IN THE SWIM.
IN THE SWIM
_A Story of
Currents and Under-Currents
in Gayest New York._
By
Richard Henry Savage
[Decoration]
Chicago and New York:
Rand, McNally & Company,
Publishers.
Copyright, 1898, by Richard Henry Savage.
All Rights Reserved.
CONTENTS.
BOOK I.
A RISING STAR.
Chapter. Pages
I—“Young Lochinvar has Come out of the West,” 5–23
II—The Drift of a Day in New York City, 24–43
III—A Frank Disclosure, 44–67
IV—“Wyman and Vreeland” Swing the Street, 68–88
V—Toward the Zenith, 89–110
BOOK II.
WITH THE CURRENT.
VI—In the “Elmleaf” Bachelor Apartments, 111–131
VII—“Plunger” Vreeland’s Gay Life, “Under the Rose,” 132–151
VIII—Miss Romaine Garland, Stenographer, 152–170
IX—Senator Alynton’s Colleague, 171–188
X—An Interview at Lakemere. Some Ingenious
Mechanism. “Whose Picture is That?” 189–209
BOOK III.
ON A LEE SHORE.
XI—Miss Marble’s Waterloo! A Lost Lamb! Her
Vacant Chair. Senator Garston’s Disclosure.
Sara Conyers’ Mission. Miss Garland’s
Dishonorable Discharge. A Defiance to the
Death. “Robbed!” 210–234
XII—Mine and Countermine, 235–257
XIII—A Wedding in High Life, 258–279
XIV—For the Child’s Sake! 280–315
XV—In the Dark Waters, 316–361
IN THE SWIM.
BOOK I—A Rising Star.
CHAPTER I.
“YOUNG LOCHINVAR HAS COME OUT OF THE WEST.”
There was an expression of sullen discontent upon the handsome features
of Mr. Harold Vreeland (gentleman unattached), as the inbound Hudson
River train dashed along under the castled cliffs of Rhinebeck.
The afternoon was fair—the river of all rivers glittered gaily in the
sun, and a dreamy peace rested on field and stream. But, the peace of
this June afternoon of ’95 entered not into the young wayfarer’s soul.
The five years which the traveler from nowhere in particular had thrown
away in the far wilds of the sporadic West had not yet robbed his
chiseled features of the good looks which he had borne away from old
Nassau.
And, though his glittering blue eye had been trained to a habitual
impassiveness by much frontier poker, he had always abjured that Rocky
Mountain whisky which “biteth like an adder.”
As he restlessly sought the smoking-car, after a vain struggle with
the all too-evident immorality of a saucy French novel, several quickly
thrilled spinsters followed his retreating form with warm glances of
furtive admiration and half-suppressed sighs.
Vreeland’s stalwart figure was clearly reminiscent of well-played
football and long straining at the oar. His well-set head was bravely
carried, his eye was searching and even audaciously daring in its
social explorations.
At twenty-seven he had not lost the fascination of his soft and
perfectly modulated voice nor the winning insinuation of his too
frequent smile. The chin was far too softly molded for an ascetic, and
an expression of lurking insincerity flickered in the pleasure-loving
curves of his handsome mouth.
But, shapely and glowing with manly vigor, he was a very “proper
man-at-arms” in the battle of life, his sweeping cavalry mustache
lending an air of decision to his sun-burned features.
Though he was perfectly dressed up to the memories of his
never-forgotten “varsity” grade, the “wanderjahre” had given to him a
little of that easy swing which is the gift of wandering on boundless
prairies, long nights spent _al fresco_ under the glittering dome of
stars, and a close commune with the sighing pines of the West.
The shade of bitterness deepened upon his moody face as he noted a
three-masted steam yacht swinging along up the river, with the elastic
quivering throb of her quadruple compounded engines. This queenly
vessel bore the private signal of one American citizen whose personal
finances beggar the resources of many modern kings.
“Those are the cold-hearted fellows who rule America now with a rod
of iron—the new money kings,” he growled. “Royal by the clink of the
dollar, sovereign by the magic wand of monopoly, impregnable with the
adamantine armor of trusts!”
And then, a lively hatred of the social grandees luxuriously grouped
aft on that splendid yacht crept into his embittered soul.
He could see the Venetian awning which covered the clustered fair-faced
patrician women from the fierce sun, which rudely burns by day.
And he knew, too, by distant rumors of that superb luxury in which
the American women of the creed of the Golden Calf passed their happy
days in a splendid and serene indolence, only lit up now and then with
gleams of the passion play of high life.
“It’s no use to fight those fellows,” mused Vreeland, as he carefully
trimmed a cigar. “They have come to stay, and I must try and fall into
the train of some one of them.”
He looked back at all those unprofitable years spent beyond the rugged
Rockies. There was a sense of shame and resentment as he recalled the
shabby career of his talented father.
“Thank God, I am now alone in the world, ‘with no one nigh to hender!’”
he bitterly reflected, unconsciously quoting Lowell’s “Zekle and Huldy.”
The train had rushed on past Poughkeepsie, and the parade music from
West Point floated sweetly across the cool river as the train halted at
Garrison’s for a few moments, before he had morosely reviewed all the
dismal events which brought him a lonely stranger back to New York.
Erastus Vreeland, a lawyer of no mean accomplishment, had destined his
only son for the bar.
The elder Vreeland was a human spider, who had finally gravitated
downward into the exercise of only the meaner craft of his much-abused
profession.
For long years, in his little office on William Street he had legally
carried on the intrigues of a daring band of clients who rightly should
have ornamented the Academy of Belles-Lettres of New York at Sing Sing.
During the life of his hoodwinked wife, Vreeland _père_ led a double
existence of more or less moral turpitude, and, at last, a shameless
and successful coup of rascality aroused the ire of a great financial
company.
It was his “notice to quit,” and after the death of his wife, Erastus
Vreeland “swung round the distant circle,” often followed by the
_déclassé_ lawyer.
Omaha, Leadville, Salt Lake, Los Angeles, and other Western cities
finally knew his fox-like cunning and gradually weakening grip.
A political affray, the result of a heated election in Montana, had
been the occasion of the elder Vreeland’s sudden taking off.
And so, the man who had never learned the homely adage that “corruption
wins not more than honesty,” slept far away from his fathers on
the rocky hillsides of Helena, in wild Montana. It was a miserable
summation of failures.
The hegira of the father had left the son stranded in life at the start
upon his finishing the four years at Princeton which had made him an
expert in all the manly arts save any definite plan of money-getting.
A still self-deceiving man, Erastus Vreeland had hopefully invited his
son to share the suggested exile, and thus, the plan of the law course
for the junior was perforce abandoned. It had not been long till
father and son drifted coldly apart.
The mean, shabby moral nature of the demoralized elder could not long
impose upon the quick-witted youth. The slights of the bench, the slurs
of the bar, the wasp-like thrusts of a bold frontier press, all proved
that the “trail of the serpent” followed on after the talented weakling
whose professional honor was never proof against gold or gain secured
from either side.
And so, with only a hypocritical pretense of a certain lingering
friendly feeling, the two men had finally parted, dividing a few
hundred dollars which were the remains of a retainer in a case, which
deftly went wrong on its trial, sold out, to the benefit of lawyer
Vreeland’s adversary. Then came the bloody finale—and, and—exit
Vreeland _pater_!
Harold Vreeland sighed in disgust as he recalled the five lost years of
his golden youthful promise.
“It’s all rot,” he muttered, “this idea that the loafer life of the far
West gives either scope, strength, or courage to any man. It is all
mere barbarism, and only a windy discounting of a future which never
comes. A long, bootless struggle with the meaner conditions of life.”
He recalled his varied experiences as notary public, deputy county
clerk, cashier of a shoddy bank—a concern which “folded its Arabian
tents” in six months.
Real estate dealer he had been in several aspiring “boom towns,” and
also, secretary of many frontier “wind” corporations, whose beautifully
engraved stock certificates were now either carried around in the
pocketbooks of dupes or else stuck up in Western saloons, to the huge
edification of the ungodly.
This strange wandering life had made him a fox in cunning, though not
as yet a ravening wolf, for there was little to prey upon in those
dreary distant Occidental preserves. But, his fangs were well sharpened
for the fray.
He realized, as the lights of Haverstraw gleamed out “beyond the
swelling tide,” that he was as yet without any definite plan of
operations.
A singular incident, illustrative of the roughly good-humored social
code of the wild West had caused him to seek the city of Manhattan.
The political clique which had coolly plotted the murder of his
crafty father, with a last generous twinge of conscience, had sent
all the private papers of the defunct lawyer over to his son, who was
listlessly engaged at the time in endeavoring, on a net cash capital of
a hundred and fifty dollars, to float a ten million dollar corporation,
in order to utilize certain waste energy of those foaming falls of
the Spokane River, which have so long caused both the salmon and the
Indians a great deal of unnecessary trouble.
And then, young Vreeland wearily explored those ashes of life—the
“papers in the case” of the defunct.
The unwelcome discovery of many evidences of his father’s shame and the
revealing of all that secret life which had sent his patient mother
to the shadowy bourne of heartbroken wives, was somewhat mitigated by
the discovery of a paid-up policy of ten thousand dollars in the great
“Acqueduct Life Insurance of New York City.”
There was, as usual, some strings and filaments hanging out
loosely knotted up, and it had been a labor of months, involving
a correspondence of some acerbity, for him to obtain letters of
administration, close up his father’s “estate,” and depart to Gotham
to receive a check for seven thousand dollars in full settlement of the
claim.
On the road over from Spokane, Mr. Harold Vreeland had carefully
counted all his ships. He had even gone over all his own abortive
attempts at opening any useful career, and so, on this summer evening,
he gloomily felt how poorly prepared he was to fight the battle of life
against the keen competition and increasing pressure of his peers in
New York City.
“If I had only my father’s profession, I would have a chance to get in
among these fellows, and I would soon have my share of the gate money,”
he growled.
“But to take a place in the line of mere drudges, to sink down into the
death in life of a hall room and a cheap boarding-house. Once planted
there, I am there forever. And I have not a friend in the whole world!”
His mental harvest had only been one of husks, and he keenly felt the
absence of any definite calling _pour accrocher_.
Suddenly his eye caught the gleam of a sunset upon a dozen drifting,
glittering white sails on the river.
They all seemed to float on serenely, borne along upon the broad tide,
with no visible man’s hand to guide.
“I will drift a while,” he murmured. “I have a few thousand dollars.
Something will surely turn up. If it does not,” he resolutely said,
“then, I will turn it up myself.”
“There are women here, too—women with hearts of flame, and who are to
be won. I was a fool ever to go out to the frontier. Perhaps—”
And his mind reverted to a lucky college chum who had married a woman
nearly two generations older than himself, but a well-preserved Madame
“Midas.”
“By Jove! anything is better than this beastly poverty,” he mused.
“Even that.”
“This is no era for poor men. Poverty is the only crime nowadays.”
His cynicism was broken off by the approach of two men, who rose to
rejoin friends in the train as it dashed along toward the Bronx River.
As they came up the smoking-car, Vreeland easily recognized Fred
Hathorn, the stroke of the college crew in which he had once won
hard-fought honors for the orange.
There was no mistaking the easy luxury which exhaled from Mr. Fred
Hathorn of the great firm of Hathorn and Potter, bankers and brokers of
dingy Wall Street, a man who had already arrived!
The first crucial glance of rapid inspection was not lost on Vreeland,
as Hathorn, in an easy way cried: “Hello, Hod Vreeland! What brings you
over here?”
With a perfunctory politeness, Mr. James Potter halted and calmly
acknowledged Hathorn’s listless introduction.
The little blonde man-about-town, however, gazed longingly ahead at the
car where certain fair dames now awaited their escorts.
Jimmy Potter was born to “no end of easy money,” and so his dashing
senior partner’s genius for finance was strongly buttressed by the
whirlwind of cash which clustered around Jimmy Potter’s lucky head.
All sorts of financial bees seemed to swarm around Potter and quietly
settle in his hive.
“What’s the use of making a row?” he often remarked. “Sit still, and
what you want in life will come to you.” Mr. James Potter of New York
was an Epicurean disciple.
The blood mounted to Vreeland’s forehead as he noted all the
deprecating courtesy of Hathorn’s welcome.
“Damn him! I’ll give him a bit of a bluff,” he quickly decided, under
the inspiration of some bold, familiar spirit.
There was an air of quiet comfort in the careless response of Vreeland.
“I have just fallen into a good bit of money by my father’s death, and
so have come on here to enjoy myself. I may spend a couple of years
abroad.”
Vreeland then blessed that daring, familiar spirit which so saucily
suggested his “cheeky” retort, as the man who had been his chum and
fellow of several Greek letter societies stopped short. “Wait for me
at the station, old fellow. We are bothered yet with some ladies. They
leave at the station. Then we will dine later at the club and talk over
old times a bit. You’ll come, too, won’t you, Potter?”
Jimmy Potter carelessly nodded an assent from sheer laziness, and then
the two members of the _jeunesse dorée_, passed on into the boudoir car.
There was a twinkle of triumph in Vreeland’s eye as he sank back in his
seat.
“I got a dinner out of you at any rate, Mr. Snob,” he gleefully
chuckled.
And, highly elated, he decided then and there, to vary his first plan
of drifting with the tide, and to cautiously put his oar in a bit where
it would help him on.
His step was as light as the tread of a panther when he leaped out of
the car at Forty-second Street.
“I’ll have a stolen glance at their women,” he quickly resolved.
“Perhaps they may give dinners, too.”
And just then, there seemed to be the twinkle of a little star of Hope
lighting up that devious, unknown path which he was so soon to tread.
“I’ll let him give me a Club card,” he mused, as the wearied passengers
hurried along to brave the din of importunate jehus.
He was wondering how much of a social show he could make at need with
his slender fortune, when the two men slowly approached with three
“shining ones” of the golden strata of womanly New York.
“These people are all in the swim,” he murmured. “I will find the way!
I am as good as any of them.”
And as he raised his eyes, he met the glances of the imperial-looking
woman who was Fred Hathorn’s companion.
The lady’s eyes rested for a moment upon the handsome stranger, and
then fell with a peculiar abruptness.
“If that woman plays any star part in his life, I will try and take her
away from him,” resolved Vreeland, whose whole soul was now thrilling
with the beautiful woman’s sudden, startled admission of interest in
a passing stranger. The wine of life stirred in the young wanderer’s
veins.
His audacious, familiar sprite suggested the profound bow which was
Mr. Harold Vreeland’s first salutation upon the outskirts of the “Four
Hundred.”
He had adroitly managed to convey the respectful homage of the
salutation by his velvety eyes to the very person intended, for, while
Jimmy Potter was placidly listening to the brilliant chatter of two
very vivacious rosebuds, Mrs. Elaine Willoughby turned to Hathorn:
“Fred, who is your Western friend?” she asked, with an assumed
carelessness.
It was by sheer good luck that Hathorn, who was watching the young
millionairess whom he was soon to marry, answered with an unusual
warmth:
“An old college chum—Vreeland of Princeton, and a rattling good fellow.”
Fred Hathorn eyed with a certain qualminess the easy _aplomb_ of
his Crœsus partner, as Jimmy Potter pressed closely to the side of
Hathorn’s destined bride, Miss Moneybags.
That young lady was destined to play the rôle of Queen of Diamonds in
the ambitious young banker’s life.
He had resolutely set up the motto, “_Aut Cæsar, aut nullus_,” and
he was just a bit shy of the beloved James trifling with his dashing
fiancée.
“All sorts of things happen in New York,” mused the agnostic Hathorn,
as he handed the ladies into a waiting victoria and then turned to
rejoin the man who more than ever had now decided to paddle a bit, as
well as to drift on with the tide of fortune.
There was a glow of satisfaction burning in the Western adventurer’s
heart as, half an hour later, he noted Hathorn dash off his potent
signature behind his guest’s name on the visitor’s book of the Old York
Club. It was the _open sesame_ to the regions of the blest—young New
York _par excellence_.
The trio adjourned to the billiard room, and, then and there, Vreeland
for the first time tasted the famous club cocktail.
He was “living up to his blue china,” as he gravely bowed when Hathorn
gave him a two-weeks’ card.
“I’ll have it renewed for you, old fellow,” lightly remarked the young
banker.
“Pity our waiting list is so long. We must try to get your name
advanced, by hook or crook.”
While Hathorn departed to give his personal orders for the dinner,
Jimmy Potter drew apart to glance over a handful of cards, letters and
_billets d’amour_ which a grave old club steward had handed to him.
He critically selected two, the missives of “she who must be obeyed,”
and then carelessly slipped the fardel of the others into the oblivion
of his breast pocket.
He sat there, the ferret-eyed young millionaire, glowering after
Hathorn’s retreating form. “Pity to see Alida VanSittart wasted on that
cold human calculating machine! Fred is as indurated as a steel chisel.”
The little child of Pactolus felt his tiny veins still tingling with
the exhalant magnetism of the budding heiress whom Hathorn had selected
as a second spoke in that wheel of fortune of which the unconscious
Jimmy was the main stay.
The aforesaid young patrician, Miss Alida, was “divinely tall” and of a
ravishing moonlight beauty, two elements of ensnaring witchery to the
dapper, _blasé_ young Midas, whose little patent leathers had pattered
vainly along after the stride of that elastic young goddess.
The alert Vreeland grimly eyed the eager Jimmy Potter, and noted the
tell-tale quiver of the youth’s slim fingers as he fished out the two
“star” leaders of his evening mail.
“I would like just one night with that chap at poker, with no limit,”
gravely mused Vreeland, with an inspirational sigh. “He looks soft.”
While the _parvenu_ “sized up” his man, he was aware of a hum of
murmured comment at a table near him.
Two men were following with their envious eyes the tall form of the
fortunate Hathorn—“the very rose and expectancy of the state,” as he
called his myrmidons around him.
“Lucky devil is Hathorn,” quoth A. “Saw him get out of the train
to-night with Mrs. Wharton Willoughby. Potter over there and a gang of
girls have been up at Lakemere. He still holds her fast.”
Quoth B: “He has a regular run of nigger luck. Elaine Willoughby is the
Queen of the Street. Her account must be worth a cool hundred thousand
a year to the firm. And here drops in to him, the whole VanSittart
fortune, a cool ten millions.”
Vreeland started as A rejoined moodily: “I had hoped that some other
fellow might have a chance to make the running at Lakemere, now that
Hathorn is _rangé_; but it really seems to be ‘a _petit ménage à
trois_’ so far.”
And B, thereat, enviously growled: “He ought to cling to the generous
woman who made him. I always thought Hathorn would finally marry her.
She trusts him with her chief account, the —— deals.” Vreeland cursed
the caution which cost him that one keyword “but, there’s a mystery.”
It was with a wolfish hunger for “more sweetness and light” that the
unmoved Vreeland deftly arose and followed his host and Potter to a
fair upper chamber of that narrow-chested corner club house on Fifth
Avenue in the thirties, at whose critic-infested windows both Miss
Patricia and Miss Anonyma “give a side glance and look down.”
The royal road to fortune which had led the ambitious Hathorn “on the
heights” seemed to be clear of mist now to his hypocritical visitor.
Was there room for another chariot in the race? The familiar sprite was
busy with daring suggestions.
If a rich woman—not of an age _très tendre_—had made one man, some
other woman of that ilk might be waiting with a willing heart in the
babel of Gotham for the shapely young Lochinvar come out o’ the West.
The fires of hope leaped through his veins.
As they seated themselves to the enjoyment of that particular clear
turtle soup which is justly the pride of the club chef, both host and
guest were adroitly playing at cross-purposes.
Hathorn, with a secret avidity entirely New Yorkish, determined to find
out all the details of Vreeland’s financial windfall.
He had a vague idea that the outlandish wilds of Montana were stuffed
with copper mines, gold ledges, silver leads, cattle ranches, and “all
sorts of things that might be gotten hold of,” _i. e._, other people’s
money.
And if this placid and lamb-like blonde guest had “dropped into a good
thing,” then by a judicious use of a regulated social hospitality,
Hathorn now proposed to “drop into that same good thing.”
An uneasy fever seems to burn in a New York man’s blood from the moment
when he knows his neighbor to have an unprotected penny.
The keen-eyed Vreeland minutely examined his old chum’s “get-up,” and
quickly decided that he would closely copy this easily graceful “glass
of fashion and mould of form.”
He had already resolved that he would also try to make a “run in” at
Lakemere, if the cards came his way.
“I could always give Fred ten points at billiards and twenty with the
women, and then do him every time,” mused Vreeland. “He only plays a
sure-thing game.”
Vreeland’s own motto had always been “_De l’audace! Toujours de
l’audace!_” and in fact, the root of his quarrel with his own cowardly
father had been the sniveling, self-deprecatory caution of that
“Old-man-afraid-of-his-record.”
The little dinner was “_très-soigné_,” for Mr. Fred Hathorn did
everything “decently and in order,” and it calmly proceeded to the
gastronomic delight of a pleasure-loving man who had long nibbled at
jerked elk and biscuits _à la_ Mike Muldoon.
The wines, with their soft suggestion and insinuating succession, soon
led them up to the point where Fred felt that he “had his man about
right.”
The shame-faced Potter, with his mandatory billets from “She,” burning
under his waistcoat, soon mumbled several iron-clad excuses of
unnecessary mendacity about “seeing a man,” and then gladly escaped,
hustling himself into the hack with all the fond expectancy of a man
who bought quite unnecessary diamond necklaces loyally and cheerfully
for that queen of bright eyes, Miss Dickie Doubleday of the Casino.
When the old college comrades were left alone, even the shaven servitor
having fled, over the cigars of the incomparable Bock & Co., the two
young men drifted into a considerable _rapprochement_.
The old friendly days came back. Château Yquem, Pontèt Canet, fine
Burgundy, and Pommery Sec have often mended many a torn thread in the
web of friendship, as well as patched up the little rift in the Lute of
Love. Your sweet devil-born spirit of champagne always stands smiling
at the crossroads of life.
“And, both reviewed the olden past—
Full many a friend, in battle slain,
And all the war that each had known,
Rose o’er them once again.”
The dinner was a “howling success” from the varying points of view of
each sly schemer and his would-be dupe.
Hathorn smiled knowingly when Vreeland carelessly remarked that he was
not familiar with the dry details of Montana investments.
“I leave all that drudgery to my lawyers,” he airily remarked, with all
the nerve of a Napoleon Ives.
“I must try and work his account in our direction,” mused the ardent
devotee of business, while Vreeland gracefully bowed his thanks, when
Hathorn rejoined:
“Mrs. Willoughby? Yes. A wonderful woman. Prettiest place at Irvington.
She entertains a great deal. I’ll ask her if I may present you. She’s
probably the heaviest operator on the Street of all our rich women.”
It was long after midnight when the two chums separated.
Their strange life orbits had intersected for the first time since they
sang “Lauriger Horatius” together in an honest, youthful chorus.
Mr. Harold Vreeland now felt intuitively that his “bluff” was a
good one. He had always battled skillfully enough in the preliminary
skirmishes of his conflict with the world, but he felt that the scene
of action had been poorly chosen.
Hard-hearted and pitiless, he cursed the memory of his corrupt and
inefficient father, as he directed his lonely steps to the “Waldorf,”
to register his name as a permanent guest.
His heart beat no throb warmer in acknowledgment of the seven thousand
dollars’ windfall which was to bring his star up from an obscure
western declination to a brilliant eastern right ascension.
He delivered his luggage checks to the night clerk of New York’s
greatest hotel, and proudly inscribed himself as a member of the “swell
mob” filling that painted Vanity Fair.
A strange fire burned within his veins. He recalled Fred Hathorn’s
final semi-confidential remark: “Do you know anything of handling
stocks? If you do, we could put you up to a good thing or two on the
Street now.”
It was no lie. The glib story which had fallen easily from his lips of
the six-months’ exciting experience in which he acted as dummy cashier
for a San Francisco kite-flying “Big Board” firm of brokers during a
sporadic revival of the “Comstock craze.”
He had learned then how to “wipe out a margin” as deftly as the veriest
scamp who ever signed a fraudulent “statement” for reckless man or sly,
insinuating woman.
He had artfully led Fred Hathorn on to describe the unique position of
Mrs. Elaine Willoughby among the bravest of the swim. The New Yorker
was over-eager in his fencing, and so Vreeland easily gathered him in.
Lighting a cigar, he strolled along the silent Fifth Avenue, arranging
with quick decision his preliminary maneuvers.
“This lovely woman who has built up Hathorn must surely have a vacancy
in her heart at present, vice Hathorn, ‘transferred for promotion’ to
head the VanSittart millions.”
“It’s a good play to come in between them now. He will never suspect my
game, but I’ll block his little scheme some way, unless he carries me
along upward. He evidently wishes to be rid of the old _rapprochement_
now, and yet not lose her stock business. By Jove! I would like to cut
in there.”
He strolled along toward the “Circassia,” that pink pearl of all
sumptuous apartment palaces, and eagerly reconnoitered the superb
citadel of Elaine Willoughby’s social fortifications.
“Lakemere, a dream of beauty,” he murmured. “I’ll soon get into that
same gilded circle, and work the whole set for all they are worth.”
He plumed himself upon the approving glance of the beautiful brown eyes
of the mistress of Lakemere as she had swept by on Fred Hathorn’s arm.
“She accepted my bow as an evident homage to her own queenly self,”
mused Vreeland, who was no dabster at reading the ways of the mutable
woman heart.
“Yes, she is my first play. I must burn my ships and now go boldly
in for ‘High Life.’ I’ll risk it. Carlisle said: ‘There are twenty
millions of people in Britain—mostly fools.’ Among the gilded fools
of Gotham, some one easy mark must be waiting for me on general
principles. I’ll take the chances and play the queen for my whole stack
of chips.”
He wandered homeward, after narrowly inspecting the “Circassia,” and
unconsciously attracting the attention of Daly, the Roundsman, the
bravest and cheeriest member of the Tenderloin police.
Lights still gleamed from a splendid second-floor apartment above him,
where a lovely woman, royal in her autumnal beauty, gazed out at the
night.
Elaine Willoughby sighed as she turned away. “If I had told Hathorn
all, he might have made me his wife. Alida—” Her face hardened as she
choked down a sob. “My God! if I only knew! I must have Endicott renew
his search.”
In some strange way, the handsome Western stranger returned to haunt
her disturbed mind. “He looks like a man brave, gallant, and tender,”
she sighed, as she forgot Hathorn, who, in his bachelor apartments was
now musing upon the ways and means to hold Elaine Willoughby’s heart
after he had wedded Miss Millions.
CHAPTER II.
THE DRIFT OF A DAY IN NEW YORK CITY.
Sparkling lances of golden morning sunbeams broke and shivered on the
fretted golden roof of the Synagogue by Central Park’s eastern wall of
living green.
New York was astir once more, and the daily burden of life settled
down again upon myriads of galled shoulders. The rumbling trains had
rattled away the blue-bearded mechanic, the pale-faced clerk, and the
ferret-eyed anæmic shop girl to their daily “demnition grinds” long
before Elaine Willoughby opened her eyes, in the Circassia.
“A breeze of morning moved,” and down the Mall early pedestrians
wandered, while the bridle bits rang out merrily on the park cantering
paths.
Sedentary citizens had strolled along into the leafy shades for a peep
at a cherished book, or a glance at the horrible of horribles in the
“New York Whirl,” while the recumbent tramp shook himself and hopefully
scuttled forth from his grassy lair to search for vinous refreshment
and to craftily elude the inexorable “sparrow cop.”
New York City was awakened in the inverse order of rank, and the
passion play of Gotham was on once more.
The splintered lances danced over the fragrant God’s acres of the great
pleasure ground to the palace on Central Park west, and as they were
gaily reflected from a silver-framed Venetian mirror, they recalled
Mrs. Wharton Willoughby to that luxurious life of Gotham in whose
fierce splendors there is no rest.
For as burning a flame throbs in the heated maelstrom of Manhattan as
in any human eddy of the whole distracted globe.
The congestion of careworn faces had filled the town below Canal
Street with its battling disciples of Mammon long before Mrs. Wharton
Willoughby stepped into her brougham to seek the counsels of the one
man on earth whose integrity was her rock of Gibraltar, Judge Hiram
Endicott, her legal adviser and trustee.
For the silver-framed mirror had relentlessly reflected the traces left
by the vigil of the night before.
It was the morning after the storm, and no calm had yet soothed the
troubled soul of the woman whom thousands envied.
With a fine Gallic perception, Justine, the black-browed, slyest of
French maids, had remarked: “_Madame n’ a pas bien dormi?_” as she
arranged the filmy coffee service of Dresden eggshell.
Elaine Willoughby was sullen, but resolute, as she arranged the details
of her morning interview by the Ariel magic of her private telephone.
The ceaseless activity of the Street compelled the veiled “queen” to
have her own “intelligence department” adjoining her boudoir, a nook
with its special wires leading to Hiram Endicott’s office and even
to his sober Park Avenue home, and its talking wire also extended to
the private office of Frederick Hathorn, Esq., of Hathorn and Potter,
and another handy wire leading to the lair where the cashier of the
Chemical Bank scanned the ebb and flow of Mrs. Elaine Willoughby’s
fortune.
A stock ticker and dial telegraph, binding the central office of the
Western Union to the Circassia, were always stumbling blocks to the
insidious Justine, who earned a vicious golden wage in piping off every
movement of the queen to the adroit Fred Hathorn.
On this particular morning, Hathorn was disturbed at heart as he
answered Justine’s spying warning of Mrs. Willoughby’s early departure
for her downtown coign of vantage—that room in Judge Endicott’s offices
in the Hanover Bank building, which was _terra incognita_ even to him.
The corner of Pine and Nassau was an Ehrenbreitstein.
For Hathorn’s acutest schemes had never yet given him the open sesame
to the room adjoining Hiram Endicott’s study bearing the simple
inscription “Office Willoughby Estate.”
There, Madame Elaine was safe, even from him.
He grumbled: “I don’t half like the way Elaine eyed Alida VanSittart
yesterday. There was a storm signal in my lady’s glances. If she should
draw away her account—”
He shuddered, for he was well overdrawn in his personal relations with
Mr. Jimmy Potter, who had just meekly slunk into his office, with
quivering nerves and much pink-eyed indications of the aftermath of “a
cosy little evening at Miss Dickie Doubleday’s.”
“I must keep her well in hand till I pull off the marriage. Sugar is on
the jump, too. There’s a half million if I follow her sure lead.
“By God! I would give ten years of my life to know who posts her in
that saccharine article of prime necessity. I will give her something
to interest her. Yes; the very thing! I’ll run in Hod Vreeland there.
“He is a new face, and she may forget to harry Alida in the new man’s
initiation at Lakemere. And I’ll go up and see her this afternoon
myself.”
When he had telephoned his carefully-worded message to Justine, to be
delivered to Mrs. Willoughby on her return, he ordered a basket of
orchids to precede his call at the Circassia, and then, with a fine
after-thought, telegraphed “Mr. Harold Vreeland, Hotel Waldorf,” to
await his call on important business after dinner.
“If I am going to use Vreeland, I may as well put him into play right
now,” cheerfully mused Hathorn, as he lit a Prince of Wales cigarette.
“I can pay that devil Justine a bit extra to watch Hod Vreeland’s
little game with Elaine.
“A bit of healthy flirtation may cause her to forget Alida shining her
down.
“Whirlwind speculator as she is, the Willoughby is one of Eve’s family,
after all. ‘But yet a woman!’ I wonder if—”
His reverie was cut off by the entrance of Mr. Jimmy Potter, who calmly
remarked: “Sugar is going hellward! You had better get out and see
about where we will land!”
Mr. Fred Hathorn had unwittingly passed one of the cross-roads of life
and a knowledge of his proposed actions would have been Balm of Gilead
to the anxious soul of Harold Vreeland, who was busily engaged with the
great tailor, Bell—manufacturer of gentlemen _à la mode_.
The crafty Vreeland’s heart would have bounded had he realized how
true was the debonnair Jimmy Potter’s one golden maxim. “Hold on
quietly, and what you want will come around to you!”
The arched doors of the Circassia, the superb gateways of Lakemere were
being slowly swung for him, by the scheming man who cunningly proposed
to divert the Montana bonanza into the coffers of Hathorn and Potter.
Mr. Potter, in his pink-eyed awakening from a night’s folly, was now
standing at the bar of the Savarin, gloomily reflecting upon certain
rashnesses of his own on the preceding evening.
These little extravaganzas, greatly to the profit and delight of Miss
Dickie Doubleday, had been all unsolicited by that sinewy-hearted young
beauty.
“The biggest fool in the world is the man who fools himself!” sadly
ejaculated Potter, as he shed his burden of care with the half dollar
dropped for a “high ball.”
He crept back to watch Fred Hathorn battling in the Sugar pit, with all
the admiration of a fainéant for an energetic man.
“Great fellow, Fred!” proudly reflected Mr. Jimmy, with one last
wormwood pang for the robbery of that young Diana, Alida VanSittart.
“She outclasses him—ranks him—clean out of sight!” sadly mourned
Potter. “Now, if I was only clear of the Doubleday, I might—”
But, an aching head cut short his half-formed determination.
“I suppose that she is like all the others!” sighed Potter.
“These New York girls’ hearts are like a ball of string, unwind the
thing—and—there’s nothing left!”
Mrs. Elaine Willoughby, on her way down town, had stolen another
glimpse at her own disturbed face. The _crise des nerfs_ had clearly
brought out to her the presaged passing of her beauty.
The little hand glass of the brougham told her, with brutal abruptness,
that the face she was gravely studying must pale before the moonlight
radiance of Alida VanSittart.
Face to face with her own sorrow, she saw the truth at last. Was it
envy of the nymph-like girl or a dull hatred of Hathorn, for his cold
ingratitude, which racked her heart?
“Perhaps, if I had told him all,” she murmured, “I will find out the
lost link of my life yet, and there must be a man somewhere who would
prove worthy of a woman’s whole confidence.
“One who could wander in le Jardin Secret, by my side!”
As she studied her own face, with a needless self-deprecation, there
came back to her the handsome Western stranger.
“Perhaps,” she dreamily said, as her mind wandered away to the great
dim Sierras, “uplifting their minarets of snow,” “he may have caught
their majestic secret of truth and lofty freedom.”
And—she, too, drifted on to a cross-road of life.
Elaine Willoughby had finished her inspection of the counterfeit
presentment afforded by the little mirror.
Though matters of both head and heart claimed all the exercise of her
mental powers on this morning, she was lost in a vexing comparison of
her own personal charms with those of Alida VanSittart.
The lady had never fathomed the reason why the wise Thales had
formulated his priceless proverb of three words into the cramped
diction, “Man! Know Thyself!”
