CHAPTER TEN
AS I sat in that apartment of Wendy Washburn's I felt like a storm-battered man-of-war that had slipped into a neutral port for its legal and limited stay and before long would be once more breasting the waves of an open sea.
So as I lay in that sheltered and orderly haven, a flock of weary-eyed wishes and longings seemed to swarm up from somewhere below, the same as tired seamen might swarm to the decks of their ship as it lay beside homely green harbor-hills and sloping town-streets which they could never hope to tread.
For it was, in the first place, a dream of an apartment, with rooms enough, apparently, to house an Elks' convention. From what I could see of its lay-out, I took it to be a duplex. If it harbored other members of my Hero-Man's family, I had no chance of getting a glimpse of them. I was glad enough to rest my eyes on old brass and the dull reflection of shaded lights on polished wood and the quiet tones of tapestry which centuries of time had mellowed into urbanity, as it seems to do with everything but human beings.
Then, as we passed through into a dream of a dining-room, I found a table laid for two. I stood for a moment staring rather stupidly down at that island of white damask floating in its sea of gloom, at the silver with the light glinting on it, at the cut-glass that seemed so cold and non-committal and at the same time so warm in its prismatic flashes of accidental color. That table, I knew, couldn't have been prepared for me. It wasn't a frame-up, as Bud would have phrased it. There had been no chance for any such move. So I found myself wondering if it was always kept in that condition of spotless preparedness, like the emergency room in a city hospital. I wondered if it was set out there every evening, like a poacher's night-line, to trap each and every nibbler that happened along.
Then I felt ashamed of my suspicion. For when your bait is worth more than your catch it doesn't exactly pay to fish. I knew, as I stared down at the round island of damask, with a vase of Richmond roses flaming at its center like a tiny volcano, that it wasn't a dead-fall in disguise. And I preferred to think of it as being suddenly conjured there, by a clap of the hands. It was some final touch of midnight magic. That night, I remembered, wasn't to be judged as you judge an ordinary night of life. It was a sort of Grimm's fairy-tale with tassels on. It was a sort of nursery-rhyme on wheels. For I'd already been through the Cinderella rôle, with the startled Prince finding the lost slipper and returning it to its owner,—though, of course, an eight-cylinder limousine could never quite take the place of a pumpkin shell coach.
If my Prince had turned into Aladdin the tailor's son, and insisted on rubbing his magic lamp, it was not for me to rub my eyes and question his power. I was too tired to think, and too hungry to haggle over details. And the whole thing seemed a sort of Arabian Nights' adventure where the City of Spot-Cash had got strangely tangled up with the City of Brass, and Broadway and Central Park badly mixed with Bagdad, with the Tigris twisting down past the Palisades where the Hudson ought to have been.
It was Wendy Washburn himself—still insisting on taking it all as a matter of course—who promptly brought me back to earth.
"Don't you think it would be as well to slip off that heavy coat?" he inquired.
He held it up as I wriggled out of it.
"One gets so used to fur," I announced, for he was smiling a little, apparently at the thought of my wearing Hudson seal so early in the season.
"Yes, one does," he agreed, as he laid the coat carefully aside. "Yet from its appearance I'd venture a guess that you haven't had it long."
I gave him a good look, but his face was as non-committal as his cut-glass.
"No, they're not wearing them long this year," I parried, and he solemnly wagged his head, as though that pearl of wisdom were something requiring deep thought. Then he came out of his trance.
"Hungry?" he inquired, as he held a chair for me.
"Starving," I told him as I sank into it, stowing the club-bag close in down by my feet, where I could keep an inquiring toe against its side, the same as a cow going to market keeps a nose against her precious calf.
Then I deliberately turned the ring on my finger, so that the big ruby surrounded by black pearls couldn't keep from staring him in the face. I waited to see what he would do when he caught sight of it. But, to my surprise, he didn't seem to recognize it. So there was, I concluded, more than one Wendy in the world.
"Champagne?" he casually inquired, as he sat down opposite me and the little Jap pussyfooted into the room.
"I never drink," I told him. I don't know whether it was the promptness or the primness with which I piped out that virtuous declaration that brought one of the heat-lightning smiles to his lips.
