TWO OF A KIND
The pretty little lady came very near swooning when she heard this.
Darrell arose from his chair.
“Come with me through the inner office,” he said in low tones.
She followed him, trembling like a leaf, and looking back as though she
expected the door to be broken in, and an angry husband to make his
appearance on the scene.
“He must have followed me—he will be so angry—oh! what shall I do—how
shall I look him in the face again?” she moaned.
“He need not see you now—here is a door that lets you out into the
passage around the corner, and you can descend the stairs without being
discovered. As for looking him in the face again, you have no reason to
shun him, my dear madam—you are innocent of wrong-doing at any rate, and
if anybody is going to be ashamed let it be him. Good-bye, madam, trust
me to the utmost.”
She gave him one pitiful look that haunted the old bachelor for many
days, and then, allowing her veil to fall over her pretty face, passed on
toward the stairs.
Meanwhile, the knock on the other door had been twice repeated—the man
without was evidently growing impatient.
Mr. Darrell walked over to the door and opened it.
“What! you, Leslie, my boy? It’s good for sore eyes to see your face.”
They shook hands warmly.
Leslie walked in.
The detective had seen on the instant that his old-time friend was
disturbed—Joe’s countenance had a gloomy look, totally at variance to the
cheerful expression that generally marked it.
Of course Eric Darrell wondered to what he owed this visit.
Was it brought about by the fact that Joe’s wife had just been seated in
the very chair he now threw his long form upon?
Since Joe’s marriage he had seen very little of him—their lines ran apart
and seldom crossed, yet they had once been pretty good friends. Again
the detective closed the door and fastened it against interruption.
Whatever the cause of Leslie’s visit, he meant to have a quiet chat with
him.
If the husband of the pretty lady who had just quitted his office
demanded to know why Lillian Leslie had visited him, he would have to
confess the truth, but he knew enough to keep a close tongue until the
lay of the land was made manifest.
Before sitting down himself he took up a box of cigars and offered it to
Joe.
The other looked at it rather sheepishly and then declined with a wave of
the hand.
“Ah! sworn off, eh? Something I never expected such an old smoker as you
to do; but every man to his taste. Now, old fellow, to what am I
indebted for this visit—a desire to talk over old times, or business?”
Leslie seemed to swallow a lump in his throat, and playing nervously with
the paper-cutter on the desk—which was a dagger taken from a notorious
assassin whom Darrell had assisted to the gallows years before, said
huskily:
“Eric, you are the only man in the world I would come to with domestic
troubles. What I am about to confide in you now I do as to a friend. At
the same time I ask for your assistance in a professional way.”
Then he seemed lost in deep thought for a minute, and was no doubt
collecting his energies to speak to the point.
As for Eric Darrell, he surveyed the other in deepest surprise.
What was coming?
Was Joe Leslie deep in the mire, and had he come to have his old friend
extricate him?
One thing seemed certain—he did not appear to know that his pretty wife
had been in this very room less than five minutes before.
Believing this, the detective considered it a peculiar freak of fate that
these two should visit him on the same day and almost the same hour, each
without the knowledge of the other.
At length Joe had recruited his energies to equal the occasion.
He looked up.
The detective was leaning back in his chair and calmly observing him,
wreaths of blue white smoke curling up from his Havana.
“Eric, you never met my wife?” he said.
The other did not by any start betray himself.
“That is your fault, old man. You were married in Chicago, and after
settling down here you never invited us old bachelors to visit you,” he
replied, quietly.
“Forgive me. But see, here is her photograph. Take a look at the girl
who captured the man who used to laugh at all Benedicts.”
Darrell took the picture.
It was the same face he had so recently sat _vis-a-vis_ with in this very
office, with one particular difference—the photograph was of a happy,
loving girl, while the other had been the face of an anxious woman.
Mentally he noted this fact, while looking long and earnestly at the
photograph.
“Well, what do you think of her?” asked Leslie.
He was a tall man, perhaps thirty-five years of age, not handsome, but
with a face that won him friends everywhere, for Joe Leslie had a warm
heart and was ready to champion the cause of any poor devil in distress.
“She’s handsome, Joe—a beauty.”
“Anyone can see that—look deeper, man.”
“I can see qualities there such as might make her a wife to be proud of,
and whom any man might well hesitate to offend.”
At this Joe groaned.
The shrewd detective thought he had driven one nail home—that his
allusion must have hit Leslie in a tender spot—but for once he made a
mistake.
Just then he was not thinking of his own shortcomings—that groan was the
result of mental agony brought about by something else.
“Eric, I am in trouble,” he said.
The other knew it before he spoke.
To himself he was saying:
“Now, here’s a surprising thing—I am already retained by the wife, and
the husband has come to confess his sins. Shall I listen—he must not
bind me to a promise not to tell.”
