“Ten thousand dollars is a great deal of money!” said Frank, easily,
with a languid shrug of her shoulders.
“It _is_ a great deal! But we’re up against a great deal! If we had
twice as much, it would be even better. I have a possible twelve hundred
now, altogether—just a scrawny, miserable twelve hundred! I got most of
it yesterday, through dabbling in this cotton of Curry’s. Tomorrow
morning every cent of it goes down to Robinson & Little, and if the
market is moderately steady, and he takes a two dollar margin, knowing
what I do, it means I double that amount before the day’s trading is
over.”
“Robinson & Little? Who are they? New friends of yours?”
“They are the big Wall Street people. I had to pay two hundred
dollars—in I. O. U. form,—for a letter to that firm. I still have a
suspicion it was forged, too. I’ve been getting acquainted with them,
however, and showing them that I’m all right. When the eleventh hour
comes, and when I have to cut in on Curry’s Postal-Union wire down-town,
we’ll have to tear around to Robinson & Little’s, flop over with the
market, and buy cotton short, on a stop-order. It all depends upon what
margin we may have to put up, whether we make forty thousand dollars, or
a hundred and forty thousand dollars. Curry, you may be sure, will try
to start the thing off as quietly as possible. So a normal market will
bring a more normal margin, and give us something worth while to play
on!”
“Something worth while?” she mused absently. Then she came and stood by
Durkin, and studied his face once more. Some sense of his isolation, of
his unhappy aloofness from his kind, touched and wrung her feeling. She
caught at his arm with a sudden companionable enthusiasm, and joined him
in pacing the room.
“After all, there _would_ be something big, and wide, and sweeping about
this sort of work, wouldn’t there?”
“Yes; it’s a blamed sight better than pool-room piking!” he cried. “It’s
living; it’s doing things!”
“I believe I could plunge in it, and glory in it!” she went on,
consolingly.
“There’s just one drawback—just one nasty little blot on the face of
the fun,” he ventured, catching at the sustaining arm of her enthusiasm.
“And that is—?”
“We’ve got to get this ten thousand dollars just for a day or two!”
“But have you any idea as to how, or where, or when?”
“Yes, I have,” he answered, looking at her steadily. There seemed to be
some covert challenge in his glance, but she faced him unwaveringly.
“Say it out, Jim; I’m not afraid!”
“I mean _you_ must get it! You’ve got to borrow it!”
He began bravely enough, but he hesitated before the startled scorn on
her face.
“You mean I’ve—I’ve got to steal it?”
He held up a protesting hand. Then he went to the half-open door of her
inner room and closed it carefully.
“No; as I said before, we can not and must not steal it. It may be
called theft, of course, but every cent of it will be returned. No, no;
listen to me—I have it all figured out. Only, it has to be done this
very night!”
“Tonight?” she said, with a reproving little cry.
“Yes, tonight! And that is why I’ve been desperate, of course, and have
been looping every telephone wire that runs near my up-town room, hoping
against hope for a chance to pick up something to work on. The only
thing that gave me that chance was Theodore Van Schaick’s house wire.
Now, listen. Two days ago his daughter Lydia came of age. I could tell
you most of the things she got, and how she has been ’phoning gratitude
and thanks and girlish messages out round the city. But among other
things Miss Lydia Van Schaick received from her father, was a small and
neat bundle not long out of the Sub-Treasury. It was made up of one
hundred equally neat little pieces of parchment, and each one of them is
a one-hundred dollar banknote.”
“And I’m to crawl through one of her windows, and burglarize the house
of this amount!”
“No, no, Frank—listen to me a moment. Yesterday, Miss Lydia telephoned
her Uncle Cedric about this money. Not being used to a small fortune in
ready cash, naturally, she feels nervous about having it around, and
wants to put it somewhere. Her level-headed old Uncle Cedric advised her
to take it down tomorrow to the Second National Bank, and open a deposit
account with it. And this Lydia intends to do. Tonight her ten thousand
dollars are laid carefully away in a glove-box, in one of her chiffonier
drawers, in her own private bedroom. So tonight is our only chance!”
“Couldn’t I sand-bag her in the morning, on her way down-town?” demanded
Frances, with mock seriousness. She had learned not to ask too much of
life, and she was struggling to school herself to the thought of this
new rôle.
