A Chance Meeting
“Told you you’d like it here.” George Holworthy crossed one pudgy knee
over the other and eyed his friend’s back at the window with immense
satisfaction, “Old Jim certainly knows how to live, doesn’t he, from
percolators to night-lights? You’ll be mighty comfortable here,
Norman.”
Storm turned slowly from his contemplation of the shadowed park below,
the broad sweep of the river and twinkle of the Palisades beyond.
“It’s great!” he declared briefly but with a ringing, buoyant note
which had long been absent from his tones. “I tell you George, old
boy, I feel like a new man already! I never knew until now how
stagnant a backwater like Greenlea can make a fellow become! Same
old trains, same old country-club, same old crowd of petty-minded
busybodies! Lord, I don’t see how I stood it all these years!”
The outburst was spontaneous, and not until he saw the look of
reproachful amazement which crossed George’s face did he realize that
he had lowered his guard.
“You were happy,” ventured George.
“Of course,” Storm hastened to acquiesce. “That made all the
difference. But alone——”
He shrugged and turned away lest the other read too clearly the change
which had come with his escape from the scene of his crime.
Significant of that change was the fact that he could think of his
deed as a crime now without shrinking. After the first shock of horror
and remorse had passed together with the fear of detection, a sense of
triumph began to dominate him, a sort of pride in himself and his
achievement. He had hoodwinked them all! He, who had fancied himself a
weakling merely because luck had been against him in the past, had
proved his strength, his invincibility now. Old George, sitting there
so placidly, blinking at him with those good-natured, near-sighted
eyes of his: how little he suspected, how little he could ever suspect
of the truth! The rest of them, with their smug condolences and pity!
Gad, how easy it had been!
“What do you think of Homachi?” George’s question broke in upon his
self-congratulation.
“The Jap you got for me? He’s an improvement on Agnes, I can tell
you!” Storm opened the bronze humidor and offered it. “Smoke?—You’ve
no idea how that girl’s sniffling got on my nerves! Of course I
appreciated her feelings, but hang it all, a man can’t buck up and
carry on with other people constantly thrusting his own sorrow at him!
Homachi is a cheerful, grinning little cuss, and he certainly can make
an omelette. Come up and have breakfast some Sunday morning and you’ll
see.”
“Thanks.” George spoke a trifle drily. “Glad you like him. Have you
made any plans yet about the disposition of the Greenlea house?”
The constraint in his tone warned Storm that for the second time he
had shown his hand too plainly, and he forced a look of pained
surprise.
“Disposition of the house?” he echoed. “Heavens, no! It’s closed up,
of course, and I’ve left MacWhirter there as caretaker. It was one of
Leila’s last wishes, you know, to give him employment when he came out
of the Base Hospital. I hadn’t dreamed of disposing of it; I couldn’t
bear to think of strangers in her garden, under her roof, in the home
she loved! If I’m glad to be out of it, it’s not that I am callous,
but that everything about it affects me too much, George. You ought to
be able to understand. If I hug my grief I’ll just simply go under,
and Leila herself wouldn’t want that.”
“I do understand, old man.” George’s voice trembled now with quick
sympathy, and Storm hid a smile of relief. “You’re trying to be brave
for her sake, and it is fine of you! Stay away from the place by all
means while it makes you feel that way. You could do worse than take a
lease here for yourself next year when Jim’s expires.”
Storm shook his head.
“I’ve been thinking that I’d like to take a trip somewhere, later on,”
he said slowly, watching the other’s face through narrowed lids. “A
long trip; China or South America or way up North. I could come back
and start all over again——”
“But your position with the Trust Company?” George sputtered. “They
couldn’t put a man in your place and then oust him for you when you
came back.”
“I wouldn’t expect them to,” Storm responded. “To tell you the truth,
I feel that I’ve been stagnating there, too. It’s a sinecure and I’ve
been content to drift along sure of the income and not taking chances,
but I’m responsible for no one else now and I can afford a risk.”
George rose.
“Don’t do anything rash,” he advised. “Fifteen thousand a year is a
mighty safe little bet in these uncertain times, and you’ve never
known what it is to get out for yourself, you know. You’ve got the
habit of luxury——”
“And no business head? Thanks,” drawled his host pleasantly. “I’m not
going to make a fool of myself and kill the goose until I find golden
eggs elsewhere. That notion of a trip was just an impulse. I may get
over this restless fit and settle down here permanently, after all. I
like these rooms of Jim’s, and town looks good to me.”
Nevertheless, the next day found him in Wendle Foulkes’ office facing
the keen old attorney with an air of quiet command which brooked no
expostulation.
“How long will it take you to convert my securities into cash?” he
demanded. “When we talked about it a fortnight ago I listened to you
because of my wife, but now I’ve only myself to consider, and I have a
right to take a risk with my own if I feel inclined.”