Aloud, he said:
“I’m sorry for that, Joe. Tell me all about it and heaven knows I will
aid you all I can.”
“Thank you, old friend—I knew it before you spoke—that was why I finally
determined to come here and unbosom myself.”
“It’s coming,” muttered Darrell, smiling grimly.
He fully expected to learn the secret of that mysterious house on
Twenty-seventh Street.
“To think,” said Joe, looking around him at the walls and ceiling, “that
here in this den where I spent so many careless, happy bachelor hours
with you, I should now be detailing the tribulations of married life.”
“Singular—of course,” nodded Eric, apparently observing the ashes on the
end of his cigar, but all the while watching Joe’s face.
“For of course,” Joe continued, “what I have to say to you concerns—my
wife.”
“Yes.”
The detective was wondering how Joe meant to bring out his confession.
He did not dream of anything else.
“You have seen that face, Eric”—tapping the photograph—“would you say
there was any deceit there?”
This was something of a staggerer—the other had not expected the electric
fluid to strike in such a quarter at all.
“Deceit—in that little woman—well, I’m an old bachelor, Joe, but my
judgment is generally conceded sound, and I tell you your wife is a woman
of a thousand. Her face speaks of purity and charity—one could not look
into the depths of those eyes and not read truth there.”
“Good heavens, man! you describe Lillian as I have believed her—one would
think you had met her,” cried Leslie, starting out of his moody fit.
“A good photograph can be easily read nowadays, my boy,” replied Darrell,
quietly; at the same time conscious that he had made a break that had
better not be repeated.
Joe gave a great sigh, and resumed his despondent attitude, nervously
playing with the paper-cutter.
“Eric, perhaps there are men who love their wives better than I do mine,
but I am completely wrapped up in Lillian, and if I lost her I’d go to
the dogs devilish quick.
“You know my nature—I’m not a suspicious fool, nor am I constitutionally
jealous, but I suppose I have a certain amount of the latter in my
disposition—every man but an idiot has.”
“That’s so. Remember Othello’s declaration about keeping a corner in the
object of his love for other people’s uses. I reckon that’s the first
corner we have any record of.”
Joe’s face had flushed at the reference made by his companion.
Quietly he went on:
“As heaven is my judge I do not wish to harbor any unjust suspicion
toward my wife—I would shield her with my life from the folly of her
imprudence, if such it prove to be—but I am a man, and I cannot shut my
eyes to certain facts set before me. I have done everything in my power
to explain the matter to myself, offering all sorts of excuses for her,
but it is useless, and I feel now that I must know the truth or go
crazy.”
“My dear fellow, this is indeed serious.”
“Serious, Eric—may you never know the awful feeling that has pressed upon
my heart during the last few weeks.”
“Has it been that long?”
“Yes, for two weeks I have noticed a difference in Lillian—she has hardly
looked me in the face at all. Poor child, she is not accustomed to
deceit, and a secret weighs upon her.”
Darrell came near laughing, as he believed he had the key to the puzzle.
Unaccustomed to deceit, forsooth—when it was his own mysterious actions
that had disturbed Lillian.
“Two weeks, you say, Joe?”
“Well, I knew something about it before then. Accident revealed it to
me. I will tell you all, and you can judge for yourself.
“You know we live in a comfortable little house up on Eighty-sixth
Street. I generally spend my days down-town at business, but I had a
call up-town one morning, and my cabman drove me past my own house—I took
a cab because the party I wished to see lived at a point inconvenient to
the elevated, and besides I had a bushel of papers, more or less, to take
him.
“While passing my house I naturally looked in.
“At that moment Lillian was opening the door and a fine-looking man
entered whom she seemed to greet cordially. I wondered who he was, but
forgot all about him until I came home in the evening. Somehow his face
came up again before me—I waited to see if she would speak, and even made
an opportunity for her to tell me of her visitor—she said nothing and I
thought looked a trifle confused.
“Eric, believe me, I dropped the matter then and there—who could look
into those eyes—well-springs of truth as you have just observed—and
believe deceit rested there?
“The next day I again found it necessary to use the cab in going to the
house of my client, and, as I passed my own dwelling, I was somewhat
nettled to see the same military-looking gentleman ascending the steps.
“I looked at the time—it was ten exactly, the same hour as on the
preceding day.
“Again, that evening, I gave Lillian the opportunity to tell me of her
visitor, but she made no mention of it.
“Eric, the demon of jealousy had his birth in my heart in that bitter
hour—my wife had a secret from me—she was receiving clandestinely a
gentleman whom I did not even know.
“I battled with the fever, heaven knows how terribly, but it conquered
me, and although I despised myself for doing so despicable an act I set
about watching Lillian.”
The large man buried his face in his hands and groaned aloud in his
suffering.