ONE WOMAN WHO DARED
These two men, the banker who had weathered so many financial storms
of "the street" and had inevitably issued from the wreckage unscathed
and buoyant, and the young multi-millionaire who faced him with
uplifted hand even after the former returned to his chair, were exact
opposites in everything save wealth alone. Roderick Duncan, son and
heir of Stephen Langdon's former partner, was the possessor, by
inheritance, of one of those colossal fortunes which are expressed in
so many figures that the average man ceases to contemplate their
meaning. Nevertheless, Duncan had kept himself clean and straight. In
person, he was tall, handsome, distinguished in appearance, and
genuinely a fine specimen of young American manhood. The older man
regarded him with undoubted approval, and affection, too, while Duncan
lowered the partly uplifted arm, and permitted the anger to die out of
his face slowly. But there remained a decidedly troubled expression in
his gray eyes, and there were two straight lines between his
brows--lines of anxiety which would not disappear, wholly. He was
plainly perplexed and, also, as plainly frightened by the almost
tragic climax that had just occurred.
The elder man, whose face was always a mask save when he was alone
with his daughter, or with this young man who now stood before him,
had been at first angered by the words and conduct of Patricia. But
the exclamation uttered by the young Croesus impressed him
ludicrously, notwithstanding the financial straits he was supposed to
be in, and he grinned broadly into the anxious face that glowered upon
him. Langdon's heart was not at stake; he had no woman's love to lose,
or even to risk losing; and so far as the financial character of his
troubles was concerned, he knew that Roderick Duncan would provide the
millions he needed, in any case. That fact was not dependant upon any
whim of Patricia's. Langdon could afford to laugh, believing that the
rupture in the relations of these young people would be healed
quickly. The old man did desire that the two should marry; he wished
it more than anything else, save possibly the winning of his "street"
contests.
It was the younger man who broke the silence. He did it first by
striking a match on the sole of his shoe and lighting a cigar; then by
crossing to one of the chairs at the oblong table, into which he
literally threw himself; and as he did this, he exclaimed, with an
expression of petulance that might have belonged to a boy better than
to a man:
"Well, you've made a mess of it, haven't you? You have got us both
into a very devil of a fix. I ought to have shot you, or myself,
before I consented to such a fool plan as that one was. Oh, yes; we're
in a fix all right!"
"How so?" asked the old man, rising and selecting a chair at the
opposite side of the table, and calmly lighting a fresh cigar, while
he swung one leg across the corner of the solid piece of furniture.
"Patricia won't stand for that little scheme of yours, not for a
minute; and you know it, Uncle Steve." This was an affectionate term
of familiarity which Duncan sometimes used in addressing Patricia's
father. "I was afraid of it when you proposed it, but I allowed
myself, like an idiot, to be influenced by you. I tell you, Langdon,
she won't stand for it; not for a minute. I have made her angry, many
times before now, but I have never known her to be quite so
contemptuously angered."
"No," said Langdon, and he chuckled audibly. "I agree with you. I
think my little girl is going to make it hot for you before we are
through with this deal. In fact, I shouldn't wonder if she made it
warm for both of us. She is like her old dad about one thing--she
won't be driven."
The younger man said something under his breath which, because it was
not audible to his companion, need not be repeated here; but it was
probably not an expression that he would have used in polite society.
He drummed on the table with his fingertips, and smoked savagely.
"You're mighty cheerful about it, aren't you?" he demanded, with
sarcastic emphasis. "What I want to know is, how are we going to fix
it up?"
"Fix what up?"
"Why, this business about collateral, and all that rot, with Patricia.
How are we going to square ourselves? That's what I'd like to know!
Maybe you can see a way out of it, but I'm darned if I can."
The banker took the cigar from his mouth, flicked the ashes into the
cuspidor, removed his leg from the table, and replied calmly, with a
half-smile:
"It looks to me as if it were all fixed up, now. Patricia has agreed
to marry you all right; she told me in plain English that I could
deliver the goods. You heard her, didn't you? As far as I can see,
she has only raised the ante just a little--a small matter of ten
millions, which you won't mind at all. What's the matter with you,
anyhow? You get what you wanted--Patricia's consent to an early
marriage." The old man grinned maddeningly at his companion.
"Confound you!" shouted Duncan, starting to his feet, and he smashed
one hand down upon the top of the table, in the intensity of the
resentment he felt at this remark.
"Do you suppose--damn you!--that I want her like that? Can't you see
how the whole thing outraged her? She hates me now, with every fibre
of her being. She hates me, and you, too, for this day's work!"
Langdon shrugged his shoulders.
"You want her, don't you?" he asked, placidly, as if he were inquiring
about a quotation on 'change.
"Of course, I want her. God only knows how greatly I want her."