"Of course," he agreed. But I turned pink again, for I still felt that he was in some way making fun of me.
He sat studying me, in an abstracted sort of way as I began to eat. He could see, I suppose, that I was hungry, and long before the days when I used to consume untold quantities of marshmallows and olives smuggled into the Ursuline academy I had won a justly established reputation as an upstanding and honest eater. The repast confronting me may not have had all the romance of a midnight feast behind a practise-piano in a lightless recreation-room, but it made up in material what it lacked in spirit. For there was boned capon, and a mousse of ham, and Parker House rolls, and some queer tasting little sandwiches which my Hero-Man told me were made of caviar. But the latter I promptly passed by for a little silver boat of French bon-bons.
Then Wendy Washburn began to fish, for it was plain that I was still perplexing him.
"I suppose you feel rather done out?" he ventured, as I switched to a dish of salted nuts.
"Why should I?" I parried, wringing a perverse satisfaction out of the fact I could be a puzzle to him.
"I thought that you must—well, that you must have had rather a hard night of it," he explained. But he did it somewhat haltingly.
"Where?" I inquired, determined not to make his investigations too easy for him.
"That was what I was hoping you would tell me," he replied.
The Jap had brought in tea-things, and my Hero-Man, I noticed, was making the tea with his own hands. It didn't seem right; yet I knew that it must be right, or Wendy Washburn would never have done it. The tea itself, however, tasted like plum-blossoms, and I didn't skimp it, for after emptying that dish of salted nuts I found that I was terribly thirsty.
"It won't keep you awake?" he asked, as I downed my second cup.
I had to laugh at that.
"Me awake? I've got other things to keep me awake!"
"Worries?"
"They were until I met you." And I rounded up boldness enough to look right at him as I said it.
"Then for the second time I've been able to help you," he said, with his quiet smile.
I nodded my head. His face looked stern, for a moment. The only thing that made it relax was my gesture of dignified disdain when his Jap servant held a cigarette-box of chased silver in front of me.
"So you're not that sort of girl either?" said the man across the table from me.
"I hope not," I said. I said it with all the dignity that I could command. Shocking one's Hero-Man with the eye-opening phrases of the underworld seemed very different to shocking him by one's actions.
"My sister-in-law, the duchess, does about forty of 'em a day!" he dolefully acknowledged. Most families, I remembered, had a skeleton or two in their closets.
"I wasn't brought up that way," I rather stiffly announced. And I looked up quickly to see whether or not he was laughing at me. But his face, as far as I could make out, was quite sober.
"We never are," was his somewhat puzzling reply. But I edged away from that subject, for we seemed to be skating on pretty thin ice.
"I suppose you don't remember some advice you gave me, that first day I met you?" I asked.
"About what?"
"About reading Browning," I reminded him.
"Did you?" he asked, with a new light in his face.
"I did," I acknowledged. "And it nearly drove me nuts!"
"Nuts?" he repeated. "Oh, yes; of course, nuts. By that I infer that you mean insane?"
"If you prefer it that way," I said. But I wasn't thinking of Browning, at the moment, for I'd just kicked the black bag to make sure it was at my feet.
"I'm afraid a great many of us are that way, if we only knew it," generalized my quiet-eyed companion, as he reached for a cigarette.
I had leaned forward against the table, and the pressure of Copperhead Kate's automatic under my waist made me suddenly think of other things.
"Do you know," I told the man across the table from me, "I rather believe the whole world has gone nuts!"
He did not speak for a moment or two.
"And to what do you attribute this—er—this somewhat disturbing belief?"
"To what I've gone through during the last six hours," was my prompt response.
"What has that been?" he just as promptly demanded.
I sat studying his face, for a minute or two, wondering just what I could tell him, asking myself just what he would expect of me. But there was a coolness and aloofness about him that frightened me. And I hadn't yet discovered just what I expected of myself.
"Instead of answering that question," I told him, "I'd rather ask you a few."
"For example?" he prompted.
"Who are the Bartletts?" I demanded.
"The Bartletts?" he meditatively repeated. "Bartletts? There must be a great many Bartletts."
"Then who is Clarissa Bartlett?" I asked.
"Why?" he casually inquired.
