Langdon Jesse and his one-time associate and co-partner in lamb-shearing
"deals," Frederick Judd, met at luncheon in a restaurant in the
financial district a few days later.
Judd, one of the powers of "the Street," was past fifty-five, and he had
no great toleration for the vacuities of young men. This fact, however,
placed no inhibition on the admiration--it could scarcely be called a
liking--which he felt for Langdon Jesse; for Jesse, whatever else he may
have been, certainly was not vacuous in the matter of business; and it
was from the angle of their success in business that Judd exclusively
judged men. Jesse, well under forty, already was a veteran of the stock
market; and on at least one occasion he had deftly "trimmed" no less a
person than his former associate, Mr. Judd; wherefore Judd, with the
breadth of vision of the financial general in considering the strategy
of the general who has beaten him, admired Jesse, who had been
virtually his pupil, all the more; resolving, at the same time, not to
permit his quondam pupil to "trim" him again.
Jesse, accepting the nodded invitation, took a seat at the table at
which Judd, alone, was eating his heavy luncheon. They exchanged market
talk in brief, brittle phrases, for a while. Then Jesse, his
too-prominent lips curving, and seeming to be gazing over the top of
Judd's bare poll, said:
"Sumptious, isn't she?"
Judd, used to Jesse's adversions to the sumptuosity of women--many
women--went on doggedly eating. After a space he replied with a
monosyllable:
"Who?"
Jesse did not answer for a moment; nor did Judd seem to be particularly
worried over that fact.
"I dropped into your--er--your place on the Drive on Sunday night," said
Jesse, fastening an abnormally long cigarette into a remarkably long
cigarette holder of amber and gold.
Judd, his fork poised in the air, looked up at Jesse. There was a
question in his red-rimmed eyes; but Judd made it a point not to submit
questions of any consequence until he had turned them over in his mind
several times.
"So I heard," said Judd, with no obvious interest, pronging away again
with his fork.
"Who told you," asked Jesse, with a sharp glance at Judd. "Not----"
"How the devil should I remember who told me?" replied Judd in a
matter-of-fact tone. "What's the difference who told me, anyhow?"
But it made considerable difference, as a matter of fact, to Jesse; his
self-satisfaction and his serene belief in his ability to make an
immediate "impression" were very great; and when Judd told him he had
"heard" he had been at the Riverside Drive house he took it for granted
that Judd had "heard" it from the person on whom his thoughts were
dwelling; Louise Treharne, that is to say.
"Oh, no particular difference," said Jesse, blowing a cloud of acrid
Turkish cigarette smoke at Judd, which caused Judd to scowl. "I thought
perhaps----"
Judd knew perfectly well what he thought; but Judd often failed even to
mention things that he knew perfectly well.
"You take in those bear-garden affairs at Tony's--at Mrs. Treharne's,"
catching himself, "right along, don't you?" said Judd. "How the devil
you can endure that pack of imbecile, loquacious what-are-theys is more
than I can make out. One of those Sundays nights cured me."
Jesse, however, had not the least intention of being side-tracked.
"Well, she is--er--well, ripping; isn't she?" he said, after a pause.
Judd, perceiving the futility of evasion, gave way.
"Yes--if that's what you want me to say--and all ice, besides," said
Judd. "You're up against it there, son," he went on, judicially. "Or are
you looking for a death by freezing? Why, I'm afraid that she's going to
fracture one of her upper vertebrae even when she nods to me! And that's
all the recognition she ever gives me--a nod."
"She doesn't strike me as being so hopelessly Arctic as all that," said
Jesse, inordinately proud of what he considered his keen judgment of
women. "Did you ever happen to meet a woman with auburn hair who
possessed a--er--a frozen or freezing temperament? And, by the way, why
do you dwell upon her rigidity, so to speak, when she nods 'even to
you?' Why 'even to you?'"
Judd, a little choler showing in his purpling face, broke out:
"Because a man naturally expects a little manners, a little common
politeness, from people he's taking care of, doesn't he? She's living in
my house, by God!"
"That," said Jesse, quietly, "is precisely what I am getting at: since
she is living in your house--if she knows it is your house--she can't be
so--er--well, stupendously straight-laced, can she? And, by frozen, of
course you meant straight-laced."
