CHAPTER XV
ON THE EDGE OF THE PRECIPICE
Tony, getting off the train at Dunbury on Saturday, found her brothers waiting for her with the car, and the kiddies on the back seat, "for ballast" as Ted said. With one quick apprizing glance the girl took in the two young men.
Ted was brown and healthy looking, clear-eyed, steady-nerved, for once, without the inevitable cigarette in his mouth. He was oddly improved somehow, his sister thought, considering how short a time she had been away from the Hill. She noticed also that he drove the car much less recklessly than was his wont, took no chances on curves, slid by no vehicles at hair-breadth space, speeded not at all, and though he kept up a running fire of merry nonsense, had his eye on the road as he drove. So far so good. That spill out on the Florence road wasn't all loss, it seemed.
Larry was more baffling. He was always quiet. He was quieter than ever to-day. There was something in his gray eyes which spelled trouble, Tony thought. What was it? Was he worried about a case? Was Granny worse? Was Ted in some scrape? Something there certainly was on his mind. Tony was sure of that, though she could not conjecture what.
The Holidays had an almost uncanny way of understanding things about each other, things which sometimes never rose to the surface at all. Perhaps it was that they were so close together in sympathy that a kind of small telepathic signal registered automatically when anything was wrong with any of them. So far as her brothers were concerned Tony's intuition was all but infallible.
She found the family gift a shade disconcerting, a little later, when after her uncle kissed her he held her off at arm's length and studied her face. Tony's eyes fell beneath his questioning gaze. For almost the first time in her life she had a secret to keep from him if she could.
"What have they been doing to my little girl?" he asked. "They have taken away her sunshininess."
"Oh, no, they haven't," denied Tony quickly. "It is just that I am tired. We have been on the go all the time and kept scandalously late hours. I'll be all right as soon as I have caught up. I feel as if I could sleep for a century and any prince who has the effrontery to wake me up will fare badly."
She laughed, but even in her own ears the laughter did not sound quite natural and she was sure Uncle Phil thought the same, though he asked no more questions.
"It is like living in a palace being at Crest House," she went on. "I've played princess to my heart's content—been waited on and fêted and flirted with until I'm tired to death of it all and want to be just plain Tony again."
She slid into her uncle's arms with a weary little sigh. It was good—oh so good—to have him again! She hadn't known she had missed him so until she felt the comfort of his presence. In his arms Alan Massey and all he stood for seemed very far away.
"Got letters for you this morning," announced Ted. "I forgot to give them to you." He fished the aforesaid letters out of his pocket and examined them before handing them over. "One is from Dick—the other"—he held the large square envelope off and squinted at it teasingly. "Some scrawl!" he commented. "Reckless display of ink and flourishes, I call it. Who's the party?"
Tony snatched the letters, her face rosy.
"Give me Dick's. I haven't heard from him but once since he went back to New York and that was just a card. Oh-h! Listen everybody. The Universal has accepted his story and wants him to do a whole series of them. Oh, isn't that just wonderful?"
Tony's old sparkles were back now. There were no reservations necessary here. Everybody knew and loved Dick and would be glad as she was herself in his success.
"Hail to Dicky Dumas!" she added, gaily waving the letter aloft. "I always knew he would get there. And that was the very story he read me. Wasn't it lucky I liked it really? If I hadn't, and it had turned out to be good, wouldn't it have been awful?"
Everybody laughed at that and perhaps nobody but the doctor noticed that the other letter in the unfamiliar handwriting was tucked away very quickly out of sight in her bag and no comments made.
It was not until Tony had gone the rounds of the household and greeted everyone from Granny down to Max that she read Alan's letter, as she sat curled up in the cretonned window seat, just as the little girl Tony had been wont to sit and devour love stories. This was a love story, too—her own and with a sadly complicated plot at that.
It was the first letter she had had from Alan and she found it very wonderful and exciting reading. It was brimming over, as might have been expected, with passionate lover's protests and extravagant endearments which Tony could not have imagined her Anglo-Saxon relatives or friends even conceiving, let alone putting on paper. But Alan was different. These things were no affectation with him, but natural as breathing, part and parcel of his personality. She could hear him now say "carissima" in that low, deep-cadenced, musical voice of his and the word seemed very sweet and beautiful to her as it sang in her heart and she read it in the dashing script upon the paper.
He was desolated without her, he wrote. Nothing was worth while. Nothing interested him. He was refusing all invitations, went nowhere. He just sat alone in the studio and dreamed about her or made sketches of her from memory. She was everywhere, all about him. She filled the studio with her voice, her laughter, her wonderful eyes. But oh, he was so lonely, so unutterably lonely without her. Must he really wait a whole year before he made her his? A year was twelve long, long months. Anything could happen in a year. One of them might die and the other would go frustrate and lonely forever, like a sad wind in the night.
Tony caught her breath quickly at that sentence. The poetry of it captivated her fancy, the dread of what it conjured clutched like cold hands at her heart. She wanted Alan now, wanted love now. Already those dear folks downstairs were beginning to seem like ghosts, she and Alan the only real people. What if he should die, what if something should happen to keep them forever apart, how could she bear it? How could she?
She turned back to her letter which had turned into an impassioned plea that she would never forsake him, no matter what happened, never drive him over the precipice like the Gadderene swine.
