Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “Stop!” Mellin flung one arm up violently, striking the headboard with his knuckles. “I won’t hear a syllable against Madame de Vaurigard!” Young Cooley regarded him steadily for a moment. “Have you remembered yet,” he said slowly, “how much you lost last night?”

  “I only remember that I behaved like an unspeakable boor in the presence of the divinest creature that ever—”

  Cooley disregarded the outburst, and said:

  “When we settled, you had a pad of express company checks worth six hundred dollars. You signed all of ’em and turned ’em over to Sneyd with three one-hundred-lire bills, which was all the cash you had with you. Then you gave him your note for twelve thousand francs to be paid within three days. You made a great deal of fuss about its being a ‘debt of honor.’” He paused. “You hadn’t remembered that, had you?”

  Mellin had closed his eyes. He lay quite still and made no answer.

  “No, I’ll bet you hadn’t,” said Cooley, correctly deducing the fact. “You’re well off, or you wouldn’t be at this hotel, and, for all I know, you may be fixed so you won’t mind your loss as much as I do mine; but it ought to make you kind of charitable toward my suspicions of Madame de Vaurigard’s friends.”

  The six hundred dollars in express company checks and the three hundred-lire bills were all the money the unhappy Mellin had in the world, and until he could return to Cranston and go back to work in the real-estate office again, he had no prospect of any more. He had not even his steamer ticket. In the shock of horror and despair he whispered brokenly:

  “I don’t care if they ‘re the worst people in the world, they’re better than I am!”

  The other’s gloom cleared a little at this. “Well, you have got it!” he exclaimed briskly. “You don’t know how different you’ll feel after a long walk in the open air.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go and see what that newspaper-man, Cornish, wants; it’s ten o’clock. I’ll be back after a while; I want to reason this out with you. I don’t deny but it’s possible I’m wrong; anyway, you think it over while I’m gone. You take a good hard think, will you?”

  As he closed the door, Mellin slowly drew the coverlet over his head. It was as if he covered the face of some one who had just died.

  VIII. What Cornish Knew

  TWO HOURS PASSED before young Cooley returned. He knocked twice without a reply; then he came in.

  The coverlet was still over Mellin’s head.

  “Asleep?” asked Cooley.

  “No.”

  The coverlet was removed by a shaking hand.

  “Murder!” exclaimed Cooley sympathetically, at sight of the other’s face. “A night off certainly does things to you! Better let me get you some—”

  “No. I’ll be all right — after while.”

  “Then I’ll go right ahead with our little troubles. I’ve decided to leave for Paris by the one-thirty and haven’t got a whole lot of time. Cornish is here with me in the hall: he’s got something to say that’s important for you to hear, and I’m goin’ to bring him right in.” He waved his hand toward the door, which he had left open. “Come along, Cornish. Poor ole Mellin’ll play Du Barry with us and give us a morning leevy while he listens in a bed with a palanquin to it. Now let’s draw up chairs and be sociable.”

  The journalist came in, smoking a long cigar, and took the chair the youth pushed toward him; but, after a twinkling glance through his big spectacles at the face on the pillow, he rose and threw the cigar out of the window.

  “Go ahead,” said Cooley. “I want you to tell him just what you told me, and when you’re through I want to see if he doesn’t think I’m Sherlock Holmes’ little brother.”

  “If Mr. Mellin does not feel too ill,” said Cornish dryly; “I know how painful such cases sometimes—”

  “No.” Mellin moistened his parched lips and made a pitiful effort to smile. “I’ll be all right very soon.”

  “I am very sorry,” began the journalist, “that I wasn’t able to get a few words with Mr. Cooley yesterday evening. Perhaps you noticed that I tried as hard as I could, without using actual force” — he laughed— “to detain him.”

  “You did your best,” agreed Cooley ruefully, “and I did my worst. Nobody ever listens till the next day!”

  “Well, I’m glad no vital damage was done, anyway,” said Cornish. “It would have been pretty hard lines if you two young fellows had been poor men, but as it is you’re probably none the worse for a lesson like this.”