"I meant exactly what I said," replied Judd, sulkily. "Stop twisting my
words around, will you? I said that she was ice, and that is what I
meant to say. You're on a blind trail, Jesse, if that's what you're
getting at. Take it from me. You're a hit with 'em, I know, and all that
sort of rot. But this one is more than your match. She'll shrivel you
good and plenty if you try anything on with her. At that, why can't you
let her alone? There are plenty of the other kind--your kind. What's the
matter, anyhow? Have all the show girls moved out of New York?"
Jesse didn't relish the slap. It was not exactly a truthful slap,
moreover. Jesse had withdrawn his devotions to "show girls" several
years before; since doing which he had quarried in entirely different
quarters.
"Let the girl alone--that's my advice," went on Judd, seized for the
moment by a flickering sense of fairness. "I don't fancy her
particularly--because she's so damned haughty with me, I suppose, and
looks down upon me from a mountain. But she's all right. I know that,
and I'm telling it to you for your information. Better forget it. There
isn't a chance on earth for you, anyhow."
Jesse didn't appear to be in the least thrown off the quest by the
advice.
"Are you sure," he inquired of Judd after a short silence, "that she
knows just where you figure in the Riverside Drive establishment?"
"Well, you could see for yourself that she is more than seven years of
age, couldn't you?" briefly replied Judd.
"But," observed Jesse, obviously seeking to get hold of all of the
threads of the situation, "she is only recently out of school, I
understand, and perhaps she hasn't yet fully grasped----"
"I don't know what she has grasped, and I don't care a damn," thrust in
Judd, tired of the colloquy. "She must know a good deal about the way
things stand or she wouldn't treat me as if I were rubbish. I can see
how I stick in her throat. When it comes to that, why shouldn't I? She's
only a schoolgirl, if she is a head taller than I am. Her mother made an
idiotic mistake in having the girl around the place. But that's none of
my affair. I take the game as it stands. Only I advise you to stand
clear. You might as well be decent for once in your life. Unless, of
course," and Judd shot a glance of inquiry at Jesse, "you mean to turn
respectable--it's about time--and go in for the marrying idea?"
Jesse's somewhat waxy, excessively smooth face flushed at Judd's
afterthought.
"I marry?" he said, with a distinctly disagreeable laugh. "Well, it may
come to that, some day or other. But can you see me marrying the
daughter of your acknowledged----" He fumbled for the word; "mistress"
was what he wanted to say, but he discarded it out of sheer timidity;
"--your acknowledged companion?" he finished.
"Be good enough to keep out of my personal affairs, Jesse," said Judd,
coldly. "I don't dip into your private concerns. You may take my advice
or leave it. But you want to go pretty slow, if you're asking me. Nobody
has yet forgotten that West Indian affair of yours; just remember that."
With Judd, one shot called for another. Jesse gave a start and paled
slightly at Judd's allusion to "the West Indian affair." Judd waited
only long enough to see that the shot found its mark; then, with an
amused leer, he rose from the table, his luncheon finished, and lumbered
away with a nod.
Jesse, discarding his cigarette, bit off the end of a cigar and fumed.
The "West Indian affair" was a sore subject with him solely because the
world knew all about it. He had not the least feeling of
self-condemnation over it; it was the thought that, for once, he had
been found out that caused him to rage internally when the matter was
adverted to; for the newspapers had been full of it at the time of the
occurrence.
"The West Indian affair," Jesse well knew, had not been forgotten, as
Judd had said, nor was it likely to be forgotten. It threw a raking
light upon his general attitude toward and his treatment of women. A
year before, after one of his periodical triumphs in the cotton market,
in which, to quote the newspapers' way of putting it, he had "cleaned up
millions," Jesse had made a midwinter cruise of the West Indies on his
yacht. A girl of unusual beauty, whom he had met by accident on an
automobile tour on Long Island, had been his companion on the cruise.
She was inexperienced, of humble parentage, and he had overborne her
objections by vaguely intimating something as to a marriage when they
should arrive in the West Indies. She had protested when, upon the
yacht's touching at many ports, he had of course shown not the least
inclination to make good his merely intimated promise; and, in his wrath
over her attitude, he had not only committed the indefensible crime, but
he had made the stupendous mistake, viewed from the politic point of
view, of deserting the girl in a West Indian city, without money or
resources, without even her clothing, and sailing back to New York
alone.
