Two Flights Up (13 page)

“I hated waking you,” she said, “but we have such a lot to do to-day. You don’t look as if you have had any sleep.”

“I slept all right, Mother.”

“I wish you’d put on some weight,” said her mother discontentedly. “Really, for a bride to look as wretched as you do is no compliment to her husband.”

At this, however, she caught Holly’s eyes fixed on her so oddly that she sheered off from the subject abruptly.

“I wish you’d come downtown with me this morning.”

“I’ve promised Aunt Margaret to go there.”

“For a fitting? I shouldn’t think, with clothes as straight as they are now, you’d need much fitting.” But her mind, preternaturally active these days, veered to another matter instantly, and she put down her coffee cup. “I do wish you’d wear rubber gloves, Holly,” she said. “Your hands—”

“I can’t work in them. I’ve tried.”

“Then you can’t work,” said Mrs. Bayne. “We’ll have to have Mrs. Carter in sooner or later. We’d better get her now.”

“At three dollars a day? And food?”

“Only for the next month or so. People will be calling and presents coming, and all that. We simply can’t manage by ourselves.”

She went on, cheerfully planning. Holly felt that ten minutes more of this cheerful babbling and she would rise up from her chair and scream. What did it matter whether they had Mrs. Carter in or not? What did it matter that her hands were red, and her mother recommending glycerine and rose water at night to whiten them? What did anything matter but James Cox and the trouble they had brought to him?

Only one ray of comfort she had. She had missed the paper from the vestibule and knew her mother had taken it. But she had evidently not seen the news item.

Her mother was going. She got up and drew on her shabby gloves, gloves without which no gentlewoman ever passed her front door, examined her purse for the lists, and so went out.

Holly accompanied her to the door and kissed her good-bye, much as she would have kissed an irresponsible child. During the long watches of the night, when a strange dog howled from somewhere apparently close under her windows and she had listened vainly for that creak on the stair which would signify Warrington’s return from James Cox’s, she had made one determination: whatever came, her mother was to have this one day more.

It was not that she so loved her mother. There were times when she guiltily wondered if she loved her at all. But passionately she believed that life had been cruel to her, and that she had suffered long and unfairly. Although she did not put it so to herself, much of her service was a sort of vicarious atonement. Once, indeed, she had told her feeling about this to Margaret, but it was after she had been forbidden to see James, and Margaret had been bitter.

“Nonsense!” she had said sharply. “She’s had it easy all her life. She’s got it easy now.”

Holly was not thinking beyond the day.

She closed the front door and then went up to her mother’s room. There she burned the newspaper and turned down the bed to air. By the small travelling clock, it was time for Warrington to be up and moving about, but she could hear nothing. She was quite certain he was in, however; there had been a strange dog closed in the yard when she went down that morning, and a half-used bottle of milk on the kitchen table. That would have been his work, she knew. She had brought the dog in and given him a warm place by the stove.

But when she finally went up to the third floor and knocked at Warrington’s door, there was no reply, nor did any cheery splashing come from the bathroom. She opened the door and looked in.

She was frightened. His bed had not been used. She stood in the doorway, staring around. Could he have stayed at Aunt Margaret’s? Maybe something had happened to James. Maybe he had felt he could not stand it and had tried—

She had, like Warrington, a swift vision of Aunt Margaret, and the way she had tried to escape when there had seemed to be no other way. She covered her eyes to shut it out.

The other possible significance of his absence did not occur to her then. She drove away the thought of James and went in. Since Margaret had gone, Mrs. Bayne had taken charge of the room, and it gave Holly an odd little thrill to be there, to sniff the faint odour of tobacco smoke which clung about the place, to see his clothing hanging in the closet, his slippers by the bed.

On the bureau were laid out his military brushes and a collar box. Those, and a few books, were all the mark he had put on the room. Five minutes, or ten, and he could be gone—as if he had never been there!

She moved to the bureau and stood fingering his brushes. She could remember her mother’s bureau in her father’s time. When he went away, his brushes went also, and for a long time there had been an empty space left where they had used to lie.

