CHAPTER XVIII
Frances Candler waited until complete quiet reigned over the house. Then she noiselessly opened her door and peered up and down the darkened hallway.
A sudden thought came to her, as she stood there in the silence, and, slipping back to her room, she took first a hot-water bottle out of her nurse’s bag, and then a hypodermic syringe from its neat little morocco case. Miss Annie Seabrooke, she decided, had been making melancholy use of her knowledge of drugs. That enlightened young lady was, obviously, addicted to the use of morphine, for beside the syringe-case Frances found a little bottle bearing its telltale chemical formula: C17H19NO3.
She removed the screw-top from the graduated “barrel,” and in its place adjusted the glistening little hollow needle. Then she carefully filled the graduated tube with its innocent-looking liquid, and, wrapping the syringe in her pocket-handkerchief, thrust it into the bosom of her bodice. Many things lay ahead of her, and before the night was out even this might be of use. She devoutly hoped not—yet the present moment, she warned herself, was no time for hesitations and compunctious half-measures.
The hot-water bottle she carried openly in her hand, as she once more softly opened the door and crept out into the half-lighted hallway.
They had given her a room on the third floor, a concession, she imagined, to the established dignity of her profession. Most of the servants slept on the fourth floor. It had, accordingly, been by way of the front stairs that the bibulous English butler, with more than one sidelong blink of admiration had brought her up to her quarters for the night.
She felt that she would like to find the back stairway, the stairway by which the household servants came and went.
She moved forward softly, listening a second at doorways as she passed. It crept through her mind at that moment, incongruously enough, how like her own future lay this silent and unknown house, with its dark entanglement of possibilities, its network of unknown dangers and surprises, its staid and unbetraying doors behind which so much or so little might anywhere dwell.
Then she suddenly stood transfixed, panting a little. For the sound of approaching footsteps fell on her startled ear.
To turn and run was out of the question, for she had no knowledge of where or into what she might flee. To hesitate longer would be equally fatal. Instant action only could save her. As quick as thought she opened the door on her left, and stepped inside.
“Is it you, Adolph?” a whispered voice asked quietly, out of the gloom. It was a woman’s voice—she must have been a young woman, Frances commiseratively felt—a voice that was neither startled nor unhappy.
She stood, then, in one of the servants’ rooms. She pictured to herself the different faces she had seen below stairs, though in none of them could she remember any sign or hint of what she had now stumbled upon. But the pregnancy of that muffled question gave her a flashing consciousness of the wheels within even those inner wheels in the dark and complicated mills of life.
“Hsssssh!” said the intruder softly, as she quickly swung to the door, padding it with her hand.
She stood there, waiting until the steps passed by. They were brisk, businesslike steps, those of a woman, mingled with the tinkling of a chain of keys. She surmised that it was the housekeeper, on her last rounds for the night.
She realized the peril of another minute in the room. The wiring of the house, she had already noticed, with the quickness of an expert, was both thorough and modern. Any moment the turning of a bedside button might flood the room with brilliant light and leave her there, betrayed beyond redemption.
“Sssssssh!” she said again sharply, as though in warning, and a moment later dodged out through the door, going as noiselessly as she had come.
But the ground was now dangerous, she felt; and she was glad to escape to the comparative freedom of a wider hallway, running at right angles to the one she had just left. This surely led to the back stairs, she argued, as she groped her way steadily forward. She was even debating whether it would not be better to risk the fully-lighted front stairs, rather than lose time as she was doing, when her groping hands came in contact with the cool wood of the polished balustrade.
Her foot was on the carpeted second step, when she drew back, with a terrified catch of the breath.
The familiar click of the light-button had thrown the entire hall and stairway into dazzling light. A man stood at the foot of the stairs, in his slippered feet, with his hand still on the button. He had not yet seen her; but it was too late to escape.
It was the bibulous English butler who had shown her to her room. In a crook of his arm he carried a Sauterne bottle and a nearly empty champagne magnum, carefully recorked. It was plain, Frances argued, that he was pilfering a nightcap for himself. That gave her at least a shred of courage.
She hesitated only the fraction of a second. Then she coldly and briskly descended the stairs, with her hot-water bottle in her hand.
The butler fell back a step or two at the sudden apparition, blinked at her unsteadily in the strong light, and made a gigantic effort to draw himself up.
Her first intention had been to march disdainfully past him; but this, she remembered, was out of the question. It was already midnight, or more, and for all his unsteadiness of limb he was, she knew, a shrewd and capable servant, well trained in his duties.
“Well, miss, what is it?” She could see him putting on his official attitude, just as he might draw on his serving-coat. The new nurse, apparently, took cold easily, for she still wore her galoshes.
“Which way do I go to the kitchen?” she demanded curtly.
“The kitchen, miss, is closed.” He was looking at her with his pale and beady little eyes. “What were you wanting?”
“I must have some hot water,” she answered, swaying her instruments of deliverance before her.
“There is a bathroom on your floor, miss, two doors to the right of your own door.” He spoke thickly but peremptorily. Frances could plainly see that he was not to be juggled with.
“I said hot water, not warm,” she retorted, almost angrily.
“You’ll find an electric heater in the bathroom, miss,” he added, more respectfully. She tried to wither him with a look, but it was unavailing. He even preceded her to her own door, turning the lights on and off as they went.
