Two Flights Up (12 page)

“Sometimes he wears a cap. It is less trouble when we go to the movies.”

He plodded along the street.

Phelps, the District Attorney, lived out of town. Warrington took a street car, but it was eleven o’clock when he reached the house, and that hard-working gentleman had already retired. Persistent ringing of the doorbell finally brought a sulky maid in a kimono, who told him the family was in bed and not to be disturbed.

“Tell Mr. Phelps I’ve killed a man and want to surrender myself,” he said with a touch of his old humour.

“There’s a police station next to the carbarn,” she told him, and closed the door in his face.

“Well,” he reflected as he trudged down the drive, “like the Irishman on Friday, the Lord knows I’ve
asked
for fish.”

At the all-night stand near the carbarn he bought a newspaper and looked it over, but there was nothing but a brief notice that Thomas Bayne, imprisoned for embezzling funds from the Harrison Bank, was ill in the penitentiary hospital and, although pardoned, was not yet able to leave.

“Keeping it under their hats,” he considered.

He still felt that a straightforward story ought to clear everything up, at least so far as he himself was concerned. For one thing, the door man at the bank might remember him. That would prove his good faith. But, on the other hand, how was he to show that he had not sold the bond for his own benefit, since both Holly and Margaret Cox were determined to keep Mrs. Bayne out of it? But he knew what would happen if that question came up. Holly would claim that she herself had given it to him to sell.

He fairly ground his teeth with fury at the thought. Better to see the District Attorney early in the morning, before they bound him to any more evasions, and clear the thing up. Tell it all; that was the way. He had heard that Phelps was a decent sort. He would understand.

But he was going to play his own hand. He had no intention of being arrested; that weakened a man’s case before he had a chance at it.

He would surrender himself in the morning, and they would let him out later on his own recognizance, probably. But the immediate problem of the night presented itself. He could not go back to Kelsey Street.

In the end he found a small and shabby sanctuary in a third-rate hotel downtown, and after locking the door took stock of himself in the mirror.

“Gad!” he said. “It’s just as well I didn’t see Phelps! He’d have run me in on general principles.”

Later on he rang the bell. “Anybody around here to mend and press a suit of clothes?” he asked the boy who came.

“Nope. Send them out for you in the morning.

“How long will it take?”

“How big’s a lump of coal?” said the boy, grinning. “Get them back early in the morning, maybe. Maybe not.”

By offer of a bribe, however, he got a promise of prompt action, and in his undergarments began a long and fruitless pacing of the room. Long after midnight he was still moving about, a ridiculous and highly anxious figure. The more he thought about the matter, the more certain he became that Holly would sacrifice herself to save her mother. And from something Margaret had told him outside the flat as he left, he knew that this sacrifice was not the absurdity it seemed on the surface.

“We must keep my sister out of this,” she had said. “She has a bad heart. It might kill her.”

He made, finally, a rather infuriated resolve: darn it all, if somebody had to be the goat, he would be. They weren’t going to stand Holly up and question her. But all his tenderness was for Holly; for Mrs. Bayne he had only anger and increasing resentment. To save that soft-handed, gently unscrupulous aristocrat, he might have to drag an unknown but honourable name in the dirt. And why? Because her heart was weak, or she thought it was! Well, why not let her take her shock? Other people had to. Suppose poor Cox’s heart had been weak? Or Holly’s?

A wave of resentment and anger fairly shook him. He saw Mrs. Bayne at the door, watching spiderlike for Holly, lest the fly in the drawing room escape. Again, he himself was looking down the stair well, and she was below, listening furtively and hindering his own progress down the stairs.

He counted his scores against her: Margaret lying unconscious on the kitchen floor; the night she had brought him the bond to sell, and the play she had made on his sympathy; Holly in the attic, staring with tragic eyes at something in the candlelight; the Cox apartment, and James, broken and yet savage, in his chair.

