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The Destroying Angel

by Louis Joseph Vance · English · Gutenberg #32302 · 478,935 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Destroying Angel

Author: Louis Joseph Vance

Illustrator: Arthur Ignatius Keller


        
Release date: May 8, 2010 [eBook #32302]

Language: English

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THE DESTROYING ANGEL

by

LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE

Author of "The Brass Bowl," "The Bronze Bell," "The Bandbox," "Cynthia
of the Minute," Etc.

With Four Illustrations by Arthur I. Keller







A. L. Burt Company
Publishers New York

Copyright, 1912,
By Louis Joseph Vance.

All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign
languages, including the Scandinavian.

Published, October, 1912.




TO

ROBERT HOBART DAVIS




[Illustration: Whitaker's jaw dropped and his eyes widened with wonder
and pity]




CONTENTS


       I. DOOM

      II. THE LAST STRAW

     III. "MRS. MORTEN"

      IV. MRS. WHITAKER

       V. WILFUL MISSING

      VI. CURTAIN

     VII. THE LATE EXTRA

    VIII. A HISTORY

      IX. ENTR'ACTE

       X. THE WINDOW

      XI. THE SPY

     XII. THE MOUSE-TRAP

    XIII. OFFSHORE

     XIV. DÉBÂCLE

      XV. DISCLOSURES

     XVI. THE BEACON

    XVII. DISCOVERY

   XVIII. BLIGHT

     XIX. CAPITULATION

      XX. TEMPERAMENTAL

     XXI. BLACK OUT




ILLUSTRATIONS


Whitaker's jaw dropped and his eyes widened with wonder and pity

Her eyes fastened dilating, upon his. The scene faltered perceptibly

Whitaker felt land beneath his feet

"I do not love you. You are mad to think it"




THE DESTROYING ANGEL




I

DOOM


"Then I'm to understand there's no hope for me?"

"I'm afraid not...." Greyerson said reluctantly, sympathy in his eyes.

"None whatever." The verdict was thus brusquely emphasized by Hartt, one
of the two consulting specialists.

Having spoken, he glanced at his watch, then at the face of his
colleague, Bushnell, who contented himself with a tolerant waggle of his
head, apparently meant to imply that the subject of their deliberations
really must be reasonable: anybody who wilfully insists on footing the
measures of life with a defective constitution for a partner has no
logical excuse for being reluctant to pay the Piper.

Whitaker looked quickly from one to the other of his three judges,
acutely sensitive to the dread significance to be detected in the
expression of each. He found only one kind and pitiful: no more than
might have been expected of Greyerson, who was his friend. Of the
others, Hartt had assumed a stony glare to mask the nervousness so
plainly betrayed by his staccato accents; it hurt him to inflict pain,
and he was horribly afraid lest the patient break down and "make a
scene." Bushnell, on the other hand, was imperturbable by nature: a man
to whom all men were simply "cases"; he sat stroking his long chin and
hoping that Whitaker would have the decency soon to go and leave them
free to talk shop--his pet dissipation.

Failing to extract the least glimmering of hope from the attitude of any
one of them, Whitaker drew a long breath, unconsciously bracing himself
in his chair.

"It's funny," he said with his nervous smile--"hard to realize, I mean.
You see, I _feel_ so fit--"

"Between attacks," Hartt interjected quickly.

"Yes," Whitaker had to admit, dashed.

"Attacks," said Bushnell, heavily, "recurrent at intervals constantly
more brief, each a trifle more severe than its predecessor."

He shut his thin lips tight, as one who has consciously pronounced the
last word.

Greyerson sighed.

"But I don't understand," argued the prisoner at the bar, plaintively
bewildered. "Why, I rowed with the Crew three years hand-running--not a
sign of anything wrong with me!"

"If you had then had proper professional advice, you would have spared
yourself such strains. But it's too late now; the mischief can't be
undone."

Evidently Bushnell considered the last word his prerogative. Whitaker
turned from him impatiently.

"What about an operation?" he demanded of Greyerson.

The latter looked away, making only a slight negative motion with his
head.

"The knife?" observed Hartt. "That would merely hasten matters."

"Yes," Bushnell affirmed....

There was a brief uneasy silence in the gloomy consulting room. Then
Whitaker rose.

"Well, how long will you give me?" he asked in a strained voice.

"Six months," said Greyerson, miserably avoiding his eye.

"Three," Hartt corrected jerkily.

"Perhaps...." The proprietor of the last word stroked his chin with a
contemplative air.

"Thanks," said Whitaker, without irony. He stood for an instant with his
head bowed in thought. "What a damned outrage," he observed
thoughtfully. And suddenly he turned and flung out of the room.

Greyerson jumped to follow him, but paused as he heard the crash of the
street door. He turned back with a twitching, apologetic smile.

"Poor devil!" he said, sitting down at his desk and fishing a box of
cigars from one of the drawers.

"Takes it hard," commented Hartt.

"You would, too, at his age; he's barely twenty-five."

"Must feel more or less like a fellow whose wife has run off with his
best friend."

"No comparison," said Bushnell bluntly. "Go out, get yourself arrested
for a brutal murder you didn't commit, get tried and sentenced to death
within six months, the precise date being left to the discretion of the
executioner--_then_ you'll know how he feels."

"If you ask me"--Greyerson handed round the box--"he feels pretty shaky
and abused, and he wants a drink badly--the same as me."

He unlocked a cellaret.

"Married?" Hartt inquired.

"No. That's the only mitigating circumstance," said Greyerson,
distributing glasses. "He's quite alone in the world, as far as I
know--no near relatives, at least."

"Well off?"

"Tolerably. Comes of good people. Believe his family had a lot of money
at one time. Don't know how much of it there was left for Whitaker. He's
junior partner in a young law firm down-town--senior a friend or
classmate of his, I understand: Drummond & Whitaker. Moves with the
right sort of people. Young Stark--Peter Stark--is his closest
friend.... Well.... Say when."




II

THE LAST STRAW


Greyerson was right in his surmise as to Hugh Whitaker's emotions. His
soul still numb with shock, his mind was altogether preoccupied with
petulant resentment of the unfairness of it all; on the surface of the
stunning knowledge that he might count on no more than six months of
life, floated this thin film of sensation of personal grievance. He had
done nothing to deserve this. The sheer brutality of it....

He felt very shaky indeed.

He stood for a long time--how long he never knew--bareheaded on a
corner, just as he had left Greyerson's office: scowling at nothing,
considering the enormity of the wrong that had been put upon him. Later,
realizing that people were staring, he clapped on his hat to satisfy
them and strode aimlessly down Sixth Avenue. It was five o'clock in the
afternoon of a day late in April--a raw, chilly, dark, unseasonable
brute of a day. He found himself walking fast, instinctively, to keep
his blood in warm circulation, and this struck him as so inconsistent
that presently he stopped short and snarled at himself:

"You blithering fool, what difference does it make whether you're warm
or cold? Don't you understand you're going to die within half a year?"

He strove manfully to grapple with this hideous fact. He felt so well,
so strong and efficient; and yet he walked in the black shadow of death,
a shadow from which there was for him no escape.

He thought it the damnedest sensation imaginable!

On top of this reflection came the third clause of Greyerson's analysis:
he made the discovery that he wanted a drink--a lot of drinks: in point
of fact, more than he had ever had before, enough to make him forget.

He turned across-town toward Fifth Avenue, came to his club, and went
in. Passing through the office, force of habit swung his gaze to the
letter-rack. There was a square white envelope in the W pigeonhole, and
it proved to be addressed to him. He knew the handwriting very well--too
well; his heart gave a great jump as he recognized it, and then sank
like a stone; for not only must he die, but he must give up the girl he
loved and had planned to marry. The first thing he meant to do (after
getting that drink) was to write to her and explain and release her from
her promise. The next thing....

He refused to let the idea of the next step form in his mind. But he
knew very well what it would be. In the backwards of his understanding
it lurked--a gray, grisly, shameful shadow.

"Anyhow," he muttered, "I'm not going to stick round here, dying by
inches, wearing the sympathy of my friends to tatters."

But as yet he dared not name the alternative.

He stuffed the letter into his pocket, and passed on to the elevator
gates, meaning to go up to the library and there have his drink and read
his letter and write the answer, in peace and quiet. The problem of that
answer obsessed his thoughts. It would be hard--hard to write--that
letter that meant the breaking of a woman's faithful heart.

The elevator kept him waiting a moment or two, just round the corner
from the grill-room door, whence came a sound of voices talking and
laughing. One was Billy Hamilton's unmistakable semi-jocular drawl.
Whitaker knew it without thinking of it, even as he heard what was being
said without, at first, comprehending--heard and afterwards remembered
in vivid detail.

"Seems to be the open season for runaways," Hamilton was saying. "It's
only a few days since Thurlow Ladislas's daughter--what's her
name?--Mary--took the bit between her teeth and bolted with the old
man's chauffeur."

Somebody asked: "How far did they get before old Ladislas caught up?"

"He didn't give chase. He's not that kind. If he was put to it, old
Thurlow could play the unforgiving parent in a melodrama without any
make-up whatever."

"That's right," little Fiske's voice put in. "Chap I know on the
_Herald_--reporter--was sent to interview him, but old Ladislas told him
quite civilly that he'd been misinformed--he hadn't any daughter named
Mary. Meaning, of course, that the girl had defied him, and that his
doors were thenceforth barred to her."

"He's just like that," said Hamilton. "Remember his other daughter,
Grace, eloping with young Pettit a few years ago? Old Ladislas had a
down on Pettit--who's a decent enough kid, notwithstanding--so Grace was
promptly disowned and cast into the outer darkness, where there's
weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, because Pettit's only
something-on-a-small-salary in the diplomatic service, and they've no
hope of ever touching a penny of the Ladislas coin."

"But what became of them--Mary and the stoker-person?"

"Nobody knows, except possibly themselves. They're laying low
and--probably--getting first-hand information as to the quantity of
cheese and kisses they can afford on chauffeur's pay."

"What's she like, this Mary-quite-contrary?" inquired George Brenton's
voice. "Anybody ever see her?"

"Oh, nothing but a kid," said little Fiske. "I used to see her often,
last summer, kiting round Southampton on a bike. The old man's so mean
he wouldn't let her use the car alone.... Weedy little beggar, all legs
and eyes--skirts to her shoe-tops and hair to her waist."

"Not over eighteen, I gather?"

"Oh, not a day," little Fiske affirmed.

The elevator was waiting by this time, but Whitaker paused an instant
before taking it, chiefly because the sound of his own name, uttered by
Hamilton, had roused him out of the abstraction in which he had
overheard the preceding conversation.

"Anyhow, I'm sorry for Hugh Whitaker. He's going to take this hard,
mighty hard."

George Brenton asked, as if surprised: "What? I didn't know he was
interested in that quarter."

"You must be blind. Alice Carstairs has had him going for a year.
Everybody thought she was only waiting for him to make some big
money--he as much as anybody, I fancy."

Brenton added the last straw. "That's tough," he said soberly.
"Whitaker's a white man, and Alice Carstairs didn't deserve him. But I
wouldn't blame any man for feeling cut-up to be thrown over for an
out-and-out rotter like Percy Grimshaw...."

Whitaker heard no more. At the first mention of the name of Alice
Carstairs he had snatched her letter from his pocket and thrust his
thumb beneath the flap. Now he had withdrawn the enclosure and was
reading.

When a mean-spirited, selfish woman starts in to justify herself
(especially, on paper) for doing something thoroughly contemptible, the
result is apt to be bitterly unfair to everybody involved--except
herself. Nobody will ever know just what Alice Carstairs saw fit to
write to Hugh Whitaker when she made up her mind to run away with
another man; but there can be little doubt that they were venomous words
he read, standing there under the curious eyes of the elevator boy and
the pages. The blood ebbed from his face and left it ghastly, and when
he had torn the paper to shreds and let them flutter about his feet, he
swayed perceptibly--so much so that one of the pages took alarm and
jumped to his side.

"Beg pardon, Mr. Whitaker--did you call me?"

Whitaker steadied himself and stared until he recognized the boy. "No,"
he said thickly, "but I want you. Give me a bar order."

The boy produced the printed form and Whitaker hastily scribbled his
order on it. "Bring that up to the library," he said, "and be quick
about it."

He stumbled into the elevator, and presently found himself in the
library. There was no one else about, and Whitaker was as glad of that
as it was in him to be glad of anything just then. He dropped heavily
into a big arm-chair and waited, his brain whirling and seething, his
nerves on edge and screeching. In this state Peter Stark found him.

Peter sauntered into the room with a manner elaborately careless.
Beneath that mask he was anything but indifferent, just as his
appearance was anything but fortuitous. It happened that the page who
had taken Whitaker's order, knowing that Peter and Hugh were close
friends, and suspecting that something was wrong with the latter, had
sought out Peter before going to get the order filled. Moreover, Peter
had already heard about Alice Carstairs and Percy Grimshaw.

"Hel-_lo_!" he said, contriving by mere accident to catch sight of
Whitaker, who was almost invisible in the big chair with its back to the
body of the room. "What you doing up here, Hugh? What's up?"

"It's all up," said Whitaker, trying to pull himself together.
"Everything's up!"

"Don't believe it," said Stark, coolly. "My feet are on the ground; but
you look as if you'd seen a ghost."

"I have--my own," said Whitaker. The page now stood beside him with a
tray. "Open it," he told the boy, indicating a half-bottle of champagne;
and then to Peter: "I'm having a bath. Won't you jump in?"

Peter whistled, watching the wine cream over the brandy in the long
glass. "King's peg, eh?" he said, with a lift of disapproving eyebrows.
"Here, boy, bring me some Scotch and plain water for common people."

The boy disappeared as Whitaker lifted his glass.

"I'm not waiting," he said bluntly. "I need this now."

"That's a question, in my mind, at least. Don't you think you've had
about enough for one day?"

"I leave it to your superior knowledge of my capacity," said Whitaker,
putting aside the empty glass. "That's my first to-day."

Peter saw that he was telling the truth, but the edge of his disapproval
remained keen.

"I hope," he said thoughtfully, "that the man who started that lie about
drink making a fellow forget died the death of a dog. He deserved to,
anyway, because it's one of the cruellest practical jokes ever
perpetrated on the human race. I know, because I've tried it on,
hard--and waked up sick to my marrow to remember what a disgusting ass
I'd made of myself for all to behold." He stopped at Whitaker's side and
dropped a hand on his shoulder. "Hugh," he said, "you're one of the
best. Don't...."

Whatever he had meant to say, he left unfinished because of the return
of the page with his Scotch; but he had said enough to let Whitaker
understand that he knew about the Carstairs affair.

"That's all right," said Whitaker; "I'm not going to make a damn' fool
of myself, but I am in a pretty bad way. Boy--"

"Hold on!" Peter interrupted. "You're not going to order another? What
you've had is enough to galvanize a corpse."

"Barring the negligible difference of a few minutes or months, that's
me," returned Whitaker. "But never mind, boy--run along."

"I'd like to know what you mean by that," Peter remarked, obviously
worried.

"I mean that I'm practically a dead man--so near it that it makes no
difference."

"The devil you say! What's the matter with you?"

"Ask Greyerson. I can't remember the name--it's too long--and I couldn't
pronounce it if I did."

Peter's eyes narrowed. "What foolishness has Greyerson been putting into
your head?" he demanded. "I've a good mind to go punch his--"

"It isn't his fault," Whitaker asserted. "It's my own--or rather, it's
something in the nature of a posthumous gift from my progenitors;
several of 'em died of it, and now it seems I must. Greyerson says so,
at least, and when I didn't believe him he called in Hartt and Bushnell
to hold my ante-mortem. They made it unanimous. If I'm uncommonly lucky
I may live to see next Thanksgiving."

"Oh, shut up!" Peter exploded viciously. "You make me tired--you and
your bone-headed M.D.'s!"

He worked himself into a comforting rage, damning the medical fraternity
liberally for a gang of bloodthirsty assassins and threatening to commit
assault and battery upon the person of Greyerson, though Whitaker did
his best to make him understand that matters were what they
were--irremediable.

"You won't find any higher authorities than Hartt and Bushnell," he
said. "They are the court of last resort in such cases. When they hand
down a decision, there's no come-back."

"You can't make me believe that," Peter insisted. "It just can't be so.
A man like you, who's always lived clean.... Why, look at your athletic
record! Do you mean to tell me a fellow could hold a job as undisputed
best all-round man in his class for four years, and all the time
handicapped by a constitutional...? Oh, get out! Don't talk to me. I'm
far more likely to be doing my bit beneath the daisies six months from
now.... I won't believe it!"

His big, red, generous fist described a large and inconclusive gesture
of violence.

"Well," he growled finally, "grant all this--which I don't, not for one
little minute--what do you mean to do?"

"I don't mind telling you," said Whitaker: "I don't know. Wish I did. Up
to within the last few minutes I fully intended to cut the knot with my
own knife. It's not reasonable to ask a man to sit still and watch
himself go slowly to pieces...."

"No," said Stark, sitting down. "No," he admitted grudgingly; "but I'm
glad you've given that up, because I'm right and all these fool doctors
are wrong. You'll see. But...." He couldn't help being curious. "But
why?"

"Well," Whitaker considered slowly--"it's Alice Carstairs. You know what
she's done."

"You don't mean to say you're going--that you think there's any
consideration due her?"

"Don't you?" Whitaker smiled wearily. "Perhaps you're right. I don't
know. We won't discuss the ethics of the situation; right or wrong, I
don't mean to shadow whatever happiness she has in store for her by
ostentatiously snuffing myself out just now."

Peter gulped and succeeded in saying nothing. But he stared.

"At the same time," Whitaker resumed, "I don't think I can stand this
sort of thing. I can't go round with my flesh creeping to hear the
whisperings behind my back. I've got to do something--get away
somewhere."

Abrupt inspiration sparked the imagination of Peter Stark, and he began
to sputter with enthusiasm.

"I've got it!" he cried, jumping to his feet. "A sea trip's just the
thing. Chances are, it'll turn the trick--bring you round all right-O,
and prove what asses doctors are. What d'you say? Are you game for a
sail? The _Adventuress_ is laid up at New Bedford now, but I can have
her put in commission within three days. We'll do it--we'll just light
out, old man! We'll try that South Seas thing we've talked about so
long. What d'you say?"

A warm light glowed in Whitaker's sunken eyes. He nodded slowly.




III

"MRS. MORTEN"


It was three in the morning before Peter Stark, having to the best of
his endurance and judgment tired Whitaker out with talking, took his hat
and his departure from Whitaker's bachelor rooms. He went with little
misgiving; Whitaker was so weary that he would have to sleep before he
could think and again realize his terror; and everything was arranged.
Peter had telegraphed to have the _Adventuress_ rushed into commission;
they were to go aboard her the third day following. In the meantime,
Whitaker would have little leisure in which to brood, the winding up of
his affairs being counted upon to occupy him. Peter had his own affairs
to look to, for that matter, but he was prepared to slight them if
necessary, in order that Whitaker might not be left too much to
himself....

Whitaker shut the hall door, when the elevator had taken Peter away, and
turned back wearily into his living-room. It was three in the morning;
his body ached with fatigue, his eyes were hot and aching in their
sockets, and his mouth hot and parched with excess of smoking; yet he
made no move toward his bedchamber. Insomnia was a diagnostic of his
malady: a fact he hadn't mentioned to his friend. He had little wish to
surrender his mind to the devils that haunt a wakeful pillow, especially
now when he could feel the reaction setting in from the anodynous
excitement of the last few hours. Peter Stark's whirlwind enthusiasm had
temporarily swept him off his feet, and he had yielded to it,
unresisting, selfish enough to want to be carried away against the wiser
counsels of his intuition.

But now, alone, doubts beset him.

Picking his way across a floor littered with atlases, charts, maps and
guide-books, he resumed his chair and pipe and with the aid of a copy of
"The Wrecker" and a nightcap, strove to drug himself again with the
fascination of the projected voyage. But the savour had gone out of it
all. An hour before he had been able to distil a potent magic, thought
obliterating, by sheer force of repetition of the names, Apia, Hawaii,
Tahiti, Samoa.... Now all their promise was an emptiness and a mockery.
The book slipped unheeded from his grasp; his pipe grew cold between his
teeth; his eyes burned like lamps in their deep hollows, with their
steady and undeviating glare....

Dawn-dusk filled the high windows with violet light before he moved.

He rose, went to the bath-room and took a bottle of chloral from the
medicine-closet. He wondered at the steadiness of the hand that measured
out the prescribed dose--no more, no less. He wondered at the strength
of will which enabled him to take no more. There was enough in the
bottle to purchase him eternity.

What he took bought him three hours of oblivion. He rose at eight,
ordered his breakfast up by telephone, bathed and dressed. When the tray
came up, his mail came with it. Among others there was one letter in a
woman's hand which he left till the last, amusing himself by trying to
guess the identity of the writer, the writing being not altogether
strange to him. When at length he gave over this profitless employment,
he read:

     "DEAR HUGH: I can call you that, now, because you're Peter's
     dearest friend and therefore mine, and the proof of that is that
     I'm telling you first of all of our great happiness. Peter and I
     found out that we loved one another only yesterday, so we're going
     to be married the first of June and...."

