meeting Whitaker's gaze openly. "I do," he repeated, flushing in his
turn, "but ... hopelessly.... However, that was the third reason," he
pursued in a more level voice--"I thought you ought to know about
it--that induced me to keep Sara Law's secret.... I loved her from the
day I found her. She has never looked twice at me.... But that's why I
never lost interest."
"You mean," Whitaker took him up diffidently--"you continued to--ah--?"
"Court her--as we say? No." Ember's shoulders, lifting, emphasized the
disclaimer. "I'm no fool: I mean I'm able to recognize a hopeless case
when it's as intimate to me as mine was--and is. Doubtless Mrs. Whitaker
understands--if she hasn't forgotten me by this time--but, if so, wholly
through intuition. I have had the sense not to invite the thunderbolt.
I've sat quietly in the background, watching her work out her
destiny--feeling a good deal like a god in the machine. She doesn't know
it, unless Max told her against my wish; but it was I who induced him to
take her from the ranks of a provincial stock company and bring her
before the public, four years ago, as _Joan Thursday_. Since then her
destiny has been rather too big a thing for me to tamper with; but I've
watched and wondered, sensing forces at work about her of which even she
was unsuspicious."
"What in blazes do you mean?" Whitaker demanded, mystified.
"Did it strike you to wonder at the extraordinary mob her farewell
performance attracted to-night--the rabble that packed the street,
though quite hopeless of even seeing the inside of the theatre?"
"Why--yes. It struck me as rather unusual. But then, Max had done
nothing but tell me of her tremendous popularity."
"That alone, great as it is, wouldn't have brought so many people
together to stare at the outside of a theatre. The magnet was something
stronger--the morbid curiosity of New York. Those people were waiting,
thrilled with expectancy, on tiptoe for--what do you think?"
"I shall think you mad in another moment, if you don't explain
yourself," Whitaker told him candidly.
Ember's smile flashed and vanished. "They were waiting for the sensation
that presently came to them: the report of Drummond's death."
"What the devil--!"
"Patience!... It had been discounted: if something of the sort hadn't
happened, New York would have gone to bed disappointed. The reason? This
is the third time it has happened--the same thing, practically: Sara Law
on the verge of leaving the stage to marry, a fatal accident
intervening. Did Max by any chance mention the nickname New York has
bestowed on Sara Law?"
"Nickname? No!"
"They call her 'The Destroying Angel.'"
"What damnable rot!"
"Yes; but what damnable coincidence. Three men loved her--and one by one
they died. And now the fourth. Do you wonder...?"
"Oh, but--'The Destroying Angel'--!" Whitaker cried indignantly. "How
can they blame her?"
"It isn't blame--it's superstition. Listen...."
Ember bent forward, holding Whitaker's gaze with intent, grave eyes.
"The first time," he said in a rapid undertone, "was a year or so after
her triumph as _Joan Thursday_. There were then two men openly
infatuated with her, a boy named Custer, and a man I believe you
knew--William Hamilton."
"I knew them both."
"Custer was making the pace; the announcement of his engagement to Sara
Law was confidently anticipated. He died suddenly; the coroner's jury
decided that he had misjudged the intentions of a loaded revolver.
People whispered of suicide, but it didn't look quite like that to me.
However ... Hamilton stepped into his place. Presently we heard that
Sara Law was to marry him and leave the stage. Hamilton had to go abroad
on business; on the return trip--the wedding was set for the day after
he landed here--he disappeared, no one knew how. Presumably he fell
overboard by accident one night; sane men with everything in the world
to live for do such things, you know--according to the newspapers."
"I understand you. Please go on."
"Approximately eighteen months later a man named Thurston--Mitchell
Thurston--was considered a dangerous aspirant for the hand of Sara Law.
He was exceedingly well fixed in a money way--a sort of dilettantish
architect, with offices in the Metropolitan Tower. One day at high noon
he left his desk to go to lunch at Martin's; crossing Madison Square, he
suddenly fell dead, with a bullet in his brain. It was a rifle bullet,
but though the square was crowded, no one had heard the report of the
shot, and no one was seen carrying a rifle. The conclusion was that he
had been shot down by somebody using a gun with a Maxim silencer, from a
window on the south side of the square. There were no clues."
"And now Drummond!" Whitaker exclaimed in horror. "Poor fellow! Poor
woman!"