"Well, you get her, don't you, by this transaction? She'll keep the
terms of the agreement. She's enough like me for that. She said I
could deliver the goods. She meant it, too. You get her, don't you?"
"Yes--but how?" was the sulky reply. "How do I get her? What will she
do to me, after I do get her? Tell me that, confound you!"
The old man chuckled again. "I am not a mind-reader," he said.
"What will she do to me, Uncle Steve? What did she threaten? What am I
to expect from her, now?"
"Oh, I don't know. I confess that I don't. Sometimes, Patricia is a
little too much for the old man, Roderick," he added, wistfully. Then,
with another change of manner, he exclaimed: "But you get her! And I
get the twenty-millions credit. What more can either of us ask? Eh?"
"The twenty millions have nothing to do with it, and you know it. They
never did have anything to do with it, and you know that, also. It was
only your cursed suggestion, that we should make her promise to marry
me the condition of keeping you from failure. You know as well as I do
that there is nothing belonging to me which you cannot have at any
time, for the asking; and that you do not stand, and have not stood,
in any more danger of failure than I do."
"I would have failed if I had not known where to get the credit for
the twenty millions," the banker remarked, quietly.
"Yes; but--confound it--you did know. You only had to ask me. But
instead of doing it in a straight, business-like way, you set that
horrible fly to buzzing in my ears, that we could make use of the
circumstance to compel Patricia to an immediate consent. And I, like a
fool, listened to you. Patricia never meant not to marry me; but
now--!"
He strode across the floor, then back again to his chair and flung
himself into it. The old man watched him warily, keen-eyed, observant,
and with a certain expression of fondness that no one but his daughter
and this young man had ever compelled from him. But, presently, he
emitted another chuckling laugh; and said:
"That was a sharp stroke of hers to have the ten millions paid over to
her. It was worthy of her old dad; eh? She is a bright one, all right.
She's a chip off the old block, my boy. I couldn't have done it
better, myself."
"Damn you!" Duncan exclaimed, and he sprang to his feet, grasped his
hat, and rushed from the office to the street with much more apparent
excitement than Patricia herself had shown. He had the feeling that he
had allowed himself to be tricked into the commission of an unmanly
act, and he was thoroughly ashamed of it.
Stephen Langdon, left alone, chuckled again, although his face quickly
fell into that reposeful, mask-like expression which was habitual to
it--an expression not to be changed by the loss or gain of millions.
He remained for a time quietly in the chair he had been occupying, but
soon he rose and crossed to his desk, throwing back the top of it. He
pulled a bundle of papers from one of the pigeonholes and calmly
examined certain portions of them. He glanced over three letters left
there by his stenographer for him to sign and post. These he signed,
and after enclosing them in their respective envelopes, dropped them
lightly into a side-pocket of his coat. Then, he pulled toward him the
bracket that held the telephone, and placed the receiver against his
ear. Having presently secured the desired number, he said:
"I wish to speak with Mr. Melvin, personally."
"Mr. Melvin is not in his office at the present moment," came the
reply over the telephone. "Who is it, please?"
"This is Stephen Langdon, and I wanted to speak--"
He was interrupted by the person at the other end of the wire, who
uttered an exclamation of surprise, followed by these words:
"Why, Mr. Langdon, Mr. Melvin has gone to your house to see you, as we
supposed. A telephone call came from your residence, and he departed
at once, saying that he would not return to the office to-day."
"The devil he did!" exclaimed the banker, as he hung up the receiver.
Then, he leaned back in his chair and smoked hard for a moment, with
the nearest approach to a frown that had appeared on his face during
all that exciting afternoon; and he did another thing unusual with
him: he spoke aloud his thoughts, with no one but himself for
listener.
"I'll be blowed if I thought Patricia would go as far as that!" was
what he said. "If she hasn't sent for Malcolm Melvin to draw those
papers she hinted at, I'm a Dutchman! By Jove, I begin to think that
Duncan was right after all, and that he is up against it in this
little play we have had this afternoon. But I hadn't an idea that my
girl would go quite so far. H'm! It looks as if it is up to me to
spoil her interview with Melvin, if I can get there in time."
Five minutes later, he left the banking-house, paused at a letter-box
long enough to drop in the correspondence he had signed, and then went
swiftly onward to the subway, by which he was conveyed rapidly to the
vicinity of his home. Somewhat later, when he entered the sumptuously
appointed library, he discovered precisely what he had expected to
find: his lawyer, Malcolm Melvin, and his daughter Patricia were
facing each other across the table, the former having before him
several sheets of paper, which were already covered with the penciled
notes and memoranda he had evidently been engaged in making.