The antique sage wisely refrained from saying, “Woman! Know Thyself!”
for, far beyond the clouds wrapping the misty ruins of Greece, Rome and
the Nile, the woman of yesterday never had been the woman of to-day,
nor her chameleon substitute of to-morrow.
The only thing unvarying in womanhood, is its infinite emotional
variety. Not one in a million of that charming sex has ever mastered
the secret of their strange enigmas of varying loves, and the one only
anchored feeling of motherhood.
The divine Shakespeare’s words, “’Tis brief! Aye—as woman’s love!” are
supplemented by the great-hearted Mrs. Browning’s feminine lines, “Yes!
I answered you last night. No! this morning, sir, I say!”
Elaine Willoughby did not know herself. She resolutely put away the
reason why she ignored all the hawk-eyed young Gibson beauties of
Irvington, Tarrytown, and Ardsley, to nourish a resentment alone
against that slim Diana, Alida VanSittart.
Woman of the world, throned upon a golden pedestal of wealth—mistress
of secrets that would shake the financial world—she had also enjoyed
the homage of men long enough to know every one of her own good points.
There had been hours of triumph, too. For, after all, a woman’s heart
beat behind the silken armor of her Worth robes.
Still in the bloom of a meridian beauty, no one in Gotham knew but
Hiram Endicott that her years were thirty-seven.
Her brunette loveliness of face was accentuated by the molded symmetry
of her Venus de Milo form.
Men knew her only as the childless widowed chatelaine of Lakemere, the
inheritor of a vast fortune hazily dating from Colorado.
A few cold words from that oracle, Judge Hiram Endicott, had dispelled
any doubts as to the authenticity of the late Wharton Willoughby.
The checks of the woman whom all had failed to win were considered
among the cognoscenti as gilt-edged as Treasury Certificates.
The grave glances of her sole attorney and trustee were also a no
thoroughfare to prying gossipers, and it was only by a long series of
stealthy financial sleuth work that the financial world discovered both
“sugar” and “oil” to be as granite buttresses to the unshaken pyramid
of her solid wealth. On the Street she was a whirlwind operator—with
“inside tips!”
As the brougham swung along through Pine Street, Mrs. Willoughby caught
a single glimpse of Fred Hathorn, eager-eyed, and hurrying to the Stock
Exchange.
The man of thirty-five had risen to be a clubman—a yachtsman of
renown—a man of settled fortune—and a social lion, too, in the five
years since she had opened the gates of her heart to admit the handsome
struggling youth, then paddling feebly in Wall Street’s foaming
breakers.
She leaned back with a sigh. Hathorn’s sudden apparition had opened her
eyes to the reason of her dull hatred of the millionaire fiancée.
“He is the reason why I hate that girl,” she murmured, with misty
lashes, and an old saw came back to her.
“It is hard to look out on a lover’s happiness through another man’s
eyes!”
In the gilded throng at Lakemere, the proprietary endearments of
Frederick Hathorn had galled her stormy soul. She knew not that the
_parvenu_ broker was only publicly sealing, beyond a doubt, the
projected union which would make him the equal in capitalistic reserve
of that easy-going Son of Fortune, Potter, to whom all things came
around—even Miss Dickie Doubleday’s bills.
A ray of light lit up her darkened heart.
“Alida is innocent of wrecking my happiness. She could know nothing.
For I have been silent! And if I held the ladder, can I blame him for
climbing? He needs me no longer.
“I have been only a means to an end. Alida will be the last. And then,
Frederick Hathorn, Esquire, is safely in the swim!”
A sudden conviction of the uselessness of her affectation of a
semi-maternal interest in the fortunes of the hardened man of
thirty-five told her that she had left all the doors open to him.
For there was that in her own life, dating back to her girlhood, which
she had never even revealed to her half-lover protégé.
With her rich womanly nature sorely shaken, her tender dark eyes
drooping, she now owned to the hope, now fled forever, that Hathorn
would light the beacon of love in her lonely heart. “I have not trusted
him,” she murmured. “He owes me nothing, nothing but gratitude.”
Too late, she saw that mere gratitude does not kindle into love, and a
sense of her own lack of frankness sealed her accusing lips.
“I can not blame Hathorn!” she murmured. “It is my own fault. I told
him the truth, but—not the whole truth!”
Still, she suffered from the shattering of flattering hopes long
secretly cherished, and saw now the marriage of her financial _éleve_
as a future bar to the confidential relations which had linked him to
her fortunes with golden chains.
“They will go on and play the game of life brilliantly without
me—these two, whom I have unwittingly brought together. I will go on
alone—now—to the end—unless I can find the lost thread.
“Endicott must reopen the search! I will spend a half million—and—that
other heart shall know mine!” She was lost in the memories of a buried
past.
As she entered the vestibule of the office building, a grave manly
voice aroused her.
“I thought that you should know this,” whispered Hugh Conyers, of the
New York _Clarion_. “It has just come over the wires from Washington.
“I was going up to tell the Judge, and have him send for you. You will
have a busy day.”
The startled woman read a slip which was the burden of the lightning
Ariel which had set “Sugar soaring hellward” in the classic diction of
James Potter, Esq.
“Hugh!” gasped the Queen of the Street, as she drew him into a dark
corner, “can I never reward you for your loyalty? Is there nothing I
can do for you?”
The Knight of the Pen laughed gaily, as he pocketed the yellow slip.
“Not now! Lady Mine! You paid in advance when you saved Sara’s life by
sending her away to Algiers! I’m off to the office. When you can give
two respectably poor people an evening, send for us, that’s all—but, we
want you all to ourselves!
“If there is anything more, I will come around. Shall I tell this to
Hathorn?” His eyes were fixed eagerly upon her.
There was a slight ring of hardness in her voice, as she hastily said:
“Not a word to him, in future. He is going to marry—and—go away for
a time. I will handle this line alone—after this—only report to the
Judge. He is my Rock of Gibraltar.”
She disappeared in the elevator with a hard little laugh. For she was
trying to make light of the blow which had told upon her lonely heart.
The newspaper man edged his way up Nassau Street in a brown study.
“Coming events cast their shadows before,” he muttered. “I wonder if
she will ever know? Some day, perhaps.”
Darting messenger boys and disgruntled pedestrians eyed wrathfully the
high-browed man of forty, who strode along with his gray eyes fixed on
vacancy.
One or two “business women” noted the clean-cut, soldierly features,
the well-shaped head, with all the intellectual stamp of old Amherst,
brightened by the fierce intellectual rivalry of the nervous New York
press.
Artist, athlete, and thinker, Hugh Conyers had hewed his upward way
through the press of bread winners out into the open, and, still
sweet-hearted and sincere, he steadily eyed without truckling, New
York’s golden luxury, and saw, with a living sympathy, the pathetic
tragedies of the side eddies of Gotham’s stiller waters.
From his cheery den, where his sister Sara Conyers’ flowers of art
bloomed, the writer looked out unmoved upon the Walpurgis nights of
winter society—the mad battles of Wall Street—and the shabby abandon of
New York City’s go-as-you-please summer life.
It was only in his faraway summer camp, by the cheery fire, under the
friendly stars, or out on the dreaming northern lakes, floating in his
beloved birch canoe, that he opened his proud heart to nature—and then,
perchance, murmured in his sleep—a name which had haunted his slumbers
long.
“So! It’s all over between them!” mused Hugh, as he was swallowed up in
a lair of clanking presses and toiling penmen. “Mr. Fred Hathorn has
arrived. God help his wife to be! The Belgian granite paving block is
as tender as that golden youth’s heart.”
He well knew that the artful protégé had only used the generous woman’s
volunteered bounty of the past—“as means to an end.”
“Elaine has simply coined her golden heart for that smart cad!” he
sighed, as he grasped a blunted spear of a pencil to dash off an
editorial upon “German Influence in the South Seas.”
In her guarded downtown office, Mrs. Elaine Willoughby resolutely put
aside the one subject now nearest her heart, to summon, by signal, the
fortunate man who was fast slipping out of her life.
The startled Queen of the Street gave but ten minutes’ time to the
consideration of the sudden change in the affairs of a giant syndicate
which used two hundred millions of dollars in swaying the world of
commercial slaves at its feet.
A warning word from Hiram Endicott’s nephew (his sole confidant) told
her that her lawyer-trustee had just been summoned, privately, to meet
the inscrutable Chief of the Syndicate.
With keen acumen, she reviewed the hostile probing of a mighty Senate,
into the Sealed Book of the great Trust’s affairs.
From her own safe, she then extracted a memorandum book and grimly
smiled, as she noted a date—May 17, 1884.
She quickly read over two cipher letters, dated “Arlington Hotel,
Washington, D.C.,” which had been silently handed her by Endicott’s
only relative, and murmured, “Can it be that the Standard Oil people
are going to quietly buy in and wager their vast fortunes on the double
event?
“Hiram will know—and—what he knows we will keep to ourselves!”
A sense of absolute safety possessed her when she reflected that the
sole depositary of her life secrets—the one man _au courant_ with her
giant speculations was a childless widower and had passed the age when
passions’ fires glow—and was, moreover, rich beyond all need of future
acquisition.
Pride kept Hiram Endicott still in the ranks of his profession, while
the acquired taste of money-making filled up the long days darkened by
the loss of wife and daughter.
When Hathorn, replying to her summons with an anxious brow, entered
the room where the beautiful architect of his fortunes awaited him, he
found a strange serenity brooding upon her face.
With a brief greeting, he plunged in _media res_. His report was
quickly made.
The unmoved listener quietly remarked, “Hold my account out of all
future deals in Sugar. Do nothing whatever. I may go away for a few
weeks. I do not care for this little flurry. I will stand out—and—the
Judge will keep that line safe.”
The quiet decision of Elaine Willoughby’s orders gave the quietus to
the young man’s eager plans for a great coup.
Watching her craftily from the corners of his eyes, he lightly turned
to the proposed visit of that interesting Montana capitalist, Harold
Vreeland.
“Bring him to see me, by all means!” the Lady of Lakemere cordially
said. “He seems to have caught a bit of the breeziness of the pines.”
And then, when Hiram Endicott briskly entered, Mr. Frederick Hathorn
fled away to the renewed struggles of the Exchange.
The quondam “only broker” was, however, not deceived. He raced on
through the excited street to cover the firm’s large line of the
rapidly advancing stock, and reasoned quickly as he went.
In his heart there was the conviction of a coming change in the
generous heart which had been so long open to him.
“Elaine is a deep one,” he wrathfully mused. “She is either flying too
high for me to follow in this—or else, she is ‘moving in a mysterious
way her wonders to perform.’”
He knew her nature too well to question her explicit orders.
The nerve of a duelist, the honor of a caballèro, the courage of a
plumed knight—all these were her attributes, and he was not mad enough
to doubt that she knew her own mind.
The “moaning of the sea of change” oppressed him. “She has got out
beyond me,” he grumbled, and then, with all the experience born of his
social life “above board” and “under the rose,” he failed to remember
any case wherein a loving woman had gone madly wild in approval of a
man’s devotion to another daughter of Eve.
“I was a fool to take Alida up there to Lakemere, and fret my best
customer with the ‘billing and cooing’ act! It was a bad play—and—yet,
the break had to come!”
He swore a deep oath that he would, when married, hold Alida VanSittart
well in hand, and still cling to the desirable business of the woman
who had made his fortune.
“Here’s Vreeland,” he hopefully planned. “Just the fellow! Ardent,
young, an interesting devil, and, rich. He will help to fill up the
measure of her lonely days—and, his game can never cross my own.
“He’s a mighty presentable fellow, too, and I can perhaps strengthen my
hold on her through him.”
A cautionary resolve to keep the handsome Western traveler away from
Miss Alida VanSittart was born of the slight uneasiness caused by the
gilded Potter’s attentions to the tall young nymph of the court of
Croesus. “She is my ‘_sine qua!_’” he smiled. “No fooling around there!”
It was four o’clock before the busy Hathorn could get the nose of his
financial bark steered safely over the saccharine breakers of the Sugar
market.
And, still, a growing excitement filled the aspiring young banker’s
veins.
While he had struggled on the floor of the Exchange, he was suddenly
smitten with a fear that his patroness had abruptly abandoned him.
He sent a confidential lad over to watch Judge Endicott’s office, and
he was soon rewarded with the reliable news that the serene goddess of
Pactolus had calmly driven away after an hour’s stay at her trustee’s
office.
“What is she up to?” he fretted. “I’ll find out if she really goes
home!” he then decided, with a growing uneasiness, as he marked the
surging tide of Sugar speculation.
He was fortunate enough to attract the personal attention of Harold
Vreeland, of Montana, for that new member of the _jeunesse dorée_
was held socially in eclipse, until Bell’s minions should purvey the
“robes of price” suited to the swelling port assumed by the bold social
gambler.
The hearty assent of the fancied dupe to the evening call, enabled
Hathorn to call his patroness by the private wire at the Circassia.
“By Jove! She is lucky to be out of this flurry!” he decided, when
Mrs. Willoughby’s voice closed the telephonic interview without even a
passing reference to “the market.” “She did go home after all!”
And, so lulled to security, he remembered all the vastness of
her varied moneyed interests. He knew only the magnitude of her
transactions in the past.
The hidden reasons of her Napoleonic moves he had never penetrated, and
he had vainly shadowed her visits to Washington and sifted the guests
at her summer palace. But now, his future control was endangered.
The crowd of guests, would-be suitors, financial and political friends
hovering around her, embraced judges, generals, senators, governors,
national statesmen, and party leaders.
Every social door was open to the mistress of Lakemere—and her smile,
like the sunshine, beamed impartially upon all. So, the veiled
espionage of the past had been fruitless.
The paid revelations of Justine had so far only rewarded him with the
recurring details of the suing of many sighing gallants kneeling before
her guarded golden shrine.
In the first months of the cementing of their past friendship, he
had even dared to dream of a personal conquest, but the high-minded
frankness of her kindness had soon killed that youthful conceit.
And now, to-day, he felt that the golden chain had snapped beyond him,
and that he really had never fathomed the inner nature of the queenly
woman.
But one unreserved intimacy characterized her guarded life. The union
of interest between herself and Hiram Endicott.
Hard-hearted and mean-spirited, Hathorn clung for a year to the idea
that the wealthy lawyer was perhaps the Numa Pompilius of this blooming
woman whose roses of life were yet fragrant with summer’s incense.
But the vastness of her transactions, and even the results of his mean
spying, left him, at last, absolutely persuaded that they were not tied
by any personal bond.
The “man who had arrived” lacked the delicacy of soul to know that the
prize might have been his, had he been true to the ideal which Elaine
Willoughby had formed of him. For, he had never been frank-hearted
enough to risk her refusal.
He had never forgotten the night, years ago, when he had boldly avowed
to her that he had not a real friend in the world. It had been with
only a coarse joy in his coming good fortune, that he had listened to
her answer, “You must come to me again.”
That night, five years before, Elaine Willoughby had whispered to her
own blushing face in her mirror, “I can make a social power of him. I
can build up his fortunes. Men shall know and honor him—and then—”
She had never completed that sentence, framing a wish that she dared
not name in words.
But he had at last coldly passed her by, and knelt before the feet of
a mere girl, who valued him only for what the silent benefactress had
made him. It was a cruel stroke.
“She is different from all the other women I have ever met!” ruefully
sighed Hathorn, who now saw that the great Sugar intrigues were sealed
from his future ken. He had watched the artful juggling of government
bonds finally make a daring and aspiring New York banker rise to be a
rival of the Rothschilds. He knew, by gossipy chatter, of the American
Sugar Company’s alleged veiled participation in the great New York
campaign of 1892.
He saw the Sugar Trust moving on to a reported influence in national
affairs, and, keenly watching every lucky stroke of the Queen of the
Street, he was persuaded that the finest threads of the vast intrigue
in some hidden way ran through her slender jeweled hands. He saw his
fault too late.
“I might have known all—if I had married her!” he decided, as he hid
his disturbed countenance in a coupé on his way uptown.
He was conscious of that slight chill of change which is an unerring
indication of a woman’s secret resolve.
But a last brilliant thought came to the puzzled trickster. It seemed a
golden inspiration.
“Here is Vreeland, heart-free and foot-loose. I can exploit him and get
him into the best houses in a month. He is not a marrying man.
“If I can work him into our stock business, I may regain her—through
him—and I’ll keep Alida out of her sight. She may fancy him. I’ll post
Vreeland, and, perhaps, he may find the key to her hold on the Sugar
deals.
“With Justine in my pay, and Vreeland well coached, I may yet fathom
the inner arcanum of the great impending deal.
“A union of the Sugar Trust and the Standard Oil interests would make
the heaviest financial battery of modern times—and—by Jove—they would
be able to swing Uncle Sam’s policy at will. Yes! I will push Vreeland
to the front.”
With a hopeful glance at a sober banking structure, not far from the
corner of Wall and Broad, the day-dreamer murmured, “I might even rise
like him,” as he caught sight of a gray-mustached man, now supposed
to be comfortably staggering along under the weight of a hundred
brilliantly won millions.
“I have Alida VanSittart’s money—as an anchor. I will use this Vreeland
as my tool. He’s an open-hearted fellow.”
Hiram Endicott, at the corner, watched the young banker dash by. The
old lawyer’s thin form was still erect at sixty-five. His stern cameo
face, and steady frosty eye, comported with his silken white hair.
He strode on, with the composed manner of an old French marquis.
His heart was wrung with the passionate appeal of Elaine Willoughby
to reopen an unavailing search of years. For she bore, in silence, a
secret burden.
The morning had been given to the calm discussion of new means to
unlock a mystery of the past, “to pluck out a rooted sorrow.”
Endicott’s nephew was now in sole charge of the giant battle with
loaded dice, in the ring of Sugar speculation. The lawyer alone knew
that Hathorn’s sceptre had departed from him. He cursed the retreating
gallant.
“Can it be that the marriage of this cold-hearted young trickster has
opened her eyes to the folly of educating a husband, _in posse_?
“Or—is it the shadow of the old sorrow, Banquo-like, returning? God
bless her. I fear it is a hopeless quest.”
And yet, with all the fond dissimulation of Eve’s family, Elaine
Willoughby was serenely radiant that night as the cautious Hathorn led
the “open-hearted fellow” into the splendors of the Circassia. “This
plan of mine will work,” mused Hathorn, who did not see the gleam of
triumph in Vreeland’s eyes when the hostess asked him to visit her
dreamy domain of Lakemere.
CHAPTER III.
A FRANK DISCLOSURE.
Hathorn returned, thoroughly hoodwinked, from the introductory evening
spent at the Circassia. It had seemed strange to him that a leading
general of the regular army, and a dapper French author, then in the
brief blaze of his “lionship,” with a grave senator and a returned
Polar explorer should have been called to meet together at the dinner
table. “It’s Elaine’s incomparable way of making a delightful _olla
podrida_ of the social menu,” he mused, as he watched the hostess
narrowly. “_Caviare_ to the General!”
When he had found time to whisper a confidential word as to the
enormous Sugar sales of the day, the Lady of Lakemere only laughed
merrily. “I have now a soul above Sugar! I shall put my ‘Trust’
elsewhere!” And then, in her serious way, she slowly said: “Wait here
with your Western friend, till all these other people go!” And he, with
a budding hope, eagerly awaited her pleasure as of old.
Elaine’s unruffled brow bore no business shades when she drew Hathorn
aside for a moment into her boudoir, leaving the luxury-loving Vreeland
wandering around spell-bound in a frank admiration of the queen’s
jewel-box. For so, the spacious apartment was termed in the circle of
“le Petit Trianon.”
“This is only my catch-all, Mr. Vreeland,” cried Elaine, as she swept
past him. “You must see Lakemere. There you can linger—and—admire.”
Harold Vreeland’s silent oath of obedience followed the woman, who
fixed her sweetly serious eyes on the agitated Hathorn, in the
well-remembered room where their hearts had so often throbbed with
quickened beats. “Was it to be a _rapprochement_?”
“It is only fair to tell you, Fred,” she simply said, “that I shall
have to avoid all excitements this summer. Doctor Hugo Alberg is not at
all satisfied with my heart action. And, a tranquil rest at Lakemere is
his sole prescription. Now, as I shall probably stay there till October
first, I shall leave my speculative stock account to be handled by
Judge Endicott, who has my sole power of attorney.”
The mystified broker stood aghast at losing his pet account for such a
long period. Was she leaving the Street forever? He faltered, “And this
means—”
“That you must hasten your marriage. There are other things in life
beside making money. Of course, I have confided only in you. Potter can
not trust himself—and so, I can not trust him with the secrets of any
of my financial movements. You are the one young Napoleon of your firm.
“So, if you really wish to go abroad, then make Alida a June bride. I
shall avoid touching the Street till late in October—and then, when
your European tour is over, I shall be able to take up the game of
pitch and toss again.”
He was conscious that she was keenly watching him. “Of course,” he
slowly said, “it gives me all the time I want. I was really concerned
about your interests. It is a good plan, and I may be able to get
Vreeland to play amateur banker in my place for a few months. Potter
and he seem to fancy each other. I’ll talk to Alida. This will probably
suit her wishes.” It all looked fair enough, and yet—his bosom was
filled with a vague alarm.
“I have already selected my present, Fred,” merrily said the Queen of
the Street. “Take time by the forelock, and give up these lovely summer
months to young love.” The broker’s eyes were gleaming as he said, “Can
it be possible that you have gone out of Sugar on the eve of a ten per
cent surplus dividend? I heard that inside rumor to-day. You know how
dear to me all your interests are.”
He now felt that there was that behind the arras which was skillfully
veiled from him. For her eyes were shining coldly over the smiling lips.
The dark-eyed woman simply said, “Tempt me not. I have promised Doctor
Alberg to refrain.
“So, go and make yourself Benedick, the married man. It is the time of
roses—you must pluck them as you pass. Come to me—when you have settled
this matter. I will give you a social send-off at Lakemere worthy of
‘the high contracting parties.’”
Her voice was thrilling him now as of old, and yet, with all her
kindness, he instinctively felt that something was going out of his
life forever.
“It will be always the same between us, Elaine,” the young Napoleon
murmured. She had risen and turned toward the door.
“Did you ever know me to change?” she softly said, as she glided out
to begin a cordial _tête-à-tête_ with Vreeland. There was no further
intimate exchange of thoughts possible between the secretly estranged
couple, and, now keenly on guard, in a disturbed state of mind,
Mr. Frederick Hathorn lingered in converse late that night at the Old
York Club, with his quondam friend.
Harold Vreeland’s conduct at his debut had been perfectly adapted to
Elaine Willoughby’s changeful mood. The deep courtesy of a perfect
self-effacement, and his coldly-designed waiting policy soothed her
strangely restless heart.
The woman who once could have married Hathorn was now feverishly eager
to see him haled to the bar of matrimony.
“Once that he is _rangé_—I am then sure of myself again,” she murmured,
as she saw her perfectly composed face for the last time that night in
the silver-framed mirror. And yet, she knew that it was but a social
mask. There was an anticipatory revenge, however, in the fact that
Hiram Endicott had reported the private pooling of her enormous Sugar
holdings with those of the great chief of the vast Syndicate.
The ten per cent bonus dividend, long artfully held back, was her
assured profit now, and Hugh Conyers’ watchful loyalty had made
“assurance doubly sure.”
Endicott had already sent out a dozen agents to take up once more the
secret quest which had so often failed them—and these “legal affairs”
naturally gave him the excuse for a tri-weekly visit to Lakemere.
“So, Mr. Frederick Hathorn, as you have locked the door of my heart on
the outside, you may now throw away the useless key!” she mused “I will
find my best defense against any weakness in the keen-witted young wife
who will surely show you yet the thorns on the rosebud.”
Dreams of the past mingled with the shapes of the present, as the lady
of Lakemere laid her shapely head to rest.
“He has irreproachable manners, at least,” was her last thought, as the
unconscious psychology of mighty Nature brought the graceful Vreeland
back to her mind. “I wonder if he is at heart like—the other?”
And so, all ignorant of the power of this self-confessed womanly
yearning toward the handsome young stranger, Elaine Willoughby fell
asleep, to dream of the crafty man who had not yet forgotten how her
liquid eyes had dropped under his ardent gaze.
The laws of nature are the only inviolable code of life, and blindly
the lady of Lakemere had passed on, all unwittingly, toward a turning
point in her lonely life. Her barrier of pride only fenced out the
ungrateful Hathorn, condemned for ingratitude.
Vreeland, following carefully upon Fred Hathorn’s curvilinear
conversational path, easily divined the uncertainty of the greedy young
broker’s mind.
“He wants Miss Millions, and yet, he would not lose his fairy
godmother,” thought the crafty adventurer. “I shall go slow and let
them make the game.
“But wait till I am the guiding spirit of Lakemere. She shall come
forward inch by inch, and he shall unfold to me every weak spot in his
armor.”
They had finished a grilled bone and a “bottle” before Hathorn foxily
sought to draw out his friend as to the details of the Montana bonanza.
The plan of an amateur four-months’ Wall Street experience was quietly
and deftly brought in.
“You see, Hod,” frankly said Hathorn, “Jimmy Potter drinks
occasionally. He has that pretty devil, Dickie Doubleday, on the
string, and he plays high. Now, my lawyer alone has my Power of
Attorney. I can post our confidential man.
“But, if you would open a special account of, say, a hundred thousand
dollars, why, there is Sugar! There will soon be a ten per cent bonus
dividend. You could see the Street, _on the inside_! I know that you
would get along with Potter.
“You always were a cool chap. What do you say? I shall marry Alida
VanSittart, and take the run over the water while I can. I don’t care,
however, to lose Mrs. Willoughby. She is the heaviest woman operator in
America. Her account is a young fortune to us. Think this over.”
The fine “poker nerve” of Mr. Harold Vreeland was now manifest in his
quick perception of Hathorn’s trembling fingers. The smoke curled
lazily from Vreeland’s Henry Clay as he said: “I will open my heart to
you, Fred. All my money is already well invested. And I do not care to
move a small block of my funds. Besides—
“I have been cut off from all phases of womanhood save the ‘Calamity
Jane’ type, or some one’s runaway wife, for long years. I shall hurry
slowly. You know the Arabic proverb: ‘Hurry is the devil’s.’ Now, by
October the first, I will have had my summer fling. I will perhaps join
you then, if you can make the showing that I would like. But, just now,
I am going in for the ‘roses and raptures.’”
“You are not a marrying man, Hod?” cried Hathorn, in a sudden alarm.
“Heavens, no!” laughed the Western man. “Omar Khayyam’s vision of
the ‘Flower Garden’ pales before the ‘_embarras de richesse_’ of the
New York ‘Beauty Show.’ I am as yet a free lance, and also, an old
campaigner. I will solemnly promise not to marry till I see you again.
But I’ll stand up with you and see you spliced.”
The compact was sealed over ’tother bottle, and then Hathorn departed
in high hopes. “He will drift easily into our circle,” mused the sly
broker, who, watching only his own loosening hold on Elaine Willoughby,
jumped to the conclusion that Vreeland really controlled a vast fortune.
His friend had “called the turn” correctly.
“Bluff goes, it seems, even in cold-hearted New York,” gaily concluded
Vreeland, as he sauntered back alone to the Waldorf. “This strangely
hastened wedding will bring me at once into the best circles. Mr. Fred
Hathorn’s groomsman is a social somebody. The Lakemere divinity will
soon do the rest, and by the time you return, my sly friend, I will be
ready to kick the ladder down on your side.” He roared with a secret
glee over his own “inability to disturb his invested funds.”
With a vulpine watchfulness, he noted all Mr. Jimmy Potter’s weak
points. “I must get up my poker practice,” he smilingly said, as he
laid his comely head down to rest.
“‘Mr. Potter of New York’ shall reinforce that slender seven thousand
dollars, or else I’m a duffer. He will never squeal, at least, not to
his partner. And so I’ll go in as a wedge between this ass and this
fine woman who has unconsciously loved him. Yes, it’s a good opening
for a young man! A mean and easy betrayal!”
The preoccupations of the splendid wedding of Miss Alida VanSittart
gave Vreeland, now “the observed of all observers,” an ample
opportunity to begin that “silent slavery” of a respectful devotion
upon which he had decided as his safest _rôle_ at Lakemere.
His days were pleasantly passed in gaining a growing intimacy with the
club circles to which two powerful influences had now gained him an
easy access. For, Elaine Willoughby was drifting under the charm of his
apparent self-surrender to her generous leadership—another handsome
protégé.
His rising social star was fixed in its orbit by the honors of
groomsman, and in the _visites de cérémonie_, the rehearsals, and all
the petty elegancies of the “great social event,” Mr. Harold Vreeland
showed a perfectly good form. There was a gentle gravity in his Waldorf
life which impressed even the _flâneurs_ of that gilded hostelry.
“There, sir,” remarked an old habitué, “is a man who holds himself at
his proper value.”
Measured and fastidious in all his ways, Mr. Vreeland neglected no
trifling detail, and he calmly went onward and upward. He well knew
that, for some as yet hidden reason, the bridegroom was assiduously
forcing his old chum forward into the glittering ring of America’s
Vanity Fair. And it exactly suited his own quiet game.
He fully appreciated the extensive influence of the Lady of Lakemere,
for her friends, moved on deftly by her, now came forward to open the
golden gates for him on every side.
Even before the wedding, Vreeland had made himself familiar with all
the glories of Lakemere. Side by side with its beautiful mistress, he
had threaded its leafy alleys, climbed its sculptured heights “when
jocund morn sat on the misty mountain tops,” and gloated secretly upon
the splendid treasures of that perfect establishment. “This shall be
mine yet,” he swore in his delighted heart.
Out upon the moonlit lake, speeding along in a fairy launch, Mr. Harold
Vreeland followed up his policy of self-abnegation. “Do you not know
that I can trace your noble kindness everywhere?” he murmured.
“I am all alone in the world. Your veiled influence is making
cold-hearted New York smile as a blossoming paradise for me. No; do not
deny it. You are the very loveliest Queen of Friendship.” The beautiful
brown eyes dropped before his eager gaze. She was a woman still.
Elaine Willoughby marked him as he went away with a growing interest.
“Graceful, grateful, manly, and sincere!” was her verdict, easily
reached, but one, however, not so enthusiastically adopted by either
Judge Hiram Endicott or the Conyers couple, whom the Lady of Lakemere
had captured for a visit before sending them away to the delightful
summer exile of her Adirondack cottage.
“I don’t know what that fellow is after, Hugh?” growled the old Judge
one day, as they were returning to town together; “but, he looks to me
like a fellow who would finally get it.”
Conyers uneasily said: “He is the ‘head panjandrum’ of this Hathorn
wedding—old college chum and all that.”
“_Arcades ambo!_” shortly said the silver-haired lawyer.
“Mrs. Willoughby has a foolish fondness for picking up these Admirable
Crichtons, and then forcing them along the road to fortune. It is only
a generous woman’s weakness, a sort of self-flattery.”
“Vreeland is immensely rich—a man of leisure. Has jumped into one
or two of the best clubs by mysterious backing, and seems to be all
right,” slowly answered Hugh, mentally contrasting his own plain tweeds
with Vreeland’s raiment of great price.
“I don’t believe a word of it,” sharply said Endicott. “Oblige me and
just keep an eye on him—_about her_, I mean,” and the journalist was
fain to give the required promise.
Their hands met in a silent pledge of loyalty to the lonely-hearted
mistress of Lakemere.
The elder man alone knew the silent sorrows of her anxious soul. He
alone knew of the quest of long years—a labor of love, so far fruitless.
The younger guarded his own heart secret in his honest breast, and yet,
while hiding it from the world, he wondered why some man worthy of her
royal nature had not taken her to wife.
As the train swept along, watching a “bright, particular star” mirrored
in the flowing Hudson, Conyers sighed, “God bless her! She’s as far
above me as that star, and yet, she makes my life bright.”
It was Mr. Harold Vreeland who later carried off all the honors of the
sumptuous wedding as a proper “man-at-arms” in Cupid’s army. He was
secretly approved by even the _raffinée_ bridesmaids. He was also the
diplomatic messenger who delivered to Mrs. Alida Hathorn that superb
diamond necklace which was Elaine Willoughby’s bridal offering. Hathorn
remembered after the ceremony how strangely stately were his lovely
patroness’ congratulations to the radiant bride.
Vreeland’s speech at the Lakemere dinner was classic in its diction,
and when the festivities slowly crystallized into iridescent memories,
and the “happy pair” were half over to that “bourne” from whence many
American travelers do not return—gay, glittering Paris—Mr. Harold
Vreeland was soon besieged with many sweetly insidious invitations to
Lenox, Bar Harbor, Narragansett Pier, Newport, the Hudson colony, and
many other Capuan bowers of dalliance.
Larchmont, Lakewood, Irvington, and other summer mazes opened their
hospitable golden gates to him, and a swarm of biddings to polo, golf,
lawn tennis, and other youthful circles, were gladly offered by man and
maid. In other words, Vreeland was launched “in the swim.”
In the hurried moments of the steamer parting, Vreeland would only
vouchsafe a cool but diplomatic answer to Hathorn’s final pleadings.
“I will meet and answer you on October 1st, but I’ll look in on Potter
a bit.”
He did cordially agree to give the bridegroom a friendly report of all
the doings at Lakemere, and he had fallen heir to Hathorn’s intimacy
with Justine—that spirited French maid, whose many life episodes
had only deprived her of a shadowy candidacy for the honors of “_la
Rosière_.” “I trust to you to look after my interests, Hod, in a
general way,” eagerly said the bridegroom.
“So I will,” heartily replied the young Lochinvar _à la mode_, and then
he mentally added: “After my own are safe.” And, so bride and groom
sailed away on the ocean of a newer life.
He so far kept his promise, mindful of the gap already made by a dash
into high life in his seven thousand dollars, as to closely cement an
intimacy with Potter, begun over the “painted beauties.”
Mrs. Hathorn’s bridal wreath had hardly withered before the astute
Vreeland, a good listener, had become the chief adviser of Potter in
his doubtful warfare with that bright-eyed Cossack of Love, Miss Dickie
Doubleday.
“Mr. Jimmy” now seriously contemplated a two years’ visit to Europe on
the return of the successfully married Hathorn. “The little rift within
the lute” was widening. Miss Doubleday was as exacting as she was
charming, and even “rosy fetters of ethereal lightness” were galling to
the spoiled child of fortune. Potter had secretly purchased a Gazetteer
and had made some furtive studies as to Askabad, Astrachan, Khiva,
Timbuctoo, Khartoum, and several other places where his golden-haired
tyrant could not follow him without due premonition. He contemplated a
“change of base.”
“I hope you will come in with us, Vreeland,” cordially remarked Potter.
