“Except the satisfaction of a decent thing decently accomplished—did you get in that line, Marie?” asked Ogilvie. “Remember—we rehearsed it last night over the telephone.”
“I did,” replied Marie Dillon, “and I improved on it on the spur of the moment. I said something to him about poverty not mattering as long as I knew that the rest of the world found life a little more easy to bear through my invention.”
“Like the rest of the benefactors,” commented Ogilvie, “Their idealism! That’s what kept them so poor, and that’s just why they are so terribly vindictive against Martyn Spencer. It wasn’t really because he cheated them, stole money from them by appropriating their patents for his private use, but because he stole it, as they figured, from the public, the world, humanity at large.”
Marie Dillon went on to say that toward the end of the interview Audley Chester, carried away by her carefully rehearsed, girlish enthusiasm, had become even more confidential. He had told her of the existence of an organization composed of people—as he expressed it—trying to do social uplift work not, as usually attempted, by giving money, thus pauperizing those whom they were trying to help, but by using their inventive brains and faculties so as to reduce the cost of living and to make life easier for the masses.
“If somebody invents, for instance, a new mangle,” he had explained, “which reduces time and effort of labor by fifty per cent and incidentally does not ruin the linen or cotton which it rolls and smoothes, such an article, ordinarily, would cost the price of manufacture plus the overhead, plus the profit to the company which manufactures it, and plus the royalty to the inventor. We cannot always regulate the profit which the manufacturing company demands. But we can always influence it by giving our invention to a company which is more reasonable, and we always do cut out our own royalties, reducing the cost by just that amount to the poor woman who needs the mangle. We, as an organization, make therefore a gift to the people at large, not of money—no, no, no! We don’t believe in that—but of our brains, our talents. We are the world’s real benefactors!”
At the next meeting of this organization, he had gone on, he would mention the matter to the other members, and they would talk it over together. He had added that they had to be very strict and careful about whom to admit to their circle, because, on the very face of it, they had to rely absolutely on the honesty of each individual member. “Mutual trust is our motto,” he had wound up, “and the moment anybody breaks this trust—”
“What happens then?” Marie Dillon had asked casually, but with enough of a shade of feminine curiosity to make the question appear natural.
And Ogilvie had smiled disagreeably. “We rely on fate to punish him,” he had replied. “Fate—possibly helped by—oh—deputy fate!”
“Deputy fate?” she had queried.
“Yes,” had come Audley Chester’s slow reply, “After all, even fate is more or less man-made. And—don’t forget—we have in our organization some very great inventors, some very great physicians and surgeons and biologists!”
“Such as Doctor Hillyer McGrath,” commented Blaine Ogilvie, “who had been Clafflin’s physician for many, many years and knew all about the state of his health.”
“What gets me,” said the police commissioner, shaking his head, “is how any member of the Benefactors Club, be he the very cleverest physician, surgeon, inventor, or biologist in the world, can stage manage a death, clearly caused by a revolver bullet, since Clafflin’s temples were pierced, which is neither due to murder nor to suicide nor to accident—to believe you,” and he turned to Ogilvie.
“You’ll believe me all right after your expert doctors at headquarters get through with the autopsy on Clafflin’s body,” replied the latter, “or I lose my bet.”
“What bet?” asked Gadsby.
“Oh—long odds! My life against the district attorney’s wits! For, of course, I realize that you can’t keep me in hiding forever.”
“Oh—please—please—Blaine!” exclaimed the girl, suddenly nervous and frightened.
“Don’t worry, honey!” Ogilvie said. “I’m not worrying. Let’s see—one hundred thousand bucks Martyn Spencer sent you. That’ll get you a peach of a trousseau.” He interrupted himself and turned to Gadsby.
“Look here, Bob,” he said. “Show a little delicacy and leave the room when an engaged couple talk about intimate details. Too, you might run down to your office and see how that autopsy came out!”