The girl, thus stranded amid new and unfriendly surroundings, had but
one resource--the American consul. The consul provided for her passage
back to New York. The correspondents of the New York newspapers in the
West Indian city had got hold of the details, adding a few neatly
whimsical touches of their own, and for days the newspapers had reeked
with the story. There had been talk of prosecuting Jesse for abduction,
but he had employed the underground method, rendered easily available to
him owing to his wealth, to smother that suggestion. But the grisly
affair had thrown a cloud over Jesse from which he knew, raging as he
knew it, there was no emerging. Several of his clubs--the good ones--had
dropped him; men and women of the world to which he aspired, and in
which he had been making progress, cut him right and left; his name had
been erased from most of the worth-while invitation lists; and the hole
in his armor was wide open to the shafts of the kind Judd had just
discharged at him.
Jesse sat at the table and gnawed angrily at his unlighted cigar for a
long time after Judd had gone; it was characteristic of him that his
compunction was all for himself. He had been found out and pilloried.
That was what cut him. He never gave a thought to the young woman whose
life he had destroyed.
Jesse had been instantly struck by the beauty of Louise Treharne. He
surmised that it was through no complaisance on her part, but purely
because she had been helpless in the matter, that she had found herself
living with her ostracised mother in the house on the Drive. That
situation, he was confident, had been thrust upon her. But this
consideration, and the additional one that she was, as he could not have
failed to note, nobly undergoing the ordeal, which might have aroused
the admiration and excited the sympathy of a man of merely average
fairness, had touched no compassionate chord in Langdon Jesse. Adopting
the trivial and far-fetched methods of analysis which are employed by
men who consider themselves expert in their knowledge of women, he had
calmly concluded that in all likelihood Louise Treharne's manner was a
skillfully-studied pose. At any rate he meant to find out. He meant to
"know her better." It was thus that his determination framed itself in
his mind; he would "know her better."
In gaining the attention of women, he believed in the gentle siege and
then the grand assault; it was, in truth, the only "system" with which
he had any familiarity, and it had generally proved successful.
Jesse returned to his office, summoned his car, went to his suite at the
Plaza, gave himself over to the grooming activities of his man for an
hour; then, resuming his car, he went to the house on Riverside Drive.
* * * * *
Louise, in brown walking suit and brown turban, her cheeks ruddy from a
long and rapid walk from one end of the Park to the other, had just
returned when Jesse's card was brought up. She was studying the card,
trying to devise an excuse--for she shrank from the thought of seeing
him--when her mother, ready for her motor airing, entered the room.
"I just caught sight of Mr. Jesse's car from my window," said Mrs.
Treharne to Louise. Louise observed that her mother was in the same
fluttered state that she had been in when she had found Jesse talking to
her on the previous Sunday night. "He has sent his card to you? Of
course you are going to see him?"
"I think I shall not see him, mother," said Louise, ringing for Heloise
with the purpose of sending word that she was indisposed, not at
home--anything.
Mrs. Treharne looked annoyed and there was irritation in her question:
"Why not, my dear?"
"I don't care for him, mother," said Louise, frankly. "In fact, I
believe I rather dislike him. Do you think he is the sort of man I
should meet?"
Louise was intensely disappointed that her mother should care to have
her meet Jesse. She tried to assure herself that her mother did not know
or realize the character of the man as she herself had heard it briefly
described by Laura; but she found that a bit difficult to believe.
"Tell me, please, Louise, why you ask me such a question as that," said
Mrs. Treharne, irritatedly. "What do you know about Mr. Jesse? Who has
been telling you things about him?"
Louise, remaining silent, plainly showed that she did not care to answer
her mother's question.
"It was Laura, no doubt," went on Mrs. Treharne. "Laura, I begin to
fear, is growing garrulous. You must not permit her to put absurd ideas
into your head, my dear. I must speak to her about it."