  “You seem to think seven thousand dollars is a joke,” remarked Cooley.

  Cornish laughed again. “You see, it flatters me to think my time was so valuable that a ten minutes’ talk with me would have saved so much money.”

  “I doubt it,” said Cooley. “Ten to one we’d neither of us have believed you — last night!”

  “I doubt it, too.” Cornish turned to Mellin. “I hear that you, Mr. Mellin, are still of the opinion that you were dealing with straight people?”

  Mellin managed to whisper “Yes.”

  “Then,” said Cornish, “I’d better tell you just what I know about it, and you can form your own opinion as to whether I do know or not. I have been in the newspaper business on this side for fifteen years, and my headquarters are in Paris, where these people are very well known. The man who calls himself ‘Chandler Pedlow’ was a faro-dealer for Tom Stout in Chicago when Stout’s place was broken up, a good many years ago. There was a real Chandler Pedlow in Congress from a California district in the early nineties, but he is dead. This man’s name is Ben Welch: he’s a professional swindler; and the Englishman, Sneyd, is another; a quiet man, not so well known as Welch, and not nearly so clever, but a good ‘feeder’ for him. The very attractive Frenchwoman who calls herself ‘Comtesse de Vaurigard’ is generally believed to be Sneyd’s wife, though I could not take the stand on that myself. Welch is the brains of the organization: you mightn’t think it, but he’s a very brilliant man — he might have made a great reputation in business if he’d been straight — and, with this woman’s help, he’s carried out some really astonishing schemes. His manner is clumsy; he knows that, bless you, but it’s the only manner he can manage, and she is so adroit she can sugar-coat even such a pill as that and coax people to swallow it. I don’t know anything about the Italian who is working with them down here. But a gang of the Welch-Vaurigard-Sneyd type has tentacles all over the Continent; such people are in touch with sharpers everywhere, you see.”

  “Yes,” Cooley interpolated, “and with woolly little lambkins, too.”

  “Well,” chuckled Cornish, “that’s the way they make their living, you know.”

  “Go on and tell him the rest of it,” urged Cooley.

  “About Lady Mount-Rhyswicke,” said Cornish, “it seems strange enough, but she has a perfect right to her name. She is a good deal older than she looks, and I’ve heard she used to be remarkably beautiful. Her third husband was Lord George Mount-Rhyswicke, a man who’d been dropped from his clubs, and he deserted her in 1903, but she has not divorced him. It is said that he is somewhere in South America; however, as to that I do not know.”

  Mr. Cornish put the very slightest possible emphasis on the word “know,” and proceeded:

  “I’ve heard that she is sincerely attached to him and sends him money from time to time, when she has it — though that, too, is third-hand information. She has been declasse ever since her first divorce. That was a ‘celebrated case,’ and she’s dropped down pretty far in the world, though I judge she’s a good deal the best of this crowd. Exactly what her relations to the others are I don’t know, but I imagine that she’s pretty thick with ’em.”

  “Just a little!” exclaimed Cooley. “She sits behind one of the lambkins and Helene behind the other while they get their woolly wool clipped. I suppose the two of ’em signaled what was in every hand we held, though I’m sure they needn’t have gone to the trouble! Fact is, I don’t see why they bothered about goin’ through
the form of playin’ cards with us at all. They could have taken it away without that! Whee!” Mr. Cooley whistled loud and long. “And there’s loads of wise young men on the ocean now, hurryin’ over to take our places in the pens. Well, they can have mine! Funny, Mellin: nobody would come up to you or me in the Grand Central in New York and try to sell us greenbacks just as good as real. But we come over to Europe with our pockets full o’ money and start in to see the Big City with Jesse James in a false mustache on one arm, and Lucresha Borgy, under an assumed name, on the other!”

  “I am afraid I agree with you,” said Cornish; “though I must say that, from all I hear, Madame de Vaurigard might put an atmosphere about a thing which would deceive almost any one who wasn’t on his guard. When a Parisienne of her sort is clever at all she’s irresistible.”

