CHAPTER XV
It was not until night had settled down over the city that Durkin opened the back window of his little top-floor room and peered cautiously out.
There was, apparently, nothing amiss. A noise of pounding came to him from the shipping-room of a lace importer below. A few scattered shafts of light glimmered from the windows opposite. A hazy half-moon slanted down over the house-tops.
When Durkin leaned out of the window for the second time he held in his hand something that looked peculiarly like a fishing-rod. From it dangled two thin green wires, and with the metal hook on the end of it he tested and felt carefully up among the slovenly tangle of wires running out past the overhanging eave.
It was a silly and careless way of doing things, he inwardly decided, this lazy stringing of wires from house-top to house-top, instead of keeping them in the tunnels where they belonged. It was not only violating regulations, but it was putting a premium on “lightning-slinging.” And he remembered what Frances had once said to him about criminals in a city like New York, how the careless riot of wealth seemed to breed them, as any uncleanness breeds bacteria; how, in a way, each was only a natural and inevitable agent, taking advantage of organic waste, seizing on the unguarded and the unorderly. She had even once argued that the criminal could lay claim to a distinct economic value, enjoining, as he did, continual alertness of attention and cleanliness of commercial method.
Yet the devil himself, he had somewhere read, could quote Scripture for his purpose; and his fishing-pole moved restlessly up and down, like a long finger feeling through answering strings. For each time, almost, that his hook rested on one of the wires the little Bunnell relay on the table behind him spoke out feebly. To the trill and clatter of these metallic pulsations Durkin listened intently, until, determining that he had looped into the right wire, he made secure his switch and carefully drew down the window to within an inch of the sill.
Then he gave his studious attention to the little Bunnell relay. Its action was feeble and spasmodic. It was doing scant justice to what Durkin easily saw was a master-hand toying with the rubber button at the far-distant end of the wire. It was not unusually quick operating, but, as the dots and dashes flew on and on, the interloper for a moment or two forgot the meaning of the messages in the clear-cut, crisp, and precise beauty of the sender’s Morse.
“That man,” commented the admiring craftsman in Durkin, “is earning his eight dollars an hour!”
Then, adjusting his rheostat, he slowly and cautiously graduated his current, until new life seemed to throb and flow through the busy little piece of clicking metal. A moment later it was speaking out its weighty and secret messages, innocently, authoritatively, almost triumphantly, it seemed to the eavesdropper, bending over the glimmering armature lever.
A quietly predaceous smile broadened on Durkin’s intent face. He suddenly smote the table with an impetuous little rap of the knuckles, as he sat there listening.
“By heaven, thiswillopen her eyes!” he cried, under his breath.
And he repeated the words more abstractedly, as he lifted his telephone transmitter out on the table and threw open a switch on the wall, well-concealed by the window curtain.
He then adjusted the watch-case receiver to his ear, and settled quietly down in his chair. Striking a match, he held it poised six inches away from the cigar between his teeth. For the sounder had suddenly broken out into life once more, and strange and momentous things were flashing in to him over that little thread of steel. The match burned away and fell from his fingers. He shook himself together with an effort.
Then he snatched up a pencil, and with the watch-case receiver still at his ear and the Bunnell sounder still busy before him, he hurriedly wrote notes on the back of an envelope.
He felt like a lean and empty wharf-rat that had tunnelled into a storehouse of unlimited provision. The very vastness of it amazed and stupefied him. He had been grubbing about for a penny or two, and here he had stumbled across a fabulous-figured banknote.
Then, as item by item he was able to piece his scattered shreds of information together, his mind became clearer and his nerves grew steadier.
He looked at his watch. It was twenty-six minutes past nine. As he had expected, and as had happened every night since Curry had installed the private wire in his Madison Avenue residence, the operator on the up-town end of the line switched off. The sounder grew still, like a clock that had run down. The telephone wire still carried its occasional message in to him, but he knew that he could wait no longer.
It took him but a minute or two to detach his looping wire from the Curry private line. Then he threw back the switch of his telephone, concealed his transmitter, and caught up his hat and coat.
Five minutes later he was careering up Fifth Avenue in a taxi-cab. A new interest, submerged in the sterner tides of life, drifted in on him as he drew nearer the Ralston and Frances Candler. He began to meditate on how much he had been missing out of existence of late, and even how empty all triumph and conquest might be, if unshared by or with another. Some vague and gently disturbing inkling of just how much a woman could become to a man, however preoccupied, crept into the quieter backgrounds of his consciousness. And with a man of his walk in life, uncompanioned, isolated, migratory, this muffling and softening element was doubly essential.
He sent his card up to Frances, with an unreasonably beating heart. Word came down to him, in time, that she was engaged, but that she would see him in twenty minutes.
