CHAPTER XVII
“Ten thousand dollars is a great deal of money!” said Frank, easily, with a languid shrug of her shoulders.
“It is a great deal! But we’re up against a great deal! If we had twice as much, it would be even better. I have a possible twelve hundred now, altogether—just a scrawny, miserable twelve hundred! I got most of it yesterday, through dabbling in this cotton of Curry’s. Tomorrow morning every cent of it goes down to Robinson & Little, and if the market is moderately steady, and he takes a two dollar margin, knowing what I do, it means I double that amount before the day’s trading is over.”
“Robinson & Little? Who are they? New friends of yours?”
“They are the big Wall Street people. I had to pay two hundred dollars—in I. O. U. form,—for a letter to that firm. I still have a suspicion it was forged, too. I’ve been getting acquainted with them, however, and showing them that I’m all right. When the eleventh hour comes, and when I have to cut in on Curry’s Postal-Union wire down-town, we’ll have to tear around to Robinson & Little’s, flop over with the market, and buy cotton short, on a stop-order. It all depends upon what margin we may have to put up, whether we make forty thousand dollars, or a hundred and forty thousand dollars. Curry, you may be sure, will try to start the thing off as quietly as possible. So a normal market will bring a more normal margin, and give us something worth while to play on!”
“Something worth while?” she mused absently. Then she came and stood by Durkin, and studied his face once more. Some sense of his isolation, of his unhappy aloofness from his kind, touched and wrung her feeling. She caught at his arm with a sudden companionable enthusiasm, and joined him in pacing the room.
“After all, there would be something big, and wide, and sweeping about this sort of work, wouldn’t there?”
“Yes; it’s a blamed sight better than pool-room piking!” he cried. “It’s living; it’s doing things!”
“I believe I could plunge in it, and glory in it!” she went on, consolingly.
“There’s just one drawback—just one nasty little blot on the face of the fun,” he ventured, catching at the sustaining arm of her enthusiasm.
“And that is—?”
“We’ve got to get this ten thousand dollars just for a day or two!”
“But have you any idea as to how, or where, or when?”
“Yes, I have,” he answered, looking at her steadily. There seemed to be some covert challenge in his glance, but she faced him unwaveringly.
“Say it out, Jim; I’m not afraid!”
“I mean you must get it! You’ve got to borrow it!”
He began bravely enough, but he hesitated before the startled scorn on her face.
“You mean I’ve—I’ve got to steal it?”
He held up a protesting hand. Then he went to the half-open door of her inner room and closed it carefully.
“No; as I said before, we can not and must not steal it. It may be called theft, of course, but every cent of it will be returned. No, no; listen to me—I have it all figured out. Only, it has to be done this very night!”
“Tonight?” she said, with a reproving little cry.
“Yes, tonight! And that is why I’ve been desperate, of course, and have been looping every telephone wire that runs near my up-town room, hoping against hope for a chance to pick up something to work on. The only thing that gave me that chance was Theodore Van Schaick’s house wire. Now, listen. Two days ago his daughter Lydia came of age. I could tell you most of the things she got, and how she has been ’phoning gratitude and thanks and girlish messages out round the city. But among other things Miss Lydia Van Schaick received from her father, was a small and neat bundle not long out of the Sub-Treasury. It was made up of one hundred equally neat little pieces of parchment, and each one of them is a one-hundred dollar banknote.”
“And I’m to crawl through one of her windows, and burglarize the house of this amount!”
“No, no, Frank—listen to me a moment. Yesterday, Miss Lydia telephoned her Uncle Cedric about this money. Not being used to a small fortune in ready cash, naturally, she feels nervous about having it around, and wants to put it somewhere. Her level-headed old Uncle Cedric advised her to take it down tomorrow to the Second National Bank, and open a deposit account with it. And this Lydia intends to do. Tonight her ten thousand dollars are laid carefully away in a glove-box, in one of her chiffonier drawers, in her own private bedroom. So tonight is our only chance!”
“Couldn’t I sand-bag her in the morning, on her way down-town?” demanded Frances, with mock seriousness. She had learned not to ask too much of life, and she was struggling to school herself to the thought of this new rôle.