Suddenly she sat down in the chair by the empty hearth and began to cry, slow, rather dreadful tears; she cried for her father, for James and Margaret, for her mother, and even for herself, as she saw ahead of her long, joyless years, if not worse. She and her mother, and perhaps her father too, shut up in that dreary house, with little love and no happiness. Time going on, and she herself drying up and getting sour, like Aunt Margaret. A succession of roomers, too; and maybe she would be arch with them, like Aunt Margaret.

But mostly her grief was for Warrington, that he cared for her and nothing could ever come of it, and that she had involved him in a trouble which was not his. To the one she was resigned; to the other, never.

She forgot the empty house and its morning disorder, forgot that she wore only her working clothes, forgot Aunt Margaret, James, Mr. Steinfeldt, all that motley gathering which had cluttered up her mind—flung them away, rather. She threw on hat and coat, picked up her purse, and reached the front door just as Furness Brooks rang the bell.

Furness, filled with high resolve and magnanimity, stepped inside the door and held out his arms.

“You poor kid!” he said. “Did you think I was going to let you down?”

She had not thought of him at all; certainly she was not thinking of him then. She stared at him blankly.

“Please don’t keep me,” she told him. “I’m busy now. I have to go out.”

“But, listen!” he said, blocking the door. “What’s the matter with you? Here I am to tell you that everything’s all right. With me, anyhow. And you try to run off!”

“Get out of the way, Furness. I’ll see you some other time. I tell you I’m in a hurry.”

“Hurry, hell!” he stormed, suddenly angry. “If you think for a minute—”

“Oh, go away,” she told him wearily. “I’m not thinking at all. Not about you, anyhow.”

She dodged around him and out through the front door, leaving him speechless and stunned in the hallway. He recovered enough, however, to go out onto the steps and to call to her.

“Holly! Come back! Just for a minute.”

But she either did not hear him or paid no attention.

Angry and humiliated, his fine gesture repudiated, he went back into the house. He wanted somebody to talk to, some explanation; he even wandered as far back as the kitchen, but there was no one about—nothing but a starveling dog which snarled at him from beneath the kitchen range.

P
HELPS, THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY
, leaned back in his chair. He was moderately young and not unkindly. True, it was his business to administer justice rather than mercy, and this had hardened him a trifle, as strict justice often does. A just man is often a hard man.

But now he was puzzled. The night before he had been very sure of himself. Bayne, on his emergence from prison, was to collect the stolen securities, realize what he could on them, and decamp. He never had believed Tom Bayne was a sick man. And there had been too much of that sort of thing; men went crooked, hid the profits, took a sentence and came out again to enjoy them.

“You can figure it this way,” he had told his assistant the day before. “Bayne laid away six hundred thousand dollars. What he’s really been doing is to stay ten years in the pen, doing easy clerical work at sixty thousand a year.”

“He wouldn’t get as much as that, the way he’d have to dispose of them.”

“Perhaps not. But he’d get a tidy sum.”

Now, however, he was not so sure. First had come the word from the penitentiary that Bayne was really ill, possibly a dying man, and this from sources he trusted. And now here was this girl, tragically meek, telling him he had been wrong; there had been no conspiracy. It was far simpler than that. She had found the suitcase and had needed money, so she had sold a bond.

He leaned back and put his hands in his pockets.

“You needed money?” he said. “Why? I mean, you imply a special reason.”

“I was going to be married, and we’ve had very little. I had to have—clothes.”

“It had nothing to do with your father’s return home from—with his return home?”

“It was taken before we knew that.”

He surveyed her. “This Cox, now. You say he didn’t know the securities were in your possession?”

“How could he know? I had only just found them. And he has never been in the house in his life.”

He leaned forward alertly. “What do you mean by that?” he asked. “He’s your aunt’s husband. Do you mean there has been trouble?”

“Not trouble, no. My mother didn’t approve of him. That is, she felt—”

“Oh!” He considered that rather grimly. He knew Mrs. Bayne. Not well, but once long ago she had snubbed his wife, and he had never forgotten it. The picture of James Cox, sitting huddled in his chair the day before, arose in his mind. Poor devil! So that was the way of it. He wasn’t good enough for the family, but he was good enough for them to use.