“No, my dear girl; it can be done so much easier than that. Her mother
and her younger sister are still at Driftwood, their summer place in
Mamaroneck. At four o’clock this afternoon they sent into the city a
certain Miss Annie Seabrooke. She is a St. Luke’s graduate, a
professional nurse who has been looking after old Mrs. Van Schaick. This
lady, apparently, is a good deal of a hypochondriac. The nurse, of
course, has to get things ready for her patient’s return. I have already
met Miss Seabrooke at the Grand Central Station. I have also, at Miss
Lydia’s urgent request, installed her at the Holland House, over night.
This, by the way, is the lady’s bag. I tried to explain to her that the
whole Van Schaick house wants to be given over to Miss Lydia’s
coming-of-age function.”
Frances, already carried down again by her tidal reaction of feeling,
watched him through narrowed and abstracted eyes.
“In this bag, among other things, you’ll find a nurse’s uniform,” Durkin
went on hurriedly, oblivious of her scrutiny. “It will fit a little
loose, I’m afraid—Miss Seabrooke is a big, wide-shouldered Canadian
girl. And in forty or fifty minutes from now you ought to be inside that
uniform and inside the Van Schaick house—if we ever want to carry this
thing through!”
“And then—?” she asked, in her dead and impersonal voice, as though her
thoughts were leagues away.
“Then,” cried Durkin, “then you’ve got to get hold of a glove-box in
Miss Lydia Van Schaick’s chiffonier drawer. By some means or other we’ve
got to get hold of that box, and—”
She stopped him, by holding up a sudden silencing hand. Her face was
white and set; he could see none of the iris of her eyes.
“It’s no use!” she said, evenly and quietly. “It’s no use. I can not and
will not do it!”
Durkin fell back from her, aghast. Then he took her by the arm, and
turned her about so that the light fell on her face. He could see that
her lower lip was trembling.
“You back down—_now_?” he demanded, with a touch of incredulity.
“Yes, I back down!” she answered, letting her eyes meet his.
“Why—” he began, inadequately. “What is it?”
“It’s simply this, Jim,” she answered him—and her voice, now, was high
and thin and unmodulated, constricted, by some inward tension, to a
gramophonic tumult of syllables. “There has got to be a limit,
somewhere. At some point we have got to draw the line. We have been
forgetting a great many things. But I can not and will not be a common
thief—for you—or for anything you can bring to me—or to my life!”
“You say _that_?”
“Yes, I do; and if you cared for me—if you thought of my feelings—if
you thought of my happiness, you would never ask me to do such
things—you would never make me suffer like this!”
He threw up his hands with what was almost a gesture of exasperation.
“But you will _not_ be a common thief—it will not be stealing at all!
Can’t you see that?”
“No, I can not. And you know as well as I know, that when we try to
justify it we do it only by a quibble!”
“But I tell you every penny of that money will go back where it came
from!”
“Then why can’t we go to Lydia Van Schaick and ask her to lend us the
money?”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“No more so than what you propose!”
Durkin, drawing back from her, closed his right fist and with it pounded
angrily on the palm of his left hand.
“If you’re going to back down I _will_ go to Lydia Van Schaick, and I’ll
get her money, too. I’ll go as a second-story man, as a porch-climber!
I’ll go after that money as a common burglar and house-breaker. But I’ll
get it, in the end, or know the reason why!”
“Oh!” she gasped, horrified. “You wouldn’t! You couldn’t!”
“I say I will!” he cried, in a passion.
“Oh, you couldn’t!” she reiterated.
“Couldn’t I?—I’ve got this machinery started, and it’s going to be kept
moving!”
Something in the scene carried her years back, to the times when her
father, emerging from his prolonged orgies, sick and shaken, stormed and
wept for the brandy she struggled to keep away from him—and the
struggle would end only, when in fear of his collapse, she surrendered
the bottle to his quivering fingers.
“My God—I’ve _got_ to have it!” Durkin was crying and storming.
There crept over her the same, slowly eviscerating pity for the defiant
man who now stood before her, so tragically weak in his very protests of
strength.
She turned and caught at his arm, with a sudden inward surrender that
left her dazed and tottering. She struggled in vain to keep down her
tears, once more torn by that old and costly and compromising hunger to
be loved and sustained by him. She could not live in the face of his
anger; she could not endure his hate. And the corroding bitterness, the
gnawing tragedy, of her life lay in the fact that the arm to which she
must turn for support was the very arm that would forever drag and hold
her down.
