared his yellow teeth. “I haven't given you a basting since you were fifteen—but I'll paste you one right in the mouth if you don't talk straight talk!”
“You hear that!” Barney gritted at her. He believed there was justice in his wrath—as indeed there was, of a sort. “Think what Jimmie and I've put into this, in time and hard coin! We've given you your chance, we've made you! And then, after hard work and waiting and our spending so much, and everything comes out exactly as we figured, you go and throw us down—not just yourself, but us and our rights! Now you talk straight stuff! Tell us, why did you refuse Sherwood when he proposed? And why did you tell me that lie about his not proposing?”
Maggie realized she was in a desperate plight, with these two inflamed gazes upon her. Never had she felt so little of a daughter's liking for Old Jimmie as now when she looked into his lean, harsh, yellow-fanged face. And she had no illusions about Barney. He might love her, as she knew he did; but that would not be a check upon his ruthlessness if he thought himself balked or betrayed.
Just then her telephone began to ring. She started to move toward it, but Barney's grip checked her short.
“You're going to answer me—not any damned telephone! Let it ring!”
The bell rang for a minute or two before it stilled its shrill clamor. Its ringing was in a way a brief respite to Maggie, for it gave her additional time to consider what should be her course. She realized that she dared not let Barney believe at this moment that she had turned against him. Again she fell back upon her cool, self-confident manner.
“You want to know why? The answer is simple enough. I thought I might try out an improvement of our plan—something that might suit me better.”
“What's that?” Barney harshly demanded.
“Since Miss Sherwood fell for me so easy, it struck me that she'd be pretty sure to fall for me if I told her the whole truth about myself. That is, everything except our scheme to play Dick for a sucker.”
“What're you driving at?”
“Don't you see? If she forgave me being what I am, and I rather think she would, and with Dick liking me as he does—why, it struck me as the best thing for yours truly to marry Dick for keeps.”
“What?” Though Barney's voice was low, it had the effect of a startled and savage roar. “And chuck us over-board?”
“Not at all. If I married Dick for keeps, I intended to pay you a lump sum, or else a regular amount each year.”
“No, you don't!” Barney cried in the same muffled roar.
“Perhaps not—I haven't decided,” Maggie said evenly. “I've merely been telling you, as you requested me, why I did as I did. I refused Dick, and lied to you, so that I might have more time to think over what I really wanted to do.”
Instinctively she had counted on rousing Barney's jealousy in order to throw him off the track of her real thoughts. She succeeded.
“I can tell you what you're going to do!” Barney flung at her with fierce mastery. “You're not going to put over a sure-enough marriage with any Dick Sherwood! When there's that kind of a marriage, I'm going to be the man! And you're going to go right straight ahead with our old plan! Dick'll propose again if you give him half a chance. And when he does, you say 'yes'! Understand? That's what you're going to do!”
There was no safety in openly defying Barney. And as a matter of fact what he had ordered was what, in the shifting currents of her thoughts, the steady momentum of her old ambitions and purposes had been pushing her toward. So she said, in her even voice:
“You waste such a lot of your good energy, Barney, by exploding when there's nothing to blow up. That's exactly what I'd decided to do. Miss Sherwood has asked me out to Cedar Crest to-morrow afternoon, and I'm going.”
Barney let go the hold he had kept upon her wrists, and the dark look slowly lifted from his face. “Why didn't you tell a fellow this at first?” he half grumbled. Then with a grim enthusiasm: “And when you come back, you're going to tell us it's all settled!”
“Of course—if he asks me. And now suppose you two go away. You've given me a headache, and I want to rest.”
“We'll go,” said Barney. “But there may be some more points about this that we may want to talk over a little later to-night. So better get all the rest you can.”
But when they had gone and left her to the silence of her pretentious and characterless suite, Maggie did not rest. She had made up her mind; she was going to do as she had said. But there was still that same turmoil within her.
Again she thought of Larry. But she would not admit to herself that her real motive for suddenly deciding to go to Cedar Crest on the morrow was the chance of seeing him.
During all these days Larry waited for news of the result of the experiment in psychology which meant so much to his life. He had not expected to hear directly from Maggie; but he had counted upon learning at once from Dick, if not by words, then either from eloquent dejection which would proclaim Dick's refusal (and Larry's success) or from an ebullient joy which would proclaim that Maggie had accepted him. But Dick's sober but not unhappy behavior announced neither of these two to Larry; and the matter was too personal, altogether too delicate, to permit Larry to ask Dick the result, however subtly he might ask it.
