Rather a painful comparison, too, when one thinks about it, with neat stacks of wedding invitations: “Mrs. Thomas Bayne requests the honour of your presence at the marriage of her daughter, Anne Hollister, to Mr. Furness Schuyler Brooks …” and so forth. The names and addresses on them had been carefully selected from the Social Register. And not only the environments, but the states of mind of the two men concerned, present ample ground for contrast. Humorous, too, with Warrington’s head outside his door, watching the passageway with haggard eyes, and Brooks calmly surveying his domain and fitting a new mistress into it.
“Soon have to lay two places, Miguel,” he said cheerfully to the servant.
“Yes, sir,” said Miguel, and smiled at some private Oriental joke of his own.
Brooks sat down, but before he did so he got a notebook and made one or two additions to his list of names—careful additions: new people, but coming on and willing to pay their ways as they came.
The entire responsibility of the list was his. Asked about her own, Holly had only raised her eyebrows.
“But I don’t know anybody,” she said. “Of course Mother’s people—but I haven’t seen any of them for years.”
And Mrs. Bayne’s list had been of little use to him. Times had changed, even in ten years, and people who used to be important had died or ceased to count. New families had come up, not all of them bearing the closest inspection, but smart and accepted. He ignored her fretful protest that she had never heard of them, and put them all in.
So it happened that he did not glance at the morning paper for some time. Then, true to his type, he read the headlines and turned to the society news, and thus it was not until later that he saw, halfway down the first page, a headline which caught his eye and, having done so, held it.
BANK LOOT FOUND
Securities from Harrison Bank
Recovered
was what he read.
The article itself was not long. Given only the initial fact, of the recovery of a suitcase containing certain missing negotiable bonds from the Harrison Bank, and the additional news that they had been found in the apartment of one James Cox, brother-in-law of Bayne, it went on to deal with Bayne’s record and his recent pardon. Evidently only the barest statement had been given out by the District Attorney’s Office.
He read it again. With the first reading he had felt only anger and furious annoyance. By the Lord Harry, wouldn’t the damned story ever die? And to have it come up again just now—was there ever such rotten luck? Already he knew that the breakfast tables and boudoirs of his world were buzzing with it, and that by afternoon the society editors would have handed in their bit, and his approaching marriage to Tom Bayne’s daughter would be duly noted in the published accounts.
It was only with the second reading that the true inwardness of the situation occurred to him. He threw down the paper and leaped to his feet, overturning his chair.
“Cox!” he thought. “Cox! That’s the counter jumper. The new uncle. He couldn’t have known Bayne. Then how the devil did he get the stuff?”
There was only one conclusion:
They had had the securities all this time, had them and hidden them. They were as criminal as Bayne himself; Cox had been no more than a cat’s paw in their ladylike, unscrupulous hands. It was Margaret and Mrs. Bayne who were guilty.
He remembered Margaret. He could see her now, casually opening the front door.
“Oh, did you ring? I thought I heard the bell,” and with a sort of timid archness, taking him into the drawing room.
“I’m afraid it’s cold in here. The furnace-man is too careless about coal.”
He knew by this time that there was no furnace man, and that the drawing room was always cold. He knew there was no Hilda. All their small hypocrisies and snobberies had long before been uncovered before his discerning, prominent blue eyes.
But why the poverty if they had had this hoard to draw upon? He considered that shrewdly, in view of his knowledge of them.
“Afraid,” he concluded. “Holding on until the old boy got out and told them how to dispose of it.”
To be fair to him, he did not include Holly in all this. Selfish as were his pre-occupations, his mind finally drifted to her with a new and unexpected compassion. “The poor kid!” he thought, and saw her perhaps getting her first knowledge through the morning paper. And with that wave of sympathy he felt stronger, every inch a man. If he dramatized himself a bit, it was one fine gesture, to be laid to his credit.
“I’ll stand by her,” he thought, and drew himself up a trifle. “I’m all she has, and I’m not letting go. The poor kid!”
He had no illusions; he knew what standing by would mean. The men would approve him for it, but the women would not. And his world was largely women. It was women who made out lists, paid calls, gave parties. It was at tea tables he was popular, not in smoking rooms after dinners. With much the same gesture with which he had disposed of the invitations, he brushed this world of women out of his way.
At the most his business was a casual one. He ordered his car brought around from the public garage where he kept it, and still warm and exalted with sacrifice, drove to the house on Kelsey Street.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
HAVING RETIRED EARLY, MRS. Bayne was up before seven o’clock that morning. She got out of bed in her cold room, lowered the window, and then put a match to the fire Holly had laid ready the night before. In front of this she placed a pitcher of water to warm, and having done so, crawled back into bed again.
She felt cheerful and active. The day opened before her, full of interesting things to be done. She took her purse from under her pillow and carefully counted her money. She still had almost nine hundred dollars.
She pulled the blankets up around her and fell to work on a shopping list, but first carefully she put down a few items, considering them at length. Twenty-five dollars for the organist at St. Andrews, ten dollars for the sexton, and a hundred dollars to the florist, for rented palms and a few white chrysanthemums. That was a hundred and thirty-five; from eight hundred and ninety, it left seven hundred and fifty-five dollars.
