CHAPTER XV
It was not until night had settled down over the city that Durkin opened the back window of his little top-floor room and peered cautiously out.
There was, apparently, nothing amiss. A noise of pounding came to him from the shipping-room of a lace importer below. A few scattered shafts of light glimmered from the windows opposite. A hazy half-moon slanted down over the house-tops.
When Durkin leaned out of the window for the second time he held in his hand something that looked peculiarly like a fishing-rod. From it dangled two thin green wires, and with the metal hook on the end of it he tested and felt carefully up among the slovenly tangle of wires running out past the overhanging eave.
It was a silly and careless way of doing things, he inwardly decided, this lazy stringing of wires from house-top to house-top, instead of keeping them in the tunnels where they belonged. It was not only violating regulations, but it was putting a premium on “lightning-slinging.” And he remembered what Frances had once said to him about criminals in a city like New York, how the careless riot of wealth seemed to breed them, as any uncleanness breeds bacteria; how, in a way, each was only a natural and inevitable agent, taking advantage of organic waste, seizing on the unguarded and the unorderly. She had even once argued that the criminal could lay claim to a distinct economic value, enjoining, as he did, continual alertness of attention and cleanliness of commercial method.
Yet the devil himself, he had somewhere read, could quote Scripture for his purpose; and his fishing-pole moved restlessly up and down, like a long finger feeling through answering strings. For each time, almost, that his hook rested on one of the wires the little Bunnell relay on the table behind him spoke out feebly. To the trill and clatter of these metallic pulsations Durkin listened intently, until, determining that he had looped into the right wire, he made secure his switch and carefully drew down the window to within an inch of the sill.
Then he gave his studious attention to the little Bunnell relay. Its action was feeble and spasmodic. It was doing scant justice to what Durkin easily saw was a master-hand toying with the rubber button at the far-distant end of the wire. It was not unusually quick operating, but, as the dots and dashes flew on and on, the interloper for a moment or two forgot the meaning of the messages in the clear-cut, crisp, and precise beauty of the sender’s Morse.
“That man,” commented the admiring craftsman in Durkin, “is earning his eight dollars an hour!”
Then, adjusting his rheostat, he slowly and cautiously graduated his current, until new life seemed to throb and flow through the busy little piece of clicking metal. A moment later it was speaking out its weighty and secret messages, innocently, authoritatively, almost triumphantly, it seemed to the eavesdropper, bending over the glimmering armature lever.
A quietly predaceous smile broadened on Durkin’s intent face. He suddenly smote the table with an impetuous little rap of the knuckles, as he sat there listening.
“By heaven, this will open her eyes!” he cried, under his breath.
And he repeated the words more abstractedly, as he lifted his telephone transmitter out on the table and threw open a switch on the wall, well-concealed by the window curtain.
He then adjusted the watch-case receiver to his ear, and settled quietly down in his chair. Striking a match, he held it poised six inches away from the cigar between his teeth. For the sounder had suddenly broken out into life once more, and strange and momentous things were flashing in to him over that little thread of steel. The match burned away and fell from his fingers. He shook himself together with an effort.
Then he snatched up a pencil, and with the watch-case receiver still at his ear and the Bunnell sounder still busy before him, he hurriedly wrote notes on the back of an envelope.
He felt like a lean and empty wharf-rat that had tunnelled into a storehouse of unlimited provision. The very vastness of it amazed and stupefied him. He had been grubbing about for a penny or two, and here he had stumbled across a fabulous-figured banknote.
Then, as item by item he was able to piece his scattered shreds of information together, his mind became clearer and his nerves grew steadier.
He looked at his watch. It was twenty-six minutes past nine. As he had expected, and as had happened every night since Curry had installed the private wire in his Madison Avenue residence, the operator on the up-town end of the line switched off. The sounder grew still, like a clock that had run down. The telephone wire still carried its occasional message in to him, but he knew that he could wait no longer.
It took him but a minute or two to detach his looping wire from the Curry private line. Then he threw back the switch of his telephone, concealed his transmitter, and caught up his hat and coat.