So Larry could only wait—and wonder. The truth did not occur to Larry; he did not see that there might be another alternative to the two possible reactions he had calculated upon. He did not bear in mind that Maggie's youthful obstinacy, her belief in herself and her ways, were too solid a structure to yield at once to one moral shock, however wisely planned and however strong. He did not at this time hold in mind that any real change in so decided a character as Maggie, if change there was to be, would be preceded and accompanied by a turbulent period in which she would hardly know who she was, or where she was, or what she was going to do—and that at the end of such a period there might be no change at all.
Inasmuch as just then Maggie was his major interest, it seemed to Larry in his safe seclusion that he was merely marking time, and marking time with feet that were frantically impatient. He felt he could not stand much longer his own inactivity and his ignorance of what Maggie was doing and what was happening to her. He could not remain in this sanctuary pulling strings, and very long and fragile strings, and strings which might be the mistaken ones, for any much greater period. He felt that he simply had to walk out of this splendid safety, back into the dangers from which he had fled, where he might at least have the possible advantage of being in the very midst of Maggie's affairs and fight for her more openly and have a more direct influence upon her.
He knew that, sooner or later, he was going to throw caution aside and appear suddenly among his enemies, unless something of a definite character developed. But for these slow, irritating days he held himself in check with difficulty, hoping that things might come to him, that he would not have to go forth to them.
He had brought Hunt's portrait of Maggie to Cedar Crest in the bottom of his trunk, and kept it locked in his chiffonier. During these days, more frequently than before, he would take out the portrait and in the security of his locked room would gaze long at that keen-visioned portrayal of her many characters. No doubt of it: there was a possible splendid woman there! And no doubt of it: he loved that woman utterly!
During these days of his ignorance, while Maggie was struggling in the darkness of her unexplored being, Larry drove himself grimly at the business to which under happier circumstances he would have gone under the irresistible suasion of pure joy. One afternoon he presented to Miss Sherwood an outline for his growing plan for the development of the Sherwood properties on the basis of good homes at fair rentals. He discovered that, in spite of her generous giving, she had much the same attitude toward Charity as his own: that the only sound Charity, except for those temporarily or permanently handicapped or disabled, was the giving of honest values for honest returns—and that was not Charity at all.
The project of reforming the shiftless character of the Sherwood properties, and of relieving even in a small degree New York's housing congestion, appealed at once to her imagination and her sensible idealism.
“A splendid plan!” she exclaimed, regarding Larry with those wise, humorous eyes of hers, which were now very serious and penetrating. “You have been working much harder than I had thought. And if you will pardon my saying it, you have more of the soundly humane vision which big business enterprise should have than I had thought.”
“Thank you!” said Larry.
“That's a splendid dream,” she continued; “but it will take hard work to translate that dream into a reality. We shall need architects, builders, a heavy initial expense, time—and a more modern and alert management.”
“Yes, Miss Sherwood.”
She did not speak for a moment. Her penetrating eyes, which had been fixed on him in close thought, were yet more penetrating. Finally she said:
“That's a big thing, a useful thing. The present agents wish to be relieved of our affairs as soon as I can make arrangements—and I'd like nothing better than for Dick to drop what he's doing and get into something constructive and useful like this. But Dick cannot do it alone; he's too unsettled, and too inexperienced to cope with some of the sharper business practices.”
She paused again, still regarding him with those keen eyes, which seemed to be weighing him. Finally she said, almost abruptly:
“Will you take charge of this with Dick? He likes you and respects your judgment; I'm sure you'd help steady him down. Of course you lack practical experience, but you can take in a practical man who will supply this element. Practical experience is one of the commonest articles on the market; vision and initiative are among the rarest—and you have them. What do you say?”
Larry could not say anything at once. The suddenness of her offer, the largeness of his opportunity, bewildered him for the moment. And his bewilderment was added to by his swift realization of quite another element involved in her frank proposition. He was now engaged in the enterprise of foisting a bogus article, Maggie, upon this woman who was offering him her complete confidence—an enterprise of most questionable ethics and very dubious issue. If he accepted her offer, and the result of this enterprise were disaster, what would Miss Sherwood then think of him?