Langdon stopped in the middle of the floor and looked at them. For the
first time since the beginning of the interview with his daughter at
the office, he realized that she had been in deadly earnest at its
close. He understood, suddenly, how deeply her pride had been wounded,
and he knew that she was enough like himself to resent it with all the
power she could command.
"Since when, Melvin, have you ceased to be my attorney!" he inquired
sharply, determined to put an end to the scene, at once.
The elderly lawyer and the young woman had raised their heads from
earnest conversation when Stephen Langdon entered the room. The
lawyer, with a startled, although amused, expression on his
professional face; the daughter with a cold smile and an almost
imperceptible nod of her shapely, Junoesque head. But her black eyes
snapped with something very nearly approaching defiance, and she
replied, before Melvin could do so:
"Do not misunderstand the situation, please," she said, quickly. And
her father noticed with deep misgiving that she omitted the customary
term of endearment between them. "Mr. Melvin is here at my request,
and because he is your attorney. I have been instructing him how to
draw the papers that are to accompany the collateral offered for your
loan, and the bonus that goes with it; and just how those papers are
to be used, in accordance with the discussion between you and me, at
the bank, this afternoon. I told you, then, to inform Mr. Duncan that
you would meet his requirements. Later, when I realized that he had
overheard us--"
"What's the matter with you, Pat?" demanded the father, interrupting
her with a touch of anger. "Have you lost your head, entirely?"
"No," she replied, with utter calmness; "I have only lost my Dad. I
went down to his office this afternoon to see him, and I left him
there. Just now, I have been instructing Mr. Melvin concerning the
particulars of the agreement I want drawn and signed in the
transaction that is to take place between you and Roderick Duncan, in
which I am, personally, so deeply concerned, in which I am to figure
as the collateral security."
The old man stared at his daughter, with an expression that had made
many a Wall-street financier turn pale with apprehension. It was a
grim visage that she saw then--hard and set, stern and unrelenting,
and many a strong man had surrendered to Stephen Langdon, frightened
by the aspect of it. Not so this daughter of his. She met his gaze
unflinchingly and calmly, without a change in her outward demeanor.
After a moment, Langdon turned with a shrug toward the lawyer.
"Melvin," he said, "how many years have you been my attorney?"
"Fourteen, I think, Mr. Langdon," was the smiling reply. One would
have thought that the man of law found something highly amusing in
this incident.
"About that--yes. Well, do you see that door?" He half-turned and
indicated the entrance he had just used. "Melvin, I want you to pick
up those papers and tell John, outside, to give you your hat; then I
want you to get out of here as quick as God'll let you. If you don't,
our relations are severed from this moment. And if you complete the
draft of those papers, without my permission, or submit them to any
person whatever, without my having seen them first, I will have
another attorney to replace you, Monday morning. Go right along now.
You needn't answer me. If you don't want my business, all you've got
to do is to say so. If you do want it, you'll come mighty near doing
what I have told you to do, just now."
The lawyer, quietly, but with dignity, rose from his chair, folded the
papers, placed them in an inner pocket of his coat, bowed to Patricia
and then to her father, and without a word passed from the room,
closing the door quietly behind him; but before he quite accomplished
this last act, the clear even tones of the girl called after him:
"I am sure, Mr. Melvin, that we had quite concluded our conference. I
will ask you please to draw those papers as I have directed. You may
submit copies to Mr. Langdon at the time you bring the originals to
me."
He did not answer, for there was no occasion to do so, and a second
later Stephen Langdon and his daughter were alone together for the
second time that afternoon.
"Now, Patricia," he said, turning toward her, with his feet wide
apart and his hands thrust deep into his trousers-pockets, "what in
blazes is this all about?"
His daughter replied coldly and precisely:
"I have merely been dictating to your lawyer the substance of the
conditions I wish to have embodied in the papers that are to complete
the transaction we have discussed at your office. I selected Mr.
Melvin because I knew him to be in your confidence, and I surmised
that you would prefer that the condition of affairs under which you
are now struggling, which forces you to borrow twenty-million dollars,
should not be made known to an outsider."
"Well, I'll tell you that I won't hear of it! It's got to stop right
now. I won't have those papers drawn at all. I won't have it. The
whole thing is preposterous, and you seem to be determined to make a
fool of yourself. I won't have it!"
"But you must have it," she said, quietly.
"Must have it? Patricia, there isn't a man in the city of New York who
dares to say that to me."
"Possibly not, sir; but there is a woman in New York who dares to say
it to you, and who does say it, here and now. That woman is,
unfortunately, your daughter."
"Patricia! Are you crazy?"
"No; but I am more hurt and angry, more outraged and incensed, than I
believed it possible ever to be. I shall insist upon the drawing of
those papers, and the fulfillment of the stipulations I have directed.
If you are determined that Mr. Melvin shall not finish what he has
begun for me, I shall select another lawyer, and shall have the papers
drawn just the same."