A slightly sardonic expression modified the lines of Ember's mouth. "So
far as Mrs. Whitaker is concerned," he said with the somewhat pedantic
mode of speech which Whitaker was to learn to associate with his moments
of most serious concentration--"I echo the sentiment. But let us suspend
judgment on Drummond's case until we know more. It is not as yet an
established fact that he is dead."
"You mean there's hope--?"
"There's doubt," Ember corrected acidly--"doubt, at least, in my mind.
You see, I saw Drummond in the flesh, alive and vigorous, a good half
hour after he is reported to have leaped to his death."
"Where?"
"Coming up the stairs from the down-town Subway station in front of the
Park Avenue Hotel. He wore a hat pulled down over his eyes and an old
overcoat buttoned tight up to his chin. He was carrying a satchel
bearing the initials C. S. D., but was otherwise pretty thoroughly
disguised, and, I fancied, anxious enough to escape recognition."
"You're positive about this?"
"My dear man," said Ember with an air, "I saw his ear distinctly."
"His ear!"
"I never forget an ear; I've made a special study of them. They're
the last parts of the human anatomy that criminals ever think
to disguise; and, to the trained eye, as infallible a means of
identification--nearly--as thumb-prints. The man I saw coming up from
the Subway kept as much as possible away from the light; he had
successfully hidden most of his face; but he wore the inches, the
hand-bag, and the ear of Carter S. Drummond. I don't think I can be
mistaken."
"Did you stop him--speak to him?"
Ember shook his head. "No. I doubt if he would have remembered me. Our
acquaintance has been of the slightest, limited to a couple of meetings.
Besides, I was in a hurry to get to the theatre, and at that time had
heard nothing of this reputed suicide."
"Which way did he go?"
"Toward the Pennsylvania station, I fancy; that is, he turned west
through Thirty-third Street. I didn't follow--I was getting into a taxi
when I caught sight of him."
"But what did you think to see him disguised? Didn't it strike you as
curious?"
"Very," said Ember dryly. "At the same time, it was none of my
affair--then. Nor did it present itself to me as a matter worth meddling
with until, later, my suspicions were aroused by the scene in the
theatre--obviously the result of your appearance there--and still later,
when I heard the suicide report."
"But--good Lord!" Whitaker passed a hand across his dazed eyes. "What
can it mean? Why should he do this thing?"
"There are several possible explanations.... How long has Drummond known
that you were alive?"
"Since noon to-day."
"Not before?"
"Not to my knowledge."
"Still, it's possible. If he has a sensitive nature--I think he
hasn't--the shame of being found out, caught trying to marry your wife
when he had positive knowledge you still lived, may have driven him to
drop out of sight. Again.... May I ask, what was the extent of your
property in his trust?"
"A couple of hundred-thousands."
"And he believed you dead and was unable to find your widow ..."
"Oh, I don't think _that_!" Whitaker expostulated.
"Nor do I. We're merely considering possible explanations. There's a
third ..."
"Well?"
"He may have received a strong hint that he was nominated for the fate
that overtook young Custer, Hamilton and Thurston; and so planned to
give his disappearance the colour of a similar end."
"You don't mean to say _you_ think there was any method in that train of
tragedies?"
"I'm not in the least superstitious, my dear man. I don't for an instant
believe, as some people claim to, that Sara Law is a destroying angel,
hounded by a tragic fate: that her love is equivalent to the death
warrant of the man who wins it."
"But what do you think, then?"
"I think," said Ember, slowly, his gaze on the table, "that some one
with a very strong interest in keeping the young woman single--and on
the stage--"
"Max! Impossible!"
Ember shrugged. "In human nature, no madness is impossible. There's not
a shred of evidence against Jules Max. And yet--he's a gambler. All
theatrical managers are, of course; but Max is a card-fiend. The tale of
his plunging runs like wild-fire up and down Broadway, day by day. A
dozen times he's been on the verge of ruin, yet always he has had Sara
Law to rely upon; always he's been able to fall back upon that asset,
sure that her popularity would stave off bankruptcy. And he's
superstitious: he believes she is his mascot. I don't accuse him--I
suspect him, knowing him to be capable of many weird extravagances....
Furthermore, it's a fact that Max was a fellow-passenger with Billy
Hamilton when the latter disappeared in mid-ocean."