“Of course you have, my boy,” Foulkes returned slowly. “I have gone
beyond my province, perhaps, in trying to influence you, but I
promised your father—however, I’ve nothing more to say. I will have
the cash for you in ten days. You have exactly fifty thousand dollars,
on which you’ve been getting six per cent; I hope you’ll be able to
better it.”
“Thanks.” Storm was conscious of an air of defeat in the old man’s
manner and he resented it vaguely, then shrugged. What did it matter,
anyway? He would be free from this pettifogging nuisance soon enough.
“About the other matter——?”
“You mean Leila’s estate?” Foulkes’ tone softened. “I have the papers
all here for you to look over. We must advertise for claims for six
months, of course—a mere formality in this case—and then what she left
can be turned over to you. She had just fourteen thousand when she
married you and spent eleven of it. Here are the accounts. It was a
matter of pride with her to buy your Christmas and birthday presents
with her own money, Norman, and I couldn’t gainsay her. Two thousand
went for that black pearl scarf-pin, three thousand——”
“Don’t!” Storm cried sharply. “I don’t want to hear all that! Send the
papers up to my rooms. Can’t you see——?”
He stopped with a gesture of repugnance, and the attorney, ignorant of
the source of the other’s emotion, nodded compassionately.
“I know, my boy, but I want you to see how matters stand. There are
three thousand left, of the principal, which were to have been paid to
Jaffray for that land adjoining yours, and accrued interest on the
constantly depleted original capital which aggregates almost as much
again. Her estate, roughly speaking, will amount to between five and
six thousand dollars; I’ll send you the exact figures.”
“I don’t care about them! I’m not thinking of what she left; it isn’t
that.” Storm rose, unable to meet the kindly gaze of the older man. “I
only want to get the whole thing settled and done with. I can’t bear
to discuss it; these details are horrible, impossible for me to
contemplate sanely just yet!”
“I quite understand, Norman, but they must be attended to, you know.”
Foulkes rose and held out his hand. “I’ll render you an accounting in
six months, and then it will be over.—About your own affairs. You have
never taken the advice I volunteered with very good grace, and I shall
not offer any now. I am getting old, and you are no longer a boy; you
know your own mind. However, if in the future you feel the need of
disinterested counsel or help you know where to come for it.”
“Thank you, sir.” Storm felt an odd sense of contrition. “I’m not
going into that South American scheme. I shall look around before
deciding definitely on what I have in mind, and I’m sorry if I have
seemed to resent your interest in the past. A man can’t be in
leading-strings all his life, you know, and I have a good,
conservative proposition now.”
He had. Storm chuckled grimly to himself as he departed. Fifty
thousand would carry him far away, give him a year or two of utterly
care-free existence, and leave a respectable sum to start in some
fresh venture. The European countries were practically bankrupt; a
little cash would bring monumental return and in some continental
capital he could start a new life. Just as the thought of escape from
Greenlea had made his surroundings there suddenly intolerable, so now
the contemplation of utter freedom and a wider vista brought with it
an impatience, a longing for instant action. The lease on Potter’s
rooms, the trumpery five thousand from Leila’s estate—these details
need not deter or delay him!
Another thought did, however. It was one thing, and a perfectly
natural one, under the circumstances, for him to have closed the house
and moved in town; it would be quite another question were he to throw
up a fifteen-thousand-a-year job, seize all the cash he could lay his
hands upon and rush out of the country. No man in his sane senses
would take such a step unless some more urgent and sinister motive
actuated him than a mere desire for forgetfulness of grief in strange
scenes and a new environment.
Forcing himself to regard it from a detached point of view, he saw the
madness of that course. His imagination conjured up the blank
amazement which would ensue not only among the Greenlea people, but in
his town clubs, in the Trust Company. There would be hints that grief
had unsettled his reason, then darker whispers still; whispers which
would grow in volume until the echo of them reached him wherever he
might be, at the uttermost ends of the earth.
He must not spoil all now by a precipitate move; he must possess his
soul in patience until a favorable opportunity presented itself. He
had inserted an opening wedge in mentioning his tentative intention to
George; in a few weeks he would refer to it again, speaking of it
casually but frequently, as a trip with definitely planned
limitations, and hinting at a sound business proposition which awaited
his return. The idea must filter through the clubs and out to
Greenlea, must have become an old story before he finally acted upon
it, so that his going would occasion no remark.
Once away, it would be simple enough to cable his instructions
regarding the sale of the house and postpone his return from time to
time until the old crowd had practically forgotten him. George would
remember, but old George wouldn’t suspect the truth if he vanished
to-morrow!