“No, my dear girl; it can be done so much easier than that. Her mother and her younger sister are still at Driftwood, their summer place in Mamaroneck. At four o’clock this afternoon they sent into the city a certain Miss Annie Seabrooke. She is a St. Luke’s graduate, a professional nurse who has been looking after old Mrs. Van Schaick. This lady, apparently, is a good deal of a hypochondriac. The nurse, of course, has to get things ready for her patient’s return. I have already met Miss Seabrooke at the Grand Central Station. I have also, at Miss Lydia’s urgent request, installed her at the Holland House, over night. This, by the way, is the lady’s bag. I tried to explain to her that the whole Van Schaick house wants to be given over to Miss Lydia’s coming-of-age function.”
Frances, already carried down again by her tidal reaction of feeling, watched him through narrowed and abstracted eyes.
“In this bag, among other things, you’ll find a nurse’s uniform,” Durkin went on hurriedly, oblivious of her scrutiny. “It will fit a little loose, I’m afraid—Miss Seabrooke is a big, wide-shouldered Canadian girl. And in forty or fifty minutes from now you ought to be inside that uniform and inside the Van Schaick house—if we ever want to carry this thing through!”
“And then—?” she asked, in her dead and impersonal voice, as though her thoughts were leagues away.
“Then,” cried Durkin, “then you’ve got to get hold of a glove-box in Miss Lydia Van Schaick’s chiffonier drawer. By some means or other we’ve got to get hold of that box, and—”
She stopped him, by holding up a sudden silencing hand. Her face was white and set; he could see none of the iris of her eyes.
“It’s no use!” she said, evenly and quietly. “It’s no use. I can not and will not do it!”
Durkin fell back from her, aghast. Then he took her by the arm, and turned her about so that the light fell on her face. He could see that her lower lip was trembling.
“You back down—now?” he demanded, with a touch of incredulity.
“Yes, I back down!” she answered, letting her eyes meet his.
“Why—” he began, inadequately. “What is it?”
“It’s simply this, Jim,” she answered him—and her voice, now, was high and thin and unmodulated, constricted, by some inward tension, to a gramophonic tumult of syllables. “There has got to be a limit, somewhere. At some point we have got to draw the line. We have been forgetting a great many things. But I can not and will not be a common thief—for you—or for anything you can bring to me—or to my life!”
“You say that?”
“Yes, I do; and if you cared for me—if you thought of my feelings—if you thought of my happiness, you would never ask me to do such things—you would never make me suffer like this!”
He threw up his hands with what was almost a gesture of exasperation.
“But you will not be a common thief—it will not be stealing at all! Can’t you see that?”
“No, I can not. And you know as well as I know, that when we try to justify it we do it only by a quibble!”
“But I tell you every penny of that money will go back where it came from!”
“Then why can’t we go to Lydia Van Schaick and ask her to lend us the money?”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“No more so than what you propose!”
Durkin, drawing back from her, closed his right fist and with it pounded angrily on the palm of his left hand.
“If you’re going to back down I will go to Lydia Van Schaick, and I’ll get her money, too. I’ll go as a second-story man, as a porch-climber! I’ll go after that money as a common burglar and house-breaker. But I’ll get it, in the end, or know the reason why!”
“Oh!” she gasped, horrified. “You wouldn’t! You couldn’t!”
“I say I will!” he cried, in a passion.
“Oh, you couldn’t!” she reiterated.
“Couldn’t I?—I’ve got this machinery started, and it’s going to be kept moving!”
Something in the scene carried her years back, to the times when her father, emerging from his prolonged orgies, sick and shaken, stormed and wept for the brandy she struggled to keep away from him—and the struggle would end only, when in fear of his collapse, she surrendered the bottle to his quivering fingers.
“My God—I’ve got to have it!” Durkin was crying and storming.
There crept over her the same, slowly eviscerating pity for the defiant man who now stood before her, so tragically weak in his very protests of strength.
She turned and caught at his arm, with a sudden inward surrender that left her dazed and tottering. She struggled in vain to keep down her tears, once more torn by that old and costly and compromising hunger to be loved and sustained by him. She could not live in the face of his anger; she could not endure his hate. And the corroding bitterness, the gnawing tragedy, of her life lay in the fact that the arm to which she must turn for support was the very arm that would forever drag and hold her down.
