In one way Howard had been correct in his surmise. It had been Lily's
idea to go to a hotel until she had made some definite plan. She would
telephone Louis then, and the rest--she did not think beyond that. She
called a taxi and took a small bag with her, but in the taxicab she
suddenly realized that she could not go to any of the hotels she knew.
She would be recognized at once.
She wanted a little time to herself, time to think. And before it was
discovered that she had left Cardew Way she must see Louis, and judge
again if he intended to act in good faith. While he was with her,
reiterating his promises, she believed him, but when he was gone, she
always felt, a curious doubt.
She thought then of finding a quiet room somewhere, and stopping the
cab, bought a newspaper. It was when she was searching for the “rooms
for rent” column that she saw he had been attacked and slightly injured.
They had got him. He had said that if they ever suspected him of playing
them false they would get him, and now they had done so. That removed
the last doubt of his good faith from her mind. She felt indignation and
dismay, and a sort of aching consciousness that always she brought only
trouble to the people who cared for her; she felt that she was going
through her life, leaving only unhappiness behind her.
He had suffered, and for her.
She told the chauffeur to go to the Benedict Apartments, and sitting
back read the notice again. He had been attacked by two masked men and
badly bruised, after putting up a terrific resistance. They would
wear masks, of course. They loved the theatrical. Their very flag was
theatrical. And he had made a hard fight That was like him, too; he was
a fighter.
She was a Cardew, and she loved strength. There were other men, men like
Willy Cameron, for instance, who were lovable in many ways, but they
were not fighters. They sat back, and let life beat them, and they took
the hurt bravely and stoically. But they never got life by the throat
and shook it until it gave up what they wanted.
She had never been in a bachelors' apartment house before, and she
was both frightened and self-conscious. The girl at the desk eyed her
curiously while she telephoned her message, and watched her as she moved
toward the elevator. “Ever seen her before?” she said to the hall boy.
“No. She's a new one.”
“Face's kind of familiar to me,” said the telephone girl, reflectively.
“Looks worried, doesn't she? Two masked men! Huh! All Sam took up there
last night was a thin fellow with a limp.”
The hall boy grinned.
“Then his limp didn't bother him any. Sam says y'ought to seen that
place.”
In the meantime, outside the door of Akers' apartment, Lily's fine
courage almost left her. Had it not been for the eyes of the elevator
man, fixed on her while he lounged in his gateway, she might have gone
away, even then. But she stood there, committed to a course of action,
and rang.
Louis himself admitted her, an oddly battered Louis, in a dressing gown
and slippers; an oddly watchful Louis, too, waiting, after the manner of
men of his kind the world over, to see which way the cat would jump.
He had had a bad day, and his nerves were on edge. All day he had sat
there, unable to go out, and had wondered just when Cameron would see
her and tell her about Edith Boyd. For, just as Willy Cameron rushed him
for the first time, there had been something from between clenched teeth
about marrying another girl, under the given circumstances. Only that
had not been the sort of language in which it was delivered.
“I just saw about it in the newspaper,” Lily said. “How dreadful,
Louis.”
He straightened himself and drew a deep breath. The game was still his,
if he played it right.
“Bad enough, dear,” he said, “but I gave them some trouble, too.” He
pushed a chair toward her. “It was like you to come. But I don't like
your seeing me all mussed up, little girl.”
He made a move then to kiss her, but she drew back.
“Please!” she said. “Not here. And I can't sit down. I can't stay. I
only came because I wanted to tell you something and I didn't want to
telephone it. Louis, Jim Doyle knew about those bombs last night. He
didn't want it to happen before the election, but--that doesn't alter
the fact, does it?”
“How do you know he knew?”
“I do know. That's all. And I have left Aunt Elinor's.”
“No!”
“I couldn't stay, could I?” She looked up at him, the little wistful
glance that Willy always found so infinitely touching, like the appeal
of a willful but lovable child, that has somehow got into trouble. “And
I can't go home, Louis, unless I--”
“Unless you give me up,” he finished for her. “Well?”
She hesitated. She hated making terms with him, and yet somehow she must
make terms.
“Well?” he repeated. “Are you going to throw me over?”
