"I didn't think you had it in you to admit that, and I'm glad that you have admitted it," replied Mrs. Treharne. "Of course your surmise is exactly right. Itison my daughter's account that I have brought myself up with a round turn. It is pretty late in the day for me to do that, I know; but one must do the best one can. We can talk as we please about our opinions of morals and ethics and the world's harsh rules; but all of our talk vanishes into murky vapor when we begin to consider our children. The most contemptible act ofmylife, since you have so unexpectedly acknowledged yours, was in permitting my daughter to come here. You know that as well as I do—now."
Judd lit another cigar and smoked in silence for a time.
"The thing that gets me around the throat in connection with all this," he said, presently, "is that it seems all to simmer down to the fact that you are thinking of quitting me."
"Don't be absurd, Fred," said Mrs. Treharne. "That consideration doesn't disturb you a whit. You know very well that you will be glad to be rid of me."
"That," said Judd, leaning toward her, his small eyes curiously alight, "is not true, and you know it."
"But," she said, perhaps, with the unconquerable desire of the woman for affection and admiration, curious to hear his reply, "I have lost my looks; I am a mere relic of what I was when I came to you; I am not far from forty. You know these things."
"Yes, I know them," said Judd, and there was genuine feeling in the man's tone. "But I know, too, that I care a damned sight more for you than I ever did for any other woman in all my life. I know that, if you really mean to go through with this plan of quitting me, it's going to knock me sky-high. I can't figure myself being without you. You have grown into my scheme of living. I don't profess to much when it comes to morals and all that sort of thing; but I've got a heart built upon some kind of a pattern, I suppose; I must have, and you ought to know it, for you've possessed it for years. And, that being the case—and itisthe case—our relationship isn't so bad as you might have been supposing it to be. Don't you imagine that I am so infernally dried up as to what is called the affections. I know that my life won't be worth much to me after you go out of it."
Mrs. Treharne, astonished and perhaps a little pleased at the earnestness of the man's self-revelation, nevertheless shook her head wearily.
"Yet you know very well, at this moment, that Imustleave you," she said broodingly.
"Well, I'm going to be fair with you," said Judd, the latent manhood, that had been buried under the callousness of years, showing in him. "I'm leaving that part of it up to you. I wouldn't do that, either, if I didn't care for you as I do. But you've got your end of it, and a big end. You're entitled to do what you are prompted to do in consideration of your daughter. I'm not hound enough to try to block you in that. I'll go further and say that you're right about it. If I were in your place I'd do the same thing. The devil of it is that I care for you all the more when I see you moved to give your daughter the fair deal she's entitled to. I hate to have you go. I don't know what I'll do with myself without you. But you've hit me right where I live in this business—the progeny end of it. The young ones have got to be thought of. And there is, I suppose, no way whereby you could remain openly under my protection and at the same time be doing the right thing by your daughter. Of course, if you cared to be more private about it, why——"
"No, no—don't even suggest that," put in Mrs. Treharne. "That would be a pitiable evasion. You know that."
"Well, probably it would, but I'm putting all angles of the thing up to you," said Judd, perhaps more in earnest that he had ever been in his life before. "One thing, though, you must leave to me. It's only the fair thing that I should continue to take care of you, no matter where you go."
"Not even that, Fred," replied Mrs. Treharne, determinedly. "That, too, would be a dodging of the issue. I have a few thousands put by. They came from you, of course, but before I had made up my mind to—to live otherwise. I shall manage. Let me have my own way this final once, won't you?" and she smiled wanly.
Judd rose and picked up his hat and coat.
"Don't take any leaps in the dark, Tony, that's all," he said. "Think the thing all over. Don't give yourself the worst of it. You know thatIwon't give you the worst of it. I never have, have I? Maybe you'll change your mind about it all. I'll be back tomorrow night and see. Goodnight."
There were tears standing in the eyes of the huge-girthed man as he went heavily out of the room, and his shoulders were hunched forward as if he had suddenly passed from elderliness to old age.
Mrs. Treharne, for almost an hour after Judd had gone, sat, chin in palm, gazing into vacancy. Then she rose, heavily enough for a woman so fragile as she now had become, gazed for a moment in the glass at her haggard features, and shook her head, smiling bitterly.
"'Facilis descensus,' and the rest of it," she murmured. "That, I suppose, is the truest of the maxims; it stands the wear of time better than any of the rest of them. Well, I have the mournful satisfaction of knowing that I have sufficient intelligence, at any rate, not to blame anybody but myself."
Then she rang for her maid.
"Pack in the morning, Heloise," she said when the maid appeared. "Begin early. Get one of the housemaids to help you. Pack everything—all of your own things, too. We shall be leaving before noon."
"Everything, madame?" inquired Heloise, her eyes widening, "Winter costumes—everything?"
"Everything," repeated Mrs. Treharne. "I am not to return here."
Heloise nodded with a sage acquiescence, and began to take down her mistress's hair.
"Where do we go tomorrow, madame?" Heloise asked when she had finished her task and Mrs. Treharne was in readiness for retiring.
"I haven't the least idea, Heloise," replied Mrs. Treharne, gesturing her unconcern. "I shall decide between now and morning. To the mountains, I suppose—the Adirondacks, probably. I am not very well—New York stifles me. The mountains, I think it shall be, Heloise."
"Madame feels badly?" inquired Heloise, solicitously. "One has noticed that madame isdistraite, grows thin, looks unlike herself."
"Sometimes I wish I were anybody but myself, Heloise," said Mrs. Treharne, enigmatically enough, considering her audience. "Goodnight."
After the maid had gone Mrs. Treharne went to her desk and wrote to Louise, telling her that she was leaving the house on the Drive, not to return. It was a long, self-reproachful letter, threaded with the wistful but not outrightly expressed hope that the step she was taking would atone, if only in a slight degree, for the "wretched sin," as she called it, of having permitted her daughter to set foot within the Riverside Drive establishment. She did not mention Langdon Jesse's name. She felt a singular uneasiness over the thought that Jesse's approaching visit to London in some way involved the weaving of a net about her daughter; but she dismissed that thought, as often as it recurred, when she considered Louise's poise and her protection by Laura Stedham, an experienced woman of the world. Moreover, Mrs. Treharne would have found it difficult, unless there were some grave actual peril, to mention Jesse's name in a letter to her daughter; for it brought the blood to her face to remember how unconcernedly she had permitted Louise to meet the man—how she had even chided her daughter for not having accepted Jesse's attentions in a more pliant, not to say grateful, spirit.
"I am leaving with Heloise tomorrow, dear, but I have not decided where to go," she concluded. "I shall write or cable you an address before long. I am entirely well, though I believe I need rest and change. Have out your good time—I know that you are in good hands with Laura, to whom my love. I am looking forward to our new, happy life when you return to me."