He took refuge in evasion. “I'm not going to try to tell you how much I appreciate your proposition, Miss Sherwood. But do you mind if I hold back my answer for the present and think it over? Anyhow, to do all that is required I must be able to work in the open—and I can't do that until I get free of my entanglements with the police and my old acquaintances.”
Thus it was agreed upon. Miss Sherwood turned to another subject. The pre-public show of Hunt's pictures had opened the previous day.
“When you were in the city yesterday, did you get in to see Mr. Hunt's exhibition?”
“No,” he answered. “Although I wanted to. But you know I've already seen all of Mr. Hunt's pictures that Mr. Graham has in his gallery. How was the opening?”
“Crowded with guests. And since they had been told that the pictures were unusual and good, of course the people were enthusiastic.”
“What kind of prices was Mr. Graham quoting?”
“He wasn't quoting any. He told me he wasn't going to sell a picture, or even mention a price, until the public exhibition. He's very enthusiastic. He thinks Mr. Hunt is already made—and in a big way.”
And then she added, her level gaze very steady on Larry:
“Of course Mr. Hunt is really a great painter. But he needed a jolt to make him go out and really paint his own kind of stuff. And he needed some one like you to put him across in a business way.”
When she left, she left Larry thinking: thinking of her saying that Hunt “needed a jolt to make him go out and really paint his own kind of stuff.” Hidden behind that remark somewhere could there be the explanation for the break between these two? Larry began to see a glimmer of light. It was entirely possible that Miss Sherwood, in so finished and adroit a manner that Hunt had not discerned her purpose, had herself given him this jolt or at least contributed to its force. It might all have been diplomacy on her part, applied shrewdly to the man she understood and loved. Yes, that might be the explanation. Yes, perhaps she had been doing in a less trying way just what he was seeking to do under more stressful circumstances with Maggie: to arouse him to his best by indirectly working at definite psychological reactions.
That afternoon Hunt appeared at Cedar Crest, and while there dropped in on Larry. The big painter, in his full-blooded, boyish fashion, fairly gasconaded over the success of his exhibit. Larry smiled at the other's exuberant enthusiasm. Hunt was one man who could boast without ever being offensively egotistical, for Hunt, added to his other gifts, had the divine gift of being able to laugh at himself.
Larry saw here an opportunity to forward that other ambition of his: the bringing of Hunt and Miss Sherwood together. And at this instant it flashed upon him that Miss Sherwood's seemingly casual remarks about Hunt had not been casual at all. Perhaps they had been carefully thought out and spoken with a definite purpose. Perhaps Miss Sherwood had been very subtly appointing him her ambassador. She was clever enough for that.
“Stop declaiming those self-written press notices of your unapproachable superiority,” Larry interrupted. “If you use your breath up like that you'll drown on dry land. Besides, I just heard something better than this mere articulated air of yours. Better because from a person in her senses.”
“Heard it from whom?”
“Miss Sherwood.”
“Miss Sherwood! What did she say?”
“That you were a really great painter.”
“Huh!” snorted Hunt. “Why shouldn't she say that? I've proved it!”
“Hunt,” said Larry evenly, “you are the greatest painter I ever met, but you also have the distinction of being the greatest of all damned fools.”
“What's that, young fellow?”
“You love Miss Sherwood, don't you? At least you've the same as told me that in words, and you've told me that in loud-voiced actions every time you've seen her.”
“Well—what if I do?”
“If you had the clearness of vision that is in the glassy eye of a cold boiled lobster you would see that she feels the same way about you.”
“See here, Larry”—all the boisterous quality had gone from Hunt's voice, and it was low-pitched and a bit unsteady—“I don't mind your joshing me about myself or my painting, but don't fool with me about anything that's really important.”
“I'm not fooling you. I'm sure Miss Sherwood feels that way.”
“How do you know?”
“I've got a pair of eyes that don't belong to a cold boiled lobster. And when I see a thing, I know I see it.”
“You're all wrong, Larry. If you'd heard what she said to me less than a year ago—”
“You make me tired!” interrupted Larry. “You two were made for each other. She's waiting for you to step up and talk man's talk to her—and instead you sulk in your tent and mumble about something you think she might have thought or said a year ago! You're too sensitive; you're too proud; you've got too few brains. It's a million dollars to one that in your handsome, well-bred way you've fallen out with her over something that probably never existed and certainly doesn't exist now. Forget it all, and walk right up and ask her!”
