"Well, you won't mind if I ring for first-aid materials, will you?"
The other politely waved his gloved hand.
A servant arrived and departed with the emergency order. Inwood pushed
an unpleasant and polychromatic mess of Sunday newspapers aside and
reseated himself in the leather chair.
"I'm terribly sorry about what happened to you, Jim," he said. "So is
everybody. We all thought it was to be another gay year of that dear
Paris for you----"
"I thought so, too," nodded Edgerton; "but what a fellow thinks hasn't
anything to do with anything. I've found out that."
Inwood emptied his glass and gazed at the frost on it, sentimentally.
"The main thing," he said, "is for your friends to stand by you----"
"No; the main thing is for them to stand aside--kindly, Billy--while I
pass down and out for a while."
"My dear fellow----"
"While I pass _out_," repeated Edgerton. "I may return; but that will be
up to me--and not up to them."
"Well, what good is friendship?"
"Good to believe in--no good otherwise. Let it alone and it's the finest
thing in the world; use it, and you will have to find another name for
it."
He smiled at Inwood.
"Friendship must remain always the happiest and most comforting of
all--theories," he said. "Let it alone; it has a value inestimable in
its own place--no value otherwise."
Inwood began to laugh.
"Your notion concerning friends and friendship isn't the popular one."
"But my friends will sleep the sounder for knowing what are my views
concerning friendship."
"That's cynical and unfair," began the other, reddening.
"No, it's honest; and you notice that even my honesty puts a certain
strain on our friendship," retorted Edgerton, still laughing.
"You're only partly in earnest, aren't you?"
"Oh, I'm never really in earnest about anything. That's why Fate
extended an unerring and iron hand, grasped me by the slack of my pants,
shook me until all my pockets turned inside out, and set me down hard on
the trolley tracks of Destiny. Just now I'm crawling for the sidewalk
and the skirts of Chance."
He laughed again without the slightest bitterness, and looked out of the
window.
The view from the club window was soothing: Fifth Avenue lay silent and
deserted in the sunshine of an early summer morning.
Inwood said: "The papers--everybody--spoke most glowingly of the way
your firm settled with its creditors."
"Oh, hell! Why should ordinary honesty make such a stir in New York?
Don't let's talk about it; I'm going home, anyway."
"Where?"
"To my place."
"It's been locked up for over a year, hasn't it?"
"Yes, but there's a janitor----"
"Come down to Oyster Bay with me," urged Inwood; "come on, Jim, and
forget your troubles over Sunday."
"As for my troubles," returned the other, rising with a shrug and
pulling on his gloves, "I've had leisure on the ocean to classify and
pigeonhole the lot of them. I know exactly what I'm going to do, and
I'm going home to begin it."
"Begin what?" inquired Inwood with a curiosity entirely friendly.
"I'm going to find out," said Edgerton, "whether any of what my friends
have called my 'talents' are real enough to get me a job worth three
meals a day, or whether they'll merely procure for me the hook."
"What are you thinking of trying?"
"I don't know exactly. I thought of turning some one of my parlor
tricks into a future profession--if people will let me."
"Writing stories?"
"Well, that, or painting, or illustrating--music, perhaps. Perhaps I
could write a play, or act in some other fellow's; or do some damn thing
or other--" he ended vaguely. And for the first time Inwood saw that his
friend's eyes were weary, and that his face seemed unusually worn. It
was plain enough that James Edgerton 3d had already journeyed many a
league with Black Care, and that he had not yet outridden that shadowy
horseman.
"Jim," said Inwood seriously, "why won't you let me help you--" But
Edgerton checked him in a perfectly friendly manner.
"You _are_ helping me," he said; "that's why I'm going about my
business. Success to yours, Billy. Good-by! I'll be back"--glancing
around the familiar room--"sometime or other; back here and around town,
everywhere, as usual," he added confidently; and the haunted look faded.
He smiled and nodded with a slight gesture of adieu, picked up his suit
cases, and, with another friendly shake of his head for the offers of
servants' assistance, walked out into the sunshine of Fifth Avenue, and
west toward his own abode in Fifty-sixth Street.
When he arrived there, he was hot and dusty, and he decided to let Kenna
carry up his luggage. So he descended to the area.
Every time he pulled the basement bell he could hear it jingle inside
the house somewhere, but nobody responded, and after a while he
remounted the area steps to the street and glanced up at the brown-stone
facade. Every window was shut, every curtain drawn. That block on
Fifty-sixth Street on a Sunday morning in early summer is an unusually
silent and deserted region. Edgerton looked up and down the sunny
street. After Paris the city of his birth seemed very mean and treeless
and shabby in the merciless American sunshine.