“But I must see her, and at once!” he told the impassive clerk.
It would be possible in twenty minutes, was the second message that came down to him.
Frances engaged—and not able to see him! The very idea of it startled and enraged him. Who had the right to stand between them?—he demanded of himself, with irrational fierceness. And out of the very midst of his soft and consuming eagerness to see her sprang up a mad fire of jealousy and uncertainty. Who was there, he again demanded of himself,—who was there that could come in this way between Frances Candler and himself, at such a time and under such circumstances? After all, her career was one of open and continuous deception. There was MacNutt! And Ottenheimer! And a dozen more! She made it her business to deceive and dupe others, so artfully, so studiously, so laboriously—why would she not use her tools on him as well? Was she, indeed, as open and candid as he had taken her to be?—she, with all her soft little feline graces, and with all that ambiguous and unknown past of hers!
And yet he remembered how she had held out against him, how he, with his laxer code, had often hurt and wounded every feeling of her sensitive nature. Even before this he had tried to argue that crime in one phase of life implied moral weakness in all other phases of that same career. Yet there she obdurately though pantingly stood, unyielding, stanch, clean of mind and life, a woman of stern honor—and through it all an adventuress and a robber! A black-leg with the conscience of a schoolgirl!—and he laughed inwardly and bitterly at the cheap irony of it all.
His icy and exacting scrutiny of her, as he stepped into her private room, sapped all the warmth out of her greeting. She had thrown on a loose-fitting dressing-gown of pale blue, which showed the white fulness of her arms and throat and darkened the violet of her brooding and seemingly unsatisfied eyes. She was more than beautiful, Durkin had told himself, with a little gulp of anguish. But why had the corroding poison of criminal inclination been poured into a glass so tinted and fragile and lovely to the sight! For there, as he looked at her with still angry and suspicious eyes, he realized, for the first time, just what she was to him, just how completely and implacably she had subjugated him.
“What is it?” she demanded, with a sudden little flutter of fear, standing halfway across the room.
“Who was in this room with you?” he demanded.
She studied his face for a moment or two, slowly shaking her head from side to side. He noticed the tumbled wealth of her glinting chestnut hair, here and there almost a golden red, and again a gulp of anguish swelled at his throat. It was no wonder that MacNutt had good use for her.
“Who has been up here with you?” he repeated miserably, but inexorably.
She seemed to sigh a little, and then her slow English laugh melted out through the room. It was a quiet and sorrowful little laugh, but it shattered the tragedy from the overstrained moment.
“You foolish boy!” she said, half-sorrowfully, as she turned to put the belittered room to rights. “It was the dressmaker I sent for, as soon as I got here. I haven’t a rag! You know that! And you know how often you have said that persons in our sort of business ought to dress well.”
The mad wave of doubt that still tumbled him back and forth ebbed suddenly away, as a woman of forty, short and stolid, stepped briskly and quietly out of the inner bedroom. She bowed a businesslike good night to them as she passed out into the hallway, carrying a handbag.
“And this is the way you welcome me back!” reproved Frances, as she drew away from him and fell to studying his face once more. “Well, we can at least talk business,” she added bitterly, on the heels of his awkward silence. “And that, I know, will appeal to you!”
Durkin bowed to the stroke, and even made belated and disjointed efforts of appeasement. But the petals seemed to have fallen from the shaken flower; a teasing sense of her aloofness from him oppressed his mind. In fact, it had always been in the full hue and cry of their adventures with the grim powers of the law that she had seemed nearest to him.
The thought came to him, with a quick sense of terror, of how he might suffer at a time or in a situation not so ridiculously transparent as the present. If, indeed, she ever did give him actual cause for jealousy, how it would rend and tear those roots which had pierced so much deeper than he had ever dreamed! And for a passing moment he felt almost afraid of himself.
CHAPTER XVI
“Then it wasn’t so difficult, after all?” commented Durkin, as Frances ended a description of her three days in Leeksville.
“No, it wasn’t the trouble so much—only, for the first time in my life, I felt so—so cruelly alone!” She found it hard to explain it to him adequately. She wondered why it was she should always shrink from undraping any inner corner of her soul to him, why, at times, she should stand so reluctant to win any of the more intimate touches of comradeship from him.
“That’s the drawback,” he remarked, wide of her mood and thought, “that’s the drawback in doing this sort of thing by oneself!”
“We really ought to hunt in pairs, don’t you think, like timber wolves?”
She turned and looked at him, with a still mocking and yet a warmer light coming into her eyes. Some propulsion, not of mind, but of body, seemed to drive her involuntarily toward him—like a ship on a lee shore, she felt—as she sniffed delicately at his cigar-scented gloves, so anomalously redolent of virility, of masculinity, of something compelling and masterful, where they lay in her nervously toying fingers. She tried to laugh at herself, with chastening scorn; but she could not.