“Larry, if I thought there was a chance that you are right—”
“A single question will prove whether I'm right!”
Hunt did not speak for a moment. “I guess I've never seen my part of it all in the way you put it, Larry.” He stood up, his whole being subdued yet tense. “I'm going to slide back into town and think it all over.”
Larry followed him an hour later, bent on routine business of the Sherwood estate. Toward seven o'clock he was studying the present decrepitude and future possibilities of a row of Sherwood apartment houses on the West Side, when, as he came out of one building and started into another, a firm hand fell upon his shoulder and a voice remarked:
“So, Larry, you're in New York?”
Larry whirled about. For the moment he felt all the life go out of him. Beside him stood Detective Casey, whom he had last seen on the night of his wild flight when Casey had feigned a knockout in order to aid Larry's escape from Gavegan. Any other man affiliated with his enemies Larry would have struck down and tried to break away from. But not Casey.
“Hello, Casey. Well, I suppose you're going to invite me to go along with you?”
“Where were you going?”
“Into this house.”
“Then I'll invite myself to go along with you.”
He quickly pushed Larry before him into the hallway, which was empty since all the tenants were at their dinner. Larry remembered the scene down in Deputy Police Commissioner Barlow's office, when the Chief of Detectives had demanded that he become a stool-pigeon working under Gavegan and Casey, and the grilling and the threats, more than fulfilled, which had followed.
“Going to give me a little private quiz first, Casey,” he asked, “and then call in Gavegan and lead me down to Barlow?”
“Not unless Gavegan or some one else saw and recognized you, which I know they didn't since I was watching for that very thing. And not unless you yourself feel hungry for a visit to Headquarters.”
“If I feel hungry, it's an appetite I'm willing to make wait.”
“You know I don't want to pinch you. My part in this has been a dirty job that was just pushed my way. You know that I know you've been framed and double-crossed, and that I won't run you in unless I can't get out of it.”
“Thanks, Casey. You're too white to have to run with people like Barlow and Gavegan. But if it wasn't to pinch me, why did you stop me out there in the street?”
“Been hoping I might some day run into you on the quiet. There are some things I've learned—never mind how—that I wanted to slip you for your own good.”
“Go to it, Casey.”
“First, I've got a hunch that it was Barney Palmer who tipped off the police about Red Hannigan and Jack Rosenfeldt, and then spread it among all the crooks that you were the stool and squealer.”
“Yes, I'd guessed that much.”
“Second, I've got a hunch that it really was from Barney Palmer that Barlow got his idea of making you become a stool-pigeon. Barney is a smooth one all right, and he figured what would happen. He knew you would refuse, and he knew Barlow would uncork hell beneath you. Barney certainly called every turn.”
“What—what—” stammered Larry. “Why, then Barney must be—” He paused, utterly astounded by the newness of the possibility that had just risen in his mind.
“You've got it, Larry,” Casey went on. “Barney is a police stool. Has been one for years. Works directly for Barlow. We're not supposed to know anything about it. He's turned up a lot of big ones. That's why it's safe for Barney to pull off anything he likes.”
“Barney a police stool!” Larry repeated in the stupor of his amazement.
“Guess that's all the news I wanted to hand you, Larry, so I'll be on my way. Here's wishing you luck—and for God's sake, don't let yourself be pinched by us. So-long.” And with that Casey slipped out of the hallway.
For a moment Larry stood moveless where Casey had left him. Then fierce purpose, and a cautious recklessness, surged up and took mastery of him. It had required what Casey had told him to end his irksome waiting and wavering. No longer could he remain in his hiding-place, safe himself, trying to save Maggie by slow, indirect endeavor. The time had now come for very different methods. The time had come to step forth into the open, taking, of course, no unnecessary risk, and to have it out face to face with his enemies, who were also Maggie's real enemies, though she counted them her friends—to save Maggie against her own will, if he could save her in no other way.
And having so decided, Larry walked quickly out of the hallway into the street.
On the sidewalk Larry glanced swiftly around him. Half a block down the street on the front of a drug-store was a blue telephone flag. A minute later he was inside a telephone booth in the drug-store, asking first for the Hotel Grantham, and then asking the Grantham operator to be connected with Miss Maggie Cameron.