"I said I'd rather ask the questions," I reminded him.
"Then supposing we look 'em up in the Social Register," he quietly suggested. And I remembered how Bud had once studied the starry names in that same Social Register, though for strictly business reasons.
"I think she's sometimes called Claire," I said, going back to the problem of the Bartletts.
"And has anything of importance happened to her?" the man across the table was quietly inquiring.
"Something very important," I just as quietly responded.
Then something in his manner, something which I couldn't define, something which I could never have explained, made me pull up short. I felt like Eliza crossing the ice, only the bloodhounds were in my own heart, instead of on the other side of the Ohio. And you can't run away from what you carry in your own heart.
"You don't know much about me, do you?" I finally said to that strange friend of mine, who, at one turn of a card, might in some way prove himself an enemy.
"Far more than you imagine," he said, though I knew he wasn't altogether sincere in saying it. "But you, on the other hand, know very little about me!"
"Would you prefer that I didn't know more?" I asked him. And I tried to ask it honestly.
He seemed to realize that. For the first time that night a look of embarrassment crept into his face.
"I'm afraid you'd be ashamed of me, if you did," he finally acknowledged.
"Then how about me?" I asked.
He looked at me, as solemn as a judge.
"You are still a bundle of contradictions to me," was all he ventured to say.
"Well, I rather surprise myself now and then," I acknowledged, a little chilled by that neutral-tinted description of myself. For every woman has a hunger to be something positive, even though she can't be something superlative. And I couldn't get away from the impression that we were both beating about the bush, that we were merely fencing when time was too precious to be wasted on words.
That Hero-Man of mine must have felt somewhat the same, for he suddenly turned to me and asked me a question which sent a Mississippi of nettle-rash right down from the collar of Copperhead Kate's black waist to the toe in the stolen suede slipper which I was keeping pressed against the black club-bag. He spoke quietly enough, but it seemed to come like a thunder-clap.
"Did you make a good haul to-night?"
I could feel the color go slowly up to the roots of my hair as I sat staring at him.
"What do you mean by that?" I somewhat weakly inquired.
"Precisely what I said," was his answer, and his voice reminded me of a razor-blade wrapped in chamois. "Have you made a good haul?"
I sat there in silence, trying to size him up. I rather resented having ten-inch shells exploded that way in my face. I was equally shocked to find that he had merely been playing a part. He accepted me, after all, as nothing more than a gun-moll.
I must have stared into his impassive face for a full two minutes. Then, in a flash, I decided to give him a dose of his own medicine. Since he reveled in abruptness, I'd give him the once-over without any orchestra-trimmings. If he'd had all he wanted of fencing, he was quite welcome to naked steel.
I pushed my chair back a little from the table. I reached down and lifted the club-bag to my knees. Then I drew back the fastenings at each end of its top, tilted the bag so the light from the shaded electrolier would fall more directly upon what it held, and opened it.
It made a show, all right. That cave-garden of Aladdin's in which all the precious stones grew on trees would have looked like the Great American Desert beside it.
My Hero-Man promptly stood up in his place, put his hands on the table, and leaned across toward where I sat. That half-quizzical smile was no longer on his face. But it was not exactly surprise that he showed. It seemed to me more like consternation, for his eyes narrowed, as though he were in a brown study. I would have laughed, only the sternness of his face rather frightened me.
"How did you get that stuff?" he asked.
Most men would have asked me where I got it. But my Hero-Man was not like most men.
"How did you get that stuff?" he repeated, as he sank back into his chair. I had the club-bag on the table by this time, and gave him the full benefit of the string of pearls that looked as though a white leghorn had laid them. Beside them, on the table-cloth, I put a sunburst of diamonds that gave me the prairie-squint to look at in the strong light. And next came a ruby pendant, of one big stone that looked like the tail-light of the Twentieth Century Limited surrounded by about a dozen emeralds, and next the lavaliere that was long enough to hang a family washing on.
"You can't call me a piker, at any rate!" I said, with all the audacity that I could screw up. For the eyes of my Hero-Man were actually beginning to disturb me.
"You can't call me a piker, at any rate!" I said
"Oh, I say, this does mix things up!" he finally exclaimed, as though he were thinking out loud.
