The Other Lady
It was plain enough to Johnson Boller.
Anthony, poor devil, was raving at last! Since there was no one likely
to ruin Anthony, the strain had developed the illusion that--or was it
an illusion? Anthony had calmed these last few seconds, clinging
childlike to his friend; his eyes denoted the general state of mind of a
hunted doe, but there was nothing more abnormal.
"Say, kid," Johnson Boller began kindly. "You----"
"You don't understand," Anthony said hoarsely but more quietly. "I've
never told you about the Dalton matter, because I've tried my best to
forget the interview--but Dalton is the man who controls virtually the
whole proprietary liniment market, barring only Fry's Imperial. My--my
liniment," said Anthony, and there was an affectionate note in his voice
which Johnson Boller had never heard before in connection with the
Imperial, "is the only one he has failed to acquire."
"Yes?" said Johnson Boller, with rising interest.
Anthony smiled wanly, dizzily.
"Well, Dalton came to the office one day about five years ago, having
made an appointment to meet me personally there. He wanted to buy us
out, and I wouldn't hear of it--partly sentiment and partly because he
didn't want to pay enough. Then he tried his usual tactics of
threatening to drive Imperial off the market, and I sat down and pointed
out to him just what it would cost and what it would gain him. He's a
hard devil, Johnson, and he was pretty angry, yet he saw the reason in
what I told him."
"Go on," said Johnson Boller.
"We parted on rather curious terms," groaned Anthony. "One might call it
an armed truce, I suppose. He seemed to be willing to let matters rest
as they were, and he has done just that ever since; but he told me in so
many words that if ever I tried to break into his particular market, if
ever, for any cause, I offended him in any way, he'd sail in and
advertise me out of business."
"Can he do it?"
"He can do it," Anthony said, with pained conviction. "He can do it,
because he's able to spend a million where I spend ten thousand, and
once he starts Fry's Imperial Liniment is as dead as Julius Cæsar. And
when he learns about this thing----"
"He--he might never learn," Johnson Boller said, without even trying to
be convincing.
Anthony laughed forlornly.
"Hell learn; I'm done for!" said he. "It's as good as done and over with
now, Johnson. Almost every cent I have in the world is invested in the
firm, you know, and once that goes to pieces I--why, great Heaven,
Johnson! I'll have to get out and work for a living!"
Johnson Boller, for a little, said nothing at all. Coming from another
man, he would have fancied the statements largely exaggeration and
imagination; coming from Anthony he knew that they were mostly solid
truth.
"Well, I told you in the first place that kid meant trouble," he
muttered.
"You have a prophetic soul!" Anthony sighed.
"Trouble isn't the word!" Mr. Boller mused further. "If you tell the
truth, according to your figuring, the old gentleman will ruin you--but
that doesn't matter much, because when you've told the truth it's a dead
sure thing Vining will let the daylight through you, so that you'll have
no need for money anyway. And if you go on trying to keep it all dark
and succeed in doing it, that Hitchin idiot will have us both jailed for
murder--_and we'll have to produce a David Prentiss before we get out_!"
Anthony, gazing fixedly at him, felt hope that hardly dared to be
creeping into his eyes.
"Johnson, could we get hold of a boy somewhere and bribe him?" he asked.
"To do what?"
"To go into a police court and swear that he was David Prentiss and that
he came here last night and left again about half-past twelve," said the
model citizen, without even reflecting that it involved perjury. "If we
could manage that it might be best of all to let Hitchin go ahead."
"Stick you and me in jail?" Johnson Boller asked harshly.
"Better that than risk----"
"I don't see it!" the less chivalrous gentleman snapped. "There's
nothing inside urging me to go to jail for anybody's sake, even
overnight. And another thing, I've got a wife, Anthony! Just consider
where this would put me with Beatrice, and how dead certain it would be,
with Hitchin airing his views and conclusions, that he'd mention the
lady you introduce as Mrs. Boller!"
"But----"
"But nothing!" Johnson Boller said, his personal trouble coming
uppermost again. "That's the worst break you've made so far, Anthony!