She thought she could manage. …
She dropped her list and fell into deep thought. Somebody would have to give Holly away; she couldn’t go up the aisle alone. But the Parkers had gone to Europe, and anyhow, she had an idea that Sam Parker wouldn’t have been keen about doing it. Sam had lost a good bit in the bank trouble; he had been a director then.
For the first time she considered Margaret’s husband. He wasn’t impressive, but at least he was available. And whether one liked it or not, he was a part of the family. One couldn’t ask an outsider to do that sort of thing, and although in this new state of society widowed mothers occasionally gave their daughters away, she did not approve of it. Nor, as she reflected bitterly, was she widowed.
She heard the paper boy on the steps below, and putting on her slippers, went down through the cold hall and retrieved the morning paper from the vestibule. On her way back, she wakened Holly, and then crawled into her bed once more, shivering. She did not, however, look at the news pages at all. Paper and pencil in hand, she went over the advertisements, marking bargains here and there, and special sales.
She was contented, quite happy.
Later on she took her bath from the warm water out of the pitcher, and dressed carefully to go out. When, hatted and coated, she reached the chilly dining room, the odour of coffee and bacon welcomed her.
A little worried frown appeared on Mrs. Bayne’s face as she surveyed Holly when she brought in the food.
“I hated waking you,” she said, “but we have such a lot to do to-day. You don’t look as if you have had any sleep.”
“I slept all right, Mother.”
“I wish you’d put on some weight,” said her mother discontentedly. “Really, for a bride to look as wretched as you do is no compliment to her husband.”
At this, however, she caught Holly’s eye
s fixed on her so oddly that she sheered off from the subject abruptly.
“I wish you’d come downtown with me this morning.”
“I’ve promised Aunt Margaret to go there.”
“For a fitting? I shouldn’t think, with clothes as straight as they are now, you’d need much fitting.” But her mind, preternaturally active these days, veered to another matter instantly, and she put down her coffee cup. “I do wish you’d wear rubber gloves, Holly,” she said. “Your hands—”
“I can’t work in them. I’ve tried.”
“Then you can’t work,” said Mrs. Bayne. “We’ll have to have Mrs. Carter in sooner or later. We’d better get her now.”
“At three dollars a day? And food?”
“Only for the next month or so. People will be calling and presents coming, and all that. We simply can’t manage by ourselves.”
She went on, cheerfully planning. Holly felt that ten minutes more of this cheerful babbling and she would rise up from her chair and scream. What did it matter whether they had Mrs. Carter in or not? What did it matter that her hands were red, and her mother recommending glycerine and rose water at night to whiten them? What did anything matter but James Cox and the trouble they had brought to him?
Only one ray of comfort she had. She had missed the paper from the vestibule and knew her mother had taken it. But she had evidently not seen the news item.
Her mother was going. She got up and drew on her shabby gloves, gloves without which no gentlewoman ever passed her front door, examined her purse for the lists, and so went out.
Holly accompanied her to the door and kissed her good-bye, much as she would have kissed an irresponsible child. During the long watches of the night, when a strange dog howled from somewhere apparently close under her windows and she had listened vainly for that creak on the stair which would signify Warrington’s return from James Cox’s, she had made one determination: whatever came, her mother was to have this one day more.
It was not that she so loved her mother. There were times when she guiltily wondered if she loved her at all. But passionately she believed that life had been cruel to her, and that she had suffered long and unfairly. Although she did not put it so to herself, much of her service was a sort of vicarious atonement. Once, indeed, she had told her feeling about this to Margaret, but it was after she had been forbidden to see James, and Margaret had been bitter.
“Nonsense!” she had said sharply. “She’s had it easy all her life. She’s got it easy now.”
Holly was not thinking beyond the day.
She closed the front door and then went up to her mother’s room. There she burned the newspaper and turned down the bed to air. By the small travelling clock, it was time for Warrington to be up and moving about, but she could hear nothing. She was quite certain he was in, however; there had been a strange dog closed in the yard when she went down that morning, and a half-used bottle of milk on the kitchen table. That would have been his work, she knew. She had brought the dog in and given him a warm place by the stove.
But when she finally went up to the third floor and knocked at Warrington’s door, there was no reply, nor did any cheery splashing come from the bathroom. She opened the door and looked in.
She was frightened. His bed had not been used. She stood in the doorway, staring around. Could he have stayed at Aunt Margaret’s? Maybe something had happened to James. Maybe he had felt he could not stand it and had tried—
She had, like Warrington, a swift vision of Aunt Margaret, and the way she had tried to escape when there had seemed to be no other way. She covered her eyes to shut it out.
The other possible significance of his absence did not occur to her then. She drove away the thought of James and went in. Since Margaret had gone, Mrs. Bayne had taken charge of the room, and it gave Holly an odd little thrill to be there, to sniff the faint odour of tobacco smoke which clung about the place, to see his clothing hanging in the closet, his slippers by the bed.
On the bureau were laid out his military brushes and a collar box. Those, and a few books, were all the mark he had put on the room. Five minutes, or ten, and he could be gone—as if he had never been there!