“Hathorn tells me that you are well up in stocks and as quick as
lightning. I wouldn’t mind helping you to an interest. I must escape
this—this—”
The puzzled little millionaire paused, for the first word was a misfit,
and he was a good devil at heart. He could not abuse the tantalizing
Miss Dickie Doubleday.
With a fine discrimination, the rising social star was touched with
one pang of regret at the little man’s agony, now impaled on the hook
of Miss Dickie Doubleday’s angle. He visited that bright-eyed young
Ithuriel, and soon effected a “_modus vivendi_” which enabled Potter
to cruise around on his yacht for one month of blessed and unhoped for
peace.
In several sittings upon the “Nixie,” Mr. Harold Vreeland relieved his
grateful host of some fourteen thousand dollars, by the application of
the neat little Western device known as “the traveling aces.”
But, James Potter, grateful to the core, and lulled by the insidious
Pommery, never “caught on,” and cheerfully “cashed up” without a murmur.
From this victorious encounter, Mr. Harold Vreeland gaily returned
to Lakemere, after a brief tour of inspection of the seaside resorts
sacred to the _gente fina_. He found everything “grist to his mill.”
The gates were widely ajar.
With the patient assiduity of a well-conceived purpose, he now began to
make the most of this “one summer.”
He was well aware, from the reports of the complacent Justine, that the
Conyers were both out of the way, and his heart bounded with delight as
he realized that Elaine Willoughby gracefully called him to her side on
those four days of the week when Hiram Endicott was not in commune with
her, in the splendid gray stone mansion bowered in its nodding trees.
He always paid her the delicate compliment of an implicit obedience,
and in all the days of absence found the way made smooth for him
elsewhere.
The circle at Lakemere was a large one, and Mr. Harold Vreeland,
“with an equal splendor” and a touch “impartially tender,” became the
favorite _ami de maison_. He failed not, however, to spread the balm of
his cordial suavity on every side.
Day after day drifted happily by, the unspoken pact between the new
friends becoming a stronger bond with every week, and the watchful
vigilance of the young adventurer was never relaxed.
He was now grounded on society’s shores as a fixture, and apparently
serenely unconscious, soon became the _vogue_ without effort. The
useless accomplishments of his college days now all came back to vastly
aid the agreeable _parvenu_.
He had early mastered the secret of womanhood—the vague dislike
possessed by all of Eve’s charming daughters for the strong-souled and
unyielding superior man. For, be they never so wary, “trifles light as
air” happily fill up the days of those women to whom American luxury
is both enfeebling and jading. The strong man is not needed in the
feather-ball game of high life.
That one rare art of the woman-catcher, “never to bring up, in the
faintest degree, the affairs of another woman,” victoriously carried
Vreeland on into the vacant halls of the _filles de marbre_. And so,
“Mr. Harold Vreeland” was universally voted “a charming man of vast
culture and rare accomplishments.”
Fortunately, Mr. Fred Hathorn had widely trumpeted abroad the Montana
bonanza, and the vulgar slavering over an easily assumed wealth carried
him on both fast and far.
In his own heart, one carefully crystallized plan had already matured.
To reach the innermost holy of holies of Elaine Willoughby’s heart, and
then, to rule at Lakemere—to secretly lord it later in the Circassia.
With a fine acumen, he refrained from making a single enemy among her
sighing swains or her fawning women parasites. “They must not suspect
my game here,” he sleekly smiled.
But one brooding shadow hung over the sunshine of these days. He was
always aware of the frequent visits of Judge Endicott. And Justine’s
recitals proved to him that a hidden sorrow had its seat in her
mistress’ soul.
There were dark days when Elaine Willoughby’s heart failed under the
burden of a past which Vreeland had never tried to penetrate. She
was inaccessible then. Guarding a perfect silence as to his own
antecedents, he trusted to her in time to unfold to him the secrets of
the heart which he had secretly sworn to dominate.
“I can be patient. I can afford to wait,” he mused, as with a faithful
assiduity he came and went, and marked no shadows on the happy dial of
those summer days.
“She is worth serving seven years for,” he mused; “and, for her
fortune—with Lakemere—seventeen.”
“When I am master here,” he secretly exulted, “I can say: ‘Soul! thou
hast much goods!’”
And so he bided his time, and yet, with keen analysis, decided to make
his _coup_ before the fretful and intriguing Hathorn returned.
“It is the one chance of a lifetime,” he mused, as he paced the lawns
of Lakemere. “Once that her social support would be withdrawn, once
that this suspicious devil, Hathorn, would ‘drop on’ the dangerous game
I am playing, I would be soon ground between the millstones of fate.”
And his soul was uneasy as the October days approached and the blue
haze of the golden Indian summer began to drift down the Hudson.
He came to the conclusion at last to put his fate to the test. For
certain letters received from Hathorn at the Isle of Wight had prepared
him for the explosion of a social bomb which wrecked forever Frederick
Hathorn’s dreams of regaining the alienated heart of the woman who had
led him up the ladder of life.
And that part of the situation which was seen “as through a glass
darkly” was quickly made clear by the confidence of a fond woman who
had begun to invest Mr. Harold Vreeland with all the virtues and many
of the graces. Caught on the rebound, her heart was opening to her
artful admirer.
The thorns upon Hathorn’s rosebud were sharp enough. He already felt
the keenness of the petted Mme. Alida’s egoistic and unruly nature.
And, in a clouded present, he looked back regretfully to a golden past,
with every fear of a stormy future. It was the old story of two women
and one man, with the poisoned-tongued society intermeddler.
There had been a little happening at the Isle of Wight which was the
direct result of the young millionaire matron displaying at a yachting
ball the diamond necklace which had been Elaine Willoughby’s wedding
gift. Then, the tongue of envy found its ready venom.
One of those sleek devils in woman form who are the social scavengers
of the world, had glowered upon those secretly coveted gems as they
rose and fell upon the bosom of the young moonlight beauty.
She uttered lying words which sent Alida Hathorn back to her summer
cottage with pallid lips and heart aflame.
The story was soon wafted across the sea by a sister spider, who had
easily followed on the first bitter quarrel between the two parties
to the “marriage of the year.” And Harold Vreeland, now on post, a
watchful sentinel at Elaine Willoughby’s side, was the first one to
whom her own outraged heart was poured out, as Mrs. Volney McMorris
drove back to her own lair at Larchmont.
Out in the dreamy gardens, in a summer house, to the accompaniment
of falling leaves and sighing pines, the indignant lady of Lakemere
told her ardent listener the story of a shameful jealousy and the
outpouring of a maddened woman’s wrath.
It gave to Harold Vreeland the needed cue. The decisive moment had
come, and he hazarded his future upon the chance of meeting her
confidence with a fine burst of manly sympathy.
To range himself forever under her colors, and to craftily lie to her,
and not in vain.
His audacious devil sprite once more urged him to be both bold and wise.
Elaine Willoughby’s eyes were flashing as she repeated the relation of
Mrs. Volney McMorris, who, “so anxious that her dear friend should know
all and not be exposed to the ignominy of a ‘dead cut’ from Hathorn’s
headstrong wife.” “And, as he is a _lâche_, I would use the ‘baby
stare’ first, my dear Elaine,” was the parting shot of the departing
McMorris. The lady of Lakemere was a roused tigress now.
Harold Vreeland listened breathlessly to the story of the bitter
taunt that the diamond necklace and parting dinner had been Elaine
Willoughby’s crafty “sop to the social Cerberus” in giving her handsome
secret lover, Hathorn, only a furlough for the honeymoon.
The insinuation that the young husband would carry on a _ménage à
trois_ had crazed the suspicious heiress, whose new wedding bonds
burned like molten gold.
“I shall soon know if Frederick Hathorn is an unutterable craven,”
proudly said Elaine to her serpent listener.
“She has publicly boasted that he shall cease all semblance of
friendship with me, and Mrs. McMorris told me that Alida had forced
every detail of our past intimacy out of her husband, who admitted
only a confidential business relation.
“‘Break it off!’ was Alida’s ultimatum, and she has publicly declared
‘war to the knife.’
“When Hathorn referred to our business connection, so profitable to the
firm, Alida had cried: ‘I have money enough for both of us. I married
a gentleman, _not a counter jumper_! You shall drop all this humbug
business which has been the cloak to your _amourette_.’”
Elaine Willoughby saw the wonderment of Vreeland’s eyes. With a
blush reddening her pale cheek, she faltered: “The maid overheard
the quarrel, and she told Mrs. McMorris all. She was once her own
attendant.”
“That McMorris is a genius,” mused Vreeland, as Mrs. Willoughby
concluded: “And, Hathorn has been silent. I have not heard one word
from him.” Her bosom heaved as she gloomily said: “I will give him a
last chance to speak out, and if he acts the moral coward, then it is
_war to the knife_!
“Her husband’s lady-love! An ex-goddess! ‘A star on the retired list!’
I will make her pay for these brutal vulgarities! I will force him to
speak, and in her presence!”
The artful Mr. Harold Vreeland fancied that he had discovered the
reason of the storms of sorrow which had swept over the lady of
Lakemere. He knew not of Endicott’s bootless quest for a message from
the misty shores of the past. “_These two women foes will decide my
fate!_” he quickly decided. “Here is the place to leap into the breach
and widen it.”
Taking Elaine Willoughby’s trembling hands in his own, he fixed his
ardent eyes upon her, and once more her glances fell under the spell
of his steady gaze.
His voice had the ring of sincerity in it as he proceeded with a
feigned reluctance.
“You need not wait, Madonna!” Mr. Vreeland had easily reached the stage
of a special appellation for the Queen of the Street.
“He has already spoken, and I will fight in this good cause—to the
death, under your colors.”
He drew out a letter from Hathorn and read it slowly, without a single
comment, and with a dramatic, hushed solemnity.
Before he had finished he saw in her glowing eyes that she was his
prey. The poisoned arrow had struck home. She was, after all, a woman
at heart.
Hathorn’s jerky letter referred to the “end of the season,” “a return
_incognito_,” and demanded an early meeting with his chum. “I presume
that you know all of Potter’s troubles. He wants to become a ‘special
partner,’ and then to go away for two years. You must join us at
once, or I must find another man. So, have your answer ready.” Elaine
Willoughby was silent until Vreeland slowly read:
“I count on you to control in future Mrs. Willoughby’s business. Make
yourself her friend and confidant. My wife is a tiger-cat of jealousy.
Some fools or fiends have been working upon her spoiled babyhood. I’ve
vainly told her that the woman whom she hates was past her youth and
old enough to be her mother; but she will listen to no reason.
“Now, old fellow, you can easily gain Mrs. Willoughby’s good will. Her
account is the best on the Street, and, in this way, if you join us, we
can divide the profits, and I am then safe from a fruitless quarrel.
Of course, I’ve got to drop the Willoughby for good.”
There was a shrill cry of rage and defiance. Vreeland’s heart leaped up.
“Let me read the rest of that _alone_,” cried Elaine, with blazing
eyes. After a moment’s pause, she handed it back, when she had noted
Hathorn’s signature.
“He asks you to cable him your decision!” breathlessly said the Queen
of the Street.
“I have simply telegraphed: ‘_Impossible! I decline!_’” answered
Vreeland, and then, in the silence the shade of Judas Iscariot laughed
far down in hell.
Their hands met in a silent pledge of a friendship which shone in
Elaine Willoughby’s misty eyes. “_How can I thank you?_” she began; but
gravely Harold Vreeland addressed her to her growing astonishment.
“Wait!” he said, with a seeming reluctance. “I never would have shown
you that letter but to save your own noble soul from the humiliation
of stooping to a conference with a man who would so meanly trade upon
your past bounty and try to trap you, through me. Your confidence
has brought this out. But, you must hear all. I claim no credit
for declining to be the man to hoodwink you. ‘The pleasant days of
Aranjuez’ are waning fast. I am soon going to leave New York and go
back to the great West.”
Vreeland noted the quick, convulsive start, and his heart rejoiced as
she grasped his hands, whispering: “Never! My one faithful knight shall
stay here _near me_ to battle in my defense, ‘even if I am old enough
to be Alida Hathorn’s mother.’ Tell me all. It is my right now to know
all your plans.”
The handsome adventurer raised his grave face to her own. “I will, if
you will promise me to ignore these two people—the hollow-hearted man
who would use me to entrap you, and that saucy girl, a spoiled child
from her cradle. Hathorn carries his own future punishment around with
him in that crisp bundle of dimity.”
The unspoken pledge of her eyes told him that his _coup_ had succeeded.
“By Jove!” he mused, “she is only a woman, like the rest. The taunt as
to her age has cut her deeper than this fellow’s rank ingratitude.”
He gazed upon her Indian summer beauty, and his eyes strayed away to
the pillared glories of the matchless country mansion. “She’s worth the
risk—with Lakemere,” he reflected. “I’ll try it!” He yielded and spoke,
and she listened with tender eyes.
And the shadows deepened around them, as the young schemer told a
plaintive story of emotional lying embroidery to the woman whose
agitated heart was swept with a storm of revengeful feeling.
A passionate desire to punish the younger woman whose husband had used
the mean taunt of her sunset years to quiet the jealous little spitfire
heiress.
“I did not come to New York City under false pretenses,” began
Vreeland, “but, Hathorn has taken me wrongly to be a rich man. I am
only a poor man to-day, and a weary and a lonely life lies before me.”
“I could not muster the hundred thousand dollars needed to go into
their firm, for I have made myself poor in the discharge of a sacred
duty.”
With a fine affectation of manly earnestness, he then told the
generous-hearted woman a romantic tale of his gifted father’s career,
and of the death of his patient mother. He judiciously unfolded the
story of his father’s professional errors, and painted that “sudden
taking off” in the wilds of Montana.
A knowledge of Judge Endicott’s encyclopedic memory, and some previous
hints from the wary Justine, caused Vreeland to put in a hidden plea
in bar, to offset any private researches of the only two men whom he
feared in Elaine’s glittering entourage. They were the silver-haired
Hiram Endicott and the manly Conyers.
Once or twice he had observed the latter’s eyes searching him in no
unmeaning hostility.
There were tears on Elaine Willoughby’s lashes as he concluded with
manly earnestness:
“Left with a supposedly ample fortune, I found, on an examination of
my father’s private papers, that there was before me a sacred task of
restitution. A work of self-abnegation, of simple honesty, lay before
me.
“I had never known of the baleful influence of the woman who led my
father (once in her clutches) on to lead a double life.
“But, in justice to his own better self and in honor of my beloved
mother’s memory, I gave up nearly all, and so arrived here with only a
few thousand dollars in my pocket.”
The shades had deepened around them when he concluded with his last
master stroke of manly simplicity.
“Chance threw me across Hathorn in the train as I came here to collect
the only honest money left to me after my work of secret restitution
was done. I saw that he valued only money—success—and the glitter of
your hot-hearted swell circles.
“It was hard for me to dishonor a father’s memory. To undeceive my old
college friend, I intended to ask him later for aid—for employment. But
I soon saw that I would not get it. He fell into the innocent error of
supposing me to be very rich.
“And,” the young special pleader rose as he said, under his voice, “_I
met you there—at the depot!_ My heart and soul craved another sight of
you. And that I might meet you again, _I did not undeceive him_.
“You know the rest. I have been true to you, and I have given up my
last hope of fortune in refusing to be his tool.”
He could see her splendid eyes shining upon him through her happy tears.
“Let us go in, Harold,” she softly said. “I must think! I must think!
But promise me that you will not go away from New York till I bid you.
Trust to me.”
“I promise,” he gravely said, as he lifted her trembling hand and
kissed it, and then, arm in arm, they wandered back to her splendid
pleasaunce palace. _It_ was the “betrayal with a kiss.”
After the dinner, to which a few of the nearest county magnates had
been previously bidden, Vreeland watched Elaine’s imperial bearing as
she proudly queened it in the drawing room.
A richer rose burned upon her cheek. Her eyes were lit up with a
strange fire, and her magnificent voice echoed in every heart with a
thrill of a quivering life, as her defiant soul rose to the prelude of
that coming war with the jealous girl who had determined to shine down
the Lady of Lakemere.
The last carriage load of guests had rattled away, and Mme. Lafarge,
wearied “_dame de compagnie_,” was nodding, with her eyes hopefully
fixed upon the old colonial hall clock, when Elaine said, softly: “One
last word with you in the library.”
The Queen of the Street stood there with downcast eyes before the great
carved mantle, as she slowly said: “They will arrive in three or four
days. You must confirm your answer to him.
“He has told me that you know stocks, and are familiar with all board
matters.”
Vreeland bowed in silence.
“Then,” she said, fixing her sparkling eyes upon him, “I will make you
a confession. I had decided to withdraw gradually my entire business
from their firm. In fact, I have been already secretly operating
through a trusted friend _on the outside_.
“You must find a good man, one acceptable to Hiram Endicott.
“I will set you up, and Hathorn & Potter shall soon find a rival. I
will carry the war into the enemy’s camp. So be on your guard. _Hathorn
must never know!_
“It is the only punishment for his abandonment at the first hostile
signal from his enraged wife. I have made him on the Street! _I can
unmake him!_” Her voice had the ring of a singing bugle calling to arms.
“But, I have no money,” the crafty Judas faltered.
“Leave that to me,” laughingly said Elaine. “You are now my own knight.
Here are your colors.”
She handed him a knot of ribbon blue. “Come to me next week. Meet him
frankly and decline all connection. Senator Alynton will be here then.”
And she smiled and pressed a rosy finger to her lips.
“The Sugar magnate!” whispered the happy Vreeland, as he stood
spellbound, while his goddess fled up the stair, leaving him there
alone.
CHAPTER IV.
“WYMAN AND VREELAND” SWING THE STREET.
Mr. Harold Vreeland was awake with the birds, and in an early morning
walk long communed with himself under the whispering trees of Lakemere.
The enchanting prospect of the superb estate delighted his eyes more
with every visit. He blessed the goddess Fortune, and smiled truly,
“the lines have fallen to me in pleasant places!”
It was only with a severe struggle that he concealed the secret joy now
burning in his heart, and he carefully laid out all his plans for the
crucial week to come. He must widen the breach.
There was the conference with Senator Alynton, Hiram Endicott, and that
strange “big brother,” Hugh Conyers. He felt instinctively that these
three men would not share “Madonna’s” enthusiasm.
He aimed to continually efface himself and to allow the resentful woman
to goad herself along in the path of social and financial revenge.
“Any fool can stand hard times, but it takes a wise man to keep his
head, under a run of winning luck!” he mused, with reminiscences of
“Mr. John Oakhurst” and his pithy proverb, that “the luck usually got
tired—before the man did.”
He retraced his steps to the house, and was most calmly quiescent and
tenderly respectful in his adieu.
“That burst of confidence has fixed her—_for good_!” he mused.
“You are to report to me, here, by letter, the result of your interview
with that man!” hurriedly whispered Elaine Willoughby, as her “knight”
turned toward the wagonette. “I will summon you here, when Alynton
comes. Do nothing else. Leave all to me.” And his eyes burned into her
soul, as he promised a happy slave’s obedience.
The bright smile of the dark-eyed enthusiast haunted him all the way to
New York. “Talleyrand was right,” he murmured, at ease in the parlor
car, “_Point de zèle!_ She will make all the running for me.” He
enjoyed the salutations showered right and left on him, as the train
picked up the men of note carrying the hopes and fears of a new week to
Gotham. “I am a somebody now!” he grinned.
The rising light of the Sentinel and Locust clubs, the man who had
superbly engineered the brilliant Hathorn-VanSittart’s nuptials—“the
great Montana capitalist,” was surely a man of mark, and Nature’s easy
gifts had earned him a warm welcome in the slightly jaded circles of
the Four Hundred. He was, moreover, a “new face,” and several spasms of
unrest under aristocratic corsages had already proved that there were
eyes “which brightened when he came.”
As for his false _rôle_ of man of leisure and _élégant_—“custom of
it, had made a property of easiness.” “I am a fraud—and—half these
anæmic swells are fools as well as frauds!—I am content!” he smilingly
decided, as he reviewed his plans for a daring course during the next
trying week.
As he had surmised, a telegram awaited him at the Waldorf from the
returned Hathorn. It was of a simple directness.
“Meet me to-night, seven. Old York Club. Must have your answer
reconsidered. Every inducement possible.” The subtle smile of triumph
which played around his lips recalled Private Ortheri’s stern remark,
“See that beggar—got him!”—as he dropped the faraway Pathan with the
“long shot.”
All day, Frederick Hathorn secretly tormented himself over the curt
answer, “Will be there. Vreeland.” There was much before the tortured
bridegroom to arrange. The mutinous Dickie Doubleday, phantom of
audacious and unrestful beauty, was now driving Mr. James Potter out of
his wits.
He longed for a “boat upon the shore and a bark upon the sea!” He had
learned that in some distant Afghan hole called “Swat,” there were
neither post-offices, telegraphs, banks, detectives, song and dance
theatres, nor any of the machinery of a “bastard civilization” which
the reckless Miss Dickie could work to ensnare or follow him.
“By Gad! Just the place! I’ll get a white shirt—brown myself up
like parched coffee, and turn into a Ghazi, or Dervish, or fighting
Mollah—or, any old thing. She is a hummer. Pray God, that some other
good-looking fellow will soon catch her ‘wandering eye.’ Her constancy
is an ‘abnormal feature’ of later development. This is the only time in
her life that she has stuck to a victim—for over three months. Other
fellows should help me bear the burden.”
There was all the details of Hathorn’s newly enhanced social state
to arrange. The Union and Metropolitan clubs were to be haunt of
Benedick—the married man. And—the war to the knife, the fight of Marius
and Sylla now lay before him.
There was Oakwood, his wife’s magnificent place at Ashmont, awaiting
its social _monture_. Her Imperious Ladyship Alida had ordered him to
go in for the pennant-bearing honors of Vice Commodore of the Ashmont
Yacht Club, and her beautiful schooner, “L’Allouette,” was awaiting his
practical hand.
A positive mandate for the best box at the Horse Show, and a royal
gallery box in the tiara-wearing tier of the Opera, were matters of
pressing urgency.
Hathorn was already “broken in” as a “general advance agent” and “heavy
man” for his wife’s “Great Moral Matrimonial Show,” and that lady,
with the coming Hathorn-Willoughby feud first in her mind, had brought
luggage enough for Cleopatra and all her nymphs on that record-breaking
voyage of splendor to the Cydnus.
All these and many more things busied the disgruntled Hathorn until
the hour set for the meeting with Vreeland. He had posted his wife and
her train away up to the Buckingham, for he felt, instinctively, that
the handsome groomsman was not just the party to linger around his
newly-enclosed sheepfold.
He had already discovered several shades of color in his rosebud not
visible to the ante-nuptial eye, and, moreover, he was hungry for news
of Elaine Willoughby and of her state of mind. He now saw the “firm’s”
interests seriously endangered.
There was the vastly profitable past business connection, and “Sugar,”
too, loomed up before him now as a vanishing pyramid of alluring
sweetness. He knew that the woman whom he had coldly left had been the
very spirit of his own wonderful success.
But Hathorn never knew how eagerly Vreeland, at the Waldorf, his
anxiety veiled by a thoughtful smile, watched the clock hands crawl
around till seven.
“That fool has but one chance left to ruin me forever—and—to block my
little game!” restlessly reflected Vreeland. “If he only had the manly
nerve to dash up to Lakemere and to throw himself there on Elaine’s
generosity, he might be forgiven—even now. The swaying bosom of
womanhood is always ripe for forgiveness. A woman is fondly weak to a
man who calls up a lost love. And he has been all in all to her, in the
past days.
“She set him up on a high pedestal and fairly worshiped him.
“Perhaps he felt like the Frenchman, that two women are necessary to
every man—one whom he loves, and one who loves him.”
But the telegraphed reports of his secret spies arriving every half
hour, told the delighted Vreeland that Hathorn was still “at the
office.”
“Give me to-night, and just one telegram to reach the Madonna—then—I
will have made that breach irrevocable!” gleefully cried Vreeland, as
he was driven down to the Old York Club.
The two men met in an apparent cordiality, and the Western man’s poker
nerve stood by him, as he calmly enjoyed a dinner, at which Hathorn
merely nibbled, with an ill-concealed restlessness.
They exhausted all the usual banalities with regard to the well-beaten
paths of the wedding tour, and Mr. Vreeland was graceful in all his
perfunctory interest in the young Adam and Eve in their newly found
Paradise.
When the cigars and liqueurs brought them around to the “hard-pan”
stage of the interview, and a guarded seclusion, with a slow
constrained manner—Frederick Hathorn began to carefully interrogate the
“devil whom he had let out of the bottle.”
Vreeland keenly eyed the speaker through the blue-curling smoke of a
Henry Clay, and, when Hathorn had reviewed all his past arguments as to
the proposed business connection, he buried his head in his hands in
deep thought.
Hathorn had even offered to aid Vreeland with the capital to qualify
him as a member of the projected firm of “Hathorn, Potter & Vreeland.”
It was a clear “giveaway” of his temporizing fears of the coming war.
“You see, you could swing Mrs. Willoughby’s account and give it your
special attention,” concluded the man who had now shown every card in
his hand.
Hathorn noticed, with a growing uneasiness, that Vreeland had been very
reticent. The “Montana capitalist” had grown pompously solemn.
Suddenly his old college chum lifted his head, and frankly eyed the
anxious banker. “Have you conferred with Mrs. Willoughby on this plan?”
he said, curtly. It was pinning his dupe to the cross—this sly thrust.
Hathorn stammered, as he reddened, “Why—no! I have left that all to
you. I have not written her nor seen her, since the wedding dinner. The
fact is—” and the alert man of the world was left strangely searching
for words which seemed to die away on his lips. He dared not betray his
wife’s orders.
“I may as well say frankly,” impressively remarked Vreeland, “and,
right here—once for all, that I can not enter your firm. I have made
other plans. The thing you propose is impossible. I am sorry—but it is
_impossible_.”
“How does Mrs. Willoughby look at it? I thought that you were getting
on splendidly there?” feebly urged Hathorn, conscious that he was very
rapidly slipping “down hill.”
There was a fine show of regret in Vreeland’s speaking eyes, as he
slowly answered, “My dear boy! You have made the mistake of your life.
There are some very ugly social rumors current in my clubs—” he paused,
“more in sorrow than in anger.”
“And those stories wafted over the sea do not lose by the telling. I
have refrained from even mentioning your name, or that of your wife,
to Mrs. Willoughby since this petticoat cabal has taken up the subject
of the impending social war. Women’s unbridled tongues are the furies’
whip-lashes.”
Hathorn sprang up in excitement. “By Jove! Hod! I look to you to tell
me the whole miserable business. I’ve taken you up and worked you in at
Lakemere. You have got to stand by me now.”
“Hold on! Stop right there,” coldly remarked Vreeland, with a vicious
gleam in his stony eyes. “I never mention a woman’s name. That is a
point of honor with me. I am no club scavenger.
“You know what you owe to Elaine Willoughby. She was the architect of
_your_ fortunes. Perhaps she builded better than she knew.
“You can not face the situations publicly. I advise you to keep
silent—and—_to keep others silent_.
“Now, beyond that I will not go. I feel that your references to me, and
what you have done for me, authorize me to say that I have more than
repaid you in the volunteer labors of your wedding.
“Once for all, let us drop Mrs. Willoughby. I will not, in any way,
take sides in this unfortunate affair, save to silently cleave to the
Lady of Lakemere, through good and evil report.
“If you dare not face her, if you have abandoned her to the mercies of
the pack of be-diamonded old ghouls who are slandering her, you know,
of course, that you will close the door of your house to every friend
of hers.” The bridegroom was cornered—and his heart was filled with a
sullen despair.
Hathorn strode up and down the room in a white rage. He paused, at
last, before Vreeland, and then, in a choking voice, said: “I must ask
you to return my last confidential letter.”
Vreeland calmly moved toward the door. “I am a free man—am I not?” he
quietly said. “I believe a letter is the property of the party to whom
addressed when regularly delivered through the mail. When you divide
the clans of society you will find me—_on the other side_.
“And, as my time is of value, you will now excuse me. Don’t force me to
tell Potter, whom I respect, that you only wanted to use me as a stool
pigeon to entrap the woman who has made you what you are—a solid man—in
Wall Street!”
With a mad impulse, Hathorn sprang to the door.
“No! by Jove! No row here!” he muttered, and when he sauntered
downstairs with an assumed carelessness, his guest had departed.
There was a “lively interlude in married life” transacted late
that evening “behind closed doors,” at the Buckingham, in which
Mr. Frederick Hathorn, for the second time that evening, suffered
a sore defeat, and “went below” to seek the consolation of
Otard-Dupuy & Co.’s very ripe old pale cognac.
That bright-eyed falcon, Alida Hathorn, then and there ran up the red
flag of “War to the Knife”—and “No Surrender!”
But the jubilant Harold Vreeland slept not till he had personally,
at Broadway and Twenty-third Street, sent off an urgent dispatch to
Lakemere. “I think that reads strongly enough,” chuckled Vreeland, as
he gazed on the words.
“He played the craven. Wanted me to give him secret reports of
your affairs, and then demanded his letters back. All relations
are permanently broken off. Will guard absolute silence.”
It was at his leisurely breakfast in the Palm Garden, the next morning,
that Vreeland, with a wildly-beating heart, tore open “Madonna’s”
answering message.
He stifled the cry of exultation which rose to his lips, for the
Rubicon was passed. It was really now “_Guerra à cuchillo!_”
Elaine Willoughby’s words were replete with that _fortiter in re_ which
the unlucky Hathorn was destined later to realize. He only knew her
_suaviter in modo_.
“_Ignore him. Be ready to report when I call you. Party from Washington
expected in three days. Stand to your colors!_” The signature, “_True
Blue_,” was a reminder of their secret pact.
“I think, Mr. Frederick Hathorn, that I have you ‘dead to rights’ now,”
mused Vreeland, who determined that the “social war” should blaze up
fiercely, but without his hand at the bellows.
A round of calls in the next three days proved to him that Mrs. Alida
Hathorn had harked back on all the old intimacy of the unhappy
bridegroom, and was diligently sowing broadcast the Cadmus teeth of
merciless and pointed satire upon the “sunset beauty on the retired
list.” “_A woman old enough to be my mother!_”
When appealed to by many bright-eyed _banditti_, Mr. Harold Vreeland
merely sadly shook his head in a vague deprecation. “I know nothing
whatever,” he softly sighed. “All this sudden gossip is Greek to me,
Greek of Cimmerian darkness.”
In the two clubs which he most affected, Vreeland—in a manly burst of
platform oratory—when appealed to by eager quidnuncs—sternly announced
his code.
“I never take a woman’s name on my lips in gossip. I know nothing, I
have heard nothing—and—excuse me—I will listen to nothing. Both the
ladies are valued friends of mine.” He was voted a “thoroughbred.”
But, in his craven heart, he rejoiced at the rapid spreading of the
war. Knowing that Hathorn would watch him, he avoided lower New York
until after Madame Elaine Willoughby had made one brief downtown visit
for a serious consultation with her agent, Endicott.
With a well-judged cautionary wisdom, he also avoided the “Circassia,”
which was, indeed, watched by Hathorn’s spies, and he grinned with
delight when his growing band of friends re-echoed his own skillfully
planted suggestion of a winter trip to Europe.
“I _am_ thinking of an extended tour,” he frankly admitted, and he soon
knew that this had reached the humiliated Hathorn, for James Potter,
Esq., in a personal visit, urged Vreeland to join him in that memorable
expedition to “Swat,” which was to throw the _mutine_ Miss Dickie
Doubleday forever “off the track.”
“I’ll give you a carte blanche as my guest, Vreeland,” laughed Potter.
“You can take anybody you want on my yacht—_save only that bright-eyed
devil, Dickie_.”
It was evident Hathorn had not “blabbed,” for Potter gaily said:
“I don’t blame you for keeping out of business. Lucky dog that you
are—Hathorn has got a first-class man, Renard Wolfe, to go in as
active, and I relapse into a special partner—but we would have sooner
had you.”
When Vreeland hastened back to Lakemere, in answer to a laconic
dispatch, “_Come up at once_,” he knew of the increasing bitterness
of the impending war. Mrs. Willoughby, riding through Pine Street,
had given her one-time protégé Hathorn the dead cut, before a dozen
magnates of Wall and Broad, to their open-eyed amazement.
Every broker on the Street was now eager to snap up “the Willoughby’s”
business, and Mr. James Potter, abstracting a “Gaiety Girl” from
an inchoate visiting troupe, had hastily set sail for “Swat,” via
the Suez canal, with a little _partie carrée_ to avoid a storm of
queries—couched with “Say, old fellow, what the old Harry’s all this
rumpus between the Hathorns and your ‘star’ customer?”
The placid Potter, far out beyond Fire Island, delightedly left the
“high contracting parties” to fight it out between them, _à la mode de
Kilkenny_.
And, the wonder grew as the golden letters “Hathorn, Wolfe & Co.” soon
took the place of the conquering device, “Hathorn & Potter,” over the
door of the booth in Mammon’s mart where Elaine Willoughby’s helping
hand had built up the fortune of the ingrate protégé.
The handsome Vreeland was light-hearted as he approached Lakemere,
for he was pondering over a letter of special invitation received
to a _diner de cérémonie_ to emphasize the reopening of Mrs. Alida
Hathorn’s superb Fifth Avenue mansion, a patrimonial hereditament
gloriously embourgeoned for that winter social campaign in which
Mrs. Alida proposed to crush “that woman Willoughby.”
The young matron had taken the bit between her teeth and was boldly
rallying all her clans, with a fine social programme adapted to both
attract the “outer woman,” and charm the “inner man.”
Vreeland’s courteous declination of the dinner on the ground of “his
impending departure,” had caused Mrs. Alida to dispatch the energetic
Mrs. Volney McMorris to glean from Vreeland, in an artfully contrived
“chance interview” at the Waldorf, all these details of the sudden
estrangement which the bride of a few months could not extract from the
morose Hathorn.
But, always sedate and sly, Vreeland brought all his batteries to bear
on the double-faced Madame Janus, who had already earned a diamond
bracelet by her Vidocq operations from Hathorn’s reckless wife.
The “McMorris Investigating Committee” was a flat failure. Vreeland—a
glib liar—“voiced his yearning” for London and its extensive jungles
replete with the social lion, alive or stuffed.
He gracefully glided out of the buxom gossip’s snares and bore off a
full account of Alida Hathorn’s plans, and a true relation of that
encounter in the leafy mazes of Central Park, where the watchful
Mrs. Elaine Willoughby, from the citadel of her victoria, froze the
beautiful Mrs. Hathorn with a pointed ignoring of the woman whose
“wedding dinner” had been the vaunt of Lakemere.
