Wild Wings

by Margaret Piper Chalmers

  CHAPTER XV

  ON THE EDGE OF THE PRECIPICE

  Tony, getting off the train at Dunbury on Saturday, found her brotherswaiting for her with the car, and the kiddies on the back seat, "forballast" as Ted said. With one quick apprizing glance the girl took inthe two young men.

  Ted was brown and healthy looking, clear-eyed, steady-nerved, for once,without the inevitable cigarette in his mouth. He was oddly improvedsomehow, his sister thought, considering how short a time she had beenaway from the Hill. She noticed also that he drove the car much lessrecklessly than was his wont, took no chances on curves, slid by novehicles at hair-breadth space, speeded not at all, and though he keptup a running fire of merry nonsense, had his eye on the road as hedrove. So far so good. That spill out on the Florence road wasn't allloss, it seemed.

  Larry was more baffling. He was always quiet. He was quieter than everto-day. There was something in his gray eyes which spelled trouble, Tonythought. What was it? Was he worried about a case? Was Granny worse? WasTed in some scrape? Something there certainly was on his mind. Tony wassure of that, though she could not conjecture what.

  The Holidays had an almost uncanny way of understanding things about eachother, things which sometimes never rose to the surface at all. Perhapsit was that they were so close together in sympathy that a kind of smalltelepathic signal registered automatically when anything was wrong withany of them. So far as her brothers were concerned Tony's intuition wasall but infallible.

  She found the family gift a shade disconcerting, a little later, whenafter her uncle kissed her he held her off at arm's length and studiedher face. Tony's eyes fell beneath his questioning gaze. For almost thefirst time in her life she had a secret to keep from him if she could.

  "What have they been doing to my little girl?" he asked. "They have takenaway her sunshininess."

  "Oh, no, they haven't," denied Tony quickly. "It is just that I am tired.We have been on the go all the time and kept scandalously late hours.I'll be all right as soon as I have caught up. I feel as if I could sleepfor a century and any prince who has the effrontery to wake me up willfare badly."

  She laughed, but even in her own ears the laughter did not sound quitenatural and she was sure Uncle Phil thought the same, though he asked nomore questions.

  "It is like living in a palace being at Crest House," she went on. "I'veplayed princess to my heart's content--been waited on and feted andflirted with until I'm tired to death of it all and want to be just plainTony again."

  She slid into her uncle's arms with a weary little sigh. It was good--ohso good--to have him again! She hadn't known she had missed him so untilshe felt the comfort of his presence. In his arms Alan Massey and all hestood for seemed very far away.

  "Got letters for you this morning," announced Ted. "I forgot to give themto you." He fished the aforesaid letters out of his pocket and examinedthem before handing them over. "One is from Dick--the other"--he held thelarge square envelope off and squinted at it teasingly. "Some scrawl!"he commented. "Reckless display of ink and flourishes, I call it. Who'sthe party?"

  Tony snatched the letters, her face rosy.

  "Give me Dick's. I haven't heard from him but once since he went back toNew York and that was just a card. Oh-h! Listen everybody. The Universalhas accepted his story and wants him to do a whole series of them. Oh,isn't that just wonderful?"

  Tony's old sparkles were back now. There were no reservations necessaryhere. Everybody knew and loved Dick and would be glad as she was herselfin his success.

  "Hail to Dicky Dumas!" she added, gaily waving the letter aloft. "Ialways knew he would get there. And that was the very story he read me.Wasn't it lucky I liked it really? If I hadn't, and it had turned out tobe good, wouldn't it have been awful?"

  Everybody laughed at that and perhaps nobody but the doctor noticed thatthe other letter in the unfamiliar handwriting was tucked away veryquickly out of sight in her bag and no comments made.

  It was not until Tony had gone the rounds of the household and greetedeveryone from Granny down to Max that she read Alan's letter, as she satcurled up in the cretonned window seat, just as the little girl Tony hadbeen wont to sit and devour love stories. This was a love story, too--herown and with a sadly complicated plot at that.

  It was the first letter she had had from Alan and she found it verywonderful and exciting reading. It was brimming over, as might have beenexpected, with passionate lover's protests and extravagant endearmentswhich Tony could not have imagined her Anglo-Saxon relatives or friendseven conceiving, let alone putting on paper. But Alan was different.These things were no affectation with him, but natural as breathing, partand parcel of his personality. She could hear him now say "_carissima_"in that low, deep-cadenced, musical voice of his and the word seemed verysweet and beautiful to her as it sang in her heart and she read it in thedashing script upon the paper.

  He was desolated without her, he wrote. Nothing was worth while. Nothinginterested him. He was refusing all invitations, went nowhere. He justsat alone in the studio and dreamed about her or made sketches of herfrom memory. She was everywhere, all about him. She filled the studiowith her voice, her laughter, her wonderful eyes. But oh, he was solonely, so unutterably lonely without her. Must he really wait a wholeyear before he made her his? A year was twelve long, long months.Anything could happen in a year. One of them might die and the otherwould go frustrate and lonely forever, like a sad wind in the night.

  Tony caught her breath quickly at that sentence. The poetry of itcaptivated her fancy, the dread of what it conjured clutched like coldhands at her heart. She wanted Alan now, wanted love now. Already thosedear folks downstairs were beginning to seem like ghosts, she and Alanthe only real people. What if he should die, what if something shouldhappen to keep them forever apart, how could she bear it? How could she?

  She turned back to her letter which had turned into an impassioned pleathat she would never forsake him, no matter what happened, never drivehim over the precipice like the Gadderene swine.