Then she penned a little note to be left behind for Judd.
"Don't think me unkind for going without seeing you again," she wrote. "We have gone over it all, and we are both of the same opinion as to the need for the step I am taking. I cannot quite tell you how you have advanced in my opinion for some of the things you said tonight. You have been very fair, and I am correspondingly grateful. I will not be sobanalas to suggest that, if there be any chance for a reconciliation, or at least a decent armistice, between you and your wife, it might be at least a solution of a sort, considering your children; I only wish that I could suggest that outright without incurring the suspicion that, having made a belated repentance myself, I am seeking to reform the world. One thing, however, I shall say outright: If I had it all to do over again, I shouldconform. There is no other way for a woman. We seek to ridicule the promptings of conscience by calling conscience an abnormality, a thing installed in us to whip us into line with age-old system. But it won't do. It is, after all, the true voice. I wish I had never closed my ears to its urgings.
"Time heals all. You will find yourself thinking less and less often of me as the days drift by. That is as it should be. I am sorry for the hurt—I did not know until you spoke as you did tonight that it would be a hurt—I am inflicting upon you in thus effacing myself, at such short notice, from your life. But Time heals. Goodbye, and all best wishes."
Before noon, on the following day, Mrs. Treharne and Heloise left the house on the Drive, leaving no word behind as to whither they were bound.
Langdon Jesse maintained a bachelor apartment in London the year round. When he arrived there, about a fortnight after his turbulent scene with Mrs. Treharne and his signally unsuccessful attempt at anententewith Blythe, he found everything in order, quite as he had left it the year before. Gaskins, factotum and general overseer of the bachelor apartments, of which there were three tiers, Jesse's being the second, was a little more bald and fat, but he still rubbed his hands as a mark of subservience and cocked his head to one side in a bird-like way while engaged in conversation with his supposititious superior. He had a respectful but earnest complaint to make of one of Jesse's New York cronies, a man engaged in the somewhat tempestuous task of drinking himself to death, who had occupied Jesse's apartment for a month during the spring; for it was Jesse's habit to extend the use of his London lodging, which was desirable mainly on account of its highly privileged character, to those of his intimates who happened to be in London while he himself was in New York.
"'E was more than 'arf-seas hover hall the time, sir," Gaskins told Jesse, lamentingly, "which of course was 'is privilege, but 'e did give 'isself some 'orrid bumps when 'e come 'ome along o' three or four o' mornings. Hi'm afraid 'e would 'ave killed 'iself, sir, falling hagainst the furniture, 'ad I not been living on the premises hand come hup hand got 'im straightened hout hin bed. Hand, sir, when Hi didn't come hup, 'e would halways go to sleep in the bath-tub with 'is clothes on. A swift goer, sir, but killing 'isself; killing 'isself fast."
Jesse laughed. He was tolerant enough of the idiosyncrasies of his intimates, and this one, the "swift goer," had been of use to him in New York as a sort of organizer and major domo of revelries.
Jesse's apartment was on one of the quiet squares of Curzon Street, set amid a row of other houses given over to the accommodation of stationary and transient bachelors who found the restraints of London hotels irksome. It was beautifully appointed, even to the culinary department which Jesse himself only used on the occasions when he entertained companies of roystering Americans and their companions, who were usually more or less photographed figurantes from the musical comedies. His breakfast was brought to him from the Gaskins ménage in the basement, and he dined here, there and everywhere—not infrequently at the Savoy.
It had not taken Jesse long, following his arrival in London, to ascertain that Louise and Laura were at the Savoy. He had, in fact, within an hour after his arrival, caused a telephone canvass to be made of the London hotels mainly patronized by Americans during the touring season to gain this information. Now, lounging about his apartment while his Japanese man unpacked his things, he began upon the devising of a method whereby he might again meet Louise. He had been reluctantly forced to abandon the idea that by this time she might have "altered her prejudice" against him and might therefore be at least passively willing to meet him upon the plane of ordinary acquaintanceship, thus giving him an opportunity to exercise his fascinations upon her.
But he had not the least intention of abandoning his besiegement of Louise Treharne—even if the besiegement had to be turned into an ambuscade. He had come to London, leaving New York at a time when the market was setting strongly against him, solely with this purpose in his mind. He furnished himself with plenty of excuses for the deliberation with which he undertook this particular quest. It was his indurated habit to doubt the continence of all women; and he made no exception of Louise Treharne. The fact that she had scarcely been out of school a month when he had first met her did not in the least serve to give her immunity from such a doubt in Jesse's mind. His single guide in such appraisals of women was his own experience with them, and his experience, he told himself, embodied plenty of parallels to the case of Louise Treharne. Why should she be immune from a furtiveness, and the indulgences thereof, which he had so often studied at first hand? Why should she be less clever at dissimulation than many others he had known?
He had not the least doubt that he was right in this view. He sought to make himself believe that otherwise he would be entirely willing to permit Louise to go her way. But, being right, then it was intolerable that she should have flouted him—him!—as she had. It was a girlish, immature prejudice. He had not had sufficient opportunity to gain her better will. Her treatment of him had sorely touched his vanity as a moulder of women to his purposes. The circumstances of his meeting with her had deprived him of a fair chance. She was young, beautiful, and, he felt sure, superbly secretive. He had not the least intention of supinely yielding to her foolish belief—it could not be other than that—that she disliked him.
But how to proceed?
No problem, having to do with what he would have called his diversions, had ever before so daunted him. Laura, to begin with, was a stumbling block in his path. Laura, with whom he had a perfunctory acquaintanceship extending over several years, had pointedly cut him, not once, but frequently, since the newspapers had flared with accounts of the one disreputable affair concerning him which had leaked out. He knew very well that there was not the least possible chance for him to regain even a nodding plane with Laura Stedham. And she was the barrier between himself and Louise Treharne. They were rarely, he felt sure, out of each other's company. If Laura were out of the way, and he could reach Louise alone, there would, he felt, be a chance. It was unimaginable that Louise would, in such a case, be unresponsive to the allurements of his wealth, his power proceeding from wealth, his personality—Jesse felt so absolutely certain of this that he smiled when a vague doubt of it passed through his mind.
He had won many aloof women by bestowing upon them magnificent gifts. But he knew perfectly well that this method would not do with Louise Treharne. Whatever else she might be, there was, he felt, not a particle of greed in her. There had even been times when Jesse had not scrupled to effect his designs by putting forth the pretence that his devotions tended in but one direction—the altar. How to employ even this final method to engage the attention of a woman whose eyes, he very well knew, would flame with scorn of him even if she found herself accidentally in his presence?
For several hours, while Mutsu, his Japanese valet, went forward with the unpacking, Jesse strode up and down his apartment, going over this problem as he would have calculated the chances and mischances of a market campaign.