Ember paused and sat up, preparatory to rising. "All of which," he
concluded, "explains why I have trespassed upon your patience and your
privacy. It seemed only right that you should get the straight,
undistorted story from an unprejudiced onlooker. May I venture to add a
word of advice?"
"By all means."
"Have you told Max of your relations with Sara Law?"
"No."
"Or anybody else?"
"No."
"Then keep the truth to yourself--at least until this coil is
straightened out."
Ember got up. "Good night," he said pleasantly.
Whitaker took his hand, staring. "Good night," he echoed blankly.
"But--I say--why keep it quiet?"
Ember, turning to go, paused, his glance quietly quizzical. "You don't
mean to claim your wife?"
"On the contrary, I expect to offer no defence to her action for
divorce."
"Grounds of desertion?"
"I presume so."
"Just the same, keep it as quiet as possible until the divorce is
granted. If you live till then ... you may possibly continue to live
thereafter."
IX
ENTR'ACTE
Dawn of Sunday found Whitaker still awake. Alone in his uncheerful hotel
bedchamber, his chair tilted back against the wall, he sat smoking and
thinking, reviewing again and again every consideration growing out of
his matrimonial entanglement.
He turned in at length to the dreamless slumbers of mental exhaustion.
The morning introduced him to a world of newspapers gone mad and
garrulous with accounts of the sensation of the preceding night. What
they told him only confirmed the history of his wife's career as
detailed by the gratuitous Mr. Ember. There was, however, no suggestion
in any report that Drummond had not in fact committed suicide--this,
despite the total disappearance of the hypothetical corpse. No doubts
seemed to have arisen from the circumstance that there had been,
apparently, but a single witness of the _felo de se_. A man, breathless
with excitement, had run up to the nearest policeman with word of what
he claimed to have seen. In the subsequent confusion he had vanished.
And so thoroughly, it seemed, had the mind of New York been prepared for
some fatal accident to this latest lover of Sara Law that no one dreamed
of questioning the authenticity of the report.
Several sensational sheets ran exhaustive resumes, elaborately
illustrated, of the public life of "The Destroying Angel."
Some remarked the fact that little or nothing was known of the history
of Sara Law prior to her appearance, under the management of Jules Max,
as _Joan Thursday_.
Whitaker learned that she had refused herself to the reporters who
besieged her residence.
It seemed to be an unanimous assumption that the news of Drummond's
suicide had in some manner been conveyed to the woman while on the
stage.
No paper mentioned the name of Whitaker....
In the course of the forenoon a note for Whitaker was delivered at the
hotel.
The heavy sheet of white paper, stamped with the address in
Fifty-seventh Street, bore this message in a strong but nervous hand:
"I rely upon the generosity you promise me. This marriage of ours,
that is no marriage, must be dissolved. Please let my
attorneys--Landers, Grimshaw & Clark, 149 Broadway--know when and
where you will accept service. Forgive me if I seem ungrateful and
unfeeling. I am hardly myself. And please do not try to see me now.
Some day I hope to see and thank you; to-day--it's impossible. I am
going away to forget, if I can.
"MARY LADISLAS WHITAKER."
Before nightfall Whitaker had satisfied himself that his wife had, in
truth, left her town house. The servants there informed all who inquired
that they had been told to report and to forward all letters to Messrs.
Landers, Grimshaw & Clark.
Whitaker promptly notified those attorneys that he was ready to be
served at their convenience. He further desired them to inform their
client that her suit would be uncontested. But beyond their brief and
business-like acknowledgment, he heard nothing more of the action for
divorce.
He sought Max several times without success. When at length run to
ground in the roulette room of a Forty-fourth Street gambling-house, the
manager was grimly reticent. He professed complete ignorance of his
star's welfare and whereabouts. He advised Whitaker to consult the
newspapers, if his interest was so insatiable.
Warned by the manager's truculent and suspicious tone that his secret
was, after all, buried no more than skin-deep, Whitaker dissembled
artfully his anxiety, and abandoned Max to his pet vices.
The newspapers reported Sara Law as being in retirement in several
widely separated sections of the country. She was also said to have gone
abroad, sailing incognito by a second-class steamship from Philadelphia.
The nine-days' wonder disintegrated naturally. The sobriquet of "The
Destroying Angel" disappeared from the newspaper scare-heads. So also
the name of Drummond. Hugh Morten Whitaker, the dead man come to life,
occupied public interest for a brief half-day. By the time that the
executors of Carter Drummond and the attorneys representing his clients
began to make sense of his estate and interests, their discoveries
failed to command newspaper space.