"Of course it mixes things up," I chirped back at him, shrinking back into my crook talk as a turtle shrinks back into its shell, "and especially for the ginks who are out their family jewels!"
He shook his head.
"I don't mean for them," he said. "I mean for you."
I tried to laugh, but it fell short. I was really beginning to feel a little frightened.
"I wish you hadn't done this!" Wendy Washburn said to me.
It seemed the first really sincere and direct statement that he had made to me all that night. It was as though, at a moment's notice and for a moment's time, he had dropped his mask.
"Why?" I asked him. And it flashed through me, for one wild breath or two, that this man must be In the same line of business as Bud Griswold's, with an outsider edging in on the beat that he had picketed out for himself.
"Why?" I repeated, studying his face, which still seemed heavy with a sort of condescending I'm-terribly-sorry-for-you expression.
But the next moment the mask went up, like a shutter over a window. He even smiled a little as he reached out for another cigarette.
"You don't happen to be looking for a partner, do you?" he inquired, as he stared rather abstractedly over that sparkling array of family junk.
"I need one badly," I rather surprised him by admitting.
"Could I possibly qualify?" he asked, after a moment's pause.
"I don't think so," I told him.
"I'm sorry," he announced, with an almost listless motion toward the black club-bag. "For I've done a bit of adventuring myself along these lines."
I looked up at him quickly, suddenly asking myself if it could indeed be true that this mysteriously calm-eyed man was by any chance what Bud and his friends would call a crook? A crook! I hated that ugly and overworked word. I hated it as much as I hated the tricks and meannesses and cruelties with which the bearer of any such brand was compelled to fill his life. For I had long since given up my girlish faith in gentleman burglars and evening-dress Raffles, who were criminals only at strictly stated hours and in strictly certain directions. I knew there was no such animal, outside the movies and the Broadway melodramas. Even poor old Bud, in his time, had tried to be a Twentieth Century Robin Hood, and he had made anything but a success of it. I simply refused to accept Wendy Washburn as either a safe-breaker or a gem-thief. And I preferred steering away from that disturbing topic. I wanted my Hero-Man to keep to his pedestal.
"Then perhaps you can advise me what to do with this," I suggested, as a nurse says "See-the-moo-cow!" to distract a wayward child.
He stared down at the loot.
"Why, the first thing, I suppose, would be to take stock," was his matter-of-fact enough suggestion.
"That's exactly what I've been wanting to do," I admitted.
"No time, I suppose," he mildly inquired, as he took out a gold pocket-pencil, "to make inventories as you grab goods like that?"
""That always comes afterward," I calmly explained, "especially when you do the work as I have to do it."
He brought his chair and came and sat beside me. I could hear him gasp, quite plainly, as I lifted out the first bundle of papers. Then still again he stared at me.
"Where did those things come from?" he asked. He seemed no longer interested in just how I got them.
"I don't know," I told him. And that, to all intents and purposes, was the truth.
"You don't know!" he repeated, as he took up one of the packages and riffled through it. "But you do know, I suppose, that these are what our commercial friends would call gilt-edged securities?" He did not wait for an answer, for ho was checking through that first package of documents. "And this bundle, I imagine, should be worth almost a hundred thousand dollars!"
"Gee!" I said. Then I stared down into the bag. There were five more packages there very much like the first. My face must have turned rather white, for the man at my side gave me a quick glance, half of inquiry, half of apprehension. Then he turned back to the table.
I knew, by this time, that I was no longer in his thoughts. He was no more conscious of me, as he sat there with that worried look on his face, than a Wall Street magnate with a million-dollar deal to think over is conscious of the tow-headed stenographer who waits with her pad ready at one end of his desk. Yet there was nothing reproving about either his looks or his movements. He seemed more like a school-teacher who'd been stumped by a problem handed up to him by the least promising of all his pupils. And it was a problem which in some way had to be worked out.
"We'll just tabulate these few trifles first," he finally announced, as he reached for a sheet of paper. Then he took his little gold pocket-pencil and deftly made out a list, as neat as an auctioneer's, first of the family jewelry and then of the bonds and certificates in the six different bundles. Then he added up the neat little row of figures which he'd jotted down.