It was inevitable that Jesse, at the end of his study of the problem, should have reached but one conclusion: it must be an ambuscade.
Having reached this conclusion, he measured the risk and sought to forecast the aftermath. Everything was in his favor. In the situation which he meditated bringing about, he knew that, in case anything went wrong, the man's word would be worth that of a thousand women, no matter how exalted their reputations. And more than likely, he calmly figured, there would be no aftermath at all. Entrapped, and perceiving no possibility of escape Louise would acknowledge her finely-acted furtiveness to him, and, like all women who used furtiveness as a screen, would make the best of the situation—which was all that Jesse desired.
The salient feature of the plan which rapidly took form in his mind consisted in discovering when Louise and Laura should be out of each other's company, even for a short time. Jesse, not in the least balking at the idea of setting a deliberate trap because he knew that he would hold the advantage no matter what the outcome, applied himself to the solution of this by no means minor difficulty. The sight of the silent, busy Mutsu, industriously stowing his master's gear in dressers and closets, furnished Jesse with a suggestion.
He would give his Japanese man a vigil at the Savoy. The vigil might be a tedious as it was sure to be a delicate one, but Mutsu was both patient and discreet. He was a studious but alert man-boy of indeterminate age, as is characteristic of Japanese males under fifty, who had been employed as a club attendant in New York for several years and thus had added to his natural gift for discretion. He had been with Jesse for more than a year, always doing more than was ever asked of him, but studiously refraining from indicating whether he entertained any personal liking for his employer—which is another trait of a certain type of Japanese in their relationships with Occidentals.
Jesse spent a concentrated half hour in minutely instructing Mutsu as to what he desired of him. The valet was to go to the Savoy on the morrow, and, by liberally tipping the doorman at the ladies' entrance, or the carriage-opener, or whomsoever among the hotel's menials he found the most pliable or knowing, have Mrs. Laura Stedham and Miss Louise Treharne, American ladies who were guests of the hotel, pointed out to him when they should make their appearance, as they no doubt would in the course of the day, either for driving or walking. Miss Treharne would be the younger of the two. After having familiarized himself with the personal exteriors of these ladies, Mutsu was to keep vigil, on whatever pretext he might invent, in or around the hotel, until such a time as he should see the older of the two American ladies leaving the hotel alone. Whenever that should happen, the valet was instantly to telephone to Jesse at the Curzon Street apartment. The watch on the movements of the two ladies was not to terminate until Mrs. Stedham should leave the hotel unaccompanied by Miss Treharne, no matter how many days of waiting should be required before such a thing occurred.
Mutsu nodded and exhibited his dental smile when Jesse had finished his instructions. He understood the instructions perfectly, without, of course, in the least guessing at the purpose back of them.
Jesse made no mistake in appraising his Japanese man's acuteness at such work. Within less than two hours after ingratiating himself, by the use of unostentatiously distributed backsheesh, with certain of the Savoy's flunkeys, Matsu had had Laura and Louise pointed out to him as they left the hotel and entered a taxicab. He fixed their faces on his mental recording tablets, and called up Jesse on the telephone and told him of his progress.
Thenceforward, for several days, the wiry little Japanese valet hovered about the ladies' entrance of the Savoy, forestalling suspicion as to the purpose of his loitering by the bestowal of liberalpourboiresupon such of the flunkeys as were in a position to notice the constancy of his vigil.
Jesse kept to his Curzon Street apartment during the day, ever on the alert for a telephone message from his valet. He chafed under the necessity—as he deemed it—which kept him indoors throughout the daylight hours and only permitted of his prowling about London at night. But he possessed a sort of Luciferian determination in the pursuit of such a purpose as that upon which he was now engaged; to the successful accomplishment of which he would have passed his days in a cellar if that had been one of the requirements of the game.
Laura had many friends, English and American, in London whom she received and called upon informally. She cared nothing for the "functionizing" of the Anglo-American social season in London, but she keenly enjoyed the unceremonious gayeties of little groups of friends. She laughingly declared that she had "trained" the people she liked to "drop in" upon her in London in the American manner of neighborliness; and she enjoyed "showing off," as she expressed it, "the beautiful Miss Treharne, from the States," as some of the chatty London weeklies had alluded to Louise. She liked to junket about, too, with Louise; and there was no lack of agreeable men keen to take them on day-long motor tours through the country, attach them for merry afternoons to houseboat parties, and so on. For her part, Louise enjoyed the contrast afforded by the shy diffidence of the young Englishmen whom she met to the exuberant breeziness of Laura's American men friends in London.
One afternoon—it was ten days after Jesse's arrival in London—Laura suggested to Louise, at luncheon, that, as they had a "clean slate" for the remainder of the daylight hours for the first time in a long while, a tour among the shops, including a visit to the American department store just then established in London, might fill in a part of the time agreeably.
"But I am not insisting upon your going with me, dear," said Laura. "I know your lack of keenness for shopping in London, and I don't blame you, considering how the tradespeople here try to positivelymakeone buy things one doesn't want. So you can very easily escape on the plea that you have letters to write, or that you are tired and want to rest up for the theatre tonight, and I shan't be in the least miffed."
"I'll make it the letter-writing plea, then, Laura," said Louise, "and cling to the truth in spite of the temptation you offer me to fib. I really have a lot of letters to write."
Laura went away in a taxicab directly after luncheon, saying that she would not be gone more than three hours, and Louise, at the desk in the sitting room of their suite, began a letter to her father, from whom, forwarded by John Blythe, she had lately received a long and affectionate letter, expressing his anxiety to see her and the hope that he might so arrange his business affairs as to permit of his visiting New York late in the Autumn.
About half an hour after she had begun writing the telephone bell rang.
"His this Miss Tre'arne?" Louise heard a man's voice, "but Mrs. Stedham says that you are that of an upper servant," in the telephone.
"Yes, I am Miss Treharne—what is it?" she replied.
"Begging pardon, Miss Tre'arne," went on the man's voice, "but Mrs. Stedham says that you are not to be halarmed. Mrs. Stedham, Miss, was taken slightly ill in a taxicab—nothing serious, Miss, she hasks me to hassure you—and she is now with Mrs. 'Ammond, at Number Naught-Fourteen Curzon Street. Mrs. Stedham, Miss, hinsists that you be not halarmed, and wishes you to come to 'er at Mrs. 'Ammond's at once. This is Mrs. 'Ammond's butler that is speaking."
"Tell Mrs. Stedham, please, that I shall come at once," said Louise, instantly aroused by the thought that something serious might have happened to Laura. "What is the number and street again, please? And you are sure Mrs. Stedham has had no accident or is not seriously ill?"
"It is Naught-Fourteen Curzon Street, Miss Tre'arne," came the reply, "hand Mrs. Stedham 'erself hasks that you be hassured that she is only slightly hindisposed."