And he tried to hate her; and then he thought of her weak relaxed throat and her childish blue eyes as she gave him the bond, and he somehow could not. After all, she had probably known about the suitcase for a long time, and yet she had suffered and pinched, denying herself everything that would have made life worth while to her. And when she had finally succumbed, it had not been for himself. He doubted if one penny of the money had been spent on herself.

Sometime toward morning he got heavily into bed in his undergarments, and dropped asleep almost at once.

At eight o’clock he wakened and rang for his clothes, but the boy who had taken them out had gone off duty and was not in the hotel, and nobody else knew anything about them. At nine o’clock he began a frenzied effort to locate them, tramping his floor in a state of mental agony and cursing himself for having let them go. Grinning bellboys came and went, and housemaids smiled outside in the passage, but the absurdity of his situation was obliterated by his anxiety. He was as nearly insane as a healthy, able-bodied man of twenty-eight may be and yet retain fragments of reason.

And at ten o’clock he did the last thing he should have done under the circumstances. He telephoned to Baylie, at the office, to go up to Kelsey Street and get him a suit of clothes.

T
HERE IS A CERTAIN
interest in comparisons, and sometimes not a little humour. Take, for example, that morning, with Warrington half-crazed in a shabby and not too clean room at the Hotel Stockton, and then consider Mr. Furness Brooks, emerging from his shower to find the buttons in his shirt and his clothing pressed and ready to his hand. No frenzied search for
his
garments; a calm shave, and an equally calm and fastidious dressing; the studio room freshly in order, the ash trays emptied, the fire going, and before it a small table with coffee bubbling in an electric arrangement, and Miguel at hand with bacon and eggs and the morning paper.

Rather a painful comparison, too, when one thinks about it, with neat stacks of wedding invitations: “
Mrs. Thomas Bayne requests the honour of your presence at the marriage of her daughter, Anne Hollister, to Mr. Furness Schuyler Brooks
…” and so forth. The names and addresses on them had been carefully selected from the Social Register. And not only the environments, but the states of mind of the two men concerned, present ample ground for contrast. Humorous, too, with Warrington’s head outside his door, watching the passageway with haggard eyes, and Brooks calmly surveying his domain and fitting a new mistress into it.

“Soon have to lay two places, Miguel,” he said cheerfully to the servant.

“Yes, sir,” said Miguel, and smiled at some private Oriental joke of his own.

Brooks sat down, but before he did so he got a notebook and made one or two additions to his list of names—careful additions: new people, but coming on and willing to pay their ways as they came.

The entire responsibility of the list was his. Asked about her own, Holly had only raised her eyebrows.

“But I don’t know anybody,” she said. “Of course Mother’s people—but I haven’t seen any of them for years.”

And Mrs. Bayne’s list had been of little use to him. Times had changed, even in ten years, and people who used to be important had died or ceased to count. New families had come up, not all of them bearing the closest inspection, but smart and accepted. He ignored her fretful protest that she had never heard of them, and put them all in.

So it happened that he did not glance at the morning paper for some time. Then, true to his type, he read the headlines and turned to the society news, and thus it was not until later that he saw, halfway down the first page, a headline which caught his eye and, having done so, held it.

BANK LOOT FOUND

Securities from Harrison Bank

Recovered

was what he read.

The article itself was not long. Given only the initial fact, of the recovery of a suitcase containing certain missing negotiable bonds from the Harrison Bank, and the additional news that they had been found in the apartment of one James Cox, brother-in-law of Bayne, it went on to deal with Bayne’s record and his recent pardon. Evidently only the barest statement had been given out by the District Attorney’s Office.

He read it again. With the first reading he had felt only anger and furious annoyance. By the Lord Harry, wouldn’t the damned story ever die? And to have it come up again just now—was there ever such rotten luck? Already he knew that the breakfast tables and boudoirs of his world were buzzing with it, and that by afternoon the society editors would have handed in their bit, and his approaching marriage to Tom Bayne’s daughter would be duly noted in the published accounts.

It was only with the second reading that the true inwardness of the situation occurred to him. He threw down the paper and leaped to his feet, overturning his chair.