A moment later, as she stood biting the end of her fingers in mingled vexation and anxiety, she could hear the sound of running water. She wondered, dreadingly, if she was never to get rid of the man. As she waited she let down her hair.
The butler appeared with a steaming pitcher. He entered unsteadily, to her preoccupied “Come!” He looked at her over his shoulder as he put the steaming pitcher down, on her dresser.
“A damned fine girl!” he said to himself, as he looked at her for a second time, and seemed loath to leave. In fact, months afterward, he dilated to the second cook on the wonder of that chestnut hair, which now fairly blanketed the girl’s head and shoulders.
“Are you in pain, miss?” he asked anxiously, coming nearer to her. His attitude was cogent, and yet non-committal.
“No,” she said icily, and then she added, more discreetly, “No—not much.”
“Just—er—where does it seem to be?” he ventured, brazenly.
She was silent now, distraught with mingled revulsion and anxiety.
“Is it here, miss?” he persisted, with easy and masterful solicitude, reaching out as though to touch her with his intrepid and insolent hand. The woman drew back with a shudder, white to the very lips. This was the penalty, she told herself, for the ways she had fallen into! This was the possible degradation that even Durkin had been willing to lead her into!
She fell back from him, and stood against the wall, struggling to calm herself. For the feeling swept over her that she must scream aloud, to rend and scatter what seemed the choking mists of a nightmare. Yet her masterful tormentor, misjudging the source of her emotion, still stood blinking at her soulfully.
“Isn’t there anything I can do for you?” he wheedled, meltingly, yet militantly.
It would have been laughable, under other circumstances, Frances tried to make herself believe—this solicitous tenderness of an unmannerly English butler, placidly extending to her the gallantries of the servants’ quarters. Now, she saw only the perils of the situation.
“You can leave this room,” she said, steadily, in answer to his question. She saw the look of stolid revolt that swept over his face, and she could have wrung her hands, in the extremity of her fear.
“Won’t you want anything fetched, later?” he still persecuted her.
“Yes, yes,” she cried, desperately; “but not now!”
“When?” he demanded, wagging his head, sagely.
“The later the better!” she answered, slowly, with a final and desperate craftiness, pointing to the door.
A sudden flame of audacious heat crept into the bloated face before her. He would still have tarried an admiring moment or two, but she returned his gaze, unfalteringly, for thirty resolute seconds. He wavered, mumbled something in his throat, flung one final melting leer at her, and then turned and crept from the room, nursing his two bottles in the crook of his arm as he went.
“Oh, thank God, thank God!” she cried, with a throaty little sob.
Then a second shudder, as momentarily benumbing as a chill, swept over her from head to foot. A sudden passion to get out where she could breathe and move took its place—at whatever ultimate loss—only to get away from that house of engulfing horrors.
The mood passed, with the passing of her fright, and she shook her tired nerves together with an effort. Then still once more she groped her way out through the darkness. Now, however, there was neither trepidation nor hesitancy in her silent movements, as she flitted through the hallway and passed like a shadow down the dark stairs.
She paused only once—at the door which she knew was Lydia Van Schaick’s bedroom. In an oriel window, opposite this door, was a little alcove fitted up with bookshelves, a highly polished writing-table, and two low-seated rattan lounging-chairs. On one end of the writing-table stood a flat silver vase holding a spray of roses; on the other end stood a desk-telephone transmitter and an oblong folio of green morocco, with “Telephone Addresses” stamped in gold on its richly tooled cover. All this Frances noticed with one quick glance, as, nursing the knob in her cautious fingers, she turned it slowly.
The door was securely locked, from the inside.
One chance remained to her—by way of the little white-tiled bathroom, which she had caught a glimpse of on her first journey up through the house. This bathroom, she knew, would open into the girl’s boudoir itself.
This door was unlocked. A moment later she was inside, and the door was closed behind her. She groped carefully across the tiled flooring until her finger-tips came in contact with the second door, which creaked a little at her touch, for it stood a few inches ajar.
This door she opened, inch by inch, in terror of that tiny hinge-creak. It was a sleeping-room, she knew, the moment she had crept inside; and it held a sleeper, for the air seemed laden with its subtle yet quite immaterial fragrance of warmth—vivified, as it were, with some intangible exhalation of its sleeping life.
She listened with strained attention, hoping to overhear the quiet and regular breathing of the sleeper. But no sound reached her ears.
Through the muffled darkness she could dimly make out the open doorway leading into what must be the girl’s sitting-room. In that room, Frances felt, would stand the chiffonier.
She felt her way to the foot of the bed. There she stood, strained second after second, still listening. No sound came from the sleeper. But, awed, for reasons that lay beyond the reach of her restless thought, she could feel the presence of the other life there, as distinctly as though the room had been steeped in noon-day light; and as she waited and listened there came to her a sense of the mystery of sleep, a feeling that, after all, this briefest midnight slumber was only a lighter and younger sister to that endless sleep of death itself.
Step by step, then, she crawled and edged her way into the second vault of black silence, feeling with outstretched fingers for each piece of furniture. The mirror-laden chiffonier, some womanly intuition told her, would stand between the two heavily curtained windows.
Her feelings had not misled her. It was a well-made piece of furniture, and the top drawer opened noiselessly. This was explored with light and feverish fingers, as a blind woman might explore it. But it held nothing but laces and scattered bits of jewelry, and filmy things she could not name and place.