"I shall be there immediately, please tell her," said Louise, making a pencilled note of the address.
Very uneasy, Louise put on her hat and long pongee coat with fluttering fingers. She felt that something serious must have happened to deflect Laura from a shopping tour to the home of a woman friend. She had not heard Laura allude to any woman friend in London named Mrs. Hammond, but that consideration did not linger more than an instant in her mind, for Laura no doubt had many London friends of whom she had not chanced to speak.
Within less than five minutes after receiving the telephoned summons, Louise was on her way in a taxicab to the address in Curzon Street. She was pale and in a tremor of uneasiness when the taxicab pulled up at the curb of a neat three-story house near the end of a row of similar houses.
So perturbed was she by the thought that she had not been told the entire truth as to what had happened to Laura that she scarcely noticed the bald, bland Gaskins when he opened the door for her and said "Miss Tre'arne?"
"Yes, yes," hastily replied Louise. "Where is Mrs. Stedham?"
"If you please, Miss, Hi shall conduct you," said Gaskins, inured by years of experience to the sort of deception he was practising; and he softly padded up the thickly-carpeted stairs in advance of her. Closely followed by Louise, who paid hardly any attention at all to the surroundings in her trepidation as to how she might find Laura, Gaskins quietly opened the front side door of the second floor apartment and held it open for her. Louise stepped into the room, and Gaskins, not entering himself, closed the door after her. She did not of course notice the click which denoted that the closed door was fitted with a spring lock. Afterwards Louise remembered having thought it odd that Gaskins did not follow her into the room to announce her, instead of so suddenly effacing himself.
Louise quickly saw that there was nobody in the charmingly arranged room—partly study, partly living room—in which she found herself. Also she noticed that it was distinctively a man's room. Wondering, but not yet affected by any fear, she made a few steps toward the portieres at the rear of the room.
She was about to reach out a hand to draw the portieres side, when they parted; and Langdon Jesse confronted her. He was trig in a big, overweight way in his lounging suit of grey; but the pallor of excitement had overspread his naturally waxy face, and his attempt at the debonair manner was proclaimed to be a mere assumption by the trembling of his hands and the huskiness of his voice when he spoke.
Louise had never swooned in her life. Now, however, at this apparition of the one human being she had ever learned to loathe, she pressed one hand to her forehead and another to her heart and swayed slightly. She feared that she would fall; but the thought rocketed through her mind that if she yielded to the almost overpowering physical weakness of the moment she would be at his mercy. By an effort of will which she afterwards remembered with wonderment, she steadied herself as if by the process of actually forcing her blood to flow evenly. She permitted her hands to fall to her sides and regarded Jesse with an appearance of calmness. In that clash of eyes, Jesse, after a very few seconds of it, turned his head away on pretence of motioning Louise to a chair. The impalement of her gaze was beyond his endurance.
Louise paid no attention to his arm-waved invitation to be seated, but stood in the spot where she had stopped when the first sight of him had almost sent her reeling. She regarded him steadily, almost incredulously; an expression of incredulity that such a thing could be.
"It is unpardonable, of course, Miss Treharne," said Jesse, with a clearing of the throat in an attempt to sweep away his huskiness. "But my madness to see you, the hopelessness of trying to see you, alone, in any other way—" He brought his sentence to a finish with a gesture meant to emphasize the excusableness of his position.
"Therefore you have sought to entrap me?" said Louise, with no trace of scorn in her tone; her contempt for him was quite beyond such a manifestation of loathing; she asked the question as if really astonished to discover that a man would do such a thing.
"What other method could I employ save a sort of strategy?" asked Jesse, evading her gaze. "Knowing that I was under the ban of your unreasonable dislike, that you would refuse to receive me, and wretched, despairing, under the constant castigation of your prejudice—what else could I do? What else could any man do who found himself in a state of desperation from his love for a woman?"
"Say anything but that, I beg of you," replied Louise, experiencing a surge of disgust at the man's effrontery in professing love in such a situation. "I have no reason to expect anything savoring of manliness from you, of course; but you might at least spare yourself the humiliation—if you can be humiliated—of seeming ridiculous."
"I expected harsh words from you, which, of course, is tantamount to confessing that I deserve them," said Jesse. "But I think we shall have a better understanding. Won't you be seated?"
"I would have credited you for knowing better than to ask me that," replied Louise. She stepped to the door by which she had entered, tried the knob, and of course found that the door was locked. Jesse, watching her, gradually resumed his attempt at the debonair manner. All of the odds were in his favor in this adventure. He could not see where he stood a chance to lose. Therefore, according to the smooth argument of cowardice, there was no reason, he considered, why he should continue his air of deference.
"You did not suppose that, having been to somewhat adroit pains to get you here, I would make it so easy for you to walk out without, at least, a little interchange of ideas?" he asked her, with coolly lifting brows, when she turned from the door.
She noticed his change of tone, and was conscious that she preferred it to his manner of fawning self-exculpation.
"Make your mind easy as to that. I have told you that I expect nothing whatever of you that befits a man," she replied with a coldness of tone from which he inwardly recoiled far more than if she had poured out upon him an emotional torrent of rebuke.
For a moment Jesse, studying her, was visited by the suggestion that perhaps, after all, Louise Treharne was wearing no mask; that she was really that anomaly—as he would have viewed such a one—a woman who was what she professed to be. But he quickly dismissed this prompting as something out of the question. She was merely a proficient in the art of acting, and she was employing her mimetic talent to the utmost upon him—thus he argued it out with himself. Moreover, he decided to give expression to his belief, as being calculated sooner to bring her to the realization that he had her measured.
"Listen, Louise," he said to her, thus calling her without even attempting to make his tone apologetic; he leaned his elbows on the back of a leather chair and forced himself to look directly at her as he spoke: "It is idle for you to seek to delude me. It might do if I were not nearly twice your age and had not had about five thousand times your experience. As the matter stands, it is simply absurd. At least give me credit for having cut my wisdom teeth as to women. You portray the part you assume with me very well. I'll have to say that for you. But, seeing that I have penetrated to the heart of the comedy, why protract the play?"
Louise disdained to attempt to have him believe that she did not understand him. But she was so riven by the shamefulness of his imputation that she could not have found words to reply to him if she had wanted to.
"Why not give me a chance to make good with you, Louise?" went on Jesse in a tone of arguing familiarity, coming from behind the leather chair and advancing toward her. He accepted her silence for wavering, or at least a willingness to listen to the sort of a presentation he had started. "You know that I am devilishly fond of you, else I would not have gone to all this trouble to get you here. Of course you may call it a trap and all that sort of penny-dreadful rot; but what other way had I to see you? You've scarcely been out of my mind since first I met you at Judd's—I should say, at your mother's house. I've been stark raving about you—am yet; and that's the truth. Why can't we be bully good friends? Your little pretenses are all very engaging and that sort of thing, and do you credit, of course, but you see I have penetrated them. Well, then, why can't we hit it off? You don't know how good I'll be to you if you look at the thing in the sensible way. The first time I saw you I heard them hail you as Empress Louise. Well, I'll see to it that you have the adornment and the investiture of an Empress. Well, is it a bargain, Louise? Will you shake hands on it?"