  “I believe you,” Cooley sighed deeply.

  “Yesterday evening, Mr. Mellin,” continued the journalist, “when I saw the son of my old friend in company with Welch and Sneyd, of course I tried to warn him. I’ve often seen them in Paris, though I believe they have no knowledge of me. As I’ve said, they are notorious, especially Welch, yet they have managed, so far, to avoid any difficulty with the Paris police, and, I’m sorry to say, it might be hard to actually prove anything against them. You couldn’t prove that anything was crooked last night, for instance. For that matter, I don’t suppose you want to. Mr. Cooley wishes to accept his loss and bear it, and I take it that that will be your attitude, too. In regard to the note you gave Sneyd, I hope you will refuse to pay; I don’t think that they would dare press the matter.”

  “Neither do I,” Mr. Cooley agreed. “I left a silver cigarette-case at the apartment last night, and after talkin’ to Cornish a while ago, I sent my man for it with a note to her that’ll make ’em all sit up and take some notice. The gang’s all there together, you can be sure. I asked for Sneyd and Pedlow in the office and found they’d gone out early this morning leavin’ word they wouldn’t be back till midnight. And, see here; I know I’m easy, but somehow I believe you’re even a softer piece o’ meat than I am. I want you to promise me that whatever happens you won’t pay that I O U.”

  Mellin moistened his lips in vain. He could not answer.

  “I want you to promise me not to pay it,” repeated Cooley earnestly.

  “I promise,” gasped Mellin.

  “You won’t pay it no matter what they do?”

  “No.”

  This seemed to reassure Mr. Cooley.

  “Well,” he said, “I’ve got to hustle to get my car shipped and make the train. Cornish has finished his job down here and he’s goin’ with me. I want to get out. The whole thing’s left a mighty bad taste in my mouth, and I’d go crazy if I didn’t get away from it. Why don’t you jump into your clothes and come along, too?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Well,” said the young man with a sympathetic shake of the head, “you certainly look sick. It may be better if you stay in bed till evening: a train’s a mighty mean place for the day after. But I wouldn’t hang around here too long. If you want money, all you have to do is to ask the hotel to cash a check on your home bank; they’re always glad to do that for Americans.” He turned to the door. “Mr. Cornish, if you’re goin’ to help me about shipping the car, I’m ready.”

  “So am I. Good-by, Mr. Mellin.”

  “Good-by,” Mellin said feebly— “and thank you.”

  Young Cooley came back to the bedside and shook the other’s feverish hand. “Good-by, ole man. I’m awful sorry it’s all happened, but I’m glad it didn’t cost you quite as much money as it did me. Otherwise I expect it’s hit us about equally hard. I wish — I wish I could find a nice one” — the youth gulped over something not unlike a sob— “as fascinatin’ as her!”

  Most people have had dreams of approaching dangers in the path of which their bodies remained inert; when, in spite of the frantic wish to fly, it was impossible to move, while all the time the horror crept closer and closer. This was Mellin’s state as he saw the young man going. It was absolutely necessary to ask Cooley for help, to beg him for a loan. But he could not.

  He saw Cooley’s hand on the doorknob; saw the door swing open.

  “Good-by, again,” Cooley said; “and good luck to you!”

  Mellin’s will strove desperately with the shame that held him silent.

  The door was closing.

  “Oh, Cooley,” called Mellin hoarsely.

  “Yes. What?”

  “J-j-just good-by,” said Mellin.

  And with that young Cooley was gone.

  IX. Expiation

  A MULTITUDINOUS CLANGOR of bells and a dozen neighboring chimes rang noon; then the rectangular oblongs of hot sunlight that fell from the windows upon the carpet of Mellin’s room began imperceptibly to shift their angles and move eastward. From the stone pavement of the street below came the sound of horses pawing and the voices of waiting cabmen; then bells again, and more bells; clamoring the slow and cruel afternoon into the past. But all was silent in Mellin’s room, save when, from time to time, a long, shuddering sigh came from the bed.