The fortuitous presence of Senator David Alynton, with his secret
partner, the Queen of the Street—the astonishment of that lovely
blonde patrician, Mrs. Mansard Larue, the companion of Hathorn’s
imprudent wife, had given the news of the “incident” to all the
gentlewomen in Gotham, as well as to clubdom.
Messrs. Merriman, Wiltshire and Rutherstone, in a noisy cabal at the
Old York Club, waylaid every “good knight and true,” until, when their
discussion had reached its height, the accidental incoming of Hathorn
brought about a strained and solemn hush, in which “the beating of
their own hearts was all the sound they heard.”
With a whitening face, Hathorn sped away to the Fifth Avenue fortress
of the VanSittart tribe, to angrily demand, “What new tomfoolery is
on the tapis?” while the three young buzzards of the club spread the
news that “the battle is on—once more—” and then, gaily whetted their
youthful beaks accordingly upon the succulent elephantine tips of their
“sticks.”
Eager leopards of the “society journals” lurking in that dim penumbra
between “the high tin gods” and the “toilers of New York,” seized upon
the garbled details and, with rending sarcasm, and thinly varnished
innuendo, hinted that the “first blood and knock-down” of this finish
fight were to be credited to that remarkably knowing matron, Madame
Elaine Willoughby, of Lakemere.
“It has gone on too far ever to be healed, this breach between the
sundered hearts,” delightedly decided the buoyant Vreeland, as he
stepped out of the train at Irvington. “All I have to do now, is not to
cross my own luck.”
He was startled as, when about to enter the wagonette, a village lad
on watch shyly bade him walk into the ladies’ waiting room, where the
adroit Justine was waiting for him with tidings of moment. Mr. Harold
Vreeland had won the caoutchouc heart of the piercing-eyed French
soubrette by his golden largesse. He had learned the importance of
“parting freely” when it was to his profit, and several hundred dollars
of Jimmy Potter’s poker money had already enlarged the growing hoard
with which Justine proposed to buy a neat cabaret in Paris and set up a
bull-throated gamin whom she resolutely adored.
“Be on your guard!” Justine whispered. “Mr. Hathorn has just now tried
to bribe me to watch you and Mrs. Willoughby. He has tormented Doctor
Hugo Alberg, also. The Doctor is my friend,” modestly admitted Justine,
with the deference of dropped eyes to her imperiled “character.”
“I have been down at New York arranging the ‘Circassia’ for our
home-coming. Hathorn has offered Doctor Alberg anything to bring him
once more accidentally into Mrs. Willoughby’s presence.
“He came up yesterday to Lakemere—and yet Madame absolutely declined
to see him, and so she returned his card. And, to the old lawyer,
_ce brav’ vieux_ Endicott, he, too, has made the call—‘to demand a
hearing’—as an old friend.
“I heard Madame and the Judge talking. And now—to-day—there are the
Senator, the journalist, Monsieur Conyers, and the Judge Endicott all
day in the library with Madame. So, _mon ami_, beware!”
The fifty-dollar bill which Vreeland pressed into her hand was an
inspirational piece of good judgment, and Gallic prayers from a
too-inflammable heart followed him as he darted away to the wagonette.
“I will back the Queen of Hearts to win!” mused the vigilant Vreeland,
as he arranged his “society face” for that watchful and nonchalant
repose which totally disarmed the three men whom he met at dinner.
There was not an awkward undercurrent of import to the evening in which
Harold Vreeland, forewarned and forearmed, knew that he was always
“under fire”—that greatest test of nerve—simply bidden to “stand fast
and wait for orders.”
He watched the “casement’s glimmering square” long after the house was
still, slowly revolving his crafty plans, and as yet ignorant of the
day’s secret council so vital to his future career.
He knew not of the sympathetic silence of Conyers, his fine
intellectual face hidden in a window’s shadow, while Endicott had
frankly related all that he had known unfavorable of the late Erastus
Vreeland, Attorney and Counselor at Law, Solicitor in Equity, and
Proctor in Admiralty.
Senator David Alynton, remembering that the owners of the “Clarion”
also owned a good-sized block of “Sugar,” and were the secret press
agents of the Trust, tried earnestly to obtain an opinion from the
taciturn Conyers. “I know nothing whatever of this man,” gallantly
answered the writer. “This thing seems to me to be like a marriage—in
which the seal of the bond goes on before anything definite is known of
the parties’ real character.”
The formation of a new firm to handle the business lost by Hathorn’s
sudden and egoistic plunge into matrimony was the matter under
discussion.
“It seems to me, Madame,” said the sagacious Alynton, “that if you
intend to put this young man into such a place of grave trust, there
should be another partner, provided, one acceptable to our side,
and—if possible—one known to me. And we must not, moreover, have a mere
tyro. I should like to approve one name in the new firm—if you select
the other.”
“Be it so,” gravely said the Lady of Lakemere. “I will only say for
Mr. Vreeland, that I know all of the secrets of the life of his late
unfortunate father, and of the son’s manly actions in closing up all
his father’s scattered affairs. I will back him with all the money
needed, and, also, guarantee his good faith, provided he alone controls
such ‘private business’ as is handled through me. Judge Endicott has
told me nothing new of the elder Vreeland. I think I can suggest a
plan to find the other man whom we want, or else a firm already in
existence, which will commend itself to you, Senator. Let us advertise,
guardedly, for a partner.”
With a sigh, Hiram Endicott drew Conyers out of the room, and while
Senator Alynton yielded to the dark-eyed lady’s most ingenious plan,
the old lawyer, under the trees, dejectedly said, “Conyers! there is
again the woman enigma! A woman with heart certainly needs no head.
And—a woman with a head should be heartless.
“The one can only be happy in being deluded, it seems—and the other can
be properly left to coldly play the game of life in safety—and then
smile at her dupes. This dear woman, unfortunately, has _both_ head and
heart, and so, _she must suffer_.
“This young fellow’s fine eyes have done the business—his mellow,
pleading voice carries the day. To be first favorite—vice Hathorn,
discharged—Vreeland, promoted from the ranks!”
While Senator David Alynton, a cool, gray-eyed young millionaire
wearer of the toga, a senator _à la mode_, listened to Elaine
Willoughby’s earnest arguments, he forgot that he was but forty years
of age.
Though he was often an official listener to secrets in the marble
capitol which might make or break the future of the Sugar Trust, he was
also a _raffiné_ man of the modern world—a luxury-lover—fond of money,
and of its concrete power.
He knew, too well, that Elaine Willoughby was “game” to back her own
candidate with a fortune as great as his own.
He felt that the past safe connection with Hathorn and Potter was
broken for all time. He saw that the secret chief of the vast Syndicate
blindly trusted the Queen of the Street, and, moreover, he was a man
who was unable to resist the warm, womanly nature which drew him as the
moon draws the seas.
“If you will personally watch over your young neophyte, Lady Mine,” he
said, at last, “I will side with you. Your interests are mine. I hope
that you do not forget what we both have to lose.” The Senator was
mindful of the sanctity of his “toga,” now.
With softly shining eyes, she thanked him. “After all,” she laughed,
her bosom heaving with the pride of victory, “you and I are the only
real parties in interest here. We will let Endicott receive all the
answers, and dear old Hugh Conyers can closely examine the whole record
of the man whom we select as working partner.
“Between Vreeland and myself, the line of communication to you shall be
guarded. As of old, Judge Endicott shall act for me—and I will alone
handle all that concerns you. Even Vreeland shall never know—there’s
my hand on it. You know that Hathorn has always been secretly kept ‘in
the dark’—against the day of his turning—like the fabled worm. You are
safe as regards him—while I—”
She sighed, and left the man who was the “missing link” in the great
scheme of active operations, wondering if she had ever really loved
Hathorn. The young Senator was unconsciously grimly jealous.
“Damned little snob!” wrathfully cried the Senator. “I hope that
purse-proud young minx of a wife will make his life a hell. I fancy
that she can be trusted to do that.” It was Alynton’s just idea of
Nemesis.
The Senator had gone back to the Capital next morning with a parting
pledge to make a flying visit to the “Circassia” in two weeks to settle
the vital matter on Mrs. Willoughby’s winter hegira to New York, and
the active lawyer and the busy journalist had also fled back to Gotham
before Elaine Willoughby in the summer home had listened to all of
Harold Vreeland’s accurate relation.
“I can not afford to tell her the whole truth—as yet!” he had rightly
decided, and he wisely abstained from adding a shade of color. For she
was watching him keenly. It was the turning tide of his life.
“You are my own true knight,” she gaily said, with an assumed
lightness. “I wish you to ignore this coming social battle entirely.
You are to be strictly non-committal. I will deal with both the
Hathorns. Read that.” She handed him a paper. “In this way we will
receive tenders from perhaps fifty individuals, and even from some good
firms already established.
“I will myself, handle the secret side of the operations, and Judge
Endicott will guide you in my general business. When we have found the
right man as a partner, our whole party will examine his past through
the various mercantile agencies, surety companies, business detectives,
and then, Endicott and Conyers, too, can throw on the searchlight.
“The new firm will go ahead—I can answer for that—and I will then be
free to openly meet Mrs. Alida Hathorn, on her chosen battle ground of
Vanity Fair.
“You are to do nothing but to simply wait at the Waldorf—and come to me
daily at the ‘Circassia.’
“As for Hathorn—a strict avoidance of him—that is my one condition.”
“The quarrel—but—the cold oblivion of the grave! Your friendship is
dead to him!”
“And—you are never to mention their names in society. Leave them to me.”
“I swear it—by this,” solemnly said Vreeland, as he kissed the knot
of ribbon blue. The glistening-eyed woman saw that it had lain on his
heart.
She rose and left him to study the strange public call for a
collaborator in that fierce fight for “the unearned increment” which
was to make his fortune—by a woman’s fondly trusted faith.
He read an advertisement which made a huge increase a week later in
Hiram Endicott’s daily mail. For the _Herald_, in special display, in
its financial page, printed the following—in an artful display:
“To Capitalists and Stock Brokers.”
“_Wanted._—A gentleman of the highest integrity, who controls
one of the largest speculative stock businesses in and around
New York City, desires to meet an associate with $200,000 cash,
with view of establishing New York Stock Exchange house, or would
make partnership arrangement with a New York Stock Exchange
firm who desire to increase their business. References given and
required. Principals only. Address, for one week,
“H. E., _Herald_ Downtown.”
Mrs. Elaine Willoughby had been a month entrenched in her apartments
at the “Circassia,” and the last summer roses had drifted down over
the silent walks of Lakemere, before the astute Vreeland had made a
surface acquaintance with Mr. Horton Wyman, whose name later headed the
sober-looking black and gold sign on a spacious Broad Street office,
reading, “Wyman & Vreeland, Bankers and Brokers!” For the new firm had
been bravely launched by Alynton and his lovely ally.
All that Vreeland knew was that Mr. Horton Wyman was a near relative of
Senator David Alynton, and that he had just given up the cashiership of
a respectable bank to enter the New York Stock Exchange.
The adventurer, lost in admiration of Elaine Willoughby’s executive
ability, never knew of that _tête-à-tête_ dinner, and the long council
of the Queen of the Street with Alynton and Judge Endicott.
Out of fifty applications, Mr. Horton Wyman had been selected. As
Senator Alynton pithily said, “It’s my man and my money against your
man and your money.” The Senator himself had answered the call for his
relative.
He did know that Judge Endicott’s nephew, Noel, was the cashier of the
new firm, now in full blast, and that he alone received the orders of
the Queen of the Street from the private wires in the Hanover Bank
Building.
And he knew, too, that Mr. Frederick Hathorn’s office boasted no longer
the “inside tip” on Sugar from the woman who was carrying a social war
“into Africa” and had already staggered even the audacious Mrs. Alida.
The checks of the new firm on the “Chemical Bank” were already
recognized as those of people “who could swing the Street,” and some
daring “deals” had opened the game.
It was Vreeland’s duty to confer once daily with his strangely-found
benefactress, and yet, he felt even now that he was but half within the
door.
But one bitter hatred followed his rising star, and he soon heard the
sneer of Frederick Hathorn: “So he lied to me, and has sneaked into
business behind a woman’s petticoats.
“Wait! Set a beggar on horseback—he will ride to the devil.” For all
that, “they never spoke as they passed by.” The war was now on in
earnest.
CHAPTER V.
TOWARD THE ZENITH.
It had been the one haunting dream of Harold Vreeland’s fevered young
manhood to finally reach a financial position wherein “the solid
ground” would not fail beneath his feet. Before the Christmas snows had
whitened the roofs of old Trinity his star was crawling surely toward
its zenith. He was, figuratively speaking, “on velvet.”
Though he realized the cogent truth of Jimmy Potter’s maxim that the
desire of one’s heart would always finally come around to the patient
man, he was yet filled with a vague uneasiness. He was entrenched at
the Waldorf _en permanence_, and his personal bank account had reached
the snug sum of twenty thousand dollars.
The status which he held in the firm was that of the office partner,
and he was also authorized to draw one thousand dollars per month. “If
you need anything else, apply to me directly,” was Mrs. Willoughby’s
quiet order. Anxious not to show even the faintest eagerness, he was
passively contented, allowing his patroness to make the game. And yet
he always watched her, lynx-eyed.
“My duties,” he had simply demanded.
“You are for the present to confer alone with Mr. Wyman,” answered
Elaine. “The books and cash will be in the sole keeping of young Noel
Endicott. I may say that he alone will sign the firm’s checks and the
balance sheets will be privately rendered by him to Judge Endicott,
who represents me, as well as the power behind your new associate,
Mr. Wyman.
“You are to carry on the current business in agreement with Wyman.
Both of you will have access to all the customers’ ledgers, but the
conditions of your continuance as a broker is that only a strictly
‘commission business’ shall be carried on. And, above all things,
silence and discretion.”
“In other words,” slowly said Vreeland, “Judge Endicott is really the
responsible holder of the firm’s assets.”
“Precisely so,” smiled Elaine. “His only nephew is the cashier and the
head bookkeeper has been named by the other principal.”
“Am I to confer as to details with Judge Endicott?” was Vreeland’s last
query.
“Only with me,” she smiled. “You are to be my own knight, and I lay
this last injunction on you: Business is never to be mentioned to me
save in our daily interview of affairs. My social hours are sacred.” He
bowed and smiled.
“If anything of moment should occur,” he murmured.
“You will be held harmless,” she smiled. “Obey orders, if you break
owners.”
Perfectly conscious that Hathorn would probably spy upon him, fearful
of over-reaching himself by any rash hurry, Mr. Harold Vreeland
assiduously delved into all the daily business details and carefully
refrained from urging on the growing social intimacy with his patroness.
Horton Wyman and Noel Endicott were both University Club men; the
last, a stalwart son of Eli, was a survival of the fittest from the
shock of football and the straining oar.
The cool head bookkeeper, Aubrey Maitland, was Wyman’s daily luncheon
companion, and young Noel Endicott always fled away at noon hour to the
Judge’s office, where the oak was sported.
It was only in their regularly exchanged uptown social courtesies that
Vreeland was enabled to study his partner.
It was, after all, of very little moment to him, for they both seemed
to be “personally conducted” by that silvered-haired old solon, Hiram
Endicott. Their way was made very smooth.
“It’s a very strange situation,” mused Vreeland. “I am a sort of
Ishmael—playing my hand against every man’s. They all think to find me
soon growing uneasy and squirming around in curiosity.
“‘Time and I against the whole world,’ said William the Silent. It’s
a good motto, and I will let them make the whole game. But, by and by,
I will get behind the scenes, and then ‘shove the clouds along.’”
With a rare self-control, he continued his judicious self-effacing
policy, and yet slyly watched the impartial welcome extended by Elaine
Willoughby to the stream of notable and desirable men who thronged her
hospitable halls.
The preliminary skirmishes of the coming battle with the Hathorns had
vastly amused him, and “all society” knew now of the impassive prudence
of the rising star. It had been Elaine Willoughby’s one fault that
her strong nature leaned little on other women. For her strong nature
buoyed her up above the petted society dolls around her.
She knew that they were barren Sahara deserts to her; she was perfectly
conscious of the absolute dearth of interest in woman natures for each
other. The few respectable “relicts” who sought her bounty were always
ranged near her, like old battleships on the shores of Time, honorably
scarred, but “out of commission” and, unfit for action. Their mild
incense of perfunctory flattery was but a prelude to the confession of
their thousand little wants. And to them, she played the Lady Bountiful.
But Vreeland honestly, yet silently, gloried in Elaine Willoughby’s
brilliant early winter social campaign.
A lovely Napoleon, she rallied her hosts in a changed strategy
of audacious energy; she chose her own battle-grounds and vastly
outnumbered her enemy at every point of concentration. It was a war to
the knife.
Through unknown agents, the Lady of Lakemere had deftly captured the
best box in the Horse Show, and eke the same in the Canine Exposition.
She had ensnared the one most eligible Opera box upon which Mrs. Alida
Hathorn doted, and then, drawing to her splendid halls the most
desirable men to battle over, Mrs. Willoughby easily attracted a crowd
of bright-eyed beauties there ready to struggle for their selected
“eligibles,” “notables,” and desirables. There was music and laughter,
the gleam of tender eyes, the sheen of white shoulders, the glow of
ivory bosoms, and all the magnetic thrill of rich young womanhood
pervading the Circassia.
It was no secret that a house party of forty would keep a “merry
Christmas” at Lakemere, and, all in vain, did Alida Hathorn strive
to secure the most sparkling pendants of the “inner fringe” for the
widely thrown open doors of Oakwood. Her Indian summer antagonist was
an easy victor.
Some merry, audacious devil seemed to have roused himself in Elaine
Willoughby’s bosom, and she was boldly _lancée_ now. Knowing well what
a woman’s war to the finish means, the sly Elaine drew off with her
varied and sumptuous entertainments all the desirable men and Beauty’s
beautiful Cossacks soon swooped down upon them.
Only Vreeland could trace Senator Alynton’s influence in the vastly
enlarged glittering circle of foreign diplomats and well accredited
European visitors of rank.
The Army and Navy gallantly charged upon the battalions of Mother
Eve’s fairest forlorn hope, and humble but effective ammunition—the
canvas-back duck, the terrapin of our beloved land, choicest wines,
chilled and warmed in the right order—did all the execution possible.
The delicately ordered beaufets were a “continuous performance” to a
star engagement.
And, by a rare self-command, the warring woman with difficulty
refrained from all open attacks upon the Hathorns, but yet deftly
drawing the “financial swells” to her side by the generally accepted
conclusion that there had been something wrong with Hathorn & Potter.
No one suspected the genial James of intermeddling. He had reached
no further point in his voyage to Samarcand, or Swat, than gay
Villefranche.
On his cozy yacht, the guileless Potter learned that Miss Dickie
Doubleday, who had returned all of his “burning letters,” but, none of
the sparkling votive diamonds, had dashingly captured and cut out a
Western mining man of untold millions who guilelessly had drifted under
her guns from a “star” of the Metropolitan opera. And, the festive Miss
Dickie was now in the seventh heaven.
The gay Eastern Elijah was overjoyed to see his rosy mantle descend
upon the Occidental Elisha, and he cautiously confided to his deported
“Gaiety Girl” the opinion that the “sun-burned buffalo of Butte would
find out a lot of things before spring.” They drank the health of the
faithless Dickie Doubleday in much champagne of rosy tint, as the white
stars shimmered around them on the blue waters of the Mediterranean.
And so, the “honors were easy” in this little game of hearts.
In vain did many friendly financiers urge Jimmy Potter’s return by the
often cabled news that “Hathorn was making a fool of himself in Wall
Street.”
“That’s his own lookout,” calmly replied the special partner, who
rightly feared that the chasm between him and the all too amiable
Dickie Doubleday was not yet quite deep enough for safety.
“By Jove! that girl is capable of running a tandem,” he reflected, and,
he had no desire to be hitched up later, even in silken harness, with
the robust “brown buffalo of Butte.” For he had drawn a “queen” in the
last deal.
He would have quickly turned the prow of the “Aphrodite” homeward,
however, if he had known of a strong-hearted woman’s resolute
determination to run the firm of Hathorn, Wolfe & Co. ashore, and to
sink it under the guns of the unsuspected enemy which was now “swinging
the Street.”
And as artful a game as Delilah ever “put up” for Samson, was one
element of Mrs. Willoughby’s campaign, for she was now “fighting all
along the line.”
The watchful Harold Vreeland was soon made conscious that he was an
object of general interest even in the cold-hearted hurry of Manhattan.
He knew that he penetrated three varying atmospheres in his daily life.
The society racket, the dress parade of the Waldorf and the clubs, was
one phase of his busy existence; the shaded dignities of his Broad
Street office another, and he was now assured that an invisible halo of
assiduous espionage now followed him in his down-sittings and uprisings.
There was the maddened Hathorn, the inscrutable Elaine Willoughby, and
his cautious and silent partner, Horton Wyman.
“_I’m pretty well followed up!_” he smiled, with a cunning glee.
Continually on guard in society, and ever straining all his mental
powers to familiarize himself with all the details of their growing
business and the unwritten lore of the feverish Street, Vreeland was
really only uneasy at heart as to his continued probation.
For he felt now, as the holiday season approached, that he was
merely being hoodwinked by the dark-eyed benefactress, whose fullest
confidence he had not as yet gained.
“Madonna’s” social manner was frankly charming, but he had made no
progress toward any further intimacy. Some shade seemed to hold them
tenderly apart. And he racked his brains in vain.
“_Ami intime de la maison!_” He had only learned more of her rare
dignity in the repeated business interviews, and in the continued
tableaux of her splendid social _entourage_, he was no nearer to her
than others.
There was the cool Conyers, who always came and went at will; he had
also seen Senator David Alynton and the silent Wyman out driving with
his lovely patroness. There were also _tête-à-tête_ dinners, too, with
the old Judge and that young son of Anak, Noel Endicott, and moreover
the well-bribed Justine spoke, too, of breakfasts where only Wyman and
the handsome bookkeeper, Aubrey Maitland, were guests. _All_ this was
dangerous.
“Hang me if I can see why I am kept here,” uneasily fretted Vreeland.
“The firm would move along just as smoothly without me,” but yet in his
soul he felt that the steadfast woman still held him in reserve for
some well-matured purpose of her own.
With admirable _sang froid_ he awaited her orders in an expectant
silence.
“She shall not weary me out; but once let the cards come my way, then I
will play the queen for all she is worth.”
He knew in the drift of customers gradually drawn in by the now
acknowledged solidity of their firm, that there were many spies and
stool-pigeons of the angry Hathorns.
He knew, too, what cold resentment burned in his old chum’s heart. He
had secretly followed (through his agents) some of these skirmishers
directly back to Hathorn, Wolfe & Co.’s office. And the cards were
played both from the top and the bottom of the pack.
Once he had himself caught Hathorn’s eyes following him with all the
wolfish glare of a murderous heart.
There were, besides, rumors of quarrels in the opposing firm and the
early retirement of the returning Potter.
And other sly traps were laid for him with silky scoundrelism. He was
well aware that the defiant Alida Hathorn had openly expressed her
utter disbelief in the existence of the late Wharton Willoughby. Even
the prehensile Mrs. Volney McMorris had waylaid him to confess that
she had never observed, in either of Mrs. Willoughby’s establishments,
any mortuary bust, portrait, or even an humble photograph of the
permanently eclipsed man who had given his name to the Queen of the
Street. These things were food for uneasy thoughts harassing to the
young schemer.
And this respectable social scavenger had faltered out some indirect
javelin thrusts evidently pointed by Hathorn’s willfully reckless wife.
There were at least two men in Elaine Willoughby’s _entourage_ who,
for gain and a passion under the rose, might be the source of all that
quietly-sustained splendor which had so enraged the young married
heiress.
Mr. Harold Vreeland was on guard. He only fixed his fine eyes upon
Mrs. McMorris in a pained surprise when that bustling dame hinted that
he could easily drag forth the desired information.
“I have always had a penchant, my dear Madame, for minding my own
business,” was his most prudent rejoinder.
So, entrenching himself in the towers of silence, he was safe, but
Vreeland also left a bitter enemy behind, on the pleasant afternoon
when he wondered why Messrs. Merriman, Wiltshire, and Rutherstone had
bidden him “to be one of a little party of four” at the Old York Club.
It was an able effort at scientific pumping.
He had never entered that gilded fortress of the _jeunesse dorée_ since
his last definite quarrel with Hathorn, and he knew, too, that these
three “splendid examples of the evolution of American manhood” now made
up a little coterie which was a sort of Three Guardsmen brotherhood
around Mrs. Alida Hathorn.
There were rumors of gay little Sunday afternoon frolics at the
Hathorns’, justifying Pip’s exclamation, “Such larks,” and these three
young fellows now directed the broad-gauge festivities of a home whose
master always wore a stern frown like the late lamented “Baron Rudiger”
of the German song.
It was Harold Vreeland’s chosen part to be left judiciously
uncompromised. He was still playing a waiting game. He knew that
certain very _dégagée_ young “married women” afforded much “congenial
pabulum” for these three sleek young society sharks, and that the
careless Mrs. Alida Hathorn was fast drifting into their hands.
And so, after a long _séance_, wherein floods of wine drenched the
festal board, the sly adventurer found out at last the motive of his
sudden popularity.
When Rutherstone brought up the unlaid ghost of the late Wharton
Willoughby, Vreeland cynically remarked: “I naturally know nothing of
local social biography here. I am only a returned borderer, and am only
engaged in making a proper business use of my capital. I stand calmly
in the center of your New York circus and see its ‘free show’ swing
around.
“My platform is that of the late Simon Cameron of blessed memory, ‘I
don’t care a damn what happens as long as it does not happen to me.’”
“But, the lady has intimate business relations with your firm!” babbled
Merriman.
“Did Fred Hathorn tell you so?” cuttingly sneered Vreeland. “Perhaps
not, as you fellows are only chummy with his smart wife. Let her find
it out for herself, by a personal visit to the lady in question.
“You might ask Wyman—he knows all our thousand customers’ affairs. I
don’t bother much with the business,” loftily remarked Vreeland, as he
hummed an old music hall refrain, “You can get onto an omnibus, but you
can’t get onto me.”
He cheerfully departed, leaving his hosts to “a night of memories and
sighs.” He was followed with curses both deep and loud.
Vreeland put all these little matters lightly away as a part of the
usual “burrowing mole” work of New York high life; but he was really
astonished, a week later, when his employer’s physician, Dr. Hugo
Alberg, haled him away to a confidential Sunday morning breakfast.
The “German specialist” was an indurated foreign egotist of thirty, and
a cunning gleam lingered behind his golden glasses.
His fresh, bewhiskered face was slightly Semitic in its cast, and his
record of prosperity was all too evident in that richness of jewelry
which has been a legacy of the Biblical times when the Egyptians made
such incautious loans of their ornaments.
Harold Vreeland had now an unwritten chapter in his life devoted
entirely to the thirsty-hearted Justine, and from that subjugated
Gallic beauty he knew of all Alberg’s crafty approaches upon the
mistress by a coarsely familiar wooing of the woman who had given
herself over, body and soul, to Vreeland’s service.
And so he marveled not that in the cozy private room at Martin’s the
Doctor’s slim, white, “sterilized” hand reached out in the direction of
a secret which Vreeland himself knew naught of.
“I’ll just let this fool talk,” mused Vreeland, as the intriguing
foreigner became both familiar and friendly. “He has his own little
scheme. Perhaps he may point me toward what no one seems to know.”
And so, in an affected _bruderschaft_, the would-be vampire listened
with a beating heart to Alberg’s confidences when the strong Rhine wine
had loosened the “Medical Arzt’s” slightly thickened tongue.
“We ought to understand each other, _mein lieber_ Vreeland,” urged the
Doctor, who had now thrown the mask off. “You and I are the two men
nearest to this magnificent woman. You are her confidential man of
affairs.
“You know all—you _must_ know all. And a woman’s best friend is always
her Doctor,” he grinned, with a suggestive pliancy.
“We are necessary to each other. You and I only want what all New York
wants—_money_!
“Money talks in New York. Life is a hell without money. Now, my dear
friend, we are both making money out of her _easily_. And to me, as
well as to you, Mrs. Willoughby’s life is of great importance.
“For my fee bill and your profits depend upon her being kept alive.”
Vreeland started, in a sudden alarm. “Speak out, man! What the devil do
you mean?” He saw a black gulf yawning before him.
“She has some concealed source of mental trouble, some eating sorrow,
some overmastering secret of her old life,” bluntly answered Alberg.
“You, as a man of the world, could easily guess that such a woman
should be married. She is rich, still very beautiful, young enough
yet—she hardly looks thirty-three—woman’s royal epoch of mental force
and bodily attractiveness. Now, she has strange periods of a profound
mental depression.
“There are dark storms of sorrow. Her heart action is somewhat
impaired, and the waves of passion beat too fiercely in her locked
breast.
“_You must help me!_ You may, in this way, save your own future. We
must work together. Drugs will do her no good. _I am at my wits’
ends!_” The gloomy Doctor buried his nose again in the Rudesheimer.
“What can I do?” flatly said Vreeland. “Speak out! Don’t mince matters.”
“Find out her past social history. Find out if she ever was really
married. Find out if some one has a hold on her. _She is an unhappy
woman at heart!_” cried Alberg. “It may be that damned cold-hearted
cur, Hathorn’s, desertion has cut her to the quick! Find out if she
really is a _free woman_!”
“And, then?” said Vreeland, a strange light coming into his eyes.
“_Marry her yourself_,” pleaded Alberg. “_She is one woman in a
million!_ Take her away for a year. Lead her away from her old self.
Pride brought low may have maddened her. I think that Hathorn first
fathomed her past, and then, coldly left her for the younger and
perhaps richer woman. It may have been too heavy a blow to her pride.”
“Is there anything in this babble about Endicott or the Senator?”
huskily whispered Vreeland, reddening with shame in spite of himself.
The half-tipsy Doctor laughed. “The old man is only her business
Mentor—he is as passionless as a basalt block.
“The Senator is but a cold-hearted money schemer, a Yankee coining
power into hard cash. I’ve followed all these trails out.”
“And you yourself are absolutely in the dark?” persisted Vreeland.
“I’ve thought at times that old Endicott may be the trustee under some
quiet old marital separation. I’ve imagined, too, that Willoughby
_mari_ may not be really dead; that she, in spite of herself, learned
to passionately love Hathorn, and has ardently desired him, and that
he selfishly married after she had pulled him up to fortune, and then,
left her powerless and tongue-tied, to pocket his brutal ingratitude.
“Whatever it is, we need each other, Vreeland. I will stand by you if
you stand by me. Is it a bargain?”
“I’ll see you here the same time next Sunday. Let me think this thing
over,” faltered Vreeland, beginning to see light at last on his way.
“I should have told you that she usually has these attacks after
Endicott’s occasional long private visits. It may be that the missing
husband is _alive_, and is bleeding her financially with extortionate
demands,” was the Doctor’s last confidence.
“I’ll be ready to talk to you next Sunday. Let me go now,” breathlessly
cried Vreeland. “In the meantime, keep a close silence. You will find
me to be the best friend you ever had in the world.”
The schemer darted away with a sudden impulse.
Ten minutes later he sat with Justine Duprez, in a hidden little nest
of her own in South Fifth Avenue. It had flashed over his mind that
Mlle. Justine’s Sunday off, just suited his purpose.
It was not the first time that he had communed with her there, in a
room once sacred to Frederick Hathorn’s private information bureau.
The startled maid had barely time to meet her generous new admirer when
he questioned her sharply upon the subject of Doctor Alberg’s recent
revelations.
And, to his annoyance, he for the first time found the Parisian woman
to be obdurate. She had been curtly abandoned by Hathorn, who had
forgotten to hand over her final payment in all the hurried glories of
the VanSittart wedding.
She alone knew that the vain fool had stupidly imagined that Elaine
Willoughby only urged on his marriage in order to be able later to
cloak an intimacy which would have later made Justine’s fortune.
And now, she would not be balked out of the harvest of fortune. For an
hour, the ardent Vreeland pleaded with the artful woman. Her bold eyes,
dulled with the bistre stains, gleamed with triumph as he pleaded with
her.
The elegant young man alternately flattered and caressed the
brown-faced _intrigante_, whose coarse beauty had long been the toast
of the _cabaret_ which she yearned to possess in Paris.
Her voluptuous bosom and heavy haunches were the antipodes of
Vreeland’s beauty ideal, and yet, he knelt to flatter and to sue. For
she alone could spy upon the most sacred privacy of the woman he had
sworn to rule.
Justine eyed him keenly, and spoke at last. “Give me a thousand dollars
and promise that you will give me a free hand if you marry Madame,” she
said, as she yielded to his self-abusing pleadings.
“And only you shall know her secrets. I hate that Doctor!” she cried.
“I can find out all you want to know, but, you must do as I wish.” Her
velvet eyes gleamed in a fierce flame.
“Listen, Justine,” urged Vreeland. “To-morrow I will bring you a
thousand dollars when I come to the Circassia. Tell me now what you
can; I swear to make you rich if you will only stand by me. It is
Sunday,” he added. “No banks are open to-day. This first hundred will
not count.”
And he thrust a bill into her brown hand.
“I have watched for years to find the secret of her past life,”
promptly said the sly Justine, drawing nearer to Vreeland. “I, too,
thought of an _affaire_. It is not. But, _a secret there is_, and only
one man knows—the old lawyer. I hid myself near them on his last visit,
for they talked long, and Madame fell down fainting after he had gone
away.
“Their talk was of the old times, and it is always so, when they come
to that. But, _this time_ I listened carefully while she moaned in her
sorrow.”
“And she said?” anxiously cried Vreeland.
“‘_My child! My child! Give me back my child!_’ she cried. And so
there is a child, and _it is not of the Senator! Voilà!_ They are
_stupidement placide toujours! Les affaires!_ Only—_ze monnaie_! She
loves him not. And only the old man knows. You shall watch him and her.”
A sudden suspicion of a feminine double life brought a name to
Vreeland’s lips.
“Hathorn!” he said, with a meaning look at his partner in an already
vicious intrigue. For Justine Duprez knew him in all the pliant
baseness of his real nature, and they had groveled toward each other
from the very first.
The Parisian gamine laughed a bitter, hard laugh.
“I have been at Madame’s side since the first day when this egoist
Hathorn first met her. There has been no love, no intrigue, no child.
And he—the hard-hearted brute—schemed only for her money.