"But, my child, it is all foolishness. The papers are not necessary.
Roderick will supply what cash I need without anything of that sort,
and you know it!"
"Am I to understand, sir, that you have lied to me?"
Langdon dropped upon a chair, breathing an oath which his daughter did
not hear, and she continued, without awaiting a reply from him:
"You have taught me, since I was a child, that in a business
transaction in the Street, where there is no time for the drawing of
papers, a man must live up to his word, absolutely. I took you
seriously in what occurred at your office this afternoon. I surmised,
when we were near the end of our interview,--nay, I assumed it--that
Roderick Duncan was inside the inner office. My surmise proved to be
true, and now I have only this to say: We shall carry out the
transaction precisely as it was stipulated between us, and according
to the papers I have dictated to Mr. Melvin, or I shall go to another
lawyer and have those same papers drawn and offered to you and to Mr.
Duncan, for your signatures. He overheard our conversation, and thus
became a party to it. I was forced into the situation without my
consent, and I shall now insist upon a certain recognition of my
rights in the matter. If you choose to deny me those rights, the fact
will not deter me from proceeding in my own way--a way which Mr.
Melvin, your attorney, thoroughly understands. I have explained it
fully to him."
The old man leaned back in his chair, glaring at his daughter, and yet
in that burning gaze of his there was undoubted admiration. He liked
her pluck, and deep down in his heart he gloried in her ability to
maintain the position she had assumed, where she literally held him
helpless. For it would never do that she should be permitted to go to
another lawyer; such a proceeding would betray to other parties the
financial embarrassment into which he had been drawn. The news would
get out. There would be a whisper here, a murmur there, and before
noon on Monday, all New York would know it. His daughter understood
her momentary power over him, and she was determined to make the most
of it.
Patricia returned her father's gaze for a moment, then turned
negligently away and moved toward the door.
"Wait," he called to her.
"Well?" She stopped, and half-turned.
"Don't you know, girl, that the whole business was tomfoolery?"
"No; and I would not believe you, or Mr. Duncan--now."
"Wait just a minute longer, Patricia; let me explain this thing to
you, fully. Let me make you understand just how it came about," her
father exclaimed. "It was all a mistake, you know, and I must confess
that the mistake was mostly mine. Of course, Roderick was ready to let
me have the twenty millions, or fifty if I had asked for them. There
was never any doubt about that, and could have been none. He has the
money, and there never has been a time, since he inherited it, when I
could not use it as if it were my own. You knew that. I have never
hesitated to go to him, either. That is why I went to him to-day.
Before I had an opportunity to explain the purpose of my call, he
asked about you, and the question suggested to my mind the idea of
utilizing the desperate situation I was in to hasten your marriage to
him. You know how I have looked forward to that. I have known, or at
least I have supposed I knew, for years, that you thought more of him
than of anyone else. You are twenty years old now; it is high time
that you were married, and it would break my old heart to see you take
up with any of those society-beaux who hover around you at every
function where you appear. On the other hand, I shall be very glad
when you are Roderick Duncan's wife. He is the son of the best friend
I ever had, the only man I ever trusted. And he is every bit as good a
man as his father was. He is square and on the level. He has wealth,
and he doesn't go bumming around town, giving champagne parties, and
monkey dinners. He knows how to be a good fellow without making a fool
of himself, and that is more than you can say of most young men who
have money to burn. You have grown up together, and why in the world
you have kept putting him off is more than I can guess. Besides all
that, he is easily worth a hundred millions. But this has nothing to
do with the present question. I want you to have him, and I want him
to have you; and if he didn't have a dollar in the world, I should
feel just the same about it. All that happened to-day was at my
instigation; not at his. And now, daughter, you must find it in your
heart to forgive him--and me."
She listened to him to the end, quietly and outwardly unmoved. When he
concluded, she replied in the same even tone she had used ever since
her father entered the library:
"I don't know, and I don't care to know, any of the particulars
regarding how the arrangement came about between you and Mr. Duncan.
What I do know is this: the arrangement was made between you, and was
agreed upon between you. I was called in, to be consulted, at your
private office, with the third interested party concealed like a spy
in an inner room. I agreed to the transaction as I understood it. I
will carry it out as I agreed to do, while at your office, and in no
other way. If Roderick Duncan wishes to make me his wife, he must do
it according to the stipulations I have dictated to Mr. Melvin, this
afternoon, or he can never do it at all. That, sir, is all I have to
say."
She turned and went from the room, closing the door behind her as
softly as the lawyer had done.
The old man slipped down more deeply into his chair, covered his eyes
with one hand, and murmured, audibly:
"I have had to live almost seventy years to find out that, after all,
I am nothing but an old fool."