Fumbling for his keys he wondered to what meaner and shabbier street he
might soon be destined, now that fortune had tripped him up; and how
soon he would begin to regret the luxury of this dusty block and the
comforts of the house which he was now about to enter. And he fitted
his latch-key to the front door and let himself in.
It was a very clumsy and old-fashioned apartment house, stupidly built,
five stories high; there was only one apartment to a floor, and no
elevator. The dark and stuffy austerity of this out-of-date building
depressed him anew as he entered. Its tenants, of course, were away
from town for the summer--respectable, middle-aged people--stodgy,
wealthy, dull as the carved banisters that guarded the dark, gas-lit
well of the staircase. Each family owned its own apartment--had been
owners for years. Edgerton inherited his floor from an uncle--widely
known among earlier generations as a courtly and delightful old
gentleman--an amateur of antiquities and the possessor of many very
extraordinary things, including his own private character and
disposition.
Carrying his suit cases, which were pasted all over with tricolored
labels, the young man climbed the first two flights of stairs, and then,
placing his luggage on the landing, halted to recover his breath and
spirits.
The outlook for his future loomed as dark as the stair well. He sat
down on the top step, lighted a cigarette, and gazed up at the sham
stained glass in the skylight above. And now for the first time he
began to realize something of the hideousness of his present position,
his helplessness, unfitted as he was to cope with financial adversity or
make an honest living at anything.
If people had only let him alone when he first emerged from college as
mentally naked as anything newly fledged, his more sensible instincts
probably would have led him to remain in the ancient firm of his
forefathers, Edgerton, Tennant & Co., dealers in iron.
But fate and his friends had done the business for him, finally
persuading him to go abroad. He happened, unfortunately, to possess a
light, graceful, but not at all unusual, talent for several of the arts;
he could tinkle catchy improvisations on a piano, sketch in oil and
water colors, model in clay, and write the sort of amateur verse popular
in college periodicals. Women often evinced an inclination to paw him
and tell him their troubles; fool friends spoke vaguely of genius and
"achieving something distinctly worth while"--which finally spoiled a
perfectly good business man, especially after a third-rate periodical
had printed one of his drawings, and a fourth-rate one had published a
short story by him; and the orchestra at the Colonnade had played one of
his waltzes, and Bernstein of the Frivolity Theater had offered to read
any libretto he might send.
So he had been ass enough to take a vacation and offer himself two
years' study abroad; and he had been away almost a year when the firm
went to the wall, carrying with it everything he owned on earth except
this apartment and its entailed contents, which he could neither cast
into the melting pot for his creditors nor even sell for his own
benefit. However, the creditors were paid dollar for dollar, and those
finer and entirely obsolete points of the Edgerton honor remained silver
bright; and the last of the Edgertons was back once more in New York
with his apartment, his carvings, tapestries and pictures, which the
will forbade him to sell, and two dollars change in his pockets.
Presently he cast his cigarette from him, picked up his suit cases, and
started upward, jaw set. It was a good thing for him that he had a jaw
like that. It was his only asset now. So far in life, however, he had
never used it.
Except the echo of his tread on the uncarpeted staircase, not another
sound stirred in the house. Every landing was deserted, every apartment
appeared to be empty and locked up for the summer. Dust lay gray on
banister and landing; the heated atmosphere reeked with the odor of moth
balls and tar paper seeping from locked doors.
On the top floor a gas jet flickered as usual in the corridor which led
to his apartment. By its uncertain flame he selected a key from the
bunch he carried, and let himself into his own rooms; and the instant he
set foot across the threshold he knew that something was wrong.
Whether it had been a slight sound which he fancied he heard in the
private passage-way, or whether he imagined some stealthy movement in
the golden dusk beyond, he could not determine; but a swift instinct
halted and challenged him, and left him listening.
As he stood there, checked, slowly the idea began to possess him that
there was somebody else in the apartment. When the slight but sudden
chill had left him, and his hair no longer tingled on the verge of
rising, he moved forward a step, then again halted. For a moment, still
grasping both suit cases, he stood as though at bay, listening, glancing
from alcove to corridor, from one dim spot of light to another where a
door ajar here and there revealed corners of empty rooms.
Whether or not there was at that moment another living being except
himself in the place he did not know, but he did know that otherwise
matters were not as he had left them a year ago in his apartment.
For one thing, here, under his feet, was spread his beautiful, antique
Daghestan runner, soft as deep velvet, which he had left carefully
rolled up, sewed securely in burlap, and stuffed full of camphor balls.
For another thing, his ear had caught a low, rhythmical sound from the
mantel in his bedroom. It was his frivolous Sevres clock ticking as
indiscreetly as it had ever ticked in the boudoir of its gayly patched
and powdered mistress a hundred and fifty years ago--which was
disturbing to Edgerton, as he had been away for a year, and had left his
apartment locked up with orders to Kenna, the janitor, to keep out until
otherwise instructed by letter or cable.
