Thinking through days when a cold and tortured moisture would burst out
on her temples and through nights when she lay wide-eyed and sleepless,
only one answer seemed to come to Conscience. All Stuart's love must
have curled in that swift transition into indifference and contempt.
Admitting that conclusion, she knew that her pride should make her hate
him, too, but her pride was dead. Everything in her was dead but the
love she could not kill and that remained only to torture her.
The most paradoxical thing of all was that in these troubled days she
thought of only one person as a dependable friend. Eben Tollman had
evinced a spirit for which she had not given him credit. It seemed that
she had been all wrong in her estimates of human character. Stuart, with
his almost brilliant vitality of charm, had after a quarrel turned his
back on her. Eben Tollman, who masked a diffident nature behind a
semblance of cold reserve, was unendingly considerate and no more asked
reward than a faithful mastiff might have asked it. It contented him to
anticipate all her wishes and to invent small ways of easing her misery.
He did not even seek to force his society and satisfied himself with
such crumbs of conversation as she chose to drop his way in passing. If
ever she should come out of this period of torpid wretchedness, she
would owe Tollman a heavy debt of gratitude.
Three months after the day when Mr. Hagan returned from Cape Cod, that
gentleman called into his private office a member of his staff, who
responded to the name of Henry Rathbone, and put him through a brief
catechism.
"What have you got on this Farquaharson party?" he inquired. "Tollman
complains that you're running up a pretty steep expense account and he
can't quite see what he's getting for his money."
Rathbone seated himself and nodded. "Mr. Tollman knows every move this
feller's made. You gotta give him time. A guy that think's he's got a
broken heart don't start right in on the gay life."
"Why don't he?" inquired Mr. Hagan with a more cynical philosophy. "I've
always heard that when a man thinks the world's gone to the bow-wows
he's just about ripe to cut loose. Don't this feller ever take a drink
or play around with any female companions?"
"You ain't got the angle straight on Farquaharson," observed the sleuth
who had for some time been Farquaharson's shadow. "He ain't that kind.
I'm living in the same apartment hotel with him and my room's next door
to his. I don't fall for the slush-stuff, Chief, but that feller gets my
goat. He's hurt and hurt bad. It ain't women he wants--it's _one_ woman.
As for female companions--he don't even seem to have any male ones."
"What does he do with his time?"
"Well, he went down to the farm for a few weeks and closed up the place.
He studied law, but he's passed it up and decided to write fiction
stories. Every morning he rides horseback in the park, and, take it from
me, those equestrian dames turn all the way round to rubber at him."
"What else does he do?"
"He walks miles, too. I fell in with him casual like one day and tagged
along. Well, he hiked me till my tongue hung out. We started at the Arch
and ended up at Dolrandi's café at the north end of the speedway--it
ain't but only about a dozen miles.... During that whole chummy little
experience he spoke just about a couple of times, except to answer my
questions. Sometimes when he thought I wasn't looking his eyes would get
like a fellow's I seen once in death-row up the river, but if he caught
me peepin' he'd laugh and straighten up sudden."
"Well, I don't suppose you can get anything on him till he gives you a
chance," said Mr. Hagan grudgingly, "but what this man Tollman wants is
results. He ain't paying out good money that he's hoarded for years,
just to get merit reports. He didn't wring it out of the local widows
and orphans just for that."
"I get you, and I'll keep watching. Since Farquaharson got this bug
about writing stories he's taken to rambling around town at night. I
said he didn't seem to want companions, but when he goes out on these
prowls he'll talk for hours with any dirty old bum that stops him and he
always falls for pan-handling. Beggars, street-walkers, any sort of old
down-and-outer interests him, if it's hard luck they're talking."
But the face which reminded Mr. Rathbone of the man who was awaiting the
electric chair was the public face of Stuart Farquaharson. He did not
see the same features during the hours when the door of his room was
closed. The hotel he had selected, near Washington Square, was a modest
place and his window looked out over roofs and chimney-pots and small
back yards.