Whitaker read no more. He could guess the rest, and for the moment he
felt too sick a man to go through to the end. Indeed, the words were
blurring and running together beneath his gaze.

After a long time he put the letter aside, absent-mindedly swallowed a
cup of lukewarm coffee and rose from an otherwise untasted meal.

"That settles that, of course," he said quietly. "And it means I've got
to hustle to get ahead of Peter."

He set busily about his preparations, thinking quickly while he packed.
It occurred to him that he had, after all, several hours in which to
catch together the loose ends of things and make an exit without leaving
the businesses of his clients in a hopeless snarl; Peter Stark would
sleep till eleven, at least, and it would be late in the afternoon
before the young man could see his fiancée and find out from her that
Whitaker knew of the sacrifice Peter contemplated for friendship's sake.

Whitaker packed a hand-bag with a few essentials, not forgetting the
bottle of chloral. He was not yet quite sure what he meant to do after
he had definitely put himself out of Peter Stark's sphere of influence,
but he hadn't much doubt that the drug was destined to play a most
important part in the ultimate solution, and would as readily have
thought of leaving it behind as of going without a toothbrush or railway
fare.

Leaving the bag in the parcels-room at the Grand Central Station, he
went down-town to his office and put in a busy morning. Happily his
partner, Drummond, was out of town for the day; so he was able to put
his desk in order unhindered by awkward questionings. He worked
expeditiously, having no callers until just before he was ready to
leave. Then he was obliged to admit one who desired to make a settlement
in an action brought against him by Messrs. Drummond & Whitaker. He took
Whitaker's receipt for the payment in cash, leaving behind him fifteen
one-hundred-dollar notes. Whitaker regarded this circumstance as a
special dispensation of Providence to save him the bother of stopping at
the bank on his way up-town; drew his personal check for the right
amount and left it with a memorandum under the paper-weight on
Drummond's desk; put a match to a shredded pile of personal
correspondence in the fireplace; and caught a train at the Grand Central
at one-three.

Not until the cars were in motion did he experience any sense of
security from Peter Stark. He had been apprehensive until that moment of
some unforeseen move on the part of his friend; Peter was capable of
wide but sure casts of intuition on occasion, especially where his
affections were touched. But now Whitaker felt free, free to abandon
himself to meditative despair; and he did it, as he did most things,
thoroughly. He plunged headlong into an everlasting black pit of terror.
He considered the world through the eyes of a man sick unto death, and
found it without health. Behind him lay his home, a city without a
heart, a place of pointing fingers and poisoned tongues; before him the
brief path of Fear that he must tread: his broken, sword-wide span
leaping out over the Abyss....

He was anything but a patient man at all times, and anything but sane in
that dark hour. Cold horror crawled in his brain like a delirium--horror
of himself, of his morbid flesh, of that moribund body unfit to sheathe
the clean fire of life. The thought of struggling to keep animate that
corrupt Self, tainted by the breath of Death, was invincibly terrible to
him. All sense of human obligation disappeared from his cosmos; remained
only the biting hunger for eternal peace, rest, freedom from the bondage
of existence....

At about four o'clock the train stopped to drop the dining-car. Wholly
swayed by blind impulse, Whitaker got up, took his hand-bag and left the
car.

On the station platform he found himself pelted by a pouring rain. He
had left Town in a sodden drizzle, dull and dismal enough in all
conscience; here was a downpour out of a sky three shades lighter than
India ink--a steadfast, grim rain that sluiced the streets like a
gigantic fire-hose, brimming the gutters with boiling, muddy torrents.

The last to leave the train, he found himself without a choice of
conveyances; but one remained at the edge of the platform, an aged and
decrepit four-wheeler whose patriarchal driver upon the box might have
been Death himself masquerading in dripping black oilskins. To
Whitaker's inquiry he recommended the C'mercial House. Whitaker agreed
and imprisoned himself in the body of the vehicle, sitting on stained
and faded, threadbare cushions, in company with two distinct odours, of
dank and musty upholstery and of stale tuberoses. As they rocked and
crawled away, the blind windows wept unceasingly, and unceasingly the
rain drummed the long roll on the roof.

In time they stopped before a rambling structure whose weather-boarded
façade, white with flaking paint, bore the legend: COMMERCIAL HOUSE.
Whitaker paid his fare and, unassisted, carried his hand-bag up the
steps and across the rain-swept veranda into a dim, cavernous hall whose
walls were lined with cane-seated arm-chairs punctuated at every second
chair by a commodious brown-fibre cuspidor. A cubicle fenced off in one
corner formed the office proper--for the time being untenanted. There
was, indeed, no one in sight but a dejected hall-boy, innocent of any
sort of livery. On demand he accommodatingly disentangled himself from a
chair, a cigarette and a paper-backed novel, and wandered off down a
corridor, ostensibly to unearth the boss.

Whitaker waited by the desk, a gaunt, weary man, hag-ridden by fear.
There was in his mind a desolate picture of the room up-stairs when
he--his soul: the imperishable essence of himself--should have finished
with it....

At his elbow lay the hotel register, open at a page neatly headed with a
date in red ink. An absence of entries beneath the date-line seemed to
indicate that he was the first guest of the day. Near the book was a
small wooden corral neatly partitioned into stalls wherein were herded
an ink-well, toothpicks, matches, some stationery, and--severely by
itself--a grim-looking raw potato of uncertain age, splotched with ink
and wearing like horns two impaled penholders.

Laboriously prying loose one of the latter, Whitaker registered; but
two-thirds of his name was all he entered; when it came to "Whitaker,"
his pen paused and passed on to write "Philadelphia" in the residence
column.

The thought came to him that he must be careful to obliterate all
laundry marks on his clothing.

In his own good time the clerk appeared: a surly, heavy-eyed, loutish
creature in clothing that suggested he had been grievously misled by
pictures in the advertising pages of magazines. Whitaker noted, with
insensate irritation, that he wore his hair long over one eye, his mouth
ajar, his trousers high enough to disclose bony purple ankles. His
welcome to the incoming guest was comprised in an indifferent nod as
their eyes met, and a subsequent glance at the register which seemed
unaccountably to moderate his apathy.

"Mr. Morton--uh?" he inquired.

Whitaker nodded without words.

The youth shrugged and scrawled an hieroglyph after the name. "Here,
Sammy," he said to the boy--"Forty-three." To Whitaker he addressed the
further remark: "Trunks?"

"No."

The youth seemed about to expostulate, but checked when Whitaker placed
one of his hundred-dollar notes on the counter.

"I think that'll cover my liability," he said with a significance
misinterpreted by the other.

"I ain't got enough change--"

"That's all right; I'm in no hurry."

The eyes of the lout followed him as he ascended the stairs in the path
of Sammy, who had already disappeared. Annoyed, Whitaker quickened his
pace to escape the stare. On the second floor he discovered the bell-boy
waiting some distance down a long, darksome corridor, indifferently
lighted by a single window at its far end. As Whitaker came into view,
the boy thrust open the door, disappeared for an instant, and came out
minus the bag. Whitaker gave him a coin in passing--an attention which
he acknowledged by pulling the door to with a bang the moment the guest
had entered the room. At the same time Whitaker became aware of a
contretemps.

The room was of fair size, lighted by two windows overlooking the tin
roof of the front veranda. It was furnished with a large double bed in
the corner nearest the door a wash-stand, two or three chairs, a
bandy-legged table with a marble top; and it was tenanted by a woman in
street dress.

She stood by the wash-stand, with her back to the light, her attitude
one of tense expectancy: hardly more than a silhouette of a figure
moderately tall and very slight, almost angular in its slenderness. She
had been holding a tumbler in one hand, but as Whitaker appeared this
slipped from her fingers; there followed a thud and a sound of spilt
liquid at her feet. Simultaneously she cried out inarticulately in a
voice at once harsh and tremulous; the cry might have been "_You!_" or
"_Hugh!_" Whitaker took it for the latter, and momentarily imagined that
he had stumbled into the presence of an acquaintance. He was pulling off
his hat and peering at her shadowed face in an effort to distinguish
features possibly familiar to him, when she moved forward a pace or two,
her hands fluttering out toward him, then stopped as though halted by a
force implacable and overpowering.

"I thought," she quavered in a stricken voice--"I thought ... you ... my
husband ... Mr. Morton ... the boy said...."

Then her knees buckled under her, and she plunged forward and fell with
a thump that shook the walls.

"I'm sorry--I beg pardon," Whitaker stammered stupidly to ears that
couldn't hear. He swore softly with exasperation, threw his hat to a
chair and dropped to his knees beside the woman. It seemed as if the
high gods were hardly playing fair, to throw a fainting woman on his
hands just then, at a time when he was all preoccupied with his own
absorbing tragedy.

She lay with her head naturally pillowed on the arm she had
instinctively thrown out to protect her face. He could see now that her
slenderness was that of youth, of a figure undeveloped and immature. Her
profile, too, was young, though it stood out against the dark background
of the carpet as set and white as a death-mask. Indeed, her pallor was
so intense that a fear touched his heart, of an accident more serious
than a simple fainting spell. Her respiration seemed entirely suspended,
and it might have been merely his fancy that detected the least
conceivable syncopated pulsation in the icy wrist beneath his fingers.

He weighed quickly half a dozen suggestions. His fundamental impulse, to
call in feminine aid from the staff of the hotel, was promptly relegated
to the status of a last resort, as involving explanations which might
not seem adequate to the singular circumstances; besides, he entertained
a dim, searching, intuitive suspicion that possibly the girl herself
would more cheerfully dispense with explanations--though he hardly knew
why.... He remembered that people burned feathers in such emergencies,
or else loosened the lady's stays (corsets plus a fainting fit equal
stays, invariably, it seems). But there weren't any feathers handy,
and--well, anyway, neither expedient made any real appeal to his
intelligence. Besides, there were sensible things he could do to make
her more comfortable--chafe her hands and administer stimulants: things
like that.

Even while these thoughts were running through his mind, he was
gathering the slight young body into his arms; and he found it really
astonishingly easy to rise and bear her to the bed, where he put her
down flat on her back, without a pillow. Then turning to his hand-bag,
he opened it and produced a small, leather-bound flask of brandy; a
little of which would go far toward shattering her syncope, he fancied.

It did, in fact; a few drops between her half-parted lips, and she came
to with disconcerting rapidity, opening dazed eyes in the middle of a
spasm of coughing. He stepped back, stoppering the flask.

"That's better," he said pleasantly. "Now lie still while I fetch you a
drink of water."

As he turned to the wash-stand his foot struck the tumbler she had
dropped. He stopped short, frowning down at the great, staring, wet,
yellow stain on the dingy and threadbare carpet. Together with this
discovery he got a whiff of an acrid-sweet effluvium that spelled
"_Oxalic Acid--Poison_" as unmistakably as did the druggist's label on
the empty packet on the wash-stand....

In another moment he was back at the bedside with a clean glass of
water, which he offered to the girl's lips, passing his arm beneath her
shoulders and lifting her head so that she might drink.

She emptied the glass thirstily.

"Look here," he said almost roughly under the lash of this new
fear--"you didn't really drink any of that stuff, did you?"

Her eyes met his with a look of negation clouded by fear and
bewilderment. Then she turned her head away. Dragging a pillow beneath
it, he let her down again.

"Good," he said in accents meant to be enheartening; "you'll be all
right in a moment or two."

Her colourless lips moved in a whisper he had to bend close to
distinguish.

"Please...."

"Yes?"

"Please don't ... call anybody...."

"I won't. Don't worry."

The lids quivered down over her eyes, and her mouth was wrung with
anguish. He stared, perplexed. He wanted to go away quickly, but
couldn't gain his own consent to do so. She was in no condition to be
left alone, this delicate and fragile child, defenceless and beset. It
wasn't hard to conjecture the hell of suffering she must have endured
before coming to a pass of such desperation. There were dull blue
shadows beneath eyes red with weeping, a forlorn twist to her thin,
bloodless lips, a pinched look of wretchedness like a glaze over her
unhappy face, that told too plain a story. A strange girl, to find in a
plight like hers, he thought: not pretty, but quite unusual: delicate,
sensitive, high-strung, bred to the finer things of life--this last was
self-evident in the fine simplicity of her severely plain attire. Over
her hair, drawn tight down round her head, she wore one of those knitted
motor caps which were the fashion of that day. Her shoes were still wet
and a trifle muddy, her coat and skirt more than a trifle damp,
indicating that she had returned from a dash to the drug store not long
before Whitaker arrived.

A variety of impressions, these with others less significant, crowded
upon his perceptions in little more than a glance. For suddenly Nature
took her in hand; she twisted upon her side, as if to escape his regard,
and covered her face, her palms muffling deep tearing sobs while waves
of pent-up misery racked her slender little body.

Whitaker moved softly away....

Difficult, he found it, to guess what to do; more difficult still to do
nothing. His nerves were badly jangled; light-footed, he wandered
restlessly to and fro, half distracted between the storm of weeping that
beat gustily within the room and the deadly blind drum of the downpour
on the tin roof beyond the windows. Since that twilight hour in that
tawdry hotel chamber, no one has ever been able to counterfeit sorrow
and remorse to Whitaker; he listened then to the very voice of utter
Woe.

Once, pausing by the centre-table, he happened to look down. He saw a
little heap of the hotel writing-paper, together with envelopes, a pen,
a bottle of ink. Three of the envelopes were sealed and superscribed,
and two were stamped. The unstamped letter was addressed to the
Proprietor of the Commercial House.

Of the others, one was directed to a Mr. C. W. Morton in care of another
person at a number on lower Sixth Avenue, New York; and from this
Whitaker began to understand the singular manner of his introduction to
the wrong room; there's no great difference between _Morton_ and
_Morten_, especially when written carelessly.

But the third letter caused his eyes to widen considerably. It bore the
name of Thurlow Ladislas, Esq., and a Wall Street address.

Whitaker's mouth shaped a still-born whistle. He was recalling with
surprising distinctness the fragment of dialogue he had overheard at his
club the previous afternoon.




IV

MRS. WHITAKER


He lived through a long, bad quarter hour, his own tensed nerves
twanging in sympathy with the girl's sobbing--like telegraph wires
singing in a gale--his mind busy with many thoughts, thoughts strangely
new and compelling, wearing a fresh complexion that lacked altogether
the colouring of self-interest.

He mixed a weak draught of brandy and water and returned to the bedside.
The storm was passing in convulsive gasps ever more widely spaced, but
still the girl lay with her back to him.

"If you'll sit up and try to drink this," he suggested quietly, "I think
you'll feel a good deal better."

Her shoulders moved spasmodically; otherwise he saw no sign that she
heard.

"Come--please," he begged gently.

She made an effort to rise, sat up on the bed, dabbed at her eyes with a
sodden wisp of handkerchief, and groped blindly for the glass. He
offered it to her lips.

"What is it?" she whispered hoarsely.

He spoke of the mixture in disparaging terms as to its potency, until at
length she consented to swallow it--teeth chattering on the rim of the
tumbler. The effect was quickly apparent in the colour that came into
her cheeks, faint but warm. He avoided looking directly at her, however,
and cast round for the bell-push, which he presently found near the head
of the bed.

She moved quickly with alarm.

"What are you going to do?" she demanded in a stronger voice.

"Order you something to eat," he said. "No--please don't object. You
need food, and I mean to see you get it before I leave."

If she thought of protesting, the measured determination in his manner
deterred her. After a moment she asked:

"Please--who are you?"

"My name is Whitaker," he said--"Hugh Morten Whitaker."

She repeated the name aloud. "Haven't I heard of you? Aren't you engaged
to Alice Carstairs?"

"I'm the man you mean," he said quietly; "but I'm not engaged to Alice
Carstairs."

"Oh...." Perplexity clouded the eyes that followed closely his every
movement. "How did you happen to--to find me here?"

"Quite by accident," he replied. "I didn't want to be known, so
registered as Hugh Morten. They mistook me for your husband. Do you mind
telling me how long it is since you've had anything to eat?"

She told him: "Last night."

He suffered a sense of shame only second to her own, to see the dull
flush that accompanied her reply. His fingers itched for the throat of
Mr. C. W. Morton, chauffeur. Happily a knock at the door distracted him.
Opening it no wider than necessary to communicate with the bell-boy, he
gave him an order for the kitchen, together with an incentive to speed
the service.

Closing the door, he swung round to find that the girl had got to her
feet.

"He won't be long--" Whitaker began vaguely.

"I want to tell you something." She faced him bravely, though he refused
the challenge of her tormented eyes. "I ... I have no husband."

He bowed gravely.

"You're so good to me--" she faltered.

"O--nothing! Let's not talk about that now."

"I must talk--you must let me. You're so kind, I've got to tell you.
Won't you listen?"

He had crossed to a window, where he stood staring out. "I'd rather
not," he said softly, "but if you prefer--"

"I do prefer," said the voice behind him. "I--I'm Mary Ladislas."

"Yes," said Whitaker.

"I ... I ran away from home last week--five days ago--to get married to
our chauffeur, Charles Morton...."

She stammered.

"Please don't go on, if it hurts," he begged without looking round.

"I've got to--I've got to get it over with.... We were at Southampton,
at my father's summer home--I mean, that's where I ran away from.
He--Charley--drove me over to Greenport and I took the ferry there and
came here to wait for him. He went back to New York in the car,
promising to join me here as soon as possible...."

"And he didn't come," Whitaker wound up for her, when she faltered.

"No."

"And you wrote and telegraphed, and he didn't answer."

"Yes--"

"How much money of yours did he take with him?" Whitaker pursued.

There was a brief pause of astonishment. "What do you know about that?"
she demanded.

"I know a good deal about that type of man," he said grimly.

"I didn't have any money to speak of, but I had some jewellery--my
mother's--and he was to take that and pawn it for money to get married
with."

"I see."

To his infinite relief the waiter interrupted them. The girl in her turn
went to one of the windows, standing with her back to the room, while
Whitaker admitted the man with his tray. When they were alone once more,
he fixed the place and drew a chair for her.

"Everything's ready," he said--and had the sense not to try to make his
tone too cheerful.

"I hadn't finished what I wanted to tell you," said the girl, coming
back to him.

"Will you do me the favour to wait," he pleaded. "I think things will
seem--well, otherwise--when you've had some food."

"But I--"

"Oh, please!" he begged with his odd, twisted smile.

She submitted, head drooping and eyes downcast. He returned to his
window, rather wishing that he had thought to order for himself as well
as for the girl; for it was suddenly borne strongly in upon him that he
himself had had little enough to eat since dinner with Peter Stark. He
lighted a cigarette, by way of dulling his appetite, and then let it
smoulder to ashes between his fingers, while he lost himself in profound
speculations, in painstaking analysis of the girl's position.

Subconsciously he grew aware that the storm was moderating perceptibly,
the sky breaking....

"I've finished," the girl announced at length.

"You're feeling better?"

"Stronger, I think."

"Is there anything more--?"

"If you wouldn't mind sitting down--"

She had twisted her arm-chair away from the table. Whitaker took a seat
a little distance from her, with a keen glance appraising the change in
her condition and finding it not so marked as he had hoped. Still, she
seemed measurably more composed and mistress of her emotions, though he
had to judge mostly by her voice and manner, so dark was the room.
Through the shadows he could see little more than masses of light and
shade blocking in the slender figure huddled in a big, dilapidated
chair--the pallid oval of her face, and the darkness of her wide,
intent, young eyes.

"Don't!" she cried sharply. "Please don't look at me so--"

"I beg your pardon. I didn't mean to--"

"It's only--only that you make me think of what you must be thinking
about me--"

"I think you're rather fortunate," he said slowly.

"Fortunate!"

He shivered a little with the chill bitterness of that cry.

"You've had a narrow but a wonderfully lucky escape."

"Oh! ... But I'm not glad ... I was desperate--"

"I mean," he interrupted coolly, "from Mr. Morton. The silver lining is,
you're not married to a blackguard."

"Oh, yes, yes!" she agreed passionately.

"And you have youth, health, years of life before you!"

He sighed inaudibly....

"You wouldn't say that, if you understood."

"There are worse things to put up with than youth and health and the
right to live."

"But--how can I live? What am I to do?"

"Have you thought of going home?"

"It isn't possible."

"Have you made sure of that? Have you written to your
father--explained?"

"I sent him a special delivery three days ago, and--and yesterday a
telegram. I knew it wouldn't do any good, but I ... I told him
everything. He didn't answer. He won't, ever."

From what Whitaker knew of Thurlow Ladislas, he felt this to be too
cruelly true to admit of further argument. At a loss, he fell silent,
knitting his hands together as he strove to find other words wherewith
to comfort and reassure the girl.

She bent forward, elbows on knees, head and shoulders cringing.

"It hurts so!" she wailed ... "what people will think ... the shame, the
bitter, bitter shame of this! And yet I haven't any right to complain. I
deserve it all; I've earned my punishment."

"Oh, I say--!"

"But I have, because--because I didn't love him. I didn't love him at
all, and I knew it, even though I meant to marry him...."

"But, why--in Heaven's name?"

"Because I was so lonely and ... misunderstood and unhappy at home.
You don't know how desperately unhappy.... No mother, never daring
to see my sister (she ran away, too) ... my friendships at school
discouraged ... nothing in life but a great, empty, lonesome house
and my father to bully me and make cruel fun of me because I'm not
pretty.... That's why I ran away with a man I didn't love--because
I wanted freedom and a little happiness."