The second drawer opened less readily, and a key had been left in the lock. She touched the little leather boxes, deciding that they must be jewel-cases, and methodic little layers of silk and linen, and a package or two of papers. Then her fingers fell on something cold, and hard, and purposeful. It was a woman’s little revolver, obviously, with a jeweled handle. She explored the trigger-guard and the safety-latch with studious fingers, and decided that it was a 32-calibre hammerless.
Then her startled hand went up to her lips, and she wheeled noiselessly about where she stood. It could not have been a sound that she heard. It was only a presence that had made itself felt, to some sixth sense in her.
No; it was nothing that she had heard or seen, but she leaned forward and studied the surrounding gloom intently, from side to side.
Acting under some quick subliminal impulse, she picked the little hammerless weapon up out of the drawer, with one hand, while her other hand explored its farther end. This exploring hand felt feverishly along the edges of what seemed a mother-of-pearl writing-portfolio, and rummaged quickly and deftly down among laces and silk, until her fingers came in contact with the glazed surface of a little oblong box.
There could be no two thoughts as to what that box was. It was the glove-box which held that particular package for which she had already dared so much.
An awakened and alert sixth sense still warned her of something ominous and imminent; but there was neither fear nor hesitation in her actions as she drew out the little oblong box and with quick fingers thrust it, along with the toy-like hammerless, into the bosom of her dress.
Then she took three stealthy steps forward—and once again caught her breath sharply.
“Somebody is in this room!”
The intruder and thief fell back, step by step, gropingly, until she touched the chiffonier once more.
“Somebody is in this room!”
It was a woman’s voice that broke in on the black silence, a quiet but sternly challenging voice, tremulous with agitation, yet strident with the triumph of conviction, and with resolute courage.
“Who is here?”
Frances Candler did not move. She stood there, breathing a little heavily, watching. For now that sudden challenge neither thrilled nor agitated her. Consciousness, in some way, refused to react. Her tired nerves had already been strained to their uttermost; nothing now could stir her dormant senses.
Then she felt the sudden patter of bare feet on the floor.
Still she waited, wondering what this movement could mean. And, as she had felt at other times, in moments of dire peril, a sense of detached and disembodied personality seized her—a feeling that the mind had slipped its sheath of the body and was standing on watch beyond and above her. She suddenly heard the sound of a key being withdrawn. It was from the door leading into the hallway. Then, almost before she realized what it meant, the bedroom door had been slammed shut, a second key had rattled and clicked decisively in its lock—and she was a prisoner!
A moment later she caught the sound of the signal-bell in the alcove.
“Central, quickly, give me the Sixty-Seventh Street police station!” It was the same clear and determined young voice that had spoken from the doorway.
There was a silence of only a few seconds. Then Frances heard the girl give her name and house number. This she had to repeat twice, apparently, to the sleepy sergeant.
“There is a burglar in this house. Send an officer here, please, at once!”
A chill douche of apprehension seemed to restore Frances to her senses. She ran across the room and groped feverishly along the wall for the electric-light button. She could find none. But on the chiffonier was a drop-globe, and with one quick turn of the wrist the room was flooded with tinted light.
The prisoner first verified her fears; there was no possible avenue of escape by way of the windows. These, she saw at once, were out of the question.
So she stopped in front of the mirror, thinking quickly and lucidly; and for the second time that night she decided to let down her hair. She could twist the bank-notes up into a little rope, and pin her thick braids closely over them, and no one might think to search for them there. It was a slender thread, but on that thread still hung her only hope.
She tore open her dress and flung the cover from the precious glove-box, scattering the gloves about in her feverish search.
The box held nothing. The money was not there. It had been taken and hidden elsewhere. And she might never have known, until it was too late!
Then methodically and more coolly she made a second search throughout the now lighted room. But nowhere could she find the package she needed. And, after all itwastoo late! And in a sort of tidal wave of deluging apprehension, she suddenly understood what life from that hour forward was worth to her.
She set to work to rearrange the chiffonier, inappositely and vacuously. She even did what she could to put the room once more in order. This accomplished, she took up her hot-water bottle, and still told herself that she must not give up. Then she seated herself in a little white-and-gold rocker, and waited, quietly blazing out through her jungle of danger each different narrow avenue of expediency.
“Poor Jim!” she murmured, under her breath, with one dry sob.
The hum of voices came to her from the hallway—the servants, obviously, had been awakened. She could hear the footsteps come to a stop without, and the shuffling of slippered feet on the hardwood floor. Then came the drone of excited whisperings, the creak and jar of the doors opening and closing.
Then, remote and muffled and far-away, sounded the sharp ringing of a bell. Somebody out in the hallway gasped a relieved, “Thank heaven!”
Frances looked at herself in the mirror, adjusting her hair, and taking note of the two little circles of scarlet that had deepened and spread across her feverish cheeks.
Then she sat down once more, and swung the hot-water bottle from her forefinger, and waited.
She heard the dull thud of the front door closing and a moment later the sound of quick footsteps on the stairs.
She looked about the comfortable, rose-tinted room, with its gilded Louis clock, with its womanish signs and tokens, with its nest-like warmth and softness; she looked about her slowly and comprehensively, as though she had been taking her last view of life.
Then she rose and went to the door, for the police had arrived.