This phenomenon was chiefly due to the fact that Whitaker didn't care to
raise an outcry about his loss. Ember, it seemed, had guessed shrewdly:
Drummond had appropriated to his own uses every dollar of the small
fortune left in his care by his erstwhile partner. No other client of
his had suffered, however. His peculations had been confined wholly to
the one quarter whence he had had every reason to anticipate neither
protest nor exposure. In Whitaker's too-magnanimous opinion, the man had
not been so much a thief as one who yielded to the temptation to convert
to his own needs and uses a property against which, it appeared, no
other living being cared to enter a claim.
Whether or not he had ever learned or guessed that Sara Law was the wife
of Whitaker, remained problematic. Whitaker inclined to believe that
Drummond had known--that he had learned the truth from the lips of his
betrothed wife. But this could not be determined save through her. And
she kept close hidden.
The monetary loss was an inconsiderable thing to a man with an interest
in mines in the Owen Stanley country. He said nothing. Drummond's name
remained untarnished, save in the knowledge of a few.
Of these, Martin Ember was one. Whitaker made a point of hunting him up.
The retired detective received confirmation of his surmise without any
amazement.
"You still believe that he's alive?"
"Implicitly," Ember asserted with conviction.
"Could you find him, if necessary?"
"Within a day, I think. Do you wish me to?"
"I don't know..."
Ember permitted Whitaker to consider the matter in silence for some
moments. Then, "Do you want advice?" he inquired.
"Well?"
"Hunt him down and put him behind the bars," said Ember instantly.
"What's the good of that?"
"Your personal safety."
"How?"
"Don't you suppose he misses all he's been accustomed to?--living as he
does in constant terror of being discovered, the life of a hunted thing,
one of the under-world, an enemy of society! Don't you suppose he'd be
glad to regain all he's lost--business, social position, the esteem of
his friends, the love of a woman who will soon be free to marry him?"
"Well?"
"With you out of the way, he could come back without fear."
"Oh--preposterous!"
"_Is_ it?"
"Drummond's not that sort. He's weak, perhaps, but no criminal."
"A criminal is the creature of a warped judgment. There'd be no
criminals if every one were able to attain his desires within the law.
Misfortunes breed weird maggots in a man's brain. Drummond's dragging
out a wretched existence in a world of false perspectives; he's not to
be blamed if he presently begins to see things as they are not."
Ember permitted another pause to lengthen, unbroken by Whitaker.
"Shall I try to find him for you?" he asked quietly, in the end.
"No," Whitaker decided. "No. Let him alone--poor devil!"
Ember disclaimed further responsibility with a movement of his
shoulders.
"But my wife? Could you find her as readily?"
"Possibly," the detective admitted cautiously. "But I don't mean to."
"Why not?"
"Because you don't want me to. Do you?"
"No..."
"But principally because she doesn't want me to. Otherwise she'd let you
know where to look for her."
"True."
These fragments of dialogue are from a conversation that took place in
the month of June, nearly seven weeks after the farewell performance at
the Theatre Max. Interim, Whitaker had quietly resumed his place in the
life of the town, regaining old friendships, renewing old associations.
Save for the fact that he pursued no gainful occupation, all with him
was much as it had been: as if the intervening six years of exile had
been blotted out, or had never been. The mild excitement occasioned by
his reappearance had already subsided; he was again an accepted and
substantial factor in the society of his kind.
He had abandoned all thought of returning to New Guinea, entertained,
indeed, no inclination whatever to do so. The life he now led was more
or less normal to him. Yet he was sensible of a growing restlessness. He
had nothing to busy himself with: this was the unguessed secret of his
unsettled temper. And the approach of hot weather was narrowing the
circle of his acquaintances. People were leaving town daily, for Europe,
for the seashore, for the mountains.
He began to receive invitations for week-ends and longer visits out of
town. A few of the former he accepted--always, however, returning to New
York with a sense of necessity strong upon his spirit. Something held
him there, some influence elusive of analysis. He was discontented, but
felt that he could not find content elsewhere.