That Mrs. Boller business is likely to cause me----"
He shut his teeth on the end of the sentence. Wilkins, white and
distressed, was coming down the corridor with what looked rather like
kangaroo leaps. He came to David's door and stopped, turning the knob.
He entered--and immediately he left the room again and sped to Anthony.
"She wishes to see you again, sir!"
Anthony jerked obediently to his feet and laid a cold hand on Johnson
Boller's.
"Get up there and keep Vining busy," he said. "That's all. Hurry!"
Johnson Boller shuffled back to the living-room, where the unfortunate
paced up and down and wrung his hands. Anthony, waiting tremulously
until he heard both their voices, hurried into Mary's room--and looked
at her with a new, dreadful terror. She was no longer a merely
unfortunate, unknown young woman whose good name he had placed in
considerable jeopardy; Mary, by now, had become the potential stick of
dynamite that bade fair to blast him out of the Lasande, out of his
regular life, out of everything but the chance to sally forth and hunt a
job!
"Well? Well?" she asked swiftly.
"Yes?"
"Is he gone? Is he gone?" Mary cried.
"He will--go shortly!" Anthony said thickly. "You--you are Theodore
Dalton's daughter!"
Mary stared at him.
"So you've discovered that?"
"He--in a business way----" Anthony muttered vaguely.
"Yes, that was my reason for coming here," Mary said, cheerfully enough.
"I've heard him speak of you--oh, no, not very flatteringly; I don't
think he likes you. I've heard him say that some day he'd wreck you,
when he was ready; and I was very curious indeed to see what sort of man
you were and whether you were nice enough to plead for, if he ever
started. I don't like dad to wreck people."
Anthony nodded.
"And that was another reason why I was afraid to tell the truth last
night," said Mary. "If you were business enemies--bitter ones, I
mean--and you found out that you had father's daughter here--well, that
has nothing to do with getting Bobby away, has it?"
"He'll go presently."
"Presently isn't soon enough!" Mary informed her captor. "I sent for
Wilkins to tell you that he must go _now_!"
"But the boy is distracted and----"
"About me?"
"Yes."
"Is he really suffering?" Mary asked.
"I think so."
The girl considered very thoughtfully indeed.
"Maybe I'd better go out there and quiet him, poor little boy!" she said
staggeringly. "He'll believe me if I tell him the truth and----"
"I wouldn't do that!" Anthony exploded. "He's wildly excited now, and
the truth might not appeal to him as reasonable."
Again Mary hesitated, causing his blood to congeal.
"Very well. Then get rid of him now!" she said sharply. "If he ever came
down here and found me, all the explaining in the world would never
help!"
"He will not," Anthony said impatiently. "Bob isn't the sort to stray
about one's apartment and----"
And from the corridor came:
"She's gone, Boller! Johnson, she's gone!"
And steps came in their direction, too, and while Mary Dalton turned to
flame, Anthony Fry turned to ice! He was coming and coming steadily, and
the door was open fully two inches. He was abreast of them now and
faithful Johnson Boller apparently was with him, for they heard--
"Well, I wouldn't go wandering around like that, old man. Come back and
sit down and we'll talk it over."
"I'll sit here on the window-seat!" Robert Vining panted.
"Don't do that," Mr. Boller protested. "No, not there, Bobby! That's
weak and likely to go down in a heap with you!"
The steps ceased. Through ten terrible seconds Anthony Fry and lovely
Mary stood listening to the panting of the afflicted youth. Then:
"My God, Johnson!" he cried wildly. "I--I want to look over the whole
world at once for her! I want to look into every room in New York! I
want to look into every room in this place and then tear out and
look----"
"Yes, but you couldn't do that," Johnson Boller assured him soothingly.
"Now, cut out the mad-house talk, old man, and come back. Have one of
Anthony's good, strong cigars and I'll dig out that brandy he keeps for
his best friends. Don't go nosing around these rooms!" said Johnson
Boller, and simultaneously they caught the shiver in his voice and saw
the door move as Vining's hand landed on the knob. "Just control
yourself and come back."
Robert Vining laughed hideously and helplessly.