With the onus of fear lifted from him, Storm still shrank from
solitude. Decency and convention precluded an immediate return to his
clubs, and he desired above all things to avoid the society of those
who knew him and the details of the recent tragedy. He took to
satisfying his gregarious need by seeking out-of-the-way hotels and
restaurants frequented for the most part by the visiting foreigners
who thronged the city, where, sitting long over his coffee, he could
lose himself in the study of his neighbors.
On an evening a few days after his interview with Foulkes he was
seated at a table in an old-fashioned French hostelry far downtown,
listening to the snatches of staccato conversation which rose above
the subdued cadences of the orchestra and watching the scene brilliant
with the uniforms of half a dozen nations, when to his annoyance he
heard his name uttered in accents of cheery surprise.
Turning swiftly he beheld Millard, flushed and evidently slightly
exhilarated, rising from the corner table where he had been seated
with a sallow-faced, distinguished looking stranger in mufti.
He bowed coldly and returned with ostentatious deliberation to his
entrèe, hoping to discourage the other’s advance; but Millard was in
no mood to comprehend a rebuff.
“By Jove, old chap, delighted to find you here!” He shook Storm’s
reluctant hand and without invitation pulled out the opposite chair
and seated himself. “That’s the boy! Get around a bit and work up an
interest in life. No use moping. We miss you out home, but as I told
Dick Brewster, change is the thing for you, change——”
“What are you doing here?” Storm interrupted him brusquely. “Thought
you were wedded to the three-forty; it’s been a bully afternoon for
golf.”
“Business!” Millard waved a pompous hand toward the table he had just
quitted. “Golf’s not in it with high finance, and this is the greatest
proposition you ever heard of! Hundred per cent profit in three months
and safe as a church; good deal safer than the churches on the other
side have been!”
He grinned expansively at his own witticism, then his face clouded
dismally.
“Can’t go into it, though; wife won’t hear of it, and you know what it
is, Storm, when a woman holds the purse strings. You know how I’m
situated!”
Storm nodded. Everyone in Greenlea knew that Millard had married a
rich woman and suffered the pangs of hope deferred ever since. Then he
glanced up and frowned.
“Your friend is coming over,” he remarked in bored impatience. “When
you gestured toward him he must have taken it for an invitation.”
“’S all right!” Millard responded easily. “Wonderful chap, Du Chainat.
Wonderful proposition—Look here! You spoke of making some
reinvestments; here’s chance of a lifetime! Never heard of anything
like it! Gilt-edged—”
The stranger halted by the table and Millard made as if to rise and
then thought better of it.
“Storm, let me present Monsieur Maurice du Chainat. My old pal and
neighbor, Mr. Norman Storm.”
The Frenchman bowed with courtly suavity, and Storm could do no less
than proffer him a chair at the table and beckon to a waiter.
“Mentioned your little proposition, old chap,” the irrepressible
Millard continued, adding airily as a shade of protestation passed
over Monsieur du Chainat’s mobile countenance: “Oh I know it’s
confidential, but Storm’s all right. He wants to make some
reinvestments, and now’s his golden opportunity!”
“Mr. Millard has told me nothing of the nature of your proposition,
Monsieur,” Storm hastened to reassure the Frenchman. “He merely
mentioned it in passing.”
For a long minute, Monsieur du Chainat regarded him in courteous but
unmistakable appraisal. Then a genial smile lifted the ends of his
small black mustache.
“It is a confidential matter, as Monsieur Millard says, but there is
nothing—how do you say?—equivocal concerning it. We of France do not
make our transactions ordinarily as you do in America; we discuss, we
deliberate, we wait. And yet in this affair which I have undertaken
haste is, alas, of the utmost need. Time is of value; such value that
I will pay twice over for three hundred thousand francs.”
“You see, it’s a factory in one of the devastated towns,” Millard
interjected eagerly. “Old feud, trying to get ahead of the other
fellow. It means sixty thousand in our money, and the French
government’s giving him a grant of a hundred and twenty thousand in
three months, but it means ruin to wait. Other man’s got his capital
now——”
“But, my friend, Monsieur Storm is perhaps not interested; we bore
him,” Monsieur du Chainat interrupted. “The letter which our consul
here has given me to your great banker, Monsieur Whitmarsh, has
interested him to such an extent that the affair is all but closed.”
“Whitmarsh?” Storm pricked up his ears. The proposition must be good
if that most astute of international financiers considered it.
“But, yes.” The Frenchman shrugged deprecatingly. “It is, of course, a
trifling matter to engage his attention, but I am to have a second
interview with him to-morrow at three. I shall be happy to conclude my
mission, for there is attached to it the sentiment as well as what you
call business.”
A second interview! Whitmarsh wasted no time, and this must mean a
deal. Sixty thousand dollars, and doubled in three months! Storm
leaned impulsively across the table.