“No! It is beyond me. Beyond my seven years of service. I will reach
_la mystère_ yet for you,” she smiled. “And you will perhaps find that
there was ze old divorce, ze old-time _scandale_. And the other man,
the husband, has perhaps taken away the child. The sorrow, _yes_; the
secret _d’amour, no! Elle est trop bravement bête pour l’amour à la
mode._
“The journalist? Ah, no! _Il n’est qu’un brave ami! Pas plus!_” It was
dark before the “rising star” dared to steal away from Justine’s little
_pied à terre_, for too well Vreeland knew that the enraged Hathorn was
shadowing his every movement.
Justine had fled away, light-hearted, after the sealing of a pact which
was to lead her to the splendors of _Dame du Comptoir_ of her own
_cabaret_. And as Vreeland strolled homeward he summed up the situation.
“Her only friend and confidant is Endicott. No thoroughfare there.
Alberg, this German brute, knows nothing and Hathorn less than nothing,
or he would have already used it against her in this bitter petticoat
fight.
“I will hoodwink them all. My time will come when I have gained her
cherished secret. And if I do gain her secret, it will be on the
market, to the highest bidder, perhaps to the dashing Alida Hathorn,
or else be quietly nursed to later bring me in a fortune.” He was
satisfied with his day’s work. The light was dawning now.
When the adventurer reviewed the whole situation, he felt that the
mystery was as yet hidden in Elaine Willoughby’s ardent bosom. “The day
will come when she will need me, when she will tell me all, when she is
safe to live a free woman’s heart-life. I will wait on her and give no
one my confidence.”
During the long, busy week before the Christmas holidays, Vreeland
narrowly watched his strange, silent partner, Horton Wyman, to see if
he were bidden to the Lakemere house party.
“He is the only one that I have to fear,” mused Vreeland, “for, with
Senator Alynton’s backing and his daily intercourse with old Endicott,
I would be bowled out in a moment, if I made a single misstep. Can he
yearn for Elaine Willoughby’s money?”
In the daily office associations, the casual meetings at the Circassia,
in the feebly maintained exchange of personal hospitalities, Horton
Wyman had so far remained to him an unexplored country.
Cool, sturdy, with piercing black eyes, and a marvelous self-control,
with a facial mask which even a Jesuit might have envied, Horton Wyman
was seemingly devoid of any passion but money-making.
Vreeland had gained the general impression that he was “bookish,” and
the silent partner avoided all show society.
Thirty-five years sat lightly on the man, whose scanty references
to Senator Alynton’s millionaire father indicated that the “poor
relation,” had been trained up in adversity as the dead financier’s
private secretary. “He is a fellow to beware of. I’ll let him alone,”
mused Vreeland.
Harold Vreeland thanked his lucky stars when Wyman drew him into his
private den when the first sporadic Christmas trees were beginning to
creep into Gotham.
“Well, old man,” cheerfully said Wyman, “I’m off for a two weeks’
visit to the Alyntons. Endicott will handle our Board work through his
uncle’s private broker, and Maitland and Noel will take their leave
after we return. I suppose that you will be at the Lakemere house party.
“Of course, there’s no need of you following up things at the office.
Here’s my telegraph address, if anything turns up, and, of course,
Mrs. Willoughby will call on you if she needs anything.
“We’ve got the thing running pretty smoothly, so take your full share
of mistletoe. Noel tells me that all the prettiest girls in town will
be up there at Lakemere.” It was a welcome relief.
“I have now a free field,” jubilantly exclaimed Vreeland. “He is
as indifferent to her as if she were only a cloak model. _Now, for
Lakemere!_”
Vreeland never stopped in his trickery to be ashamed of his low
truckling with the French maid, whose malleable conscience was at his
disposal, in the hopes of much future backsheesh.
And so the adroit Continental Doctor had now two false friends between
him and the woman who was his “star patient” and whom he, too, intended
for an innocent dupe. The fate of every rich and lonely woman!
It was under the Christmas tree at Lakemere that Harold Vreeland
learned for the first time why the Queen of the Street had held him for
months in a glittering quiescence in the rapidly built-up firm.
The merry guests were already assembled on the other side of the
curtain when the breathless Justine drew Vreeland into a dark corner.
The French woman’s panting bosom heaved as she whispered: “She wants to
see you in there, first of all. Now is your time, but don’t forget me,
Harold.”
There was the pledge of an infamous pact in the meeting of their guilty
eyes. Justine now stood, with flaming sword, between her secret lover
and those who would approach the woman who held both their fortunes.
Her dark fidelity was doubly bought.
It was a robed queen who stood waiting there by the fragrant Christmas
tree and held both her hands out to Harold Vreeland. The Lady of
Lakemere at her very best!
With beaming eyes, she handed him an envelope and whispered: “The time
has now come when you will have your own part to play, under my sole
orders.
“I know your whole record. You have been my own faithful knight.
“Listen! All these merrymakers will go away with the old year. Judge
Endicott brings me the firm’s settlement papers on New Years. I will
then send for you and make you my secret representative in a momentous
affair.
“To protect my interests you must at once leave the Waldorf.
“Trust to me!” she smiled. “I will have your bachelor apartments ready.
And no one, not even Wyman, must ever learn of your ‘secret service.’
Silence and obedience, and your fortune is assured. You alone shall
battle for me and drive this fool Hathorn forever from the Street.
“Go now! You will leave with the first departing guests, but await
my telegram at the Waldorf to come to me here. And so, I have your
plighted word. Never a whisper to a living soul. You are to be still
only the office partner—_to the world_!”
Vreeland snatched her trembling hand and kissed it.
It was burning in fever.
But he sped away, and before the curtain rose to a chorus of happy
laughter and shouts of delighted surprise, a glance in a corner of the
hallway where Justine awaited him showed him a check for twenty-five
thousand dollars as his Christmas gift. His patroness had handed him
the precious envelope in silence.
In a low whisper he opened the gates of paradise to the French woman,
who watched her lover with flaming eyes. “Five thousand dollars of this
to you, if you find out for me the secret of that child.”
And he left her, panting with the thrill of a sated avarice.
“I will go through fire and water to serve you,” she faltered. “I will
steal the secret from her midnight dreams.”
That night, after the gay dances were done, when the house was stilled,
Elaine Willoughby sat before her fire, while Justine laid away the
regal robes.
There was the glitter of diamonds and the shimmer of pearls everywhere.
With her hands clasped, the lonely mistress of Lakemere gazed into the
dancing flames.
“I must crush him—to leave the past buried—that I may yet find the
path trodden by those little wandering feet.
“Ah, my God!” she moaned, “it is not revenge that I want. It is
love—_her love_—I burn to know her mine alone. And the past shall be
kept as a sealed book, for her dear sake. It must be so. It is the only
way. For, Vreeland is brave and true!”
The handsome hypocrite was even then dreaming of a “double event,” a
duplicated prize, one beyond his wildest hopes.
“By heaven! I’ll have both her and the fortune!” His busy, familiar
devil “laughed by his side.”
BOOK II—With the Current.
CHAPTER VI.
IN THE “ELMLEAF” BACHELOR APARTMENTS.
Mr. Harold Vreeland silently wondered at the protean character of
womanhood as he watched Mrs. Elaine Willoughby’s almost feverish gaiety
in the few days which followed their new relation. “I can believe
anything of a woman’s subtle arts after this,” he wonderingly said, as
he made himself a graceful factor in the joys under holly and mistletoe.
Not a single reference to the coming business had ever escaped her, and
she was as merrily impartial in her favors as a girl at her first ball.
There was hardly a financier in the house party, Noel Endicott’s visit
of a day being a mere duty call. “She evidently wishes to hide our
intimacy from all, and to publicly impress only the social character on
our friendship,” mused Vreeland.
“Lady mine! you are a deep one!” he mused. Never had he been placed
next to her at dinner, and even at the cotillion’s trifling favors she
had only sought him among the very last.
He was aware that all New York knew of how Hathorn had been coached up
by her into financial glory. “That mistake she will not repeat. It’s a
case of blood and the secret warpath, now,” reflected Vreeland.
But with the check for twenty-five thousand dollars in his pocket, he
felt that his silence was paid for in advance. He was swimming gaily on
with the current now.
He had calmed Dr. Hugo Alberg down into an expectant friendship by
agreeing to dine with him once a week and to exchange regular reports
at Martin’s.
“So far, I have found out nothing, Doctor,” said the lying Vreeland;
“but I have written out West. I understand that she has immense
properties in Colorado. If I get a clew, you and I will work it up
together.
“In the meantime watch over her yourself, and then tell me all.”
Alberg was in high glee at his social début, and confided to Vreeland
that their patroness was in the most brilliant health.
“_Well_,” good-humoredly answered Vreeland, “between you and me we will
manage to guard her and take care of her property, if she will only let
us.”
The miserly German’s eyes gleamed as they drank to their private pact.
“The great thing is to keep every one else away from her,” whispered
Alberg. “I of course watch her professionally. You must keep off all
those society sharks like that upstart Hathorn.”
“Trust to me. I know my business,” laughed Vreeland.
When Vreeland left Lakemere on the last day of the old year, his only
reminder was the whispered word, “Remember!”
“I will wait at the Waldorf,” he answered, with a last meaning gleam in
his eyes.
Standing now on an almost secure pedestal, Vreeland never dared to
dream of the sentimental approach upon the woman who was now the sole
arbiter of his destiny.
“That would be the clumsiest mistake of all,” he decided. “Only—when
she comes into the net—I will tighten it.”
He well knew that the bachelor apartment was to be the scene of some
veiled financial strategy and not a rosy Paphian bower.
Mean and low at heart as he was, he knew that her soul towered above
all low deceit, as the rosy Jungfrau lifts its unsullied peaks to the
blue skies.
The one rare virtue of this scoundrel in embryo was that no inane
self-conceit clouded his clear and mercilessly direct reasoning.
“I am only her tool as yet,” he reflected.
“But the Endicotts, Aubrey Maitland, and Wyman are to know nothing!
This, of course, excludes Senator Alynton. She trusts me then
_alone_—of the whole world.” And so, he panted for the coming solution
of the enigma.
As he departed for New York, he left one lynx-eyed aid behind him.
It was the hot-hearted Justine, who already knew what her _étrennes_
would be—a second thousand dollars.
“Remember, my own Justine,” he urged, with glowing eyes, “I want you to
earn that whole five thousand dollars. Spy on Alberg.
“He is only a fool. But catch every whisper of this wary old Endicott.
He alone knows what you must learn. There lies your fortune—in those
pretty ears.”
“I have made my plan,” smilingly whispered the brown-skinned maid. “I
am going to earn that money. Remember, I am _vraie Française_!”
There were but two plausible explanations of Madonna’s strangely secret
course. Some “deed without a name” was in the plot.
And none of her old friends, no one of the financial world, not even
her advisers, tried and true, were to share the secret of the two for
whom the “bachelor apartment” was to be the veiled headquarters.
“Either Hathorn has surprised the secret of her early life and spirited
away her child, hoping to have drawn her down to his will, or—can it be
that she means to sell out the sugar syndicate?”
He gazed reflectively at the winter landscape flying by, as he
pondered over the first. “_No!_” was his correct deduction. “Hathorn
is powerless. He would surely have held on to her business, by fear or
force, and gained the inside track in the great gamble, Sugar.
“He would have bent her to his will, and carried on the old hideous
gilded sin—to make his light o’ love his young wife’s best friend.
“That’s quite _fin de siècle_ in New York, they tell me.
“His crime was only the bull-headed folly of preferring another and
a younger woman to the one woman whom he could have gratefully and
logically married.
“There is a man’s fatuous vanity to look for her support in chasing
down a younger and prettier rival under her very eyes. And yet, she
hastened on the marriage. By Jove! she did. It’s a mystery to me!”
The puzzled schemer never knew of the real foundation of his own
blossoming fortunes.
The lightning flashes of Elaine Willoughby’s mad anger came when Judge
Endicott had found out that Frederick Hathorn was secretly shadowing
his loving and trusting employer and tracing back her past life. Then,
Elaine Willoughby became a wolf on the trail.
All of social life is but a hoodman blind game. The stern old lawyer
was only carrying out a secret quest, and he could not divine that
Hathorn’s real object was to trace down to a direct connection Elaine
Willoughby’s secret alliance with the heads of the great Sugar Trust.
It was but a mean money greed, after all.
Keenly alive to every pointer of the Street, Hathorn had not learned,
for all his five years of florid devotion, that his lovely patroness
had sealed that one treasured secret in her soul. And, meanly, he had
tried to dig under her mines. But it was the thirst for gold alone that
fired his veins.
Hiram Endicott alone knew of the coolly-devised scheme by which the
woman whom he had deceived had made Hathorn’s marriage and enforced
absence the epoch for a complete break-off of all business relations.
But she, deluded, as even the keenest mortals are, in stocks, love, or
war, only feared for the one darling secret of her heart—that veiled
sorrow which lay behind Hiram Endicott’s useless search of years.
And in the defense of that one pure and unsullied memory, she would
have torn herself from Hathorn’s arms even at the altar. For there is a
love which can tear the face of any man from a true woman’s heart—the
mother love.
Before Harold Vreeland reached New York he had decided upon the “Sugar
speculations” as the secret reason for setting up the “bachelor
apartment.”
It was now a matter of gossip on the Street that the great Standard Oil
Company was reaching its octopus arms out for “safe investments,” as
well as sure new speculative fields.
To use a huge surplus of idle money and an inexhaustible credit, it
was rumored that they proposed to sneak into a quiet mastery of the
American Sugar Refinery Company’s outside stock, and even in time to
gather in all the great Gas monopolies of Manhattan Island.
“_That’s my lady’s game!_” gleefully cried Vreeland. “She could crush
Hathorn at will. Their business is ruined. The ugly rumors as to his
shabby behavior to her have hurt that firm.
“And Potter, too, is about to draw out. Wolfe has no money to speak of.
‘Missie VanSittart’ will not pay her husband’s stock losses, not she.”
Harold Vreeland grinned, for the young woman’s name was even now
lightly bandied by the club jackals, but only _sotto voce_, in
deference to her social rank.
“That’s her little game! She dares not let Alynton know that she
proposes to dally with the other side in this coming fight of giants.
“She proposes to ‘copper’ the game of ‘more sweetness and light,’ as
well as play it for a sure winner.
“And I am to be her _left hand_, and the _right_ (our firm) is to be
ignorant of what the left doeth!”
He was well aware that in some way she was always early possessed
of all the Sugar Syndicate secrets. Whether Endicott, Alynton, the
statesman, or Conyers was her coach, he knew not.
“Perhaps all three—the law, the senate, and journalism,” he grinned.
“_Or, is she going to betray these people to the newcomers?_ There
would be enormous profits in that ‘sweet surrender.’
“I shall enjoy the run, and be in at the death,” he gaily cried, as he
sought his hotel in a vastly enhanced good humor.
When he entered the Waldorf, a sudden encounter made him think that
angels of light had invaded the crepuscular gloom of the long hall in
the early winter evening.
He scarcely credited his senses when Mrs. Frederick Hathorn motioned
him to a corner of the Turkish room, after his startled but gravely
polite salute.
The lady was a ravishing example of the “survival of the fittest” in
the line of Worth, Pingât, and Redfern.
With a wave of her slender hand she swept away the flood of easy lies
that were trembling on his lips, and then, her bright eyes, deep and
searching, seemed to delve into his very soul.
“Remember, you need not answer, if you don’t care to; but you must give
me the right to feel that you are a gentleman. My husband’s enemies
_may_ or _may not_ be mine!” She burned a Parthian glance into his
trembling heart.
“Why did you conceal from him that you were going into banking, and let
him go on and parade you as his best friend, and all that?” she curtly
demanded.
“Mrs. Hathorn,” earnestly pleaded the accomplished liar, “another
man had my promise of partnership long before I left Montana. He was
already making arrangements as to offices and several confidential
matters on which our firm’s future depended.
“I was only asked to give your husband an answer on October 1st.
“And I did give one early enough—a friendly declination—which your
husband made me repeat too forcibly. You should not blame me for our
little estrangement.”
“And you did not scheme to supplant him with—with—”
“One word, Madame,” meaningly said Vreeland. “I have opened my heart to
you. _Noblesse oblige!_ Your question was one I could honorably answer,
just as I could _not_ honorably forewarn men whom fate had made our
business rivals.
“Remember, all’s fair in love, stocks, and war. And it’s every man for
himself in New York.”
“And every woman, too,” added Mrs. Alida, with a little snaky smile.
“I always liked you,” she hesitatingly said, and then, her eyes dropped
before the ardent and merciless gaze of a man who now saw “a new way to
pay old debts.”
“Then let me volunteer a hint that I have never supplanted your
husband with anyone nor sought to. My capital alone gives me weight
in our firm. I have never even opened a ledger or made an individual
transaction.
“Pride and old comradeship should temper each other in your husband.
I have only avoided the distressing embarrassments which he alone has
brought upon himself, and you will always find me your secret friend,
though I can not seek you out in this witches’ parade of Gotham. You
know all the reasons why I can not range myself openly at your side.”
His devilish familiar was now whispering in his ear.
The victim was young, fair, and foolish.
The luxurious woman sighed. All her allures had been baffled.
“_If I should need to tax your friendship?_” she slowly said, her
breathing quick and fierce, telling of her agitation.
It was now Vreeland’s eyes which “burned into her spirit’s core.”
“Yes; if you make the place where we can meet without a foolish risk
and placing us both in a false position.”
He glanced around the debatable ground of the Turkish room. Any
notable, from Chauncey Depew down to the last “Western bonanza beauty,”
might surprise them there at any moment.
“Will you come, if you need me?” he whispered, taking her hand, with
insidious suggestion.
“_Perhaps_,” she faltered, with pale and trembling lips, and when he
looked up he was alone, but a knot of lilies of the valley from her
corsage lay in his hand.
He dreamed strange dreams that night, for he well knew of the seraglio
secrets of the bachelor apartments of New York.
He knew the light vanity that might lead her feet to the “Castle
Dangerous” to solve the riddle which was as yet a mystery to himself.
But he whistled “Donna è Mobile” very contentedly, as he awoke to find
a telegram on New Year’s morning from his sly partner in an already
plotted treason. Justine’s words were pithy, and Justine was on guard.
“_Watch in South Fifth Avenue for news!_”
The simple signature J followed the words: “_Lawyer here. See me first
on your arrival._”
“I think that I am a pretty lucky devil,” was the flattering unction
with which Vreeland regaled his soul, as he drove down to Wall Street
and found the two responsible men there on duty.
Noel Endicott, with Aubrey Maitland, were in a secret junta busily
opening the new set of books.
The finely assumed carelessness of Vreeland covered his desire to trace
and locate the only man he feared—Mr. Horton Wyman.
“Just write your dispatch,” calmly said Endicott. “I’ll send it down
to Washington to Alynton’s private secretary, and you’ll have Wyman’s
answer at once. They are inspecting some of Alynton’s West Virginia
properties.”
And, in truth, an open answer to Vreeland’s holiday greeting was at the
Waldorf when the schemer finished his New Year’s dinner, and slipped
out to visit the lair where a wrinkled hag guarded Justine Duprez’
convenient _pied à terre_.
He marveled long over a second dispatch which awaited him there. Its
words were ominous, and yet, Elaine Willoughby was firm and steadfast
in her purpose.
“She has been greatly excited. Doctor Alberg has been telegraphed for.
You are to come to-morrow. Lawyer leaves to-night. Dare not communicate
by letter. I have the most important news.”
And all night Harold Vreeland was tossed about in a vain unrest.
He knew that his greedy accomplice Justine would easily handle and draw
out Alberg, for, not of a jealous disposition, Vreeland was perfectly
willing that the doctor should be made a tool of the facile Parisienne.
“You know how to lead him on, Justine,” was Vreeland’s easy-going hint,
whereat the demure maid dropped her lashes and smiled. And after all,
even the artful Justine was only means to an end.
The recurring excitement of the tortured lonely rich woman was only a
new phase of the old invincible mystery. “Can it be a gigantic game of
blackmail, the infamous price of someone’s silence—the bribe to her
quiet enjoyment of a station not her own? What hideous Frankenstein
hides behind the dropped arras of her life?”
Vreeland knew how many dark shadows lurked behind the bright curtains
of New York’s Belgravia and Mayfair.
“By God! I shall know soon!” he growled, as the second day of the new
year brought him the dispatch confirming Justine’s watchful foresight.
There was no uncertain ring to the words of the Lady of Lakemere.
“Come to me at once! Immediate action necessary!”
“It seems to be something recurrent—something, too, that even
golden-massed money can not help! She would quickly brush this trouble
away, if the ‘long green’ would do it. And, it must be something which
that old fox, Endicott, can not help, or he would stay up there on
guard and help it, instead of leaving her to Dr. Hugo Alberg’s chloral,
chlorodyne, and phenacetine. There must be an ugly snarl—some olden
shame, some hidden disgrace.”
Vreeland very well knew that the sly German practitioner’s drugs had
brought his patient “no surcease of sorrow,” but only “pushed the
clouds along” to a new day of reactionary misery. For, the proud heart
was sealed and yet surcharged almost to its breaking.
“I wonder what our opinion of each other would be if we all had to
walk abroad with our life stories openly branded on our faces?” mused
the anxious Vreeland, as he drove away to the station. The flying
wheels of the coupé seemed to clatter “Not much! Not much! Nothing at
all!” He meanly believed all men and women to be as base at heart as
himself.
“Thank Fortune for the decent lies of a smooth appearance and a still
tongue!” was the schemer’s cheering conclusion, as he finally dismissed
all vain moralizing, and then, wondered how he would meet the crafty
Justine first, and so be able to gain her budget of stolen tidings
before he faced the watchful Lady of Lakemere.
The provokingly suggestive face of the French woman met him at the
front door, on his arrival. “I am to see that you have your breakfast,”
she smilingly said, “while Doctor Alberg, now upstairs, prepares Madame
for your visit!”
And, as she drew him into a coign of vantage, she whispered, “He is now
my very slave! For he, too, is hunting for an ally, and I had him all
to myself last evening! Now for the news! You can afford to be liberal
to me!”
Her eyes were beaming with that vicious triumph of an unfaithful
underling discovering the naked soul of her helpless mistress.
The household traitor is the lowest of all human spawn.
“Tell me everything,” was Vreeland’s hurried response. “When I marry
her, I will be the King of the Street, and you shall stay with us as
long as you wish—it will be always the same between us.”
The woman’s gleaming eyes softened in a glow of triumph.
“And, your house at Paris shall be my _pied à terre_. But, give me
every word—remember!”
His bosom was rent with thronging hopes and fears.
Justine smiled, as she pressed herself close to the handsome scoundrel.
“It is a bargain, then. I will hold you to every word, and I will
never let you go. How I secreted myself so as to hear them, is my own
business. But I did. In their fear of Doctor Alberg, whom Endicott
heartily despises, they fell easily into my hands. There was much talk
of the child—a girl—a missing girl—her child—but no time or age was
given—no whisper of the father’s name.”
Justine paused, while Vreeland hoarsely whispered, “Go on! Go on!
Quick! She may send any moment for me, now!”
“It appears she had placed her child, to get rid of it, in a ‘private
Orphan Asylum’ here, in the city. Just why—I can not tell. But, they
have lost all traces of the girl.
“The old man said, ‘I have followed up every “private inquiry”
possible, since your orders of last summer. These detective fellows
all come to me for their money on the New Year. Now you must be brave,
Elaine,’ he said, and I could hear her choking sobs.
“‘I have very bad news.’
“‘She is dead?’ almost screamed Madame.
“From my little peep-hole, I could see the old lawyer take her hands.
“‘We have been led away on a blind trail. And I have only just now
found the right one—but to lose it forever, I fear. For one of my best
agents has discovered that Doctor McLloyd’s private Orphan Asylum was
chased out of New York City by some angry rivals, and a bevy of too
inquisitive reporters.
“‘The Doctor was making money too fast, and there was a very suspicious
mortality among the little girls. It reappeared as the “House of the
Good Samaritan,” at a little village in Westchester County. The old
Doctor has gone either to his reward, or punishment. Probably, the
latter.
“‘But the sly hypocrite who sported a D. D., as well as a medical
title, left the Westchester property to a buxom grass widow, who long
officiated as his matron.
“‘This woman is now forty years old—well-to-do—and is married to a
thrifty young farmer—a man who is not particular as to how she earned
the handsome property which they enjoy.’
“Mrs. Willoughby was softly sobbing when he finished.
“‘By the lavish use of money and a compact of immunity, she agreed to
privately examine the books and records. Of course _she has not got
them_. “It is a friend—and so on.” We did not dare to force her. For,
she is a very sly bird.
“‘She was only twenty-two when she eased the good Doctor’s lonely
hours, and she is a remarkably cool hand at the game of life.’
“The old man sighed, as he said, ‘It appears that the enthusiastic
childless woman, who first adopted the child, died in two years after
your babe was taken away from the “private Orphan Asylum,” and, as her
young husband remarried in a year, he brought the pretty child back and
left her again on McLloyd’s hands—with a handsome present.
“‘The girl was a beautiful three-year-old fairy, and the “matron”
remembers her especially. But, McLloyd, always anxious for profit,
gave her to the first decent applicants, a respectable childless
couple, from Western New York.
“‘Under the name of “Alva Whiting”—full orphan—she was sent away for
the second time.
“‘I must find her! You must advertise!’ cried Madame.
“‘Ah!’ said the old lawyer. ‘There is no hope. The young widower came
back, after his second wedding was all safe, returning from a three
years’ visit in Europe. By a strange chance, his later union was also
childless.
“‘Rich, and now thoroughly independent, he, too, wished to trace “Alva
Whiting,” and to reclaim her.
“‘But the matron says that even the wily McLloyd, tempted by a handsome
reward, failed to find her. The Western New York people may have given
a false name, to prevent the child from ever knowing that she was not
their own.
“‘That is all—the matron would gladly earn our offered money—she knows
nothing.
“‘And now, God alone can, in his infinite mercy, ever reclaim “Alva
Whiting.”
“‘I have tried to induce this woman to meet me. She flatly told
my agent that she would have all the books burned—and then, deny
everything—if her prosperous middle age was connected with old
McLloyd’s baby farm. She cried, “I’m as fond of money as anyone—but
there’s the end of it.”
“‘No more would she say. I fear there is no hope.’ The old lawyer was
almost in tears, as he saw Madame’s sufferings.
“Now,” whispered Justine, “I merely saved my place by that agility
of body which you have so often praised. When Madame fell in a dead
faint, and the old lawyer screamed for help, I just ran around the
hall, knocking over a table, and—the rest has been left in Doctor
Alberg’s hands. So, you now know all.” The schemer’s brain was working
like lightning as they parted in silence.
After the breakfast, it was Justine who conducted Vreeland to Madame
Willoughby’s morning room—but not until Doctor Alberg had first waylaid
him.
“The same old mystery!” the German sighed.
“Money trouble it can not be.”
He flourished his arm in the direction of the fortune in art and
bibelots scattered around.
“Her general system is without disease. Her mind and self-control are
perfect. She has no concealed bad habits, like the ‘suffering New York
dames,’” he sneered. “But always periodical violent storms of sorrow,
these violent attacks following old Endicott’s business visits.
“There must be some old bug-a-boo. Now, I know lonely women are often
apt to be hysterical.
“Marry her. Take her away to Europe. Make her happy. She is a Venus de
Melos, yet in her prime. Break off the domination of this old legal
crab.
“Marriage reveals all secrets, finally. You will surely break his hold
on her. You are no sentimentalist. I will prescribe marriage—do you
see? We will work together. I will be your ally—your slave—your friend.
“You can well afford to be generous, and you then can work me in, as
confidential physician, into that golden New York circle where the
women’s confidence once gained, a man need not look further for a
Golconda.
“Discretion, silence, and a willingness to go through fire to hide any
woman’s secrets—_voilà_—the perfect doctor—the successful medical man!
Shall we work together—you and I?”
The young schemer grasped the greedy German’s hand. “I’ll stop at
nothing—to help you. By God! you shall have her every secret.”
“It’s a go. Loyal to the end,” whispered Vreeland.
“And you and I breakfast at Martin’s every Sunday till I am a happy
bridegroom.”
The alert physician glided away to where Justine Duprez’s eyes called
him, with their velvety lure.
Harold Vreeland’s face was lit up with a tender sympathy, as he knelt
before the fair woman who lay in a _chaise longue_ before her superbly
sculptured fireplace. There was a surprise in store for “the knight of
the ribbon blue.” His patroness’ face was stoically calm. She was no
hysterical weakling!
With a perfect self-possession, she plunged at once into the “business
in hand.”
“A modern mystery,” he murmured. “A sphinx of the heart,” for Elaine
Willoughby, Napoleon-like, ignored her ailments, whether of a mere
passing weakness or “memory’s rooted sorrow.” And at what secret cost?
“Time presses!” she said. “Follow my every word. For, I have sent them
all away. There is only Doctor Alberg in the house—and Justine always
keeps him in her eye.”
Vreeland breathed hard. It dawned upon him that the universally pliant
French woman was in the receipt of several salaries.
“She is a smart devil,” he thought, with a glow of pride.
“I shall have to travel some, this spring—in connection with very
important movements and reactions of a specialty in the stock market,
which you alone will know of.
“You and I must be the only ones to handle the concealed intimacy of
ours. Not even Endicott suspects.
“He never must. No one in the firm. Should foul play or awkwardness
reveal it, the firm name of Wyman & Vreeland would come down in a day.
So, mark my every word. I will not return to New York till you are
installed in your new apartments in the Elmleaf.
“It is well located, in the ‘thirties’—I have taken the best one on the
top floor to aid you in the gay and showy life that I wish you to lead
there.
“You will find your new man, Bagley, a veteran London valet, just
brought over, waiting to report to you now at the Waldorf. He has never
been in America before, and none of our opponents know him. I had
Justine engage him through Low’s Exchange.
“The rooms are already decorated and arranged for you. They have been
ready for a month, and no one can ever trace the ownership. The whole
belongings are yours.”
Vreeland found a voice. He began his grateful praise.
She smiled faintly. “Nay! no thanks! It is purely a business matter. If
you wish anything else, give a list to me. I will transmit it to the
furnisher, who will at once provide. There will be no bills. I hope
that the rooms will please you. Of course, I shall never see them.”
The young would-be bridegroom noted the cold dignity of her measured
sentences. There was the thin icy rivulet still between them.
“Mark me now,” she said. “There is a working room, and a private
secretary (a stenographer, typewriter, and telegraph operator) will
attend daily, from nine until six. The telegraph and private telephone
wire are connected with my rooms in the ‘Circassia.’ There is a
duplicate ’phone joining you with ‘Central,’ for your social use.”
Vreeland began to take his cue.
“From the café in the Elmleaf, you can have morning service, and be
furnished such entertainment as you may wish to give. I presume that
you dine at your clubs, or in society. The café accounts will all come
to me.”
She paused, and studied Vreeland’s face closely.
“And, in all this, what am I to do?” he asked bewildered.
The Lady of Lakemere laughed gaily at his embarrassment.
“You are to move in there, at once. Sign the lease for a year. Bagley
will take charge of you. There you are to give a jolly house-warming.
Call up all your friends. Do not neglect Merriman, Wiltshire, and
Rutherstone. You are to be pretty gay. These gentlemen may even bring
some of the ladies who wear diamond garter buckles. So much the better!
“When I return to New York, you are to report to me at the ‘Circassia,’
and the serious business of your new life will then begin. The woman
whom I will send to you as secretary is thoroughly reliable, and I will
answer for her fidelity.”
“The woman?” babbled the astounded Vreeland.
“Yes! Miss Mary Kelly—a talented young business woman of perfect
accomplishment, who represents me.” The voice of the lady was cuttingly
clear.
“Her slight lameness alone prevents her being placed in some position
of the greatest trust. That room only is sacred from all of your
rattle-headed social friends. I trust her implicitly.”
“I begin to understand you,” gravely said Vreeland.
“Under the guise of enjoying my life and living up to my prosperity, I
am to hide the momentous secret stock business carried on there.”
“Precisely,” soberly said Elaine Willoughby.
“The office business below?” he hesitatingly said.
“Ah! I have given up months to the study of this new arrangement,”
thoughtfully said the Queen of the Street. “You are to be master of
your own hours.
“Once a day, however, you are to show up at the downtown office. Wyman
knows that you will be busied at home a great deal. You will have no
awkward questions asked. Endicott will watch the downtown affair.”
“The firm signature?” he said.
“Will never be used. You will sign ‘Harold Vreeland, Trustee,’ and the
securities handled daily will be delivered to me at the ‘Circassia,’ on
my list of purchases and sales. Your checks and my daily statements are
to correspond.”
“In other words, I am, as trustee, your hidden broker?” Vreeland said.
“Under my daily orders,” she gravely answered. “And you are not to deny
that you indulge in private speculations. You are not even to avoid
Hathorn’s nearest friends.
“Even if Mrs. Volney McMorris should steal into your breakfast room, or
a bevy of the gay young matrons, or—even a pretty anonyma—your record
as a ‘_preux chevalier_’ in gayest New York will not suffer. You are to
be a young man _à la mode_.” Vreeland bowed in a grave silence.
That night, when he returned to New York City, to blindly obey his
strange patroness, Vreeland’s bosom was big with his happy secrets.
“I am to hold the hidden fort ‘of the Sugar treasure.’”
He divined a bitter campaign against Hathorn. And he then dreamed
a strange, sweet, wicked dream. Alida Hathorn’s stolen visits—with
Justine, perhaps—as a dark-eyed devil laughing over the downfall of his
enemy’s wife.
“I will make my own little game,” he laughed.
CHAPTER VII.
“PLUNGER” VREELAND’S GAY LIFE, “UNDER THE ROSE.”
Before the February snows were congealed into those dirty flakes of
ice and street mud which are an evidence of the “effectiveness” of
New York’s Street Cleaning department, the “top floor” of the Elmleaf
bachelor apartment was considered to set the pace for the gayest of the
bachelor apartments of Gotham. The hidden programme was even literally
carried out.
Outwardly, the daily life of that fortunate individual, Mr. Harold
Vreeland, had undergone little change. Once a day he duly occupied
his desk at the downtown office, using alternately the morning and
afternoon fraction.
He proved a very “tough nut to crack” for the local gossips, however.
There was a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde flavor of mystery clinging to the
audacious young “Westerner.” The slow trots of the “Locust” and the old
senile wiseacres of the “Sentinel” clubs wondered at his calm demeanor,
his easily acquired repose of the caste of “Vere de Vere.” Vreeland was
posing now as a “fixed star.”
Not even Bradstreet, or Dun, could seize upon any public delinquencies
to the detriment of his “business character,” and yet, Harold Vreeland
had rapidly acquired the reputation of a “devil of a fellow.” He had,
like Byron, his “hours of idleness.”
