For weeks and months, perhaps, Ilingsworth had seen this coming, had
known that it was inevitable, and here it was, thrust into his face
in scare headlines that smelt to heaven! It smote him as with sudden
lightning shock. But the public announcement did more than shock him,
it turned him almost into a raving maniac. For an instant he stood
silent, regarding the clamorous morsels of humanity all about him,
clamorous for the smallest coin known to the Union. Then, with mighty
swings of his arms, he swooped upon them, shrieking:
"Get out of my sight, get out of my sight, you ragamuffins!"
The newsboys fled as far as the next corner. There they stopped,
clustered once again and jeered at him.
Turning, Ilingsworth again faced the house of Wilkinson.
"I'm tricked--tricked!" he cried. "Why did I give up so easy; why
didn't I force the girl...." For a moment he checked his half-frenzied
words, then he went on: "Peter V. Wilkinson, I'll even up with you,
somehow, yet!"
In a few moments he had turned the nearest corner and disappeared.
Back in the Wilkinson household, Leslie, almost exhausted, sank into a
chair. As she sat there, she perceived one of the footmen passing her,
bound from the rear to the outer entrance.
"Jeffries," cried the girl, springing up, "tell Jordan that it will be
quite unnecessary to mention Mr. Ilingsworth's call to anyone. He came
to see me."
"Very good, ma'am," returned the footman, passing on.
"And Jeffries," she continued, "have you anything to do just now?"
"Nothing, Miss Leslie," answered the man, "except to obtain the latest
extras for Mrs. Wilkinson. She's that particular about it."
"Are there any extras now?" inquired the girl.
The footman inclined his head toward the entrance to the house, through
which Ilingsworth had just made his exit.
"Don't you hear them, Miss?" he asked.
And indeed, at that moment, the yelping of the young street wolves
of Manhattan could plainly be heard. Leslie placed her hands over
her ears and fled incontinently up the broad stairs, disdaining the
services of the man at the lift, who rose expectantly as she started
past him. On reaching the first landing, she met Roy Pallister--little
Pallister, she always thought of him, and noting the consternation on
his countenance, she could not refrain from bursting into laughter.
"Why, Mr. Pallister," she cried, "you look as if you had been shot out
of a cannon!"
In a moment Pallister's look of worriment changed to one of temporary
happiness. He was an undersized little fellow, doing the duties of
his insignificant career with a gentle manner. He was her father's
household secretary, amanuensis, a paid servant, it is true; but
critics of the Wilkinson household always maintained two things:
first, that there was only one gentlewoman there--Leslie; and only one
gentleman--Pallister. Leslie liked him, yet she could not eradicate
from the humorous part of her nature the fact that Pallister was ever
like a shuttlecock, dancing his dignified but harried attendance now
upon Peter V. and then upon another member of the household, whose
demands were even more exacting.
"Have you been shot out of a cannon, Mr. Pallister?" she persisted.
Pallister turned his eyes away from hers: he didn't dare to look at
Leslie too long. To him she was just a bit too bewildering. After a
time his glance crept back to hers.
"Yes, Miss Wilkinson," he said nervously, "and what's more, I've got to
come back directly and face the cannon's mouth again."
Leslie touched him lightly on the shoulder; a thrill passed through the
young man's frame.
"Never mind," she said smilingly, "I'm going up to spike the cannon for
you."
On reaching the second floor she knocked gently, but persistently, at a
boudoir door.
"Oh, who is it now?" came in a petulant, nasal voice from within.
"Come in, if you're coming; otherwise stay out!" And an expression of
something like pain crossed the girl's face as she entered.
Sitting up in bed in a flowered-silk kimona, a lady was sipping a
claret cup. Year after year, like the Wilkinson mansion, the lineaments
and form of this lady had been portrayed in the press throughout the
country; and long after she was entitled to any claim to comeliness,
she had been heralded as one of the beauties of the universe. As a
matter of fact, her delicate form--if delicate form she had ever
possessed--had been wholly obliterated by a generous layer of
avoirdupois--lumps wherever the lumps were the least needed.
"Oh, it's you, is it?" she snapped.
Leslie groaned inwardly as she looked at the woman before her;
for this lady of leisure was the Maggie Lane mentioned by the
megaphone--Margaret Lane Wilkinson now, but still Maggie by nature--and
her step-mother! The girl's eyes moistened as she thought of her own
mother that she had known, and who had died a short time ago. For in
the case of Wilkinson the funeral baked meats had almost furnished the
marriage feast.
"Anything I can do?" asked the young girl, forcing up the pleasant
little smile that was always part and parcel of Leslie Wilkinson.
The lady of the flowered kimona did not respond at once, but kept her
eyes fastened on the door.
"I told Jeffries to get those extras right away--he's been gone an
hour," she complained.