He was very close to where she stood by this time, having continued to advance toward her as he spoke. A sudden flush had appeared on his features, and his enunciation was choppy, muffled, indistinct from the huskiness of passion.
"Don't come any closer to me than you are," she said to him when, within an arm's length of her, he stopped and held out his hand to bind the pact his words had attempted to frame. She spoke quietly, stood her ground, looked straight at him, and placed her hands behind her back. "And allow me to say this: I feel sure no coward of your kind ever yet escaped some sort of retribution. You will repent what you have said to me. But you will repent far more if you put your hands upon me. Will you open this door and let me go?"
She looked her innocence, her perfect purity, as she stood before him. But Jesse was blind to what even the most ordinary, uncultivated man might have seen at a glance. His prominent, protrusive eyes had become bloodshot, and, instead of breathing, he was almost gasping.
"So you're going to keep on your white domino of pretense, eh?" he sneered. "Open the door? Do you think I'm going to let you treat me as if I were some credulous cub just turned loose from school? Open the door? Don't, for Heaven's name, take me for an imbecile!"
Suddenly he reached forward and twined his arms about her waist and crushed her to him, making for her lips. She gave no outcry, but, raising her right forearm, pressed it under his chin, thus holding his head back and keeping his face from hers. But he did not relax his powerful embrace. Louise strove with all of her unusual woman's strength to break his hold upon her, but his hands were clasped back of her, and her exertions only caused the two of them to sway and change ground; and his embrace remained that of a python.
"You might as well drop this damned ground-and-lofty business and behave yourself like a sensible girl, you know," panted Jesse, speaking in a choked tone because her forearm remained wedged under his chin. "You're game, and all that sort of thing, and you're all kinds of a good actress, too; but, by God, you're not quite clever enough to pull the wool over my eyes! You're Antoinette Treharne's daughter, and you're some other things besides that I don't exactly know the details of but have a pretty good guess at; and you're going to rest quiet in these arms today, if you never do again!"
They struggled back and forth, Louise, quite conscious that she stood in the greatest peril she was ever likely to know, holding her own with a strength which Jesse, even in the madness of the moment, told himself was almost preternatural in a young, slender woman.
"You are simply wasting your strength, you know," Jesse went on, putting forth all of the power of his arms and holding her so close to him that for a moment she could not move. "I have no taste for this sort of schoolboy and schoolgirl tugging and hauling. But you force me to it. You haven't a chance on earth of getting out of here, even if I release you—which I shall, as soon as I have taken a little harmless toll of your lips. Now, are you going to be sensible and quit this idiotic business?"
Louise did not answer him. She had said no word, made no plea, since he had seized upon her. She knew that words would be useless, and she could not have framed a beseeching phrase to address to him had she tried. She was taking her chance, doing all she could to make the chance better. But she could not and would not implore him to release her. She thought of screaming; but, remembering how the man who had conducted her upstairs had let her into the room and then obliterated himself, she reasoned it out, even in the intensity of the struggle, that this man no doubt was a flunky accomplice who would pay no attention to her screaming. Nevertheless she did decide that, as a last resort, she would scream, taking the chance that whomsoever happened to be on the floor beneath or the one above might come to her assistance.
She had relaxed a little, for rest, as he spoke to her, and, catching her off her guard, Jesse suddenly put forth all of his power and swung her, slipping and almost falling as he did so, partly through the portieres from which he had emerged when she came in.
When the portieres thus were thrust apart, Louise saw, standing in the middle of the room which they screened off, a surprised-looking, somewhat scowling little Japanese. Jesse caught sight of Mutsu at the same instant that Louise did.
"What the devil are you doing here?" Jesse demanded of the valet. "Get out and stay out till this evening, do you hear?"
Mutsu first lowered his head, then shook it with a most decided negative. His lips were pulled back from his teeth; mutiny shone all over him.
"What you do?" he demanded of Jesse, falling into a pidgin vernacular which he rarely used except when excited. "She no like to be crushed in embrace? She is of an innocence. She is of an honorable. I saw that at Savoy Hotel when first I see her. Why you no let go?"
"Get out of here, I say, you damned chattering monkey!" Jesse raged at him, relaxing his hold upon Louise, and leaping at the little Japanese.
Mutsu, retreating not an inch, met the charge of his employer with lowered head, and when Jesse thrust out a hand to grab him the Japanese, revealing a perfect adeptness at jiu-jitsu which Jesse never had known he possessed, seized the thrust-out hand between both of his own sinewy ones; and in an instant Jesse's face was drawn with pain. Then the Japanese made a sudden dart behind Jesse, pulling back the hand to which he still clung and the arm to which it was attached in such a way that the big, bulky man could not move without breaking the arm; he felt the tendons stretching to the breaking point as it was.
"Now you go, Miss innocent honorable lady," said Mutsu, without visible excitement, to Louise. "Go through next back room and out door there. I see you at Savoy tonight after I get fired-dismissed from valet position here."
Jesse, his face red with the torture of the accomplished jiu-jitsuing he was receiving, stormed at and cursed the Japanese in fo'c'sle terms as he saw Louise pass toward the rear door the Japanese had indicated. She nodded affirmatively to Mutsu when he told her that he would be at the Savoy that evening to see that she had arrived there safely; then she passed through the rear door leading into the hall, went down the thickly-padded stairs without awakening the bald and bland Gaskins, who dozed in a hall chair; and had the luck to hail a taxicab almost in front of the house.
Laura was at the hotel, and in a panic of worriment about Louise, when the girl got back. Louise told Laura what had happened in a few words, then fainted, falling back heavily upon a couch, for the first time in her life—after the danger was all over, with the usual feminine whimsiness.
That night the following cable message to John Blythe was flashed under the sea:
"Come immediately. You are needed here.Laura."
"Come immediately. You are needed here.Laura."