There, sitting before his typewriter, his sleeves rolled above his
elbows, he sought to devote himself to his newly chosen profession: the
profession which he had substituted for law. Through a near-by window he
had occasional glimpses of a girl who was evidently trying to be an
illustrator. Stuart imagined that she was poor and ambitious, and he
envied her the zest of her struggle for success. He himself had no such
incentives. Poverty was not likely to touch him unless he became a
reckless waster, and he fancied that his interests were too far burned
to ashes for ambition. It was with another purpose that he forced
himself to his task. He was trying to forget dark hair and eyes and the
memory of a voice which had said, "Love you! In every way that I know
how to love, I love you. Everything that a woman can be to a man, I want
to be to you, and everything that a woman can give a man, I want to give
you."
And because he sought so hard to forget her, his fingering of the
typewriter keys would fall idle, and his eyes, looking out across the
chimney-pots, would soar with the circling pigeons, and he would see her
again in every guise that he remembered--and he remembered them all.
She had been cruel to the point of doing the one thing which he had told
her would brand him with the deepest possible misery--and which pledged
him in honor not to approach her again by word or letter without
permission. But that was only because the thing which he conceived to be
her heritage of narrowness had conquered her.
On the floor below was a young man of about his own age, who was also a
candidate for the laurels in literature. Stuart had met him by chance
and they had talked a little. This man's enthusiasms had gushed forth
with a vigor at which the Virginian marveled. For him ambition blazed
like an oriflamme and he had dared to gamble everything on his belief in
himself. With scant savings out of a reporter's salary in the West he
had come to wrest success from the town where all is possible, but now a
shadow of disappointment was stealing into his eyes. A fear was lurking
there that, after all, he might have mistaken the message of the Bow
Bells which had rung to him the Dick Whittington message that the city
was his to conquer.
Perhaps because Louis Wayne desperately needed to succeed, while Stuart
Farquaharson wrote only as an anodyne to his thoughts, Wayne vainly
peddled his manuscripts and almost from the first Stuart sold his at
excellent rates.
* * * * *
Mrs. Reinold Heath was rarely in a sunny mood at the hour when her
coffee and rolls came to her, as she sat propped against the pillows of
the elaborately hung bed in her French gray and old-rose room. The same
hour which brought the breakfast tray brought Mrs. Heath's social
secretary and those duties which lie incumbent upon a leader of
society's most exploited and inner circles.
Mrs. Heath, kimono-clad in the flooding morning light, looked all of her
fifty years as she nodded curtly to her secretary. It was early winter
and a year had passed since Stuart had left Cape Cod.
"Let's get this beastly business done with, Miss Andrews," began the
great lady sharply. "What animals have you captured this time? By the
way, who invented week-ends, do you suppose? Whoever it was, he's a
public enemy."
The secretary arranged her notes and ran efficiently through their
contents. These people had accepted, those had declined; the
possibilities yet untried contained such-and-such names.
"Why couldn't Harry Merton come?" The question was snapped out
resentfully. "Not that I blame him--I don't see why any one comes--or
why I ask them for that matter."
"He said over the 'phone that he was off for a duck-shooting trip,"
responded Miss Andrews.
"Well, I suppose we can't take out a subpoena for him. He's escaped
and we need another man." Mrs. Heath drew her brow in perplexed thought,
then suddenly demanded: "What was the name of that young man Billy
Waterburn brought to my box at the horse show? I mean the one who rode
over the jumps like a devil and blarneyed me afterward like an angel."
The secretary arched her brows. "Do you mean the Virginian? His name was
Stuart Farquaharson."
"Do you know where he lives--or anything else about him?"
"Why, no--that is, nothing in the social sense." Miss Andrews smiled
quietly as she added, "I've read some of his stories in the magazines."
"All right. Find out where he lives and invite him in Merton's place.
Don't let _him_ slip--he interested me and that species is almost
extinct."
As Miss Andrew jotted down the name, Mrs. Heath read the surprised
expression on her face, and it amused her to offer explanation of her
whim.
"You're wondering why I'm going outside the lines and filling the ranks
with a nobody? Well, I'll tell you. I'm sick of these people who are all
sick of each other. The Farquaharsons were landed gentry in Virginia
when these aristocrats were still grinding snuff. Aren't we incessantly
cudgeling our brains for novelty of entertainment? Well, I've discovered
the way. I'm going to introduce brains and manners to society. I daresay
he has evening clothes and if he hasn't he can hire them."