“And out of it all,” he went on, “when brokerage fees and other things are counted, we have made just three hundred and sixty-seven dollars!”
“Only that?”
“I had no more than the thirty minutes, you see, for a margin to work on!”
She pushed back her hair with a languid hand.
“But why cry over spilt milk?” she asked, wearily. Firmer and firmer, she felt, this mad fever of money-getting was taking hold on him.
“Especially when we seem about to wade knee-deep in cream!”
She made a last effort to fall in with his mood of ruthless aggression.
“Yes; what’s this you were going to open my eyes with?”
The final vestige of his clouded restraint slipped away from Durkin’s mind.
“I had better start right at the beginning, hadn’t I?” he queried, cigar in hand, while she nodded comfortably to the silent question as to whether or not he might smoke.
“I suppose you know that Curry was once a New Orleans cotton broker. It was a little over two years ago that he first came to New York, with about a million and a half of his own, and an available three or four million belonging to a pool that was to back him through thick and thin. This they did, when he became a member of the Cotton Exchange. Then step by step he began to plan out his campaign, patiently and laboriously plotting and scheming and manipulating and increasing his power, until the newspaper-men dropped into the habit of speaking of him as the Cotton King, and the old home pool itself got a little afraid of him, and held a few secret meetings to talk things over.”
“But how did this campaign end?”
“It has not ended. Of just how it will end only two men, outside of Curry and his confidential old head-broker down on the Exchange floor, have any inkling.”
“Who is theotherman?” asked Frances quietly.
Durkin smiled covertly, with a half-mockingly bowed “Thanks!”
“The other man, of course, not counting myself, is the operator, or, rather, the private secretary, he keeps at the home end of the wire he has had put into his house, for carrying on his collateral manipulations, as it were.”
“I understand,” said Frances.
“And then comes myself,” he added confidently.
The woman settled back in her leather-lined arm-chair, locking her slender white fingers together above her head. The clustered lights of the chandelier threw heavy shadows about her quiet eyes, and for the first time Durkin noticed the tender little hollow just under her cheek-bones, lending an indescribable touch of tragedy to the old-time softer oval of her face.
“Now this is what our friend Curry has been doing, in a nutshell. For months and months he has been the acknowledged bull leader of the Exchange. Point by point, week by week and day by day, he has managed to send cotton up. Where it was at first 11 and 12 and perhaps 13 cents, he has shouldered, say, August cotton up to 16.55, and July up to 17.30 and May up to 17.20. Day before yesterday July cotton advanced to 17.65 in New Orleans. Some time, and some time mighty soon—if not tomorrow, then the next day, or perhaps even the next—every option is going to go still higher. And this man Curry is the imperial dictator of it all. He is known to have interests behind him that amount to millions now. And this is the point I’m coming to: this present week is to see the rocket go up and burst.”
Durkin was on his feet by this time pacing up and down the room.
“The first, but not the final, climax of all this plotting is twenty-cent cotton.”
“Has it ever been that before?”
“Never! It has not been above seventeen cents, not since 1873!” declared Durkin, excitedly. “But here is the important part of it all, the second climax, as it were. When it strikes nineteen his old home pool are going to abdicate. They are going to turn traitor on him, I mean, and suddenly stand from under. Then here is the third and last climax: Curry knows this fact; he knows they’re making ready to crush him. And when they get ready he’s going to turn and smash ’em, smash ’em and sling ’em down, even though he goes with them in the crash. Which he won’t, if he’s the Curry I take him to be. In other words, Frank, at the right moment he is going to abdicate from the bull movement absolutely, before it is publicly realized.”
“It all seems vague and misty to me—but I suppose you know.”
“Know? Why, I’ve been rioting through his holy of holies for two days now. I’ve been cutting in and reading his own private wire. He firmly intends to forsake this bull movement, which, apparently, he has spent so much time and toil in building up. But in reality, out of the crash that comes with a collapsing market—and it must collapse when he stands from under!—he is to sit and see a million or two rain down into his lap.”
“But can he, one solitary man, do all this—I mean do it unmistakably, inevitably?”
“Yes, he can. I firmly believe that nothing short of a miracle can now upset his plan. Today he is not only the leader of the cotton pit; he is both openly and tacitly the supreme dictator of the market—of the world’s market. Why, last week, when he publicly announced that he was going down to Lakewood for a couple of days, the market fell back to 12.85 for an hour or two, and he had to jump in and start buying, just to give a little order to things. Somebody even said that when his wife and an actress friend of hers visited the Exchange gallery he asked them if they’d like to see a little panic on the floor. The actress said she’d love to see cotton go up a few points if he wouldn’t mind. Curry said all right, to watch out for some real acting. So he started down into the pit and pulled the strings until his puppets danced to their hearts’ content.”