The mutiny of Mutsu, culminating at so opportune a time for Louise, was the result of an enmity for his employer which had been slumbering for a long time in the mind of the Japanese valet. It had its origin in Jesse's treatment of several women and girl victims for the entrapment of whom Jesse had invoked the unwilling services of his Japanese man. Mutsu had been employed as an attendant at New York clubs long enough to know the meaning of the word "thoroughbred" in its vernacular application to men; and he knew very well that the "thoroughbred" man did not go in for the sort of women-corraling machinations to which Jesse devoted more than half of his time. Thus formed and grew Mutsu's contempt for his employer as a coward who preyed upon the defencelessness of inveigled women; and his contempt had reached a focal point when, after having been made the instrument to accomplish the enmeshment of Louise Treharne, he had returned to the Curzon Street house to find her in a peril with which he had become all too familiar since entering Jesse's service. Louise's beauty and palpable purity had touched a sympathetic chord in the Japanese; so that, after accomplishing his vigil, his knowledge, based upon experience, of the indignities and perhaps worse to which she was bound to be subjected by his employer had impelled him, in a sudden surge of Oriental wrath, to follow her after he had seen her start for the Curzon Street house.
Mutsu had no difficulty in making a leisurely departure from Jesse's establishment and service after having released Louise from his employer's toils. He retained his tendon-stretching jiu-jitsu hold on Jesse until he was sure that Louise had reached the street, while Jesse, literally foaming at the mouth in his rage, cursed him with an almost Arabic variety and profusion of epithets. Then Mutsu, suddenly releasing his employer, darted to the center of the room and faced Jesse with a teeth-exhibiting smile that was also half a snarl.
"Now I quit," said Mutsu, briefly. "I am glad for a quit. I despise-hate your typical. You not come near me—" as Jesse, rubbing his sorely-stretched arm, made a step toward him—"or I break your two-both arms. I pack. You pay me. I quit permanent-forever."
Jesse came to a full stop at the threat of being treated to a pair of broken arms. He was twice the size of the Japanese, but the difference in their sizes was more than compensated for by his own cravenness and the valet's mastery of the bone-breaking art. Mutsu, never taking his eyes off Jesse, got out his two suit-cases and packed them carefully and deliberately. Jesse, striding up and down and storming, seized a heavy jade ornament from a mantel, when Mutsu was about half through with his packing task, and drew it back as if to heave it at the valet; but Mutsu, making two agile backward steps, grabbed one of Jesse's pistols which lay on top of the tray of an open trunk, and thus waited for the missile. Jesse replaced the jade ornament on the mantel and resumed his striding up and down. When the Japanese had finished his packing, he consulted a little notebook and, totting up a column of expenditures, found that Jesse owed him fifteen pounds.
"You pay now and permanent I quit," the Japanese said to Jesse, and the latter threw his wallet on a table.
"Take it out of that, you dirty little mandril," he growled to Mutsu, "and be on your way before I have you handed over on the charge of being a thief."
"Just that you try," replied Mutsu, breathing hard, as he counted over the money that was due him, "and I—you see where you get off—just that you try! Your name like fertilizer I would make!"
Then Mutsu stuffed the amount that was due him into his pocket, tossing the rest of the money on to the table, clapped on his hat, picked up his pair of suit-cases, and walked out, flying the gonfalon of victory. He went straight to the Savoy, and was taken into the service of Laura Stedham the instant he made his appearance before her.
Jesse, wearing a thoroughly whipped look, huddled in a deep chair for hours after Mutsu's departure. The chair was close enough to his brandy bottle to enable him to apply himself to it at startlingly frequent intervals. The first "transaction" of his life, having to do with women, had gone flatly against him. He ground his teeth as he drunkenly pondered that irrefutable fact. He had no fear of the consequences of his attempt to enmesh Louise Treharne. Her only male protector, he knew, was on the other side of the sea. But it was the knowledge that he had utterly and finally lost out in the most diligent and ingenious attempt he had ever made upon a feminine citadel that enraged him. He did not even have the satisfaction of framing reprisals. What reprisals could he attempt? And they could avail him nothing even if he succeeded in setting such revengeful machinery in motion.
Jesse was considerably more than middling drunk when, his brandy having receded to the lees, he summoned the obsequious Gaskins.
"Anybody above or below me here now?" he inquired of Gaskins.
"No, sir," replied Gaskins. "The gentleman that 'as the hapartment below is abroad, hand the gentleman that 'as the hapartment above only comes 'ere occasionally, sir, for a little hamusement—'e's married now, sir."
"Well, that's good," said Jesse, reeling about. "That'll let me have the whole damned outfit for my parties for the next ten days or so, eh?"
"Hat your service, sir," replied Gaskins, familiar with Jesse's prodigality in devising and settling for his diversions.
"I'm going to have a series of rough-houses here," said Jesse, minus even a crumb of dignity in the presence of a man who had been a flunky all his life, "to celebrate a defeat—or make me forget a defeat; it all comes to the same thing. Fellows have been defeated before my time, haven't they? Yes, and they'll be defeated after I'm dead, by hell! You've got your work cut out for you, Gaskins; I'm going to paint this sheltered little corner of London a luminous red for a week or so, and then damn your England! I'll have you fix up the suppers and that sort of thing. Engage all the help you want, and right away. And, say, get me another man, will you? I've fired that dirty little Japanese chimpanzee—he's a thief."
"You may leave heverything to me, sir," said Gaskins, rubbing his hands. "Hi quite understand, sir."
The saturnalia in the Curzon Street house began that very night. Certain London stage managers of musical comedies still remember that week as one during which, for several nights running, they had to present their extravaganzas with mere apologies for feminine choruses, and, in some instances, with many of the female principals' shrill understudies doing their dismal best with only half-learned lines and songs.
John Blythe, making theMauretaniaa quarter of an hour before that leviathan started on one of her East-bound record-breaking voyages, reached London on the sixth day after having received Laura's cablegram. He surmised why he had been summoned. So sure was he that his surmise was correct that, when he walked in upon Laura and Louise at the Savoy, he did not even inquire why so urgent a summons had been sent to him. He preferred to postpone that question until he had an opportunity to be alone with Laura.
Laura had told Louise that Blythe was coming. But neither of the women had been expecting him so soon. When he was announced by telephone from the hotel desk Louise flushed and paled alternately. Laura watched her amusedly.
"Such hardened unconcern is dreadful to see in one so young, Louise," she was beginning to chaff when Blythe was ushered in by a diminutive Buttons. Louise gave him both of her hands. He held them, looking into her eyes with his wide smile.
"May I?" he asked her, a little unsteadily.
"As Louise's chaperon, I shall never forgive her if she refuses—nor you, if you accept her refusal," said Laura.
Louise upraised her face to his. It was a simple but eloquent confession that she knew her lips were for him.
"Not as your guardian, I hope, Louise?" said Blythe, putting it in the form of a question.
Her face still upraised and her eyes partly closed, she shook her head; and Blythe, drawing her to him, kissed her full on the lips. Then he quickly released her and took Laura's outstretched hands.
It was the luncheon hour, and Laura had luncheon served in the rooms. They chatted upon little intimate matters quite as if they had been lunching in Laura's New York apartment. Blythe, in fact, mentioned Laura's apartment.
