“Why, Mr. Crane!” she exclaimed, her young face alight.
Lamont straightened; instantly his whole manner changed. The elder man paid not the slightest attention to him.
“I thought I’d take you home, my child,” said Enoch.
“But—Mr. Crane,” faltered Sue, “I’ve promised Mrs. Van Cortlandt——”
“I’ve seen to that,” said Enoch pleasantly, as he gave her his arm. With a rapidity that amazed her, Pierre Lamont bid her good night. Enoch had known the Van Cortlandts for years, and though for a long while he had persistently declined their hospitality, the fact that Sue was to sing, and his anxiety over Lamont’s attentions to her, had brought him to the musicale.
He had known Sam even before his unscrupulous business deals, a fact to which was due their later estrangement—even before his runaway match with Rose Dickson, who was then considered the prettiest girl in Troy, an orphan who at sixteen went to live with her Uncle Jim, in Plattsburg, and who availed herself of that old sport’s trotting stock and a buggy of her own whenever it pleased her. Her Uncle Jim had spoiled her. Who had not spoiled Rose? She was too devilish pretty, and had a will of her own equal to a two-year-old in harness on her first week’s rations of oats.
At eighteen Sam Van Cortlandt had met her. He never said where, but it is presumed at a picnic. With a high-school graduation as proof of her education, and two years at a fashionable girls’ college, cut short by her marriage, Rose had entered society—a polishing school in which with her woman’s adaptability and Sam’s money, she quickly acquired that varnish of refinement and good breeding which so often passes as being to the manner born.
At a quarter past eight the next morning Griggs rapped at the double door of his master’s bedroom. Getting no response, he entered. Before him, face down on the Turkish rug by the bed, one arm doubled under him, his right hand outstretched, clutching a pearl-handled revolver, lay Sam Van Cortlandt—a bullet-hole through his brain. He had been dead several hours.
CHAPTER IX
Life tragedies happen swiftly, with a simplicity that is appalling. People seldom scream; they stand agape, or rush out of the house, dragging back a doctor who can do nothing, or a policeman who can do even less. It was Griggs who told Rose Van Cortlandt. It was the second time he had been through a similar experience. Five years before as valet to the young Earl of Lowden, he had found him a suicide in his villa at Dinard. He, too, had been gambling.