Frances nodded her appreciation of the scene’s dramatic values, and waited for Durkin to continue.
“And one minor result of that was that one hour later a well-known cotton merchant was found in his chair, with a slowly widening stain of red on his shirt front, as the evening papers put it. He had shot himself through the heart—utterly ruined by that last little capricious rise in our Cotton King’s market.”
“Who, after all, is not much better than a wire-tapper!” exclaimed the woman, with her mirthless little laugh of scorn.
“There’s a difference—he thinks in big figures and affairs; we, up till now, have worked and worried and fretted over little things. This man Curry, too, is a sort of Napoleon. ‘You have to smash the eggs to make your omelet,’ was all he said when he heard that a big brokerage firm had closed its one hundred and twenty-five offices because of his bull operations. Why, this week he’s making his clerks eat and sleep right in the offices—he’s turned one of the rooms into a sort of dormitory, and has their meals sent up to them. And outside of all this he’s manipulating his own underground movement, doing that over his home wire, after his regular office hours.”
“And this is the wire you have tapped?”
“Yes, that’s the wire that has been giving me my information—or, rather, little scattered shreds of it. But here, mind, is where the difficulty comes in. Curry has got to let his partner, Green, down in New Orleans, in on the last movement of his campaign, so that the two can strike together. But he is wise, and he isn’t trusting that tip to any open wire. When the time comes it’s to be a cipher message. It will read, ‘Helen sails’—then such and such a time on such and such a day. That message Curry’s confidential operator will send out over the wire, under the protection of a quadruplex, from his Wall Street office. And that is the message I have to intercept.”
She was moving her head slowly up and down, gazing at him with unseeing eyes.
“And you have some plan for doing it?”
“Precisely,” replied Durkin, wheeling nervously back and forth. “This is where I’ve got to run the gauntlet of the whole Postal-Union system, cut in on their double-guarded wires, and get away with my information without being caught.”
“But you can’t do it, Jim. It’s impossible.”
“Oh, but itispossible, quite possible!” he said, halting for a moment before her. “Here’s where the climax comes to my story—the one I started to tell you over the ’phone. You see, just at the time of that little conduit fire the Postal-Union Company was having trouble with the Electrical Workers’ Union. I happened to be laying in the supplies for that up-town loop of mine when I found they were offering two dollars an hour for expert work. I jumped on a Broadway car, and took the plunge.”
“What plunge, Jim?”
“I mean that I applied for work, down there, as a cable-splicer.”
“Wasn’t it dangerous work—foryou, I mean?”
“Yes, a trifle so, I suppose. But none of the inside men were on the force. No one knew me there, from Adam. And it was worth it, too!”
“You mean, of course—?”
“I mean that a certain cable-splicer has the entrée to that conduit, that he has a hand-made chart as to its wire-disposition, and—well, several other things!”
He waited for some word of appreciative triumph from her. As she remained silent, he went on again.
“And I mustn’t forget to tell you that I’ve leased a little basement place not far from Pine Street. I’m going to do commercial printing and that sort of thing. I’ve got a sign out, and the power all ready, only my presses are slow in coming!”
“And will be still further delayed, I suppose?”
“Yes, I’m afraid they will.”
Some mysterious touch of his excitement at last communicated itself to the listening woman, almost against her will. She was as fluctuant, she told herself, as the aluminum needle of a quadrant electrometer. No, she was more like the helpless little pith-ball of an electroscope, she mentally amended, ever dangling back and forth in a melancholy conflict of repulsion and attraction. Yet, as she comprehended Durkin’s plot, point by point, she began to realize the vast possibilities that confronted them, and, as ever before, to fall a victim to the zest of action, the vital sting of responsibility. Nor did she allow herself to lose sight of the care and minuteness of the continued artfulness and finish, so teeming with its secondary æsthetic values, with which he had reconnoitered his ever-menacing territory and laid his mine. And added to this, she saw, was the zest of stalking the stalker: it carried with it an ameliorating tang of dramatic irony, an uncouth touch of poetic justice.
As often happened with her in moments of excitement, the expanded pupils of her violet eyes crept over and all but blotted out the iris, until out of the heavy shadows that hung under her full brow, they glowed faintly, in certain lights, with an animal-like luminousness. “Those eyes—they look as though a halo had melted and run down into them!” Durkin had once cried, half wonderingly, half playfully, as he turned her face from shadow to light and back to shadow again.