"I suppose I'm making an ass of myself!" said his weak voice. "I can't
help it! On my soul, I can't help it. Give me a shot of the brandy,
though, and maybe I'll steady a bit!"
Something like one hundred years passed; then the hand slid from the
door and they could hear Johnson Boller leading the sufferer gently away
from the shock of his whole lifetime. Mary, her eyes closed for a
moment, gripped herself and spoke very softly:
"Mr. Fry, if--if you don't get that boy out of here and then find a way
of sending me home--if you don't do it instantly, I'm going out there to
Bob and tell him that you brought me here and kept me here all night
against my will! After that, whatever happens, happens!"
Life returned to Anthony's frozen legs.
"I will go!" he managed to say, and he went.
The brandy was already within Robert Vining, yet it seemed to have made
small difference in his condition. The young man's eyes were wild and
rolling; they rested on Anthony for a moment as if they had seen him
before but could not quite place him.
"You--you've been telephoning," he said.
"Not yet," said Anthony, "but if you'll run along and do your share,
I'll think up ways of helping you."
"My share?" Vining echoed.
Mentally, he was not more than half himself. Anthony Fry, therefore,
grew very firm and very stern, pleasantly certain that Robert was paying
no heed to his pallor or the uncontrollable shake that had come to his
hands.
"If the girl has really disappeared," he said steadily, "your part is
not to be sitting here and whining for help, Robert. Why don't you get
out and hustle and see if you can't get track of her? Have you gone to
all her friends?"
"Eh? No!"
"Then go now!" said Anthony Fry. "You know her girl friends? Get after
the most intimate at first--and get about it!"
Here he scowled, and Robert Vining, rising, shook himself together.
"You're right, Anthony," he said. "I'm an ass; I've lost my head
completely this last hour. I--I caught it from her father, I think; the
man's going about like an infuriated bull, swearing to kill everybody in
the world if Mary isn't returned and--but you're right, old chap. Thank
you for steadying me." Robert concluded bravely. "Where's my hat? I've
been wearing it all this time, eh? Good-by, Anthony. Good-by, Johnson."
He tried to smile at them--and he fled. This time it was Johnson Boller
who turned weak at his going. Mr. Boller, smiling at his old friend in a
sickly, greenish way, dropped into a chair and mopped his forehead.
"Narrow squeak, Anthony!"
"Yes!" Anthony agreed, with some difficulty.
"I was never so scared as that in all my life!" Johnson Boller went on
faintly. "I thought sure I'd have to watch it and--Anthony, it turned me
so sick I could hardly stand on my feet!"
"What did?"
"The idea of seeing you shot down there," Mr. Boller said with a
shudder. "Gad! I could picture the whole thing, Anthony! I could see him
start and look at you both--I swear I could see him pull a gun from his
pocket and shoot! I could see the blood spurting out of your forehead,
Anthony, and hear the chicken screech, and it turned me so infernally
sick----"
"Didn't think of any of my sensations, did you?" Anthony asked
caustically.
"As a matter of fact--no, I didn't!" muttered Johnson Boller, with
another great shiver. "What do your confounded sensations matter,
anyway? This whole affair is your fault, not mine! You deserve whatever
you get--I don't! You've got nobody in the world to worry over you, but
I've got a _wife_, Anthony!"
"You have mentioned it before."
"And I'm likely to mention it again!" said Mr. Boller savagely. "You
know, Anthony, I'm about through with this thing! I'm a nervous man, and
I can stand about so much suffering of my own, but I don't see the idea
of taking on yours as well. And what is more, this thing of introducing
this girl as my wife is----"
"Well? What is it?" Mary herself asked very crisply, appearing in her
disconcertingly and silent fashion.
Johnson Boller smiled feebly.
"It's very flattering in some ways, Miss--Miss Dalton, but for a man
like me, who loves his wife, you know, and all that sort of thing----"
His voice thinned out and died before the decidedly cold light in Mary's
eye. It seemed to Johnson Boller that she had a low opinion of himself;
and when she looked at Anthony he noted that she had a low opinion of
Anthony as well.
"Have you settled it yet!" she snapped.
"The--er--means of getting you out?"