CHAPTER XIX
Durkin was both puzzled and apprehensive. That a taxi should follow his own at eleven o’clock at night, for some twenty-odd blocks, was a singular enough coincidence. That it should stop when he stopped, that it should wait, not a square away, for him to come out of hiscafé, and then shadow him home for another thirteen circuitous blocks, was more than a coincidence. It was a signal for the utmost discretion.
It was not that Durkin, at this stage of the kaleidoscopic game, was given to wasting tissue in unnecessary worry. But there had been that mysterious cigar-light in the hallway. When he had glanced cautiously down through the darkness, leaning well out over the bannister, he had distinctly seen the little glow of light. Yet, with the exception of his own top-floor rooms, the building was given over to business offices, and by night he had invariably found the corridors empty and unused. No Holmes watchman, no patrolman, not even a Central Office man, he knew, indulged in fragrant Carolina Perfectos when covering his beat.
But when he descended quietly to reconnoitre, he saw that no one went down to the street door. And no one, he could see equally well, remained on the stairs or in the halls, for he turned on the light, floor by floor, as he went back to his rooms.
Yet nobody, again, intelligently trying to secrete himself, would thus flaunt a lighted cigar in the darkness. From the suave and mellow odor of that cigar, too, Durkin knew that the intruder was something more than the ordinary house-thief and night-hawk.
As he thought the matter over, comfortably lounging back in a big arm-chair up in his rooms, he tried to force himself to the pacifying conclusion that the whole affair was fortuitous. He would keep a weather-eye open for such casual occurrences, in the future; but he now had no time to bother with the drifting shadows of uncertainty. He had already that day faced more material dangers; there were more substantial perils, he knew, rising up about him.
He flung himself back, with a sigh, after looking at his watch, and through the upward-threading drifts of his cigar smoke he wondered, half-reprovingly, what was taking place in the house not two hundred yards away from him, where Frances was so wakefully watching and working, while he sat there, idly waiting—since waiting, for once, was to be part of the game.
He afterward decided that in his sheer weariness of body and mind he must have dozed off into a light sleep.
It was past midnight when he awoke with a start, a vague sense of impending evil heavy upon him.
His first thought, on awakening, was that some one had knocked. He glanced at his watch, as he sprang to open the door. It was on the point of one.
Frank should have been back an hour ago. Then hehadfallen asleep, of a certainty, he decided, with electric rapidity of thought.
But this was she, come at last, he conjectured. Yet, with that sense of impending danger still over him, he stepped back and turned off the lights. Then he quietly and cautiously opened the door.
No one was there. He peered quickly down through the gloom of the hallways, but still neither sound nor movement greeted him.
His now distraught mind quickly ran the gamut of possibilities. A baffling, indeterminate impression seized him that somebody, somewhere, was reaching out to him through the midnight silence, trying to come in touch with him and speak to him.
He looked at the motionless clapper of his transmitter signal-bell, where he had discreetly muffled the little gong with a linen handkerchief. It could not have been the telephone.
Yet he caught up the receiver with a gesture of half-angered impatience.
“. . . in this house—send an officer at once!” were the words that sped along the wire to his listening ear. An officer at once! Six quick strokes of conjecture seemed to form the missing link to his chain of thought.
“My God!” he exclaimed in terror, “that means Frank!”
There had been a hitch somewhere, and in some way. And that was the Van Schaicks telephoning for the police—yes, decided Durkin, struggling to keep his clearness of head, it would be first to the Sixty-Seventh Street station that they would send for help.
He had already learned, or striven to learn, at such work, not only to think and to act, but to essay his second step of thinking while he accomplished his first in action.
He rummaged through a suit-case filled with lineman’s tools, and snatched up a nickel badge similar to that worn by inspectors of the Consolidated Gas Company. It was taking odds, in one way, such as he had never before in his career dared to take. But the case, he felt, was desperate.
Once off the Avenue he ran the greater part of the way round the block, for he knew that in five minutes, at the outside, the police themselves would be on the scene. And as he ran he let his alert imagination play along the difficulties that walled him in, feeling, in ever-shifting fancy, for the line of least resistance.
He mounted the brownstone steps three at a time, and tore at the old-fashioned bell. He pushed his way authoritatively up through a cluster of servants, shivering and chattering and whispering along the hall.
At a young woman in a crimson quilted dressing-gown, faced with baby-blue silk, he flashed his foolish little metal shield. She was a resolute-browed, well-poised girl, looking strangely boyish with her tumbled hair thrown loosely to one side.
“I’m the plain-clothes man, the detective from the police station!”
He looked at her abstractedly, and curtly shifted his revolver from his hip-pocket to his side-pocket. This caused a stir among the servants.
“Get those people out of here!” he ordered.
The resolute-browed young woman in the dressing-gown scattered them with a movement of the hand, and slipped a key into his fingers. Then she pointed to a doorway.
“This thing was half expected, ma’m, at Headquarters,” said Durkin hurriedly, as he fitted the key. “It’s a woman, isn’t it?”
The girl with the resolute brow and the tumbled hair could not say.
“But I think I understand,” she went on hurriedly. “I had quite a large sum of money, several thousand dollars, in my room here!”
Durkin, who had stooped to unlock the door, turned on her quickly.
“And it’s still in this room?” he demanded.
“No; it worried me too much. I was going to keep it, but I took it down to the bank, this afternoon.”