Listening, eyes searching the dusk, he heard somewhere the rustle of a
curtain blowing at an open window; and, stepping softly to his
dining-room door, he turned the knob cautiously and peered in.
No window seemed to be open there; the place was dark, the furniture
still in its linen coverings.
As he moved silently to the butler's pantry, where through loosely
closed blinds the sunshine glimmered, making an amber-tinted mystery of
the silence, it seemed for a moment to him as though he could still hear
somewhere the stir of the curtain; and he turned and retraced his steps
through the library.
In the twilight of the place, half revealed as he passed, he began now
to catch glimpses of a state of things that puzzled him.
Coming presently to his dressing room, he opened the door, and, sure
enough, there was a window open, and beside it a curtain fluttered
gayly. But what completely monopolized his attention was a number of
fashionable trunks--wardrobe trunks, steamer trunks, hat trunks, shoe
trunks--some open, and the expensive-looking contents partly visible;
some closed and covered. And on every piece of this undoubtedly
feminine luggage were the letters D.T. or S.T.
And on top of the largest trunk sat a live cat.
*CHAPTER II*
*CORPUS DELICTI*
The cat was pure white and plumy, and Persian. Out of its wonderful
sky-blue eyes it looked serenely at Edgerton; and the young man gazed
back, astonished. Then, suddenly, he caught a glimpse of the bedroom
beyond, and froze to a statue.
The object that appeared to petrify him lay flung across his bed--a
trailing garment of cobweb lace touched here and there with rose-tinted
ribbons.
For a moment he stared at it hypnotized; then his eyes shifted wildly to
his dresser, which seemed to be covered with somebody else's toilet
silver and crystal, and--_what_ was that row of cunning little
commercial curls!--that chair heaped with fluffy stuffs, lacy, intimate
things, faintly fragrant!
[Illustration: "A dainty, unreal shape, exquisite as a tinted phantom
stealing through a fairy tale of Old Japan."]
With a violent shiver he turned his startled eyes toward the parted
tapestry gently stirring in the unfelt summer wind.
From where he stood he could see into the great studio beyond. A small,
flowered silk slipper lay near the threshold, high of heel, impertinent,
fascinating; beyond, on the corner of a table stood a bowl full of
peonies, ivory, pink, and salmon-tinted; and their perfume filled the
place.
Somebody had rolled up the studio shades. Sunshine turned the great
square window to a sheet of dazzling glory, and against it, picked out
in delicate silhouette, a magic shadow was moving--a dainty, unreal
shape, exquisite as a tinted phantom stealing through a fairy tale of
Old Japan.
Suddenly the figure turned its head and saw him, and stood motionless
against the flare of light--a young girl, very slim in her shimmering
vestments of blossom-sprayed silk.
The next moment he walked straight into the studio.
Neither spoke. She examined him out of wide and prettily shaped eyes;
he inspected her with amazed intentness. Everything about her seemed so
unreal, so subtly fragrant--the pink peonies like fluffy powder-puffs
above each little close-set ear, the rose-tinted silhouette of her, the
flushed cheeks, soft bare arms, the silk-sheathed feet shod in tiny
straw sandals tied with vermilion cords.
"Who are you?" she asked; and her voice seemed to him as charmingly
unreal as the rest of the Japanese fairy tale that held him enthralled.
"Will you please go out again at once!" she said, and he woke up partly.
"This--this is perfectly incredible," he said slowly.
"It is, indeed," she said, placing a snowy finger upon an electric
button and retaining it there.
He regarded her without comprehension, muttering:
"I--I simply cannot realize it--that cat--those g-garments--you----"
"There is another thing you don't realize," she said with heightened
color, "that I am steadily ringing the janitor's bell--and the janitor
is large and violent and Irish, and he is probably halfway upstairs by
this time----"
"Do you take me for a malefactor?" he asked, astounded.
"I am not afraid of you in the least," she retorted, still keeping her
finger on the bell.
"Afraid of _me_? Of course you are not."
"I am _not_! Although your two suit cases are probably packed with the
silver from my dressing stand."
"What!"
"Then--then--what have you put into your suit cases? _What_ are you
doing in this apartment? And will you please leave your suit cases and
escape immediately?"
Her voice betrayed a little unsteadiness now, and Edgerton said:
"Please don't be frightened if I seem to remain----"
"You _are_ remaining!"
"Of course, I am." He forced an embarrassed smile. "I've got to; I
haven't any other place to go. There are all kinds of complications
here, and I think you had better listen to me and stop ringing. The
janitor is out anyway."