There was, too, an outward prosperous harmony in the busy office of
Wyman and Vreeland, now packed with clerks and forging to the front as
a house of unexampled strength.
There was a sober, quiet effectiveness in the firm, which shamed the
nervous “bucket shop” decadents, who were only noisy, screaming gulls,
clamoring over the financial sea for “any old thing” in the way of
floating pabulum.
It was undeniable that the hats went off to right and left, as Vreeland
paced the sacred precincts of Wall, Broad and Pine. A rising man—a
successful man—a man of mark!
“A safe man, sir! A wonderful young financier! A man whose outside
operations are enormous!” gravely said the cashier of the Mineralogical
Bank to his esteemed colleague, the cashier of Henry Screws & Company.
“You see!” confidentially said the speaker, between two mouthfuls of
“hasty lunch,” “the house is bound not to speculate, but—Vreeland, as
an individual, is to-day, perhaps the heaviest single operator of all
the young men of New York.” The young man’s fame was duly noised abroad.
“Where does he get all his backing?” grunted the other, as he dashed
down a tankard of “bitter.”
“He owns the half of Montana,” dreamily said the Mineralogical’s
Cerberus.
“And so, he is founded on the eternal rocks.”
It was not half an hour until this brilliant new canard was traveling
like a winged locust—and, it soon achieved the voyage—even to the
jungles of Harlem—and spread all over Gotham like the Canada thistle
attacking a poorhouse farm. A new financial Napoleon had appeared.
The self-possessed Vreeland was astounded at the many offered social
honors, the crowding attractive business temptations, and all the
rosy lures now thronging his pathway. He knew not as yet the whole
force of a lie “well stuck to,” which often treads down the modest and
shamefaced truth.
And even the agnostic sneer of “parvenu” was spared him. He was suave,
careful, chary in making enemies, and strictly non-committal.
His conduct toward Elaine Willoughby absolutely disarmed even that
vigilant social scavenger, Mrs. Volney McMorris.
For, many other men were just as often seen on parade in Elaine’s opera
box. Senator Alynton, General Morehouse, U. S. A., Judge Arbuckle, and
other social heavy guns oftener pressed the cushions of her victoria,
or nestled under her sleigh robes.
The Lady of Lakemere’s dinners were always stocked with a half dozen
masculine “lions” of deep-toned and majestic growl. There were also two
or three society swells—“howling swells”—who represented the “froth
and foam,” and these young men, with vacuous smiles and heaven-kissing
collars, impartially formed the “bodyguard” at theatre parties, and a
gilded Spartan band, deftly “cleaned up” the debris of the midnight
spread in the Waldorf supper room.
Elaine had a peculiar fashion of segregating the lions and
dudes, and sending each kind of social animal forth radiant with
self-satisfaction, after a happy five minutes passed with her alone—in
the pearl boudoir.
So, calm and serene, Harold Vreeland duly came and went. Men wondered
that he so freely stood back to let “other fellows take up the
running,” and Augustus Van Renslayer sagely summed up the verdict of
the younger “women hunters” of New York: “He is no marrying man. He
lives in an eternal picnic of his own—up there—in the Elmleaf.” It was
vaguely understood that Sardanapalus was Vreeland’s patron saint, and
Bacchus and Nero his household gods. The charm had worked but too well.
And the women of Gotham, those bright-eyed heart-wreckers, were all
fain to agree with the catfish-eyed Van Renslayer. There was a fatal
impartiality in the easy gallantry of the wary Princeton graduate.
Liberal, dashing, mindful of all the _petits agrémens_, he was no
woman’s slave—and yet, all women’s friend. If no single heart quivered
at his master touch, still, there were many arms open to him _selon son
métier_. A fatal curiosity led many a pretty Columbus on voyages of
discovery to the Elmleaf—whereat Bagley duly grinned.
That famous housewarming had been a marvel in its delicate recognition
of the _monde ou l’on s’ennuie_, and the judicious hilarity of the
Demi-Vierges.
For the return of Mr. James Potter, now finally severed from the
flagging firm of Hathorn & Wolfe, had furnished Vreeland with a
brilliant new idea.
There was a superb “First Part,” in which Mrs. Volney McMorris lightly
and amiably matronized the bravest ladies of the “swim”—who had long
been burning to inspect the splendors of the upper floor of the Elmleaf.
Among the forty guests of the “official” programme, were such
undeniably good form clubmen as Potter, Wiltshire, Merriman, and
Rutherstone. They and their gilded brothers suggested the names
of willing goddesses, and so it was that Miss Katharine VanDyke
Norreys, the “staccato” Californian heiress—Mrs. Murray Renton, of
Cleveland—and several other detached, semi-detached, and detachable
women “of spotless reputation,” joyed with the host’s convives, dipped
their laughing, rosy lips in his Roederer, and pattered with their
lightly-treading feet over his airy domain of a wondrously refined
luxury.
It was nearly one o’clock when the grave Bagley had closed the last
carriage door and sent the two policemen away with “a heavenly smile on
their faces”—and a five-dollar bill clutched in each brawny hand.
And then, on softly-rolling rubber wheels, came slipping along under
the shadows of clubhouse and virtuous mansions of drowsy decorum,
the pick of Cupid’s Dashing Free Lances—the very flower of the Light
Infantry of Love. This “Pickett’s charge” of these demure Demi-Vierges
was successful.
It was the solemn Bagley who marveled as he sped these “shining ones”
on their way up the stair at the struggling odors of “Y’lang Y’lang,”
“Atkinson’s White Rose,” “Wood Violets,” and “Peau d’Espagne.”
For days, that scented staircase recalled the “informal visit”
of the regent moon, Miss Dickie Doubleday; the audacious Tottie
Thistledown, the fair queen of light heels; Nannie Bell, the _mignonne
chanteuse_, and several other disciples of the “partly” and, alas, the
“altogether.” The girdle of Venus was _en évidence_ that happy night.
It is true that the glass globes automatically shrank up in affright
toward the ceiling, as these flashing-eyed birds fluttered in and
burst upon the gay banquet “mid the bright bowls.” The Elmleaf never
sheltered a lighter-hearted crew.
It was left to the imperturbable Bagley, next day, “to gather up the
fragments,” and headaches, heartaches, and visions of “woven paces
and waving arms,”—with sky-pointed toes and glimpses _ne quid nimis_
of clocked stockings and sleek tricots, were fairly divided among the
gallant swains who “did not go home till morning.”
It was in this jovial manner that Vreeland vindicated the public
character of _un homme galant_, which his strange feverish-hearted
patroness seemed to thrust upon him. And he wondered as he obeyed—but,
the game went bravely on.
There were some seriously tender interludes in the “evening’s
hilarity.” Miss Dickie Doubleday, in the _empanchement de son âme_
and, watchfully jealous of that dimpled star, Stella Knox, had quickly
effected a truce, of an amatory character, with the loved and lost
Jimmie Potter, who had lived to learn that her heart was “a bicycle
made for two”—if not more.
“After the ball,” Potter ostentatiously lingered to smoke a last weed
with Vreeland, who had opened for him alone the last unprofaned corner
of his domain—that Bluebeard chamber which was “strictly business.” He
knew that Potter was secret, safe, and gamely silent.
“Ah! my boy!” sighed Potter. “I see how you carry on your own private
plunging. What a fool Hathorn was—to quarrel with the Willoughby!
“Now that I’m out I don’t mind to tell you that the old firm is going
downhill very fast. Hathorn lost his luck when he cut the golden cord.
“I can’t make him out. He has grown strangely reckless and haggard.
“And the wife is, to say the least, _un peu insouciante_. You know of
that little yacht racket?”—and he whispered a few telling words.
“Well! Alida Hathorn was the Veiled Lady. I have it from the man who is
to be the sailing master of the ‘Aphrodite’ next year.
“And the blinded Hathorn is obstinately shadowing Mrs. Willoughby,
still following up her game, digging up her past, and backing up all
his wife’s acidulated slanders.
“When I found this to be a truth, and saw these damned guttersnipe
Hawkshaws slipping in and out of his private office, I decided to
quietly withdraw—for a quieter and a gamer woman never drew breath than
Elaine Willoughby.
“I wish to God that I had married Alida,” burst out the honest reveler,
whose relaxed nerves had unsealed the fountains of truth. “For now, I
fear, she will be every man’s woman—if she don’t pull up. She’s left
all alone, and Hathorn’s one idea is revenge upon Elaine Willoughby.
“And for her sake, he bitterly hates you. Look out for him. For he has
lost all self-control. You are wise to play your outside game here in
safety. Hathorn would not hesitate to bribe your own people.
“I know he had that big lump of deviltry, Justine Duprez, in his pay.
He even took her over to Paris the summer Mrs. Willoughby went out to
Colorado. I’m glad I’m out of the stock business. You’ll tire of it,
and with your money why do you fool with it?”
The young Crœsus arose unsteadily, and said, “Come to breakfast with me
at the Union to-morrow—that is to say, to-day,” he chuckled. “Well,
let us have one hour’s poker—you and me—and with no limit—just for fun.
“You owe me a revenge. Now, remember—I have warned you. Look out that
Hathorn don’t get onto your little game—dig a pit—and drop you in it.
“He’s grown to be an ether drinker now, and his wife is as cold-hearted
an egoist as breathes. Just dead gone on herself—and her own pretty
bodily mechanism. If he ever gets in an ugly money corner, she won’t
give him a sou marqué.
“Now, Elaine Willoughby has ‘held up her end of the log’ against some
of the stiffest men in Wall Street. She is smarter than a whole stack
of Hathorns. I know in the outside companies that I am director of, she
has loads of the best paying permanent investments.
“And if she ever catches Hathorn nosing into her affairs, or yours, for
I know your firm does a part of her business, she will smash up Fred
Hathorn like the ‘Mary Powell’ going over a rowboat.”
With an affected unconcern, Vreeland saw his friend disappear in a
night hour club coupé, after swearing fidelity to the poker tryst.
But his heart was beating wildly, as he crawled upstairs in the gray of
the dawn. “That’s her game; defense and revenge! I wonder if Hathorn
really traced her out to Colorado, and has he an inkling of Alva
Whiting?
“He’s not above levying a blackmail. And I am in some strange way her
pawn in this veiled duel to the death, a duel between a man and woman
who may have often rested in each other’s arms with vows of deathless
love.
“It may be only self-protection that made her shove him off on Alida
VanSittart. How she hurried on that marriage?
“Was it jealousy, fear, or some of her craft? And I am used—used and
only half trusted.
“Wait! Lady Mine! If Justine only plays me fair, I will have got all
your game—and then I’ll be master of you, Lakemere and the money. Once
inside your lines, then you will never be able to throw me off.” He was
beginning to see the threads of the swift current now.
His own expression, “inside your lines,” haunted him through his three
hours’ sleep, his bath, and early breakfast. Vreeland had the nerves of
the Iron Duke, and he burned for a few words with Justine, who was to
seek him that very morning, at her nest in South Fifth Avenue.
For there was a southward trip impending, and he wished to give his one
faithful spy her orders.
“If I could only get at the wires in her room! If I could only manage
to tap her talk and messages to old Endicott! For this woman here in
the office is surely her spy. Bagley may be.
“By Heavens! There is just one chance. And her mail! Justine may help
me. What can she not do?”
His heart burned with a dull jealousy of that past when Justine had
aided Hathorn on his upward way. “If she could only get around the
janitor of the ‘Circassia,’ and the letter carrier. What money can do,
I can aid her in, and she must do the rest—” He closed his eyes in
a fierce glow of sensual irritation, for the Parisienne had already
forged chains upon him which, with all his cold craft, he could not
lightly break away from.
“She is not to be resisted—if she plays her own game. First the trip,
then the other idea. But I could never handle this pale-faced St.
Agnes—this lame bundle of all the virtues. I must have some one else
here to watch Miss Mary Kelly—this convent-bred marvel.
“Why not find a smart woman to be my private stenographer and one of
the right kind? She could also keep an eye on Bagley and the little
dove-eyed devotee. Justine may help me to the right woman. I’ll tell
her all.” He began to see Lakemere moving toward him.
The gilded child of fashion was first at the tryst, and Justine Duprez
threw herself into her secret lover’s arms with a glad cry of triumph,
when ten o’clock brought her to the meeting place. “If I could only
come to you,” she fiercely sighed—“in your palace home!
“But wait—wait—till we have netted my lady. I have news now to make
your heart dance.”
The panting woman drew from her breast a scrawl of paper, on which she
had copied even the office marks. “This telegram came this morning. You
see that it is dated Washington.” Vreeland’s heart bounded as he read
the words: “Arlington—to-morrow. Don’t fail.” Was it an appointment—a
lover’s secret call?
He could have shouted with triumph, as he gazed on the signature,
“Alynton,” for a messenger had brought him a note at the moment of his
departure to meet Justine. His patroness had fallen into a snare.
“I am going to Pittsburg to-night. Come up and dine. I will give you
your orders for a week.”
He drew out the note, and glanced at the firm pen stroke. “Can Alynton
be the father of Alva Whiting?” he growled.
He dropped his head on the table, while Justine took off her hat and
wraps with the easy insouciance of a Camille. He was mad with mingled
greed and jealousy.
“Perhaps! Alynton’s father was an irascible magnate of enormous wealth.
They are about the same age. He may have feared his father’s wrath, for
he naturally should make a political marriage. Ah! my lady, you have
lied to me.
“If it is not the old secret of two guilty hearts, then there is the
gordian knot of the great Sugar intrigue in this.”
His thoughts thronged upon him with lightning rapidity, and as her head
lay on his arm, he gave the triumphant Frenchwoman her orders.
“Our whole future hangs on your adroitness. You must find out what goes
on between them. In a hotel you have a far better chance than in either
of her two homes.”
Vreeland murmured that in her ears which made the vicious woman’s
cheeks redden.
“Bah! all we women are alike,” she sneered. “But if she slyly sends me
out?” There was a gloomy pause.
“I do not think that she suspects you,” finally answered Vreeland.
“Telegraph me here what you dare to.
“And bring me all the other news in person. Now, tell me all you know
of this very saintly young Mary Kelly.”
His voice had the ring of anxiety. “I have had the janitor and the
letter-carrier watch her. They are both friends of mine,” modestly
murmured Justine.
“She lives near us, on a side street, with her old mother. And never
goes out with a man, except Officer Daly. Daly, the Roundsman. A
_beau garçon_, too; but it may be only a flirtation _Catholique à
l’Irelandaise_.
“I have often followed her myself to church. And she comes once a week
to Madame. They always look over papers together.”
“And that smug devil Bagley,” cried Vreeland, “only comes to the door,
leaves me the _pacquet_ of bills, and does not even see Madame. He
gets an order for the money, and then returns later with the receipted
bills.”
Justine was back at the Circassia before Vreeland left her rooms to
engage in his little joust at poker with Mr. James Potter, whose
morning diet of red pepper, cracked ice, and soda water had at last
brought him up to the normal, after several sporadic cocktails.
All through the quiet duel of cards, Vreeland was haunted by the twin
obstacles, Bagley and Miss Mary Kelly. “Bagley is a perfect servant,
and I can not get any excuse to rid myself of him. My secrets are not
kept where he can reach them,” mused Vreeland.
“The girl I surely dare not displace; but I can get around them both,
if I have the right kind of a woman here near me. I have the excuse of
my ‘outside correspondence’ and social affairs.
“Miss Kelly is sacred to the affairs of this cool-headed patroness of
mine. And even Elaine can not object.
“It would ‘give away’ her veiled espionage on me. Yes, that’s the plan!
I can advertise; pick one or two out of a hundred women and then _try
them on_,” he craftily smiled, “and only begin my real operations when
I have found the right one and the two young women have struck up an
intimacy.” He laughed. “My pretty spy shall watch the placid young
saint.”
Vreeland tossed upon his bed that night, and reflected upon the
singular methods of his covert business.
A list of stocks sent to him by messenger, or personally delivered
by Mrs. Willoughby, to be bought and sold, with seemingly no guiding
rule; all the checks signed only by him as “Harold Vreeland, Trustee,”
and all the securities daily deposited, after due receipt and tag, in
Mrs. Willoughby’s steel vault compartment at the Mineralogical Bank.
And she alone knew of gain or loss. He was only a gilded dummy.
But one great house guarded all these covert transactions, and the
deliveries to them, in case of sales, were always made by an order on
the cashier of the Mineralogical.
A dozen times the wily schemer had verified that Mrs. Willoughby knew
all the details of each purchase or delivery long before his own daily
report.
For when her account was actively moving, once a day the mistress and
her secret agent always met.
But never had Elaine Willoughby’s foot mounted the broad steps of the
Elmleaf, neither had the luxury-loving man ever dared to yield to
Justine’s mad desire to visit him in his splendid new home.
“It would be simply a financial suicide—our joint ruin!” he had
whispered.
“But wait—wait till I marry her!”
And then, their chiming laughter ended the daring woman’s pleadings.
For the time was to come when the fortune of the generous dupe would be
ruled by the victorious young Napoleon.
Harold Vreeland knew, in his heart, that the Queen of the Street was
aware of the wild daily life of the men in the Elmleaf.
For after rout-ball, opera, and theatre there were often stolen visits,
aided by the friendly mantle of darkness, and diamonds which had
gleamed but an hour before on calm and unsullied brows at the opera
glittered balefully in the crepuscular gloom of shaded rooms, where at
least one of the passionate lovers was far away from home.
The schemer had, from the first, avoided all intimacies with these
light-headed men.
He knew that each of his fellow _locataires_ was a Don Juan, and that
tragedy and comedy, sweet sin with shame, were traveling fast upon its
heels and satiety stalking along; that aching brows upon rose-leaf
couches haunted the decorous interiors of this abode of hidden
pleasures. The Elmleaf was a Golgotha of reputations.
And only a fire or an earthquake could reveal the daringly desperate
_liaisons_, which, urged on by the delightful zest of danger, would
have made public, by any sudden disaster, a story far more ghastly than
the untold record of that hideous night when the Hotel Royal went up in
fire and flame.
It was in a dull resentment against Elaine, and spurred on by Potter’s
tipsy confidence, that Vreeland, now fearing nothing, drew Mrs. Alida
Hathorn aside as he met her by hazard once more in the reception room
of the Savoy. He was waiting for a momentary telegram from Justine,
when his eyes rested upon the alluring moonlight glances of that
provoking young beauty, Mrs. Fred Hathorn. When she had gaily rallied
him on the Sardanapalian splendor of his Elmleaf establishment, he
whispered in burning words: “Why do you not ever come and see it?”
The costly fan trembled and snapped in her hand as she slowly said: “I
wanted to ask you something to-day! _The time has come!_”
“With Mrs. McMorris?” she whispered, vaguely pointing toward his spider
parlor.
“Without Mrs. McMorris,” the ardent pleading voice replied.
“I will tell you all. _I will lay my life at your feet!_”
Alida Hathorn pouted. “I will never find my way.” Her tone was that of
light raillery, but her cheeks were deadly pale. She was trembling on
the brink of her ruin.
And then, Vreeland, taking her hands in his, whispered to her words
whereat the busy familiar devil at his side laughed in glee.
“If you mean to say yes,” he murmured, “give me that red rose from your
breast.”
And when he raised his head, the rose in his hand was the pledge of a
dark tryst of the devil’s own making.
Before he slept, for his throbbing heart would not down in the crowning
victory of his revenge upon the desperate Hathorn, he tore open a
telegram which marked another milestone of his life.
“_Victory!_” he cried, for the words told him of Justine’s success.
“They dined to-day alone at the place named, and I have news for
you. Coming home, by Pittsburg.”
The overjoyed scoundrel cried: “Potter was right, after all. Everything
comes round to the man who waits.”
For a study of the great journals told him of a forthcoming report
fixing the policy of the Government upon the tariff.
“If she has the secret, she will surely act upon it,” he cried. “That
ties her to the great Sugar Trust’s secret service. Perhaps he trusts
her on account of the old love.
“Justine shall wrest the proofs from her by either fair means or foul.
And, as for to-morrow night—” His lips were parched and dry as he
thought of the light foot slipping up the stairway of the Elmleaf—“not
with Mrs. McMorris!” He seemed to be wrapped in a golden whirlwind of
success.
“If she comes once _when she wishes to_, she will come again _when
I wish her to_!” gloated the schemer, whose mind was now fixed upon
detaching Bagley upon some trumped-up errand and making such a feast as
“Rose in bloom” laid out when the hoodwinked “Shah Jehan” was “away” at
his palace of Ispahan.
“I now hold the cards, and I shall be the victor at last in this game
of life,” he swore, as he dreamed of those pleading moonlight eyes.
Harold Vreeland waited for two days in a fever of excitement for some
mandate from his artful patroness. “She is a sly one at heart, after
all, is Mme. Elaine,” he growled. “Her stay ‘at Pittsburg’ is only to
throw me off my guard, and perhaps Hathorn.
“She may have taken any one of a dozen short roads to steal back from
her rendezvous with her senatorial confidant. Friend or lover—_which?_”
He groaned in helpless rage. His mean spirit, his hidden vicious
agnosticism, made him doubt every woman.
To him they were all the same! The biting words of that crooked,
malignant genius, Pope, came back: “Every woman is at heart a rake.”
“By Jove! I have found them all to be living behind imitation fronts,”
he snarled.
He was seated in his office watching the pale-faced and silent Mary
Kelly, when a street messenger arrived with a card sealed in an
ordinary telegraph envelope.
It bore only these words, scrawled by the artful Frenchwoman: “Come
over to the room.”
Stealing a watchful glance at the silent girl in the office, Vreeland
hastened away. He had never been able to approach the slightest
intimacy with the gray-eyed Irish-American girl.
“Her convent shyness backs up her convent modesty,” sneered Vreeland,
who dared not covertly insult his patroness’ protégé.
Plaintively handsome, her steadfast eyes gleaming with a patient
resignation, the pale cheeks and slender form told of a life of
semi-invalidism. When not employed on her fashionable master’s
business, she was ever busied copying literary manuscripts or legal
documents.
“She’s another cool hand,” vulgarly imagined the upstart schemer.
“She knows that she is safe as long as Mrs. Willoughby is at the other
end of that private wire.
“But, perhaps this Daly, the Roundsman, may some day bring a glow
to those cheeks. They are all alike—mistress and maid—here in
hot-hearted, wicked New York.
“This one’s only a neat, sly little sneak, and a spy on me.”
Vreeland’s every nerve was tingling as he dashed up the stairs to
Justine’s nest on South Fifth Avenue.
Standing ready for instant departure, the excited girl told him of how
she had stolen away while her fatigued mistress slept.
“You will hear from her at once—probably to come up to-night. Now, once
for all, _there is no love between them_. I found my way as usual. Only
business—_great business_—MONEY AFFAIRS—the play of the stocks. He is
to come up in a month and bring a new Senator from the West.
“One of the secret friends; so, _mon ami_, you may soon have another
rival.”
Vreeland gnashed his teeth as the girl said: “They dined
together—alone—and talked for hours. Senator Alynton gave her a
paper after they had talked about the Government, about lawsuits and
troubles, and that I sewed up in her corset for her in her presence
before we left. Brother and sister they are, in friendship, but he
never even raised her hand to his lips. _Elle est bien bête, trop bête,
pour l’amour!_” was Justine’s parting fling.
“You and I must get that paper, or a copy of it. It’s our fortune!” he
cried. But, Justine had fled, only adding: “She saw no other man. She
only went there to meet Alynton. Now, back to your rooms. She will soon
call for you.”
Justine was a true prophetess, for while Vreeland sat in his rooms
immersed in the study of a dozen newspaper articles upon an ominous
flurry in the “Sugar” securities, the lame girl tapped at his door.
With a bow, she handed him the transcribed telephone message: “Please
come up at once. Very important.”
“Compliments, and say that I’ll leave instantly,” gravely replied
Vreeland, without lifting his head.
As he hurried on toward the Circassia, he endeavored to frame some idea
of the daring woman speculator’s plans.
There were rumors of unfavorable tariff action, of hostile legislation,
of adverse decisions of the courts to be expected, of a growing
agitation against the “Sugar Trust,” and even of the desire of the
great Standard Oil Company to force the value of “Sugar shares” down by
the pressure of their heavily-armed capitalistic secret brokers, and
to “gobble” a controlling interest, or at least the bulk of the heavy
holdings.
“This surely means a slaughter of the little fishes,” mused Vreeland.
Rumors of a reincorporation of the seventy-five million dollar
capitalized company in New Jersey, the threatened move to divide its
capital stock into common and preferred, were rife on the Street.
“Ah!” growled Vreeland, as he glanced over a tabulated statement of the
ratings since its organization. “This may either send the stock, now at
seventy, down to forty or fifty, or up to a hundred and twenty-five. If
I only knew?”
He laughed mockingly as he dismissed the subject. “It will only be
double or quits.”
“Double their wealth for the insiders—and quits for the poor devils
squeezed to the wall!” While he waited in the drawing-room for his
patroness, the woman whom he began to fear he never would make his
dupe or slave, he pondered over her real purposes in the vast hidden
speculations.
“Has she not already money enough?” he enviously thought, gazing on the
heaped-up splendors of costly taste around him. And then, he remembered
that he had never met any man, woman, or child in New York City who had
money enough.
“It’s the fashionable craze—money-getting, by hook or crook,” he
reflected.
“And once mixed up in the game, it’s hard for her to leave it,
especially if she is the go-between who links some of the nation’s
statesmen to the great insiders of the Trust.
“This home may be only a sham, Lakemere only a way station for the
friendly conspirators, and that paper may be a dangerous document which
neither side would dare to hold. And old Endicott, too—what’s his rôle?”
He was the more interested as Justine had swept away all suspicions of
an _amourette_ between the two whom he feared.
“Still there is the lost child. If I only knew how old the girl was,”
he fretted.
“It may be the child of the last decade, or the fruit of a girlish
marriage. That secret, and the paper, I must have.
“But, Justine must steal the one, and I have got to reach her line of
secret communications.”
As he met his calmly-smiling secret employer he could not divine the
revengeful purposes hidden under her gently-heaving bosom.
CHAPTER VIII.
MISS ROMAINE GARLAND, STENOGRAPHER.
It was late that night when the excited Vreeland left the Circassia and
he was still somewhat in the dark as to the real object of his veiled
employment. He reasoned justly that there was not a grain of sentiment
now in the frankly defined relations between himself and the Lady of
Lakemere.
The money bond between them was only that cold one of employer and
employed, and the unmistakable dignity of Elaine’s business manner held
him decidedly aloof. Here was no lover’s thrall.
Not a single reference to her absence had escaped her lips. There was
no pleasant, social white-lying going on between them, and he was still
in the dark when he left, with the strictest orders to await every
moment between ten and three, her signal for the beginning of stock
operations of gigantic magnitude.
“This Sugar stock may pay twelve and seven per cent on common and
preferred in a year, or else be driven down to half price. We must
be wary,” she sighed. “No one can truly forecast the actions of our
courts, journals, electors or government,” she mused. “The very
principle of reckless instability is the one sure thing of all our
American doings.”
“And yet, you move along with the others, Madonna,” smilingly said
Vreeland.
“You shall see,” she laughed. “The stock market, the sea, and a woman’s
heart are never at rest. Always distrust the seeming calm.
“Now,” her voice became grave, “you are to be, each instant, ready at
the post of duty. You will personally telephone your orders as received
from me to your buyer. The bank will then telephone me the deliveries
of the stock, and I will telephone you to pay over each cheque myself.
“The thing is to be reversed in sales, when you have received certified
cheques to your name as trustee, for any sales, you are then to
telephone down your delivery order to be confirmed by me, after you
have brought me the cheques. I have a private wire to the cashier,
remember.
“But, above all, silence. You are now suspected of being a daring and a
lucky speculator. You will be watched.
“Therefore, go out everywhere in society during the next three weeks.
Show yourself as gay and jolly as you can.
“I am also handling some other very heavy matters, and I wish you, just
now, to be particularly thought the gayest reveler in Gotham.
“In exhibiting yourself everywhere, the gossips will cease to watch us
jointly and our different purposes will be divided in the public eye.
“Miss Kelly’s record of each day’s transactions will be your warrant.
She comes to me nightly to report.”
Vreeland was overjoyed as he received Mrs. Willoughby’s hearty approval
of his employing a personal stenographer.
“If you get the right person,” said his patroness, “she may be a
pleasant companion for my trusted little Mary.”
When he had raised the lady’s hand to his lips and departed he realized
how sternly he was being kept out of her real councils. Even the
vainest fool could not have deceived himself.
“It’s the payment of money, the changing of coin between us, that
simply makes me only an upper servant,” he snarled.
“Once that money passes between man and woman, in any relation, there
is an end of any free will. But, I can wait. And, you shall pay me,
Madame, to the uttermost, when you are in my power.”
He knew the probable magnitude of the transactions and, even his iron
nerve was shaken.
“It cannot be merely herself, it is the grouped official cowards behind
her, who are making money on the sly.”
He found a new surprise awaiting him at his rooms, one which brought
the blood to his heart with a sudden surge. There was a bunch of red
roses awaiting him with a sealed note. He knew not the handwriting,
but, his eyes gleamed with a strange fire as he read:
“The Lady of the Red Rose will visit you at ten to-morrow night.
Remember your promise. _Fail not._ She will be veiled and dressed in
black. _Be alone._ And, at your door, _at ten_.”
“They are all the same,” he gasped, with a wildly beating heart, “under
the rose, lurks always some wild intrigue, some desperate game.
“Life in New York is only a game of catch who catch can.”
And, when the sunset of the next day came, Mr. Harold Vreeland had
dispatched the acute Bagley to Boston with a “valuable package” to be
deposited in a Safe Deposit Company there, and he was seated in his
own room gazing tenderly upon the crimsoned flowers whose mute incense
filled the air.
The crawling hands of the clock were a torture to the man whose darkest
purpose was now hidden behind a smiling face—for it is not often
given, even to a smooth scoundrel, to betray two women at once. He was
swimming in a sea of glory, now.
Vreeland slept but little after his conference with his resolute and
beautiful patroness. He had scanned her face keenly to see the “sweet
unrest of Love,” or the play of a hidden passion written there, but
all that the keen schemer could discern was the calmness of a settled
purpose, the poise of an unshaken self-control.
“She has either no heart, or else, a marvelous power of dissimulation,”
he wearily decided. He felt that she was playing some great hidden game
in which he was but a mere pawn, a poor private soldier in the fight.
“It’s a waiting game,” he rightly concluded, “but, it is for vengeance,
or a fight to cover up her clouded past.”
He knew now that Elaine Willoughby was victorious over her young social
enemy at every point of the field. For, the house of Hathorn was known
to be divided against itself, and the once magnificent Frederick’s
careworn brow showed a sullen discontent.
Hathorn’s disgruntled face was now too often reflected in the mirrors
of the Café Savarin bar; he was shunned at the clubs even by the young
_flâneurs_ who had now gone over bodily to Mrs. Willoughby, and the
little Sunday afternoon _séances_ at Mrs. Alida Hathorn’s became noted
for their daring _camaraderie_ and the “high class vaudeville” enacted
there.
Hathorn was now more frequently absent from town “upon business,” and
Vreeland wrongly suspected him of tracing down the past antecedents of
“his dearest foe.”
“What the old Harry did she throw him over and pick me up for?” he
vainly pondered. “She may have found him creeping too closely on her
track and perhaps she feared him.
“To cut the cord, she has pushed him out, and, pensioned him off on
Alida.
“But, what chilling spectre of the past affrights her? That I can only
reach by tapping her secret lines.
“I must get in between Endicott and her. I must find out her relations
with the Sugar Trust, and also get at the underground railroad to the
chamber where the first news of the secret operations of the ‘Senate
Finance Committee’ makes her the witch of the Street.
“She is a sly one. She may be trading coldly on the secrets of the
Sugar magnates, possibly selling out her senatorial friends and
betraying old Endicott’s banking connections.
“Her social entertainments, those little confidences of the ‘pearl
boudoir,’ give her a safe chance to play these men off, the one against
the other.”
Vreeland’s San Francisco experience, his analytical brain, and his
quick wit, had enabled him in his few months of New York stock
speculating, to quietly pick up every trick of the “put, call and
straddle,” every dark cross of the bucket-shop infamy, every “dummy”
subterfuge used in “shearing the sheep.”
He knew now every mystery of “doubled trades,” “crossing trades,” and
“wiping out a margin.”
“She has evidently never trusted me for a single moment, and, has
covered her right hand, while she has played me as a ‘left bower.’”
It dawned upon him that she perhaps, like David, said in her heart,
“All men are liars.” That her “developing process” with Fred Hathorn
had made her “sadly wise,” and that she was “trying him out” now at
every distance, before making him a champion.
He had, however, preserved the same even, devoted watchful courtesy,
and he was wise enough not to try to jump blindly from “seed time” to
harvest. “She has not opened her heart to me; if she ever marries me,
it will only be when she is driven to my arms.
“But, I can wait.”
And, so, never having dipped deeper into any true woman’s heart than
the light-winged swallow brushing the lake, he forgot that he was
not true to her. He knew not the force of those ringing lines of “A
Fo’castle Ballad”:
“If you’re good to her, she’s good to you!
For a woman’s square, if you treat her right!”
The morning found the energetic Mr. Harold Vreeland in close conference
with the thin-lipped Miss Marble, of “Marble’s Business Agency,” near
that dingy little square where Greeley in bronze gazes vacantly down
at his own feet, awed by the stony glare of the New York Herald’s
singularly inartistic owls.
The wary woman broker had listened in silence to the young banker’s
long description of his need of an accomplished “private secretary.”
She flushed slightly when Vreeland mentioned the Elmleaf as the scene
of the varied “labors.”
The quiet orgies of that “whited sepulchre” were now the theme of much
whispered comment over the whole Tenderloin.
There were other “rising men” besides Harold Vreeland burning the
candle of Life at both ends there and covertly reënacting the lurid
scenes of old Monte Tiberio, and infamous Baiæ.
“Expense is no object, my dear Miss Marble,” softly purred Vreeland. “I
fancy you know now what I want. I would prefer a capable young woman
who is a stranger to New York City.
“One who has been accustomed to refinement. My private correspondence
is largely social.”
The handsome scoundrel’s eye sunk under the keen woman’s direct thrust.
“There may be an objection on the part of the young lady, your social
surroundings are of the gayest.”
Miss Marble was already familiar through the “blanket sheets,” with the
comet-like cavorting of the young Western star in these Eastern skies.
“There is a business secretary, always there on duty, an exemplary
young woman now in my employ, so, you can dismiss all your fears,”
insidiously remarked Vreeland, “and, for the right person, I will pay
you any commission that you ask.”
The eyes of the two adroit schemers met.