"Pray do not, mother," said Louise, earnestly. "She is one of the
dearest women in the world, and everything that she tells me, I know, is
not only perfectly true, but for my good. It is not anything said to me
by Laura that makes me dislike the idea of receiving Mr. Jesse. It is
simply that I don't like him. There is a boldness, an effrontery, a
cynicism, about him that make me distrust him. I don't care for his type
of man. That is all."
"You must not fall into the habit of forming sudden prejudices, my
dear," said her mother, diplomatically assuming an air of grave
persuasiveness. "Mr. Jesse no doubt has had his fling at life. What
worth-while man of his age hasn't? But he is a man of mark. He has made
his way as few men have. Of course you found him handsome, _distingué_?
Most women do, my dear. And I could see that he was greatly struck with
you. You will soon be twenty, Louise; and Mr. Jesse, perhaps I should
remind you, is a great _parti_."
Louise felt herself crimsoning. Her mother did know Jesse's record,
then. That was manifest from her words. And yet she was calmly exalting
him as an "eligible!"
The girl so shrank from having any further conversation with her mother
on the subject just then that she turned to her and said:
"I would not see him of my own volition, mother; but if you very much
wish it, I shall see him."
"For heaven's sake, Louise, don't look so terribly austere and crushed
over it!" broke out Mrs. Treharne. "The man will not kidnap you! I very
much wish that you should be sensible and receive eligible men, of
course. Isn't that a perfectly natural wish?"
Louise, without another word, not stopping to remove her turban or even
glance in the glass, went down-stairs to receive Jesse. Her mother
fluttered past the drawing-room door a moment later, merely stopping
for a word of over-effusive greeting to Jesse before joining the waiting
Judd in his car. Jesse, whether by accident or from foreknowledge, had
timed his visit well. He was quite alone on the floor with Louise
Treharne. She caught the gleam of his upraised eyes and noted the bold
persistence of the question in them when, still in his fur overcoat, he
turned from the contemplation of a picture to greet her.
"Ah," he said with an attempt at airiness, slipping out of the overcoat
and extending his hand, "our Empress already has been out?" glancing at
her turban and her wind-freshened cheeks. "That is unfortunate. I was
about to place my car at her disposal----"
He withdrew his hand, not seeming to notice that Louise had failed to
see it.
"Yes, I have been walking," put in Louise, in no wise stiffly, but with
an air of preoccupied withdrawal which she genuinely felt. "As to what
you call me, I believe I should prefer to be known by my name."
Jesse, remembering what Judd had said as to the likelihood of his being
frozen or shrivelled, laughed inwardly. He rather enjoyed being rebuffed
by women--at first. It made the game keener. None of them, he remembered
now with complaisancy, continued to rebuff him for very long.
"Pardon me, Miss Treharne," he said, with a certain languishing air
which Louise found even more offensive than his initial familiarity. "I
thought, when the title was so spontaneously applied to you on Sunday
night, that perhaps you found it agreeable. But it is difficult to
gauge--women." He dwelt upon the word "women," thinking that,
considering how recently she had left school, it might flatter her.
Louise chose to talk commonplaces. Her bed-rock genuineness made it
impossible for her to affect an interest in a visitor which she did not
feel. And her lack of interest in Jesse was complicated by her growing
dislike for him.
"I am doubly disappointed," said Jesse after a pause which he did not
find embarrassing. Nothing embarrassed Jesse when he had his mind
definitely set upon a purpose. "First, I had hoped, as I say, that, not
having been out, you would honor me by accepting the use of my car.
Second, I am desolated because you are wearing a hat. I had been
promising myself another glimpse of your superb hair. Is it _banal_ to
put it that way? I am afraid so. But consider the temptation! Was it
Aspasia or Cleopatra whose hair was of the glorious shade of yours--or
both?"
"Mr. Jesse," said Louise, now quite _dégagé_, facing him squarely and
speaking with the greatest deliberation, "I seem to find, from my two
limited conversations with you, that you are suffering under some sort
of a misapprehension as to me. You will discover that yourself, I think,
if you will take the trouble to recur to several things you already have
said to me after an acquaintanceship, all told, of perhaps ten minutes.
Suppose we seek a less personal plane? I am too familiar with my hair to
care to have it made a subject of extended remarks on the part of men
whom I scarcely know. There are less pointed themes. Permit me to
suggest that we occupy ourselves in finding them."
