CHAPTER XXX
Frances sent Durkin on alone to the Chelsea, where, he had finally agreed, they were to take rooms for a week at least. There, she argued, they could live frugally, and there they could escape from the old atmosphere, from the old memories and associations that hour by hour had seemed to grow more unlovely in her eyes.
On wisely reckless second thought, she ran into a florist’s and bought an armful of roses. These she thrust up into the taxi-seat beside him, explaining that he was to scatter them about their rooms, so that he could be in the midst of them when she came. Then she stood at the curb, watching him drive off, demanding of herself whether, after all, some Indian Summer of happiness were not due to her, wondering whether she were still asking too much of life.
Then she climbed the stairs to the little top-floor apartment, saying to herself, compensatingly, that it would be for the last time. She felt glad to think that she had taken from Durkin’s hands the burden of packing and shutting up the desolate and dark-memoried little place.
Yet it had taken her longer than she imagined, and she was still stooping, with oddly mixed emotions, over the crumpled nurse’s dress and the little hypodermic that she carried away from the Van Schaick house, when she heard a hurried footfall on the stairs and the click of a pass-key in the lock. She realized, with a start, that it was Durkin come back for her, even after she had begged him not to.
She ran over toward the door, and then, either petulantly or for some stronger intuitive reason—she could never decide which—stopped short, and waited.
The door opened slowly. As it swung back she saw standing before her the huge figure of MacNutt.
“You!” she gasped, with staring eyes.
“Sure it’s me!” he answered curtly, as he closed the door and locked it behind him.
“But, how dare you?” and she gasped once more. “What right have you to break in here?”
She was trembling from head to foot now, recoiling, step by step, as she saw some grim purpose written on the familiar blocked squareness of his flaccid jaw and the old glint of anger in the deep-set, predatory eyes.
“Oh, I didn’t need to break in, my lady! I’ve been here before, more than once. So don’t start doin’ the heavy emotional and makin’ scenes!”
“But—but Durkin will kill you this time, when he sees you!” she cried.
MacNutt tapped his pocket confidently.
“He’ll never catch me that way twice, I guess!”
“How dare you come here?” she still gasped, bewildered.
“Oh, I dare go anywhere, after you, Frank! And I may as well tell you, that’s what I came for!”
She still shivered from head to foot. It was not that she was afraid of him. It was only that, in this new beginning of life, she was afraid of some unforeseen disaster. And she knew that she would kill herself, gladly, rather than go with him.
“Now, cool down, little woman,” MacNutt was saying to her in his placid guttural. “We’ve been through enough scrapes together to know each other, so there’s no use you gettin’ high-strung and nervous. And I guess you know I’m no piker, when it comes to anybody I care about. I never went back on you, Frank, even though you did treat me like a dog and swing in with that damned welcher Durkin, and try to bleed me for my last five hundred. I tell you, Frank, I can’t get used to the thought of not havin’ you ’round!”
She gave forth a little inarticulate cry of hate and abhorrence for him. She could see that he had been drinking, and that he was shattered, both in body and nerve.
“Oh, you’ll get over that! I’ve knocked around with women—I’ve been makin’ and spendin’ money fast enough for anybody this season; but no one’s just the same as you! You thought I was good enough to work with once, and I guess I ought to be good enough to travel with now!”
“That’s enough!” she broke in, wrathfully. She had grown calmer by this time, and her thoughts were returning to her mind now, buzzing and rapid, like bees in a fallen hive.
“No, it’s not,” he retorted, with an ominous shake of the square jaw and beefy neck. “And you just wait until I finish. You’ve been playin’ pretty fast and loose with me, Frank Candler, and I’ve been takin’ it meek and quiet, for I knew you’d soon get tired of this two-cent piker you’ve been workin’ the wires with!”
She opened her lips to speak, but no sound came from them.
“I tell you, Frank, you’re not the sort of woman that can go half fed and half dressed, driftin’ ’round dowdy and hungry and homeless, most of the time! You’re too fine for all that kind o’ thing. A woman like you has got to have money, and be looked after, and showed around, and let take things easy—or what’s the use o’ bein’ a beauty, anyway! You know all that, ’s well as I do!”