* * * *
It was quite late in the afternoon when the police commissioner returned, accompanied by two men, whom he introduced as Doctor Elliot and Doctor Griffith, and—“Miss Dillon, and Mr. Blaine Ogilvie, the man who—”
“The commissioner told us about you,” said Doctor Elliot, shaking hands with Ogilvie.
“Did he blacken my reputation?” demanded Ogilvie with a twinkle in his eye. “Did he tell you a long sob story of how I, a fugitive from justice, a supposedly crimson-handed assassin, took refuge in his house and caused him to be false to his sworn duty?”
“He did,” said Doctor Elliot with a laugh.
“Heavens! I’m surprised he tried to put that one across!” said Ogilvie.
“But he has reformed,” interjected the other doctor. “Mr. Ogilvie, let me be the first to tell you the good news. You are a free man. You can come and go where and as you please. You are no longer under suspicion.”
“Which means you finished the autopsy and you found out—”
“Well, what did we find out?”
“That the revolver bullet which pierced Clafflin’s temples was fired after the man had died,” said Ogilvie. “That he died by natural causes, neither by murder, suicide, nor accident!”
“How did you figure it out?” asked the police commissioner with admiration.
“Why, you chump, I was trying to tell you straight along! Simply by figuring out the psychology of the case—the peculiar psychology of the gang of idealists at No. 17—Clapperton and McGrath and—”
“Incidentally,” cut in Doctor Elliot, “it’s that same McGrath whom you have to thank for the fact that you are free from all suspicion.”
“Oh,” asked Marie, “he confessed?”
“We didn’t see him,” said Doctor Elliot, “nor would he have had anything to confess. But Mr. Ogilvie has to thank McGrath for another of his marvelous medical discoveries, namely an instrument which, used during an autopsy, registers almost automatically to what cause death has been due. If death apparently has been due to more than one cause, it decides between them and points at the right one.
“It’s the most delicate instrument you ever saw. You lay people wouldn’t understand it. It looks rather like a tiny barometer, with a number of needles composed of a new metal. This metal has a great deal to do with the success of the instrument, since it has a peculiar, almost uncanny, power over blood circulation and blood pressure. It can, so to speak, catch the reflex action of blood even after death. The metal is called rhizopolin.
“We used the instrument,” continued the doctor, “and we discovered that death was due to heart failure, while the heart failure, in its turn, was due to a complication of organic troubles which had ravaged poor Clafflin and had sapped his vitality for a number of years.”
“Exactly,” said Ogilvie. “And McGrath had been Clafflin’s physician for a long time. He could read the state of his health—marvelous physician that he is—with the same ease as I can read a simple book. He took him to No. 17 that night. Everything had been minutely prearranged, minutely dovetailed. They were sure that Spencer would come. Perhaps Spencer telephoned or wrote them that he would, and, beforehand, I mean before arranging for the date of Spencer’s coming, McGrath had mathematically figured out that Clafflin would die that night—perhaps, though I don’t know, kept him alive with powerful drugs until that very night.”
“Medically quite possible,” commented Doctor Griffith.
“He got Clafflin out of the house,” went on Ogilvie
, “under the promise—remember the testimony of Clafflin’s nurse and butler—that he would meet a remarkable young physician who would cure him. All right; they came. I, whom they supposed to be Spencer, was there. Clafflin died suddenly. McGrath, the great physician, and absolutely, intimately familiar with the man’s state of health, saw it at once, gave the signal, when I happened to be looking the other way. Then the shot, either fired by McGrath himself or by somebody else—it makes no difference—and there you are.”
“Except,” said the police commissioner, “that I believe you have a clear case against the Benefactors Club for trying to frame you up. In fact, I think it is really my duty to—”
“Forget your duty!” interrupted Ogilvie. “After all, they are idealists, public benefactors, and they can’t and shouldn’t be measured with the ordinary yardstick of police morality. Just you go down there, Bob, to No. 17 some night and throw a good scare into them. By the way, how about that job as assistant something-or-other with your detective force you promised me?”
“I didn’t promise,” said Gadsby, “but you’re on, old man.”