“I want a woman whom I can train up into my own ways,” meaningly said
Vreeland. “I think that you understand me, now.”
The pale-green eyes of Miss Marble shone with glee at the prospect
of some other woman “with reluctant feet” going blindly on to the
thirty-third degree initiation of the hard ways of New York.
“I do, perfectly,” she replied, her thin, pitiless lips pressed closely
together.
“How shall I select the one who is best fitted to suit you?” Her voice
was slightly shaky.
“Easy enough,” lightly cried Vreeland, reaching for his hat and cane.
“Take two or three days. Go over the whole field of your most promising
applicants. Have say, four or five of them here to meet me when you are
ready.
“You can indicate the one whom you would prefer. Find out all their
private histories, as far as you can get at it,” he uneasily laughed.
“I will call in, of course, by hazard, and then take a look at them.
You can then have the one whom we decide upon, meet me as your only
candidate. The rest you can leave to me. If the first one is not
suitable, we will follow on down the list.
“Remember, salary is no object. I am liberal in all things, especially,
as to your commission.”
For once in her artful career, Miss Joanna Marble infused a real warmth
into the clasp of her clammy hand.
For these two read between the lines of each other’s impassive faces.
“A very fine man—the sort of man likely in time, to get shot or
lynched, down South,” mused the veteran Miss Marble, “as near a sleek
human wolf in sheep’s clothing as they put them up.”
And, then, Joanna Marble carefully indited a dragnet advertisement
which next day brought a shoal of young womanhood to the breakers of
her woman trap.
There was “the solemn silence of the night,” the “speaking silence of a
dream,” at ten o’clock, as the waiting Harold Vreeland listened with a
beating heart behind the portals of his aerial den in the Elmleaf.
That gliding step came at last. “Soft as the dews that fell that
night,” was the footfall of the Lady of the Red Rose when _très
discretement vêtue_, in shrouding black, with her face swathed in an
impermeable veil, Alida Hathorn glided into his room, and coolly threw
aside her hat and wraps.
The flowers and ornate wealth of decorations made the room a very dream
of luxury. Vreeland sprang forward when he had locked the door, but
the burning words of tenderness on his lips were stayed as a slender,
uplifted arm stopped him. The visitor’s face was impassive.
“Not yet. We must understand each other,” was the whisper which sounded
like the voice of a lost soul. It was, with a fatal overreaching, that
Vreeland murmured, “This is hardly the place for a business interview.”
“I know it,” stolidly said Alida Hathorn, turning toward him a face
whose burning eyes thrilled him to his bosom’s core. “You have as much
to lose as I have, perhaps more.”
“My life is ruined,” she gloomily said. “We will play fair to-night,
you and I, with the cards on top the table. I know all your game—you
shall now know mine. And, I presume that both of us are willing to pay
the price.”
A French clock ticked away in the awkward silence, and then, Vreeland,
a master of woman’s moods, quietly seated himself beside the excited
woman, and took her burning palms in his own.
“Tell me what your will is. It shall be my law,” he simply said.
Alida Hathorn coldly studied his face for a moment. “I will soon test
your sincerity,” she answered. “I will tear off the lying mask we all
wear for a moment, and let you see the real woman behind the society
veneer.”
“I have found out that my husband is only a reckless stock gambler,
a man who coldly married me simply as ‘means to an end.’ He is half
crazed by his loss of influence in the Street.
“He has lately established secret branches of his house in Buffalo,
Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago and Montreal.
“There seems to have been some devil crossing him everywhere, and, he
has also fought out a silent duel to the death with Elaine Willoughby,
who has torn the old firm to pieces.”
Vreeland was now watching her with gleaming eyes.
“Wolfe has nothing whatever to lose. My husband insists that I shall
back the firm (practically himself), and, he swears that you are the
most successful man on the Street. He knows of all your individual
plunging.
“And he knows, too, that you are ‘on the inside’ of the great Sugar
deals, the Oil Company’s intrigues, and, are first favorite now since
Hathorn married.”
Her voice rang out bitterly as she buried her face in her hands. “A
woman’s capacity of resistance has its limits.
“I come to you to-night for help. I will make one last effort to break
him of his mad folly, or else, leave him to his fate.
“When he is penniless, he may follow me over to Europe. He, at least,
will be a husband, in name; a protection against the foreign society
mob, over there.” Her voice was bitterly hard.
Vreeland began to murmur platitudes.
The beautiful woman’s eyes flashed. “Don’t dissemble. You shall know
what I want!” she cried, pacing the room in her rising agitation.
“There is an ominous look in the Sugar market. You will go into the
deal on a sure basis. Open your heart to me to-night, for my own sake.
Give me your game for the next week. Let me copy it. I will make just
one turn for him. If you only play fair, I may save him. It may bring
me peace.
“If Hathorn will not be ruled, then my future life will be my own. I
depend on you—on your honor, on your pledges made to me, at the Waldorf
and the Savoy. I have come to you, here, fearlessly. What is your
answer?”
They were facing each other, as Vreeland hoarsely whispered, “And, my
reward?” The woman’s warring soul shone in her eyes.
“Let me know first that I can trust you,” she whispered with ashen
lips. “Trust to me, and, remember a woman’s gratitude can overpay.
Drive no hard bargain with me.”
In a moment, Harold Vreeland, on his pinnacle of sudden prosperity, saw
the gulf yawning before him. “If Elaine should find it out.” He bowed
his head, but the truth stole into his lying face.
“Is it possible that you are a coward?” cried Alida Hathorn. “You
would flinch before the woman who has come to you here—_here_, at your
bidding. I believed that we both were ready to pay the price.” He
sprang to her side, in answer to the invitation of her eyes.
“Listen,” he whispered. “I will, so help me God, give you all the
duplicate orders of my private account for the next two weeks. But, to
you, alone.”
He listened, and was astounded at her daring plan to receive his
betrayal of the confidence of a woman who had been her bane, and yet,
he yielded to the charm at last.
The echo of her departing foot on the stair left him stunned and
breathless at his own unwitting self-surrender. For, caught off his
guard, he had left the vantage-ground which he proposed to hold.
“In any case, neither of us will dare to speak. There is ruin staring
us both in the face, and, we should play fair. Fear is a wise
counselor,” she had frankly said. He trembled before her moonlight
eyes, burning in a wild unrest.
She had dominated him at the last, and, swept away an unscarred victor.
Three days of wild excitement followed the nocturnal visit of the Lady
of the Red Rose. Vreeland was unable to leave his apartment even for
a moment to meet Justine, his busy spy, or to respond to the urgent
invitation of Miss Joanna Marble, who had telegraphed to him: “I have
found the very woman you want. A perfect stranger, and, a beauty.”
In the haste of his feverish stock gambling, he had only time to order
this happily discovered nonpareil to await his pleasure.
“Keep her with you. Give her a month’s salary, in advance. Accept my
check sent by messenger as your commission. Will call soon.” So he had
telegraphed in reply to the adroit Miss Marble, and dashed off a check
for a round sum—a sum which clearly indicated to the overjoyed Miss
Marble, the nature of the “discretionary advice” which she was to give
to the beautiful neophyte in New York’s fiercest glitter.
Harold Vreeland, with a pale face, sat on watch in his own room,
his eyes glued upon the features of Mary Kelly as she recorded each
momentous message from the strange woman at the Circassia who was now
playing a gigantic game.
An influx of bank and stock private confidential messengers, the
evening conferences with Elaine Willoughby, and a breathless study of
check book stubs “delivery and statements,” pressed him, while the
pale-faced woman near him, cut out every lurid article of the daily
journals describing the cyclonic rise and fall of the price of Sugar
Certificates now heaving in a storm of unrest as sweeping as the Bay of
Fundy’s tides.
Below, in the noisy street, the newsboys bawled “extras,” while all the
hotels, clubs and money marts were thronged with excited babblers.
For three days, the corridors of the New York Stock Exchange were
crowded with men whose vulpine faces were either hardened by despair,
or else excitedly gleaming with the flush of victory.
Broad and Wall streets were filled with excited crowds, while in the
galleries, the clients, reporters and money-betting public watched the
members on the floor struggling over Sugar.
From ten to three daily the heat of battle was on, and, even after dark
the duels of winner and loser were transferred “uptown.”
In the Consolidated Petroleum and Stock Exchange a mad riot reigned,
intensified by the vociferous dealings of the crowding “curb-stone”
brokers.
With a cowardice newly born of his mean treason, Harold Vreeland
trembled as he crept out of the “Elmleaf,” during the three days to
steal into a decorous-looking private residence near, where from ten to
three with her eyes glittering with a fierce excitement, Alida Hathorn
sat in a rear parlor, guarded by the all too accommodating Mrs. Volney
McMorris cozily ensconced upstairs.
But the schemer well knew that Hathorn was a leading figure in the
downtown mêlée where “Sugar” had been steadily hammered down from
“seventy” to “fifty” under tremendous sales. Every conceivable disaster
had been suddenly “materialized” around the standard of the hitherto
strongly upheld monopoly.
It was on Friday, at one o’clock, that Vreeland, awestruck, added
up his scheduled statement of sales, on ten-day delivery terms. It
amounted to nearly twenty thousand shares, and the total of the
transactions astounded him.
He had just stolen in to report the last order to Alida Hathorn, a
sale of a thousand shares, and she had gleefully whispered, “You have
already handled twenty, but I have turned forty thousand shares, and
I’ve now reached my limit. If it goes down ten dollars more, we can
cover all our contracts and clear nearly a half million dollars.”
Vreeland’s eyes opened in wonder, as he saw the file of waiting
messengers in her gallery, and a cipher book at her side. He fled away
in silence.
At the door of his room, he was seized by Mary Kelly, her white hands
trembling. “She is there now at the instrument, calling you—hasten.”
Bold, intrigant, as he was, Vreeland paled, and the blood left his
heart as he listened to Elaine Willoughby’s last orders. It was a most
momentous message. “Telegraph instantly down over private wire, to
Cashier Mineralogical Bank. For my order, _buy in_, at once—on this
board—forty thousand shares of Sugar in lots of one to five thousand
shares. Do not leave the instrument for one moment, till you report
the execution back to me. Have them telegraph to you the buying rate
of each lot and report when all is bought in. Then I will come to the
Waldorf and send over for you.
“I will sign the checks myself there at the hotel. Keep the messengers
there in your room with the stocks. I have suite No. 700 in the hotel.”
Mary Kelly’s flying fingers had recorded the momentous message in
shorthand as it fell from Hathorn’s pallid lips, and, her fingers then
pressed the telegraph key with lightning rapidity. Vreeland was dazed.
“My God, this is ruin for her,” he whispered. It was of the Lady of the
Red Rose he spoke.
“You must sit here, sir, and record for me,” cried the girl. “They are
holding me on the wire.” The agony of hell was in the heart of the
entrapped scoundrel.
He knew that his whole personal future now depended on executing his
mistress’ behests with lightning rapidity. There was no way to warn
Alida Hathorn. He dared not trust Bagley—a spy, perhaps.
One hasty sentence of explanation and he sat down at the table, beside
the girl, while far away at the Circassia, Elaine Willoughby eagerly
awaited the warning ring of the telephone bell. In three-quarters of
an hour, Vreeland staggered to the speaking tube. “The whole order
is covered,” he reported, “opening price, forty-nine; closing price,
seventy-three. I will await you here.”
With a sickening heart, the would-be traitor watched Mary Kelly adding
up the scheduled lots and averaging the prices.
“The whole forty thousand shares average us sixty-four dollars,” she
whispered, pushing the paper over to him, as she bent over her clicking
key. “There has been a terrific rise. Failures on the Street are
reported. Sugar is going up with jumps. Market practically bare.”
“My God!” groaned Vreeland, as he hid his face for a few moments in his
own room.
“This will be her ruin. Poor Alida. Forty thousand shares left to
cover, means a loss of three-quarters of a million.”
And then his own white face stared back at him, in the glass as his
trembling lips refused to frame the question: “Did Elaine know of his
treachery?” For, it seemed that his sin had found him out.
He dared not even for a single moment leave the presence of the girl
who was now recording each message from the cashier of the bank,
announcing the departure of the agents with each lot of the stocks as
bought in.
“Was it a blind pool to break and make a market?” he queried.
But, he found no time to steal away an instant from Mary Kelly’s
eyes and the impassive Bagley who stood waiting to conduct him to
Mrs. Willoughby at the Waldorf. “I am watched,” the cowed traitor
muttered.
The house was dark where Alida Hathorn had directed her secret campaign
when Vreeland, under Bagley’s escort, returned at midnight from the
Waldorf. Vreeland turned his eyes away in a sickening dread.
The only remark made by the serene Queen of the Street was a
commendation of his promptness. She was graciously cheerful. “The
market turned upon us so quickly, that not a moment was to be lost,”
placidly remarked Elaine Willoughby, whose pleasant smile of dismissal
followed the sending up of a card whereon Vreeland saw the words “Hiram
Endicott.” But, his patroness said, “You have earned a week’s rest. I
can now give you that. You can amuse yourself for a week. I shall stand
out of the market. You can go ahead and pick up the threads of current
affairs down town.
“Remember, not a word of this to Wyman. It would lead to our instant
parting. You have done well. I know now that I can trust to you, to the
very last.”
Vreeland shuddered and stole away, wearing a sickly smile. The night
had new terrors for him now.
All that long night, Mr. Harold Vreeland paced his room, waiting for
the morrow. His haggard face was gray and ashen in the morning dawn, as
he waited for the earliest journals.
And, for once, the brandy bottle was his friend.
He recalled a thousand times the impassioned face of the beautiful
woman who had blindly followed his desperate lead.
“I had nothing to lose,” he mused. “This fierce play was only a flurry
to my nerves, but, she may be wrecked. And if she should now turn upon
me.”
He did not dare to think of facing her, and he even feared to show
himself in Wall Street until the news of his beautiful accomplice’s
situation should reach him.
“Where would she land on Life’s stormy seas?” He did not dare to face
the ruin he had wrought.
An occupation for his morning hours suggested itself. He would visit
Miss Joanna Marble, and so, at eleven o’clock, he was seated in her
“Bureau,” curiously awaiting the arrival of the young woman who was to
fill the lofty position of “private secretary” to the “star” of the
Elmleaf. Leaning out of the window, he beckoned to one of a shouting
mob of newsboys as the words “Extra! extra! Failures in Wall Street!”
resounded high above the din of Herald Square.
Tossing the lad a half dollar, he unfolded the still damp sheet.
Among the glaring headlines, he read, “Failure of Hathorn & Wolfe.
Liabilities, one million dollars.”
He sank back in his chair, and then, seized with a sudden impulse,
he quickly ran downstairs and jumped into a coupé, bidding the agent
detain the expected beauty.
Some indefinable impulse led him to his rooms, where the grave Bagley
handed him a telegraphic dispatch. He tore it open and read the bitter
lines: “You have lied and basely betrayed me. I have left America
forever. I leave it to the future to punish you.” The signature, “Red
Rose,” was that of a woman who was sobbing alone in her stateroom on
the Etruria, as she glided past the Narrows on this sunny Saturday
morning.
With a clouded brow, Vreeland descended the stair and at the street
door, met Mr. Jimmy Potter, who whispered: “Fred Hathorn has cleared
out to Havana—last night—the fool. He gouged his wife out of half a
million.
“I saw her off on the Etruria to-day, and I’m going to save what I can
for her out of the wreck, and, then go over and meet her in Paris.
“I told you that all things would come round to the man who waits.”
With a smothered oath, Vreeland pushed on, glad to escape the
easy-going tormentor who was destined to be the _prochain ami_ of the
daring Lady of the Red Rose.
He dashed away to Miss Marble’s “Bureau,” where his eyes gleamed as
Miss Joanna led him into her private room. Her warning glance gave him
the key to his conduct.
And he was speechless in silent rapture, as he gazed upon the fresh and
womanly beauty of “Miss Romaine Garland, stenographer.”
“She is the very woman,” he mused. “The woman of my dreams.”
Afar, uptown, in the shaded boudoir of her pleasaunce palace, Elaine
Willoughby dropped the newspaper from her hands. “I am safe at last. He
is a criminal fugitive.
“And, now, to plead to God for the return of my child.”
CHAPTER IX.
SENATOR ALYNTON’S COLLEAGUE.
An exciting month had slipped away after the sudden Sugar flurry in
Wall Street which had filled its gray granite channels with lame and
dead ducks.
Seated in his cozy morning room at the “Elmleaf,” Mr. Harold Vreeland
was reflectively watching the snowflakes whirled by a March storm in
fluffy white eddies, and furtively gazing askance upon the beautiful
face of Romaine Garland at his side.
“Where have I seen that face before?” he mused, as the lovely
stenographer arose with a silent bow, and passed through the half-open
door to seat herself at her typewriting table, _en vis-à-vis_ with Mary
Kelly nodding over her clicking telegraph instrument.
There was ample time for Vreeland to attend to his growing personal
correspondence in these long mornings when he awaited the next secret
orders of his patroness. But, a singular social and speculative
lethargy now seemed to have seized upon Mrs. Elaine Willoughby. The
nearness of Lent, the reaction of the giddy winter social season, and
the cares of a large property all contributed to keep the woman who
had fought Alida Hathorn to a finish, out of the garish glare of show
society.
All the news that Vreeland could gain from the watchful Doctor Alberg
and the pliant Justine was, that the Lady of Lakemere was seemingly
drifting into a settled melancholy. Vreeland was astonished at the dead
water into which he himself had glided. His afternoons were regularly
spent now at the Wall Street office, where Wyman was busied with the
“legitimate.”
It had been Vreeland’s secret self-appointed task to follow out all the
details of the Hathorn & Wolfe failure, whose echoes still reverberated
in the curses of the defrauded customers.
Wolfe was left alone to face the music, and the whole financial world
knew that the great sums paid in to the firm’s coffers by customers in
the sudden Sugar flurry had been all diverted by the fugitive Hathorn
to margin those enormous private deals of his own plunging, which, even
criminal in their character, had been made dead against the rising
market. The “double or quits” had been “quits” with him. His disgraced
name was off the club lists, the VanSittart town mansion was closed,
the deserted Oakwood place was garrisoned for a long foreign stay of
the unhappy heiress, and “lightly they spoke of the spirit” which had
fled with Hathorn’s good luck.
There was little left for the plundered creditors to divide but
“experience.”
Wolfe, the luckless partner, was sullen and crushed, and a new
champion, Mr. James Potter, alertly moved around town gathering up
loose ends in the interest of the absent wife.
Wyman, beyond a cold comment that Hathorn’s “pace had been a killing
one,” never referred to the utter crash of their natural enemies, and
the social world was beginning to forget Mr. Frederick Hathorn, having
relegated him to the “Limbo” of failure, and marked him off as a “has
been.” The mad rush of New York life soon tramples the forgotten graves
to a dead level.
In the avoidance of any question as to his regular morning absence,
Vreeland knew that Wyman had been evidently posted by Judge Endicott as
to Vreeland’s sidereal duties under the orders of Mrs. Willoughby.
It was wormwood to the man who still aspired to read every hidden
secret of Elaine Willoughby’s life to know that Wyman and Endicott now
frequently spent the long evenings with the Queen of the Street at
the “Circassia,” and that vouchers, schedules and papers covered the
great table where only the three sat, well out of reach of Justine’s
eaves-dropping.
“Cool old file is Endicott,” growled Vreeland. “Cased in steel armor
of proof. Nor passion, pride, nor weakness ever leaves him open to the
enemy a moment.”
And then his habitual sneer returned. “Bah! He is too old for all of
man’s follies. It is only the young and ardent who burn with fond hopes
and bravely take the chances of life in the open.
“He has nothing left to gain, why should he disquiet himself? Man
delights him not, no—nor woman either.”
But Mrs. Elaine Willoughby had really overplayed the game of an assumed
carelessness as to Hathorn’s fate. Vreeland was not deceived.
He narrowly watched her when he ventured to call and report the
aftermath of the Hathorn failure. Her lack of interest in the downfall
of the two whom she had fought in society and on the Street was
entirely forced. She gloated over her victory.
Her despondency, however, was real, for a vague sorrow shone in her
eyes and the great rooms of the Circassia were no longer filled with
that glittering throng which she had drawn away from Alida Hathorn’s
Fifth Avenue drawing-rooms.
“Did she ever love Hathorn?” was Vreeland’s self-torturing question.
“And is her vengeance after all only Dead Sea fruit?” He secretly
resented the calm, equable kindness of his patroness, for there was no
answering glow within her splendid eyes, no quickening of her frozen
pulses at his approach.
“She has only used me as a human buffer, a switch to safely reach the
other track, and I have worked under the espionage of the adroit Mary
Kelly. I see her whole plan,” wrathfully decided Vreeland.
“To break up her whole secret into disjointed links. To play us off,
one against the other, and then perhaps to drop me, forever, as she
dropped Hathorn, if I am ever caught napping.
“She guards some momentous secret. Either of this hidden syndicate’s
inside methods, or else the dangerous past life which blackens her
present. How much of that did Hathorn know?
“Not enough to hurt her. But, I will rule her by fear yet, for love is
out of the game. Let me secretly tap her lines, and, then, _gare le
corbeau_!”
He had once timidly approached Mrs. Willoughby as to the
immediate-future programme of the uptown “special bureau.” His
patroness manifested but little interest and simply coldly said, “You
will have ample leisure for society and your own affairs. Remain there
silent, watchful, and always on duty, though.
“The reincorporation in New Jersey, the coming division into common
and preferred stock, and the court’s dubious actions may cause me
to act strongly in simulated attack or defense, at any moment. And
there’s always that veering Congress; its actions are inexplicably
swayed under flex or reflex of the public mind, private manipulation
or ‘advanced journalism.’” Vreeland chafed in his heart that there had
been as yet no _rapprochement_ between himself and Senator Alynton.
A slight cold disdain seemed to chill that magnate’s courtesy in all
their brief _rencontres_. “He likes me not!” was the schemer’s just
observation. And yet, he gravely held a uniform courtesy.
A special delivery letter at last awoke Vreeland from his reverie, as
he was furtively gazing at Miss Romaine Garland’s shapely head bowed
over her machine, and then the tube’s whistle announced from below a
call of “Mr. James Potter” on “the most important business.”
The letter lay unopened as Vreeland wonderingly advanced to meet his
unfrequent visitor.
It was easy to see that the “butterfly” of fashion was gravely
impressed. It was none of the Dickie Doubleday’s crumpled rose leaves
which had brought the pale-faced man to the luxurious sky parlors of
the “Elmleaf.” His merry face was soberly overshadowed.
With little formality, Jimmy Potter closed the door into the rooms
where the two women were engaged, and, not without a glance of impelled
admiration at the statuesque stenographer, broke into a confidence
which astounded Vreeland.
“Hear me out first, Vreeland,” he soberly said, “and then help me if
you can. I’m off on the steamer for Havre to-morrow. To join Hathorn’s
widow.”
Vreeland started, but Potter’s outstretched arm kept him in his chair.
“Poor Fred was drowned two days ago by the upsetting of a boat at
Cienfuegos. The fact is, the Cuban authorities were after him, and so,
he cleared out of Havana.”
“I’ve sent a good man down there to do all that may be done, in a
decent respect for his past. Mrs. Hathorn has just cabled for me. I
have had a long letter from her.
“Some damned traitor deliberately gave her the dead cross on the ‘Sugar
Deal.’ She was trying to get Fred out of the Street. And so, she
plunged on fifty thousand shares of Sugar on this lying tip, came out
short, and has to pay, as Hathorn shoved all their customers’ money in
to hold over his own huge, private gamble until the market broke down
to forty. It’s up to seventy-eight and there to stay. Now, she wishes
to make restitution to the men whom the firm robbed. And I have to help
her settle her own private losses.”
“Poor woman,” murmured Vreeland, with an agitation which did not escape
Potter. The little man was all broken up.
“See here, Vreeland!” cried Potter, “I have had a glimpse into a real
woman’s heart. This fatal quarrel with the Willoughby has wrecked two
lives. Hathorn believed Mrs. Willoughby to be invincible in the Street.
“He tried to follow her game. She is reported to have dealt in Sugar up
to several millions.
“Do you suppose that she laid a trap for Hathorn’s wife to fall into?
Who gave her the false tips? I hope that the author of this misery will
roast in hell.”
“I know nothing. I am not in speculative stocks,” musingly said
Vreeland.
“Someone may have taken advantage of the Hathorns and lured them on by
pretending to give them Mrs. Willoughby’s game. I am busied here now,
half the day, with my own private matters.”
“It was soul-murder, whoever did it,” said Potter. “Alida Hathorn
went in nobly to help and save her husband. To aid him, to square him
with the Street and his firm, and then to take him forever out of the
turmoil and convoy him over to Europe. She has loads of money, you
know. But, the Ring was too much for him.
“He plunged, too, on her tip, and then came the crash, his flight, and
now his untimely death. It’s all due to the one who lured Alida Hathorn
on to ruin her husband. It was a fiend’s work.” A silence reigned, a
gloomy acquiescence.
Vreeland was moodily regarding the falling snow through the darkened
panes when Jimmy Potter sighed and said: “Well, it’s good-by, old
fellow. I’ve got an expert with Wolfe going over the real honest debts.
“I shall stay over there, advise with Alida and see that the sufferers
get their money. For she has been a wifely sacrifice; she is
high-spirited and true, she outclassed Hathorn. Mrs. Willoughby set him
up, and then threw him down.
“His pride never got over her ruin of his firm’s reputation by drawing
all her business out.
“Of course, the society snakes who poisoned the young wife’s mind
brought on the social catastrophe. I would like to feel that Elaine
Willoughby did not betray that poor young woman. But I’ll square it all
by and by.”
“How?” eagerly demanded Vreeland. Potter was brave in a mad resolve.
The young millionaire paused, hat and umbrella in hand. “I have found a
business in life at last. One that suits me.
“If Alida Hathorn has not money enough to square all the honest claims,
_I have_. For a year and a day from Hathorn’s death, I shall marry
her, and then give her a woman’s decent happiness.
“It was a false ambition that pushed Hathorn into her circle. He was
only a good-looking upstart, and never worthy of her.
“So, you can see all comes around to the man who waits.
“Now, I count on your sense of manliness to protect the name of Fred
Hathorn’s widow, the woman who will be my wife, for, with all your
money, you would not be in New York to-day, as you are, at the top of
the ladder but for Hathorn.
“You stand in his shoes up at Lakemere, here in the Circassia, and you
of all men, should be considerate to his memory.” The scheming liar
bowed his head in a speechless agitation.
Vreeland escorted his visitor to the stair. “If I need any private tip,
I may use you,” said Potter. “I’ll be at Hotel Vendôme, Paris, till I
have made her Mrs. Jimmy Potter, if we live.”
With a last touch of his old lightness, the champion of the absent
Alida whispered, “That’s a young goddess you have captured.” Potter had
observed the Bona Dea.
Vreeland frowned gravely as he followed the furtive gesture.
“Miss Garland has entire charge of all the books and records of my
private estate,” he coldly said.
“I am a man of system and order. The other little woman is my private
telegraph operator. She is a part of our ‘business force.’” Vreeland
affected the careworn millionaire.
“Ah, you don’t mix up the two affairs. Very good, very good,”
complacently said Potter as he disappeared, leaving Vreeland startled.
He bore away fruitful memories of Vreeland’s downcast hesitation.
The hard-hearted schemer took a pull at the brandy bottle. “It was a
close shave,” he murmured.
“Alida Hathorn is game to the very last. She has not given him my name,
and now, as she will finally drift into this fortunate marriage, the
Lady of the Red Rose will be only a buried memory.
“I am safe, and he never will know. The lovely ‘Red Rose’ is only
another flower in _le Jardin Secret_.”
He realized, at last, that the daring imprudence of Alida Hathorn’s
visit was but a jealous wife’s device, at any risk, to break the lines
of her husband’s enemies.
“She got my secret far too easily,” he gloomily reflected, “and without
paying the price.
“I wonder if she was playing me as a lone fish,” he pondered—and then a
flash came to enlighten him.
“Could Elaine Willoughby fancy that the news of her plunging would leak
out and ruin them?
“By heaven! She may have crossed this gigantic trade by secret orders
to Endicott. Hathorn ruined, she may have no further use for me.
“And if the Lady of the Red Rose should ever speak I would be ruined,
even held at arms length as I am.”
He shuddered under the curse of the burning words of that last telegram.
“She believes me a liar and traitor to her, and I will never dare to
undeceive her.” He felt that he had missed the finest play of his life.
But the “special delivery” letter still stared him in the face. He
carelessly tore it open and then a smile wreathed his lips.
“To meet Senator Alynton, Senator Garston, and Miss Katharine
VanDyke Norreys at dinner.” He instantly wrote out and dispatched his
acceptance. A glow of joy lit up his anxious face.
“I must get Justine at work soon on my secret lines. I see it all.
These Senators are of the ‘Inner Guild,’ the true illuminati.
“Who the devil is this Garston—some Western fellow?”
A few moments’ reference gave him the news: “Senator-elect from one
of the newly knocked together Western States”—the “means to an end”
in balancing National elections. The trick of warring plutocrats and
democrats.
He paced the room in deep thought, after dispatching his reply. “The
battle will be on again soon. The Trust is reorganized and conveniently
removed to little Jersey. The courts have now done their worst, and the
small holders are all squeezed out.
“Now for a game of high ball. Yes, my lady, that’s your trick. A new
deal. And the beautiful Californian heiress is only a bright lay-figure.
“Your real hold on the Street is the secret chain linking these
statesmen, through you and Endicott, to the secret chiefs of the Sugar
Syndicate.
“I’ll get myself into your current, as a ‘transmitter,’ and you, Madame
Elaine, shall yet learn to bow and bend. The child, the secrets of this
dangerous partnership, the story of your past life, I can soon get it
all, bit by bit. And, then, marriage and ‘dominion over you.’ That’s my
game!”
There was an unpleasant menace lingering in the last words of the
departing Potter. Vreeland knew that should the generous-hearted
ex-banker, in time, marry Fred Hathorn’s widow, the few hundred
thousands lost in saving Hathorn’s personal honor would not in any way
impair their united estates. He lingered long on the subject. He feared
this new alliance.
“They might crush me, if they joined forces. The one danger is a
reconciliation with Mrs. Willoughby. I will see that this never occurs.”
And so, with a sense of defeat clinging to his past attempts, he
decided to use great care in approaching his proposed dupe, Miss
Romaine Garland.
For his patroness certainly was not wearing her heart upon her sleeve
now. Her private sorrows busied her more than the confidential intimacy
with her newest _protégé_.
“She could drop me, ruin me, or trap me as easily as she finished off
Hathorn,” he decided.
“And the hot-headed, daring young wife, desperate in her jealousy,
anxious to break Elaine Willoughby’s lines and guide her husband into
the heart of the Sugar forces, she had merely broken the _convenances_,
nothing more.
“For only a cur dare ever hint at the stolen visits. Club and coterie
would brand the man as a hound who dared to boast of such a desperate
confidence in a man’s honor.
“No. The Lady of the Red Rose, bright, daring and stormy-hearted like
many another _fin de siècle_ New York wife, was safe.”
Safe by all the laws of manhood and honor. And, in all the gay life he
had led, he had only met the easy abandon of high life.
The loosening of restraint of a democratic luxury. He well knew that
the Dickie Doubledays and the Tottie Thistledowns did not weigh in the
scale against a real flesh and blood womanhood. They were only bright,
lurid beacons, warning signals on the seas of life, stranded on the
reefs of human weakness, and with shoals of foolish virgins following
on in their daring footsteps.
When he lifted his head, the stroke of twelve brought Miss Romaine
Garland, with bowed head, before him, awaiting her daily dismissal.
He had never dared to use the busy hours from nine to twelve for any
covert approach upon the stately girl’s confidence. There, too, was the
clear-eyed Mary Kelly.
The rapturous verdict of Jimmy Potter was confirmed as he glanced at
the young goddess, her brown hair rippling from a pure Greek brow, her
dark eyes dreaming under their lashes, and her pale, proud face at
rest, with all the untroubled peace of maidenhood.
In her plain, dark dress, her sculptured form was deliciously
intimated. Her voice, sweet and low as the breath of forest winds,
awoke his hungering curiosity. It was _temps de relâche_.
Here was the very chance to begin to mold her to his will. To awake
her latent love of luxury, to lead her out step by step into the
confidential delights of wine and song, and to find out the shady
places where Love lurks, an archer unawares. Yes. He would begin to
mold this woman to his will.
Vreeland desired to let the loneliness of a great city aid him in
his easy approach. And to hurry slowly and be wise. He had noted the
friendly cordiality of the two young women. “If the new assistant would
only play into his hands, and help to outwit the pale spy.
“If she can throw this little spy off her guard—if I can get them both
to begin to enjoy themselves a little, and then drop into an easy,
hidden intimacy with Miss Romaine, then my patroness’ little spy game
here will be useless.
“For, if that woman learned to love a man, she would go through fire
and water for him.”
The throbbing of his heart made his voice tremble, and the veiled
purpose of his crafty soul crept into his eyes, though they only rested
on her superbly molded arms and slender, delicate hands, when he
carelessly said: “If you would kindly leave me your private address,
Miss Garland, I might need it. There may be some extra call of duty. I
might wish to communicate with you.”
There was a slight flush upon her cheek as the delicate lips slowly
parted.
“I live at some distance, Mr. Vreeland, with private friends, and it
would be impossible for me to render you any other services than as
arranged. I have no one to escort me, and I never receive visitors.”
The voice was as cold as the glacier’s rills.
Her beauty shone out as pure as an Easter lily, when she simply said:
“Miss Kelly will, however, send any communication you might have to
make. I am an absolute stranger in New York. The references which I
gave Miss Marble are from old friends in Buffalo. I can, however, at
all times, stay as late as Miss Kelly does, on any occasion when you
may have overwork.”
The young Diana’s pure brow was loftily brave in its innocence.
Vreeland’s eyes hungrily followed her as she moved quietly away in
answer to his grave bow of dismissal.
“More time. More time,” he murmured. “If I could find some way to gain
her personal confidence. Flowers, books, little attentions, a stray set
of theatre or opera tickets. For she is, after all, only a woman. Fit
to reign, royal in youth, and serving without stooping.
“I must see Miss Marble. The ice once broken, perhaps—”
He mused long upon an ingenious plan to “brighten the life” of the
woman he would use as a tool. “Yes, it can be done, easily, through the
Marble.” And he knew that veteran traitress would aid him for money.
The week before the day of Mrs. Willoughby’s ceremonial dinner was
wasted by Vreeland in some amateur detective work. Miss Justine Duprez
easily diagnosed the growing friendship of the two young girls.