"Is there anything more important?"
"Ah--decidedly not," Anthony said wearily. "Several times, I think,
we've attempted a council of war, and we may as well try it again. There
will be no interruptions this time, I think, and if we all put our minds
to it----"
That was all. As on several other similar occasion, he halted because of
sounds from the doorway. It seemed to Anthony, indeed, that he had heard
Wilkins muttering at the telephone a moment ago, too; and now the
faithful one was at the door and working over the latch.
Mary's ears were preternaturally keen, too; Mary had acquired a way of
standing erect and poising every time sounds came from that door. She
did it now, remaining on tiptoe until the oddest little giggle brought
Anthony and Johnson Boller to their feet also.
"That's a woman's voice!" Mary whispered.
And she looked about wildly, and, since there was no hope of escape
unseen by the corridor, her eyes fell upon the open door of Johnson
Boller's room. Mary, with a bound that would have done credit to a young
deer, was across the room, and the door clicked behind her just as
Wilkins, smiling in a perturbed and mystified way, appeared to announce:
"A lady, sir, who----"
Then the lady had passed him, moving with a speed almost equal to Mary's
own--a lovely lady, indeed, with great, flashing black eyes and black
hair--a lady all life and spirit, her face suffused just now with a
great joy. Wilkins, perceiving that neither gentleman protested after
gazing at her for one second, backed away to regions of his own, and the
spell on Johnson Boller broke and his soul found vent in one great, glad
cry of:
"Bee!"
"Pudgy-wudgy!" cried the lady, and flew directly into Johnson Boller's
arms!
Anthony Fry steadied himself, mentally and physically, and the little
smile that came to his lips was more than half sneer--because Johnson
Boller and his lovely wife were hugging each other and babbling
senselessly, and the best that Anthony could make of it at first was
something like:
"And was it lonely? Oh, Pudgy-wudgy, was it lonely?"
Whereat Johnson Boller burbled:
"Lonely, sugar-plum? Lonely, sweetie? Oh, Beetie-girl, if Pudgy-wudgy
could tell you how lonely----"
Here they kissed again, three times, four times, five times!
"Hell!" said Anthony Fry.
"And did it come back?" the imbecile that had been Johnson Boller
gurgled.
The dark, exquisite head burrowed deep on Boller's shoulder.
"Oh, Pudgy!" a muffled voice protested, almost tearfully. "I couldn't do
it! I thought I could, but I couldn't, sweetest!"
"And so it came back to its Pudgy-wudgy!" Johnson Boller oozed
ecstatically. "So it turned around and came back to its Pudgy!"
Mrs. Boller regarded him solemnly, holding him off for a moment.
"At some awful, awful place north of Albany," she said. "I couldn't go
any farther and I--I was going to wire you to come for me, Pudgy! And
then I thought I'd stay at their terrible hotel and come down and
surprise you, and you weren't home and they said you'd come here!"
"Yes!" Johnson Boller agreed.
"How could you leave our home, Pudgy-wudgy?" his darling asked
reprovingly.
"If I had stayed there another hour without my little chicky-biddy, I'd
have shot myself!" said Pudgy-wudgy. "Ask Anthony!" And here he looked
at Anthony and demanded: "Ain't we silly? Like a couple of kids!"
"You certainly are!" Anthony Fry rasped.
"You don't have to screw your face all up when you say it!" Mr. Boller
informed him, disengaging himself.
Beatrice laughed charmingly.
"You'll overlook it, Mr. Fry?" said she. "We've never been separated
before in all the----"
"Six months!" beamed Johnson Boller.
"--that we've been married!" finished his wife, squeezing his hand.
Followed a pause. Anthony had nothing whatever to say; after witnessing
an exhibition like that he never had anything to say for an hour or more
that a lady could hear. He stood, a cold, stately, disgusted figure,
surging internally, thanking every star in the firmament that he had
never laid himself open to a situation of that kind--and after a time
the inimical radiations from him reached Beatrice, for she laughed
uneasily.
"May I--may I fix my hair?" she asked. "And then we'll go home, Pudgy?"
"Yes, my love," purred Johnson Boller.