"Good Lord!" he murmured beneath his breath, awed by the pitiful,
childish simplicity of her confession and the deep damnation that had
waited upon her.

"So it's over!" she cried--"over, and I've learned my lesson, and I'm
disgraced forever, and friendless and--"

"Stop right there!" he checked her roughly. "You're not friendless yet,
and that nullifies all the rest. Be glad you've had your romance and
learned your lesson--"

"Please don't think I'm not grateful for your kindness," she
interrupted. "But the disgrace--that can't be blotted out!"

"Oh, yes, it can," he insisted bluntly. "There's a way I know--"

A glimmering of that way had only that instant let a little light in
upon the darkness of his solicitous distress for her. He rose and began
to walk and think, hands clasped behind him, trying to make what he had
in mind seem right and reasonable.

"You mean beg my father to take me back. I'll die first!"

"There mustn't be any more talk, or even any thought, of anything like
that. I understand too well to ask the impossible of you. But there is
one way out--a perfectly right way--if you're willing and brave enough
to take a chance--a long chance."

Somehow she seemed to gain hope of his tone. She sat up, following him
with eyes that sought incredulously to believe.

"Have I any choice?" she asked. "I'm desperate enough...."

"God knows," he said, "you'll have to be!"

"Try me."

He paused, standing over her.

"Desperate enough to marry a man who's bound to die within six months
and leave you free? I'm that man: the doctors give me six months more of
life. I'm alone in the world, with no one dependent upon me, nothing to
look forward to but a death that will benefit nobody--a useless end to a
useless life.... Will you take my name to free yourself? Heaven my
witness, you're welcome to it."

"Oh," she breathed, aghast, "what are you saying?"

"I'm proposing marriage," he said, with his quaint, one-sided smile.
"Please listen: I came to this place to make a quick end to my
troubles--but I've changed my mind about that, now. What's happened in
this room has made me see that nobody has any right to--hasten things.
But I mean to leave the country--immediately--and let death find me
where it will. I shall leave behind me a name and a little money,
neither of any conceivable use to me. Will you take them, employ them to
make your life what it was meant to be? It's a little thing, but it will
make me feel a lot more fit to go out of this world--to know I've left
at least one decent act to mark my memory. There's only this far-fetched
chance--I _may_ live. It's a million-to-one shot, but you've got to bear
it in mind. But really you can't lose--"

"Oh, stop, stop!" she implored him, half hysterical. "To think of
marrying to benefit by the death of a man like you--!"

"You've no right to look at it that way." He had a wry, secret smile for
his specious sophistry. "You're being asked to confer, not to accept, a
favour. It's just an act of kindness to a hopeless man. I'd go mad if I
didn't know you were safe from a recurrence of the folly of this
afternoon."

"Don't!" she cried--"don't tempt me. You've no right.... You don't know
how frantic I am...."

"I do," he countered frankly. "I'm depending on just that to swing you
to my point of view. You've got to come to it. I mean you shall marry
me."

She stared up at him, spell-bound, insensibly yielding to the domination
of his will. It was inevitable. He was scarcely less desperate than
she--and no less overwrought and unstrung; and he was the stronger; in
the natural course of things his will could not but prevail. She was
little more than a child, accustomed to yield and go where others led or
pointed out the path. What resistance could she offer to the domineering
importunity of a man of full stature, arrogant in his strength
and--hounded by devils? And he in the fatuity of his soul believed that
he was right, that he was fighting for the girl's best interests,
fighting--and not ungenerously--to save her from the ravening
consequences of her indiscretion!

The bald truth is, he was hardly a responsible agent: distracted by the
ravings of an ego mutinous in the shadow of annihilation, as well as by
contemplation of the girl's wretched plight, he saw all things in
distorted perspective. He had his being in a nightmare world of
frightful, insane realities. He could have conceived of nothing too
terrible and preposterous to seem reasonable and right....

The last trace of evening light had faded out of the world before they
were agreed. Darkness wrapped them in its folds; they were but as voices
warring in a black and boundless void.

Whitaker struck a match and applied it to the solitary gas-jet. A thin,
blue, sputtering tongue of flame revealed them to one another. The girl
still crouched in her arm-chair, weary and spent, her powers of
contention all vitiated by the losing struggle. Whitaker was trembling
with nervous fatigue.

"Well?" he demanded.

"Oh, have your own way," she said drearily. "If it must be...."

"It's for the best," he insisted obstinately. "You'll never regret it."

"One of us will--either you or I," she said quietly. "It's too
one-sided. You want to give all and ask nothing in return. It's a fool's
bargain."

He hesitated, stammering with surprise. She had a habit of saying the
unexpected. "A fool's bargain"--the wisdom of the sage from the lips of
a child....

"Then it's settled," he said, business-like, offering his hand. "Fool's
bargain or not--it's a bargain."

She rose unassisted, then trusted her slender fingers to his palm. She
said nothing. The steady gaze of her extraordinary eyes abashed him.

"Come along and let's get it over," he muttered clumsily. "It's late,
and there's a train to New York at half-past ten, you might as well
catch."

She withdrew her hand, but continued to regard him steadfastly with her
enigmatic, strange stare. "So," she said coolly, "that's settled too, I
presume."

"I'm afraid you couldn't catch an earlier one," he evaded. "Have you any
baggage?"

"Only my suit-case. It won't take a minute to pack that."

"No hurry," he mumbled....

They left the hotel together. Whitaker got his change of a hundred
dollars at the desk--"Mrs. Morten's" bill, of course, included with
his--and bribed the bell-boy to take the suit-case to the railway
station and leave it there, together with his own hand-bag. Since he had
unaccountably conceived a determination to continue living for a time,
he meant to seek out more pleasant accommodations for the night.

The rain had ceased, leaving a ragged sky of clouds and stars in
patches. The air was warm and heavy with wetness. Sidewalks glistened
like black watered silk; street lights mirrored themselves in fugitive
puddles in the roadways; limbs of trees overhanging the sidewalks
shivered now and again in a half-hearted breeze, pelting the wayfarers
with miniature showers of lukewarm, scented drops.

Turning away from the centre of the town, they traversed slowly long
streets of residences set well back behind decent lawns. Warm lamplight
mocked them from a hundred homely windows. They passed few people--a
pair of lovers; three bareheaded giggling girls in short, light frocks
strolling with their arms round one another; a scattering of men
hurrying home to belated suppers.

The girl lagged with weariness. Awakening to this fact, Whitaker
slackened his impatient stride and quietly slipped her arm through his.

"Is it much farther?" she asked.

"No--not now," he assured her with a confidence he by no means felt.

He was beginning to realize the tremendous difficulties to be overcome.
It bothered him to scheme a way to bring about the marriage without
attracting an appalling amount of gratuitous publicity, in a community
as staid and sober as this. He who would marry secretly should not
select a half-grown New England city for his enterprise....

However, one rarely finds any really insuperable obstacles in the way of
an especially wrong-headed project.

Whitaker, taking his heart and his fate in his hands, accosted a
venerable gentleman whom they encountered as he was on the point of
turning off the sidewalk to private grounds.

"I beg your pardon," he began.

The man paused and turned upon them a saintly countenance framed in hair
like snow.

"There is something I can do for you?" he inquired with punctilious
courtesy.

"If you will be kind enough to direct me to a minister...."

"I am one."

"I thought so," said Whitaker. "We wish to get married."

The gentleman looked from his face to the girl's, then moved aside from
the gate. "This is my home," he explained. "Will you be good enough to
come in?"

Conducting them to his private study, he subjected them to a kindly
catechism. The girl said little, Whitaker taking upon himself the brunt
of the examination. Absolutely straightforward and intensely sincere, he
came through the ordeal well, without being obliged to disclose what he
preferred to keep secret. The minister, satisfied, at length called in
the town clerk by telephone; who issued the license, pocketed his fee,
and, in company with the minister's wife, acted as witness....

Whitaker found himself on his feet beside Mary Ladislas. They were being
married. He was shaken by a profound amazement. The incredible was
happening--with his assistance. He heard his voice uttering responses;
it seemed something as foreign to him as the voice of the girl at his
side. He wondered stupidly at her calm--and later, at his own. It was
all preposterously matter-of-fact and, at the same time, stupidly
romantic. He divined obscurely that this thing was happening in
obedience to forces nameless and unknown to them, strange and terrific
forces that worked mysteriously beyond their mortal ken. He seemed to
hear the droning of the loom of the Fates....

And they were man and wife. The door had closed, the gate-latch clicked
behind them. They were walking quietly side by side through the scented
night, they whom God had joined together.

Man and wife! Bride and groom, already started on the strangest,
shortest of wedding journeys--from the parsonage to the railroad
station!

Neither found anything to say. They walked on, heels in unison pounding
the wet flagstones. The night was sweet with the scent of wet grass and
shrubbery. The sidewalks were boldly patterned with a stencilling of
black leaves and a milky dappling of electric light. At every corner
high-swung arcs shot vivid slants of silver-blue radiance through the
black and green of trees.

These things all printed themselves indelibly upon the tablets of his
memory....

They arrived at the station. Whitaker bought his wife a ticket to New
York and secured for her solitary use a drawing-room in the sleeper.
When that was accomplished, they had still a good part of an hour to
wait. They found a bench on the station platform, and sat down. Whitaker
possessed himself of his wife's hand-bag long enough to furnish it with
a sum of money and an old envelope bearing the name and address of his
law partner. He explained that he would write to Drummond, who would see
to her welfare as far as she would permit--issue her an adequate monthly
allowance and advise her when she should have become her own mistress
once more: in a word, a widow.

She thanked him briefly, quietly, with a constraint he understood too
well to resent.

People began to gather upon the platform, to loiter about and pass up
and down. Further conversation would have been difficult, even if they
had found much to say to one another. Curiously or not, they didn't.
They sat on in thoughtful silence.

Both, perhaps, were sensible of some relief when at length the train
thundered in from the East, breathing smoke and flame. Whitaker helped
his wife aboard and interviewed the porter in her behalf. Then they had
a moment or two alone in the drawing-room, in which to consummate what
was meant to be their first and last parting.

"You'll get in about two," said Whitaker. "Better just slip across the
street to the Belmont for to-night. To-morrow--or the day
after--whenever you feel rested--you can find yourself more quiet
quarters."

"Yes," she said....

He comprehended something of the struggle she was having with herself,
and respected it. If he had consulted his own inclinations, he would
have turned and marched off without another word. But for her sake he
lingered. Let her have the satisfaction (he bade himself) of knowing
that she had done her duty at their leave-taking.

She caught him suddenly by the shoulders with both her hands. Her eyes
sought his with a wistful courage he could not but admire.

"You know I'm grateful...."

"Don't think of it that way--though I'm glad you are."

"You're a good man," she said brokenly.

He knew himself too well to be able to reply.

"You mustn't worry about me, now. You've made things easy for me. I can
take care of myself, and ... I shan't forget whose name I bear."

He muttered something to the effect that he was sure of that.

She released his shoulders and stood back, searching his face with
tormented eyes. Abruptly she offered him her hand.

"Good-by," she said, her lips quivering--"Good-by, good friend!"

He caught the hand, wrung it clumsily and painfully and ... realized
that the train was in motion. He had barely time to get away....

He found himself on the station platform, stupidly watching the rear
lights dwindle down the tracks and wondering whether or not
hallucinations were a phase of his malady. A sick man often dreams
strange dreams....

A voice behind him, cool with a trace of irony, observed:

"I'd give a good deal to know just what particular brand of damn'
foolishness you've been indulging in, this time."

He whirled around to face Peter Stark--Peter quietly amused and very
much the master of the situation.

"You needn't think," said he, "that you have any chance on earth of
escaping my fond attentions, Hugh. I'll go to the ends of the earth
after you, if you won't let me go with you. I've fixed it up with Nelly
to wait until I bring you home, a well man, before we get married; and
if you refuse to be my best man--well, there won't be any party. You can
make up your mind to that."




V

WILFUL MISSING


It was one o'clock in the morning before Whitaker allowed himself to be
persuaded; fatigue reënforced every stubborn argument of Peter Stark's
to overcome his resistance. It was a repetition of the episode of Mary
Ladislas recast and rewritten: the stronger will overcame the
admonitions of a saner judgment. Whitaker gave in. "Oh, have your own
way," he said at length, unconsciously iterating the words that had won
him a bride. "If it must be...."

Peter put him to bed, watched over him through the night, and the next
morning carried him on to New Bedford, where they superintended the
outfitting of Peter's yacht, the _Adventuress_. Beyond drawing heavily
on his bank and sending Drummond a brief note, Whitaker failed to renew
communication with his home. He sank into a state of semi-apathetic
content; he thought little of anything beyond the business of the
moment; the preparations for what he was pleased to term his funeral
cruise absorbed him to the exclusion of vain repinings or anxiety for
the welfare of his adventitious wife. Apparently his sudden
disappearance had not caused the least ripple on the surface of life in
New York; the newspapers, at all events, slighted the circumstance
unanimously: to his complete satisfaction.

Within the week the _Adventuress_ sailed.

She was five months out of port before Whitaker began to be conscious
that he was truly accursed. There came a gradual thickening of the
shadows that threatened to eclipse his existence. And then, one day as
they dined with the lonely trader of an isolated station in the
D'Entrecasteaux Islands, he fell from his chair as if poleaxed. He
regained consciousness only to shiver with the chill of the wind that's
fanned by the wings of death. It was impossible to move him. The agonies
of the damned were his when, with exquisite gentleness, they lifted him
to a bed....

Stark sailed in the _Adventuress_ before sundown of the same day,
purposing to fetch a surgeon from Port Moresby. Whitaker said a last
farewell to his friend, knowing in his soul that they would never meet
again. Then he composed himself to die quietly. But the following
morning brought a hapchance trading schooner to the island, and with it,
in the estate of supercargo, a crapulous Scotch gentleman who had been a
famous specialist of London before drink laid him by the heels. He
performed an heroic operation upon Whitaker within an hour, announced by
nightfall that the patient would recover, and the next day sailed with
his ship to end his days in some abandoned Australian boozing-ken--as
Whitaker learned in Sydney several months later.

In the same place, and at the same time, he received his first authentic
news of the fate of the _Adventuress_. The yacht had struck on an
uncharted reef, in heavy weather, and had foundered almost immediately.
Of her entire company, a solitary sailor managed to cling to a life-raft
until picked up, a week after the wreck, by a tramp steamship on whose
decks he gasped out his news and his life in the same breaths.

Whitaker hunted up an account of the disaster in the files of a local
newspaper. He read that the owner, Peter Stark, Esq., and his guest, H.
M. Whitaker, Esq., both of New York, had gone down with the vessel.
There was also a cable despatch from New York detailing Peter Stark's
social and financial prominence--evidence that the news had been cabled
Home. To all who knew him Whitaker was as dead as Peter Stark.

Sardonic irony of circumstance, that had robbed the sound man of life
and bestowed life upon the moribund! Contemplation wrought like a toxic
drug upon Whitaker's temper, until he was raving drunk with the black
draught of mutiny against the dictates of an Omnipotence capable of such
hideous mockeries of justice. The iron bit deep into his soul and left
corrosion there....

    "There is a world outside the one you know
      To which for curiousness 'Ell can't compare;
    It is the place where wilful missings go,
      As we can testify, for we are there."

Kipling's lines buzzed through his head more than once in the course of
the next few years; for he was "there." They were years of such
vagabondage as only the South Seas countenance: neither unhappy nor very
strenuous, not yet scarred by the tooth of poverty. Whitaker had between
four and five thousand dollars in traveller's checks which he converted
into cash while in Sydney. Memory of the wreck of the _Adventuress_ was
already fading from the Australian mind; no one dreamed of challenging
the signature of a man seven months dead. And as certainly and as
quietly as the memory, Whitaker faded away; Hugh Morten took his place,
and Sydney knew him no more, nor did any other parts wherein he had
answered to his rightful name.

The money stayed by him handsomely. Thanks to a strong constitution in a
tough body (now that its malignant demon was exorcised) he found it easy
to pick up a living by one means or another. Indeed, he played many
parts in as many fields before joining hands with a young Englishman he
had grown to like and entering upon what seemed a forlorn bid for
fortune. Thereafter he prospered amazingly.

In those days his anomalous position in the world troubled him very
little. He was a Wilful Missing and a willing. The new life intrigued
him amazingly; he lived in open air, in virgin country, wresting a
fortune by main strength from the reluctant grasp of Nature. He was one
of the first two men to find and mine gold in paying quantities in the
Owen Stanley country.... Now that Peter Stark was dead, the ties of
interest and affection binding him to America were both few and slender.
His wife was too abstract a concept, a shadow too vague in his memory,
to obtrude often upon his reveries. Indeed, as time went on, he found it
anything but easy to recall much about the physical appearance of the
woman he had married; he remembered chiefly her eyes; she moved mistily
across the stage of a single scene in his history, an awkward,
self-conscious, unhappy, childish phantasm.

Even the consideration that, fortified by the report of his death, she
might have married again, failed to disturb either his slumbers or his
digestion. If that had happened, he had no objection; the tie that bound
them was the emptiest of forms--in his understanding as meaningless and
as powerless to make them one as the printed license form they had been
forced to procure of the State of Connecticut. There had been neither
love nor true union--merely pity on one side, apathy of despair on the
other. Two souls had met in the valley of the great shadow, had paused a
moment to touch hands, had passed onward, forever out of one another's
ken; and that was all. His "death" should have put her in command of a
fair competence. If she had since sought and found happiness with
another man, was there any logical reason, or even excuse, for Whitaker
to abandon his new and pleasant ways of life in order to return and
shatter hers?

He was self-persuaded of his generosity toward the girl.

Casuistry of the Wilful Missing!...

It's to be feared he had always a hard-headed way of considering matters
in the light of equity as distinguished from the light of ethical or
legal morality. This is not to be taken as an attempt to defend the man,
but rather as a statement of fact: even as the context is to be read as
an account of some things that happened rather than as a morality....

When at length he did make up his mind to go Home, it wasn't because he
felt that duty called him; plain, everyday, human curiosity had
something to do with his determination--a desire to see how New York was
managing to get along without him--together with a dawning apprehension
that there was an uncomfortable amount of truth in the antiquated
bromidiom about the surprising littleness of the world.

He was in Melbourne at that time, with Lynch, his partner. Having
prospered and laid by a lump of money, they had planned to finance their
holdings in the traditional fashion--that is, to let in other people's
money to do the work, while they rested and possessed their souls and
drew dividends on a controlling interest. Capital in Melbourne had
proved eager and approachable; the arrangement they desired was quickly
consummated; the day the papers were signed, Whitaker passed old friends
in the street. They were George Presbury and his wife--Anne Forsythe
that was--self-evident tourists, looking the town over between steamers.
Presbury, with no thought in his bumptious head of meeting Hugh Whitaker
before the Day of Judgment, looked at and through him without a hint of
recognition; but his wife was another person altogether. Whitaker could
not be blind to the surprise and perplexity that shone in her eyes, even
though he pretended to be blind to her uncertain nod; long after his
back alone was visible to her he could feel her inquiring stare boring
into it.

The incident made him think; and he remembered that he was now a man of
independent fortune and of newly idle hands as well. After prolonged
consideration he suddenly decided, told Lynch to look out for his
interests and expect him back when he should see him, and booked for
London by a Royal Mail boat--all in half a day. From London Mr. Hugh
Morten crossed immediately to New York on the _Olympic_, landing in the
month of April--nearly six years to a day from the time he had left his
native land.

He discovered a New York almost wholly new--an experience almost
inevitable, if one insists on absenting one's self even for as little as
half a decade. Intimations of immense changes were borne in upon
Whitaker while the steamer worked up the Bay. The Singer Building was an
unfamiliar sky-mark, but not more so than the Metropolitan Tower and the
Woolworth. The _Olympic_ docked at an impressive steel-and-concrete
structure, new since his day; and Whitaker narrowly escaped a row with a
taxicab chauffeur because the fellow smiled impertinently when directed
to drive to the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

A very few hours added amazingly to the catalogue of things that were
not as they had been: a list so extensive and impressive that he made up
his mind to maintain his incognito for a few days, until familiar with
the ways of his home. He was quick to perceive that he would even have
to forget most of the slang that had been current in his time, in
addition to unlearning all he had picked up abroad, and set himself with
attentive ears pricked forward and an open mind to master the new,
strange tongue his countrymen were speaking, if he were to make himself
intelligible to them--and them to him, for that matter.

So he put up at the Ritz-Carlton, precisely as any foreigner might be
expected to do, and remained Hugh Morten while he prowled around the
city and found himself. Now and again in the course of his wanderings he
encountered well-remembered faces, but always without eliciting the
slightest gleam of recognition: circumstances that only went to prove
how thoroughly dead and buried he was in the estimation of his day and
generation.

Nothing, indeed, seemed as he remembered it except the offerings in the
theatres. He sat through plays on three successive nights that sent him
back to his hotel saddened by the conviction that the tastes of his
fellow-countrymen in the matter of amusements were as enduring as
adamant--as long-enduring. Some day (he prophesied) New York would be
finished and complete; then would come the final change--its
name--because it wouldn't be New York unless ever changing; and when
that was settled, the city would know ease and, for want of something
less material to occupy it, begin to develop a soul of its own--together
with an inclination for something different in the way of theatrical
entertainment.