There was a long wait. While he listened for Maggie's voice he blazed with terrible fury against Barney Paler. For Maggie to be connected with a straight crook, that idea had been bad enough. But for her to be under the influence of the worst crook of all, a stool, a cunning traitor to his own friends—that was more than could possibly be stood! In his rage in Maggie's behalf he forgot for the moment the many evils Barney had done to himself. He thought of wild, incoherent, vaguely tremendous plans. First he would get Maggie away from Barney and Old Jimmie—somehow. Then he would square accounts with those two—again by an undefined somehow.
Presently the tired, impersonal voice of the Grantham operator remarked against his ear-drum: “Miss Cameron don't answer.”
“Have her paged, please,” he requested.
Larry, of course, could not know that his telephone call was the very one which had rung in Maggie's room while Barney and Old Jimmie were with her, and which Barney had harshly forbidden her to answer. Therefore he could not know that any attempt to get Maggie by telephone just then was futile.
When he came out of the booth, the impersonal voice having informed him that Miss Cameron was not in, it was with the intention of calling Maggie up between eight and nine when she probably would have returned from dinner where he judged her now to be. He knew that Dick Sherwood had no engagement with her, for Dick was to be out at Cedar Crest that evening, so he judged it almost certain Maggie would be at home and alone later on.
Having nothing else to do for an hour and a half, he thought of a note he had received from the Duchess in that morning's mail asking him to come down to see her when he was next in town. Thirty minutes later he was in the familiar room behind the pawnshop. The Duchess asked him if he had eaten, and on his reply that he had not and did not care to, instead of proceeding to the business of her letter she mumbled something and went into the pawnshop.
She left Larry for the very simple reason that now that she had him here she was uncertain what she should say, and how far she should go. Unknown to either, one thread of the drama of Larry and Maggie was being spun in the brain and heart of the Duchess; and being spun with pain to her, and in very great doubt. True, she had definitely decided, for Larry's welfare, that the facts about Maggie's parentage should never be known from her—and since the only other person who could tell the truth was Jimmie Carlisle, and his interests were all apparently in favor of silence, then it followed that the truth would never be known from any one. But having so decided, and decided definitely and finally, the Duchess had proceeded to wonder if she had decided wisely.
Day and night this had been the main subject of her thought. Could she be wrong in her estimate of Maggie's character, and what she might turn out to be? Could she be wrong in her belief that, given enough time, Larry would outgrow his infatuation for Maggie? And since she was in such doubt about these two points, had she any right, and was it for the best, to suppress a fact that might so gravely influence both matters? She did not know. What she wanted was whatever was best for Larry—and so in her doubt she had determined to talk again to Larry, hoping that the interview might in some way replace her uncertainty with stability of purpose.
Presently she returned to the inner room, and in her direct way and using the fewest possible words, which had created for her her reputation of a woman who never spoke and who was packed with strange secrets, she asked Larry what he had done concerning Maggie. He told her of the plan he had evolved, of Maggie's visit to Cedar Crest, of his ignorance of Maggie's reactions. To all this his grandmother made response neither by word nor by change of expression. He then went on to tell her of what he had just learned from Casey of Barney's maneuvering his misfortunes.
The old head nodded. “Yes, Barney's just that sort,” she said in her flat monotone.
And then she came to the purpose of her sending for him. “How do you feel about Maggie now?”
“The same as before.”
“You love her?”
“Yes—and always will,” he said firmly.
She was silent once more. Then, “What are you going to do next?”
“Break things up between her and Barney and her father. Get her away from them.”
She asked no further questions. Larry was as settled as a man could be. But was Maggie worth while?—that was the great question still unanswered.
“Just what did you want me for, grandmother?” he asked her finally.
“Something which I thought might have developed, but which hasn't.”
And so she let him go away without telling him. And wishing to shape things for the best for him, she was troubled by the same doubts as before.
His visit with his grandmother had had no meaning to Larry, since he had no guess of the struggle going on within that ancient, inscrutable figure. The visit had for him merely served to fill in a nervous, useless hour. His rage against Barney had all the while possessed him too thoroughly for him to give more than the mere surface of his mind to what had passed between his grandmother and himself. And when he had left her, his rage at Barney's treachery and his impetuous desire to snatch Maggie away from her present influences, so stormed within him that his usually cautious judgment was blown away and recklessness swept like a gale into control of him.