"I met your decorator the other day," he said, "and he wore a very puzzled expression. He told me that you had charged him by cable to do your place over in Tyrian purple, and he was afraid that color would be too dark, or too obtrusive, or something—I forget his exact words."
They knew, however, that his banter was simply a device. Both of the women, taking Blythe's manner as their cue, and observing how pointedly he refrained from asking why he had been sent for, knew at once that he had formed his surmise. Louise, for her part, was awaiting Laura's signal for her to withdraw. When she had gone, Blythe turned a suddenly-sobered face upon Laura.
"It's Jesse, I suppose?" he said to her.
"Yes," said Laura, and she told him of what had happened at the Curzon Street house. Also she told him of Jesse's attempted advances upon Louise in New York.
"I reprove myself now, of course, that I did not tell you at the time about how the man sought to force his attentions upon her in New York," she said, "but you will understand, I know, why I hesitated to tell you. I felt that you would have found it too hard to keep your hands off of him, and I feared to put you to the test. Of course I should have known that you would do nothing, no matter how sorely tempted, that would have involved Louise; but my timidity, I suppose, is of a piece with that of other women in such circumstances."
"Don't worry about that part of it, Laura," said Blythe, consolingly. "You've atoned, if any atonement were necessary, by getting me here now. After all, I could scarcely have taken it upon myself to chastise him in New York. The blackguard did not go quite far enough there, as I understand it, to permit of me getting out on the firing line, even if I had known about it. It is just as well that you waited, for that and some other reasons. There is everything in having a good case," and his face wreathed in a dry sort of a smile which Laura analyzed as boding little good for the man of whom they were speaking.
"What are your plans, John?" Laura asked him presently. "London, you know, is quite as fruitful a field as New York for the achieving of an unmerited and distorted notoriety. I lean upon your judgment, of course."
"You are not supposing that I am going to call the cur out, or tweak his nose in public, or any such yellow-covered thing as that, are you, Laura?" Blythe asked her with another of his reflective smiles.
"I know that you are going to punish him," replied Laura. "I want you to punish him. Heaven knows that I am not bloodthirsty, but I should dearly love to be by while you are in the article of punishing him. Only it is an affair that must be handled with extreme caution. I promise not to say that again. But, really, John, you must——"
"The only thing I am afraid of," interrupted Blythe, meditatively, "is that he might have left London. Where did you say his place is? I'll have to devise some way to find out if he is still there."
"Mutsu can do that," said Laura. She had told Blythe of the Japanese valet's fine part in saving Louise from Jesse, and now she summoned him. Blythe, studying the wiry little man, who wore a distinctively agreeable smile when he made his appearance, commended him warmly for his conduct and asked him if he knew whether Jesse still remained at the Curzon Street house. Mutsu replied that he did not know but that he could find out; and he went to the telephone and called up Gaskins, representing himself to be a club servant who had been directed to ascertain if Mr. Jesse still remained in town. Gaskins replied that he was, and Mutsu gave that word to Blythe.
"You go there, sir?" inquired Mutsu, evidently sensing that Blythe's contemplated visit to the Curzon Street house was not to be in the nature of a peace errand. "Let it be that I shall go with you, sir? I can the help-assist you."
Blythe laughingly told the Japanese that he considered that he had done his share and that he would not be needing any help-assistance; and Mutsu withdrew.
"Shall we all dine together here?" Blythe asked Laura, rising after the Japanese had gone. "I am staying at the Carlton, and I want to run over there to——"
"Listen, John: are you going to see that man at his place now, at once?" Laura asked him, with an expression of mingled worriment and curiosity. "You know you are!"
"Oh," said Blythe, "I have a bit of running about to do, and——"
"But listen, please: supposing the coward were to try to use some weapon on you and——"
"Tush, Laura. What became of Louise? But stay: make my devoirs to her, won't you, please? I am off to keep an appointment. We are dining here this evening then? You may expect me by eight o'clock," and off he rushed. He had, in fact, been "straining at his leash," as Laura thought, watching him, ever since he had found that Jesse still was in town.
Louise came back a few moments after Blythe's departure, and she looked rueful when she saw that he had gone.
"Don't take it so excessively to heart, dear," Laura said to her. "He left all sorts of messages of apology for going without seeing you, but he had an appointment—er—I mean he had to go to——" Laura came to a somewhat feeble pause, and Louise, moreover, had noticed that her tone was a bit forced. Louise, trembling slightly, placed her hands on Laura's shoulders.
"Dear, he has gone to Curzon Street, has he not?" she asked the older woman.
"Of course he has!—why shouldn't he?" replied Laura, with a bravado which immediately gave away to tears. Louise promptly followed her example. It was merely another repetition of the age-old story wherein women weep when men go forth. And, although they of course did not know it at the time, no doubt both women enjoyed their tears quite as heartily as if they had been justified in feeling the least fear for the safety of John Blythe.
Jesse, his fiesta "in celebration of a defeat" at an end, was supervising the packing of his trunks by the young English valet obtained for him by Gaskins. His face was puffed and there were purplish pouches under his restless eyes. Three New York men, two of them somewhat youngish, the third of about Jesse's age, who had been drawn into the current of the recent gayety at the Curzon Street house, lounged about, smoking rather dismally, glancing occasionally into the mantel glass at their furred tongues and shaking their heads in the spirit of self-accusation which comes with the aftermath.
"Back to little old New York and at least a year's exemplary conduct for mine," observed the eldest of Jesse's three visitors, Jermyn Scammel, a stock broker widely known in New York for the catholicity of his views as to his associates.
"The veil for me," chorused the two younger men, sepulchrally.
Jesse accepted their vows of amendment as tributes to his lavishness as an entertainer and smiled flaccidly. The self-gratulating smile still flickered on his face when there came a knock, and Gaskins, grown unceremonious during the recent gay proceedings, opened the door without waiting for a "Come in" and said:
"Gentleman with an happointment with you, sir."
Blythe had told Gaskins that he had an appointment with Jesse and that therefore there would be no need to announce him.
Jesse's smile congealed, his jaw fell, and he stood with mouth agape, when John Blythe stepped into the room. Blythe bestowed a mere nod upon him and then glanced around at the other men. He knew Scammel.
"Hul-lo!" exclaimed that now repententbon vivant, advancing upon Blythe with outstretched hand. "John Blythe it is, but too late for the doings! But who'd have thought you ever participated in doings, old man!"
Something in Blythe's eye, as well as the panic-stricken appearance of Jesse, stopped Scammel's airy greeting when he had got that far. "Why, what the devil——" he muttered, looking first at Blythe and then at Jesse, whose face had taken on a sickly, chalky pallor. The two younger men, seated a-straddle of chairs, watched the scene with curious eyes.