He had looked for some word of disapproval from her, for he could remember how often, with her continuous scruples, she had taken the razor-edge off his enthusiasm, when he stood on the brink of adventuring with something big and momentous. So he studied her face abstractedly, his own alight with an eager and predaceously alert look which only his half-whimsical, half-boyish smile held above the plane of sheer vulpine craftiness.
“Why, this man Curry,” he went on, still standing in front of her, “has got such a grip on the market that he can simply juggle with it. Before this boom you or I could buy a bale of cotton on a dollar margin. Today, most of the brokerage houses insist on a four dollar margin, some of them demanding a five, and it’s said that a ten dollar margin can still be looked for.”
“But still, I don’t see how one man can do this, and keep it up!”
“It’s mostly all the natural outcome of his own, individual, long-headed plot. Beyond that, it’s a mere infection, a mania, an operation of mob-law, the case of sheep following a sheep. Curry, all along, is crying out that the demand has outgrown the supply, and that the commercial world has got to get used to the idea of twenty-cent cotton. In the old days it used to sell away down around six cents, and ever since then mills have been increasing their spindles,—in ten years, Curry’s papers claim, the mills have added more than seventeen million spindles to swell this tremendous cry for cotton. That’s his argument, to tide him along until he kicks the post out, and the drop comes. Then of course, he and the rest of his bull pool have been buying, buying, buying, always openly and magnificently, yet all the while, selling quietly and secretly.”
“And they call this legitimate business?” she demanded, with the familiar tinge of scorn in her voice.
“Yes, they call it high finance. But it’s about as legitimate, on the whole, as the pea and thimble game I used to watch up at the county fairs in Canada. In other words, Frank, when we carry on our particular line of business cleanly and decently, we are a hanged sight more honest than these Exchange manipulators.”
“But not recognized!” she cut in, for she knew that with this unction of comparison he was salving a still tender conscience.
“That’s because we are such small fry,” he went on heatedly. “But, by heavens, when we get this thing going, I guess we’ll rather count a little!”
“And what is to keep us from getting it going?”
He wheeled on her suddenly.
“One thing, and one hard thing!”
“Well?”
“Within twenty-four hours we have got to have ten thousand dollars!”
CHAPTER XVII
“Ten thousand dollars is a great deal of money!” said Frank, easily, with a languid shrug of her shoulders.
“Itisa great deal! But we’re up against a great deal! If we had twice as much, it would be even better. I have a possible twelve hundred now, altogether—just a scrawny, miserable twelve hundred! I got most of it yesterday, through dabbling in this cotton of Curry’s. Tomorrow morning every cent of it goes down to Robinson & Little, and if the market is moderately steady, and he takes a two dollar margin, knowing what I do, it means I double that amount before the day’s trading is over.”
“Robinson & Little? Who are they? New friends of yours?”
“They are the big Wall Street people. I had to pay two hundred dollars—in I. O. U. form,—for a letter to that firm. I still have a suspicion it was forged, too. I’ve been getting acquainted with them, however, and showing them that I’m all right. When the eleventh hour comes, and when I have to cut in on Curry’s Postal-Union wire down-town, we’ll have to tear around to Robinson & Little’s, flop over with the market, and buy cotton short, on a stop-order. It all depends upon what margin we may have to put up, whether we make forty thousand dollars, or a hundred and forty thousand dollars. Curry, you may be sure, will try to start the thing off as quietly as possible. So a normal market will bring a more normal margin, and give us something worth while to play on!”
“Something worth while?” she mused absently. Then she came and stood by Durkin, and studied his face once more. Some sense of his isolation, of his unhappy aloofness from his kind, touched and wrung her feeling. She caught at his arm with a sudden companionable enthusiasm, and joined him in pacing the room.
“After all, therewouldbe something big, and wide, and sweeping about this sort of work, wouldn’t there?”
“Yes; it’s a blamed sight better than pool-room piking!” he cried. “It’s living; it’s doing things!”
“I believe I could plunge in it, and glory in it!” she went on, consolingly.
“There’s just one drawback—just one nasty little blot on the face of the fun,” he ventured, catching at the sustaining arm of her enthusiasm.
“And that is—?”
“We’ve got to get this ten thousand dollars just for a day or two!”
“But have you any idea as to how, or where, or when?”
“Yes, I have,” he answered, looking at her steadily. There seemed to be some covert challenge in his glance, but she faced him unwaveringly.
“Say it out, Jim; I’m not afraid!”
“I meanyoumust get it! You’ve got to borrow it!”
He began bravely enough, but he hesitated before the startled scorn on her face.
“You mean I’ve—I’ve got to steal it?”
He held up a protesting hand. Then he went to the half-open door of her inner room and closed it carefully.