Apparently merely putting the thought into words crystallized all his
fears of the past hours; seeing her there, too, had intensified his want
of her. She stood there, where he had so often dreamed of seeing her,
but still holding him off with the aloofness that both chilled and
inflamed him, and with a question in her eyes. He held out his arms, but
she drew back.
“Do you mean what you have said, Louis, about leaving them, if I marry
you, and doing all you can to stop them?”
“You know I mean it.”
“Then--I'll not go home.”
“You are going to marry me? Now?”
“Whenever you say.”
Suddenly she was trembling violently, and her lips felt dry and stiff.
He pushed her into a chair, and knelt down beside her.
“You poor little kid,” he said, softly.
Through his brain were racing a hundred thoughts; Lily his, in his arms,
in spite of that white-faced drug clerk with the cold eyes; himself in
the Cardew house, one of them, beating old Anthony Cardew at his own
cynical game; and persistently held back and often rising again to the
surface, Woslosky and Doyle and the others, killers that they were,
pursuing him with their vengeance over the world. They would have to be
counted in; they were his price, as he, had he known it, was Lily's.
“My wife!” he said. “My wife.”
She stiffened in his arms.
“I must go, Louis,” she said. “I can't stay here. I felt very queer
downstairs. They all stared so.”
There was a clock on the mantel shelf, and he looked at it. It was a
quarter before five.
“One thing is sure, Lily,” he said. “You can't wander about alone,
and you are right--you can't stay here. They probably recognized you
downstairs. You are pretty well known.”
For the first time it occurred to her that she had compromised herself,
and that the net, of her own making, was closing fast about her.
“I wish I hadn't come.”
“Why? We can fix that all right in a jiffy.”
But when he suggested an immediate marriage she made a final struggle.
In a few days, even to-morrow, but not just then. He listened,
impatiently, his eyes on the clock. Beside it in the mirror he saw his
own marred face, and it added to his anger. In the end he took control
of the situation; went into his bedroom, changed into a coat, and came
out again, ready for the street. He telephoned down for a taxicab, and
then confronted her, his face grim.
“I've let you run things pretty much to suit yourself, Lily,” he said.
“Now I'm in charge. It won't be to-morrow or next week or next month. It
will be now. You're here. You've given them a chance to talk downstairs.
You've nowhere to go, and you're going to marry me at once.”
In the cab he explained more fully. They would get a license, and then
go to one of the hotels. There they could be married, in their own
suite.
“All regularly and in order, honey,” he said, and kissed her hand. She
had hardly heard. She was staring ahead, not thinking, not listening,
not seeing, fighting down a growing fear of the man before her, of his
sheer physical proximity, of his increasing exuberance.
“I'm mad about you, girl,” he said. “Mad. And now you are going to be
mine, until death do us part.”
She shivered and drew away, and he laughed a little. Girls were like
that, at such times. They always took a step back for every two steps
forward. He let her hand go, and took a careful survey of his face in
the mirror of the cab. The swelling had gone down, but that bruise below
his eye would last for days. He cursed under his breath.
It was after nine o'clock when one of the Cardew cars stopped not far
from the Benedict Apartments, and Willy Cameron got out.
He was quite certain that Louis Akers would know where Lily was, and
he anticipated the interview with a sort of grim humor. There might
be another fight; certainly Akers would try to get back at him for the
night before. But he set his jaw. He would learn where Lily was if
he had to choke the knowledge out of that leering devil's thick white
throat. His arrival in the foyer of the Benedict Apartments caused more
than a ripple of excitement.
“Well, look who's here!” muttered the telephone girl, and watched his
approach, with its faint limp, over the top of her desk. Behind, from
his cage, the elevator man was staring with avid interest.
“I suppose Mr. Akers is in?” said Willy Cameron, politely. The girl
smiled up at him.
“I'll say he ought to be, after last night! What're you going to do now?
Kill him?”
In spite of his anxiety there was a faint twinkle in Willy Cameron's
eyes.
“No,” he said slowly. “No. I think not. I want to talk to him.”
“Sam,” called the telephone girl, “take this gentleman up to
forty-three.”