Blythe rather liked Scammel, in spite of the latter's excessively careless way of living. The man was genuine, at any rate, and Blythe was not displeased to find him there; he knew that Scammel would be a trustworthy witness as to anything that might happen. Blythe bowed to the two younger men, and turned to the still agape Jesse.
"Would you prefer to see me privately, or do you elect to have these gentlemen remain?" he asked Jesse in a quiet tone.
"I have nothing to see you about," spluttered Jesse, "and you are intruding upon——"
"You know what I have crossed the Atlantic to see you about," Blythe broke in upon him in an even tone.
"This is no place for a clergyman's son—I can see that!" ejaculated Scammel, picking up his hat and stick, the two younger men doing likewise; the fact having become very obvious by this time that something unusual between Blythe and Jesse was in the wind.
"Don't you people go!" gasped Jesse, and they all saw, not without a certain immediate disgust, that the man was in positive terror. "I want all of you as witnesses! This man," staring with protrusive eyes at Blythe, "has no appointment with me. He wasn't asked to come here, and he has no right here. He is intruding upon my——"
"Easy has it, Jesse," put in Scammel, putting off his airiness of a sudden and assuming the dignity which belonged to him. "I know Blythe. He doesn't intrude anywhere. This is a quarrel between you two. I am your guest and I'll stay if you want me to and if Blythe is agreeable. How about it, Blythe?"
"I would a little prefer that you and these other gentlemen remain," replied Blythe, quite at his ease. "I think it fair to tell you in advance, however, that you are to witness the chastisement of your host."
Jesse gave an audible gasp, and Scammel looked at him and then at Blythe.
"Well, since you both want us to stay, there is no other way for it, is there?" turning to the two younger men, who nodded acquiescently. "But it's a bit unusual, isn't it, Blythe? Coming to a man's house with a chastising programme?"
"You won't think so, Scammel, nor will your friends here, when I explain the reason," replied Blythe, no trace of excitement in his tone; "and, since you are going to remain, you are of course entitled to an explanation."
"It's all a put-up job!" broke out Jesse, hoarsely. "I've had no affair with this man. He's meddling, that's what he is doing—meddling! I swear it, by God!"
"Just a moment, Jesse," put in Scammel, squarely facing the man he addressed. "Blythe doesn't meddle. I know that as well as I know that I wear a hat. He wouldn't be here with any such purpose as he announces unless he had some pretty good reason. Don't try to prejudice his case in advance. That isn't the square thing."
"But," almost screamed Jesse, "he is picking up other people's affairs and trying to make them his——"
"Stop that, Jesse!" broke in Scammel, raising an authoritative arm, a trace of anger in his tone. "Good God, man, can't you play the game? You've got a man's gizzard, haven't you? What the devil are you trembling and quaking about? Is your case so bad as all that? Go ahead, Blythe. It's your say now, and we're listening."
Jesse, knowing that the verdict of this court of arbitration could not but be against him, glanced at the portieres as if upon the point of bolting for it. Scammel, noticing this, passed behind Jesse and took his stand at the parting of the portieres. The two younger men rose from their straddled chairs and viewed the proceedings standing, their eyes slitting perceptibly when they perceived Jesse's manifest cravenness.
"Gentlemen," said Blythe, glancing from Scammel to the younger men and not even seeming to see Jesse, "I don't think it will be necessary to pledge you to secrecy as to what happens here, even if no names are to be mentioned. If the affair involved a man it would be different. But it does not. It involves a young New York lady, now in London, who has been out of school less than half a year. The young lady is my ward. Moreover, she is to be my wife."
"But I didn't know that!" broke in Jesse with a hideous shrillness of tone. "I swear to God that I did not know that, or——"
Scammel glared Jesse into silence, and Blythe went on.
"It makes no difference, as you will discover, whether he knew it or not," he said, speaking of Jesse as if he had not been present. "The thing that he did, in this place, a week ago, was a thing so incredibly base that my account of it might well tax your credulity. But that it happened precisely as I am going to tell it to you is of course true, else I should not be here. The young New York lady of whom I speak is in London under the protection of a chaperon, a friend of her mother's. A week ago, by means of a trick, this man enticed my ward, who is wholly lacking in experience, to this house. He caused a telephone message to be sent to her at her hotel, informing her that her chaperon, who had left the hotel on a shopping tour, had been overtaken by an illness and had been brought to this house. This house was represented in the telephone message to be the home of a 'Mrs. Hammond,' an imaginary friend of my ward's chaperon. The young lady came here with all haste to see, as she supposed, her chaperon and protectress. This man, waiting for her, not only insulted her grossly, subjecting her to indignities and physical violence which I can scarcely speak of in the presence of gentlemen, but he told her, virtually in so many words, that it was his deliberate purpose to deflower her. His own valet, a Japanese, appeared in her moment of peril; and it was the valet's physical intervention alone that saved her from the fate this man had ingeniously and malignantly planned for her."
Blythe paused. He had spoken quietly, but there was a menacing timbre in his voice. Jesse, looking like a hunted animal, had attempted several times to break in upon Blythe's recital, but each time Scammel had stopped him with a warning gesture.
Now Scammel, with gathered brows, stepped in front of Jesse and inquired of him:
"What have you to say to this, Jesse?"
"I didn't know, I tell you," Jesse broke out in a voice that was choked with terror, "that she was to be married to Blythe, or——"
"Wait!" commanded Scammel, thrusting up a staying hand. "That convicts you, Jesse. You're a damned scoundrel on your own say-so. What difference does it make as to the main facts of your dirty bit of work whether you knew that or not? I am not unmindful of the duties of a guest; but, for all that, if I were Blythe I'd whale the everlasting hell out of you, here and now, and I reckon he will; and I, for one, am going to stick around to see fair play!"
"Same here" and "That goes for me, too," put in the two younger men.
Blythe stepped forward, and, drawing back his right arm, left the quickly-crimsoning imprint of his palm upon Jesse's waxy cheek. Jesse received the blow, merely meant to be introductory, with a shriek, and wriggled back and sought to huddle in a corner of the room.
"Why, damnation take it, Jesse," exclaimed Scammel, reddening with the shame of seeing a man he had been on terms with performing so cravenly, "you're going to put up your hands, aren't you? You're not going to be such a cur as to——Here, none of that, you know!" and he leaped at Jesse and wrenched from his grasp the heavy teakwood tabouret which the man, at bay and with no sense of fairness, had suddenly reached down and grabbed from beneath the jardiniere which it supported.
"Keep out, Scammel, please," quietly enjoined Blythe, and he stepped over to Jesse, pulled him to the center of the room by the lapel of his coat, and then brought his right fist crashing to the point of Jesse's jaw. Jesse, seeing the blow coming, squeaked like a rat; then he went down like a log and lay unconscious before the fireplace. Blythe and the three other men stood looking at him with wonderment mingled with disgust.