  The unhappy young man had again drawn the coverlet over his head, but not to sleep: it was more like a forlorn and desperate effort to hide, as if he crept into a hole, seeking darkness to cover the shame and fear that racked his soul. For though his shame had been too great to let him confess to young Cooley and ask for help, his fear was as great as his shame; and it increased as the hours passed. In truth his case was desperate. Except the people who had stripped him, Cooley was the only person in all of Europe with whom he had more than a very casual acquaintance. At home, in Cranston, he had no friends susceptible to such an appeal as it was vitally necessary for him to make. His relatives were not numerous: there were two aunts, the widows of his father’s brothers, and a number of old-maid cousins; and he had an uncle in Iowa, a country minister whom he had not seen for years. But he could not cable to any of these for money; nor could he quite conjure his imagination into picturing any of them sending it if he did. And even to cable he would have to pawn his watch, which was an old-fashioned one of silver and might not bring enough to pay the charges.

  He began to be haunted by fragmentary, prophetic visions — confused but realistic in detail, and horridly probable — of his ejectment from the hotel, perhaps arrest and trial. He wondered what they did in Italy to people who “beat” hotels; and, remembering what some one had told him of the dreadfulness of Italian jails, convulsive shudderings seized upon him.

  The ruddy oblongs of sunlight crawled nearer to the east wall of the room, stretching themselves thinner and thinner, until finally they were not there at all, and the room was left in deepening grayness. Carriages, one after the other, in unintermittent succession, rumbled up to the hotel-entrance beneath the window, bringing goldfish for the Pincio and the fountains of Villa Borghese. Wild strains from the Hungarian orchestra, rhapsodical twankings of violins, and the runaway arpeggios of a zither crazed with speed-mania, skipped along the corridors and lightly through Mellin’s door. In his mind’s eye he saw the gay crowd in the watery light, the little tables where only five days ago he had sat with the loveliest of all the anemone-like ladies....

  The beautifully-dressed tea-drinkers were there now, under the green glass dome, prattling and smiling, those people he had called his own. And as the music sounded louder, faster, wilder and wilder with the gipsy madness — then in that darkening bedchamber his soul became articulate in a cry of humiliation —

  “God in His mercy forgive me, how raw I was!”

  A vision came before his closed eyes; the maple-bordered street in Cranston, the long, straight, wide street where Mary Kramer lived; a summer twilight; Mary in her white muslin dress on the veranda steps, and a wistaria vine climbing the post beside her, half-embowering her. How cool and sweet and good she looked! How dear — and how kind! — she had always been to him.

  Dusk stole through the windows: the music
ceased and the tea-hour was over. The carriages were departing, bearing the gay people who went away laughing, calling last words to one another, and, naturally, quite unaware that a young man, who, five days before, had adopted them and called them “his own,” was lying in a darkened room above them, and crying like a child upon his pillow.

  X. The Cab at the Corner

  A TEN O’CLOCK, a page bearing a card upon a silver tray knocked upon the door, and stared with wide-eyed astonishment at the disordered gentleman who opened it.

  The card was Lady Mount-Rhyswicke’s. Underneath the name was written:

  If you are there will you give me a few minutes? I am waiting in a cab at the next corner by the fountain.

  Mellin’s hand shook as he read. He did not doubt that she came as an emissary; probably they meant to hound him for payment of the note he had given Sneyd, and at that thought he could have shrieked with hysterical laughter.

  “Do you speak English?” he asked.

  “Spik little. Yes.”

  “Who gave you this card?”

  “Coachman,” said the boy. “He wait risposta.”

  “Tell him to say that I shall be there in five minutes.”

  “Fi’ minute. Yes. Good-by.”

  Mellin was partly dressed — he had risen half an hour earlier and had been distractedly pacing the floor when the page knocked — and he completed his toilet quickly. He passed down the corridors, descended by the stairway (feeling that to use the elevator would be another abuse of the confidence of the hotel company) and slunk across the lobby with the look and the sensations of a tramp who knows that he will be kicked into the street if anybody catches sight of him.