But his ultimate and utter awakening to the truth that his home had
outgrown him fell upon the fourth afternoon following his return, when a
total but most affable gentleman presented himself to Whitaker's
consideration with a bogus name and a genuine offer to purchase him a
drink, and promptly attempted to enmesh him in a confidence game that
had degenerated into a vaudeville joke in the days when both of them had
worn knickerbockers. Gently but firmly entrusting the stranger to the
care of a convenient policeman, Whitaker privately admitted that he was
outclassed, that it was time for him to seek the protection of his
friends.

He began with Drummond. The latter, of course, had moved his offices; no
doubt he had moved them several times; however that may be, Whitaker had
left him in quiet and contracted quarters in Pine Street; he found him
independently established in an imposing suite in the Woolworth
Building.

Whitaker gave one of Mr. Hugh Morten's cards to a subdued office-boy.
"Tell him," he requested, "that I want to see him about a matter
relating to the estate of Mr. Whitaker."

The boy dived through one partition-door and reappeared by way of
another with the deft certainty of a trained pantomime.

"Says t' come in."

Whitaker found himself in the presence of an ashen-faced man of
thirty-five, who clutched the side of his roll-top desk as if to save
himself from falling.

"Whitaker!" he gasped. "My God!"

"Flattered," said Whitaker, "I'm sure."

He derived considerable mischievous amusement from Drummond's patent
stupefaction. It was all so right and proper--as it should have been. He
considered his an highly satisfactory resurrection, the sensation it
created as complete, considered in the relation of anticipation to
fulfilment, as anything he had ever experienced. Seldom does a scene
pass off as one plans it; the other parties thereto are apt to spoil
things by spouting spontaneously their own original lines, thus cheating
one out of a crushing retort or cherished epigram. But Drummond played
up his part in a most public-spirited fashion--gratifying, to say the
least.

It took him some minutes to recover, Whitaker standing by and beaming.

He remarked changes, changes as striking as the improvement in
Drummond's fortunes. Physically his ex-partner had gone off a bit; the
sedentary life led by the average successful man of business in New York
had marked his person unmistakably. Much heavier than the man Whitaker
remembered, he wore a thick and solid air of good-natured prosperity.
The hair had receded an inch or so from his forehead. Only his face
seemed as it had always been--sharply handsome and strong. Whitaker
remembered that he had always somewhat meanly envied Drummond his good
looks; he himself had been fashioned after the new order of
architecture--with a steel frame; but for some reason Nature, the master
builder, had neglected sufficiently to wall in and conceal the skeleton.
Admitting the economy of the method, Whitaker was inclined to believe
that the effect must be surprising, especially if encountered without
warning....

He discovered that they were both talking at once--furiously--and, not
without surprise, that he had a great deal more enlightenment to impart
to Drummond than he had foreseen.

"You've got an economical streak in you when it comes to
correspondence," Drummond commented, offering Whitaker a sheet of paper
he had just taken from a tin document-box. "That's Exhibit A."

Whitaker read aloud:

     "'DEAR D., I'm not feeling well, so off for a vacation. Burke has
     just been in and paid $1500 in settlement of our claim. I'm
     enclosing herewith my check for your share. Yours, H. M. W.'"

"Far be it from me to cast up," said Drummond; "but I'd like to know why
the deuce you couldn't let a fellow know how ill you were."

Whitaker frowned over his dereliction. "Don't remember," he confessed.
"I was hardly right, you know--and I presume I must have counted on
Greyerson telling."

"But I don't know Greyerson...."

"That's so. And you never heard--?"

"Merely a rumour ran round. Some one--I forget who--told me that you and
Stark had gone sailing in Stark's boat--to cruise in the West Indies,
according to my informant. And somebody else mentioned that he'd heard
you were seriously ill. More than that nothing--until we heard that the
_Adventuress_ had been lost, half a year later."

"I'm sorry," said Whitaker contritely. "It was thoughtless...."

"But that isn't all," Drummond objected, flourishing another paper. "See
here--Exhibit B--came in a day or so later."

"Yes." Whitaker recognized the document. "I remember insisting on
writing to you before we turned in that night."

He ran through the following communication:

     "DEAR DRUMMOND: I married here, to-night, Mary Ladislas. Please
     look out for her while I'm away. Make her an allowance out of my
     money--five hundred a month ought to be enough. I shall die
     intestate, and she'll get everything then, of course. She has your
     address and will communicate with you as soon as she gets settled
     down in Town.

     "Faithfully--

     "HUGH MORTEN WHITAKER."

"If it hadn't been so much in character," commented Drummond, "I'd've
thought the thing a forgery--or a poor joke. Knowing you as well as I
did, however ... I just sat back to wait for word from Mrs. Whitaker."

"And you never heard, except that once!" said Whitaker thoughtfully.

"Here's the sole and only evidence I ever got to prove that you had told
the truth."

Drummond handed Whitaker a single, folded sheet of note-paper stamped
with the name of the Waldorf-Astoria.

     "CARTER S. DRUMMOND, Esq., 27 Pine Street, City.

     "DEAR SIR: I inclose herewith a bank-note for $500, which you will
     be kind enough to credit to the estate of your late partner and my
     late husband, Mr. Hugh Morten Whitaker.

     "Very truly yours,

     "MARY LADISLAS WHITAKER."

"Dated, you see, the day after the report of your death was published
here."

"But why?" demanded Whitaker, dumfounded. "_Why?_"

"I infer she felt herself somehow honour-bound by the monetary
obligation," said the lawyer. "In her understanding your marriage of
convenience was nothing more--a one-sided bargain, I think you said she
called it. She couldn't consider herself wholly free, even though you
were dead, until she had repaid this loan which you, a stranger, had
practically forced upon her--if not to you, to your estate."

"But death cancels everything--"

"Not," Drummond reminded him with a slow smile, "the obligation of a
period of decent mourning that devolves upon a widow. Mrs. Whitaker may
have desired to marry again immediately. If I'm any judge of human
nature, she argued that repayment of the loan wiped out every
obligation. Feminine logic, perhaps, but--"

"Good Lord!" Whitaker breathed, appalled in the face of this contingency
which had seemed so remote and immaterial when he was merely Hugh
Morten, bachelor-nomad, to all who knew him on the far side of the
world.

Drummond dropped his head upon his hand and regarded his friend with
inquisitive eyes.

"Looks as though you may have gummed things up neatly--doesn't it?"

Whitaker nodded in sombre abstraction.

"You may not," continued Drummond with light malice, "have been so
generous, so considerate and chivalric, after all."

"Oh, cut that!" growled Whitaker, unhappily. "I never meant to come
back."

"Then why did you?"

"Oh ... I don't know. Chiefly because I caught Anne Presbury's sharp
eyes on me in Melbourne--as I said a while ago. I knew she'd talk--as
she surely will the minute she gets back--and I thought I might as well
get ahead of her, come home and face the music before anybody got a
chance to expose me. At the worst--if what you suggest has really
happened--it's an open-and-shut case; no one's going to blame the woman;
and it ought to be easy enough to secure a separation or divorce--"

"You'd consent to that?" inquired Drummond intently.

"I'm ready to do anything she wishes, within the law."

"You leave it to her, then?"

"If I ever find her--yes. It's the only decent thing I can do."

"How do you figure that?"

"I went away a sick man and a poor one; I come back as sound as a bell,
and if not exactly a plutocrat, at least better off than I ever expected
to be in this life.... To all intents and purposes I _made_ her a
partner to a bargain she disliked; well, I'll be hanged if I'm going to
hedge now, when I look a better matrimonial risk, perhaps: if she still
wants my name, she can have it."

Drummond laughed quietly. "If that's how you feel," he said, "I can only
give you one piece of professional advice."

"What's that?"

"Find your wife."

After a moment of puzzled thought, Whitaker admitted ruefully: "You're
right. There's the rub."

"I'm afraid you won't find it an easy job. I did my best without
uncovering a trace of her."

"You followed up that letter, of course?"

"I did my best; but, my dear fellow, almost anybody with a decent
appearance can manage to write a note on Waldorf stationery. I made sure
of one thing--the management knew nothing of the writer under either her
maiden name or yours."

"Did you try old Thurlow?"

"Her father died within eight weeks from the time you ran away. He left
everything to charity, by the way. Unforgiving blighter."

"Well, there's her sister, Mrs. Pettit."

"She heard of the marriage first through me," asserted Drummond. "Your
wife had never come near her--nor even sent her a line. She could give
me no information whatever."

"You don't think she purposely misled you--?"

"Frankly I don't. She seemed sincerely worried, when we talked the
matter over, and spoke in a most convincing way of her fruitless
attempts to trace the young woman through a private detective agency."

"Still, she may know now," Whitaker said doubtfully. "She may have heard
something since. I'll have a word with her myself."

"Address," observed Drummond, dryly: "the American Embassy, Berlin....
Pettit's got some sort of a minor diplomatic berth over there."

"O the devil!... But, anyway, I can write."

"Think it over," Drummond advised. "Maybe it might be kinder not to."

"Oh, I don't know--"

"You've given me to understand you were pretty comfy on the other side
of the globe. Why not let sleeping dogs lie?"

"It's the lie that bothers me--the living lie. It isn't fair to her."

"Rather sudden, this solicitude--what?" Drummond asked with open
sarcasm.

"I daresay it does look that way. But I can't see that it's the decent
thing for me to let things slide any longer. I've got to try to find
her. She may be ill--destitute--in desperate trouble again--"

Drummond's eyebrows went up whimsically. "You surely don't mean me to
infer that your affections are involved?"

This brought Whitaker up standing. "Good heavens--no!" he cried. He
moved to a window and stared rudely at the Post Office Building for a
time. "I'm going to find her just the same--if she still lives," he
announced, turning back.

"Would you know her if you saw her?"

"I don't know." Whitaker frowned with annoyance. "She's six years
older--"

"A woman often develops and changes amazingly between the ages of
eighteen and twenty-four."

"I know," Whitaker acknowledged with dejection.

"Well, but what _was_ she like?" Drummond pursued curiously.

Whitaker shook his head. "It's not easy to remember. Matter of fact, I
don't believe I ever got one good square look at her. It was twilight in
the hotel, when I found her; we sat talking in absolute darkness, toward
the end; even in the minister's study there was only a green-shaded lamp
on the table; and on the train--well, we were both too much worked up, I
fancy, to pay much attention to details."

"Then you really haven't any idea--?"

"Oh, hardly." Whitaker's thin brown hand gesticulated vaguely. "She was
tall, slender, pale, at the awkward age...."

"Blonde or brune?"

"I swear I don't know. She wore one of those funny knitted caps, tight
down over her hair, all the time."

Drummond laughed quietly. "Rather an inconclusive description,
especially if you advertise. 'Wanted: the wife I married six years ago
and haven't seen since; tall, slender, pale, at the awkward age; wore
one of those funny knit--'"

"I don't feel in a joking humour," Whitaker interrupted roughly. "It's a
serious matter and wants serious treatment.... What else have we got to
mull over?"

Drummond shrugged suavely. "There's enough to keep us busy for several
hours," he said. "For instance, there's my stewardship."

"Your which?"

"My care of your property. You left a good deal of money and securities
lying round loose, you know; naturally I felt obliged to look after 'em.
There was no telling when Widow Whitaker might walk in and demand an
accounting. I presume we might as well run over the account--though it
is getting late."

"Half-past four," Whitaker informed him, consulting his watch. "Take too
long for to-day. Some other time."

"To-morrow suit you?"

"To-morrow's Sunday," Whitaker objected. "But there's no hurry at all."

Drummond's reply was postponed by the office boy, who popped in on the
heels of a light knock.

"Mr. Max's outside," he announced.

"O the deuce!" The exclamation seemed to escape Drummond's lips
involuntarily. He tightened them angrily, as though regretting the lapse
of self-control, and glanced hurriedly askance to see if Whitaker had
noticed. "I'm busy," he added, a trace sullenly. "Tell him I've gone
out."

"But he's got 'nappointment," the boy protested. "And besides, I told
him you was in."

"You needn't fob him off on my account," Whitaker interposed. "We can
finish our confab later--Monday--any time. It's time for me to be
getting up-town, anyway."

"It isn't that," Drummond explained doggedly. "Only--the man's a bore,
and--"

"It isn't Jules Max?" Whitaker demanded excitedly. "Not little Jules
Max, who used to stage manage our amateur shows?"

"That's the man," Drummond admitted with plain reluctance.

"Then have him in, by all means. I want to say howdy to him, if nothing
more. And then I'll clear out and leave you to his troubles."

Drummond hesitated; whereupon the office boy, interpreting assent,
precipitately vanished to usher in the client. His employer laughed a
trifle sourly.

"Ben's a little too keen about pleasing Max," he said. "I think he looks
on him as the fountainhead of free seats. Max has developed into a
heavy-weight entrepreneur, you know."

"Meaning theatrical manager? Then why not say so? But I might've guessed
he'd drift into something of the sort."

A moment later Whitaker was vigorously pumping the unresisting--indeed
the apparently boneless--hand of a visibly flabbergasted gentleman, who
suffered him for the moment solely upon suspicion, if his expression
were a reliable index of his emotion.

In the heyday of his career as a cunning and successful promoter of
plays and players, Jules Max indulged a hankering for the picturesquely
eccentric that sat oddly upon his commonplace personality. The hat that
had made Hammerstein famous Max had appropriated--straight crown, flat
brim and immaculate gloss--bodily. Beneath it his face was small of
feature, and fat. Its trim little mustache lent it an air of
conventionality curiously at war with a pince-nez which sheltered his
near-sighted eyes, its enormous, round, horn-rimmed lenses sagging to
one side with the weight of a wide black ribbon. His nose was
insignificant, his mouth small and pursy. His short, round little body
was invariably by day dressed in a dark gray morning-coat, white-edged
waistcoat, assertively-striped trousers, and patent-leather shoes with
white spats. He had a passion for lemon-coloured gloves of thinnest kid
and slender malacca walking-sticks. His dignity was an awful thing, as
ingrained as his strut.

He reasserted the dignity now with a jerk of his maltreated hand, as
well as with an appreciable effort betrayed by his resentful glare.

"Do I know you?" he demanded haughtily. "If not, what the devil do you
mean by such conduct, sir?"

With a laugh, Whitaker took him by the shoulders and spun him round
smartly into a convenient chair.

"Sit still and let me get a _good_ look," he implored. "Think of it!
Juley Max daring to put on side with me! The impudence of you, Juley!
I've a great mind to play horse with you. How dare you go round the
streets looking like that, anyway?"

Max recovered his breath, readjusted his glasses, and resumed his stare.

"Either," he observed, "you're Hugh Whitaker come to life or a damned
outrage."

"Both, if you like."

"You sound like both," complained the little man. "Anyway, you were
drowned in the Philippines or somewhere long ago, and I never waste time
on a dead one.... Drummond--" He turned to the lawyer with a vastly
business-like air.

"No, you don't!" Whitaker insisted, putting himself between the two men.
"I admit that you're a great man; you might at least admit that I'm a
live one."

A mollified smile moderated the small man's manner. "That's a bargain,"
he said, extending a pale yellow paw; "I'm glad to see you again, Hugh.
When did you recrudesce?"

"An hour ago," Drummond answered for him; "blew in here as large as life
and twice as important. He's been running a gold farm out in New Guinea.
What do you know about that?"

"It's very interesting," Max conceded. "I shall have to cultivate him; I
never neglect a man with money. If you'll stick around a few minutes,
Hugh, I'll take you up-town in my car." He turned to Drummond,
completely ignoring Whitaker while he went into the details of some
action he desired the lawyer to undertake on his behalf. Then, having
talked steadily for upwards of ten minutes, he rose and prepared to go.

"You've asked him, of course?" he demanded of Drummond, nodding toward
Whitaker.

Drummond flushed slightly. "No chance," he said. "I was on the point of
doing it when you butted in."

"What's this?" inquired Whitaker.

Max delivered himself of a startling bit of information: "He's going to
get married."

Whitaker stared. "Drummond? Not really?"

Drummond acknowledged his guilt brazenly: "Next week, in fact."

"But why didn't you say anything about it?"

"You didn't give me an opening. Besides, to welcome a deserter from the
Great Beyond is enough to drive all other thoughts from a man's mind."

"There's to be a supper in honour of the circumstances, at the Beaux
Arts to-night," supplemented Max. "You'll come, of course."

"Do you think you could keep me away with a dog?"

"Wouldn't risk spoiling the dog," said Drummond. He added with a
tentative, questioning air: "There'll be a lot of old-time acquaintances
of yours there, you know."

"So much the better," Whitaker declared with spirit. "I've played dead
long enough."

"As you think best," the lawyer acceded. "Midnight, then--the Beaux
Arts."

"I'll be there--and furthermore, I'll be waiting at the church a week
hence--or whenever it's to come off. And now I want to congratulate
you." Whitaker held Drummond's hand in one of those long, hard grips
that mean much between men. "But mostly I want to congratulate her. Who
is she?"

"Sara Law," said Drummond, with pride in his quick color and the lift of
his chin.

"Sara Law?" The name had a familiar ring, yet Whitaker failed to
recognize it promptly.

"The greatest living actress on the English-speaking stage," Max
announced, preening himself importantly. "My own discovery."

"You don't mean to say you haven't heard of her. Is New Guinea, then, so
utterly abandoned to the march of civilization?"

"Of course I've heard--but I have been out of touch with such things,"
Whitaker apologized. "When shall I see her?"

"At supper, to-night," said the man of law. "It's really in her
honour--"

"In honour of her retirement," Max interrupted, fussing with a gardenia
on his lapel. "She retires from the stage finally, and forever--she
says--when the curtain falls to-night."

"Then I've got to be in the theatre to-night--if that's the case," said
Whitaker. "It isn't my notion of an occasion to miss."

"You're right there," Max told him bluntly. "It's no small matter to
me--losing such a star; but the world's loss of its greatest
artist--_ah!_" He kissed his finger-tips and ecstatically flirted the
caress afar.

"'Fraid you won't get in, though," Drummond doubted darkly. "Everything
in the house for this final week was sold out a month ago. Even the
speculators are cleaned out."

"_Tut!_" the manager reproved him loftily. "Hugh is going to see Sara
Law act for the last time from my personal box--aren't you, Hugh?"

"You bet I am!" Whitaker asserted with conviction.

"Then come along." Max caught him by the arm and started for the door.
"So long, Drummond...."




VI

CURTAIN


Nothing would satisfy Max but that Whitaker should dine with him. He
consented to drop him at the Ritz-Carlton, in order that he might dress,
only on the condition that Whitaker would meet him at seven, in the
white room at the Knickerbocker.

"Just mention my name to the head waiter," he said with magnificence;
"or if I'm there first, you can't help seeing me. Everybody knows my
table--the little one in the southeast corner."

Whitaker promised, suppressing a smile; evidently the hat was not the
only peculiarity of Mr. Hammerstein's that Max had boldly made his own.

Max surprised him by a shrewd divination of his thoughts. "I know what
you're thinking," he volunteered with an intensely serious expression
shadowing his pudgy countenance; "but really, my dear fellow, it's good
business. You get people into the habit of saying, 'There's Max's
table,' and you likewise get them into the habit of thinking of Max's
theatre and Max's stars. As a matter of fact, I'm merely running an
immense advertising plant with a dramatic annex."

"You are an immense advertisement all by your lonesome," Whitaker agreed
with a tolerant laugh, rising as the car paused at the entrance of the
Ritz.

"Seven o'clock--you won't fail me?" Max persisted. "Really, you know,
I'm doing you an immense favour--dinner--a seat in my private box at
Sara Law's farewell performance--"

"Oh, I'm thoroughly impressed," Whitaker assured him, stepping out of
the car. "But tell me--on the level, now--why this staggering
condescension?"

Max looked him over as he paused on the sidewalk, a tall, loosely built
figure attired impeccably yet with an elusive sense of carelessness, his
head on one side and a twinkle of amusement in his eyes. The twinkle was
momentarily reflected in the managerial gaze as he replied with an air
of impulsive candour: "One never can tell when the most unlikely-looking
material may prove useful. I may want to borrow money from you before
long. If I put you under sufficient obligation to me, you can't well
refuse.... Shoot, James!"

The latter phrase was Max's way of ordering the driver to move on. The
car snorted resentfully, then pulled smoothly and swiftly away. Max
waved a jaunty farewell with a lemon-coloured hand, over the back of the
tonneau.

Whitaker went up to his room in a reflective mood in which the
theatrical man had little place, and began leisurely to prepare his
person for ceremonious clothing--preparations which, at first, consisted
in nothing more strenuous than finding a pipe and sitting down to stare
out of the window. He was in no hurry--he had still an hour and a half
before he was due at the Knickerbocker--and the afternoon's employment
had furnished him with a great deal of material to stimulate his
thoughts.

Since his arrival in New York he had fallen into the habit of seeking
the view from his window when in meditative humour. The vast sweep of
gullied roofs exerted an almost hypnotic attraction for his eyes. They
ranged southward to the point where vision failed against the false
horizon of dull amber haze. Late sunlight threw level rays athwart the
town, gilding towering westerly walls and striking fire from all their
windows. Between them like deep blue crevasses ran the gridironed
streets. The air was moveless, yet sonorously thrilled with the measured
movement of the city's symphonic roar. Above the golden haze a drift of
light cloud was burning an ever deeper pink against the vault of
robin's-egg blue.