Decidedly puzzled, Stuart Farquaharson listened to the message over the
telephone later in the day, but his very surprise momentarily paralyzed
his power of inventing a politely plausible excuse, so that he hung up
the receiver with the realization that he had accepted an invitation
which held for him no promise of pleasure.
It happened that Louis Wayne, who had by sheer persistency seized the
outer fringes of success, had come up with a new manuscript to read and
was now sitting, with a pipe between his teeth, in Stuart's morris
chair.
"Sure, go to it," he exclaimed with a grin, as Stuart bewailed his lack
of a ready excuse. "It'll be a bore, but it will make you appreciate
your return to the companionship of genius."
"The Crags" was that palatial establishment up the Hudson where the
Reinold Heaths hold court during the solstices between the months at
Newport and the brief frenzy of the New York season, and the house party
which introduced Stuart Farquaharson to Society with a capital S was
typical. One person in the household still had, like himself, the
external point of view, and her ditties threw her into immediate contact
with each new guest.
"Miss Andrews," he laughed, when the social secretary met him shortly
after his arrival, "I'm the poor boy at this frolic, and I'm just as
much at my ease as a Hottentot at college. When I found that I was the
only man here without a valet, I felt--positively naked."
The young woman's eyes gleamed humorously. "I know the feeling," she
said, "and I'll tell you a secret. I took a course of education in
higher etiquette from the butler. You can't do that, of course, but when
in doubt ask me--and I'll ask the butler."
But it was Mrs. Heath's prerogative to knight her protégés with the
Order of the Chosen, and Stuart Farquaharson would have graced any
picture where distinction of manner and unself-conscious charm passed
current.
"Who is the girl with the red-brown hair and the wonderful complexion
and the dissatisfied eyes?" he asked Miss Andrews later, and that lady
answered with the frankness of a fellow-countryman in foreign parts:
"Mrs. Larry Holbury. That's her husband over there--it's whispered that
they're not inordinately happy."
Farquaharson followed the brief glance of his companion and saw a man
inclining to overweight whose fingers caressed the stem of a cocktail
glass, and whose face was heavy with surliness.
It subsequently developed, in a tête-à-tête with the wife, that she had
read all of Mr. Farquaharson's stories and adored them. It leaked out
with an air of resignation that her husband was a bit of a brute--and
yet Mrs. Holbury was neither a fool nor a bore. She was simply a
composite of flirtatious instinct and an amazing candor.
In the life of Stuart Farquaharson the acceptance of that invitation
would have passed as a disconnected incident had it been altogether a
matter of his choosing, but he had let himself be caught. Mrs. Reinold
Heath had chosen to present him as her personal candidate for lionizing
and whom she captured she held in bondage.
"Honestly, now, Miss Andrews," he pleaded over the telephone when that
lady called him to the colors a second time, "entirely between
ourselves, I came before because I couldn't think of an excuse in time.
Let me off and I'll propose a substitute arrangement. Suppose we have
dinner together somewhere where the _hors d'oeuvres_ aren't all gold
fish."
Her laugh tinkled in the telephone. "I wish we could," she said. "I knew
you let yourself in for it the first time--but now you're hooked and you
_have_ to come." So he went.
On later occasions it was more flattering than satisfying to him that
the beautiful Mrs. Holbury should drop so promptly into a sort of easy
intimacy and treat him almost from the start with a proprietary manner.
It soon became an embarrassment of riches. Stuart was thinking of
himself as a woman-hater, these days, and he held a normal dislike for
wagging tongues. Holbury, too, who was reputed to be of jealous
tendency, seemed to regard him unfavorably and took no great pains to
affect cordiality.
One day Wayne dropped, coatless, into Farquaharson's room and grinned
as he tossed a magazine down on the table. "_Sic fama est_" was his
comment, and Stuart picked up the sheet which his visitor indicated with
a jerk of the thumb. The magazine was a weekly devoted ostensibly to the
doings of smart society, but its real distinction lay in its innuendo
and its genius for sailing so close to the wind of libel that those who
moved in the rarified air of exclusiveness read it with a delicious and
shuddering mingling of anticipation and dread. Its method was to use no
names in the more daring paragraphs, but for the key to the spicy, one
had only to refer back. The preceding item always contained names which
applied to both.