“Forty-three's out.” Sam partly shut the elevator door; he had seen
Forty-three's rooms the night before, and he had the discretion of his
race. “Went out with a lady at quarter to five.”
Willy Cameron took a step or two toward the cage.
“You don't happen to be lying, I suppose?”
“No, sir!” said Sam. “I'll take you up to look, if you like. And about
an hour ago he sent a boy here with a note, to get some of his clothes.
The young lady at the desk was out at the movies at the time.”
“I was getting my supper, Sam.”
Willy Cameron had gone very white.
“Did the boy say where he was taking the things?”
“To the Saint Elmo Hotel, sir.”
On the street again Willy Cameron took himself fiercely in hand. There
were a half-dozen reasons why Akers might go to the Saint Elmo. He
might, for one thing, have thought that he, Cameron, would go back to
the Benedict. He might be hiding from Dan, or from reporters. But there
had been, apparently, no attempt to keep his new quarters secret. If
Lily was at the Saint Elmo--
He found a taxicab, and as it drew up at the curb before the hotel he
saw the Cardew car moving away. It gave him his first real breath for
twenty minutes. Lily was not there.
But Louis Akers was. He got his room number from a clerk and went up,
still determinedly holding on to himself. Afterwards he had no clear
recollection of any interval between the Benedict and the moment he
found himself standing outside a door on an upper floor of the Saint
Elmo. From that time on it was as clear as crystal, his own sudden calm,
the overturning of a chair inside, a man's voice, slightly raised, which
he recognized, and then the thin crash of a wineglass dropped or thrown
to the floor.
He opened the door and went in.
In the center of the sitting room a table was set, and on it the
remains of a dinner for two. Akers was standing by the table, his chair
overturned behind him, a splintered glass at his feet, staring angrily
at the window. Even then Willy Cameron saw that he had had too much to
drink, and that he was in an ugly mood. He was in dinner clothes, but
with his bruised face and scowling brows he looked a sinister imitation
of a gentleman.
By the window, her back to the room, was Lily.
Neither of them glanced at the door. Evidently the waiter had been
moving in and out, and Akers considered him as little as he would a dog.
“Come and sit down,” he said angrily. “I've quit drinking, I tell you.
Good God, just because I've had a little wine--and I had the hell of a
time getting it--you won't eat and won't talk. Come here.”
“I'm not hungry.”
“Come here.”
“Stay where you are, Lily,” said Willy Cameron, from inside the closed
door. “Or perhaps you'd better get your wraps. I came to take you home.”
Akers had wheeled at the voice, and now stood staring incredulously.
First anger, and then a grin of triumph, showed in his face. Drink had
made him not so much drunk as reckless. He had lost last night, but
to-day he had won.
“Hello, Cameron,” he said.
Willy Cameron ignored him.
“Will you come?” he said to Lily.
“I can't, Willy.”
“Listen, Lily dear,” he said gravely. “Your father is searching the city
for you. Do you know what that means? Don't you see that you must go
home at once? You can't dine here in a private suite, like this, and not
expose yourself to all sorts of talk.”
“Go on,” said Akers, leering. “I like to hear you.”
“Especially,” continued Willy Cameron, “with a man like this.”
Akers took a step toward him, but he was not too sure of himself, and
he knew now that the other man had a swing to his right arm like the
driving rod of a locomotive. He retreated again to the table, and his
hand closed over a knife there.
“Louis!” Lily said sharply.
He picked up the knife and smiled at her, his eyes cunning. “Not going
to kill him, my dear,” he said. “Merely to give him a hint that I'm not
as easy as I was last night.”
That was a slip, and he knew it. Lily had left the window and come
forward, a stricken slip of a girl, and he turned to her angrily.
“Go into the other room and close the door,” he ordered. “When I've
thrown this fellow out, you can come back.”
But Lily's eyes were fixed on Willy Cameron's face.
“It was you last night?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Willy Cameron said steadily, “he had got a girl into trouble,
and then insulted her. I wouldn't tell you, but you've got to know the
truth before it's too late.”
Lily threw out both hands dizzily, as though catching for support. But
she steadied herself. Neither man moved.
“It is too late, Willy,” she said. “I have just married him.”