Then the girl said “Sir!” wonderingly; for Durkin had emitted a quick mutter of anger. They were doubly defeated. By this time the bedroom door was open.
“Ah, I thought it would be a woman,” he went on coolly, as he glanced at Frank’s staring and wide eyes. “And, if I mistake not, Miss Van Schaick, this is Number 17358, at the Central Office.”
Frances knew his chortle was one of hysteria, but still she looked and wondered. Once more Durkin flashed his badge as he took her firmly by one shaking wrist.
“Come with me,” he said, with quiet authority, and step by step he led her out into the hallway.
“Not a word!” he mumbled, under his breath, as he saw her parted lips essay to speak.
“It’s really too bad!” broke in the girl in the dressing-gown, half-relentingly, with an effort to see the prisoner’s now discreetly downcast face.
“You won’t say so, later,” retorted Durkin, toying to the full with the ironic situation. “An old offender!” Even the bibulous butler, in the doorway, shook his head knowingly at this, thereby intimating, as he later explained, with certain reservations, to the second maid, that he all along knew as much.
Durkin pushed the gaping servants authoritatively aside.
“Have these people watch the back of the house—every window and door, till the Inspector and his men come up. I’ll rap for the patrol from the front.”
Durkin waited for neither reply nor questions, but hurried his charge down the stairway, across the wide hall, and out through the heavy front doors.
The audacity, the keen irony, the absurdity of it all, seemed to make him light-headed, for he broke into a raucous laugh as he stood with her in the cool and free night air.
But once down on the sidewalk he caught her shaking hand in his, and ran with her, ran desperately and madly, until the rattle and clatter of a bell broke on his ear. It was a patrol-wagon rumbling round from the Avenue on the east. He would have turned back, but at the curb in front of the Van Schaick mansion already a patrolman stood, rapping for assistance.
In his dilemma Durkin dropped breathlessly down an area stairs, feeling the limp weight of the woman on his body as he fell. To Frances herself it seemed like the effortless fall in a nightmare; she could remember neither how nor when it ended, only she had the sensation of being pulled sharply across cold flagstones. Durkin had dragged her in under the shadow of the heavy brownstone steps, behind a galvanized iron garbage can, hoping against hope that he had not been noticed, and silently praying that if indeed the end was to come it might not come in a setting so sordid and mean and small.
A street cat, lean and gaunt and hungry-looking, slunk like a shadow down the area-steps. The eyes of the two fugitives watched it intently. As it slunk and crept from shadow to shadow it suddenly became, to the worn and depressed Durkin, a symbol of his own career, a homeless and migratory Hunger, outlawed, pursued, unresting, a ravenous and unappeased purloiner of a great city’s scraps and tatters.
The soft pressure of Frank’s arm on his own drove the passing thought from his mind. And they sat together on the stone slabs, silently, hand in hand, till the patrol-wagon rattled past once more, and the street noises died down, and hastily opened windows were closed, and footsteps no longer passed along the street above them.
Then they ventured cautiously out, and, waiting their chance, sauntered decorously toward the corner. There they boarded a passing car, bound southward and crowded to the doors with the members of a German musical club, who sang loudly and boisterously as they went.
It seemed the most celestial of music to Durkin, as he hung on a strap in their midst, with Frank’s warm body hemmed in close to him, and the precious weight of it clinging and swaying there from his arm.
Suddenly he looked down at her.
“Where are you going tonight?” he asked.
Their eyes met. The tide of abandonment that had threatened to engulf him slowly subsided, as he read the quiet pain in her gaze.
“I am going back to the Ralston,” she said, with resolute simplicity.
“But, good heaven, think of the risk!” he still half-heartedly pleaded. “It’s dangerous, now!”
“My beloved own,” she said, with her habitual slow little head shake, and with a quietness of tone that carried a tacit reproof with it, “life has far worse dangers than the Ralston!”
She had felt unconditionally, completely drawn toward him a moment before, while still warm with her unuttered gratitude. As she thought of the indignity and the danger from which he had carried her she had almost burned with the passion for some fit compensation, without any consideration of self. Now, in her weariness of body and nerve, he had unconsciously unmasked her own potential weakness to herself, and she felt repelled from him, besieged and menaced by him, the kindest and yet the most cruel of all her enemies.
CHAPTER XX
As she slowly wakened in response to the call that had been left at the hotel office, Frances wondered, with the irrelevancy of the mental machinery’s first slow movements, if Durkin, at that precise moment, was still sleeping in his own bed and room in his own distant part of the city. For his awakening, she felt, would be sure to be a gray and disheartening one. It would be then, and then only, that the true meaning of their defeat would come home to him. She wondered, too, if he was looking to her, waiting for her to help him face the old-time, dreaded monotony of inactive and purposeless life.
“Oh, poor Jim!” she murmured again, under her breath.
She hoped, as she waked more fully to her world of realities, that he at least was still sleeping, that he at any rate was securing his essential rest of nerve and body,—for some heavy dregs of her own utter weariness of the previous night still weighed down her spirits and ached in her limbs.
She had always boasted that she could sleep like a child. “I make a rampart of my two pillows, and no worries ever get over it!” Yet she now felt, as she waited for a lingering last minute or two in her warm bed, that, if fortune allowed it, she could lie there forever, and still be unsatisfied, and cry for one hour more.