When he called up the Grantham a second time, at nine o'clock, Maggie's voice came to him:
“Hello. Who this, please?”
“Mr. Brandon.”
He heard a stilted “Oh!” at the other end of the line “I'm coming right up to see you,” he said.
“I—I don't think you—”
“I'll be there in then minutes,” Larry interrupted the startled voice and hung up.
He counted that Maggie, after his sparing her at Cedar Crest, would receive him and treat him at least no worse than an enemy with whom there was a half hour's truce. Sure enough, when he rang the bell of her suite, Maggie herself admitted him to her sitting-room. She was taut and pale, her look neither friendly nor unfriendly.
“Don't you know the risk you're running,” she whispered when the door was closed—“coming here like this, in the open?”
“The time has come for risks, Maggie,” he announced.
“But you were safe enough where you were. Why take such risks?”
“For your sake.”
“My sake?”
“To take you away from these people you're tied up with. Take you away now.”
At an earlier time this would have been a fuse to a detonation of defiance from her. But now she said nothing at all, and that was something.
“Since I've come out into the open, everything's going to be in the open. Listen, Maggie!” The impulse had suddenly come upon him, since his plan to awaken Maggie by her psychological reactions had apparently failed, to tell her everything. “Listen, Maggie! I'm going to lay all my cards on the table, and show you every card I've played. You were invited to come out to Cedar Crest because I schemed to have you come. And the reason I schemed to have you invited was, I reasoned that being received in such a frank, generous, unsuspecting way, by a woman like Miss Sherwood, would make you sick of what you were doing and you would drop it of your own accord. But it seems I reasoned wrong.”
“So—you were behind that!” she breathed.
“I was. Though I couldn't have done it if Dick Sherwood hadn't been honestly infatuated with you. But now I'm through with working under cover, through with indirect methods. From now on every play's in the open, and it's straight to the point with everything. So get ready. I'm going to take you away from Barney and Old Jimmie.”
The mention of these two names had a swift and magical effect upon her. But instead of arousing belligerency, they aroused an almost frantic agitation.
“You must leave at once, Larry. Barney and my father were here before dinner, and they've just telephoned they were coming back!”
“Coming back! That's the best argument you could make for my staying!”
“But, Larry—they both have keys, and Barney always carries a gun!”
“I stay here, unless you leave with me. Listen to some more, Maggie. I laid all the cards on the table. Do you know the kind of people you're tied up with? I'll not say anything about your father, for I guess you know all there is to know. But Barney Palmer! He's the lowest kind of crook that breathes. There's been a lot of talk about squealers and police stools. Well, the big squealer, the big stool, is Barney Palmer!”
“I don't believe it!” she cried involuntarily.
“It's true! I've got it straight. Barney wanted to smash me, because I'd made up my mind to quit the old game and because he wanted to get me out of his way with you. So he framed it up so that I appeared to be a squealer, and started the gangmen after me. And he put Barlow up to the idea of forcing me to be a stool, and then framing me when I refused. It was Barney who fixed things so I had to go to jail, or be shot up, or run away. It was Barney Palmer who squealed on Red Hannigan and Jack Rosenfeldt, and who's been squealing on his other pals. And that's the sort you're stringing along with!”
She gazed at him in appalled half conviction. He remained silent to let his truth sink in.
They were standing so, face to face, when a key grated in the outer door of the little hallway as on the occasion of Larry's first visit here. And as on that occasion, Maggie sprang swiftly forward and shot home the bolt of the inner door. Then she turned and caught Larry's arm.
“It's Barney—I told you he was coming!” she whispered. “Oh, why didn't you go before? Come on!”
She tried to drag him toward her bedroom door, through which she had once helped him escape. But this time he was not to be moved.
“I stay right here,” he said to her.
There was the sound of a futile effort to turn the lock of the inner door; then Barney's voice called out: “What's the matter, Maggie? Open the door.”
Maggie, still clutching Larry's resisting arm, stood gasping in wide-eyed consternation.
“Open the door for them, Maggie,” Larry whispered.
“I'll not do it!” she whispered back.
“Open it, or I will,” he ordered.