Yet she was inarticulate, in the face of it all. She could not plead; she could not explain. She could only break out with a sudden unreasoning and passionate cry of: “You are not kind to me!”
Durkin had already shaken her hand from his arm, and was on the point of a second outburst. Then he stopped, and the gathering anger and revolt ebbed out of his face, for at that tearful and passionate cry from her he knew that the battle between them had come to an end. He knew, with an exultation in which even pity and cruelty were strangely entangled, that it was a sign of her inward capitulation, that he had won her over.
“Frank!”
He swung about, suddenly, and with one clasp of his arms let wide the flood-gates of her strained emotions.
“Good God!” he cried. “You know I hate it, as much as you do! But can’t you see it’s too late now, to quibble and vacillate? Can’t you see that I’m getting nothing more out of it than you?”
He pleaded with her, hotly, impetuously. He showed her how he needed her, how he was helpless without her. He held her, and kissed the tears from her unhappy eyes—he could see them droop, pitifully, as with a narcotic, at his first intimate and tender touch. He would have to sway her now, he felt, not through her judgment, not by open attack, but only by those more circuitous and subterranean approaches of feminine feeling. And still he expostulated and pleaded, unnerving and breaking her will with his cruel kindnesses of word and caress.
“Oh, I’ll do it!” she cried, at last, mopping her stained face. “I’ll do it, Jim, if I have to!”
“But there’s nothing so terrible in it, Dear Heart,” he assuaged. “We’ve been through worse things together. And it will be made right again, every penny of it!”
“Jim,” she said slowly, as she grew calmer once more; “Jim, I want you to give me your word of honor that it will be made right! I’m—I’m too cowardly, yet, to do a thing that’s wickedness, through and through. I’ve got to see some glimmer of right in it, I’ve got to feel that it will end right, even—”
“But this will end right! It can’t help it. I give you my word of honor, now, to save you from being what you might seem, that every cent of this woman’s money goes back to her.”
She was moving her head slowly up and down, as she studied his face.
“Then you must remember, through it all, how much I’m trusting myself to you,” she said, with a forlornness that brought a lump in his throat, as she looked about the room with hopeless eyes. “Do you realize how hard all this is going to be?”
“It’s not easy, I know—but it’s our only chance.”
“Is it our only chance?” she suddenly asked. “Life is full of chances. I saw one today, if I’d only known.”
She looked at him again, with some new light sifting through all her tangle of clouds. “Yes,” she went on, more hopefully, “there might be still another way!”
“Well?” he asked, almost impatiently, as he glanced at his watch.
“It was something that happened when I went into that little Postal-Union office at Broadway and Thirty-seventh Street.” She was speaking rapidly now, with a touch of his former fire. “The relays and everything are in the same room, you know, behind the counter and a wire screen. I wanted my dressmaker, and while I was sitting at a little side-desk chewing my pen-handle and trying to boil seventeen words down to ten, a man came in with a rush message. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. It was Sunset Bryan, the race-track plunger, and it occurred to me that it might be worth while to know what he was sending out.”
“Did he see you, or does he know you?”
“I took good pains that he shouldn’t see me. So I scrawled away on my blank, and just sat there and read the ticker as the operator took the despatches off the file and sent them out. Here is the wording of Sunset Bryan’s message, as well as I can remember it: ‘Duke—of—Kendall—runs—tomorrow—get—wise—and—wire—St. Louis—and—South!’”
“Well, what of it?” Durkin asked.
“Why, this Bryan is the man who took one hundred and ten thousand dollars out of the Aqueduct ring in one day. Since the Gravesend Meeting began, people say he has made nearly half a million. He’s a sort of race-track Curry. He keeps close figures on every race he plays. He has one hundred men and more on his pay roll, and makes his calculations after the most minute investigating and figuring. It stands to reason that he manipulates a little, though the Pinkerton men, as I suppose you know, have never been able to get him off the Eastern tracks. Now, Jim, my firm belief is that there is something ‘cooked up,’ as they say, for tomorrow afternoon, and if we could only find out what this Duke of Kendall business is, we might act on it in time.”