"Which is your room, pigeon-boy?" his bride asked.
So far as concerned Johnson Boller, Mary had been wafted out of this
world; all aglow with witless happiness, he pointed at the door as he
said:
"That one, Beetie-chicken."
Beatrice turned--and ten thousand volts shot through Anthony and caused
his hair to stand on end. His laugh, coming simultaneously, was a loud,
weird thing, splitting the still air.
"Your bedroom, Johnson!" he cried. "She means your _bedroom_!"
"Well--of course?" Beatrice said wonderingly.
"Well, that's down at the end of the corridor, dear madam," Anthony
smiled wildly, and went so far as to stay her by laying hands on her
arm. "Right down there--see? The open door. That's Johnson's room!"
Beatrice, distinctly startled, glanced at him and nodded and left.
Anthony, drawing the first real breath in a full minute, glared at his
friend in silence; but the morning's dread situation had slid from
Johnson Boller's shoulders as a drop of water from a duck's back. For a
second or two he had been slightly jarred at the magnitude of the break
he had made--but that was all over now.
"My mistake, old scout," he chuckled softly. "You saved the day--what
are you glowering about?"
"Clod!" gasped Anthony.
"Clod your necktie!" Johnson Boller said airily. "Well, did you ever see
the like of it? Did you ever see anything like the little squeezicks,
Anthony! She's back, bless her little heart! She couldn't stand it."
"Umph!" said his host.
"And so I'm let out of it!" Mr. Boller chuckled on. "We'll just scoot
along to the little dove-cote, old vinegar-face, and see how she looks
after all this time. I can get my things later on. Well--I'm sorry to
leave you with the problem on your hands, you know."
"Don't let it disturb you!" Anthony snapped.
"But at that, you know, fate's doing the kind, just thing by snatching
me out," Mr. Boller concluded earnestly and virtuously. "It wasn't my
muddle in the first place, and somehow I feel that you haven't acted
just on the level with me about any of it."
Anthony's mouth opened to protest. Yet he did not protest. Instead, he
jumped, just as one jumps at the unexpected explosion of a
fire-cracker--for down the corridor a scream, shrill and sharp, echoed
suddenly.
And after the scream came a long, choking gasp, so that even Wilkins
appeared in the doorway and Johnson Boller darted forward to learn what
had overtaken his only darling. He was spared the trouble of going down
the corridor, however. Even as he darted forward, Beatrice had rejoined
them; and having looked at her just once Johnson Boller stood in his
tracks, rooted to the floor!
Because Beatrice, the lovely, the loving, Beatrice of the melting eyes
and the high color, had left them. The lady in the doorway was white as
the driven snow and breathing in a queer, strangling way; and whatever
her eyes may have expressed, melting love for Johnson Boller was not
included.
For this unpleasant condition the hat in her hand seemed largely
responsible. It was a pretty little hat, expensively simple, but it was
the hat of a lady!
And, looking from it to Johnson Boller, Beatrice finally managed:
"This--this! This hat!"
Johnson Boller moved not even a muscle.
"Who is the woman?" Beatrice cried vibrantly. "_Who is she?_"
And still neither Anthony nor Johnson Boller seemed able to canter up to
the situation and carry it of with a blithe laugh. Anthony was making
queer mouths; Johnson Boller was doing nothing whatever, even now; and
when three seconds had passed Beatrice whirled abruptly on the only
other possible source of information present, which happened to be
Wilkins.
"You were here!" she said swiftly. "You answer me: who was the woman?"
"The--the woman, ma'am!" Wilkins repeated.
Beatrice came nearer and looked up at him, and there was that in her
eyes which sent Wilkins back a full pace.
"You--you creature!" Beatrice said. "What woman was in this apartment
last night?"
Now, as it chanced, Wilkins was far more intelligent than he looked.
Give him the mere hint to a situation and he could lumber through
somehow. Only a little while ago, when Hobart Hitchin came upon them, he
had caught the key to this affair--so he smiled quite confidently and
bowed.
"There was no woman here last night, ma'am," said Wilkins, "only Mrs.
Boller, the wife of that gentleman there!"