She moved to the bureau and stood fingering his brushes. She could remember her mother’s bureau in her father’s time. When he went away, his brushes went also, and for a long time there had been an empty space left where they had used to lie.
Suddenly she sat down in the chair by the empty hearth and began to cry, slow, rather dreadful tears; she cried for her father, for James and Margaret, for her mother, and even for herself, as she saw ahead of her long, joyless years, if not worse. She and her mother, and perhaps her father too, shut up in that dreary house, with little love and no happiness. Time going on, and she herself drying up and getting sour, like Aunt Margaret. A succession of roomers, too; and maybe she would be arch with them, like Aunt Margaret.
But mostly her grief was for Warrington, that he cared for her and nothing could ever come of it, and that she had involved him in a trouble which was not his. To the one she was resigned; to the other, never.
She forgot the empty house and its morning disorder, forgot that she wore only her working clothes, forgot Aunt Margaret, James, Mr. Steinfeldt, all that motley gathering which had cluttered up her mind—flung them away, rather. She threw on hat and coat, picked up her purse, and reached the front door just as Furness Brooks rang the bell.
Furness, filled with high resolve and magnanimity, stepped inside the door and held out his arms.
“You poor kid!” he said. “Did you think I was going to let you down?”
She had not thought of him at all; certainly she was not thinking of him then. She stared at him blankly.
“Please don’t keep me,” she told him. “I’m busy now. I have to go out.”
“But, listen!” he said, blocking the door. “What’s the matter with you? Here I am to tell you that everything’s all right. With me, anyhow. And you try to run off!”
“Get out of the way, Furness. I’ll see you some other time. I tell you I’m in a hurry.”
“Hurry, hell!” he stormed, suddenly angry. “If you think for a minute—”
“Oh, go away,” she told him wearily. “I’m not thinking at all. Not about you, anyhow.”
She dodged around him and out through the front door, leaving him speechless and stunned in the hallway. He recovered enough, however, to go out onto the steps and to call to her.
“Holly! Come back! Just for a minute.”
But she either did not hear him or paid no attention.
Angry and humiliated, his fine gesture repudiated, he went back into the house. He wanted somebody to talk to, some explanation; he even wandered as far back as the kitchen, but there was no one about—nothing but a starveling dog which snarled at him from beneath the kitchen range.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
PHELPS, THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY, leaned back in his chair. He was moderately young and not unkindly. True, it was his business to administer justice rather than mercy, and this had hardened him a trifle, as strict justice often does. A just man is often a hard man.
But now he was puzzled. The night before he had been very sure of himself. Bayne, on his emergence from prison, was to collect the stolen securities, realize what he could on them, and decamp. He never had believed Tom Bayne was a sick man. And there had been too much of that sort of thing; men went crooked, hid the profits, took a sentence and came out again to enjoy them.
“You can figure it this way,” he had told his assistant the day before. “Bayne laid away six hundred thousand dollars. What he’s really been doing is to stay ten years in the pen, doing easy clerical work at sixty thousand a year.”
“He wouldn’t get as much as that, the way he’d have to dispose of them.”
“Perhaps not. But he’d get a tidy sum.”
Now, however, he was not so sure. First had come the word from the penitentiary that Bayne was really ill, possibly
a dying man, and this from sources he trusted. And now here was this girl, tragically meek, telling him he had been wrong; there had been no conspiracy. It was far simpler than that. She had found the suitcase and had needed money, so she had sold a bond.
He leaned back and put his hands in his pockets.
“You needed money?” he said. “Why? I mean, you imply a special reason.”
“I was going to be married, and we’ve had very little. I had to have—clothes.”
“It had nothing to do with your father’s return home from—with his return home?”
“It was taken before we knew that.”
He surveyed her. “This Cox, now. You say he didn’t know the securities were in your possession?”
“How could he know? I had only just found them. And he has never been in the house in his life.”
He leaned forward alertly. “What do you mean by that?” he asked. “He’s your aunt’s husband. Do you mean there has been trouble?”
“Not trouble, no. My mother didn’t approve of him. That is, she felt—”
“Oh!” He considered that rather grimly. He knew Mrs. Bayne. Not well, but once long ago she had snubbed his wife, and he had never forgotten it. The picture of James Cox, sitting huddled in his chair the day before, arose in his mind. Poor devil! So that was the way of it. He wasn’t good enough for the family, but he was good enough for them to use.
“Well, now, let’s get this straight: You gave this roomer, this fellow Warrington, the bond to sell? And he did this, and gave you the money?”
“Yes.”
“But you say he didn’t know how you’d got the bond?”
“No.”
“Have you seen Warrington since he carried the suitcase for you to the Cox flat?”
“For a few minutes last night.”
“Where?” he asked sharply.
“At the house.”
“He was there last night?” he said, sitting up in his chair. “How the—how did he get in?”
“I don’t know,” she told him honestly. “I was out, probably, when he came back. He came downstairs later on, and I told him what had happened; then he went out again, to my aunt’s, to see what he could do.”
Two Flights Up Page 10