A view of ten thousand roofs, inexpressibly enchaining....
Somewhere--perhaps--in that welter of steel and stone, as eternal and as
restless as the sea, was the woman Whitaker had married, working out her
lonely destiny. A haphazard biscuit tossed from his window might fall
upon the very roof that sheltered her: he might search for a hundred
years and never cross her path.

He wondered....

More practically he reminded himself not to forget to write to Mrs.
Pettit. He must try to get the name of the firm of private detectives
she had employed, and her permission to pump them; it might help him, to
learn the quarters wherein they had failed.

And he must make an early opportunity to question Drummond more closely;
not that he anticipated that Drummond knew anything more than he had
already disclosed--anything really helpful at all events.

His thoughts shifted to dwell temporarily on the two personalities newly
introduced into his cosmos, strikingly new, in spite of the fact that
they had been so well known to him of old. He wondered if it were
possible that he seemed to them as singularly metamorphosed as they
seemed to him--superficially if not integrally. He had lost altogether
the trick of thinking in their grooves, and yet they seemed very human
to him. He thought they supplemented one another somewhat weirdly: each
was at bottom what the other seemed to be. Beneath his assumption, for
purposes of revenue only, of outrageous eccentricities, Jules Max was as
bourgeois as César Birotteau; beneath his assumption of the
steady-going, keen, alert and conservative man of affairs, Drummond was
as romantic as D'Artagnan. But Max had this advantage of Drummond: he
was not his own dupe; whereas Drummond would go to his grave believing
himself bored to extinction by the commonplaceness of his fantastical
self....

Irresponsibly, his reverie reëmbraced the memory he had of the woman who
alone held the key to his matrimonial entanglement. The business bound
his imagination with an ineluctable fascination. No matter how far his
thoughts wandered, they were sure to return to beat themselves to
weariness against that hard-faced mystery, like moths bewitched by the
light behind a clouded window-glass. It was very curious (he thought)
that he could be so indifferent and so interested at one and the same
time. The possibility that she might have married a second time did not
disturb his pulse by the least fraction of a beat. He even contemplated
the chance that she might be dead with normal equanimity. Fortunate,
that he didn't love her. More fortunate still, that he loved no one
else.

It occurred to him suddenly that it would take a long time for a letter
to elicit information from Berlin.

Incontinently he wrote and despatched a long, extravagant cablegram to
Mrs. Pettit in care of the American Embassy, little doubting that she
would immediately answer.

Then he set whole-heartedly about the business of making himself
presentable for the evening.

When eventually he strode into the white room, Max was already
established at the famous little table in the southeast corner. Whitaker
was conscious of turning heads and guarded comment as he took his place
opposite the little fat man.

"Make you famous in a night," Max assured him importantly. "Don't happen
to need any notoriety, do you?"

"No, thanks."

"Dine with me here three nights hand-running and they'll let you into
the Syndicate by the back door without even asking your name. P.T.A.'s
one grand little motto, my boy."

"P.T.A.?"

"Pays to advertise. Paste that in your hat, keep your head small enough
to wear it, and don't givadam if folks do think you're an addle-pated
village cut-up, and you'll have this town at heel like a good dog as
long as--well," Max wound up with a short laugh, "as long as your luck
lasts."

"Yours seems to be pretty healthy--no signs of going into a premature
decline."

"Ah!" said Max gloomily. "Seems!"

With a morose manner he devoted himself to his soup.

"Look me over," he requested abruptly, leaning back. "I guess I'm some
giddy young buck, what?"

Whitaker reviewed the striking effect Max had created by encasing his
brief neck and double chin in an old-fashioned high collar and black
silk stock, beneath which his important chest was protected by an
elaborately frilled shirt decorated with black pearl studs. His waist
was strapped in by a pique waistcoat edged with black, and there was a
distinctly perceptible "invisible" stripe in the material of his evening
coat and trousers.

"Dressed up like a fool," Max summed up the ensemble before his guest
could speak. "Would you believe that despair could gnaw at the vitals of
any one as wonderfully arrayed?"

"I would not," Whitaker asserted.

"Nobody would," said Max mournfully. "And yet, 'tis true."

"Meaning--?"

"Oh, I'm just down in the mouth because this is Sara's last appearance."
Max motioned the waiter to remove the débris of a course. "I'm as
superstitious as any trouper in the profession. I've got it in my knob
that she's my mascot. If she leaves me, my luck goes with her. I never
had any luck until she came under my management, and I don't expect to
have any after she retires. I made her, all right, but she made me, too;
and it sprains my sense of good business to break up a paying
combination like that."

"Nonsense," Whitaker contended warmly. "If I'm not mistaken, you were
telling me this afternoon that you stand next to Belasco as a producing
manager. The loss of one star isn't going to rob you of that prestige,
is it?"

"You never can tell," the little man contended darkly; "I wouldn't bet
thirty cents my next production would turn out a hit."

"What will it cost--your next production?"

"The show I have in mind--" Max considered a moment then announced
positively: "between eighteen and twenty thousand."

"I call that big gambling."

"Gambling? Oh, that's just part of the game. I meant a side bet. If the
production flivvers, I'll need that thirty cents for coffee and sinkers
at Dennett's. So I won't bet.... But," he volunteered brightly, "I'll
sell you a half interest in the show for twelve thousand."

"Is that a threat or a promise?"

"I mean it," Max insisted seriously; "though I'll admit I'm not crazy
about your accepting--yet. I've had several close calls with Sara--she's
threatened to chuck the stage often before this; but every time
something happened to make her change her mind. I've got a hunch maybe
something will happen this time, too. If it does, I won't want any
partners."

Whitaker laughed quietly and turned the conversation, accepting the
manager's pseudo-confidences at their face value--that is, as pure
bluff, quite consistent with the managerial pose.

They rose presently and made their way out into the crowded, blatant
night of Broadway.

"We'll walk, if you don't mind," Max suggested. "It isn't far, and I'd
like to get a line on the house as it goes in." He sighed affectedly.
"Heaven knows when I'll see another swell audience mobbing one of my
attractions!"

His companion raised no objection. This phase of the life of New York
exerted an attraction for his imagination of unfailing potency. He was
more willing to view it afoot than from the windows of a cab.

They pushed forward slowly through the eddying tides, elbowed by a
matchless motley of humanity, deafened by its thousand tongues, dazzled
to blindness by walls of living light. Whitaker experienced a sensation
of participating in a royal progress: Max was plainly a man of mark; he
left a wake of rippling interest. At every third step somebody hailed
him, as a rule by his first name; generally he responded by a curt nod
and a tightening of his teeth upon his cigar.

They turned east through Forty-sixth Street, shouldered by a denser
rabble whose faces, all turned in one direction, shone livid with the
glare of a gigantic electric sign, midway down the block:

    THEATRE MAX

    SARA LAW'S
     FAREWELL

It was nearly half-past eight; the house had been open since seven; and
still a queue ran from the gallery doors to Broadway, while still an
apparently interminable string of vehicles writhed from one corner to
the lobby entrance, paused to deposit its perishable freight, and
streaked away to Sixth Avenue. The lobby itself was crowded to
suffocation with an Occidental durbar of barbaric magnificence, the
city's supreme manifestation of its religion, the ultimate rite in the
worship of the pomps of the flesh.

"Look at that," Max grumbled through his cigar. "Ain't it a shame?"

"What?" Whitaker had to lift his voice to make it carry above the
buzzing of the throng.

"The money I'm losing," returned the manager, vividly disgusted. "I
could've filled the Metropolitan Opera House three times over!"

He swung on his heel and began to push his way out of the lobby. "Come
along--no use trying to get in this way."

Whitaker followed, to be led down a blind alley between the theatre and
the adjoining hotel. An illuminated sign advertised the stage door,
through which, _via_ a brief hallway, they entered the postscenium--a
vast, cavernous, cluttered, shadowy and draughty place, made visible for
the most part by an unnatural glow filtering from the footlights through
the canvas walls of an interior set. Whitaker caught hasty glimpses of
stage-hands idling about; heard a woman's voice declaiming loudly from
within the set; saw a middle-aged actor waiting for his cue beside a
substantial wooden door in the canvas walls; and--Max dragging him by
the arm--passed through a small door into the gangway behind the boxes.

"Curtain's just up," Max told him; "Sara doesn't come on till near the
middle of the act. Make yourself comfortable; I'll be back before long."

He drew aside a curtain and ushered his guest into the right-hand
stage-box, then vanished. Whitaker, finding himself the sole occupant of
the box, established himself in desolate grandeur as far out of sight as
he could arrange his chair, without losing command of the stage. A
single glance over the body of the house showed him tier upon tier of
dead-white shirt-bosoms framed in black, alternating with bare gleaming
shoulders and dazzling, exquisite gowns. The few empty stalls were
rapidly filling up. There was a fluent movement through the aisles. A
subdued hum and rustle rose from that portion of the audience which was
already seated. The business going on upon the stage was receiving
little attention--from Whitaker as little as from any one. He was
vaguely conscious only of a scene suggesting with cruel cleverness the
interior of a shabby-genteel New York flat and of a few figures peopling
it, all dominated by a heavy-limbed, harsh-voiced termagant. That to
which he was most sensitive was a purely psychological feeling of
suspense and excitement, a semi-hysterical, high-strung, emotional state
which he knew he shared with the audience, its source in fact. The
opening scene in the development of the drama interested the gathering
little or not at all; it was hanging in suspense upon the unfolding of
some extraordinary development, something unprecedented and extraneous,
foreign to the play.

Was it due simply to the fact that all these people were present at the
last public appearance--as advertised--of a star of unusual popularity?
Whitaker wondered. Or was there something else in their minds, something
deeper and more profoundly significant?

Max slipped quietly into the box and handed his guest a programme.
"Better get over here," he suggested in a hoarse whisper, indicating a
chair near the rail. "You may never have another chance to see the
greatest living actress."

Whitaker thanked him and adopted the suggestion, albeit with reluctance.
The manager remained standing for a moment, quick eyes ranging over the
house. By this time the aisles were all clear, the rows of seats
presenting an almost unbroken array of upturned faces.

Max combined a nod denoting satisfaction with a slight frown.

"Wonderful house," he whispered, sitting down behind Whitaker. "Drummond
hasn't shown up yet, though."

"That so?" Whitaker returned over his shoulder.

"Yes; it's funny; never knew him to be so late. He always has the aisle
seat, fourth row, centre. But he'll be along presently."

Whitaker noted that the designated stall was vacant, then tried to fix
his attention upon the stage; but without much success; after a few
moments he became aware that he had missed something important; the
scene was meaningless to him, lacking what had gone before.

He glanced idly at his programme, indifferently absorbing the
information that "Jules Max has the honour to present Miss Sara Law in
her first and greatest success entitled JOAN THURSDAY--a play in three
acts--"

The audience stirred expectantly; a movement ran through it like the
movement of waters, murmurous, upon a shore. Whitaker's gaze was drawn
to the stage as if by an implacable force. Max shifted on the chair
behind him and said something indistinguishable, in an unnatural tone.

A woman had come upon the stage, suddenly and tempestuously, banging a
door behind her. The audience got the barest glimpse of her profile as,
pausing momentarily, she eyed the other actors. Then, without speaking,
she turned and walked up-stage, her back to the footlights.

Applause broke out like a thunderclap, pealing heavily through the big
auditorium, but the actress showed no consciousness of it. She was
standing before a cheap mirror, removing her hat, arranging her hair
with the typical, unconscious gestures of a weary shop-girl; she was
acting--living the scene, with no time to waste in pandering to her
popularity by bows and set smiles; she remained before the glass,
prolonging the business, until the applause subsided.

Whitaker received an impression as of a tremendous force at work across
the footlights. The woman diffused an effect as of a terrible and
boundless energy under positive control. She was not merely an actress,
not even merely a great actress; she was the very soul of the drama of
to-day.

Beyond this he knew in his heart that she was his wife. Sara Law was the
woman he had married in that sleepy Connecticut town, six years before
that night. He had not yet seen her face clearly, but he _knew_. To find
himself mistaken would have shaken the foundations of his understanding.

Under cover of the applause, he turned to Max.

"Who is that? What is her name?"

"The divine Sara," Max answered, his eyes shining.

"I mean, what is her name off the stage, in private life?"

"The same," Max nodded with conviction; "Sara Law's the only name she's
ever worn in my acquaintance with her."

At that moment, the applause having subsided to such an extent that it
was possible for her to make herself heard, the actress swung round from
the mirror and addressed one of the other players. Her voice was clear,
strong and vibrant, yet sweet; but Whitaker paid no heed to the lines
she spoke. He was staring, fascinated, at her face.

Sight of it set the seal of certainty upon conviction: she was one with
Mary Ladislas. He had forgotten her so completely in the lapse of years
as to have been unable to recall her features and colouring, yet he had
needed only to see to recognize her beyond any possibility of doubt.
Those big, intensely burning eyes, that drawn and pallid face, the
quick, nervous movements of her thin white hands, the slenderness of her
tall, awkward, immature figure--in every line and contour, in every
gesture and inflection, she reproduced the Mary Ladislas whom he had
married.

And yet ... Max was whispering over his shoulder:

"Wonderful make-up--what?"

"Make-up!" Whitaker retorted. "She's not made up--she's herself to the
last detail."

Amusement glimmered in the manager's round little eyes: "You don't know
her. Wait till you get a pipe at her off the stage." Then he checked the
reply that was shaping on Whitaker's lips, with a warning lift of his
hand and brows: "Ssh! Catch this, now. She's a wonder in this scene."

The superb actress behind the counterfeit of the hunted and hungry
shop-girl was holding spell-bound with her inevitable witchery the most
sophisticated audience in the world; like wheat in a windstorm it swayed
to the modulations of her marvellous voice as it ran through a
passage-at-arms with the termagant. Suddenly ceasing to speak, she
turned down to a chair near the footlights, followed by a torrent of
shrill vituperation under the lash of which she quivered like a whipped
thoroughbred.

Abruptly, pausing with her hands on the back of the chair, there came a
change. The actress had glanced across the footlights; Whitaker could
not but follow the direction of her gaze; the eyes of both focussed for
a brief instant on the empty aisle-seat in the fourth row. A shade of
additional pallor showed on the woman's face. She looked quickly,
questioningly, toward the box of her manager.

Seated as he was so near the stage, Whitaker's face stood out in rugged
relief, illumined by the glow reflected from the footlights. It was
inevitable that she should see him. Her eyes fastened, dilating, upon
his. The scene faltered perceptibly. She stood transfixed....

[Illustration: Her eyes fastened, dilating, upon his. The scene faltered
perceptibly]

In the hush Max cried impatiently: "What the devil!" The words broke the
spell of amazement upon the actress. In a twinkling the pitiful
counterfeit of the shop-girl was rent and torn away; it hung only in
shreds and tatters upon an individuality wholly strange to Whitaker: a
larger, stronger woman seemed to have started out of the mask.

She turned, calling imperatively into the wings: "_Ring down!_"

Followed a pause of dumb amazement. In all the house, during the space
of thirty pulse-beats, no one moved. Then Max rapped out an oath and
slipped like quicksilver from the box.

Simultaneously the woman's foot stamped an echo from the boards.

"Ring down!" she cried. "Do you hear? Ring down!"

With a rush the curtain descended as pandemonium broke out on both sides
of it.




VII

THE LATE EXTRA


Impulsively Whitaker got up to follow Max, then hesitated and sank back
in doubt, his head awhirl. He was for the time being shocked out of all
capacity for clear reasoning or right thinking. Uppermost in his
consciousness he had a half-formed notion that it wouldn't help matters
if he were to force himself in upon the crisis behind the scenes.

Beyond all question his wife had recognized in him the man whom she had
been given every reason to believe dead: a discovery so unnerving as to
render her temporarily unable to continue. But if theatrical precedent
were a reliable guide, she would presently pull herself together and go
on; people of the stage seldom forget that their first duty is to the
audience. If he sat tight and waited, all might yet be well--as well as
any such hideous coil could be hoped ever to be....

As has been indicated, he arrived at his conclusion through no such
detailed argument; his mind leaped to it, and he rested upon it while
still beset by a half-score of tormenting considerations.

This, then, explained Drummond's reluctance to have him bidden to the
supper party; whatever ultimate course of action he planned to pursue,
Drummond had been unwilling, perhaps pardonably so, to have his romance
overthrown and altogether shattered in a single day.

And Drummond, too, must have known who Sara Law was, even while denying
knowledge of the existence of Mary Ladislas Whitaker. He had lied, lied
desperately, doubtless meaning to encompass a marriage before Whitaker
could find his wife, and so furnish him with every reason that could
influence an honourable man to disappear a second time.

Herein, moreover, lay the reason for the lawyer's failure to occupy his
stall on that farewell night. It was just possible that Whitaker would
not recognize his wife; and _vice versa_; but it was a chance that
Drummond hadn't the courage to face. Even so, he might have hidden
himself somewhere in the house, waiting and watching to see what would
happen.

On the other hand, Max to a certainty was ignorant of the relationship
between his star and his old-time friend, just as he must have been
ignorant of her identity with the one-time Mary Ladislas. For that
matter, Whitaker had to admit that, damning as was the evidence to
controvert the theory, Drummond might be just as much in the dark as Max
was. There was always the chance that the girl had kept her secret to
herself, inviolate, informing neither her manager nor the man she had
covenanted to wed. Drummond's absence from the house might be due to any
one of a hundred reasons other than that to which Whitaker inclined to
assign it. It was only fair to suspend judgment. In the meantime....

The audience was getting beyond control. The clamour of comment and
questioning which had broken loose when the curtain fell was waxing and
gaining a high querulous note of impatience. In the gallery the gods
were beginning to testify to their normal intolerance with shrill
whistles, cat-calls, sporadic bursts of hand-clapping and a steady,
sinister rumble of stamping feet. In the orchestra and dress-circle
people were moving about restlessly and talking at the top of their
voices in order to make themselves heard above the growing din. Had
there been music to fill the interval, they might have been more calm;
but Max had fallen in with the theatrical _dernier cri_ and had
eliminated orchestras from his houses, employing only a peal of gongs to
insure silence and attention before each curtain.

Abruptly Max himself appeared at one side of the proscenium arch. It was
plain to those nearest the stage that he was seriously disturbed. There
was a noticeable hesitancy in his manner, a pathetic frenzy in his
habitually mild and lustrous eyes. Advancing halfway to the middle of
the apron, he paused, begging attention with a pudgy hand. It was a full
minute before the gallery would let him be heard.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he announced plaintively, "I much regret to
inform you that Miss Law has suffered a severe nervous shock"--his gaze
wandered in perplexed inquiry toward the right-hand stage-box, then was
hastily averted--"and will not be able to continue for a few moments. If
you will kindly grant us your patience for a very few minutes...." He
backed precipitately from view, hounded by mocking applause.

A lull fell, but only temporarily. As the minutes lengthened, the
gallery grew more and more obstreperous and turbulent. Wave upon wave of
sound swept through the auditorium to break, roaring, against the
obdurate curtain. When eventually a second figure appeared before the
footlights, the audience seemed to understand that Max dared not show
himself again, and why. It was with difficulty that the man--evidently
the stage-manager--contrived to make himself disconnectedly audible.

"Ladies and ..." he shouted, sweat beading his perturbed forehead ...
"regret ... impossible to continue ... money ... box-office...."

An angry howl drowned him out. He retreated at accelerated discretion.

Whitaker, slipping through the stage-door behind the boxes, ran into the
last speaker standing beside the first entrance, heatedly explaining to
any one who would listen the utter futility of offering box-office
prices in return for seat checks which in the majority of instances had
cost their holders top-notch speculator prices.

"They'll wreck the theatre," he shouted excitedly, mopping his brow with
his coat sleeve, "and damned if I blame 'em! What t'ell'd she wana pull
a raw one like this for?"

Whitaker caught his arm in a grasp compelling attention.

"Where's Miss Law?" he asked.

"You tell me and I'll make you a handsome present," retorted the man.

"What's happened to her? Can't you find her?"

"I dunno--go ask Max."

"Where is _he_?"

"You can search me; last I saw of him he was tearing the star
dressin'-room up by the roots."

Whitaker hurried on just in time to see Max disappearing in the
direction of the stage-door, at which point he caught up with him, and
from the manager's disjointed catechism of the doorkeeper garnered the
information that the star had hurried out of the building while Max was
making his announcement before the curtain.

Max swung angrily upon Whitaker.

"Oh, it's you, is it? Perhaps you can explain what this means? She was
looking straight at you when she dried up! I saw her--"

"Perhaps you'd better find Miss Law and ask her," Whitaker interrupted.
"Have you any idea where she's gone?"

"Home, probably," Max snapped in return.

"Where's that?"

"Fifty-seventh Street--house of her own--just bought it."

"Come on, then." Passing his arm through the manager's, Whitaker drew
him out into the alley. "We'll get a taxi before this mob--"

"But, look here--what business've _you_ got mixing in?"