But she had already made her rigorous plans for the day, and time, she knew, was precious. After her bath she at once ordered up an ample breakfast of fruit and eggs and coffee and devilled mutton chops—remembering, as she religiously devoured her meat, that Durkin had always declared she was carnivorous, protesting that he could tell it by those solid, white, English teeth of hers.
Then she dressed herself simply, in a white shirt-waist and a black broadcloth skirt, with a black-feathered turban-hat draped with a heavy traveling veil. This simple toilet, however, she made with infinite care, pausing only long enough to tell herself that today, as never before, appearances were to count with her. Yet beyond this she brushed every thought away from her. She kept determinedly preoccupied, moving feverishly about the room, allowing space for no meditative interludes, permitting herself never to think of the day and what it was to hold for her.
Then she hurried from her room, and down into the street, and into a taxi, and through the clear, cool, wintry sunlight drove straight to the Guilford, an apartment hotel, where Sunset Bryan, the race-track plunger, made his home when in New York.
The Guilford was one of those ultra-ornamented, over-upholstered, gaudily-vulgar upper Broadway hotels, replete with marble and onyx, with plate glass and gilt and outward imperturbability, where a veneer of administrative ceremonial covered the decay and sogginess of affluent license. It was here, Frances only too well knew, that Little Myers, the jockey, held forth in state; it was here that an unsavory actress or two made her home; that Upton Banaster, the turf-man, held rooms; that Penfield himself had once lived; it was here that the “big-ring” bookmakers, and the more sinister and successful rail-birds and sheet-writers and touts foregathered; it was here that the initiated sought and found the court of the most gentlemanly blacklegs in all New York.
All this she knew, and had known beforehand; but the full purport of it came home to her only as she descended from her taxi-cab, and passed up the wide step that led into the sickeningly resplendent lobby.
Then, for the second time in her career, she did a remarkable and an unexpected thing.
For one moment she stood there, motionless, unconscious of the tides of life that swept in and out on either side of her. She stood there, like an Alpine traveller on his fragile little mountain bridge of pendulous pine and rope, gazing down into the sudden and awful abysses beside her, which seemed to open up out of the very stone and marble that hemmed her in. For at one breath all the shrouded panoramic illusions of life seemed to have melted before her eyes. It left her gaping and panting into what seemed the mouth of Hell itself. It deluged her with one implacable desire, with one unreasoning, childlike passion to escape, if only for the moment, that path which some day, she knew, she must yet traverse. But escape she must, until some newer strength could come to her.
She clenched and unclenched her two hands, slowly. Then she as slowly turned, where she stood, re-entered her taxi-cab, and drove back to her own rooms once more. There she locked and bolted her door, flung from her hat and gloves and veil, and fell to pacing her room, staring-eyed and rigid.
She could not do it! Her heart had failed her. Before that final test she had succumbed, ignominiously and absolutely. For in one moment of reverie, as she faced that hostelry of all modern life’s unloveliness, her own future existence lay before her eyes, as in a painted picture, from day to day and year to year. It had been branded on her consciousness as vividly as had that picture of a far different life, which had come to her behind the ivy-covered walls of her uncle’s parsonage. It was a continuous today of evil, an endless tomorrow of irresolution. Day by day she was becoming more firmly linked to that ignoble and improvident class who fed on the very offal of social activity. She was becoming more and more a mere drifting derelict upon the muddy waters of the lower life, mindless and soulless and purposeless. No; not altogether mindless, she corrected herself, for with her deeper spiritual degradation, she felt, she was becoming more and more an introspective and self-torturing dreamer, self-deceiving and self-blighting—like a veritable starving rat, that has been forced to turn and nibble ludicrously at its own tail.
Yet why had she faltered and hesitated, at such a moment, she demanded of herself. This she could not fully answer. She was becoming enigmatic, even to herself. And already it was too late to draw back—even the tantalizing dream of withdrawal was now a mockery. For, once, she had thought that life was a single straight thread; now she knew it to be a mottled fabric in which the past is woven and bound up with the future, in which tangled tomorrows and yesterdays make up the huddled cloth. She writhed, in her agony of mind, at the thought that she had no one to whom to open her soul. This she had always shrunk from doing before Durkin (and that, she warned herself, was an ill omen) and there had been no one else to whom she could go for comradeship and consolation. Then she began making excuses for herself, feebly, at first, more passionately as she continued her preoccupied pacing of the floor. She was only one of many. Women, the most jealously guarded and the most softly shrouded women had erred. And, after all, much lay in the point of view. What was criminality from one aspect, was legitimate endeavor from another. All life, she felt, was growing more feverish, more competitive, more neuropathic, more potentially and dynamically criminal. She was a leaf on the current of the time.
And her only redemption now, she told herself, was to continue along that course in a manner which would lend dignity, perhaps even the glorified dignity of tragedy itself, to what must otherwise be a squalid and sordid life. Since she was in the stream, she must strike out for the depths, not cringe and whimper among the shallows. By daring and adventuring, audaciously, to the uttermost, that at least could still lend a sinister radiance to her wrong-doing. That alone could make excuse for those whimpering and snivelling sensibilities which would not keep to the kennel of her heart.