  "You and your love are the only thing that can save me, dear heart," hewrote. "Remember that always. Without you I shall go down, down intoblacker pits than I ever sank before. With you I shall come out into thelight. I swear it. But oh, beloved, pray for me, if you know how to pray.I don't. I never had a god."

  There were tears in Tony's eyes as she finished her lover's letter.His unwonted humility touched her as no arrogance could ever havedone. His appeal to his desperate need moved her profoundly as suchappeals will always move woman. It is an old tale and one oftrepeated. Man crying out at a woman's feet, "Save me! Save me! MyselfI cannot save!" Woman, believing, because she longs to believe it,that salvation lies in her power, taking on herself the all butimpossible mission for love's high sake.

  Tony Holiday believed, as all the million other women have believed sincetime began, that she could save her lover, loved him tenfold the morebecause he threw himself upon her mercy, came indeed perhaps to trulylove him for the first time now with a kind of consecrated fervor whichbelonged all to the spirit even as the love that had come to her whilethey danced had belonged rather to the flesh.

  * * * * *

  And day by day Jim Roberts grew sicker and the gnawing thing crept upnearer to his heart. Day by day he gloated over the goading whips hebrandished over Alan Massey's head, amused himself with the variousdevelopments it lay in his power to give to the situation as he passedout of life.

  He wrote two letters from his sick bed. The first one was addressed toDick Carson, telling the full story of his own and Alan Massey's share inthe deliberate defraudment of that young man of his rightful name andestate. It pleased him to read and reread this letter and to reflect thatwhen it was mailed Alan Massey would drink the full cup of disgrace andexposure while he who was infinitely guiltier would be sleeping veryquietly in a cool grave where hate, nor vengeance, nor even pity couldtouch him.

  The other letter, which like the first he kept
unmailed, was a lesshonest and less incriminating letter, filled with plausible half truths,telling how he had just become aware at last through coming intopossession of some old letters of the identity of the boy he had once hadin his keeping and who had run away from him, an identity which he nowhastened to reveal in the interests of tardy justice. The letter made nomention of Alan Massey nor of the unlovely bargain he had driven withthat young man as the price of silence and the bliss of ignorance. It wasaddressed to the lawyers who handled the Massey estate.

  Roberts had followed up various trails and discovered that AntoinetteHoliday was the girl Massey loved, discovered through the bribing of aCrest House servant, that the young man they called Carson was alsopresumably in love with the girl whose family had befriended him sogenerously in his need. It was incredibly good he thought. He couldhardly have thought out a more diabolically clever plot if he had tried.He could make Alan Massey writhe trebly, knowing these things.

  Pursuing his malignant whim he wrote to Alan Massey and told him of theexistence of the two letters, as yet unmailed, in his table drawer. Hemade it clear that one of the letters damned Alan Massey utterly whilethe other only robbed him of his ill-gotten fortune, made it clear alsothat he himself did not know which of the two would be mailed in the end,possibly he would decide it by a flip of a coin. Massey could only waitand see what happened.

  "I suppose you think the girl is worth going to Hell for, even if themoney isn't," he had written. "Maybe she is. Some women are, perhaps. Butdon't forget that if she loves you, you will be dragging her down theretoo. Pretty thought, isn't it? I don't mean any future-life businesseither. That's rot. I heard enough of that when I was a boy to sicken meof it forever. It is the here and now Hell a man pays for his sins with,and that is God's truth, Alan Massey."

  And Alan, sitting in his luxurious studio reading the letter, crushedit in his hands and groaned aloud. He needed no commentary on the "hereand now Hell" from Jim Roberts. He was living it those summer days ifever a man did.

  It wasn't the money now. Alan told himself he no longer cared for that,hated it in fact. It was Tony now, all Tony, and the horrible fear lestRoberts betray him and shut the gates of Paradise upon him forever.Sometimes in his agony of fear he could almost have been glad to end itall with one shot of the silver-mounted automatic he kept always near, tobeat Jim Roberts to the bliss of oblivion in the easiest way.

  But Alan Massey had an incorrigible belief in his luck. Just as he hadhoped, until he had all but believed, that his cousin John was as dead ashe had told that very person he was, so now he hoped against all reasonthat he would be saved at the eleventh hour, that Roberts would go to hisdeath carrying with him the secret that would destroy himself if itceased to be a secret.

  Those unmailed letters haunted him, however, day and night, so much so,in fact, that he took a journey to Boston one day and sought out thelittle cigar store again. But this time he had not mounted the stairs.His business was with the black-eyed boy. With one fifty dollar bill hebought the lad's promise to destroy the letters and the packet inRobert's drawer in the event of the latter's death; secured also thepromise that if at any time before his death Roberts gave orders thateither letter should be mailed, the boy would send the same not to theaddress on the envelope but to Alan Massey. If the boy kept faith withhis pledges there would be another fifty coming to him after the death ofthe man. He bought the lad even as Roberts had once bought himself. Itwas a sickening transaction but it relieved his mind considerably andcatered in a measure to that incorrigible hope within him.

  But he paid a price too. Fifty miles away from Boston was Tony Holiday onher Heaven kissing hill. He was mad to go to her but dared not, lest thisfresh corruption in some way betray itself to her clear gaze.

  So he went back to New York without seeing her and Tony never knew he hadbeen so near.

  And that night Jim Roberts took an unexpected turn for the worse anddied, foiled of that last highly anticipated spice of malice in flippingthe coin that was to decide Alan Massey's fate.

  In the end the boy had not had the courage to destroy the letters as hehad promised to do. Instead he sent them both, together with the packetof evidence as to John Massey's identity, to Alan Massey.

  The thing was in Alan's own hands at last. Nothing could save or destroyhim but himself. And by a paradox his salvation depended upon his beingstrong enough to bring himself to ruin.