"Ask Miss Law," said Whitaker, shortly. It had been on the tip of his
tongue to tell the man flatly: "I'm her husband." But he retained wit
enough to deny himself the satisfaction of this shattering rejoinder. "I
know her," he added; "that's enough for the present."

"If you knew her all the time, why didn't you say so?" Max expostulated
with passion.

"I didn't know I knew her--by that name," said Whitaker lamely.

At the entrance to the alley Max paused to listen to the uproar within
his well-beloved theatre.

"I'd give five thousand gold dollars if I hadn't met you this
afternoon!" he groaned.

"It's too late, now," Whitaker mentioned the obvious. "But if I'd
understood, I promise you I wouldn't have come--at least to sit where
she could see me."

He began gently to urge Max toward Broadway, but the manager hung back
like a sulky child.

"Hell!" he grumbled. "I always knew that woman was a Jonah!"

"You were calling her your mascot two hours ago."

"She'll be the death of me, yet," the little man insisted gloomily. He
stopped short, jerking his arm free. "Look here, I'm not going. What's
the use? We'd only row. And I've got my work cut out for me back
there"--with a jerk of his head toward the theatre.

Whitaker hesitated, then without regret decided to lose him. It would be
as well to get over the impending interview without a third factor.

"Very well," he said, beckoning a taxicab in to the curb. "What's the
address?"

Max gave it sullenly.

"So long," he added morosely as Whitaker opened the cab door; "sorry I
ever laid eyes on you."

Whitaker hesitated. "How about that supper?" he inquired. "Is it still
on?"

"How in blazes do I know? Come round to the Beaux Arts and find out for
yourself--same's I'll have to."

"All right," said Whitaker doubtfully. He nodded to the chauffeur, and
jumped into the cab. As they swung away he received a parting impression
of Max, his pose modelled on the popular conception of Napoleon at
Waterloo: hands clasped behind his back, hair in disorder, chin on his
chest, a puzzled frown shadowing his face as he stared sombrely after
his departing guest.

Whitaker settled back and, oblivious to the lights of Broadway streaming
past, tried to think--tried with indifferent success to prepare himself
against the unhappy conference he had to anticipate. It suddenly
presented itself to his reason, with shocking force, that his attitude
must be humbly and wholly apologetic. It was a singular case: he had
come home to find his wife on the point of marrying another man--and
_she_ was the one entitled to feel aggrieved! Strange twist of the
eternal triangle!...

He tried desperately, and with equal futility, to frame some excuse for
his fault.

Far too soon the machine swerved into Fifty-seventh Street, slipped
halfway down the block, described a wide arc to the northern curb and
pulled up, trembling, before a modest modern residence between Sixth and
Seventh avenues.

Reluctantly Whitaker got out and, on suspicion, told the chauffeur to
wait. Then, with all the alacrity of a condemned man ascending the
scaffold, he ran up the steps to the front door.

A man-servant answered his ring without undue delay.

Was Miss Law at home? He would see.

This indicated that she was at home. Whitaker tendered a card with his
surname pencilled after that of _Mr. Hugh Morten_ in engraved script. He
was suffered to enter and wait in the hallway.

He stared round him with pardonable wonder. If this were truly the home
of Mary Ladislas Whitaker--her property--he had builded far better than
he could possibly have foreseen with that investment of five hundred
dollars six years since. But who, remembering the tortured, half-starved
child of the Commercial House, could have prefigured the Sara Law of
to-day--the woman who, before his eyes, within that hour, had burst
through the counterfeit of herself of yesterday like some splendid
creature emerging from its chrysalis?

Soft, shaded lights, rare furnishings, the rich yet delicate atmosphere
of exquisite taste, the hush and orderly perfection of a home made and
maintained with consummate art: these furnished him with dim, provoking
intimations of an individuality to which he was a stranger--less than a
stranger--nothing....

The man-servant brought his dignity down-stairs again.

Would Mr. Whitaker be pleased to wait in the drawing-room?

Mr. Whitaker surrendered top-coat and hat and was shown into the
designated apartment. Almost immediately he became aware of feminine
footsteps on the staircase--tapping heels, the faint murmuring of
skirts. He faced the doorway, indefinably thrilled, the blood quickening
in throat and temples.

To his intense disappointment there entered to him a woman impossible to
confuse with her whom he sought: a lady well past middle-age, with the
dignity and poise consistent with her years, her manifest breeding and
her iron-gray hair.

"Mr. Whitaker?"

He bowed, conscious that he was being narrowly scrutinized, nicely
weighed in the scales of a judgment prejudiced, if at all, not in his
favor.

"I am Mrs. Secretan, a friend of Miss Law's. She has asked me to say
that she begs to be excused, at least for to-night. She has suffered a
severe shock and is able to see nobody."

"I understand--and I'm sorry," said Whitaker, swallowing his chagrin.

"And I am further instructed to ask if you will be good enough to leave
your address."

"Certainly: I'm stopping at the Ritz-Carlton; but"--he demurred--"I
should like to leave a note, if I may--?"

Mrs. Secretan nodded an assent. "You will find materials in the desk
there," she added, indicating an escritoire.

Thanking her, Whitaker sat down, and, after some hesitation, wrote a few
lines:

     "Please don't think I mean to cause you the slightest inconvenience
     or distress. I shall be glad to further your wishes in any way you
     may care to designate. Please believe in my sincere regret...."

Signing and folding this, he rose and delivered it to Mrs. Secretan.

"Thank you," he said with a ceremonious bow.

The customary civilities were scrupulously observed.

He found himself in the street, with his trouble for all reward for his
pains. He wondered what to do, where to go, next. There was in his mind
a nagging thought that he ought to do something or other, somehow or
other, to find Drummond and make him understand that he, Whitaker, had
no desire or inclination to stand in his light; only, let the thing be
consummated decently, as privately as possible, with due deference to
the law....

The driver of the taxicab was holding the door for him, head bent to
catch the address of the next stop. But his fare lingered still in
doubt.

Dimly he became aware of the violent bawlings of a brace of news-vendors
who were ramping through the street, one on either sidewalk. Beyond two
words which seemed to be intended for "extra" and "tragedy" their cries
were as inarticulate as they were deafening.

At the spur of a vague impulse, bred of an incredulous wonder if the
papers were already noising abroad the news of the fiasco at the Theatre
Max, Whitaker stopped one of the men and purchased a paper. It was
delivered into his hands roughly folded so that a section of the front
page which blazed with crimson ink was uppermost--and indicated,
moreover, by a ridiculously dirty thumb.

"Ther'y'are, sir. 'Orrible moider.... Thanky...."

The man galloped on, howling. But Whitaker stood with his gaze riveted
in horror. The news item so pointedly offered to his attention was
clearly legible in the light of the cab lamps.

     LATEST EXTRA

     TRAGIC SUICIDE IN HARLEM RIVER

     Stopping his automobile in the middle of Washington Bridge at 7.30
     P.M., Carter S. Drummond, the lawyer and fiancé of Sara Law the
     actress, threw himself to his death in the Harlem River. The body
     has not as yet been recovered.




VIII

A HISTORY


Whitaker returned at once to the Theatre Max, but only to find the front
of the house dark, Forty-sixth Street gradually reassuming its normal
nocturnal aspect.

At the stage-door he discovered that no one knew what had become of the
manager. He might possibly be at home.... It appeared that Max occupied
exclusive quarters especially designed for him in the theatre building
itself: an amiable idiosyncrasy not wholly lacking in advertising value,
if one chose to consider it in that light.

His body-servant, a prematurely sour Japanese, suggested grudgingly that
his employer might not improbably be found at Rector's or Louis
Martin's. But he wasn't; not by Whitaker, at least.

Eventually the latter realized that it wasn't absolutely essential to
his peace of mind or material welfare to find Max that night. He had
been, as a matter of fact, seeking him in thoughtless humour--moved
solely by the gregarious instinct in man, which made him want to discuss
the amazing events of the evening with the one who, next to himself and
Sara Law, was most vitally concerned with them.

He consulted a telephone book without finding that Drummond had any
private residence connection, and then tried at random one of the clubs
of which they had been members in common in the days when Hugh Whitaker
was a human entity in the knowledge of the town. Here he had better
luck--luck, that is, in as far as it put an end to his wanderings for
the night; he found a clerk who remembered his face without remembering
his name, and who, consequently, was not unwilling to talk. Drummond, it
seemed, had lived at the club; he had dined alone, that evening, in his
room; had ordered his motor car from the adjacent garage for seven
o'clock; and had left at about that hour with a small hand-bag and no
companion. Nothing further was known of his actions save the police
report. The car had been found stationary on Washington Bridge, and
deserted, Drummond's motor coat and cap on the driver's seat. Bystanders
averred that a man had been seen to leave the car and precipitate
himself from the bridge to the stream below. The body was still
unrecovered. The club had notified by telegraph a brother in San
Francisco, the only member of Drummond's family of whom it had any
record. Friends, fellow-members of the club, were looking after
things--doing all that could and properly ought to be done under the
circumstances.

Whitaker walked back to his hotel. There was no other place to go: no
place, that is, that wooed his humour in that hour. He could call to
mind, of course, names of friends and acquaintances of the old days to
whom there was no reason why he shouldn't turn, now that he had elected
to rediscover himself to the world; but there was none of them all that
he really wanted to see before he had regained complete control of his
emotions.

He was, indeed, profoundly shocked. He held himself measurably
responsible for Drummond's act of desperation. If he had not wilfully
sought to evade the burden of his duty to Mary Ladislas, when he found
that he was to live rather than die--if he had been honest and generous
instead of allowing himself to drift into cowardly defalcation to her
trust--Drummond, doubtless, would still be alive. Or even if, having
chosen the recreant way, he had had the strength to stick to it, to stay
buried....

Next to poor Peter Stark, whom his heart mourned without ceasing, he had
cared most for Drummond of all the men he had known and liked in the old
life. Now ... he felt alone and very lonely, sick of heart and forlorn.
There was, of course, Lynch, his partner in the Antipodes; Whitaker was
fond of Lynch, but not with the affection that a generous-spirited youth
had accorded Peter Stark and Drummond--a blind and unreasoning affection
that asked no questions and made nothing of faults. The capacity for
such sentiment was dead in him, as dead as Peter Stark, as dead as
Drummond....

It was nearly midnight, but the hour found Whitaker in no humour for bed
or the emptiness of his room. He strolled into the lounge, sat down at a
detached table in a corner, and ordered something to drink. There were
not many others in the room, but still enough to mitigate to some extent
his temporary horror of utter loneliness.

He felt painfully the heaviness of his debt to the woman he had married.
He who had promised her new life and the rich fulfilment thereof had
accomplished only its waste and desolation. He had thrust upon her the
chance to find happiness, and as rudely had snatched it away from her.
Nor could he imagine any way in which he might be able to expiate his
breach of trust--his sins of omission and commission, alike deadly and
unpardonable!

Unless ... He caught eagerly at the thought: he might "die" again--go
away once more, and forever; bury himself deep beyond the groping
tentacles of civilization; disappear finally, notifying her of his
intention, so that she might seek legal freedom from his name. It only
needed Max's silence, which could unquestionably be secured, to insure
her against the least breath of scandal, the faintest whisper of
gossip.... Not that Max really knew anything; but the name of Whitaker,
as identified with Hugh Morten, might better be permitted to pass
unechoed into oblivion....

And with this very thought in mind he became aware of the echo of that
name in his hearing.

A page, bearing something on a salver, ambled through the lounge, now
and again opening his mouth to bleat, dispassionately: "Mista Whitaker,
Mista Whitaker!"

The owner of that name experienced a flush of exasperation. What right
had the management to cause him to be advertised in every public room of
the establishment?... But the next instant his resentment evaporated,
when he remembered that he remained Mr. Hugh Morten in the managerial
comprehension.

He lifted a finger; the boy swerved toward him, tendered a blue
envelope, accepted a gratuity and departed.

It was a cable message: very probably an answer to his to Grace Pettit.
Whitaker tore the envelope and unfolded the enclosure, glancing first at
the signature to verify his surmise. As he did so, he heard his name a
second time.

"Pardon me; this is Mr. Whitaker?"

A man stood beside the little table--one whom Whitaker had indifferently
noticed on entering as an equally lonely lounger at another table.

Though he frowned involuntarily with annoyance, he couldn't well deny
his identity.

"Yes," he said shortly, looking the man up and down with a captious eye.

Yet it was hard to find much fault with this invader of his
preoccupation. He had the poise and the dress of a gentleman: dignity
without aggressiveness, completeness without ostentation. He had a
spare, not ungraceful body, a plain, dark face, a humorous mouth, steady
eyes: a man easily forgotten or overlooked unless he willed it
otherwise.

"My name is Ember," he said quietly. "If you'll permit me--my card." He
offered a slip of pasteboard engraved with the name of Martin Ember.
"And I'll sit down, because I want to talk to you for a few minutes."

Accordingly he sat down. Whitaker glanced at the card, and questioningly
back at Mr. Ember's face.

"I don't know you, but ... What are we to talk about, please?"

The man smiled, not unpleasingly.

"Mrs. Whitaker," he said.

Whitaker stared, frowned, and jumped at a conclusion.

"You represent Mrs. Whitaker?"

Mr. Ember shook his head. "I'm no lawyer, thank God! But I happen to
know a good deal it would be to your advantage to know; so I've taken
this liberty."

"Mrs. Whitaker didn't send you to me? Then how--? What the deuce--!"

"I happened to have a seat near your box at the theatre to-night," Mr.
Ember explained coolly. "From--what I saw there, I inferred that you
must be--yourself. Afterwards I got hold of Max, confirmed my suspicion,
and extracted your address from him."

"I see," said Whitaker, slowly--not comprehending the main issue at all.
"But I'm not known here by the name of Whitaker."

"So I discovered," said Ember, with his quiet, engaging smile. "If I
hadn't remembered that you sometimes registered as Hugh Morten--as, for
instance, at the Commercial House six years ago--"

"You were there!"

"A considerable time after the event--yes." The man nodded, his eyes
glimmering.

Whitaker shot a quick glance round the room, and was relieved to find
they were not within earshot of any of the other occupied tables.

"Who the devil are you?" he demanded bluntly.

"I was," said the other slowly, "once, a private detective. Now--I'm a
person of no particular employment, of independent means, with a
penchant--you're at liberty to assume--for poking my nose into other
people's business."

"Oh...."

A word, "blackmail," leapt into Whitaker's consciousness, and served to
harden the hostility in his attitude.

"Mrs. George Pettit once employed me to find her sister, Miss Mary
Ladislas, who had run away with a chauffeur named Morton," pursued the
man, evenly. "That was about the time--shortly after--the death of
Thurlow Ladislas; say, two months after the so-called elopement."

"Just a minute," said Whitaker suddenly--"by your leave--"

Ember bowed gravely. For a thought longer Whitaker's gaze bored into his
eyes in vain effort to fathom what was going on behind them, the animus
undiscovered by his words; then, remembering, he looked down at the
cable message in his hand.

"_Martin Ember_ (it ran) _private agency 1435 Broadway Grace Pettit_."

Whitaker folded the paper and put it away in a pocket.

"Go on, please," he said quietly.

"In those days," Mr. Ember resumed, "I did such things indifferently
well. I had little trouble in following the runaways from Southampton to
Greenport. There they parted. The girl crossed to the Connecticut shore,
while the man went back to New York with the automobile. He turned the
machine in at the Ladislas garage, by the way, and promptly fell into
the hands of the police. He was wanted for theft in a former position,
was arrested, convicted and sent to Sing Sing; where he presently died,
I'm glad to say.... I thought this information might interest you."

Whitaker nodded grimly.

"Can I order you something to drink?"

"No, thank you--and I'm already smoking." Mr. Ember dropped the ash from
a cigar. "On the Connecticut side (because it was my business to find
out things) I discovered that Miss Ladislas had registered at the
Commercial House as Mrs. Morton. She was there, alone, under that name,
for nearly a week before you registered as Hugh Morten, and in the space
of a few hours married her, under your true name, and shipped her off to
New York."

"Right," Whitaker agreed steadily. "And then--?"

"I traced her to the Hotel Belmont, where she stopped overnight, then
lost her completely; and so reported to Mrs. Pettit. I must mention
here, in confidence, in order that you may understand my subsequent
action, that my bill for the investigation was never paid. Mr. Pettit
was not in very comfortable circumstances at the time.... No matter. I
didn't press him, and later was glad of it, for it left me a free
agent--under no obligation to make further report."

"I don't understand you."

"In a moment.... I came into a little money about that time, and gave up
my business: gave it up, that is, as far as placing myself at the
service of the public was concerned. I retained my devouring curiosity
about things that didn't concern me personally, although they were often
matters of extreme interest to the general public. In other words, I
continued to employ my time professionally, but only for my private
amusement or in the interests of my friends.... After some time Mr.
Drummond sought me out and begged me to renew my search for Mrs.
Whitaker; you were dead, he told me; she was due to come into your
estate--a comfortable living for an independent woman."

"And you found her and told Drummond--?"

Whitaker leaned over the table, studying the man's face with intense
interest.

"No--and yes. I found Mrs. Whitaker. I didn't report to Drummond."

"But why--in Heaven's name?"

Ember smiled sombrely at the drooping ash of his cigar. "There were
several reasons. In the first place I didn't have to: I had asked no
retainer from Drummond, and I rendered no bill: what I had found out was
mine, to keep or to sell, as I chose. I chose not to sell because--well,
because Mrs. Whitaker begged me not to."

"Ah!" Whitaker breathed, sitting back. "Why?"

"This was all of a year, I think, after your marriage. Mrs. Whitaker had
tasted the sweets of independence and--got the habit. She had adopted a
profession looked upon with abhorrence by her family; she was succeeding
in it; I may say her work was foreshadowing that extraordinary power
which made her the Sara Law whom you saw to-night. If she came forward
as the widow of Hugh Whitaker, it meant renunciation of the stage; it
meant painful scenes with her family if she refused to abandon her
profession; it meant the loss of liberty, of freedom of action and
development, which was hers in her decent obscurity. She was already
successful in a small way, had little need of the money she would get as
claimant of your estate. She enlisted my sympathy, and--I held my
tongue."

"That was decent of you."

The man bowed a quiet acknowledgment. "I thought you'd think so....
There was a third reason."

He paused, until Whitaker encouraged him with a "Yes--?"

"Mr. Whitaker"--the query came point-blank--"do you love your wife?"

Whitaker caught his breath. "What right--!" he began, and checked
abruptly. The blood darkened his lean cheeks.

"Mrs. Whitaker gave me to understand that you didn't. It wasn't hard to
perceive, everything considered, that your motive was pure
chivalry--Quixotism. I should like to go to my grave with anything half
as honourable and unselfish to my credit."

"I beg your pardon," Whitaker muttered thickly.

"You don't, then?"

"Love her? No."

There was a slight pause. Then, "I do," said this extraordinary man,
meeting Whitaker's gaze openly. "I do," he repeated, flushing in his
turn, "but ... hopelessly.... However, that was the third reason," he
pursued in a more level voice--"I thought you ought to know about
it--that induced me to keep Sara Law's secret.... I loved her from the
day I found her. She has never looked twice at me.... But that's why I
never lost interest."

"You mean," Whitaker took him up diffidently--"you continued to--ah--?"

"Court her--as we say? No." Ember's shoulders, lifting, emphasized the
disclaimer. "I'm no fool: I mean I'm able to recognize a hopeless case
when it's as intimate to me as mine was--and is. Doubtless Mrs. Whitaker
understands--if she hasn't forgotten me by this time--but, if so, wholly
through intuition. I have had the sense not to invite the thunderbolt.
I've sat quietly in the background, watching her work out her
destiny--feeling a good deal like a god in the machine. She doesn't know
it, unless Max told her against my wish; but it was I who induced him to
take her from the ranks of a provincial stock company and bring her
before the public, four years ago, as _Joan Thursday_. Since then her
destiny has been rather too big a thing for me to tamper with; but I've
watched and wondered, sensing forces at work about her of which even she
was unsuspicious."

"What in blazes do you mean?" Whitaker demanded, mystified.

"Did it strike you to wonder at the extraordinary mob her farewell
performance attracted to-night--the rabble that packed the street,
though quite hopeless of even seeing the inside of the theatre?"

"Why--yes. It struck me as rather unusual. But then, Max had done
nothing but tell me of her tremendous popularity."

"That alone, great as it is, wouldn't have brought so many people
together to stare at the outside of a theatre. The magnet was something
stronger--the morbid curiosity of New York. Those people were waiting,
thrilled with expectancy, on tiptoe for--what do you think?"

"I shall think you mad in another moment, if you don't explain
yourself," Whitaker told him candidly.

Ember's smile flashed and vanished. "They were waiting for the sensation
that presently came to them: the report of Drummond's death."

"What the devil--!"

"Patience!... It had been discounted: if something of the sort hadn't
happened, New York would have gone to bed disappointed. The reason? This
is the third time it has happened--the same thing, practically: Sara Law
on the verge of leaving the stage to marry, a fatal accident
intervening. Did Max by any chance mention the nickname New York has
bestowed on Sara Law?"

"Nickname? No!"

"They call her 'The Destroying Angel.'"

"What damnable rot!"

"Yes; but what damnable coincidence. Three men loved her--and one by one
they died. And now the fourth. Do you wonder...?"

"Oh, but--'The Destroying Angel'--!" Whitaker cried indignantly. "How
can they blame her?"