“Well, now, let’s get this straight: You gave this roomer, this fellow Warrington, the bond to sell? And he did this, and gave you the money?”

“Yes.”

“But you say he didn’t know how you’d got the bond?”

“No.”

“Have you seen Warrington since he carried the suitcase for you to the Cox flat?”

“For a few minutes last night.”

“Where?” he asked sharply.

“At the house.”

“He was there last night?” he said, sitting up in his chair. “How the—how did he get in?”

“I don’t know,” she told him honestly. “I was out, probably, when he came back. He came downstairs later on, and I told him what had happened; then he went out again, to my aunt’s, to see what he could do.”

Phelps tapped the desk irritably with his fingers; they had had him last night, then, in that house on Kelsey Street, and he had given them the slip! He’d see about that; he’d—

“So he went out and didn’t come back?” he asked, controlling his voice.

“No. I thought he had stayed at my aunt’s apartment, but he didn’t. I’ve been there this morning.”

So she had been anxious. There was more to this, certainly, than met the eye.

“A little while ago you spoke of your marriage,” he said. “Are you engaged to this Warrington?”

“No,” she said, and coloured. “He is only—a roomer in the house.”

“How well did Warrington know your uncle, Mr. Cox?”

“Not at all. I don’t think he had ever even seen him.”

“You are sure of that, are you?”

“Quite sure.”

“Suppose I tell you that they were acquainted as long ago as October? That at that time a small incident happened which concerned Mr. Cox, and that Warrington was with him at the time?”

“I would think there must be a mistake. But I don’t see how it would matter, really.”

“Now, let’s go back a little. You found this suitcase, and after you had taken one bond, you were sorry, eh? You wanted it out of the house so you wouldn’t be tempted again? Is that it?”

“I wanted it back where it belonged. In the bank.”

“And until Warrington surprised you in the attic, he had not known it was there?”

“How could he? It was under the floor.”

“How long is it since any member of the family has seen your father?”

“My mother was there about four weeks ago.”

“Ah! Now, suppose we just go into this from a different angle, for a minute. Suppose, just to see how it works, we say this: Your mother learned at the prison that the suitcase was in the house. Being an honourable person, she did not touch it, but she told her sister. Do you see what I mean? Now, then, your aunt is newly married and she has no secrets from her husband, so she passes the news to Cox. And Cox
knows
Warrington. Whatever you may think, we can prove that.”

“But it isn’t true. I’ve told you the truth.”

“Then where is this Warrington?” he demanded sternly. “What is he hiding from? Why did he leave the stuff at the Cox house instead of taking it to the bank? My dear Miss Bayne,” he said, leaning forward, “I don’t believe you took that bond. I believe you are protecting—well, we will say somebody else. And it’s no good. Go home and think it over; you have no business being mixed up in this.”

He rang the bell and there was a movement among those waiting in the anteroom. She got up, feeling dizzy and slightly dazed.

“My mother,” she said, “I don’t want my mother to know about this. She has heart trouble, and it would kill her.”

“I see. We’ll be as easy as we can.”

But he was not easy a half-hour or so later, with two detectives lined up unhappily before him.

“I don’t want any more excuses,” he said angrily. “I
want
this fellow Warrington, and no more slips. What the devil do you fellows think you’re doing with him? Playing peek-a-boo?”

F
OR SOME REASON BAYLIE,
at the office, had chosen to regard Warrington’s desperate message as highly humorous. He roared with laughter over the telephone, and Warrington, as he hung up, felt he had done a reckless thing.

Had he been able to see into the office, he would have been certain of it. Baylie, redheaded and cheerfully sophisticated, wandered over to Miss Sharp’s desk and passed on the glad tidings.

“Can you beat it?” he inquired jovially. “What sort of a boss have you got, anyhow, hanging around a disreputable hotel without his clothes?”

“Quit stringing me, Mr. Baylie.”