“No; as I said before, we can not and must not steal it. It may be called theft, of course, but every cent of it will be returned. No, no; listen to me—I have it all figured out. Only, it has to be done this very night!”
“Tonight?” she said, with a reproving little cry.
“Yes, tonight! And that is why I’ve been desperate, of course, and have been looping every telephone wire that runs near my up-town room, hoping against hope for a chance to pick up something to work on. The only thing that gave me that chance was Theodore Van Schaick’s house wire. Now, listen. Two days ago his daughter Lydia came of age. I could tell you most of the things she got, and how she has been ’phoning gratitude and thanks and girlish messages out round the city. But among other things Miss Lydia Van Schaick received from her father, was a small and neat bundle not long out of the Sub-Treasury. It was made up of one hundred equally neat little pieces of parchment, and each one of them is a one-hundred dollar banknote.”
“And I’m to crawl through one of her windows, and burglarize the house of this amount!”
“No, no, Frank—listen to me a moment. Yesterday, Miss Lydia telephoned her Uncle Cedric about this money. Not being used to a small fortune in ready cash, naturally, she feels nervous about having it around, and wants to put it somewhere. Her level-headed old Uncle Cedric advised her to take it down tomorrow to the Second National Bank, and open a deposit account with it. And this Lydia intends to do. Tonight her ten thousand dollars are laid carefully away in a glove-box, in one of her chiffonier drawers, in her own private bedroom. So tonight is our only chance!”
“Couldn’t I sand-bag her in the morning, on her way down-town?” demanded Frances, with mock seriousness. She had learned not to ask too much of life, and she was struggling to school herself to the thought of this new rôle.
“No, my dear girl; it can be done so much easier than that. Her mother and her younger sister are still at Driftwood, their summer place in Mamaroneck. At four o’clock this afternoon they sent into the city a certain Miss Annie Seabrooke. She is a St. Luke’s graduate, a professional nurse who has been looking after old Mrs. Van Schaick. This lady, apparently, is a good deal of a hypochondriac. The nurse, of course, has to get things ready for her patient’s return. I have already met Miss Seabrooke at the Grand Central Station. I have also, at Miss Lydia’s urgent request, installed her at the Holland House, over night. This, by the way, is the lady’s bag. I tried to explain to her that the whole Van Schaick house wants to be given over to Miss Lydia’s coming-of-age function.”
Frances, already carried down again by her tidal reaction of feeling, watched him through narrowed and abstracted eyes.
“In this bag, among other things, you’ll find a nurse’s uniform,” Durkin went on hurriedly, oblivious of her scrutiny. “It will fit a little loose, I’m afraid—Miss Seabrooke is a big, wide-shouldered Canadian girl. And in forty or fifty minutes from now you ought to be inside that uniform and inside the Van Schaick house—if we ever want to carry this thing through!”
“And then—?” she asked, in her dead and impersonal voice, as though her thoughts were leagues away.
“Then,” cried Durkin, “then you’ve got to get hold of a glove-box in Miss Lydia Van Schaick’s chiffonier drawer. By some means or other we’ve got to get hold of that box, and—”
She stopped him, by holding up a sudden silencing hand. Her face was white and set; he could see none of the iris of her eyes.
“It’s no use!” she said, evenly and quietly. “It’s no use. I can not and will not do it!”
Durkin fell back from her, aghast. Then he took her by the arm, and turned her about so that the light fell on her face. He could see that her lower lip was trembling.
“You back down—now?” he demanded, with a touch of incredulity.
“Yes, I back down!” she answered, letting her eyes meet his.
“Why—” he began, inadequately. “What is it?”
“It’s simply this, Jim,” she answered him—and her voice, now, was high and thin and unmodulated, constricted, by some inward tension, to a gramophonic tumult of syllables. “There has got to be a limit, somewhere. At some point we have got to draw the line. We have been forgetting a great many things. But I can not and will not be a common thief—for you—or for anything you can bring to me—or to my life!”
“You saythat?”
“Yes, I do; and if you cared for me—if you thought of my feelings—if you thought of my happiness, you would never ask me to do such things—you would never make me suffer like this!”
He threw up his hands with what was almost a gesture of exasperation.
“But you willnotbe a common thief—it will not be stealing at all! Can’t you see that?”
“No, I can not. And you know as well as I know, that when we try to justify it we do it only by a quibble!”
“But I tell you every penny of that money will go back where it came from!”
“Then why can’t we go to Lydia Van Schaick and ask her to lend us the money?”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“No more so than what you propose!”
Durkin, drawing back from her, closed his right fist and with it pounded angrily on the palm of his left hand.
“If you’re going to back down Iwillgo to Lydia Van Schaick, and I’ll get her money, too. I’ll go as a second-story man, as a porch-climber! I’ll go after that money as a common burglar and house-breaker. But I’ll get it, in the end, or know the reason why!”