Yet she was inarticulate, in the face of it all. She could not plead;
she could not explain. She could only break out with a sudden
unreasoning and passionate cry of: “_You are not kind to me!_”
Durkin had already shaken her hand from his arm, and was on the point of
a second outburst. Then he stopped, and the gathering anger and revolt
ebbed out of his face, for at that tearful and passionate cry from her
he knew that the battle between them had come to an end. He knew, with
an exultation in which even pity and cruelty were strangely entangled,
that it was a sign of her inward capitulation, that he had won her over.
“Frank!”
He swung about, suddenly, and with one clasp of his arms let wide the
flood-gates of her strained emotions.
“Good God!” he cried. “You know I hate it, as much as you do! But can’t
you see it’s too late now, to quibble and vacillate? Can’t you see that
I’m getting nothing more out of it than you?”
He pleaded with her, hotly, impetuously. He showed her how he needed
her, how he was helpless without her. He held her, and kissed the tears
from her unhappy eyes—he could see them droop, pitifully, as with a
narcotic, at his first intimate and tender touch. He would have to sway
her now, he felt, not through her judgment, not by open attack, but only
by those more circuitous and subterranean approaches of feminine
feeling. And still he expostulated and pleaded, unnerving and breaking
her will with his cruel kindnesses of word and caress.
“Oh, I’ll do it!” she cried, at last, mopping her stained face. “I’ll do
it, Jim, if I have to!”
“But there’s nothing so terrible in it, Dear Heart,” he assuaged. “We’ve
been through worse things together. And it will be made right again,
every penny of it!”
“Jim,” she said slowly, as she grew calmer once more; “Jim, I want you
to give me your word of honor that it _will_ be made right! I’m—I’m too
cowardly, yet, to do a thing that’s wickedness, through and through.
I’ve got to see some glimmer of right in it, I’ve got to feel that it
will end right, even—”
“But this _will_ end right! It can’t help it. I give you my word of
honor, now, to save you from being what you might seem, that every cent
of this woman’s money goes back to her.”
She was moving her head slowly up and down, as she studied his face.
“Then you must remember, through it all, how much I’m trusting myself to
you,” she said, with a forlornness that brought a lump in his throat, as
she looked about the room with hopeless eyes. “Do you realize how hard
all this is going to be?”
“It’s not easy, I know—but it’s our only chance.”
“_Is_ it our only chance?” she suddenly asked. “Life is full of chances.
I saw one today, if I’d only known.”
She looked at him again, with some new light sifting through all her
tangle of clouds. “Yes,” she went on, more hopefully, “there _might_ be
still another way!”
“Well?” he asked, almost impatiently, as he glanced at his watch.
“It was something that happened when I went into that little
Postal-Union office at Broadway and Thirty-seventh Street.” She was
speaking rapidly now, with a touch of his former fire. “The relays and
everything are in the same room, you know, behind the counter and a wire
screen. I wanted my dressmaker, and while I was sitting at a little
side-desk chewing my pen-handle and trying to boil seventeen words down
to ten, a man came in with a rush message. I could see him out of the
corner of my eye. It was Sunset Bryan, the race-track plunger, and it
occurred to me that it might be worth while to know what he was sending
out.”
“Did he see you, or does he know you?”
“I took good pains that he shouldn’t see me. So I scrawled away on my
blank, and just sat there and read the ticker as the operator took the
despatches off the file and sent them out. Here is the wording of Sunset
Bryan’s message, as well as I can remember it:
‘Duke—of—Kendall—runs—tomorrow—get—wise—and—wire—St.
Louis—and—South!’”
“Well, what of it?” Durkin asked.
“Why, this Bryan is the man who took one hundred and ten thousand
dollars out of the Aqueduct ring in one day. Since the Gravesend Meeting
began, people say he has made nearly half a million. He’s a sort of
race-track Curry. He keeps close figures on every race he plays. He has
one hundred men and more on his pay roll, and makes his calculations
after the most minute investigating and figuring. It stands to reason
that he manipulates a little, though the Pinkerton men, as I suppose you
know, have never been able to get him off the Eastern tracks. Now, Jim,
my firm belief is that there is something ‘cooked up,’ as they say, for
tomorrow afternoon, and if we could only find out what this Duke of
Kendall business is, we might act on it in time.”