“What is your proposition, Monsieur, if I may ask? It sounds a
trifle—er, unusual.”
“It is.” The Frenchman smiled again. “You will understand, Monsieur
Storm, that in France it is not the custom to develop a manufacturing
concern until it grows too big for us and then sell out to a
corporation. With us business descends from generation to generation,
it becomes at once the idol and life of the family.
“My father-in-law, Henri Peronneau of Lille, has a soap factory
established by his grandfather. Twenty years ago, a dishonest chemist
in his employ stole the formula which rendered the Peronneau soap
famous and set up a rival factory. Both, of course, were dismantled
during the German occupation.
“Monsieur Peronneau has been granted a loan of six hundred thousand
francs from the government, but it cannot be obtained for three months
yet; meanwhile our rival has acquired more than that sum from an
English house, and if his factory is the first in operation it will
steal all our old trade, and Monsieur Peronneau, who is already
ruined, will have no opportunity to recoup. He is in frail health from
the slavery of the invasion, and his heart will be broken. Three
hundred thousand francs now will enable him to compete with his rival,
for his factory is in far better condition, and for that he is willing
to pay the entire sum which the government will lend him.
“I admit that I have tried to obtain the amount at a sacrifice less
great, but there is no time for lengthy investigation, and I have
found that people even in your generous America are afraid to trust my
credentials and the sponsorship of our consul. Only a man of Monsieur
Whitmarsh’s experience and caliber could comprehend that the affair is
bona fide, that he takes no risk. _Voyez_, here is the personal letter
which I have received from him.”
Storm glanced over the single sheet of terse, typed sentences ending
in the well-known, crabbed signature, and returned it to the
Frenchman.
“I congratulate you, Monsieur. I know Whitmarsh’s methods and this
looks as if he intended to take you up on it.”
Monsieur du Chainat flushed with pleasure.
“It is of great happiness to me,” he said simply. “Almost I have
despaired of my mission. At the Hotel Belterre, where I am staying,
there are so many of my compatriots here also to try to borrow that
they may rehabilitate themselves, and with so little success that I,
too, feared failure. But Monsieur Whitmarsh is shrewd; he knows—what
you say?—‘a good thing,’ and he makes no mistakes.”
The conversation drifted into desultory topics and after a half hour
Monsieur du Chainat took his leave, dragging the reluctant Millard
with him. As for Storm, he sat long over his cooling coffee, and until
far into the night he pondered the possibilities which this chance
meeting opened before him. The difference between sixty thousand
dollars and a hundred and twenty meant the difference between
luxurious living and the petty economies which would try his soul;
between independence for years of travel and care-free pleasure, and
the necessity of knuckling down after a brief respite to uncongenial
money-grubbing. It must be all right if Whitmarsh were going into it,
and his letter left no room for doubt on that score.
If he, Storm, had only met the Frenchman first!
In the morning he tried to concentrate on the affairs of the Trust
Company, but it was of no avail. The glittering opportunity aroused
all his gambling instinct and seemed all the more alluring in that it
was out of his reach. But was it? Perhaps Whitmarsh would fail, for
some reason, to accept the proposition; not from lack of faith in its
genuineness, for he must have looked into it with his usual caution
before going so far in the negotiations; but he had been known to turn
down deals of much greater magnitude at the last moment through sheer
eccentricity.
If Du Chainat could offer bona fide securities and he himself could
obtain a mortgage of ten thousand on the Greenlea house, he could add
that to his capital and take the plunge.
At noon, Storm telephoned to the Belterre and asked for Monsieur du
Chainat.
“This is Storm talking, Millard’s friend,” he answered. “I called up,
Monsieur, to tell you that if by any chance the Whitmarsh deal falls
through, I might consider your proposition myself . . . Yes, call me
up at my rooms, 0519 Riverside, at six. Good-bye.”
He hung up the receiver slowly. Suppose, after all, the man should be
an impostor? He would be risking all he had in the world in the event
that Whitmarsh did not take the proposition; all that stood between
him and the accursed treadmill of existence here within reach of the
memories which thrust out their tentacles to crush him. If that Lille
soap factory were a myth——!
He reached for the receiver once more and called the French consulate.
Yes, Monsieur Henri Peronneau, of Lille, was well known to them. His
son-in-law, Monsieur Maurice du Chainat, was now in this country
negotiating a loan to reconstruct the Peronneau factory. If Mr. Storm
were interested, a meeting could be arranged . . . .
Storm turned away from the booth with sparkling eyes. If Whitmarsh
refused the loan he would take a chance! Luck must be with him still;
that marvelous luck which had enabled him to elude the consequences of
his crime was yet running strong, At six o’clock he would know!