Gradually he began to know more hours of loneliness than suited his
tastes. His rooms--the old rooms overlooking Bryant Park, regained and
refurnished much as they had been six years before--knew his solitary
presence through many a long evening. July came with blistering breath,
and he took to the Adirondacks, meaning to be gone a month. Within ten
days he was home again, drawn back irresistibly by that strange
insatiable craving of unformulated desire. Town bored him, yet he could
not seem to rest away from it.
He wandered in and out, up and down, an unquiet, irresolute soul,
tremendously perplexed....
There came one dark and sultry night, heavy beneath skies overcast, in
August. Whitaker left a roof-garden in the middle of a stupid
performance, and walked the streets till long after midnight, courting
the fatigue that alone could bestow untroubled sleep. On his return, a
sleepy hall-boy with a wilted collar ran the elevator up to his
tenth-floor landing and, leaving him fumbling at the lock of his door,
dropped clankingly out of sight. Whitaker entered and shut himself in
with the pitch-blackness of his private hall.
He groped along the wall for the electric switch, and found only the
shank of it--the hard-rubber button having disappeared. And then, while
still he was trying to think how this could have happened, he sustained
a murderous assault.
A miscalculation on the part of the marauder alone saved him. The
black-jack (or whatever the weapon was) missing his head by the
narrowest shave, descended upon his left shoulder with numbing force.
Notwithstanding his pain and surprise, Whitaker rallied and grappled,
thus escaping a second and possibly more deadly blow.
But his shoulder was almost useless, and the pain of it began to sicken
him, while the man in his grip fought like a devil unchained. He found
himself wedged back into a corner, brutal fingers digging deep into the
flesh round his windpipe. He fought desperately to escape strangulation.
Eventually he struggled out of the corner and gave ground through the
doorway into his sitting-room.
For some minutes the night in that quiet room, high above the city, was
rendered wild and violent with the crashes of overthrown furniture and
the thud and thump of struggling bodies. Then by some accident little
short of miraculous, Whitaker broke free and plunged across the room in
what he imagined to be the direction of a dresser in which he kept a
revolver. His foot slipped on the hardwood floor, the ankle twisted, and
he fell awkwardly, striking his head against a table-leg with such force
that he lay half-stunned. An instant later his assailant emptied five
chambers of a revolver into the darkness about him, and then, alarmed by
a racket of pounding on the hall door, fled successfully by way of the
fire-escape to adjoining roofs and neighbouring back-yards.
By the time Whitaker was able to pull himself together and hobble to the
door, a brace of intelligent policemen who had been summoned by the
hall-boy were threatening to break it down. Admitted, they took his
safety into their care and, simultaneously, the revolver which he
incautiously admitted possessing. Later they departed, obviously
disgruntled by the unprofessional conduct of the "crook" who had left no
"clues," with a warning to the house-holder that he might expect to be
summoned to court, as soon as he was able to move, to answer for the
crime of keeping a weapon of defence.
Whitaker took to his bed in company with a black temper and the aroma of
arnica.
He entertained, the next day, several persons: reporters; a physician; a
futile, superfluous, unornamental creature misleadingly designated a
plain-clothes man; finally his friend (by now their acquaintance had
warmed to real friendship) Ember.
The retired investigator found Whitaker getting into his clothes: a
ceremony distinguished by some profanity and numerous grunts.
"Afternoon," he said, taking a chair and surveying the sufferer with
slightly masked amusement. "Having a good time?"
"You go to thunder!" said Whitaker in disgust.
"Glad to see you're not hurt much," pursued the other, unabashed.
Whitaker withered him with a glare. "I suppose it's nothing to have a
shoulder and arm black-and-blue to the elbow! a bump on the side of my
head as big as a hard-boiled egg! a bruised throat and an ankle next
door to sprained! Oh, no--I'm not much hurt!"
"You're lucky to be alive," observed Ember, exasperatingly philosophic.
"A lot you know about it!"
"I'm a canny little guesser," Ember admitted modestly.
"Where'd you get your information, then?"
Ember waved a non-committal hand. "I hear things...."
"Oh, yes--you know a lot. I suppose you could lay this thug by the heels
in a brace of shakes?"
"Just about," Ember admitted placidly. "I wouldn't mind trying."
"Then why don't you?" Whitaker demanded heatedly.
"I had a notion you wouldn't want me to."
Whitaker stared aggressively. "You mean ... Drummond?"
The answer was a nod.
"I don't believe it."