“Yes, I know all that!” she said vacantly, wearily, for her racing thoughts were far away. She was inwardly confessing to herself that they who live by the sword must die by the sword.
“Then what’s the use o’ crucifyin’ yourself?” cried MacNutt, seeming to catch hope from her change of tone. “You know as well as I do that I can hound this Durkin off the face o’ the globe. I can make it so hot for him here in New York that he daren’t stick his nose within a foot o’ the Hudson. And I’m goin’ to do it, too! I’m goin’ to do it, unless you want to come and stop me from doin’ it!”
“Why?” she asked emptily.
“Didn’t you save my life once, Frank, right in this room? Damn it all, you must have thought a little about me, to do a thing like that!”
“And what did you do for it?” she demanded, with a sudden change of front. Once again she was all animal, artful and cunning and crafty. “You played the sneak-thief. You slunk back here and stole his money. No, no; there’s no good your denying it—you came and stole his honestly earned money!”
“Honestly earned?” he scoffed.
“No, not honestly earned, perhaps, but made as clean as it could be made, in this low and mean and underhand business you taught us and dragged us into! And you came and stole it, when it meant so much to me, and to him!”
“Yes, I said I’d knock him, and I did knock him! But, good heavens, what’s his money to a high-roller like me! If that’s all you’re swingin’ your clapper about, you may as well get wise. If it’s the money you’re achin’ after, you can have it—providin’ you take it the way I’m willin’ to give it to you!”
“I can’t believe you—you know that!”
“You think I’m talkin’ big? Well, look here. Here’s my wad! Yes, look at it good and hard—there’s enough there to smother you in diamonds, and let you lord it ’round this town for the rest of your life!”
“You’re drunk,” she cried, once more consumed by a sudden fear of him.
“No, I’m not; but I’m crazy, if you want to put it that way, and you’re the cause of it! I’m tired o’ plottin’ and schemin’ and gettin’ mixed up in all kinds o’ dirty work, and I want to take it easy now, and enjoy life a little!”
She gasped at his words. Were his aspirations, then, quite as high as hers? Were all the vague ideals she mouthed to Durkin and herself only the thoughts of any mottled-souled evil-doer?
Then she watched him slowly close the great polished pig-skin wallet, replace it in his inside breast-pocket, and secure it there with its safety-button.
Frances gazed at him blankly, with detached and impersonal attention. He stood to her there the embodiment of what all her old life had been. In him she saw incarnate all its hideousness, all its degrading coarseness, all its hopeless vileness and wickedness. And this was what she had dreamed that at a moment’s notice she could thrust behind her! She had thought that it could be slipped off, at a turn of the hand, like a soiled skirt, when the insidious poison of it had crept into her very bones, when it had corroded and withered and killed that holier something which should have remained untouched and unsullied in her inmost heart of hearts. He was her counterpart, her mate, this gross man with the many-wrinkled, square-set jaw, with the stolid bull-neck, with his bloated, vulpine face and his subdolous green eyes. This was what she had fallen to, inch by inch, and day by day. And here he was talking to her, wisely, as to one of his kind, bargaining for her bruised and weary body, as though love and honor and womanly devotion were chattels to be bought and sold in the open market.
The ultimate, inexorable hopelessness, the foredoomed tragedy of her dwarfed and perverted life came crushingly home to her, as she looked at him, still confronting her there in his challenging comradeship of crime and his kinship of old-time dishonor.
“Mack,” she said quietly, but her voice was hard and dry and colorless, “I could never marry you, now. But under one condition I would be willing to go with you, wherever you say.”
“And that condition is?”
“It is that you return to Durkin every cent you owe him, and let him go his way, while we go ours.”
“You mean that, Frank?”
“Yes, I mean it!”
He looked at her colorless face closely. Something in it seemed to satisfy him.
“But how am I to know you’re going to stick to your bargain?” he still hesitated. “How am I to be sure you won’t get your price and then give me the slip?”
“Would Durkin want me, after that? Would he take up with me when you had finished with me? Oh, he’s not that make of man!” she scoffed in her hard, dry voice. There was a little silence; then, “Is that all?” she asked in her dead voice.