"By God, a broadside!" said Jesse to himself, not in the least abashed;
his admiration always grew for women who trounced him--at first. "I
didn't think she had it in her! And Judd, the fat imbecile, called her
an iceberg! She is a volcano!"
Aloud, he said, with a neatly-assumed air of subjection and penitence:
"Well delivered, Miss Treharne. But I merit it. I have made the error of
supposing--"
"That my comparatively recent return from school, and the
open-mindedness naturally associated with that," Louise quietly
interrupted, "made me a fair target for your somewhat labored and not
particularly apt compliments. Yes, you erred decisively there."
"Again!" thought Jesse, bubbling with finely-concealed delight. "She
_is_ an empress right enough, whether she likes to be called that or
not! What a prize!"
Aloud, he said with an air of chastened gravity:
"You do me scant justice there, Miss Treharne, but that is easily
passed, seeing how chagrinedly conscious I am that I deserved your
rebuke in the first instance. You are fond of motoring?" changing the
subject with no great deftness.
"No," replied Louise, sufficiently out of hand. "I don't in the least
care for it." The conversation was irksome to her and she would not
pretend that it was not.
"I inquired," said Jesse, looking chapfallen though he did not in the
least feel so, "because I had been hoping you might do me the honor to
accept the use--the steady use--of one of my cars. I have several," this
last with an ostentation that rather sickened Louise. But she could not
allow the carefully veiled suggestion in his words to pass.
"Mr. Jesse," she said, reverting to her tone of deliberation and again
gazing straight at him, "aside from the fact that, as I have told you, I
don't in the least care for motoring, will you be good enough to suggest
to me just one fairly intelligible reason why I should accept your
proffer of the use--'the steady use'--of one of your cars? It may be
that you will have some reason to offer for what, otherwise, I should
deem a distinct impertinence."
Jesse's eyes gleamed with the joy of it. "What a prize!" he thought
again.
"I seem, Miss Treharne," he said with a laugh which he purposely made
uneasy, "to be stumbling upon one blunder after another. There is no
reason for my having offered you the use of one of my cars--and I hasten
to withdraw the offer, since it seems to offend you--other than my
friendship of long standing with your mother and my desire--my hope, I
was about to say--that you, too, might consider me worthy of your
friendship."
It was rather adroitly turned, but it completely missed fire.
"I don't seem to recall that it is necessary for one to adopt one's
mother's friends as one's own," said Louise, without the least
hesitancy. His assumption of an easily-penetrated ingratiating manner
had thoroughly disgusted her; she wanted him to take his departure; and
she chose the most straightout means to that end. There was no possible
way for her to know that Jesse enjoyed the early taunts of some women
much as he relished the cocktails with which he preceded his dinners,
and for very much the same reason--they were appetizers.
He rose with an air of irresolution which he was far from feeling.
"I fear," he said, resignedly, "that something has happened--or perhaps
that something has been said--to predispose or prejudice you against me,
Miss Treharne. It is a conclusion to which I am driven."
He paused, then faced her with an appearance of frankness which he was
adept at assuming.
"Miss Treharne," he went on, cleverly adopting a tone with a tremolo
note in it, "you will grant, I think, that men--men, that is to say, who
cut any sort of figure in affairs"--a flourish here--"often are
misjudged. Without in the least desiring to pose as one who has been a
victim of such misjudgment, I feel, nevertheless----" Here he stopped,
having carefully calculated his stopping point, and, with impulsively
extended hands, he went on with a beautifully acted semblance of real
feeling: "Miss Treharne, I merely ask you to give me a chance to prove
myself; a chance at least to wear the candidate's stripes for your
friendship."
Despite her youthfulness and her utter inexperience with men of Jesse's
type, Louise, aided by an unusually subtle intuition, and mindful of
what she had heard of Jesse, caught the hollow ring in his tone,
detected the false shifty light in his now furtive, eager eyes.
She rose.
"You are quite overpoweringly in earnest over what seems to me a very
trivial matter, Mr. Jesse," she said with a little laugh that sounded
harsh even to her own ears.
"You gravely underestimate the value of your friendship in calling it
trivial, Miss Treharne," said Jesse, rising also; for at length he was
ready to accept the dismissal which a less thick-skinned man, even of
his type, would have taken long before.