Their gazes held a moment longer while Barney rattled at the lock. Then slowly, falteringly, her amazed eyes over her shoulder upon him, Maggie crossed and unlocked the door. Barney entered, Old Jimmie just bend him.
“I say, Maggie, what was the big idea in keeping us—” he was beginning in a grumbling tone, when he saw Larry just beyond her. His complaint broke off in mid-breath; he stopped short and his dark face twitched with his surprise.
“Larry Brainard!” he finally exclaimed. Old Jimmie, suddenly tense, blinked and said nothing.
“Hello, Barney; hello, Jimmie,” Larry greeted his former allies, putting on an air of geniality. “Been a long time since we three met. Don't stand there in the door. Come right in.”
Barney was keen enough to see, though Larry's attitude was careless and his tone light, that his eyes were bright and hard. Barney moved forward a couple of paces, alert for anything, and Old Jimmie followed. Maggie looked on at the three men, her girlish figure taut and hardly breathing.
“Didn't know you were in New York,” said Barney.
“Well, here I am all right,” returned Larry with his menacing cheerfulness.
By now Barney had recovered from his first surprise. He felt it time to assert his supremacy.
“How do you come to be here with Maggie?” he demanded abruptly.
“Happened to catch sight of her on the street to-day. Trailed her here to the Grantham, and to-night I just dropped in.”
Barney's tone grew more authoritative, more ugly. “We told you long ago we were through with you. So why did you come here?”
“That's easy answered, Barney. The last time we were all together, you'd come to take Maggie away. This is that same scene reproduced—only this time I've come to take Maggie away.”
“What's that?” snapped Barney.
Larry's voice threw off its assumed geniality, and became drivingly hard. “And to get Maggie to come, I've been telling her the kind of a bird you are, Barney Palmer! Oh, I've got the straight dope on you! I've been telling her how you framed me, and were able to frame me because you are Chief Barlow's stool.”
Barney went as near white as it was possible for him to become, and his mouth sagged. “What—what—” he stammered.
“I've been telling her that you are the one who really squealed on Red Hannigan and Jack Rosenfeldt.”
“You're a damned liar!” Barney burst out, and instantly from beneath his left arm he whipped an automatic which he thrust against Larry's stomach. “Take that back, damn you, or I'll blow you straight to hell!”
“Barney!—Larry!” interjected Maggie in sickened fright.
“This is nothing to worry over, Maggie,” Larry said. He looked back at Barney. “Oh, I knew you would flash a gun on me at some stage of the game. But you're not going to shoot.”
“You'll see, if you don't take that back!”
Larry realized that his hot blood had driven him into an enterprise of daring, in which only bluff and the playing of his highest cards could help him through.
“You don't think I was such a fool as to walk into this place without taking precautions,” he said contemptuously. “You won't shoot, Barney, because since I knew I might meet you and you'd pull a gun, I had myself searched by two friends just before I came up here. They'll testify I was not armed. They know you, and know you so well that they'll be able to identify the thing in your hand as your gun. So no matter what Maggie and Jimmie may testify, the verdict will be cold-blooded murder and the electric chair will be your finish. And that's why I know you won't shoot. So you might as well put the gun away.”
Barney neither spoke nor moved.
“I've called your bluff, Barney,” Larry said sharply. “Put that gun away, or I'll take it from you!”
Barney's glare wavered. The pistol sank from its position. With a lightning-swift motion Larry wrenched it from Barney's hand.
“Guess I'd better have it, after all,” he said, slipping it into a pocket. “Keep you out of temptation.”
And then in a subdued voice that was steely with menace: “I'm too busy to attend to you now, Barney—but, by God, I'm going to square things with you for the dirt you've done me, and I'm going to show you up for a stool and a squealer!” He wheeled on Old Jimmie. “And the only reason I'll be easy with you, Jimmie Carlisle, is because you are Maggie's father—though you're the rottenest thing as a father God ever let breathe!”
Old Jimmie shrank slightly before Larry's glower, and his little eyes gleamed with the fear of a rat that is cornered. But he said nothing.
Larry turned his back upon the two men. “We're through with this bunch, Maggie. Put on a hat and a wrap, and let's go. We can send for your things.”
“No you don't, Maggie,” snarled Barney, before Maggie could speak.
Old Jimmie made his first positive motion since entering the room. He shifted quickly to Maggie's side and seized her arm.