She waited for Durkin to speak. He tapped the top of his head,
meditatively, with his right forefinger, pursing his lips as his mind
played over the problem.
“Yes, we might. But how are we to find out what the Duke of Kendall and
his mere running means?”
“I even took the trouble to look up the Duke of Kendall. He is a
MacIntosh horse, the stable companion to Mary J., and ridden by Shirley,
a new jockey.”
She could see that he had little sympathy for her suggestion, and she
herself lost faith in the plan even as she unfolded it.
“My idea was, Jim, that this horse was going to run—is _sure_ to run,
under heavy odds, for what they call ‘a long shot.’”
“But still, how would we be able to make sure?”
“I could go and ask Sunset Bryan himself.”
Durkin threw up his hand with a gesture of angry disapproval.
“That beast! He’s—he’s unspeakable! He’s the worst living animal in
America!”
“I shouldn’t be afraid of him,” she answered, quietly.
“The whole thing comes too late in the game, anyway,” broke in Durkin,
with a second gesture of disgust. Then he added, more gently: “Good
heavens, Frank, I don’t want to see _you_ mixed up with that kind of
cur! It wouldn’t be right and fair! It’s infinitely worse than the thing
I’m suggesting!”
“After all, we are not so different, he and I,” she responded, with
acidulated mildness.
Durkin took her hand in his, with real pain written on his face.
“Don’t talk that way,” he pleaded; “it hurts!”
She smoothed his hair with her free hand, quietly, maternally.
“Then you had rather that I—I borrowed this money from the Van Schaick
house?” she asked him.
“It’s the choice of two evils,” he answered her, out of his unhappiness,
all his older enthusiasm now burnt down into the ashes of indifferency.
“If only I was sure you could keep your promise,” she said, dreamily, as
she studied his face.
“It _will_ go back!” he responded determinedly, shrugging off his
momentary diffidence. “Even though I have to make it, dollar by dollar,
and though it takes me twenty years! But I tell you, Frank, that it will
not be needed. Here we have the chance of a life time. If we only had
the money to start with, the whole business could be carried on openly
and decently—barring, of course,” he added, with his sudden shamefaced
smile, “the little bit of cutting-in I’ll have to do down-town on the
Curry wires!”
“One minute—before we go any farther with this. Supposing we
successfully get this glove-box, and successfully watch Curry, and on
the strength of our knowledge invest this money, and get our returns,
and find ourselves with enough—well, with enough not to starve on—will
you promise me this: that it will be the last?”
“But why should it be the last?”
“You know as well as I do! You know that I want to be honest, to live
straight and aboveboard; but a hundred times more, that I want to see
you honest and aboveboard!”
He studied the tense and passionate mood that flitted across her face,
that seemed to deepen the shadows about her brooding violet eyes.
“I would do anything for you, Frank!” he said, with an inadequate and
yet eloquent little outthrust of the arms.
“Then do this for me! Let us get back to the daylight world again!”
“But would it satisfy us? Would we—?”
“Would we—?” she echoed forlornly. Then she turned suddenly away, to
hide a trace of inconsequential tears.
“We have got to!” she cried out passionately over her shoulder, as she
stooped to the suit-case and deftly opened it. A moment later she was
rummaging hurriedly through its neatly packed contents.
“And I am Mrs. Van Schaick’s trained nurse?” she asked, ruminatively.
“Yes, Miss Annie Seabrooke, remember!”
“But the others—the servants—won’t they know me?”
“You were engaged in Mamaroneck; not one of the city servants has seen
your face.”
“But it will be eleven and after—was my train delayed?”
“No, not delayed; but you took a later train.”
She was silent for a minute or two, as she probed deeper into the
suit-case.
“You haven’t promised!” she murmured, her face still low over the
womanly white linen, and the little cap and apron and uniform which she
was gently shaking out before her.
She rose to her feet and turned to him.
“I promise you—anything!” he cried, in the teeth of all his inner
misgivings. He followed her to the open window.
“Then kiss me!” she said, with a little exhausted sigh of ultimate
surrender, as she sank into his arms and her lonely and hungry body felt
the solace of his strength about and above it. And in that minute they
lost all count of time and place, and for them, with the great
glimmering granite city stretching away at their feet, there was neither
past nor future.