"I have not been in the habit of placing any sort of an appraisal upon
the value of my friendship," she replied, succinctly.
He thrust his arms into the sleeves of his greatcoat of fur and
strolled, with a downcast air, to the drawing-room door.
"This is not your normal mood, Miss Treharne," he said, turning upon her
a smile that he meant to be wan. "You see what unresentful justice I do
you. There are to be other days. I shall find you in a humor less
inclined to magnify my candidly professed demerits. I hope to have an
opportunity to prove to you that I have at least a few merits to balance
the faults."
The hint was sufficiently broad, but Louise appeared to be momentarily
obtuse. At any rate she did not extend the invitation he too patently
fished for. Her reticence in that respect, however, did not in the least
abash Jesse.
"At least I have the cheering knowledge that this door is open to me,"
he said, entering the foyer on his way out. "Have I not?"
Unavailingly Louise strove to steady herself in order to thrust back the
color which she felt mounting to her face.
"It is not my door," she said in a low tone; and instantly was keenly
sorry for having said it.
"Oh, I quite understand that," he said, with an air of lightness, though
at the moment he did not dare to turn and look at her. "But it is all
the same, since it is your mother's, is it not?"
She made no reply. She felt that she deserved the barb for having given
him the opportunity to discharge it. He bowed low, essayed the smile
that he considered his most engaging one, and went out to his waiting
car.
For the second time after having been in the presence of Langdon Jesse,
Louise went to her rooms and threw all the windows wide; then stood in
the wintry eddies and permitted the cold, sweet air to enwrap and purify
her.
* * * * *
When Mrs. Treharne, after leaving Louise and Jesse together, stepped
into the car with Judd, she found that adipose man of finance chuckling
softly to himself. She deigned not to inquire of him the reason for his
chuckling--knowing, of course, that presently he would be volunteering
that information himself.
"That was Jesse's car in front of the house, wasn't it, Tony?" he asked
her, still chuckling unpleasantly as the car pulled away from the curb.
"Yes," she replied, alert of a sudden, but disdaining to appear so.
"Jesse is calling to see--er--your daughter, eh?" Judd asked, continuing
his rumbling manifestations of joviality.
"He is," replied Mrs. Treharne, carefully screening her impatience to
catch Judd's drift. "But I fail to see why that fact should incite you
to give vent to such a harrowing series of low comedy chuckles."
"Quite so, quite so, my dear Antoinette," said Judd, soothingly, but not
in the least diminishing his choppy cachinnatory performance.
Mrs. Treharne, with an air of disgust which merely screened her worried
curiosity, permitted him to continue for a while. Then she said, with an
air of gravity intended to drag him back to his naturally sullen state,
but assumed also for the purpose of sounding him:
"Jesse was plainly struck with Louise on Sunday night last. Her position
now, of course, is hideous. Jesse may be the solution."
Judd straightened himself in his seat and suddenly stopped chuckling.
Then he glanced with quizzical keenness out of slitted eyes at his
companion.
"Meaning, I suppose," he said, "that you have an idea that Jesse might
take it into his head to marry her?"
"What else could I mean?" she asked him huskily.
"Quite so, quite so, my dear Antoinette," said Judd, leaning back in his
seat again. "Of course. Certainly. I fully understand you," and he
closed his eyes as if about to lapse into a refreshing nap.
Mrs. Treharne, distinctly wrought up, grasped one of the lapels of his
seal-lined greatcoat and shook him determinedly.
"Be good enough to explain to me, and at once, precisely what you mean,"
she said rapidly, a growing hoarseness in her tone.
Judd, for his part, promptly relapsed into his chuckling.
"It is nothing, my dear--nothing at all, I assure you," he said, between
wheezes. "Only it strikes me as rather diverting that anybody should
consider Jesse in the light of a matrimonial eligible. When, by the way,
did you gather the idea that Jesse was a marrying man? Since
that--er--somewhat widely-exploited little affair of his in the West
Indies last year? Or more recently?"
Judd generally won in the little skirmishes they had in the motor car.
The fact that he had won again was plainly indicated by the fact that
she remained silent for the remainder of the ride.