"He is _not_!" she retorted, now really frightened; "I can hear him
coming up the stairway--probably with a p-pistol----"
Edgerton turned red. "When I next set eyes on that janitor," he said,
"I'll probably knock his head off.... _Don't_ be frightened! I only
meant it humorously. Really, you must listen to me, because you and I
have some rather important matters to settle within the next few
minutes."
In his growing perplexity and earnestness he placed his suit cases on
the rug and advanced a step toward her, and she shrank away, her hands
flat against the wall behind her, the beautiful, frightened eyes fixed
on his--and he halted.
"I haven't the slightest notion who you are," he said, bewildered; "but
I'm pretty sure that I'm James Edgerton, and that this is my apartment.
But how you happen to be inhabiting it I can't guess, unless that
rascally janitor sublet it to you supposing that I'd be away for another
year and never know it."
"_You_!--James Edgerton!" she exclaimed.
"My steamer docked yesterday."
"_You_ are James Edgerton?--of Edgerton, Tennant & Co.?"
He began to laugh.
"I _was_ James Edgerton, of Edgerton, Tennant & Co.; I am now only a
silent partner in Fate, Destiny & Co.... If you don't mind--if you
please--who are _you_?"
"Why, I'm Diana Tennant!"
"_Who?_"
"Diana Tennant! Haven't you ever heard of my sister and me?"
"You mean you're those two San Francisco nieces?" he asked, astonished.
"I'm one of them. Silvette is sitting on the roof."
"On--the _roof_!"
"Yes; we have a roof garden--some geraniums and things, and a hammock.
It's just a makeshift until we secure employment.... Is it possible that
you are really James Edgerton? And didn't you know that we had rented
your apartment by the month?"
He passed an uncertain hand over his eyes.
"Will you let me sit down a moment and talk to you?" he said.
"Please--of course. I _do_ beg your pardon, Mr. Edgerton.... You must
understand how startling it was to look up and see a man standing there
with two suit cases."
He began to laugh; and after a moment she ventured to smile in an
uncertain, bewildered way, and seated herself in a big velvet chair
against the light.
They sat looking at each other, lost in thought: he evidently absorbed
in the problem before him; she, unquiet, waiting, the reflex of unhappy
little perplexities setting her sensitive lips aquiver at moments.
"You did rent this apartment from the janitor?" he said at length.
"My sister and I--yes. Didn't he have your permission?"
"No.... But don't worry.... I'll fix it up somehow; we'll arrange----"
"It is perfectly horrid!" she exclaimed. "What in the world can you
think of us? ... But we were quite innocent--it was merely chance.
Isn't it strange, Mr. Edgerton!--Silvette and I had walked and walked
and walked, looking for some furnished apartment within our means which
we might take by the month; and in Fifty-sixth Street we saw the sign,
'Apartment and Studio to let for the summer,' and we inquired, and he
let us have it for almost nothing.... And we never even knew that it
belonged to _you_!"
"To whom did you draw your checks for the rent?"
"We were to pay the janitor."
"Have you done so?" he asked sharply.
"N-no. We arranged--not to pay--until we could afford it----"
"I'm glad of that! Don't you pay that scoundrel one penny. As for me,
of course I couldn't think of accepting----"
"Oh, dear! oh, dear!" she said in pretty despair; "I've got to tell you
everything now! Several humiliating things--circumstances--very tragic,
Mr. Edgerton."
"No; you need not tell me a single thing that is likely to distress
you."
"But I've _got_ to! You don't understand. That wretched janitor has put
us in a position from which there is absolutely no escape. Because I--we
ought to go away instantly--b-but we--can't!"
"Not at all, Miss Tennant. I ought to leave you in possession, and
I--I'm trying to think out how to--to do it."
"How can we ask _you_ to do such a----"
"You don't ask; I've got to find some means--ways--expedients----"
"But we _can't_ turn you out of your own place!"
"No; but I've got to turn myself out. If you'll just let me think----"
"I will--oh, I will, Mr. Edgerton; but please, _please_ let me explain
the dreadful and humiliating conditions first, so that you won't
consider me absolutely shameless."
"I don't!"
"You will unless I tell you--unless I find courage to tell you how it is
with my sister and me."
"I'd like to know, but you must not feel obliged to tell me."
"I do feel obliged! I _must_! We're poor. We've spent all our money,
and we _can't_ go anywhere else very well!"
Edgerton glanced at the luxury in the next room, astonished; then his
gaze reverted to the silk-clad figure before him.
"You don't understand, of course," she said, flushing. "How could you
suppose us to be almost penniless living here in such a beautiful place
with all those new trunks and gowns and pretty things! But _that_ is
exactly why we are doing it!"
She leaned forward in her chair, the tint of excitement in her cheeks.
"After the failure, Silvette and I hadn't anything very much!--_you_
know how everything of uncle's went--" She stopped abruptly.
"Why--why, probably everything of yours went, too! Did it?"