“You're my daughter, and you stay with me!” he ordered. “I brought you up, and you do exactly what I tell you to! You're not going with Larry—he's lying about Barney. You stay with me!”
“Come on, let's go, Maggie,” repeated Larry.
“You stay with me!” repeated Jimmie.
Thus ordered and appealed to, Maggie was areel with contradicting thoughts and impulses while the three men awaited her action. In fact she had no clear thought at all. She never knew later what determined her course at this bewildered moment: perhaps it was partly a continuance of her doubt of Larry, perhaps partly once more sheer momentum, perhaps her instinctive feeling that her place was with the man she believed to be her father.
“Yes, I'll stay with you,” she said to Old Jimmie.
“That's the signal for you to be on your way, Larry Brainard!” Barney snapped at him triumphantly.
Larry realized, all of a sudden, that his coming here was no more than a splendid gesture to which his anger had excited him. Indeed there was nothing for him but to be on his way.
“I've told you the truth, Maggie; and you'll be sorry that you have not left—if not sorry soon, then sorry a little later.”
He turned to Barney with a last shot; he could not leave the gloating Barney Palmer his unalloyed triumph. “I told you I had the straight dope on you, Barney. Here's some more of it. I know exactly what your game is, and I know exactly who your sucker is. We'll see if you put it over—you squealer! Good-night, all.”
With that Larry walked out. Old Jimmie regarded his partner with suspicion.
“How about that, Barney—you being a stool and a squealer?” he demanded.
“I tell you it's all a lie—a damned lie!” cried Barney with feverish emphasis.
“I hope it is!” breathed Old Jimmie.
This was a subject Barney wanted to get away from. “Maggie,” he demanded, “is what Larry Brainard said about how he came here the truth?—his seeing you on the street and then following you here?”
“How do I know where he first saw me?”
“But is to-night the first time you've seen him?”
“It is.”
“Sure you haven't been seeing him?” demanded Barney's quick jealousy.
“I have not.”
“Did he tell you where he came from?—where he hangs out?”
“No.”
Old Jimmie interrupted this cross-examination.
“You're wasting good time asking these questions. Barney, do you realize the cold fact that it's not a good thing for you, nor for us, for Larry Brainard to be back in New York, floating around as he pleases?”
“I should say not!” Barney saw he was facing a sudden crisis, and in the need for quick action he spoke without thought of Maggie. “We've got to look after him at once!”
“Tell the bunch he's back, and let them take care of him?” suggested Old Jimmie.
Barney considered rapidly. If Larry knew of his arrangement with the police, then perhaps his secret was beginning to leak through to others. He decided that for the present it would be wiser to keep from these old friends and allies.
“Not the bunch—the police!” he said inspiredly. “They're after him, anyhow, and are sore. All we've got to do is slip them word—they'll do the rest!” And then with the sharper emphasis of an immediate plan: “We don't want to lose a minute. I know where Gavegan hangs out at this time of night. Come on!”
With a bare “Good-night” to Maggie the two men hurried forth on their pressing mission. Left to herself, Maggie sank into a chair and wildly considered the many elements of this new situation. Presently two thoughts emerged to dominance: Whether Larry was right or wrong, he had risked coming out of his safety for her sake—perhaps had risked all he had won for her sake. And now the police were to be set after him, with that Gavegan heading the pack.
Perhaps the further thinking Maggie did did not result in cool, mature wisdom—for her thoughts were the operations of a panicky mind. Somehow she had to get warning to Larry of this imminent police hunt! Without doubt Larry would return to Cedar Crest sometime that night. Word should be sent to him there. A letter was too uncertain in such a crisis. Of course she had an invitation to go to Cedar Crest the following afternoon, and she might warn him then—but that might be too late. She dared not telephone or telegraph—for that might somehow direct dangerous attention to the exact spot where Larry was hidden. Also she had an instinct, operating unconsciously long before she had any thought of what she was eventually to do, not to let Barney or Old Jimmie find out, or even guess, that she had warned Larry—not yet.
There seemed nothing that she herself could do. Then she thought of the Duchess. That was the way out! The Duchess would know some way in which to get Larry word.
Five minutes later, in her plainest suit and hat, Maggie in a taxicab was rolling down toward the Duchess's—from where, only a few months back, she had started forth upon her great career.