“Oh!” she gasped, horrified. “You wouldn’t! You couldn’t!”
“I say I will!” he cried, in a passion.
“Oh, you couldn’t!” she reiterated.
“Couldn’t I?—I’ve got this machinery started, and it’s going to be kept moving!”
Something in the scene carried her years back, to the times when her father, emerging from his prolonged orgies, sick and shaken, stormed and wept for the brandy she struggled to keep away from him—and the struggle would end only, when in fear of his collapse, she surrendered the bottle to his quivering fingers.
“My God—I’vegotto have it!” Durkin was crying and storming.
There crept over her the same, slowly eviscerating pity for the defiant man who now stood before her, so tragically weak in his very protests of strength.
She turned and caught at his arm, with a sudden inward surrender that left her dazed and tottering. She struggled in vain to keep down her tears, once more torn by that old and costly and compromising hunger to be loved and sustained by him. She could not live in the face of his anger; she could not endure his hate. And the corroding bitterness, the gnawing tragedy, of her life lay in the fact that the arm to which she must turn for support was the very arm that would forever drag and hold her down.
Yet she was inarticulate, in the face of it all. She could not plead; she could not explain. She could only break out with a sudden unreasoning and passionate cry of: “You are not kind to me!”
Durkin had already shaken her hand from his arm, and was on the point of a second outburst. Then he stopped, and the gathering anger and revolt ebbed out of his face, for at that tearful and passionate cry from her he knew that the battle between them had come to an end. He knew, with an exultation in which even pity and cruelty were strangely entangled, that it was a sign of her inward capitulation, that he had won her over.
“Frank!”
He swung about, suddenly, and with one clasp of his arms let wide the flood-gates of her strained emotions.
“Good God!” he cried. “You know I hate it, as much as you do! But can’t you see it’s too late now, to quibble and vacillate? Can’t you see that I’m getting nothing more out of it than you?”
He pleaded with her, hotly, impetuously. He showed her how he needed her, how he was helpless without her. He held her, and kissed the tears from her unhappy eyes—he could see them droop, pitifully, as with a narcotic, at his first intimate and tender touch. He would have to sway her now, he felt, not through her judgment, not by open attack, but only by those more circuitous and subterranean approaches of feminine feeling. And still he expostulated and pleaded, unnerving and breaking her will with his cruel kindnesses of word and caress.
“Oh, I’ll do it!” she cried, at last, mopping her stained face. “I’ll do it, Jim, if I have to!”
“But there’s nothing so terrible in it, Dear Heart,” he assuaged. “We’ve been through worse things together. And it will be made right again, every penny of it!”
“Jim,” she said slowly, as she grew calmer once more; “Jim, I want you to give me your word of honor that itwillbe made right! I’m—I’m too cowardly, yet, to do a thing that’s wickedness, through and through. I’ve got to see some glimmer of right in it, I’ve got to feel that it will end right, even—”
“But thiswillend right! It can’t help it. I give you my word of honor, now, to save you from being what you might seem, that every cent of this woman’s money goes back to her.”
She was moving her head slowly up and down, as she studied his face.
“Then you must remember, through it all, how much I’m trusting myself to you,” she said, with a forlornness that brought a lump in his throat, as she looked about the room with hopeless eyes. “Do you realize how hard all this is going to be?”
“It’s not easy, I know—but it’s our only chance.”
“Isit our only chance?” she suddenly asked. “Life is full of chances. I saw one today, if I’d only known.”
She looked at him again, with some new light sifting through all her tangle of clouds. “Yes,” she went on, more hopefully, “theremightbe still another way!”
“Well?” he asked, almost impatiently, as he glanced at his watch.
“It was something that happened when I went into that little Postal-Union office at Broadway and Thirty-seventh Street.” She was speaking rapidly now, with a touch of his former fire. “The relays and everything are in the same room, you know, behind the counter and a wire screen. I wanted my dressmaker, and while I was sitting at a little side-desk chewing my pen-handle and trying to boil seventeen words down to ten, a man came in with a rush message. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. It was Sunset Bryan, the race-track plunger, and it occurred to me that it might be worth while to know what he was sending out.”
“Did he see you, or does he know you?”
“I took good pains that he shouldn’t see me. So I scrawled away on my blank, and just sat there and read the ticker as the operator took the despatches off the file and sent them out. Here is the wording of Sunset Bryan’s message, as well as I can remember it: ‘Duke—of—Kendall—runs—tomorrow—get—wise—and—wire—St. Louis—and—South!’”
“Well, what of it?” Durkin asked.