“Cox!” he thought. “Cox! That’s the counter jumper. The new uncle. He couldn’t have known Bayne. Then how the devil did
he
get the stuff?”

There was only one conclusion:

They had had the securities all this time, had them and hidden them. They were as criminal as Bayne himself; Cox had been no more than a cat’s paw in their ladylike, unscrupulous hands. It was Margaret and Mrs. Bayne who were guilty.

He remembered Margaret. He could see her now, casually opening the front door.

“Oh, did you ring? I
thought
I heard the bell,” and with a sort of timid archness, taking him into the drawing room.

“I’m afraid it’s cold in here. The furnace-man is too careless about coal.”

He knew by this time that there was no furnace man, and that the drawing room was always cold. He knew there was no Hilda. All their small hypocrisies and snobberies had long before been uncovered before his discerning, prominent blue eyes.

But why the poverty if they had had this hoard to draw upon? He considered that shrewdly, in view of his knowledge of them.

“Afraid,” he concluded. “Holding on until the old boy got out and told them how to dispose of it.”

To be fair to him, he did not include Holly in all this. Selfish as were his pre-occupations, his mind finally drifted to her with a new and unexpected compassion. “The poor kid!” he thought, and saw her perhaps getting her first knowledge through the morning paper. And with that wave of sympathy he felt stronger, every inch a man. If he dramatized himself a bit, it was one fine gesture, to be laid to his credit.

“I’ll stand by her,” he thought, and drew himself up a trifle. “I’m all she has, and I’m not letting go. The poor kid!”

He had no illusions; he knew what standing by would mean. The men would approve him for it, but the women would not. And his world was largely women. It was women who made out lists, paid calls, gave parties. It was at tea tables he was popular, not in smoking rooms after dinners. With much the same gesture with which he had disposed of the invitations, he brushed this world of women out of his way.

At the most his business was a casual one. He ordered his car brought around from the public garage where he kept it, and still warm and exalted with sacrifice, drove to the house on Kelsey Street.

H
AVING RETIRED EARLY, MRS
. Bayne was up before seven o’clock that morning. She got out of bed in her cold room, lowered the window, and then put a match to the fire Holly had laid ready the night before. In front of this she placed a pitcher of water to warm, and having done so, crawled back into bed again.

She felt cheerful and active. The day opened before her, full of interesting things to be done. She took her purse from under her pillow and carefully counted her money. She still had almost nine hundred dollars.

She pulled the blankets up around her and fell to work on a shopping list, but first carefully she put down a few items, considering them at length. Twenty-five dollars for the organist at St. Andrews, ten dollars for the sexton, and a hundred dollars to the florist, for rented palms and a few white chrysanthemums. That was a hundred and thirty-five; from eight hundred and ninety, it left seven hundred and fifty-five dollars.

She thought she could manage. …

She dropped her list and fell into deep thought. Somebody would have to give Holly away; she couldn’t go up the aisle alone. But the Parkers had gone to Europe, and anyhow, she had an idea that Sam Parker wouldn’t have been keen about doing it. Sam had lost a good bit in the bank trouble; he had been a director then.

For the first time she considered Margaret’s husband. He wasn’t impressive, but at least he was available. And whether one liked it or not, he was a part of the family. One couldn’t ask an outsider to do that sort of thing, and although in this new state of society widowed mothers occasionally gave their daughters away, she did not approve of it. Nor, as she reflected bitterly, was she widowed.

She heard the paper boy on the steps below, and putting on her slippers, went down through the cold hall and retrieved the morning paper from the vestibule. On her way back, she wakened Holly, and then crawled into her bed once more, shivering. She did not, however, look at the news pages at all. Paper and pencil in hand, she went over the advertisements, marking bargains here and there, and special sales.

She was contented, quite happy.

Later on she took her bath from the warm water out of the pitcher, and dressed carefully to go out. When, hatted and coated, she reached the chilly dining room, the odour of coffee and bacon welcomed her.

A little worried frown appeared on Mrs. Bayne’s face as she surveyed Holly when she brought in the food.