Two Flights Up Read online

  He controlled his voice with an effort.

  “If he thinks about that at all, then he doesn’t deserve her. And if he doesn’t deserve her, I hope to God he doesn’t get her.”

  His sudden anger surprised him. He had thought he had schooled himself better, and Margaret’s eyes were wide.

  “What I mean is,” he said more quietly, “you and I can’t help that, can we? We’ll have to let it work itself out.”

  Just inside the entrance door stood Margaret’s work basket, and a piece of heavy ivory-white satin lay on the top of it. As he was taking his leave, his eyes fell on it, and when he stopped outside at the elevator to light a cigarette, his hands were shaking.

  “I’m in fine shape,” he told himself grimly. “Shot to pieces, by heck! I’ll have to stop smoking.

  And comforted by that masculine panacea for all ills, went down and out into the street. As with most such resolutions, however, he forgot it almost at once, and a short time after lighted another cigarette for the mere pleasure of observing that his hands were all right again!

  By the time he reached the bank he had managed to concentrate on his business there. But the concentration did him very little good. That distinguished citizen and president of the reorganized Harrison Bank, Mr. Samuel Parker, had just sailed for Europe. This from the door man. And inside the bank an absent-looking youth raised his eyes from figures of incredible size to tell him that the vice president was down with influenza.

  “What’s the cashier’s name?” he asked, irritably resorting to somewhat smaller fry.

  “Gilbert. He’s on jury duty just now.”

  “Then who the hell’s running this bank?” he demanded. But the absent youth went back to his figures, and Warrington retreated to the street, uneasy and at a loss. How about going to the district attorney? But that meant the law, and probably publicity; he had a cynical belief that district attorneys thrived on publicity. No, that wouldn’t do. He’d have to wait till he could manage to think things out.

  It was in this frame of mind that he bumped into a passer-by and angrily told him to look out what he was doing. And the passer-by snapped back: “Look out yourself, you darned fool!” It was Furness Brooks.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  FURNESS HAD BEEN IN a state of rage since the announcement in the papers the evening before of Bayne’s approaching release.

  By direct appeal he had managed to engineer a few callers to the Bayne house, but as time went on, it became more and more clear to him that he could not force them back into society. And for all his lack-lustre eyes, he was shrewd enough. He knew that his present semi-popularity was due largely to the demand for unattached men at dinners, and the bits of gossip he could carry from one tea table to another.

  With the failure of his campaign, therefore, it was plain to him that his popularity would cease with his marriage. Some men held on, he knew, but that was because they had married girls who could hold up their own end in the frivolous give and take of smart groups. With the same clear view he took of himself, he knew that Holly would never do that.

  “Why don’t you smoke?” he asked her once. “Everybody does, you know.”

  “I have tried. I hate it.”

  He brought her a long shell cigarette holder one day, and as dutifully as she did everything those days, she tried it.

  “You hold it like a fountain pen, honey!”

  “Well, how on earth should one hold the thing?” she demanded. And then, sorry for her tone: “You can’t make me over, you know, Furness.”

  She had managed part of a cigarette, and then put it down.

  Nor did he try to fool himself as to Holly’s attitude to him. He had made no real headway with her. He could still feel the recoil as he put his arms around her, and her unconscious effort to get away.

  “Don’t you like me to hold you?”

  “But I feel so silly!”

  “It isn’t silly to be in my arms.”

  In the light-hearted but seriously pleasure-hunting group he knew best, girls gave their kisses so easily that they lost value. A caress had no more significance to them than a handclasp, hardly as much. Holly’s withdrawals therefore had the effect of stimulating his passion for her, and his vanity refused to admit the reason for them.

  And the trap closed down. He brought her presents, sent her flowers. Mostly he saw her in the afternoons, as he was hurrying home to dress for a dinner somewhere afterward: holding desperately to his place in the sun, trying to have his cake and eat it too.

  He had a fair income. His apartment was of the studio type, and now and then he sent out cards, and his Filipino servant Miguel brought in an assistant or two and he gave a party. Somebody sang, or he had a pianist and they danced, and the pantry became an extemporized bar. They were gay but sufficiently decorous, and they had had a certain vogue.

  He had intended to give one for Holly after the engagement was announced, but the failure of his other campaign killed that idea. “Afterward, if they want me, they will have to take her too,” he reflected. But he was not as certain as he pretended to himself that “they” would want him. Like James, he used the word “they” rather often.

  On the same evening, then, that James saw the announcement that Tom Bayne had been pardoned, Furness saw it, read it carefully, and flung down the paper angrily.

  A dead scandal was one thing; a resurrected scandal in a morning coat, still with the prison pallor on its face, walking up the aisle at St. Andrews, was another. Of course it wouldn’t be; the Baynes had too much sense for that. It simply meant no wedding. It meant going to the City Hall or wherever one did go, and going through a formula more or less clandestinely. It meant—oh, hell!

  He got into his dinner clothes morosely. At the Willoughby-Joneses’, where he was dining, he thought a small silence followed the announcement of his name, but conversation started again almost at once. He moved from group to group, watching with his pale blue eyes for any reservation, any indication of the social ticker that his stock had gone down. But there was none; society has its weaknesses, but it is well bred. It ignores what it cannot cover.