For Miss Garland’s sweet, tender face was already familiar in the
little household where Mary Kelly’s mother watched and wondered from
what fairyland this bright-faced nymph had descended.
A stout school lad of sixteen was an efficient home escort for the
young neophyte in New York, and pride filled the eyes of Mary Kelly’s
brother.
Vreeland felt all the growing charm of the steadfast girl’s influence,
her cultured manners, her dainty refinement and the rare delicacy of
her language and taste. He valued her as of superior clay.
“Not of common stock,” he murmured as he deftly trod along her path,
with a veiled impatience. He was deep now in the last details of
a plan which busied Justine Duprez, for the coming of the second
Senator, the open splendors of the grand dinner party as elaborated by
Justine warned him that if he would cut the secret channels so vital
to his success, he must bring the janitor and postal carriers of the
“Circassia” under control.
Justine, checking his headlong impatience, only smiled her velvety
smile and whispered, “Give me some money to hoodwink them a little.
Wait only for a few days, and trust to me. Have I ever failed you?”
When the “rising and successful man,” Mr. Harold Vreeland, dressed
himself with unusual distinction for Mrs. Willoughby’s regal dinner
party of twenty, there was all the happiness of a new-born hope in his
heart. For he was nearly ready now “to move on the enemy’s works.”
That experienced “broker in young womanly talent,” Miss Marble, had
earned herself a pretty diamond lace pin, and “an authorization to
proceed,” by her ingenious plan of drawing out “Miss Romaine Garland.”
The experienced lady had smiled at all his first crude attempts.
“You were too abrupt. There is the awkward fact before her eyes always,
that you are her employer. She acts on the mere defensive.
“The proprieties you surely know. Now, you are far too young and
charming as a man,” she blushingly said, “to be a safe benefactor for
this glowing-hearted girl with her sweet, tender eyes.
“She is a rare beauty and frankly good, and untinged as yet with the
fires of Babylon. I have some showy friends of some influence, and, as
she trusts me blindly, I will ‘have warm-hearted civilities’ extended
to her.
“You will have her home address now, in return for my pretty pin. Never
go there. You would ruin all.
“But, sir, you shall be drawn in as a guest to our little friendly
coteries. She must be led into our allied camp gradually.
“You, by hazard, will appear as an old intimate, here and there, when
her shyness is worn off and, on that friendly and neutral ground,
you can soon warm the marble into life.” The Marble had a crafty and
glowing heart.
The sly woman smiled. “No lonely young woman can resist long-continued
and unobtrusive kindness. It always disarms. Let me have the means
to lead her along into little pleasures. Once the taste of the easy
evening outing life comes upon her, then, bit by bit, she will be as
wax in my hands. You can meet her, by chance, at the theatres or operas
when out with me. I will have a little supper given at some friend’s
home. We can drop off the friends one by one. I cling to her.
“You can then drop me off, when we are sure that the taste of pleasure
is gently awakened, and you are free to then show her all your generous
liberality. Take her home to your daily life, then once that the
confidential relation is established—” Vreeland’s eyes gleamed in a
coming triumph. The way shone out, “straight and sweet,” before him.
“Miss Joanna, you are a good fairy, and a keen-witted genius. I will
give you _carte blanche_ to lead her out along the rosy path, step by
step, and a path that leads always toward me.”
Mr. Harold Vreeland moved on serenely and laid his pitfalls for
the pure young girl, whom chance had thrown in his way, with no
compunction. In the blighted career of his own dishonored father, he
had only despised the weaknesses which led to failure.
He had seen the downfall of Hathorn without a throb of sympathy and
he resented the frank, honest predilection which was now leading the
warm-hearted Potter to screen Alida Hathorn from a mob of cold-hearted
“woman eaters” in honorable marriage.
Mean at heart, he even doubted the past life of the woman who had
lifted him up to luxury. He hated her now only that his charms of
person and manner had not brought her to his feet, a willing dupe.
“She seemed to be impressed at first,” he mused. “But the shock of
Hathorn’s cold abandonment in his little tiger cat wife’s jealous
frenzy seems to have turned her against man, for a time.
“But, let me only get a hold on her. I do not care to be the star actor
in a modern ‘Romance of a Poor Young Man.’ She shall not shake me off.”
He plotted deliberately against her peace—his generous benefactress.
“First, the tapping of the private lines. Then, to mold Romaine Garland
to my will. If she does not yield to Joanna Marble’s smooth ways, then
out into the streets of New York.
“There are others, more complaisant; but to awaken those dark eyes to
pleasure’s glow. To have them quicken at my coming.”
It was with these “undreamed dreams” haunting him that Harold Vreeland
arrived, in sedate splendor, at the “Circassia,” where “the feast was
set” for Senator Alynton and that Western wonder of recent occultation,
Senator-elect James Garston.
In the kaleidoscopic splendors of the drawing-room, where manly
eyes gleamed upon the beauties of splendid womanhood, among the
fair daughters of Eve he missed that brilliant blonde heiress, Miss
Katharine VanDyke Norreys. A tap from Mrs. Volney McMorris’ fan
recalled him.
“I know that you are looking for her,” whispered the radiant duenna.
“Katharine is a sort of ward of Senator Garston. He is her trustee.
They all come together. I must have a word with you about poor—”
The entrance of Mrs. Elaine Willoughby brought the splendid circle
around her, there where gleaming lights and the breath of matchless
flowers, where diamonds and brightest eyes, where ivory bosoms and
shapely silver shoulders were mingling charms of a modern Paradise of
throbbing, hungry hearts.
Doctor Alberg’s gloved hand was resting in Vreeland’s palm—he was
whispering, “You and I and Justine must watch”—when the calm,
passionless face of Senator Alynton, with Miss Katharine Norreys on his
arm, appeared.
There was a hum of astonishment, of frank self-surrender to the
Occidental beauty’s charms as Alynton gravely presented a tall, stately
stranger, whose slightly silvered hair and chevalieresque bearing
recalled the “Silver King.”
“My friend, Senator James Garston,” began Alynton, but there was
a crowd of a dozen men eagerly stretching willing arms, as Elaine
Willoughby’s face contracted in a spasm of pain, and she fell senseless
into Doctor Alberg’s firm grasp. “Only the old heart trouble. In five
minutes madame will be herself,” suavely announced the doctor. “Perhaps
a bit too tightly laced,” he whispered to Mrs. McMorris.
It was a stately function, the dinner, which proceeded in a solemn
splendor.
Senator James Garston was gravely attentive at the hostess’ left, and
only Vreeland knew when the lights were low that Garston had whispered,
“I must see you, at once.”
And with pale lips Elaine Willoughby had murmured, “At Lakemere, and
to-morrow.”
Justine had gained her long-needed clue.
CHAPTER X.
AN INTERVIEW AT LAKEMERE—SOME INGENIOUS MECHANISM.—“WHOSE PICTURE
IS THAT?”
Harold Vreeland was seated in a blaze of light, in his own rooms at
four in the morning, anxiously awaiting a night visit from one who
might unravel the whole mystery while the lonely Elaine Willoughby lay
helpless in her secluded rooms, feebly struggling toward a return of
her self-control.
“What new devil’s jugglery is this?” muttered Vreeland, pausing in
his wolf stride. He carefully recalled every action of the newly-made
Senator and yet he was baffled at every turn. “Was the newcomer an
agent of a morose husband, an old lover, or an unwelcome apparition
from the clouded past?” He was baffled.
For, he began to realize how baseless were his meaner suspicions of the
past. There had been no unworthy love between Elaine and Hathorn. The
devil’s poison of slander alone had excited Alida’s burning jealousy.
She herself had only sought “a dead straight point” in the daring visit
to his rooms. Elaine’s record was clear so far. “Was it only an old
sorrow?” He pondered long. Even the pale-faced, proud girl, whom he
would trap, so far had hugged her honest poverty to a stainless bosom.
“I’ve been dead wrong on Alynton’s game all along. There’s neither an
old love, nor a new intrigue, there,” he growled. “Justine has clearly
proved that. Their union is only to be termed, ‘strictly business.’
“And the Senator’s frank, brotherly concern at Elaine’s sudden
illness went no farther than Colonel Barton Grahame’s sympathy, Judge
Endicott’s alarm, or my own undisguised interest. Here is a new
jack-in-the-box. I must watch Senator Garston.”
It had been a galling mortification to Vreeland in the past, that
faintly disguised disdain of Senator David Alynton, who had always
practically ignored him.
But, this new statesman, sturdy James Garston, had brought to their
meeting an unfeigned western _bonhomie_.
The newcomer had sought him out eagerly. He had drawn the younger man
aside, in a lull of the entertainment.
“We must meet and talk over western matters; we have the world’s coming
treasury out there,” largely remarked the new Senator-elect.
“I am housed at the Plaza, to be near Miss Norreys, who is at the
Savoy. I shall stay here a few days, and, we will have a luncheon
together.”
In fact the acute Mrs. Volney McMorris had very deftly arranged it, for
she was eager to matronize the resplendent Miss Norreys, to bask in the
smile of this rising financial sun, and to have her own private chat
with the young Fortunatus about the vanished Lady of the Red Rose. Her
prompt social fastening upon Mrs. Willoughby, was only a grim proof
that “the one who goes is happier than the one that’s left behind.”
The new Senator’s round bullet-head, his curved beak-like nose, his
uncertain gray eye and unsmiling lips marked him as a man of power.
He bore in every movement the badge of hard-won success.
His fifty-one years had marked him lightly, and, lawyer, mine owner,
and capitalist, he was riding into the Senate on a chariot with golden
wheels. It is the West that holds now the American sceptre.
Vreeland had watched Garston keenly at the dinner and noted his poised
manner, his brilliant flashes of silence, and the grave, undisturbed
courtesy of his demeanor toward the marble-faced hostess. “A man of a
level head,” was Vreeland’s verdict. And he tried to read the secret of
Garston’s imploring glances.
There had been no lingering cloud over the table, and no shade of
Banquo was evoked to chill the later merriment. Love, veiled and
unveiled, deftly footed it, among the revelers, and, only Doctor
Alberg’s steady eyes, anxiously fixed upon his “star” patient, proved
that but one, besides Vreeland, realized the desperate battle against
Time which Elaine Willoughby was fighting out to the last. The egoistic
revelers imagined their hostess’ seizure to be a mere passing weakness.
They all knew the strain of the exhausting New York season.
“Charming woman, our hostess,” frankly remarked Senator Garston to
Vreeland. “Type all unknown to our modest Marthas of the Occident.
Here in America, our women will soon be crowned queens, if I may trust
to the ‘tiara’ bearing stories of the society journals.” And a casual
remark from Vreeland brought out the admission that Senator Garston had
never before met the hostess. “It was to my colleague, Alynton, that I
owe the honor of this presentation,” said the newly-made toga wearer.
“And, as Mrs. Willoughby has been so kind to my ward, Miss Norreys, in
this new acquaintance, both pleasure and duty join hands.”
But, the startled Vreeland, pacing his silent room had several times
exclaimed, in his lonely rounds while waiting for Alberg, “James
Garston, you are a cool-headed, thorough-paced liar! I will trace you
back, my occidental friend, only to find ‘the wires crossed,’ somewhere
in the past, and, from you, I will yet wrench the secret of Elaine
Willoughby’s early life. Her child! Yes,” he cried, “It might well be.”
He was thrilling in every fibre, for, in the dressing room, Justine had
stolen to his side whispering:
“Doctor Alberg has sent for a trained nurse to help me watch with her
to-night. Be on your guard.
“When this new Senator had made his adieu, I was hidden behind the
curtain in the long hall. I saw him neatly drop his glove, as if by
accident. Alynton and that tall golden-haired girl were waiting outside
as he stole back.” The French woman fairly hissed, “He is the man to
fear. I am sure they are old lovers. For, he caught her by both hands
and fairly devoured her with his eyes.
“‘To-morrow, alone, at Lakemere,’ she said. _Voilà!_ Milady. Just a
woman, like the rest of us.”
“Justine, that paper, the one in her corset. A thousand dollars for a
copy of it.”
“I will get it to-night!” the velvet-eyed spy cried.
“Go now. You will hear from me soon. Don’t leave your room for
a moment, and, _gare la_ Kelly. She reports daily on you to our
full-blown _ingenue_. Whatever turns up, you will surely hear from me.
I’ll earn your money yet.”
It was five o’clock when the haggard German physician crawled up
Vreeland’s stair. He was worn and exhausted.
“I’ve had a night of it,” he savagely cried, “give me a glass of real
brandy. No slops. That poor devil of a woman has had fainting fits one
after the other. I’ve now got Martha Wilmot, my only really reliable
nurse, watching her. The devil of it is, Madame will go up to Lakemere
at ten o’clock, and she vows she will, alone. The house there is shut
up. It is not even properly warmed. She will come back, and have a
relapse, but what can I do. She has an iron will.”
The angry Teuton drank a second dram and then relapsed into a sullen
silence.
“Alberg, my boy, you are a good doctor, but, you don’t know women, only
your blue-eyed, clumsy frauleins, over there. This American woman is
made of fire and flame. Tell me, what sort of a person is your nurse,
Wilmot?”
“She’s a good one—an ‘out and outer.’ She goes home to England next
week. She has some ideas of her own to work out over there.”
“Tell that smart woman to slip down here and see me before our patient
comes back. I’ll be here from four to seven to-day. And, mind that you
put her ‘dead on’ to me, as the holder of a hundred pound note for her.”
“Good,” grunted Alberg.
“And, now, my son of Galen, what was it that upset Mrs. Willoughby?”
Vreeland was eagerly studying the German’s face.
“The old thing. She has raved all night about her child. I only brought
her out of the attack with the strongest anti-spasmodics that man dare
to use, short of clear cold murder. It’s a terrible risk,” sighed
Alberg.
When Doctor Hugo Alberg left the Elmleaf, he was under the spell of his
lying coadjutor, and richer by a few hundred dollars. “This fellow
must never even lift the veil of the Temple,” muttered Vreeland. “Only
trust to Justine. Only Justine,” he cried, as he threw himself down to
sleep, after ordering the wondering Bagley to send Miss Kelly home on
her arrival, and also that dark-eyed enigma, Miss Garland. He needed
solitude.
“I am ill, and, must have a long sleep. You can take a day off
yourself. Clear out for the day and don’t let me hear a single footfall
about my rooms,” were the staccato injunctions of the excited schemer.
“If that nurse only comes,” he murmured, as he closed his weary eyes.
It was eleven o’clock when a light step echoed in Vreeland’s hall,
and the swishing sound of Justine Duprez’s robe made the banker leap
to his door. The French girl had her will at last. She stood amid the
splendors of Vreeland’s veiled Paradise—her lover’s home.
She cried out in glee, “Thank God! She is out of the way. I came here
from the train. She absolutely forbade me to go with her. I have had
the janitor’s boy watching all the trains. This Senator Garston went up
the road an hour ago. The smart boy helped us last night in the cloak
rooms, and, so, they are off alone together, up there, to-day.”
Vreeland’s eyes blazed in a mighty triumph. “To-night, you must help
me, Justine,” cried the eager schemer.
“See here. I already have stolen what you want,” cried Justine. “You
said it was worth a thousand dollars. I copied even every mark on
the hidden papers, and, I went over it a dozen times, while the new
nurse was with her. Madame was insensible, and, I had time to work in
safety. What will you give me, now?”
She was not listened too, for with a ferocious joy, Vreeland leaped up,
crying, “My God! I have her now. They are all in the hollow of my hand.”
He had glanced over the list of names written there, and a row of
figures with some characters added, which seemed to glow before him in
living flame.
He drew the Frenchwoman to his side, and there dashed off a check to
his own order and carefully indorsed it.
“There’s your money, you jewel,” he gasped. “Listen. To-night, when
she comes back, or to-morrow night, if she is again under the nurse’s
watch, you must steal that envelope again. I will be waiting outside
the Circassia, and stay all of both nights till I get the original
paper that you copied. Put a simple sheet of blank paper back in the
envelope and close it up. Sew it up again in the same place in her
corset.
“We will leave that to be stolen by the nurse, Martha Wilmot. She will
know what to do with it.
“She clears out of here for Europe in a few days. She will keep well
out of Mrs. Willoughby’s way. And, so the Madame will think that she
has been robbed by our sly, English friend. I will pay the nurse well
and help her away. But that _original paper_ must come to me.
“Be sure to leave Mrs. Willoughby’s garments where the nurse could
easily reach them—no one shall suspect you. I’ll hold you safe—it is
our own secret. Alberg will, of course, raise a devil of a row about
the nurse clearing out, and robbing him, but only after she is gone.”
“And my mistress. _Mon Dieu!_ But, how I fear her!” faltered the
trembling Justine.
“Nonsense. The woman comes down here to-day. She will get her orders
from me. You can put this blank envelope with its paper filling back in
the corset, so that Mrs. Willoughby will feel that something is there.
And, now, about tapping her telephone and telegraph wires.”
Justine had finished a glass of wine when she sprang to her feet.
“To-day is the day of days. The janitor, August Helms, is all ready to
tie on the wires to tap her telegraph and telephone. Come up to the
Circassia at noon. I will take you into his room by the back way. He
has arranged all with Mulholland, one of the two letter-carriers, to
always delay Mrs. Willoughby’s mail by one delivery. Mulholland can
hold them all for himself to handle. And, Helms, in his room, will then
open and copy any we need. He is a German adept in letter opening.”
“You are a genius, Justine,” cried Vreeland. “You can bring Helms down
to your own room in South Fifth Avenue and there you and I together can
square up with him. We must be two to his one. This is the very day
of days while she is fondly lingering at Lakemere with her own oldest
lover.
“And now, my girl, take a good look around my den and then get out of
here. It is too dangerous for us.
“For, you must never come here again. The janitor has sharp eyes.”
“Yes, and, the new ‘Mees Gairland’ is many evenings now, with that
little Kelly devil. Look out for them both. You can only trust me,”
nodded Justine, as she fled away, whispering, “I will come down into
the court of the Circassia and meet you, in the entrance, as if by
hazard at noon precisely. All you have to do is to silently follow me.
I will have that paper by midnight if I live and the nurse shall have
the blame.”
The rooms echoed to the laughter of hell as Vreeland’s fiery devil
whispered, “Victory!” He had at last solved the mystery of a “business
syndicate” which made him tremble as he feared its name might escape
his lips. The copied paper gave a list of names whose publication would
shake a nation’s counsels, and Garston’s name was there.
So, tiger-like and triumphant, he waited for the hour to go and arrange
for his secret stealing of his dupe’s messages.
And, far away, at lonely Lakemere, where the trees now gleamed like
ghastly silver skeletons of summer’s glories, the winds wailed around
the silent mansion where Elaine Willoughby stood face to face with the
man who had come out of her dead past, an apparition as grim and awful
to her as the rising of the sheeted dead.
It was the struggle to the death of two proud and world-hardened
hearts. The secret of her blighted youth was face to face with her now.
And, the shadow of a crime hung menacingly over James Garston, the toga
wearer. A statesman of a clouded past—a past known only to the defiant
woman facing him on her own battle-ground.
“I find you here under a stolen name, facing the world, as a living
lie.” The woman’s scornful lips had lashed into his quivering
heart. Garston, bold-brave, reckless now with a mad tide of desire
sweeping over his reawakened heart, had seized her hands. He cried,
passionately: “And, I find my lost wife, the mother of our child,
here, a lovely, and a glowing truth.”
When he would have drawn her to him, she flung him off and dropped,
a shaken Niöbe, into a chair, with her stormy tears raining over her
beautiful, pallid face. That single word, “child,” had disarmed her
rising anger. For, she was facing one who knew all of the sealed past.
“My child, my child,” she sobbed.
But, James Garston was on his knees before her now.
“_Our child_—Margaret! It can all be made right, now. Trust to me. Let
me take you openly to my heart. Be my wife once more. Be a world’s
queen. I will make you happy.”
Bold as he was, he shuddered, as she sprang to her feet. “You hound!”
she bitterly cried, and then slowly turned, and walked unsteadily
to the door. He had found a way to wring her heart at last, but her
courage had returned. The wrongs of her youth burned in her bosom again.
“Hear me. You must! You shall!” he pleaded, seizing her in his strong
arms. “I knew not even the horn book of my own nature when we married
as young fools marry.” She had torn herself away from him, and stood at
bay with an unutterable loathing hardening upon her face. “I am rich,
now, a Senator to be, and the friend of your friends.
“You dare not openly defy me. For, I can publicly claim you as mine. I
demand to see our child. I offer you myself—the matured man—a leader of
men. I offer you a secured, honored place in Washington life. And, you
need me, for I can throw down your house of cards. When Alynton told me
of the wonder-worker, the Queen of the Street, the Lady of Lakemere, I
was merely interested. But, when I saw you, last night, my heart leaped
up. For mine you were, mine you are—mine you shall be.”
The strong man counted upon the physical subjection of the woman once
reduced to be his loving vassal—the girl wife who had lain in his arms.
And, master of her destiny once, he would now bend her to his will
again.
His eyes were burning, his breath came quickly, and he awaited the
physical revulsion of a weakened womanhood.
“There is always the tie that binds—the child—and, she belongs by
Nature’s bond to me.”
But, the man who coarsely counted upon “a previous condition of
servitude” as establishing a valid claim upon the Lady of Lakemere,
shivered under the cold scorn of her words, for the wife of his youth
seated herself, and, gazing into his eyes with an unutterable contempt,
read the death warrant of his hopes.
“Let me cast up our accounts, here, now, in my home, Arnold Cranstoun,
on this winter day, in a solitude on which you shall never intrude
again save when I call upon you.
“The dead past is buried. Let it rest. Dare not to cry _Resurgam_! I
dismiss all your sneers as to Alynton, and, I fear not your circle. You
are as yet, but a clumsy neophyte there.
“Know, once for all, that your friends are in my power, but they trust
to me, and, I am more than worthy of their confidence.
“For another circle of men of boundless power also trust me—men who
would not trust them, save through me, and, men who would resistlessly
crush you at my bidding.
“I speak now for the woman who is dead.
“Margaret Cranstoun, the woman heart slain by your cowardice, the
loving and tender girl-wife. Look back nineteen long years to see
yourself the trusted bank-cashier, a rising man of thirty-two.
“I was then your slave, your loving slave, a wearer of self-forced
heart shackles. I, the girl of seventeen, believed you to be my lover
husband—a man among men.”
Senator James Garston’s head was bowed in his hands, as the accusing
voice rang out. He heard the knell of his last hopes.
“A year later, when you basely fled, leaving me, the mother of your two
months’ old helpless girl to face the employers whom you had robbed in
your hidden speculations, then, only then, I learned of your double
life in New York. I knew that I was the innocent hostage of purity and
honor. The screen of your dearest vices.”
Garston groaned as the voice rose high in its scorn and Elaine
Willoughby stood before him, with outstretched arm, an angel with a
flaming sword, at the shut gates of his Lost Paradise.
“Where you fled to I knew not—I cared not, for, with young blood and a
loving heart, I might even have shared the fate of a bold sinner.
“But a sneaking coward must learn that woman’s heart condones not
poltrooning nor meanness!
“You would now hold the dead past over my head—trumpet to the world
your own story!” she cried. “I can easily confirm it. I have kept all
your letters—the story of your crime, the papers and vouchers which
were found in your New York room.
“Your letters of egoistic love, your later whining apologies from your
unknown Western haunt. And armed with these, _I_ could chase James
Garston from the Senate.”
The suffering man sprang up. “Not so. I have a right to my name. I
legally changed it years ago. The bank is long years out of existence;
there is also the limitation of the past years. No one would believe
you.”
His voice was broken with helpless tears now.
“Look at me! look at me!” the splendid woman proudly cried. “Dare any
man say that my life has been a lie? Hear my story.
“Starvation, cold charity or the ignominy of helpless dependence was
all you left me. I put our babe away. I went out a toiler into the
world. As a school teacher I drifted away to the far West, and only
changed my name. I left our home to avoid the honest love of good men
who would have married me for pity’s sake. For men were good to the
shamed widowed Margaret Cranstoun.
“My clean hands were still linked by law to the unpunished fugitive
felon. _I am free now_, and I know that you never would dare to speak.
I know your coward soul. A judicial decree that you are dead can be
easily had; your eighteen years of absence makes that my legal right.
Widow of the heart, I will be a widow by law. But your coward silence
will continue.
“Where did I gain wealth? I see the question in your eyes. I became a
school teacher at Leadville. A few acres of ground and a cottage were
the first fruits of my savings.
“The kindly mountain gnomes worked for me, with fairy friendship.
“There was a million in carbonates under those rocky slopes where I
tempted the hardy flower to grow.
“Young yet—_beautiful then_—I became the ardent chase of men in
marriage. My gold gilded my lonely life. Many wished to share it.
“I was made sadly wise, and I reaped my harvest of sorrows. Five years
in Europe made me a woman of the world—an accomplished world wanderer.
I have learned in these lonely years the delicious power of wealth.
“I followed your secret example. I legally changed my name to Elaine
Willoughby. And my honest title is clearer than yours.
“I have an able lawyer to defend my rights, in whom you would find an
implacable foe.”
She paused and spoke the final doom of his hopes.
“Had you come to me, red-handed, but loving, I might have forgiven you,
followed you—loved you even in your crime—and suffered all to shield
the one beloved head. _I did love you once with my whole soul._”
There was the sound of choking sobs, and in an instant, Garston was on
his knees before her. The silence was broken by her faltering accents.
“But now, freed by Nature’s reincarnation, loyal even yet to a dead
past, I exult in the unchallenged ownership of my mind, body and soul.
You would take to your bosom the woman you still find fair, rich,
powerful and respected. _Never! Nature revolts!_
“For the starving outcast of the streets who sells herself for bread
to the first chance comer were white as snow compared to the woman who
would again sink to your level.
“Arnold Cranstoun, any man in the world but you may look on me with
longing eyes.
“_Between us there is the gulf of your eternal shame!_ Now, _leave
me_. I fear you not! Let all else go on as fate ordains.
“Your silence will be assured, for fear will seal your lips. Let there
be neither approach nor avoidance—simply the oblivion of the absolute
divorce of all laws, God’s, Nature’s, and man’s.
“Go now! If you ever seek to cross my path, beware! You may haunt the
peopled solitudes around me and meet me as a chance acquaintance.
“Your ‘society drill’ will hold you in your place in the poor parade of
this superficial life.”
She dropped her eyes, and her impassioned voice echoed sadly on his
ears. He was defeated, and an agony rent his heart.
“Let me do something for you, Margaret,” he pleaded.
“I am above your power to aid,” the proud woman replied.
“Let me atone,” he begged.
“Dead beyond awakening is my heart, and you know it. Do not now add a
hideous insult to Nature to your cowardly abandonment of the past.”
The dull, level coldness of her voice proved to him that she bore a
frozen heart, one never to awaken at his touch. He cast himself down
before her in a last appeal.
And then, on his knees before the woman whom he had sworn to cherish
“till death do us part,” the strong man pleaded for the child whom fate
had robbed from the clinging arms of its mother. Margaret Cranstoun
sobbed:
“_The child!_ Oh, my God! _Never!_ Name not her name. Me, your victim
or your sacrifice. Her name shall never cross your lips. Wherever God’s
mercy takes that innocent one, she shall live and die fatherless—save
for Him above. I swear it, on the memory of a mother’s natal anguish.
And _now_, Senator James Garston,—”
The stately woman stood before him with the menace of a life in her
eyes.
“_This is the end of all!_ Go! You are safe from my vengeance now. I
care not how you have dragged yourself up on Fortune’s wheel.
“Go! And if you ever break the sorrow-shaded stillness of my life,
then, may God help you. For I will strike you down for the sake of that
same fatherless child.”
A black storm of suddenly aroused jealousy swept over Garston’s face.
“Your handsome lover Vreeland shall be my prey, my tool, my confidant.
I will creep into your heart through your own pleasant vice. And, by
God! _He shall find out the girl for me._”
When James Garston’s passion-blinded eyes cleared, he was standing
there alone, and a sudden fear smote upon him.
The ghastly silence of the splendid deserted halls weighed upon him.
He staggered out into the blinding snows, now falling, and crossed the
park to where a sleigh waited at the garden gate.
He was half mad, as he wandered away under the trees, and he hurled
away his revolver lest he should be tempted to die there before her
windows.
“I have lost a woman upon whose breast a king’s head might proudly
rest,” he said to that ghost of his dead self which rose up to
mock the man of mark, the millionaire. “And—_she loved me once_.
Fool—_fool_—and—_blind fool!_” he muttered.
A mad resolve thrilled him now.
“The child! By God! _she would hide her. The world is not wide enough._
There’s my money—and this young fellow Vreeland. I have a lure for him.”
His busy brain thrilled with plots of the one revenge left to him. “I
will steal away both child and lover!” he swore.
Senator Garston’s face was sternly composed that night as he indited
his invitation to the rising young banker to join him at the Plaza.
“Katie Norreys can soon twist him around her slim, white fingers—he
is young and rash,” the cold-hearted millionaire mused. “I am safe in
Margaret’s silence. My money will talk. My record is safe. I have made
my calling and election sure. I’ll get Vreeland into the fair Katie’s
hands.
“A little money will help. He shall be turned away from Margaret. Once
that I have the girl, then Margaret will surely soften—for that child’s
sake. _By God! I’ll buy the girl’s heart!_ I have money enough, and
I’ll outbid even Mrs. Elaine Willoughby.”
The Senator-elect felt a new glow in his heart, the ardor of a
wolf-like chase, an untiring chase, for love, passion, and vengeance
carried him on.
“I’ll live to laugh at her heroics yet,” he cried, “for I will bring
her into camp. _I am not accustomed to fail._” He was resolute now.
The lights were gleaming golden in the Circassia when a pale-faced
woman crept back to the splendors of the pearl boudoir.
No one had marked Senator James Garston’s visit to Lakemere, and the
two caretakers—man and wife—marveled at their mistress’ agitation when
she bade them escort her back to New York City. The gardener summoned
to watch over the lonely mansion grumbled: “I never saw her look like
that.” For the brave woman was now “paying the price.” It was the
reflex swing of the pendulum of Life.
Could the three humble servitors have heard the accusing cry of Elaine
Willoughby’s heart they would have known the anguish of a stricken
woman’s arraignment of Providence.
“And he—oh, my God! _He prospers_, while my child is taken from me! Is
this the price of my mother’s love, my empty heart, my vacant home, my
death in life!”
It seemed as if God had spared the wrongdoer to smite her quivering
mother heart.
Dr. Hugo Alberg and the stolid-faced Martha Wilmot were busily
whispering in a corner of Mrs. Willoughby’s sick room that night long
after midnight had sounded on the frosty air.
For, relaxed and broken by the enforced bravery of her struggle with
the father of her lost child, the Lady of Lakemere had crept, bruised
and wounded in soul, back to die or live, she cared not, in the peopled
wilderness of the two million souls who envied her the lonely luxuries
of her life.
“She has had one dose,” whispered Alberg. “She is dead safe to sleep
till three o’clock. Give her this chloral carefully then. Get your work
done as soon as you can, and at eight o’clock your expected telegram
will call you away. The French woman will watch till the new nurse
comes. You have seen young Vreeland?”
The Doctor’s eyes glowed like live coals.
“Yes,” she whispered. “_It’s all right_,” and her fingers tightly
closed on the vial. “I am to meet him at the ferry. _The boat sails at
eleven._ It will be all right.”
Dr. Alberg passed out of the sick-room, and Justine Duprez followed him
down the stair.
“You have left all where she can do the work?” whispered the miserly
German, who already had the price of his treason in his pocket.
“Yes,” murmured Justine. “I’ll tell you all when we meet down there.”
The hoodwinked physician went out into the night, whispering: “I’ll be
here at seven, on the watch.”
It was but half an hour later that a man seated in August Helms’
darkened basement room opened his arms as Justine Duprez glided in.
“She is sleeping like a log,” murmured the maid. “_Here is what you
want._ The nurse will do her part later, and be sure that she clears
out at once. I’ll keep the Doctor with me here till noon. She will get
her ‘sudden telegram;’ he will be here on duty; while he is busied with
the new nurse Martha will go and rob the Doctor’s office and rooms, and
be soon on the sea. Then we are all covered.”
The schemer’s eyes gleamed as he pocketed the paper which made his
patroness an involuntary traitor to her dangerous trust. Vreeland
breathed in a happy triumph.
“You must not leave your rooms to-morrow. Keep in sight of the Kelly
girl,” warned the Frenchwoman. “_Now I will steal away._”
There were words murmured which bound the two wretches to each other,
and they laughed as they pointed to the janitor’s new telegraphic
instrument and telephone.
“A great convenience to the patrons of the Circassia,” laughed
Vreeland. He alone knew how deftly the crafty August Helms had seized
upon Mrs. Willoughby’s absence of the day to effect the joining
of the skilfully hidden wires tapping the lines which led to the
Hanover Bank building and joined Judge Endicott’s private office to
Mrs. Willoughby’s pearl boudoir.
“When I have the extra instrument in my own room,” he exulted, “then if
Miss Romaine Garland is not approachable I will soon find another more
malleable.
“But the secret firm of Endicott & Willoughby will talk into my ear
when they think that the whole world is theirs. _It’s a royal plan_,”
he mused.
Justine’s gliding step had died away when Harold Vreeland crept out
like a guilty thief.
“Where shall I hide this original,” he muttered, as he disappeared in
the darkness. “_I must find a place in my rooms. I cannot carry it
about me._”
When he had regained the Elmleaf he dared hardly breathe as he
carefully examined the original document which tied up the fate of the
Sugar Syndicate with that of men whose very names he feared to utter.
“She is in my power at last. Her ruin is in my hands.
“And now to bring her into my arms to be my fond tool and willing
slave.”
There was no “stock plunging” for two long weeks, as the illness of
Mrs. Willoughby dragged on, and Martha Wilmot was well across the seas
before the police of New York City had ceased to blunder around after
the ungrateful nurse who had seemingly robbed her benefactor’s office
and then decamped.
Mr. Harold Vreeland was astounded at the golden sunshine of Senator
James Garston’s favors which followed on that luncheon at the Plaza
Hotel which had made him a sworn knight in the rosy chains of Miss
Katharine VanDyke Norreys.
There was little to do, for the market was quiescent.
Miss Mary Kelly’s desk, too, was vacant, for she lay at home ill with a
fever, and it was at the side of the girl’s sick-bed that Mrs. Elaine
Willoughby, still feeble and shaken in soul, suddenly seized a
photograph from the mantel. “Whose picture is this?” she cried, her
voice trembling in the throes of an emotion which swept her loving soul
with wonderment and a new hope.
BOOK III—On a Lee Shore.