Stuart found his name and that of Mrs. Holbury listed in an account of
some entertainment--and below that:
"A young Southerner, recently arrived and somewhat lionized, is
whispered to be complicating the already uneven balance of
domesticity in the home of a couple whose status in society
antedates his own. This gallant has all the attractiveness of one
untouched with ennui. He rides like a centaur, talks like a
diplomat and flatters as only a Virginian or an Irishman can
flatter. The same whisper has it that the husband suffers in the
parallel."
Farquaharson's face darkened and he reached for his discarded coat.
"Hold on; you have company," suggested Wayne placatingly. "Where do you
think you're going in such hot haste?"
Stuart was standing with his feet well apart and his mouth set in a
stern line.
"Wayne," he said with a crisp and ominous decisiveness, "I've never
slandered any man intentionally--and I require the same decency of
treatment from others."
"Go easy there. Ride wide! Ride wide!" cautioned the visitor. "That
little slander is mild compared with many others in the same pages. Are
the rest of them rushing to the office to cane the editors? They are
not, my son. Believe me, they are not."
"They should be. Submission only encourages a scoundrel."
"In the first place they would find no one there but a rather fragile
and extremely polite young lady. The editor himself doesn't sit around
waiting to be horsewhipped. In the second, society tacitly sanctions and
supports that sheet. Your fashionable friends would call you a barbarian
and what is worse--a boob."
Farquaharson stood in a statuesque ire, and Wayne went philosophically
on. "Take the advice of a singularly wise bystander. At least treat it
with the contempt of silence until you've consulted the lady. Caning
people in New York is attended with some degree of notoriety and she
would have to share it. When you're in Rome, be as Romanesque as
possible."
"For my part," declared Stuart, "I like another version better. When
you're a Roman, be a Roman wherever you are."
Yet after some debate he took off his coat again and announced
cryptically, "After all, the one unpardonable idiocy is sectionalism of
code--damn it!"
He knew that Marian Holbury and her husband were near a break and that
the husband's jealousy looked his way. But, conscious of entire
rectitude, he gave no thought to appearances and treated the matter
lightly. But the Searchlight Investigation Bureau, whose employment had
been discontinued as not paying for itself, was now re-employed and
instructed to send a marked copy of the weekly to Miss Conscience
Williams. That copy was anonymously mailed, bearing a New York
postmark, and its sending was a puzzle which its recipient never solved.
Spring came, and Stuart, who had begun the writing of a novel, took a
small house in Westchester County, where he could work apart from the
city's excitement. Had he been cautious he would not have selected one
within two miles of the Holbury country house, yet the fact was that
Marian Holbury had discovered it and he had taken it because of its
quaintness. He had been there several weeks alone except for a man
servant when, one night, he sat under the lamp of his small living-room
with sheets of manuscript scattered about him. It was warm, with clouds
gathering for a storm, and the scent of blossoms came in through the
open doors and windows. There was no honeysuckle in the neighborhood,
but to his memory there drifted, clear and strong and sweet, the
fragrance of its heavy clusters.
He sat up straight, arrested by the poignancy of that echo from the
past. The typewriter keys fell silent and his eyes stared through the
open window, wide and full of suffering. He heard himself declaring with
boyhood's assurance, "They may take you to the North Pole and surround
you with regiments of soldiers--but in the end it will be the same."
Then without warning a wild sob sounded from the doorway and he looked
up, coming to his feet so abruptly that his overturned chair fell
backward with a crash.
"Marian!" he exclaimed, his voice ringing with shocked incredulity.
"What are you doing here--and alone?"
Mrs. Holbury stood leaning limply against the door-frame. She was in
evening dress, and a wrap, glistening with the shimmer of silver,
drooped loosely about her gleaming shoulders.
"It's over," she declared in a passionate and unprefaced outburst. "I
can't stand it! I'm done with him! I've left him!"
Stuart spread his hands in dumfounded amazement. "But why, in God's
name, did you come here? This is madness--this is inconceivable!"
She went unsteadily to the nearest chair and dropped into it. "I came to
stay--if you don't turn me out," she answered.