  It was after dinner, when the men moved in a body from the library to rejoin the women that he had his first words with his hostess.

  “I suppose you’ve seen it, Furney?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “What is there to do? Of course, the church wedding’s off.”

  “But you’re going through with it?”

  “I’d hardly call it that,” he said, showing a certain resentment. “The marriage will go on, naturally. It will be quiet, that’s all.”

  “And you’ll be quiet afterward,” said Mrs. Willoughby-Jones. “I’m being brutal for your own good, Furney. How many evenings do you dine at home now? How are you going to get along without all this?” She gestured toward the crowded, noisy room with her fan. “How long will it last?”

  “As long as I can make it last,” he said doggedly. But he was not so sure.

  He won quite a little money that night at bridge, and somebody said to him:

  “Does your—does Miss Bayne play?”

  “No. She doesn’t,” he admitted.

  There was a silence after that, and he went on playing his hand. But it came to him that all these people, all his world, disapproved of his marriage and expected it to fail. It roused something obstinate in him.

  “I’ll show them,” he told himself. “They’re not marrying her; I am.”

  And he felt a warm and voluptuous glow. It persisted until the small hours, when he finally pocketed his winnings and started home, and it drove him out of his way in his car to pass the Bayne house on Kelsey Street.

  The house, as he had expected, was dark, but out of a small dormer window on the top floor, came a faint glow of light.

  He concluded that “Hilda” was keeping late hours!

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  WITH THE SUITCASE OUT of the hou
se Holly felt that she could breathe again. She carried up her mother’s tray and coaxed her to eat some breakfast, but Mrs. Bayne was querulous and depressed.

  “If they had only kept him another month!” she said. “Take this thing away; I can’t eat with this hanging over my head.”

  “Still, if he is really ill—”

  “They have doctors there, and a Hospital. A good hospital. I’ve seen it. Anyhow, I don’t believe he’s so ill. He’s only been doing clerical work there; he’s had it easy enough.”

  “You don’t really feel that way, Mother.”

  “Certainly I do. Another month or so wouldn’t have hurt him after all these years. And he knows about the wedding. I sent him the announcements from the papers.”

  “Let’s not think about the wedding just now. We’ll have to make some plans. I can move up to Aunt Margaret’s room, and he can have mine. I’ll fix the bed now and get ready.”

  “You can’t go to Margaret’s room. I’m not going to have you on the same floor with that wretched man. I’ve seen the way he looks at you. I’m not blind.”

  Holly’s pale face flushed

  “Father can’t climb all those stairs. And—” she hesitated—“I don’t suppose you want him in here?”

  “You can put up the cot in the nursery.” It was still the nursery, after all these years.

  “Very well,” said Holly quietly. “That’s what I’ll do. But I’ll go there myself, Mother. It’s quite comfortable.”

  She went out, taking the tray with her. She was hardly capable of consecutive thought, but there was room in her mind for a great thankfulness. The suitcase and all it contained was gone, and downtown that portion of her trouble at least was being straightened out. True, she dreaded the moment when Mrs. Bayne would go to the attic again and find out what had happened. Not that there would be a scene. The very facts precluded that. But there would be a shock.

  She tried to think of some way to avoid that shock, but without success.

  The morning wore on. She worked hard; but then, she was accustomed to that. Now and then the relation of the new situation to her marriage obtruded itself, but she drove it away. Time for that when they came to it. But in the back of her mind she was puzzling over it. How could she go away and leave those two there together? A sick man and an ailing, helpless woman?

  For Mrs. Bayne was not well. Holly could not leave her, even to go to Margaret’s. At half-past eleven, there being no telephone in the house, she went to Simmons’s grocery store and called her up, but the Cox apartment did not answer, and she went back again, vaguely uneasy.

  At noon she carried up another tray. Mrs. Bayne was up in a chair by that time; she looked really ill, but she would not have a doctor.

  “Have you heard from Furness yet?”

  “No. Of course he’s busy, and with no telephone—”

  “Just the same, he might have sent you some word. He must know we are anxious.”

  “I’m not anxious, Mother. If he would let a thing like this keep him away, a thing he always knew had to happen sometime, then it’s better to learn it now rather than later on.”

  At one o’clock, however, there came a box of roses and his card. “Always thine,” it read, in his affected manner. She carried the flowers to her mother’s room and was completely routed by the relief in Mrs. Bayne’s face.

  “Then it’s all right!” she said. “I really have been terrified, Holly. If anything goes wrong now, I really think it will finish me.”

  She put her handkerchief to her eyes, that soft bit of fresh linen with her initials in the corner, A. H. B., which was always in her hand. Holly could not remember her mother without a handkerchief; and when, later on, one of them played its small part in her story, the mere sight of it was to bring up not only every crisis of her life, it was to bring up that life itself, day by day and hour by hour.

  “Nothing will go wrong, Mother,” Holly told her.