"Just a trifle over half a million," he announced, without a ghost of a smile. Then he sat back and watched me as I started to pile the papers and jewelry back in the bag again. I may have been as frightened as a darky in a graveyard; but I didn't intend to let my Hero-Man know it.
"These things shouldn't be left lying around loose, should they?" I offhandedly ventured. I was still altogether uncertain as to which way the cat was going to jump.
"That's truer than you imagine!" retorted my Hero-Man.
"Then what are we going to do about it?" I asked, still uncertain of my ground.
His eye met mine. I don't know what he was about to say. I wasn't even sure that he intended saying anything. But that tableau was interrupted by the noiseless entrance of his servant.
That small-bodied Oriental, in fact, came and stood close behind his master. His attitude was one of veiled expectancy, as though he had been sent for. Yet I could recall no sign or message having gone out from that room.
I saw my Hero-Man tear a small slip from the sheet of paper on which he had been inventorying the contents of the club-bag. On this slip of paper he wrote a sentence or two, in very small script. He gave it to the waiting Jap, without a word of explanation, and the Jap as silently vanished from the room.
It might have been anything, of course. But that unknown message began to worry me. It may have been nothing more than the next day's meat order, or a carriage call, or a trick to intimidate me into a freer channel of confession.
Yet I would have given a good deal to know just what was written on that departing slip of paper. I let no sign of this escape me, however, as I went on restoring that scattering of wealth to its leather receptacle. I even took advantage of an unobserved moment to slip old Ezra Bartlett's six bank-notes from their keeping-place and drop them down in the club-bag. Then I pulled off the ruby ring and tossed it into the same place. For a new impulse had taken possession of me. I wanted to cleanse my soul of the whole tangled business. I wanted none of the fruits of that night's misadventure about my body. Until then, for some reason, I had taken a sort of black joy in letting Wendy Washburn believe the worst of me that he was able to believe. Why it was, I couldn't exactly explain, any more than I can explain why the preacher's son who plays pirate loves to stick a wooden dagger in his belt. But I'd had my fill of playing pirate, and now a reaction, born of heaven knows what, had set in.
I looked up as I finished my task, to find Wendy Washburn staring at me with a slight frown on his usually placid forehead.
"I suppose you still don't feel like telling me just how and where you got possession of all this?" he asked, with a hand-wave toward the club-bag.
"I don't think you'd believe me, even if I told you," was my somewhat ungracious reply.
"Probably not," he said. But he said it with a ghost of a sigh.
"Positively not," I amended.
"But there's still the question of what we're going to do about it," he ruminated aloud.
I turned and closed the bag-top with a snap.
"What do you intend to do about it?" I demanded.
He looked at me solemnly, studiously, as if he imagined he could read right down to my shoe-numbers by staring into my eyes. It must have been the way the Prince of Denmark peered into the face of his altogether disappointing Ophelia.
"Especially as I don't see a mail-box anywhere in the neighborhood!" I meekly ventured, remembering only too vividly a certain afternoon at Long Beach.
I was hoping he would laugh at that, but all he did was to stand up.
"I'll tell you what I'm going to do about it," he solemnly announced. "I'm going to take this whole thing into my own hands!"
"And then what?" I somewhat mockingly inquired. For there were more snarls in that tangled fish-line of fate than he had any idea of.
"Then," he told me, "I'm going to take these things back to where they came from!"
"When?" I inquired, wondering if it would be safe to say that I regarded him as one grand little retriever.
"I'm going to do it right away," was his answer.
"And where are you going to take them?" was my next inquiry. I could even afford to laugh, he seemed so sure of himself, and his little pilgrimage seemed such a perfectly simple one.
"To the house you came out of before you stepped into my car," he told me as he reached for the bag.
"And have you any idea," I inquired, "of just what you'll bump into, in that house?"
"Perhaps not," he acknowledged. "But the uncertainty of it ather appeals to me!"
He seemed nettled by my listlessness. He was even ready to disregard my cynical laugh.
"And why are you doing all this?" I asked, with my eyebrows up.
"For the sake of your immortal soul!" was his altogether unexpected retort, as he reached over and touched the bell.