"It isn't blame--it's superstition. Listen...."

Ember bent forward, holding Whitaker's gaze with intent, grave eyes.
"The first time," he said in a rapid undertone, "was a year or so after
her triumph as _Joan Thursday_. There were then two men openly
infatuated with her, a boy named Custer, and a man I believe you
knew--William Hamilton."

"I knew them both."

"Custer was making the pace; the announcement of his engagement to Sara
Law was confidently anticipated. He died suddenly; the coroner's jury
decided that he had misjudged the intentions of a loaded revolver.
People whispered of suicide, but it didn't look quite like that to me.
However ... Hamilton stepped into his place. Presently we heard that
Sara Law was to marry him and leave the stage. Hamilton had to go abroad
on business; on the return trip--the wedding was set for the day after
he landed here--he disappeared, no one knew how. Presumably he fell
overboard by accident one night; sane men with everything in the world
to live for do such things, you know--according to the newspapers."

"I understand you. Please go on."

"Approximately eighteen months later a man named Thurston--Mitchell
Thurston--was considered a dangerous aspirant for the hand of Sara Law.
He was exceedingly well fixed in a money way--a sort of dilettantish
architect, with offices in the Metropolitan Tower. One day at high noon
he left his desk to go to lunch at Martin's; crossing Madison Square, he
suddenly fell dead, with a bullet in his brain. It was a rifle bullet,
but though the square was crowded, no one had heard the report of the
shot, and no one was seen carrying a rifle. The conclusion was that he
had been shot down by somebody using a gun with a Maxim silencer, from a
window on the south side of the square. There were no clues."

"And now Drummond!" Whitaker exclaimed in horror. "Poor fellow! Poor
woman!"

A slightly sardonic expression modified the lines of Ember's mouth. "So
far as Mrs. Whitaker is concerned," he said with the somewhat pedantic
mode of speech which Whitaker was to learn to associate with his moments
of most serious concentration--"I echo the sentiment. But let us suspend
judgment on Drummond's case until we know more. It is not as yet an
established fact that he is dead."

"You mean there's hope--?"

"There's doubt," Ember corrected acidly--"doubt, at least, in my mind.
You see, I saw Drummond in the flesh, alive and vigorous, a good half
hour after he is reported to have leaped to his death."

"Where?"

"Coming up the stairs from the down-town Subway station in front of the
Park Avenue Hotel. He wore a hat pulled down over his eyes and an old
overcoat buttoned tight up to his chin. He was carrying a satchel
bearing the initials C. S. D., but was otherwise pretty thoroughly
disguised, and, I fancied, anxious enough to escape recognition."

"You're positive about this?"

"My dear man," said Ember with an air, "I saw his ear distinctly."

"His ear!"

"I never forget an ear; I've made a special study of them. They're
the last parts of the human anatomy that criminals ever think
to disguise; and, to the trained eye, as infallible a means of
identification--nearly--as thumb-prints. The man I saw coming up from
the Subway kept as much as possible away from the light; he had
successfully hidden most of his face; but he wore the inches, the
hand-bag, and the ear of Carter S. Drummond. I don't think I can be
mistaken."

"Did you stop him--speak to him?"

Ember shook his head. "No. I doubt if he would have remembered me. Our
acquaintance has been of the slightest, limited to a couple of meetings.
Besides, I was in a hurry to get to the theatre, and at that time had
heard nothing of this reputed suicide."

"Which way did he go?"

"Toward the Pennsylvania station, I fancy; that is, he turned west
through Thirty-third Street. I didn't follow--I was getting into a taxi
when I caught sight of him."

"But what did you think to see him disguised? Didn't it strike you as
curious?"

"Very," said Ember dryly. "At the same time, it was none of my
affair--then. Nor did it present itself to me as a matter worth meddling
with until, later, my suspicions were aroused by the scene in the
theatre--obviously the result of your appearance there--and still later,
when I heard the suicide report."

"But--good Lord!" Whitaker passed a hand across his dazed eyes. "What
can it mean? Why should he do this thing?"

"There are several possible explanations.... How long has Drummond known
that you were alive?"

"Since noon to-day."

"Not before?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"Still, it's possible. If he has a sensitive nature--I think he
hasn't--the shame of being found out, caught trying to marry your wife
when he had positive knowledge you still lived, may have driven him to
drop out of sight. Again.... May I ask, what was the extent of your
property in his trust?"

"A couple of hundred-thousands."

"And he believed you dead and was unable to find your widow ..."

"Oh, I don't think _that_!" Whitaker expostulated.

"Nor do I. We're merely considering possible explanations. There's a
third ..."

"Well?"

"He may have received a strong hint that he was nominated for the fate
that overtook young Custer, Hamilton and Thurston; and so planned to
give his disappearance the colour of a similar end."

"You don't mean to say _you_ think there was any method in that train of
tragedies?"

"I'm not in the least superstitious, my dear man. I don't for an instant
believe, as some people claim to, that Sara Law is a destroying angel,
hounded by a tragic fate: that her love is equivalent to the death
warrant of the man who wins it."

"But what do you think, then?"

"I think," said Ember, slowly, his gaze on the table, "that some one
with a very strong interest in keeping the young woman single--and on
the stage--"

"Max! Impossible!"

Ember shrugged. "In human nature, no madness is impossible. There's not
a shred of evidence against Jules Max. And yet--he's a gambler. All
theatrical managers are, of course; but Max is a card-fiend. The tale of
his plunging runs like wild-fire up and down Broadway, day by day. A
dozen times he's been on the verge of ruin, yet always he has had Sara
Law to rely upon; always he's been able to fall back upon that asset,
sure that her popularity would stave off bankruptcy. And he's
superstitious: he believes she is his mascot. I don't accuse him--I
suspect him, knowing him to be capable of many weird extravagances....
Furthermore, it's a fact that Max was a fellow-passenger with Billy
Hamilton when the latter disappeared in mid-ocean."

Ember paused and sat up, preparatory to rising. "All of which," he
concluded, "explains why I have trespassed upon your patience and your
privacy. It seemed only right that you should get the straight,
undistorted story from an unprejudiced onlooker. May I venture to add a
word of advice?"

"By all means."

"Have you told Max of your relations with Sara Law?"

"No."

"Or anybody else?"

"No."

"Then keep the truth to yourself--at least until this coil is
straightened out."

Ember got up. "Good night," he said pleasantly.

Whitaker took his hand, staring. "Good night," he echoed blankly.
"But--I say--why keep it quiet?"

Ember, turning to go, paused, his glance quietly quizzical. "You don't
mean to claim your wife?"

"On the contrary, I expect to offer no defence to her action for
divorce."

"Grounds of desertion?"

"I presume so."

"Just the same, keep it as quiet as possible until the divorce is
granted. If you live till then ... you may possibly continue to live
thereafter."




IX

ENTR'ACTE


Dawn of Sunday found Whitaker still awake. Alone in his uncheerful hotel
bedchamber, his chair tilted back against the wall, he sat smoking and
thinking, reviewing again and again every consideration growing out of
his matrimonial entanglement.

He turned in at length to the dreamless slumbers of mental exhaustion.

The morning introduced him to a world of newspapers gone mad and
garrulous with accounts of the sensation of the preceding night. What
they told him only confirmed the history of his wife's career as
detailed by the gratuitous Mr. Ember. There was, however, no suggestion
in any report that Drummond had not in fact committed suicide--this,
despite the total disappearance of the hypothetical corpse. No doubts
seemed to have arisen from the circumstance that there had been,
apparently, but a single witness of the _felo de se_. A man, breathless
with excitement, had run up to the nearest policeman with word of what
he claimed to have seen. In the subsequent confusion he had vanished.
And so thoroughly, it seemed, had the mind of New York been prepared for
some fatal accident to this latest lover of Sara Law that no one dreamed
of questioning the authenticity of the report.

Several sensational sheets ran exhaustive résumés, elaborately
illustrated, of the public life of "The Destroying Angel."

Some remarked the fact that little or nothing was known of the history
of Sara Law prior to her appearance, under the management of Jules Max,
as _Joan Thursday_.

Whitaker learned that she had refused herself to the reporters who
besieged her residence.

It seemed to be an unanimous assumption that the news of Drummond's
suicide had in some manner been conveyed to the woman while on the
stage.

No paper mentioned the name of Whitaker....

In the course of the forenoon a note for Whitaker was delivered at the
hotel.

The heavy sheet of white paper, stamped with the address in
Fifty-seventh Street, bore this message in a strong but nervous hand:

     "I rely upon the generosity you promise me. This marriage of ours,
     that is no marriage, must be dissolved. Please let my
     attorneys--Landers, Grimshaw & Clark, 149 Broadway--know when and
     where you will accept service. Forgive me if I seem ungrateful and
     unfeeling. I am hardly myself. And please do not try to see me now.
     Some day I hope to see and thank you; to-day--it's impossible. I am
     going away to forget, if I can.

     "MARY LADISLAS WHITAKER."

Before nightfall Whitaker had satisfied himself that his wife had, in
truth, left her town house. The servants there informed all who inquired
that they had been told to report and to forward all letters to Messrs.
Landers, Grimshaw & Clark.

Whitaker promptly notified those attorneys that he was ready to be
served at their convenience. He further desired them to inform their
client that her suit would be uncontested. But beyond their brief and
business-like acknowledgment, he heard nothing more of the action for
divorce.

He sought Max several times without success. When at length run to
ground in the roulette room of a Forty-fourth Street gambling-house, the
manager was grimly reticent. He professed complete ignorance of his
star's welfare and whereabouts. He advised Whitaker to consult the
newspapers, if his interest was so insatiable.

Warned by the manager's truculent and suspicious tone that his secret
was, after all, buried no more than skin-deep, Whitaker dissembled
artfully his anxiety, and abandoned Max to his pet vices.

The newspapers reported Sara Law as being in retirement in several
widely separated sections of the country. She was also said to have gone
abroad, sailing incognito by a second-class steamship from Philadelphia.

The nine-days' wonder disintegrated naturally. The sobriquet of "The
Destroying Angel" disappeared from the newspaper scare-heads. So also
the name of Drummond. Hugh Morten Whitaker, the dead man come to life,
occupied public interest for a brief half-day. By the time that the
executors of Carter Drummond and the attorneys representing his clients
began to make sense of his estate and interests, their discoveries
failed to command newspaper space.

This phenomenon was chiefly due to the fact that Whitaker didn't care to
raise an outcry about his loss. Ember, it seemed, had guessed shrewdly:
Drummond had appropriated to his own uses every dollar of the small
fortune left in his care by his erstwhile partner. No other client of
his had suffered, however. His peculations had been confined wholly to
the one quarter whence he had had every reason to anticipate neither
protest nor exposure. In Whitaker's too-magnanimous opinion, the man had
not been so much a thief as one who yielded to the temptation to convert
to his own needs and uses a property against which, it appeared, no
other living being cared to enter a claim.

Whether or not he had ever learned or guessed that Sara Law was the wife
of Whitaker, remained problematic. Whitaker inclined to believe that
Drummond had known--that he had learned the truth from the lips of his
betrothed wife. But this could not be determined save through her. And
she kept close hidden.

The monetary loss was an inconsiderable thing to a man with an interest
in mines in the Owen Stanley country. He said nothing. Drummond's name
remained untarnished, save in the knowledge of a few.

Of these, Martin Ember was one. Whitaker made a point of hunting him up.
The retired detective received confirmation of his surmise without any
amazement.

"You still believe that he's alive?"

"Implicitly," Ember asserted with conviction.

"Could you find him, if necessary?"

"Within a day, I think. Do you wish me to?"

"I don't know..."

Ember permitted Whitaker to consider the matter in silence for some
moments. Then, "Do you want advice?" he inquired.

"Well?"

"Hunt him down and put him behind the bars," said Ember instantly.

"What's the good of that?"

"Your personal safety."

"How?"

"Don't you suppose he misses all he's been accustomed to?--living as he
does in constant terror of being discovered, the life of a hunted thing,
one of the under-world, an enemy of society! Don't you suppose he'd be
glad to regain all he's lost--business, social position, the esteem of
his friends, the love of a woman who will soon be free to marry him?"

"Well?"

"With you out of the way, he could come back without fear."

"Oh--preposterous!"

"_Is_ it?"

"Drummond's not that sort. He's weak, perhaps, but no criminal."

"A criminal is the creature of a warped judgment. There'd be no
criminals if every one were able to attain his desires within the law.
Misfortunes breed weird maggots in a man's brain. Drummond's dragging
out a wretched existence in a world of false perspectives; he's not to
be blamed if he presently begins to see things as they are not."

Ember permitted another pause to lengthen, unbroken by Whitaker.

"Shall I try to find him for you?" he asked quietly, in the end.

"No," Whitaker decided. "No. Let him alone--poor devil!"

Ember disclaimed further responsibility with a movement of his
shoulders.

"But my wife? Could you find her as readily?"

"Possibly," the detective admitted cautiously. "But I don't mean to."

"Why not?"

"Because you don't want me to. Do you?"

"No..."

"But principally because she doesn't want me to. Otherwise she'd let you
know where to look for her."

"True."

These fragments of dialogue are from a conversation that took place in
the month of June, nearly seven weeks after the farewell performance at
the Theatre Max. Interim, Whitaker had quietly resumed his place in the
life of the town, regaining old friendships, renewing old associations.
Save for the fact that he pursued no gainful occupation, all with him
was much as it had been: as if the intervening six years of exile had
been blotted out, or had never been. The mild excitement occasioned by
his reappearance had already subsided; he was again an accepted and
substantial factor in the society of his kind.

He had abandoned all thought of returning to New Guinea, entertained,
indeed, no inclination whatever to do so. The life he now led was more
or less normal to him. Yet he was sensible of a growing restlessness. He
had nothing to busy himself with: this was the unguessed secret of his
unsettled temper. And the approach of hot weather was narrowing the
circle of his acquaintances. People were leaving town daily, for Europe,
for the seashore, for the mountains.

He began to receive invitations for week-ends and longer visits out of
town. A few of the former he accepted--always, however, returning to New
York with a sense of necessity strong upon his spirit. Something held
him there, some influence elusive of analysis. He was discontented, but
felt that he could not find content elsewhere.

Gradually he began to know more hours of loneliness than suited his
tastes. His rooms--the old rooms overlooking Bryant Park, regained and
refurnished much as they had been six years before--knew his solitary
presence through many a long evening. July came with blistering breath,
and he took to the Adirondacks, meaning to be gone a month. Within ten
days he was home again, drawn back irresistibly by that strange
insatiable craving of unformulated desire. Town bored him, yet he could
not seem to rest away from it.

He wandered in and out, up and down, an unquiet, irresolute soul,
tremendously perplexed....

There came one dark and sultry night, heavy beneath skies overcast, in
August. Whitaker left a roof-garden in the middle of a stupid
performance, and walked the streets till long after midnight, courting
the fatigue that alone could bestow untroubled sleep. On his return, a
sleepy hall-boy with a wilted collar ran the elevator up to his
tenth-floor landing and, leaving him fumbling at the lock of his door,
dropped clankingly out of sight. Whitaker entered and shut himself in
with the pitch-blackness of his private hall.

He groped along the wall for the electric switch, and found only the
shank of it--the hard-rubber button having disappeared. And then, while
still he was trying to think how this could have happened, he sustained
a murderous assault.

A miscalculation on the part of the marauder alone saved him. The
black-jack (or whatever the weapon was) missing his head by the
narrowest shave, descended upon his left shoulder with numbing force.
Notwithstanding his pain and surprise, Whitaker rallied and grappled,
thus escaping a second and possibly more deadly blow.

But his shoulder was almost useless, and the pain of it began to sicken
him, while the man in his grip fought like a devil unchained. He found
himself wedged back into a corner, brutal fingers digging deep into the
flesh round his windpipe. He fought desperately to escape strangulation.
Eventually he struggled out of the corner and gave ground through the
doorway into his sitting-room.

For some minutes the night in that quiet room, high above the city, was
rendered wild and violent with the crashes of overthrown furniture and
the thud and thump of struggling bodies. Then by some accident little
short of miraculous, Whitaker broke free and plunged across the room in
what he imagined to be the direction of a dresser in which he kept a
revolver. His foot slipped on the hardwood floor, the ankle twisted, and
he fell awkwardly, striking his head against a table-leg with such force
that he lay half-stunned. An instant later his assailant emptied five
chambers of a revolver into the darkness about him, and then, alarmed by
a racket of pounding on the hall door, fled successfully by way of the
fire-escape to adjoining roofs and neighbouring back-yards.

By the time Whitaker was able to pull himself together and hobble to the
door, a brace of intelligent policemen who had been summoned by the
hall-boy were threatening to break it down. Admitted, they took his
safety into their care and, simultaneously, the revolver which he
incautiously admitted possessing. Later they departed, obviously
disgruntled by the unprofessional conduct of the "crook" who had left no
"clues," with a warning to the house-holder that he might expect to be
summoned to court, as soon as he was able to move, to answer for the
crime of keeping a weapon of defence.

Whitaker took to his bed in company with a black temper and the aroma of
arnica.

He entertained, the next day, several persons: reporters; a physician; a
futile, superfluous, unornamental creature misleadingly designated a
plain-clothes man; finally his friend (by now their acquaintance had
warmed to real friendship) Ember.

The retired investigator found Whitaker getting into his clothes: a
ceremony distinguished by some profanity and numerous grunts.

"Afternoon," he said, taking a chair and surveying the sufferer with
slightly masked amusement. "Having a good time?"

"You go to thunder!" said Whitaker in disgust.

"Glad to see you're not hurt much," pursued the other, unabashed.

Whitaker withered him with a glare. "I suppose it's nothing to have a
shoulder and arm black-and-blue to the elbow! a bump on the side of my
head as big as a hard-boiled egg! a bruised throat and an ankle next
door to sprained! Oh, no--I'm not much hurt!"

"You're lucky to be alive," observed Ember, exasperatingly philosophic.

"A lot you know about it!"

"I'm a canny little guesser," Ember admitted modestly.

"Where'd you get your information, then?"

Ember waved a non-committal hand. "I hear things...."

"Oh, yes--you know a lot. I suppose you could lay this thug by the heels
in a brace of shakes?"

"Just about," Ember admitted placidly. "I wouldn't mind trying."

"Then why don't you?" Whitaker demanded heatedly.

"I had a notion you wouldn't want me to."

Whitaker stared aggressively. "You mean ... Drummond?"

The answer was a nod.

"I don't believe it."

"You'll at all events do me the credit to recall that I warned you two
months ago."

"All the same, I don't believe it was Drummond."

"You haven't missed any property, I believe?"

"No."

"So presumably the fellow had some motive other than a desire to thieve.
Besides, if he'd been on the loot he might much more easily have tried
one of the lower floors--and more sensibly."

"It would seem so," Whitaker admitted sulkily.

"And that missing switch-button--"

"What do _you_ know about that?"

"My sources of information.... It strikes me that a man who took that
much trouble to prevent your turning on the light must have been rather
anxious to avoid recognition. I shed the inference for its intrinsic
worth, merely."

"Well...." Whitaker temporized.

"And I'd like to know what you mean to do."

"About what?"

"With the understanding that you're content to leave the case of
burglary and assault to the mercies of the police: what do you mean to
do with yourself?"

"I don't know--hadn't thought."

"Unless you're hell-bent on sticking around here to get your head bashed
in--I venture respectfully to suggest that you consign yourself to my
competent care."

"Meaning--?"

"I've got a bungalow down on Long Island--a one-horse sort of a bachelor
affair--and I'm going to run down there this evening and stay awhile.
There's quiet, no society and good swimming. Will you come along and be
my guest until you grow tired of it?"

Whitaker looked his prospective host over with a calculating, suspicious
eye.

"I ought to be able to take care of myself," he grumbled childishly.

"Granted."

"But I've a great mind to take you up."

"Sensibly spoken. Can you be ready by three? I'll call with the car
then, if you can."

"Done with you!" declared Whitaker with a strong sense of relief.

As a matter of fact, he was far less incredulous of Ember's theory than
he chose to admit.




X

THE WINDOW


Though they left New York not long after three in the afternoon,
twilight was fast ebbing into night when the motor-car--the owner
driving, Whitaker invalided to the lonely grandeur of the tonneau--swept
up from a long waste of semi-wooded countryside, sparsely populated,
bumped over railroad tracks, purred softly at sedate pace through the
single street of a drowsy village, and then struck away from the main
country road.

Once clear of the village bounds, as if assured of an unobstructed way,
Ember gave the motor its head; with a long, keen whine of delight it
took the bit between its teeth and flung away like a thoroughbred
romping down the home-stretch. Its headlights clove a path through
darkness, like a splendid sword; a pale shining ribbon of road seemed to
run to the wheels as if eager to be devoured; on either hand woodlands
and desolate clearings blurred into dark and rushing walls; the wind
buffeted the faces of the travellers like a soft and tender hand,
seeking vainly if with all its strength to withstand their impetus: only
the wonderful wilderness of stars remained imperturbable.