Yet it was only the flesh that was weak and faltering, she argued—and in an abstracted moment she remembered how even a greater evil-doer than she herself had buoyed her will to endure great trial. “That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold,” she repeated to herself, inspirationally, as she remembered the small medicine-flask of cognac which she carried in her toilet bag.
She hated the thought of it, and the taste of it,—but more than all she hated the future into which she dare no longer look. As she medicined her cowardice with the liquor she could not help marvelling at the seeming miracle, for, minute by minute, with each scalding small draught, her weak-heartedness ebbed away. She knew that later there would be stern exaction for that strength, but she had her grim work to do, and beggars can not always be choosers.
Then she gathered up her veil and hat and gloves, and once more made ready for her day’s enterprise. The pith-ball had passed from its period of revulsion to its period of attraction.
CHAPTER XXI
Frances Candler’s fingers trembled a little at the Guilford office desk as she took out her card and penciled beneath her name: “Representing the Morning Journal.”
She knew that Sunset Bryan’s success on the circuit, his midnight prodigalities, his bewildering lavishness of life, and his projected departure for New Orleans, had already brought the reporters buzzing about his apartments. Even as she lifted the blotter to dry the line she had written with such craven boldness, her eye fell on a well-thumbed card before her, bearing the inscription:
ALBERT ERIC SPAULDING
The Sunday Sun.
A moment later she had it in her white-gloved hand, with her own card discreetly hidden away, and in the most matter-of-fact of voices she was asking the busy clerk behind the desk if she could see Mr. Bryan.
“Mr. Bryan is a very late riser,” he explained.
“I know that,” she answered coolly, “but he’s expecting me, I think.”
The clerk looked at her, as he stamped the card, and he continued to look at her, studiously and yet quizzically, as a bell-boy led her back to the elevator. Sunset Bryan and the type of men he stood for, the puzzled clerk knew well enough; but this type of woman he did not know. Sunset, obviously, was branching out.
“You needn’t bother to wait!” she said to the youth who had touched the electric button beside the great, high-paneled door of the apartment.
She stood there quietly until the boy had turned a corner in the hallway; then she boldly opened the door and stepped inside.
The big, many-mirrored, crimson-carpeted room was empty, but from an inner room came the clinking of chopped ice against glass and the hiss of a seltzer siphon. The race-track king was evidently about to take his morning pick-me-up. A heavy odor of stale cigar-smoke filled the place. She wondered what the next step would be.
“Hello, there, Allie, old boy!” the gambler’s off-hand and surprisingly genial bass voice called out, as he heard the door close sharply behind Frances.
That must mean, thought the alert but frightened girl, that Albert Eric Spaulding and the plunger were old friends. Once more the siphon hissed and spat, and the ice clinked against the thin glass. Here was a predicament.
“Hello!” answered the woman, at last, steeling herself into a careless buoyancy of tone ill-suited to the fear-dilated pupils of her eyes.
She heard a muffled but startled “Good God!” echo from the inner room. A moment later the doorway was blocked by the shadow of a huge figure, and she knew that she was being peered at by a pair of small, wolfish eyes, as coldly challenging as they were audacious.
She looked nervously at her gloved hands, at the little handkerchief she was torturing between her slightly shaking fingers. Her gloves, she noticed, were stained here and there with perspiration.
If she had not already passed through her chastening ordeal with a half-drunken English butler, and if the shock of that untoward experience had not in some way benumbed and hardened her shrinking womanhood, she felt that she would have screamed aloud and then incontinently fled—in the very face of those grim and countless resolutions with which she had bolstered up a drooping courage. It flashed through her, with the lightning-like rapidity of thought at such moments, that for all her dubiously honest career she had been strangely sheltered from the coarser brutalities of life. She had always shrunk from the unclean and the unlovely. If she had not always been honest, she had at least always been honorable. Durkin, from the first, had recognized and respected this inner and better side of her beating so forlornly and so ineffectually against the bars of actuality; and it was this half-hidden fineness of fibre in him, she had told herself, that had always marked him, to her, as different from other men.
But here was a man from whom she could look for no such respect, a corrupt and evil-liver whom she had already practically taunted and challenged with her own show of apparent evilness. So she still tortured her handkerchief and felt the necessity of explaining herself, for the big gambler’s roving little eyes were still sizing her up, cold-bloodedly, judicially, terrifyingly.
“You’re all right, little girl,” he said genially, as his six feet of insolent rotundity came and towered over her. “You’re all right! And a little dimple in your chin, too.”
A new wave of courage seemed pumping through all of the shrinking girl’s veins, of a sudden, and she looked up at her enemy unwaveringly, smiling a little. Whereupon he smilingly and admiringly pinched her ear, and insisted that she have a “John Collins” with him.
Again she felt the necessity of talking. Unless the stress of action came to save her she felt that she would faint.
“I’m a Morning Journal reporter,” she began hurriedly.
“The devil you are!” he said with a note of disappointment, his wagging head still on one side, in undisguised admiration.
“Yes, I’m from the Journal,” she began.
“Then how did you get this card?”
“That’s a mistake in the office—the clerk must have sent you the wrong one,” she answered glibly.
“Come off! Come off! You good-looking women are all after me!” and he pinched her ear again.