Five minutes later he was careering up Fifth Avenue in a taxi-cab. A new interest, submerged in the sterner tides of life, drifted in on him as he drew nearer the Ralston and Frances Candler. He began to meditate on how much he had been missing out of existence of late, and even how empty all triumph and conquest might be, if unshared by or with another. Some vague and gently disturbing inkling of just how much a woman could become to a man, however preoccupied, crept into the quieter backgrounds of his consciousness. And with a man of his walk in life, uncompanioned, isolated, migratory, this muffling and softening element was doubly essential.
He sent his card up to Frances, with an unreasonably beating heart. Word came down to him, in time, that she was engaged, but that she would see him in twenty minutes.
“But I must see her, and at once!” he told the impassive clerk.
It would be possible in twenty minutes, was the second message that came down to him.
Frances engaged—and not able to see him! The very idea of it startled and enraged him. Who had the right to stand between them?—he demanded of himself, with irrational fierceness. And out of the very midst of his soft and consuming eagerness to see her sprang up a mad fire of jealousy and uncertainty. Who was there, he again demanded of himself,—who was there that could come in this way between Frances Candler and himself, at such a time and under such circumstances? After all, her career was one of open and continuous deception. There was MacNutt! And Ottenheimer! And a dozen more! She made it her business to deceive and dupe others, so artfully, so studiously, so laboriously—why would she not use her tools on him as well? Was she, indeed, as open and candid as he had taken her to be?—she, with all her soft little feline graces, and with all that ambiguous and unknown past of hers!
And yet he remembered how she had held out against him, how he, with his laxer code, had often hurt and wounded every feeling of her sensitive nature. Even before this he had tried to argue that crime in one phase of life implied moral weakness in all other phases of that same career. Yet there she obdurately though pantingly stood, unyielding, stanch, clean of mind and life, a woman of stern honor—and through it all an adventuress and a robber! A black-leg with the conscience of a schoolgirl!—and he laughed inwardly and bitterly at the cheap irony of it all.
His icy and exacting scrutiny of her, as he stepped into her private room, sapped all the warmth out of her greeting. She had thrown on a loose-fitting dressing-gown of pale blue, which showed the white fulness of her arms and throat and darkened the violet of her brooding and seemingly unsatisfied eyes. She was more than beautiful, Durkin had told himself, with a little gulp of anguish. But why had the corroding poison of criminal inclination been poured into a glass so tinted and fragile and lovely to the sight! For there, as he looked at her with still angry and suspicious eyes, he realized, for the first time, just what she was to him, just how completely and implacably she had subjugated him.
“What is it?” she demanded, with a sudden little flutter of fear, standing halfway across the room.
“Who was in this room with you?” he demanded.
She studied his face for a moment or two, slowly shaking her head from side to side. He noticed the tumbled wealth of her glinting chestnut hair, here and there almost a golden red, and again a gulp of anguish swelled at his throat. It was no wonder that MacNutt had good use for her.
“Who has been up here with you?” he repeated miserably, but inexorably.
She seemed to sigh a little, and then her slow English laugh melted out through the room. It was a quiet and sorrowful little laugh, but it shattered the tragedy from the overstrained moment.
“You foolish boy!” she said, half-sorrowfully, as she turned to put the belittered room to rights. “It was the dressmaker I sent for, as soon as I got here. I haven’t a rag! You know that! And you know how often you have said that persons in our sort of business ought to dress well.”
The mad wave of doubt that still tumbled him back and forth ebbed suddenly away, as a woman of forty, short and stolid, stepped briskly and quietly out of the inner bedroom. She bowed a businesslike good night to them as she passed out into the hallway, carrying a handbag.
“And this is the way you welcome me back!” reproved Frances, as she drew away from him and fell to studying his face once more. “Well, we can at least talk business,” she added bitterly, on the heels of his awkward silence. “And that, I know, will appeal to you!”
Durkin bowed to the stroke, and even made belated and disjointed efforts of appeasement. But the petals seemed to have fallen from the shaken flower; a teasing sense of her aloofness from him oppressed his mind. In fact, it had always been in the full hue and cry of their adventures with the grim powers of the law that she had seemed nearest to him.
The thought came to him, with a quick sense of terror, of how he might suffer at a time or in a situation not so ridiculously transparent as the present. If, indeed, she ever did give him actual cause for jealousy, how it would rend and tear those roots which had pierced so much deeper than he had ever dreamed! And for a passing moment he felt almost afraid of himself.