Whitaker, braced against the jolting, snatched begrudged mouthfuls of
air strong of the sea. From time to time he caught fugitive glimpses of
what seemed to be water, far in the distances to the right. He had no
very definite idea of their whereabouts, having neglected through sheer
indifference to question Ember, but he knew that they were drawing
minute by minute closer to the Atlantic. And the knowledge was soothing
to the unquiet of his soul, who loved the sea. He dreamed vaguely, with
yearning, of wave-swept shores and their sonorous silences.

After some time the car slowed to a palpitant pause at a spot where the
road was bordered on one hand by a woods, on the other by meadow-lands
running down to an arm of a bay, on whose gently undulant surface the
flame-tipped finger of a distant lighthouse drew an undulant path of
radiance.

Ember jumped out to open a barred gate, then returning swung the car
into a clear but narrow woodland road. "Mine own domain," he informed
Whitaker with a laugh, as he stopped a second time to go back and close
the gate. "Now we're shut of the world, entirely."

The car crawled cautiously on, following a path that, in the searching
glare of headlights, showed as two parallel tracks of white set apart by
a strip of livid green and walled in by a dense tangle of scrub-oak and
pine and second growth. Underbrush rasped and rattled against the
guards. Outside the lighted way arose strange sounds audible above even
the purring of the motor--vast mysterious whisperings and rustlings:
stealthy and murmurous protests against this startling trespass.

Whitaker bent forward, inquiring: "Where are we?"

"Almost there. Patience."

Whitaker sat back again, content to await enlightenment at the pleasure
of his host. Really, he didn't much care where they were: the sense of
isolation, strong upon his spirit, numbed all his curiosity.

He reckoned idly that they must have threaded a good two miles of
woodland, when at length the car emerged upon a clearing and immediately
turned aside to the open doorway of a miniature garage.

For the first time in five hours he was aware of the hush of Nature; the
motor's song was ended for the night.

The clearing seemed no more than a fair two acres in extent; the forest
hemmed it in on three sides; on the fourth lay water. Nor was it an
unqualified clearing; a hundred yards distant the lighted windows of a
one-story structure shone pleasantly through a scattering plantation of
pine.

Linking arms the better to guide his guest, Ember drew him toward the
lights.

"Bungalow," he explained, sententious, flourishing his free hand:
"hermitage--retreat."

"Paradise," Whitaker summed up, in the same humour.

"Still-water swimming at the front door; surf bathing on the beach
across the bay; sailing, if you care for it; fishing, if you don't care
what you say; all sorts of civilized loafing and no society except our
own."

"No women?"

"Not a petticoat."

"No neighbours?"

"Oh"--Ember motioned to his left as they faced the water--"there's a
married establishment over there somewhere, but we don't bother one
another. Fellow by the name of Fiske. I understand the place is shut
up--Fiske not coming down this year."

"So much the better. I've been wanting just this all summer, without
realizing it."

"Welcome, then, to Half-a-loaf Lodge!"

Skirting the edges of the plantation, they had come round to the front
of the house. An open door, warm with light, welcomed them. They entered
a long and deep living-room with walls of peeled logs and, at one end, a
stone fireplace wherein a wood fire blazed heartily. Two score candles
in sconces furnished an illumination mellow and benign. At a comfortable
distance from the hearth stood a table bright with linen, silver and
crystal--covers for two. The rear wall was broken by three doors, in one
of which a rotund Chinaman beamed oleaginously. Ember hailed him by the
title of Sum Fat, explaining that it wasn't his name, but claiming for
it the virtue of exquisite felicity.

"My servant in town, here man-of-all-work; I've had him for years;
faithful and indispensable...."

Toward the end of an excellent dinner, Whitaker caught himself nodding
and blinking with drowsiness. The fatigue of their long ride, added to
the nervous strain and excitement of the previous night, was proving
more than he had strength to struggle against. Ember took laughing
compassion upon him and led him forthwith to a bedroom furnished with
the rigid simplicity of a summer camp. Once abed he lay awake only long
enough to recognize, in the pulsating quiet, the restless thunder of
surf on the beach across the bay. Then he slept round the clock.

He recovered consciousness to lie luxuriating in the sensation of
delicious and complete repose, and to listen lazily to the drum of
raindrops on the low roof--too lazy, indeed, to turn his head and
consult his watch. Yet he knew it must be late in the morning, for the
light was broad, if gray.

The shrill, imperative rattle of a telephone bell roused him more
thoroughly. Lifting on his elbow, he eyed his watch, then hastily swung
his legs out of bed; for it was nearly ten o'clock.

As he dressed he could hear the voice of Ember in the living-room
talking over the telephone. Presently there came a tap at his door, and
his host entered.

"Up, eh?" he said cheerfully. "I was afraid I'd have to wake you. You're
surely a sincere young sleeper.... I say!" His smile vanished beneath
the clouds of an impatient frown. "This is the devil of a note: I've got
to leave you."

"What's the trouble?"

"That's what I'm called upon to find out. A friend of mine's in a tight
place, and I've got to go and help pull him through. He just called me
up--and I can't refuse. D'you mind being left alone for a day or so?"

"Certainly not--only I'm sorry."

"No more than I. But I'll try to get back to-morrow. If I don't, the
next day--or as soon as I possibly can. Meanwhile, please consider
yourself lord and master here. Sum Fat will take good care of you.
Anything you want, just ask him. Now I've got to get into waterproofs:
it's raining like all get-out, but I can't wait for a let-up."

By the time Whitaker was ready for breakfast, his host had splashed off
to his motor car.

Later, while Sum Fat crooned to himself over the dish-pan in the
kitchen, Whitaker explored his quarters; to begin with, not in the least
disconsolate to be left alone. The place had for his imagination the
zest of novelty and isolation. He rather enjoyed the sensation of
complete dissociation from the rest of the world, of freedom to humour
his idlest whim without reference to the prejudices of any neighbour.

Within-doors there was every comfort conceivably to be desired by any
other than a sybarite; without--viewed from the shelter of a wide
veranda--a vague world of sweeping mist and driving rain; pine trees
Japanesque against the mist, as if etched in bronze-green on frosted
silver; a breadth of rough, hummocky ground sloping down to the water's
edge, with a private landing-stage and, farther out, a courtesying
cat-boat barely discernible.

The wind, freshening and driving very respectable if miniature rollers
against the beach, came in heavy gusts, alternating with periods of
steady, strong blowing. At times the shining lances of the rain seemed
to drive almost horizontally. Whitaker shivered a little, not
unpleasantly, and went indoors.

He poked his head into the kitchen. In that immaculate place, from which
every hint of breakfast had disappeared as if by magic, Sum Fat was
religiously cleaning his teeth--for the third time that morning, to
Whitaker's certain knowledge.

When he had finished, Whitaker put a question:

"Sum Fat, which way does the wind blow--do you know?"

Sum Fat flashed him a dazzling smile.

"East'ly," he said in a cheerful, clucking voice. "I think very fine
damn three-day blow."

"At least," said Whitaker, "you're a high-spirited prophet of evil. I
thank you."

He selected a book from several shelves stocked with a discriminating
taste, and settled himself before the fire.

The day wore out before his patience did, and with every indication of
fulfilling the prognosis of Sum Fat; by nightfall the wind had developed
into an enthusiastic gale, driving before it sheeted rain and great
ragged wastes of mist. Whitaker absolutely enjoyed the sensation of
renewed intimacy with the weather, from which his life in New York had
of late divorced him so completely. He read, dozed, did full justice to
the admirable cuisine of Sum Fat, and between whiles considered the
state of his soul, the cycle of the suns, his personal marital
entanglement, and the further preservation, intact, of his bruised
mortal body.

The ceaseless pattering on the shingled roof reminded him very strongly
of that dark hour, long gone, when he had made up his mind to wed a
strange woman. He marvelled at that madness with an inexhaustible wonder
and with an equally vast, desolate, poignant regret.

He considered faithfully what he had gained by reasserting his identity,
and found it an empty thing. He had been happier when a Wilful Missing,
unmissed, unmourned. It seemed as if it might be best to go away again,
to eliminate Hugh Whitaker from the coil his reappearance had created.
Then his wife could gain her freedom--and incidentally free him--and
marry as she willed. And Drummond would be free to come to life--with
hands unstained, his honour besmirched only in the knowledge of a few
who would not tell.

Did he remain, Drummond, he feared, would prove a troublesome problem.
Whitaker was, in the light of sober after-thought, more than half
convinced that Ember had guessed cunningly at the identity of his
assailant. The thing was conceivable, at least, of Drummond: the
hedonist and egoist seeking to regain his forfeited world in one
murderous cast. And it was hardly conceivable that he would hesitate to
make a second attempt whenever opportunity offered. New York, Whitaker
saw clearly, was far too small to contain them both while Drummond
remained at liberty. By attempting to stay there he would simply invite
a second attempt upon his life, merely strengthen Drummond's temptation.

He thought it very curious that he had heard nothing more of the
proposed action for divorce. It might be well to communicate again with
his wife's attorneys.

He went to bed with a mind unsettled, still curious, speculative, unable
to fix upon any definite course of conduct.

And the second day was like unto the first: a day of rain and wind and
fog periodically punctuated by black squalls that tore shrieking across
the bay with the blind fury of spirits of destruction gone stark, raving
mad.

The third day broke full of the spirit of the second; but toward noon
the rain ceased, and by mid-afternoon the violence of the wind had
moderated perceptibly to a stiffish but failing breeze beneath a
breaking cloud-rack. With the disappearance of fog, for the first time
since Whitaker's arrival the neighbourhood discovered perspectives. By
evening, when the wind went down with the sun, leaving absolute calm,
the barrier beach far across the quiet waters of the shallow, landlocked
bay shone like a bar of ruddy gold against a horizon of melting mauve.

In the evening, too, a telegram from Ember was transmitted by telephone
to the bungalow, advising Whitaker of his host's intention to return by
the following night at the latest.

This communication worked with the turn of the weather to effect a
change in the temper of Whitaker, who by this time had managed to fret
himself to the verge of incontinent departure for Australia _via_ New
York. He decided, however, to wait and thank Ember for his hospitality,
and thought seriously of consulting him as to the wisest and fairest
course to pursue.

None the less, the restlessness and impatience bred of nearly three days
of enforced inaction possessed him like a devil. After another of Sum
Fat's admirable dinners, his craving for open air and exercise drove him
out, despite the failing light, to explore the clearing rather
thoroughly, and to some extent the surrounding woodlands. At one time,
indeed, he caught sight, through thinning trees, of a summer home
somewhat more pretentious than Half-a-loaf Lodge--evidently the property
termed by Ember "the Fiske place." But it was then so nearly dark that
he didn't pause to investigate an impression that the place was
tenanted, contradictory to his host's casual statement; and he was back
on the bungalow porch in time to see the moon lift up like a great
shield of brass through the haze beyond the barrier beach.

Sounds of splashings and of song drew him down to the water's edge, to
find that Sum Fat had rowed out to the anchored cat-boat and, almost as
naked as industrious, was bailing it clear of the three days'
accumulation of rain-water. He came in, presently, and having performed
what was probably at least the eighth cleaning of his teeth since
morning, went to bed.

Wearying at length of the lunar spectacle, and quite as weary of the
sedulous attentions of a cloud of famished mosquitoes, Whitaker lounged
disconsolately indoors to a pipe and a book by candle-light. But the one
needed cleaning, and the other was out of tune with his temper, and the
flame of the candle excited the amorous interest of a great fluttering
fool of a moth until Whitaker blew it out and sat on in darkness, not
tired enough to go to bed, too tired to bestir himself and seek
distraction from a tormenting train of thought.

A pool of limpid moonlight lay like milk upon the floor beneath a window
and held his dreaming gaze while memory marshalled for his delectation a
pageant of wasted years, infinitely desolate and dreary in his vision. A
life without profit, as he saw it: an existence rendered meaningless by
a nameless want--a lack he had not wit to name.... The romance of his
life enchanted him, its futility furnished him a vast and profound
perplexity. To what end?--this was the haunting burden of his
complaint....

How long he sat unstirring, preoccupied with fruitless inquiry, he did
not guess. But later he reckoned it could not have been long after ten
o'clock when he was disturbed. The sound of a footfall, hushed and
stealthy on the veranda, roused him with a start, and almost at the same
instant he became aware of a shadow that troubled the pool of moonlight,
the foreshortened shadow of a man's head and shoulders. He sat up,
tense, rigid with surprise and wonder, and stared at the silhouetted
body at pause just outside the window. The fellow was stooping to peer
in. Whether he could distinguish Whitaker in the shadows was debatable,
but he remained motionless through a long minute, as if fascinated by
the undeviating regard returned by Whitaker. Then the latter broke the
spell with a hasty movement. Through the feeling of surprised resentment
there had filtered a gnawing suspicion that he was acquainted with the
pose of that head and the set of those shoulders. Had Drummond hunted
him down to this isolate hiding-place? On the thought he leaped up, in
two strides slammed out through the door.

"I say!" he cried loudly. But he cried, apparently, to empty air. The
man was gone--vanished as strangely and as quietly as he had appeared.

Whitaker shut teeth on an oath and, jumping down from the veranda, cast
wildly about the bungalow without uncovering a single sign of the
trespasser. In transit from his chair to the door, he had lost sight of
the fellow for no more, certainly, than half a second; and yet, in that
absurdly scanty space of time, the trespasser had managed to effect an
absolute disappearance. No conjuring trick was ever turned more neatly.
There one instant, gone the next!--the mystery of it irritated and
perplexed more than did the question of identity. It was all very
plausible to suspect Drummond--but whither could Drummond have juggled
himself in the twinkling of an eyelash? That it was no trick of an idle
imagination, Whitaker was prepared to swear: he was positive he had seen
what he had seen. And yet.... It was, on the other hand, impossible to
say where in the plantation of pines the man might not then be skulking.
Whitaker instituted a narrow search, but fruitless.

Eventually pausing and glaring round the clearing in complete
bewilderment, he detected or else fancied a slight movement in the
shadows on the edge of the encompassing woodland. Instantly, heedless of
the risk he ran if the man were indeed Drummond and if Drummond were
indeed guilty of the assault now four nights old, Whitaker broke for the
spot. It proved to be the entrance to one of the woodland paths, and
naturally--whether or no his imagination were in fault--there was nobody
waiting there to be caught.

But if any one had been there, he had unquestionably fled along the
trail. Whitaker in a rage set himself to follow, sticking to the path
partly through instinct, mainly thanks to a spectral twilight
manufactured in the forest by moon-beams filtered thin through
innumerable leaves and branches. Once or twice he paused to listen, then
again plunged on: misled perhaps by the mysterious but inevitable noises
of the nocturnal woodland. Before he realized he could have covered half
the distance, he emerged abruptly into the clearing of the Fiske place.

Here he pulled up, for the first time alive to the intrinsic idiocy of
his conduct, and diverted besides by the discovery that his impression
of the early evening, that the cottage was tenanted, had been well
founded.

The ground floor windows shone with a dim but warm illumination. There
was one quite near him, a long window opening upon the railed veranda,
through which he could see distinctly part of a living-room rather
charmingly furnished in a summery way. At its farther end a dark-haired
woman in a plain black dress with a short apron and lace cap sat reading
by lamplight: evidently a maid. Her mistress--judged by appearances--was
outside on the lawn below the veranda, strolling to and fro in company
with a somewhat short and heavy man who wore an automobile duster and
visored cap. By contrast, her white-clad figure, invested with the
illusion of moonlight, seemed unusually tall. Her hair was fair, shining
like a head-dress of palest gold as she bent her head, attentive to her
companion. And Whitaker thought to discern an unusual quality in her
movements, a quality of charm and a graciousness of mien rarely to be
noticed even in the most beautiful of the women he had known.

Of a sudden the man paused, produced a watch from beneath his duster,
consulted it briefly and shut the case with a snap. He said something in
a brusque tone, and was answered by what sounded like a pleasant
negative. Promptly, as if annoyed, he turned and strode hastily away,
disappearing round the house.

Alone, the woman watched him as long as he was in sight, her head to one
side with an effect of critical amusement. Then with a low laugh she
crossed the veranda and entered the lighted room. At the same time,
Whitaker, lingering and watching without in the least understanding or
even questioning why he was doing this thing so contrary to his
instincts, heard the heavy rumble of a motor-car on the far side of the
house and saw the machine swing off across the clearing and into the
woods.

In the living-room the woman was saying: "You may go now, Elise. I'll be
ready for bed before long."

"Yes, madam." The maid rose and moved briskly out of sight.

Her mistress, casting aside a scarf of embroidered Chinese brocade,
moved about the room with an air at once languid and distrait. Pausing
beside a table, she took up a book, opened it, shut it smartly,
discarding it as if hopeless of finding therein any sort of diversion.
She stood for a moment in deep thought, her head bowed, the knuckle of a
slender forefinger tapping her chin--charmingly posed. Whitaker abruptly
understood why it was he loitered, peeping: she was absolutely
beautiful, a creature both exquisite and superb, a matchless portrait
for the galleries of his memory.

With a sigh and a quick movement of impatience, seating herself at a
cottage piano she ran her fingers over the keys. Whitaker recognized the
opening bars of something or other of Beethoven's--he couldn't say
precisely what, at the instant; and even as he tried a thing happened
which drove the music altogether from his mind: in short, he discovered
that he was not the only watcher below the window.

Something--a movement or perhaps a slight sound--had drawn his attention
from the woman. He saw the other man standing boldly in full moonlight,
all his attention concentrated on the brilliant picture framed by the
window. He was unquestionably without knowledge of the nearness of the
other--of Whitaker in the shadows. And though his back was to the moon
and his face further shadowed by a peaked cap, Whitaker was absolutely
sure of the man: he was certainly Drummond.

Without pause for thought he sprang toward him, in a guarded voice
uttering his name--"Drummond!" But the fellow proved too alert and quick
for him. Whitaker's hands closed on nothing more substantial than thin
air; at the same time he received a blow upon his bruised shoulder smart
and forcible enough to stagger him and evoke an involuntary grunt of
pain. And before he could regain his balance the fellow was thrashing
noisily away through the woodland underbrush.

Involuntarily Whitaker glanced through the window to see if the woman
had been alarmed. But apparently a succession of sonorous chords from
the piano had deafened her to all other sounds. She played on with every
sign of total unconsciousness.

Forthwith he struck off and blundered senselessly through the forest,
misled by its elusive phantasmagoria, until, realizing at length he did
but duplicate an earlier folly, he gave up the chase in disgust and
slowly made his way back to the bungalow.

And yet (for all the mystery and the wonder of his experience) it was
with a somewhat sheepish feeling that he took the precaution of locking
the doors and windows before turning in. After all, what grounds had he
for his suspicions? Merely a hasty guess at the identity of one who
might turn out to be nothing more than a hapchance tramp--a skulking
vagabond on the watch for a chance to pilfer and fly.

If he were Drummond and as murderous-minded as Ember claimed, why had he
neglected his dozen opportunities to ambush his prey in the woods?

A shade of incredulity insensibly began to color Whitaker's
apprehensions. In time, with impatience, he dismissed them altogether
from his mind.

He dozed off while dwelling upon the vision of a fair-haired woman
idling over a piano, swaying slightly as she played.




XI

THE SPY


Whitaker slept soundly but lightly: the adventures of the evening had
not been so fatiguing as to render his slumbers profound, after three
days of sheer loafing. And he awoke early, roused by a level beam of
blood-red light thrown full upon his face by the rising sun.

He lay for a time languid, watching the incarnadined walls and lazily
examining the curious thrill of interest with which he found himself
anticipating the day to come. It seemed a long time since he had looked
forward to the mere routine of existence with so strong an assurance of
emotional diversion. He idled in whimsical humour with an odd conceit to
the effect that the roots of his soul had somehow been mysteriously
watered, so that it was about to burgeon like a green bay tree--whatever
that might mean. And with this he experienced an exhilarating glow of
well-being that had of late been more a stranger to his body than he
liked to admit.

He wondered why. Was the change in the weather responsible? Or had the
mere act of withdrawing from the world for a little time wrought some
esoteric change in the inscrutable chemistry of his sentiments? Had the
recent innocuous waste of time somehow awakened him to the value of the
mere act of living? Or, again--absurd surmise!--was all this due simply
to the instinct of sex: was it merely the man in him quickening to the
knowledge that a pretty woman existed in his neighbourhood?

At this last he laughed openly, and jumped out of bed. At all events, no
healthy man had any business dawdling away a single minute of so rare a
morning.

Already the sun was warm, the faint breeze bland. Standing at the window
and shading his eyes against the glare, he surveyed a world new-washed
and radiant: the sun majestically climbing up and away from the purple
lattice-work of cloud that barred the nitid mauve horizon; the distant
beach, a violet-tinted barrier between the firmament and sea; the
landlocked bay dimpled with vagrant catspaws and smitten with sunlight
as with a scimitar of fire; the earth fresh and fragrant, steaming
faintly in the ardent glow of dawn.

In another moment he was at the kitchen door, interrupting Sum Fat's
first matutinal attentions to his teeth with a demand for a
bathing-suit. One of Ember's was promptly forthcoming, and by happy
accident fitted him indifferently well; so that three minutes later
found him poised on the end of the small dock, above fifteen feet of
water so limpid bright that he could easily discern the shapes of
pebbles on the bottom.

He dived neatly, coming to the surface with his flesh tingling with
delight of the cool water; then with the deliberate and powerful
movements of an experienced swimmer, struck away from the land.

Two h

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