“Thanks!” Ogilvie turned to Marie Dillon. “Shake hands with my new boss, honey,” he said, “and smile at him. I need all the pull I can get in my new profession. My first job will be to trace Spencer and hand him the accumulated dividends of the Benefactors Club.”
RENUNCIATION
When she came to him that night, forty-eight hours before he sailed for France with his battalion on democracy’s greatest, most splendid adventure, she did so of her own free will. For he had not seen her; he had not written to her; he had even tried not to think of her since that shimmering, pink-and-lavender morning of early June, two years earlier, when, in rose point lace and orange-blossoms, she had walked up the aisle of St. Thomas’s Church and had become the wife of Dan Coolidge.
Her low, trembling “I will!” had sounded the death-knell of Roger Kenyon’s tempestuous youth. He had plucked her from his heart, had uprooted her from his mind. From his smoldering, subconscious passion he had cast the memory of her pale, pure oval of a face to the limbo of visions that must be forgotten.
It seemed strange that he could do so; for Roger had always been a hot-blooded, virile, inconsiderate man who rode life as he rode a horse, with a loose rein, a straight bit, and rowel-spurs. He had always had a headstrong tendency to hurdle with tense, savage joy across the obstacles he encountered—which were of his own making as often as not. He had been in the habit of taking whatever sensations and emotions he could—until he had met Josephine Erskine up there in that sleepy, drab New England village where, for a generation or two, her people had endeavored to impose upon the world with a labored, pathetic, meretricious gentility.
Heretofore, woman had meant nothing to him except a charming manifestation of sex. Then suddenly, like a sweet, swift thrush, love had come to him in Josephine’s brown, gold-flecked eyes and crimson mouth. He had told her so quite simply as they walked in the rose-garden; but she had shaken her head.
“No, Roger,” she had replied.
“Why not?”
“I do not love you.”
She told him that she was going to become the wife, for better or for worse, of Dan Coolidge, a college chum of his—a mild, bald-headed, paunchy, stock-broking chap with a steam-yacht, a garage full of imported, low-slung motor-cars, a red-brick-and-white-woodwork house on the conservative side of Eleventh Street, a few doors from Fifth Avenue, a place in Westchester County at exactly the correct distance between suburbia and yokeldom; four servants, including a French—not an English—butler; and a mother who dressed in black bombazine and bugles.
“Yes,” she had said in a weak, wiped-over voice, “I am going to marry Dan.”
“Because you love him—and because you don’t love me?”
“Yes, Roger!”
He had laughed—a cracked, high-pitched laugh that had twisted his dark, handsome face into a sardonic mask.
“You lie, my dear,” he had replied brutally, and when she gasped and blushed he had continued: “You lie—and you know you do! You love—me! I can feel it in my heart, my soul, in every last fiber and cell of my being. I can feel it waking and sleeping. Your love is mine, quite mine—a thing both definite and infinite. You don’t love Dan!”
“But—”
“I tell you why you’re going to marry him. It’s because he has money, and I have no financial prospects except a couple of up-State aunts who are tough and stringy, and who have made up their minds to survive me, whatever happens.”
“I must think of mother and the girls,” had come her stammered admission through a blurred veil of hot tears; “and Fred—he must go to Harvard—”
“Right! You have your mother, and the girls, and Fred, and the rest of your family, and they’ll all live on Dan’s bounty and on the sacrifice you’re making of yourself—not to mention myself!”
Then, after a pause, taking her by both her slender shoulders, he went on:
“I could make love to you now, my dear. I could crush you in my arms—and you’d marry Dan afterward, and somehow strike a compromise between your inbred, atavistic Mayflower Puritanism and the resolute Greek paganism which is making your mouth so red. But”—as she swayed and trembled—“I won’t! I’m going to play the game!”
She said nothing. He laughed and spoke again:
“Confound it! You can put your foot on every decency, on every bully, splendid emotion, on the blessed decalogue itself—as long as you play the game!”