“I’m a Morning Journal reporter,” she found herself rattling on, as she stood there quaking in mysterious fear of him, “and we’re going to run a story about you being the Monte Cristo of modern circuit-followers, and all that sort of thing. Then we want to know if it was true that you copped one hundred and sixty thousands dollars on Africander at Saratoga, and if you would let our photographer get some nice pictures of your rooms here, and a good one of yourself—oh, yes, you would take a splendid picture. And then I wanted to know if it is true that your system is to get two horses that figure up as if they each had a good square chance and then play the longer of the two and put enough on the other for a place to cover your losses if the first one should lose. And our sporting editor has said that you make that a habit, and that often enough you are able to cash on both, and that you—”
“Say, look here, little girl, what in the devil are you driving at, anyway?”
“I’m a reporter on the Morning Journal,” she reiterated, vacuously, foolishly, passing her hand across her forehead with a weak little gesture of bewilderment. She could feel her courage withering away. Alcohol, she was learning, was an ally of untimely retreats.
“Well, it’s a shame for a girl like you to get afraid of me this way! Hold on, now, don’t butt in! It’s not square to use a mouth like that for talking—I’d rather see it laughing, any day. So just cool down and tell me, honest and out-and-out, what it is you’re after.”
She flung herself forward and hung on him, in a quite unlooked for paroxysm of hysteria, apparently reckless of the moment and the menace.
“It’s this,” she sobbed in a sudden mental obsession, the tears of actual anguish running down her face. “It’s this,” she went on shrilly, hurriedly. “I’ve put my money on the Duke of Kendall today—and if he doesn’t come in, I’m going to kill myself!”
Sunset Bryan let his arm drop from her shoulder in astonishment. Then he stepped back a few paces, studying her face as she mopped it with her moistened handkerchief. She would never drink brandy again, was the idle and inconsequential thought that sped through her unstable mind. For it was not she herself that was speaking and acting; it was, she felt, some irresponsible and newly unleashed spirit within her.
“Why’d you do it?” he demanded.
“Because—because Clara—that’s Clara Shirley, his rider’s sister—told me the Duke of Kendall was fixed to win on a long shot this afternoon!”
“Now, look here—are you, or are you not, a newspaper woman?”
“No, I’m not,” she shrilled out. “I lied, just to get in to see you!”
“And you’ve put your money on this Duke of Kendall?”
“Every cent I own—every cent! If I lose it—oh—It will kill me to lose it!”
“But what the devil did you come here for?”
“Because I am desperate! I’ve—I’ve—”
“Now, don’t spoil those lovely eyes by crying this way, honey-girl! What would I get if I told you something about that race this afternoon?”
“Oh, I’d give you anything!” she cried, almost drunkenly, snatching some belated hope from the change in his tone.
“Do you mean that?” he demanded suddenly, stepping back and looking at her from under his shaggy brows.
“No—no, not that,” she gasped quickly, in terror, for then, and then only, did she catch an inkling of his meaning. She felt that she had floundered into a quagmire of pollution, and that the more fiercely she struggled and fought, the more stained with its tainted waters she was destined to remain.
She was afraid to look up at the crafty, sunburnt, animal-like face before her, with its wrinkles about the heavy line of the mouth, and its minutely intersecting crow’s-feet in the corners of the shrewd and squinting eyes.
She felt that the very air of life was being walled and held away from her. Still another fierce longing for escape took hold of her, and she shuddered a little as she fought and battled against it. She seemed without the strength to speak, and could only shake her head and try not to shrink away from him.
“Still afraid of me, eh?” he asked, as he lifted her drooping head brazenly, with his forefinger under her chin. He studied her tear-stained, colorless face for a minute or two, and then he went on:
“Well, I’m not so rotten as I might be! Here’s a tip for you, little girl! The Duke of Kendall is goin’ to come in on a long shot and what’s more, he’s goin’ to run on odds of fifty to one!”
“You’re certain of it?” she gasped.
“Dead sure of it, between you and me! There’s a gang down at the Rossmore’d cover this floor with gold just to know that tip!”
“Then wecanwin! It’snottoo late!” she broke out fervently, forgetting where she stood, forgetting the man before her. She was already reaching up to draw down her veil, with a glance over her shoulder at the door.
“Am I goin’ to see you again?” he still wheedled.
Again their eyes met. She had to struggle desperately to keep down the inward horror of it all. And now above all things there must be no missteps.
“Yes,” she murmured.
“When?” he demanded.
“I’ll come back—tomorrow!”
She already had her hand on the door-handle, when he called to her sharply.
“Here, wait one minute!”
She paused, in some deadly new fear of him.
“Look here, little girl, I began to follow this business of mine when I was nineteen years old. I’m forty-three now, and in those twenty-four years I’ve hauled in a heap of money. Are you listening?”
“Yes,” she murmured.
“And I’ve hauled in something besides money!”
Still she waited.
“What I haven’t made by plunging I’ve made by poker. And I’d never have come out the long end if I didn’t know a thing or two about faces. I know a bluff when I see it. Now I want to tell you something.”
“Well?” she faltered.
“You’re not comin’ back tomorrow! You’re not comin’ back at all, my pink-and-white beauty! I’m tellin’ you this for two reasons. One is that I don’t want you to carry off the idea that you’ve been breakin’ me all up, and the other is that I’m not so rotten bad as—well, as Bob Pinkerton would try to make me out. That’s all.”
“Good-bye!” murmured the humbled woman from the doorway.
“Good-bye, and good luck!” answered Sunset Bryan in his genial bass.