“That’s just as you say,” he answered.
“Very well,” she said between her drawn lips. She stepped quickly to the back of the room, and lifting the hidden telephone transmitter up on the table she threw open the window to loop the wire that ran by the overhanging eave.
“Hold on, there!” cried MacNutt, in alarm. “What’s all this, anyway?”
“I have got to tell Durkin, that’s all. He has got to know, of course, what we have decided on.”
“Oh, no, you don’t, my beauty! If there’s goin’ to be any telephonin’ out o’ this house, I do it myself!”
“It makes no difference,” she answered, apathetically. “You can tell him as well as I could.”
She could see some new look of suspicion and rage mounting into his watchful eyes. “I do the talking this trip,” he cried.
“Then cut in and loop that third wire—no, the fourth, counting the lighting wire—on the eave there. It is the Van Schaick house-wire—indeed, it would be much better to cut them off altogether, after we cut in, or there might be some interference from them with Central. Now throw open that switch behind the window-curtain there—so. Now, if you will ring up Central and ask for the Chelsea, they will connect you directly with Durkin. He is waiting in his room there for me.”
He looked at her, suspicious and puzzled, the momentary note of triumph gone out of his voice.
“See here, Frank, I may as well tell you one thing, straight out. Although I square up with Durkin for what I got out of him, and pass this money of his over to you, I tell you now, I’m going to smash that man!”
“Smash him?” she echoed, dismally. “Then you’ve been lying!”
“Yes, smash him! You don’t imagine I’m goin’ to have that piker shadowin’ and doggin’ me like a flatty all my days! I stand pat now with Doogan and his men. And in ten days I can have Durkin up against ten years!”
“That’s a lie,” she contended.
“Well, I can have him so he’ll be glad to get ten years, just to get out o’ what’s comin’ to him!”
“Then this was all a trap, a plot?” she gasped.
“No, it’s not a trap—it’s only that I wanted to save you out o’ the mess. I’m wise enough in most things, but about you I’ve always been a good deal of a fool. It’s my loose screw, all right; sometimes it’s driven me near crazy. I’m goin’ to have you, I don’t care what it costs me—I don’t care if I have to pound this Durkin’s brains out with a lead-pipe!”
“Take me! Take me—but save him!” she pleaded.
“Good God, it’s not just you I want—it’s—it’s your feelin’s, it’s your love that I’ve got to have!”
“Oh!” she moaned, covering her face with her hands.
“It’s a queer way of makin’ love, eh?—but I mean it! And I want to know if you’re goin’ to swing in with me and get taken care of, or not?”
“Oh, you fool, you fool!” she cried suddenly, smiting the air with her vehemently closed fists. “You poor, miserable fool! I loathe and hate the very sound of your voice! I despise every inch of your brutish, bloated body! I’d die—I’d kill myself ten times over before I’d so much as touch you!”
He looked at her gathering storm of rage, first in wonder, and then in a slow and deadly anger that blanched his face and left only the two claret-colored blotches on his withered cheeks.
“I’ll give you one last chance,” he said, clenching his flaccid jaw.
“Chance! I don’t want a chance! Now I know how things must go! Now I know how to act! And before we settle it between us, and if I have to—to lose everything, I want you to know one thing. I want you to know that I’m doing it for Durkin! I’m doing it all, everything, for him!”
“For Durkin?” he choked, with an oath. “What are you fightin’ for that washed-out welcher for?”
“Because Durkin is my husband!” she said, in her ashen white determination, as she stepped quickly to the door and double-locked it. “And because I would die for him”—she laughed shrilly, horribly, as she said it—“before I’d see him hurt or unhappy!”
She stood firmly with her back against the door, panting a little, her jaw fallen loosely down, her eyes luminous with their animal-like fire.
“Then, by God, you will!” said MacNutt in his raucous guttural, with his limbs beginning to shake as he glared at her.
She stood there motionless, trying to think out the first moves in that grim game for which freedom and love and life itself were the stakes.
“Then, by God, you will!” repeated MacNutt, with the sweat coming out in beads on his twitching temples.