So he had gone away, after being Dan’s best man, to his little plantation in South Carolina. For two years he had not seen her, had not written to her, had even tried not to think of her—
And there she stood—now—on the threshold of his room in the discreet little hotel where he had put up, with a grinning, plump bellboy in buttons, his hand well weighted with money, winking as if to say: “It’s O. K., boss. I’m goin’ to keep mum, all right, all right!”
Then the boy closed the door, and the bolt snapped into the lock with a little steely, jeering click of finality.
II
She was dressed in white from head to foot; only her lips were red, and the longstemmed Gloire de Dijon rose that she held in her hand. She spoke in a matter-of- fact voice, as if continuing a conversation that had been interrupted just for a second by the entry of a servant or the postman’s whistle:
“Don’t you see, Roger? I had to come. I had to say good-by to you—before you sail for France!”
He did not move from where he stood between the two windows, with the moonlight drifting across his shoulders into the dim, prosy hotel room, and weaving a fantastic pattern into the threadbare carpet. There was surprise in his accents, and a keen, peremptory challenge.
“How did you know that I was booked to sail? Our orders are secret. I am here on a special mission until the day after tomorrow—incognito, at that. Josephine, how did you find me out? Who told you that I was here?”
She smiled.
“Of course I knew, dear. How could I help knowing?”
Suddenly, strangely, the explanation—what there was of it—seemed lucid and satisfactory and reasonable, and he crossed the room and bowed over her hand. He took the rose from her narrow, white fingers and inhaled its heavy, honeyed fragrance.
“A rose from your garden!” He heard his own voice coming in an odd murmur. “From your garden up there in the little New England village!”
“Yes, Roger.”
“Did your mother send it to you?”
“No, I picked it myself. It kept fresh, didn’t it, Roger dear?”
“Yes.”
He remembered the garden where they had walked side by side, two years earlier—where he had told her of his love. It was the one splotch of color, the one sign of the joy of life, in the whole drab Massachusetts community, this old garden which the Erskine family had jealously nursed and coddled for generations. It was a mass of roses, creepers as well as bushes, sc
rambling and straining and growing and tangling in their own strong-willed fashion, clothing old stones with hearts of deep ruby and amethyst, building arches of glowing pink and tea-yellow against the pale sky, lifting shy, single, dewy heads in hushed comers, as if praying.
But he had always liked the scarlet Gloire de Dijon roses best. They were like her lips.
III
He looked up.
“What about Dan?” he asked.
“Oh, Danny—” She smiled.
“He is my friend, and your husband. If he knew—”
“Danny won’t mind, dear,” she said.
Her words carried conviction. Somehow he knew that Dan wouldn’t mind. He sat down on the hard couch that faced the windows, drew her down beside him, and put his arm around her shoulder. Her hand, which sought and found his, was very steady and very cool.
He did not speak; neither did she. Twisting his head sidewise, he looked at her. She was in shadow from the shoulder downward. Only her face was sharply defined in the moonlight. The scarlet lips seemed to swim to him along the slanting, glistening rays, and he leaned over.
There was hunger in his soul, in his mind, in his heart, in his body.
“I am going to play the game!”
The words came from very far, from across the bitter bridge of years, with the jarring, dissonant shock of a forgotten reproach.
“Dear, dear heart!” he whispered.
She did not resist. She did not draw back; nor did she say a word. Only, just as his lips were about to touch hers, something—“an immense, invisible, and very sad presence,” he described it afterward—seemed to creep into the room with a huge whirring of wings.
The whirring was soundless; but he felt the sharp displacement of the air as the pinions cut through it, the left tip resting on the farther window-sill, the right on a chair near the bed, on which he had thrown his khaki overcoat and his campaign hat.
With the whirring came a sense of unutterable peace and sweetness, strangely flavored with a great pain. As he leaned back without having touched her lips, the pain was mysteriously transmuted. It became a realization, not a vision, of color—clear, deep scarlet with a faint golden glow in the center. Then it began to assume a definite form—that of a gigantic Gloire de Dijon rose, which, as he watched, slowly shrank to its natural proportions until it rested, velvety, scented, where he had dropped it among the books on his writing-desk.
The Achmed Abdullah Megapack Page 21