“Why, this Bryan is the man who took one hundred and ten thousand dollars out of the Aqueduct ring in one day. Since the Gravesend Meeting began, people say he has made nearly half a million. He’s a sort of race-track Curry. He keeps close figures on every race he plays. He has one hundred men and more on his pay roll, and makes his calculations after the most minute investigating and figuring. It stands to reason that he manipulates a little, though the Pinkerton men, as I suppose you know, have never been able to get him off the Eastern tracks. Now, Jim, my firm belief is that there is something ‘cooked up,’ as they say, for tomorrow afternoon, and if we could only find out what this Duke of Kendall business is, we might act on it in time.”
She waited for Durkin to speak. He tapped the top of his head, meditatively, with his right forefinger, pursing his lips as his mind played over the problem.
“Yes, we might. But how are we to find out what the Duke of Kendall and his mere running means?”
“I even took the trouble to look up the Duke of Kendall. He is a MacIntosh horse, the stable companion to Mary J., and ridden by Shirley, a new jockey.”
She could see that he had little sympathy for her suggestion, and she herself lost faith in the plan even as she unfolded it.
“My idea was, Jim, that this horse was going to run—issureto run, under heavy odds, for what they call ‘a long shot.’”
“But still, how would we be able to make sure?”
“I could go and ask Sunset Bryan himself.”
Durkin threw up his hand with a gesture of angry disapproval.
“That beast! He’s—he’s unspeakable! He’s the worst living animal in America!”
“I shouldn’t be afraid of him,” she answered, quietly.
“The whole thing comes too late in the game, anyway,” broke in Durkin, with a second gesture of disgust. Then he added, more gently: “Good heavens, Frank, I don’t want to seeyoumixed up with that kind of cur! It wouldn’t be right and fair! It’s infinitely worse than the thing I’m suggesting!”
“After all, we are not so different, he and I,” she responded, with acidulated mildness.
Durkin took her hand in his, with real pain written on his face.
“Don’t talk that way,” he pleaded; “it hurts!”
She smoothed his hair with her free hand, quietly, maternally.
“Then you had rather that I—I borrowed this money from the Van Schaick house?” she asked him.
“It’s the choice of two evils,” he answered her, out of his unhappiness, all his older enthusiasm now burnt down into the ashes of indifferency.
“If only I was sure you could keep your promise,” she said, dreamily, as she studied his face.
“Itwillgo back!” he responded determinedly, shrugging off his momentary diffidence. “Even though I have to make it, dollar by dollar, and though it takes me twenty years! But I tell you, Frank, that it will not be needed. Here we have the chance of a life time. If we only had the money to start with, the whole business could be carried on openly and decently—barring, of course,” he added, with his sudden shamefaced smile, “the little bit of cutting-in I’ll have to do down-town on the Curry wires!”
“One minute—before we go any farther with this. Supposing we successfully get this glove-box, and successfully watch Curry, and on the strength of our knowledge invest this money, and get our returns, and find ourselves with enough—well, with enough not to starve on—will you promise me this: that it will be the last?”
“But why should it be the last?”
“You know as well as I do! You know that I want to be honest, to live straight and aboveboard; but a hundred times more, that I want to see you honest and aboveboard!”
He studied the tense and passionate mood that flitted across her face, that seemed to deepen the shadows about her brooding violet eyes.
“I would do anything for you, Frank!” he said, with an inadequate and yet eloquent little outthrust of the arms.
“Then do this for me! Let us get back to the daylight world again!”
“But would it satisfy us? Would we—?”
“Would we—?” she echoed forlornly. Then she turned suddenly away, to hide a trace of inconsequential tears.
“We have got to!” she cried out passionately over her shoulder, as she stooped to the suit-case and deftly opened it. A moment later she was rummaging hurriedly through its neatly packed contents.
“And I am Mrs. Van Schaick’s trained nurse?” she asked, ruminatively.
“Yes, Miss Annie Seabrooke, remember!”
“But the others—the servants—won’t they know me?”
“You were engaged in Mamaroneck; not one of the city servants has seen your face.”
“But it will be eleven and after—was my train delayed?”
“No, not delayed; but you took a later train.”
She was silent for a minute or two, as she probed deeper into the suit-case.
“You haven’t promised!” she murmured, her face still low over the womanly white linen, and the little cap and apron and uniform which she was gently shaking out before her.
She rose to her feet and turned to him.
“I promise you—anything!” he cried, in the teeth of all his inner misgivings. He followed her to the open window.
“Then kiss me!” she said, with a little exhausted sigh of ultimate surrender, as she sank into his arms and her lonely and hungry body felt the solace of his strength about and above it. And in that minute they lost all count of time and place, and for them, with the great glimmering granite city stretching away at their feet, there was neither past nor future.