Leslie could not suppress a smile when she saw the multitude of papers
that bestrewed the bed and floor, and before she could speak, the elder
woman went on, between sips of her claret cup, to say:
"Oh, the disgrace of these failures! The terrible charges that
are made! I simply cannot stand it! A mere girl, like you, cannot
appreciate the strain of this thing on my nerves. And everybody thinks
of nothing but the strain on Peter; no one considers poor me----"
"Oh, but you must not take it so to heart," said the girl with
well-feigned sympathy. "Everybody is failing now."
"But I have looked these papers through and through," Mrs. Peter V.
went on, "and nowhere, nowhere have I been considered at all. Why, not
one paper has even mentioned my name to-day. For a month not one of
them has published a picture of me; yet they are full of pictures of
Peter V., this house, and of the Tri-State Trust Company offices. It
makes me sick--nobody thinks of me."
At this moment the footman knocked at the door. Leslie stepped forward
and took the papers that he passed in, tossing them lightly on the bed.
"Oh! Oh!" wailed Mrs. Peter V. as her eye rested on the headlines. "The
Tri-State has gone up! This is the end--the end of everything! Here,
Leslie, you take this paper, and I'll take that--we'll see whether
there isn't something in them about me."
* * * * *
On the floor below, no sooner had Leslie left the Den than there was
a rustle behind the heavy curtains, in that room, and presently they
were parted, and then, with a stealthy movement a woman stepped forth
into the middle of the room.
Madeline Braine looked carefully about her, listened for an instant,
and then advanced still further toward the door. Her attitude was
watchfulness itself.
"His daughter Elinor, a girl who needs protection!" she cried, with
an agitation born of fresh events, and then a half-sob broke from her
lips. "There are other girls who should have had care just as much--and
haven't had it."
She glanced at her watch and started forward once again.
"I can't wait!" she cried. "Why isn't Peter Wilkinson here?"
For a moment it occurred to her to cross the hall to the
reception-room, and from there to summon a servant and give him a
message. She had had her own reasons, in the first instance, for
darting into Wilkinson's Den to hide. She well knew that her agreement
with Wilkinson forbade her to cross his threshold; but she intended to
make a crisis in her affairs as an excuse to him, and quite naturally
decided that there would be much less danger in the Den of her being
discovered by others than in the reception-room. Now, there were
reasons why she must not be found within this room: the interview
between Ilingsworth and Leslie Wilkinson made it impossible. And she
started to leave, but suddenly drew back.
"Somebody's coming," she whispered to herself. And scarcely had she
retreated once more behind the concealing curtains of the Den when
Jeffries entered with an armful of the latest extras and laid them down
upon the desk. After that, he passed out, but events happened with such
unusual rapidity that Madeline Braine found herself again caught like a
rat in a trap behind the heavy curtains in the room.
"It's just as well," she assured herself, as she waited there, every
minute expecting to get a chance to escape; but as it turned out, it
was not just as well for her.
* * * * *
Alone at last in the silence and solitude of her own apartments at
the top of the house, Leslie sat for some moments on the window-seat,
gazing out over the Hudson at the misty, dusky shore across the way.
"I wonder," she mused, "if what this man Ilingsworth says is true. Is
it possible that my father----" she stopped abruptly. "No, no, it can't
be true," she went on; "my father wouldn't...." But the face of Giles
Ilingsworth rose before her, and she found herself searching his open,
honest countenance for some loophole of escape. Now his words rang in
her ears, and she felt that they were the words of a man who knew....
"Oh," she cried, "I must find out who is right, and who is wrong! I
must know about my father, and what he has done!" Presently, she leaped
to her feet, crossed to her dressing-table and picked up the photograph
of a man--a young man with a square chin and wonderful eyes--so she
thought--that looked her squarely in the face.
"Eliot," she said softly, to the picture, "you're always honest with
me, are you not? You're honest with everybody. I wonder if you will
find out for me--the truth about my father."
Now she drew the photograph nearer to her, and her eyes grew soft
and tender, and, for the time being, she forgot Ilingsworth and his
daughter Elinor; forgot the Tri-State Trust Company and its alleged
iniquities; forgot even her father, Peter V. Wilkinson.
"Eliot, dear," she whispered, "I wonder what you would think of me, if
you knew that I did this?" Whereupon, she pressed her soft, warm, young
face against the pictured one. "Maybe you'll never know, though," she
went on; "maybe you'll never take the trouble to find out."
Leslie laid down the photograph with a sigh, and, retracing her
steps to the window, was just in time to see a big Mastodon bring
up at the curb in the street below, from which four men alighted:
Peter V. Wilkinson, her father, looking very much exercised and
troubled; Flomerfelt, his confidential man; and, lastly, two Pinkerton
detectives, recently-acquired guards who were never far away whenever
he appeared in the open.