"You and your love are the only thing that can save me, dear heart," he wrote. "Remember that always. Without you I shall go down, down into blacker pits than I ever sank before. With you I shall come out into the light. I swear it. But oh, beloved, pray for me, if you know how to pray. I don't. I never had a god."
There were tears in Tony's eyes as she finished her lover's letter. His unwonted humility touched her as no arrogance could ever have done. His appeal to his desperate need moved her profoundly as such appeals will always move woman. It is an old tale and one oft repeated. Man crying out at a woman's feet, "Save me! Save me! Myself I cannot save!" Woman, believing, because she longs to believe it, that salvation lies in her power, taking on herself the all but impossible mission for love's high sake.
Tony Holiday believed, as all the million other women have believed since time began, that she could save her lover, loved him tenfold the more because he threw himself upon her mercy, came indeed perhaps to truly love him for the first time now with a kind of consecrated fervor which belonged all to the spirit even as the love that had come to her while they danced had belonged rather to the flesh.
* * * * *
And day by day Jim Roberts grew sicker and the gnawing thing crept up nearer to his heart. Day by day he gloated over the goading whips he brandished over Alan Massey's head, amused himself with the various developments it lay in his power to give to the situation as he passed out of life.
He wrote two letters from his sick bed. The first one was addressed to Dick Carson, telling the full story of his own and Alan Massey's share in the deliberate defraudment of that young man of his rightful name and estate. It pleased him to read and reread this letter and to reflect that when it was mailed Alan Massey would drink the full cup of disgrace and exposure while he who was infinitely guiltier would be sleeping very quietly in a cool grave where hate, nor vengeance, nor even pity could touch him.
The other letter, which like the first he kept unmailed, was a less honest and less incriminating letter, filled with plausible half truths, telling how he had just become aware at last through coming into possession of some old letters of the identity of the boy he had once had in his keeping and who had run away from him, an identity which he now hastened to reveal in the interests of tardy justice. The letter made no mention of Alan Massey nor of the unlovely bargain he had driven with that young man as the price of silence and the bliss of ignorance. It was addressed to the lawyers who handled the Massey estate.
Roberts had followed up various trails and discovered that Antoinette Holiday was the girl Massey loved, discovered through the bribing of a Crest House servant, that the young man they called Carson was also presumably in love with the girl whose family had befriended him so generously in his need. It was incredibly good he thought. He could hardly have thought out a more diabolically clever plot if he had tried. He could make Alan Massey writhe trebly, knowing these things.
Pursuing his malignant whim he wrote to Alan Massey and told him of the existence of the two letters, as yet unmailed, in his table drawer. He made it clear that one of the letters damned Alan Massey utterly while the other only robbed him of his ill-gotten fortune, made it clear also that he himself did not know which of the two would be mailed in the end, possibly he would decide it by a flip of a coin. Massey could only wait and see what happened.
"I suppose you think the girl is worth going to Hell for, even if the money isn't," he had written. "Maybe she is. Some women are, perhaps. But don't forget that if she loves you, you will be dragging her down there too. Pretty thought, isn't it? I don't mean any future-life business either. That's rot. I heard enough of that when I was a boy to sicken me of it forever. It is the here and now Hell a man pays for his sins with, and that is God's truth, Alan Massey."
And Alan, sitting in his luxurious studio reading the letter, crushed it in his hands and groaned aloud. He needed no commentary on the "here and now Hell" from Jim Roberts. He was living it those summer days if ever a man did.
It wasn't the money now. Alan told himself he no longer cared for that, hated it in fact. It was Tony now, all Tony, and the horrible fear lest Roberts betray him and shut the gates of Paradise upon him forever. Sometimes in his agony of fear he could almost have been glad to end it all with one shot of the silver-mounted automatic he kept always near, to beat Jim Roberts to the bliss of oblivion in the easiest way.
But Alan Massey had an incorrigible belief in his luck. Just as he had hoped, until he had all but believed, that his cousin John was as dead as he had told that very person he was, so now he hoped against all reason that he would be saved at the eleventh hour, that Roberts would go to his death carrying with him the secret that would destroy himself if it ceased to be a secret.
Those unmailed letters haunted him, however, day and night, so much so, in fact, that he took a journey to Boston one day and sought out the little cigar store again. But this time he had not mounted the stairs. His business was with the black-eyed boy. With one fifty dollar bill he bought the lad's promise to destroy the letters and the packet in Robert's drawer in the event of the latter's death; secured also the promise that if at any time before his death Roberts gave orders that either letter should be mailed, the boy would send the same not to the address on the envelope but to Alan Massey. If the boy kept faith with his pledges there would be another fifty coming to him after the death of the man. He bought the lad even as Roberts had once bought himself. It was a sickening transaction but it relieved his mind considerably and catered in a measure to that incorrigible hope within him.
But he paid a price too. Fifty miles away from Boston was Tony Holiday on her Heaven kissing hill. He was mad to go to her but dared not, lest this fresh corruption in some way betray itself to her clear gaze.
So he went back to New York without seeing her and Tony never knew he had been so near.
And that night Jim Roberts took an unexpected turn for the worse and died, foiled of that last highly anticipated spice of malice in flipping the coin that was to decide Alan Massey's fate.
In the end the boy had not had the courage to destroy the letters as he had promised to do. Instead he sent them both, together with the packet of evidence as to John Massey's identity, to Alan Massey.
The thing was in Alan's own hands at last. Nothing could save or destroy him but himself. And by a paradox his salvation depended upon his being strong enough to bring himself to ruin.