  It was about two o’clock when the bell rang. Mrs. Bayne slept quietly on her couch, a lavender slumber robe drawn over her, and the scent of the roses heavy in the room. Downstairs, Holly had dusted the drawing room and laid out the tea table—if her mother wakened and came down, it would never do for her to find it unready—and was standing in front of an old photograph of her father which she had brought from the disused library across the hall, where like her father himself it had been shelved for many years.

  He must not, she reasoned, ever guess that it had been hidden away.

  It was out of date now. Mr. Bayne had been taken in his dress clothes, after the fashion of twenty years ago. Over a broad and high expanse of snowy white shirt bosom and collar he looked into his daughter’s eyes, handsome and debonair.

  “Poor Father!” said Holly, and dusting the glass, placed the photograph on a table.

  She had not seen him for many years, and she had never known him well, but acting on impulse she went across the hall into the closed library, and wrote a telegram.

  “So glad you are coming. Welcome home and much love.”

  After a little hesitation, she signed both her mother’s name and her own.

  The library had been his room, as the drawing room had been her mother’s. It was hardly ever opened now; the matter of heating it had been a factor, but Holly knew too that as definitely as her mother had shut her husband out of her life, she had closed and sheeted the room which had been his.

  The anger Holly had felt the night before was lost in pity. He had stolen, and he had not only spent; he had hidden away a part of that stolen wealth in that very house. He was dying and he had made no attempt at restitution. But he was dying; he could not live long.

  And then suddenly there came to her mind her mother’s face, on the day she came home from the penitentiary; and later on, her suppressed excitement, the times when she had sat like someone who nursed a secret, the haste as to the wedding and the trousseau.

  Suppose on that visit of hers he had told her? Suppose she had not happened on the suitcase but had known it was there? Suppose he had wanted to make restitution, to come back clean, and had told her; and out of her dire need her mother—

  She sat up suddenly. The doorbell was furiously ringing.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  JAMES COX WAS ENORMOUSLY proud of his stock. He liked, when he was not busy, to run his hand down over his tidy shelves and to realize that he could tell its very quality by touch. And when he opened up the blue wrappers from his best tablecloths it was as though he gained a vicarious splendour from their quality.

  “Wonderful piece of work, this,” he would say. “Grace any table! Make any sort of food taste good, eh?”

  He was completely out of patience with the new vogue for doilies, although he had to sell them. The nearest thing he had ever come to a quarrel with Margaret was on that very question. He came home one evening to find the table set with small bits of linen, scalloped by her own busy hands, little islands of white in a shining sea of imitation mahogany.

  “What’s this you’ve got on the table?”

  “Don’t you like them?”

  “Oh, they’re all right,” he said grudgingly. …” He didn’t like to hurt her. “But if you ask me, give me honest food on an honest linen cloth.”

  “Then off they go!” said Margaret, shamelessly and spinelessly loving. “I don’t care for them myself. I just thought—”

  Honest linen! Honest everything. That was James Cox.

  On the day, then, that Warrington had carried the suitcase to Margaret, James was behind his counter. They had opened up a new shipment in the stockroom, and huge baskets were still being trundled along the aisles.

  He was in a state of suppressed excitement, as he was always when new stock came in, and so he did not notice that he was being quickly observed from a near-by counter. Nor was his feeling when he was summoned to the manager’s office other than one of irritation at being interrupted. He never saw the light-stepping, rather stout man who followed him there
and unceremoniously entered after him.

  The office was empty. James, hearing the door close behind him, turned and confronted this gentleman.

  “Your name Cox?” said the stranger.

  “Yes.”

  “Live at Number Eleven, Aurelia Apartments?”

  James suddenly stopped breathing. Something had happened to Margaret!

  “I do,” he stammered. “I live there. What’s wrong? For God’s sake, what’s the matter?”

  “Don’t get excited, Mr. Cox. Sit down. I only want to ask you some questions.”

  “My wife—”

  “She’s all right, so far as I know. Mr. Cox, you are related to a family named Bayne, I believe, on Kelsey Street?”

  Mr. Cox had recovered, and now he stiffened.

  “Only by marriage. My wife is Mrs. Bayne’s sister.”

  “But you are on pretty friendly terms with the family?”

  “Never been in the house,” said Mr. Cox, unflaggingly honest. “They don’t like me, and I don’t like them. The girl’s all right,” he added conscientiously.

  “Do you know a young man named Warrington who has a room there?”

  “Never saw him but once,” said James. But he looked self-conscious, as well he might, recalling that amazing evening; and the detective saw it.

  “But your wife knows him? Rather, well?”

  “Look here,” said Mr. Cox, “I don’t know what it’s all about, and I don’t give a damn. But I want my wife’s name left out of this, see?”

  The detective knew men, and so he realized the belligerent honesty of James’s attitude. It put him at a disadvantage, in a way; you can trap a scoundrel, but there is no trap for the straightforward. However, he tried it.

  “What’s the use, Mr. Cox? We’ve got the stuff!”

  “What stuff?” roared Mr. Cox. “If you’re accusing me of having bootleg stuff in my place, it’s a lie. That bottle of brandy was given me ten years ago, and I can prove it.”

  “We’ve got the suitcase.”

  James stared at him, and the detective stared back.