She waited for Durkin to speak. He tapped the top of his head, meditatively, with his right forefinger, pursing his lips as his mind played over the problem.
“Yes, we might. But how are we to find out what the Duke of Kendall and his mere running means?”
“I even took the trouble to look up the Duke of Kendall. He is a MacIntosh horse, the stable companion to Mary J., and ridden by Shirley, a new jockey.”
She could see that he had little sympathy for her suggestion, and she herself lost faith in the plan even as she unfolded it.
“My idea was, Jim, that this horse was going to run—is sure to run, under heavy odds, for what they call ‘a long shot.’”
“But still, how would we be able to make sure?”
“I could go and ask Sunset Bryan himself.”
Durkin threw up his hand with a gesture of angry disapproval.
“That beast! He’s—he’s unspeakable! He’s the worst living animal in America!”
“I shouldn’t be afraid of him,” she answered, quietly.
“The whole thing comes too late in the game, anyway,” broke in Durkin, with a second gesture of disgust. Then he added, more gently: “Good heavens, Frank, I don’t want to see you mixed up with that kind of cur! It wouldn’t be right and fair! It’s infinitely worse than the thing I’m suggesting!”
“After all, we are not so different, he and I,” she responded, with acidulated mildness.
Durkin took her hand in his, with real pain written on his face.
“Don’t talk that way,” he pleaded; “it hurts!”
She smoothed his hair with her free hand, quietly, maternally.
“Then you had rather that I—I borrowed this money from the Van Schaick house?” she asked him.
“It’s the choice of two evils,” he answered her, out of his unhappiness, all his older enthusiasm now burnt down into the ashes of indifferency.
“If only I was sure you could keep your promise,” she said, dreamily, as she studied his face.
“It will go back!” he responded determinedly, shrugging off his momentary diffidence. “Even though I have to make it, dollar by dollar, and though it takes me twenty years! But I tell you, Frank, that it will not be needed. Here we have the chance of a life time. If we only had the money to start with, the whole business could be carried on openly and decently—barring, of course,” he added, with his sudden shamefaced smile, “the little bit of cutting-in I’ll have to do down-town on the Curry wires!”
“One minute—before we go any farther with this. Supposing we successfully get this glove-box, and successfully watch Curry, and on the strength of our knowledge invest this money, and get our returns, and find ourselves with enough—well, with enough not to starve on—will you promise me this: that it will be the last?”
“But why should it be the last?”
“You know as well as I do! You know that I want to be honest, to live straight and aboveboard; but a hundred times more, that I want to see you honest and aboveboard!”
He studied the tense and passionate mood that flitted across her face, that seemed to deepen the shadows about her brooding violet eyes.
“I would do anything for you, Frank!” he said, with an inadequate and yet eloquent little outthrust of the arms.
“Then do this for me! Let us get back to the daylight world again!”
“But would it satisfy us? Would we—?”
“Would we—?” she echoed forlornly. Then she turned suddenly away, to hide a trace of inconsequential tears.
“We have got to!” she cried out passionately over her shoulder, as she stooped to the suit-case and deftly opened it. A moment later she was rummaging hurriedly through its neatly packed contents.
“And I am Mrs. Van Schaick’s trained nurse?” she asked, ruminatively.
“Yes, Miss Annie Seabrooke, remember!”
“But the others—the servants—won’t they know me?”
“You were engaged in Mamaroneck; not one of the city servants has seen your face.”
“But it will be eleven and after—was my train delayed?”
“No, not delayed; but you took a later train.”
She was silent for a minute or two, as she probed deeper into the suit-case.
“You haven’t promised!” she murmured, her face still low over the womanly white linen, and the little cap and apron and uniform which she was gently shaking out before her.
She rose to her feet and turned to him.
“I promise you—anything!” he cried, in the teeth of all his inner misgivings. He followed her to the open window.
“Then kiss me!” she said, with a little exhausted sigh of ultimate surrender, as she sank into his arms and her lonely and hungry body felt the solace of his strength about and above it. And in that minute they lost all count of time and place, and for them, with the great glimmering granite city stretching away at their feet, there was neither past nor future.