Children of the Whirlwind Part 44

For the moment Larry was so overwhelmed that he made no attempt to speak. And since for once Gavegan was content merely to gloat over his triumph, there was stiff silence in the room until Miss Sherwood said in the cold voice of a judge after a jury has brought in a verdict of guilty:

"Of course, if you think there is anything you may say for yourself, Mr.

Brainard, you now have the chance to say it."

"I have much to say, but I can't blame you if you refuse to believe most of it," Larry said desperately, fighting for what seemed his last chance. "I loved Maggie Carlisle. I believed she had splendid qualities.

Only she was dominated by the twisted ideas Old Jimmie Carlisle had planted in her. I wanted to eradicate those twisted ideas, and make her good qualities her ruling ones. But she didn't believe in me.

She thought me a soft-head, a police stool, a squealer. Then I had to disappear; you know all about that. Not till I had been with you for several weeks did I learn that she was being used in a swindling scheme against d.i.c.k.

"I did think of telling you or d.i.c.k. But my greatest interest was to awaken that better person I believed to be in her; and I knew that the certain result of my exposing her to you would be for me to lose the last bit of influence I had with her, and for her to pa.s.s right on to another enterprise of similar character. So the idea came to me that if I didn't expose her, but caused her to be received with every courtesy by her intended victims, the effect upon her would be that she would feel a revulsion for what she was doing and she would come to her best senses. I told this to Mr. Hunt; that's why he agreed not to give her away. And another point, though frankly this was not so important to me: it seemed to me that a good hard jolt might be just what was needed to make d.i.c.k take life more seriously, and I saw in this affair a chance for d.i.c.k to get just the jolt he needed.

"That's all, Miss Sherwood. Except that I have seen signs which make me believe that what I figured would happen to Maggie Carlisle have begun to happen to her."

"Bunk!" snorted Gavegan.

"I know that part of what he says is true," put in Hunt.

Miss Sherwood ignored Hunt and his remark. The look of controlled wrath which she held upon Larry did not change. Larry recognized that his statement had sounded most implausible. Miss Sherwood in her indignation considered only that her kindness had been betrayed, her hospitality outraged, and that those she had accepted as friends had sought to trick her family in the worst way she could conceive; and she spoke accordingly.

"If that is the best Mr. Brainard has to say for himself, Mr. Gavegan, you may take him with you, and without any interference from me. I ask only that you take him out of the house at once."

With that she moved from the room, not looking again at either Hunt or Larry. For a brief s.p.a.ce there was silence, while Gavegan let his triumph feed gloatingly upon the sight of his prisoner.

This brief silence was broken by a low, strange sound, like a human cry quickly repressed, that seemed to come from just outside the French windows.

"What was that?" Larry asked quickly.

"I didn't hear anything," said Gavegan whose senses had been thoroughly concentrated upon his triumph.

"I did," said Hunt. "On the veranda."

"We'll see. Watch him--" to the county officer; and Gavegan followed Hunt to the French windows and looked out. "No one on the veranda, and no one in sight," he reported. "You fellows must have been dreaming."

He returned and faced Larry. "I guess you'll admit, Brainard, that I've got you for keeps this time."

"Then suppose we be starting for Headquarters." Larry responded.

Hunt moved to Larry's side. "I'll just trail along after you, Larry.

Anyhow, this doesn't seem to be any place for me."

A few minutes afterwards Larry was in a car beside Gavegan, speeding away from Cedar Crest toward the city. Larry's thoughts were the gloomiest he had entertained since he had come out of Sing Sing months before with his great dream. All that he had counted on had gone wrong.

He was in the hands of the police, and he knew how hard the police would be. He had incurred the hostility of Miss Sherwood and had lost what had seemed a substantial opportunity to start his career as an honest man.

The only item of his great plan in which he did not seem to have failed completely was Maggie. And he did not know what Maggie was going to do.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

When Maggie drove away with d.i.c.k from Cedar Crest--this was an hour before Gavegan descended out of the blue upon Larry and two hours before he rode triumphantly away with his captive--she was the most dazed and disillusioned young creature who had ever set out confidently to conquer the world. Courage, confidence, quickness of wit, all the qualities on which she had prided herself, were now entirely gone, and she was just a white, limp figure that wanted to run away: a weak figure in which swirled thoughts almost too spasmodically powerful for so weakened a vessel not to be shattered under their wild strain: thoughts of her amazingly discovered real father--of how she was the very contradiction of her father's dream--of Larry--of the cunning Jimmie Carlisle whom till this day she had believed her father--of Barney Palmer.

So agitated was she with these gyrating thoughts that she was not conscious that d.i.c.k had stopped the car on the green roadside until he had taken her hand and had begun to speak. The happy, garrulous, un.o.bservant d.i.c.k had not noticed anything out of the way with her more than a pallor which she had explained away as being due to nothing more than a bit of temporary dizziness. And so for the second time d.i.c.k now poured out his love to her and asked her to marry him.

"Don't, d.i.c.k--please!" she interrupted him. "I can't marry you! Never!"

"What!" cried the astounded d.i.c.k. "Maggie--why not?"

"I can't. That's final. And don't make me talk to you now, d.i.c.k--please!

I cannot!"

His face, so fresh and happy the moment before, became gray and lined with pain. But he silently swung the car back into the road.

She forgot him utterly in what was happening within her. As they rode on, she forced herself to think of what she should do. She saw herself as the victim of much, and as guilty of much. And then inspiration came upon her, or perhaps it was merely a high frenzy of desperation, and she saw that the responsibility for the whole situation was upon her alone; she saw it as her duty, the role a.s.signed her, to try to untangle alone this tangled situation, to try to measure out justice to every one.

First of all, as she had told Larry, her father's dream of her must remain unbroken. Whatever she did, she must do nothing that might possibly be a sharp blow to the conception of his daughter which were the roots and trunk and flowering branches of his present happiness.. ..

And then came a real inspiration! She would, in time, make herself into the girl he believed her--make his dream the truth! She would get rid of Old Jimmie and Barney--would cut loose from everything pertaining to her former life--would disappear and live for a year or two in the kind of environment in which he believed he had placed her--and would reappear and claim him for her father! And for his own sake, he should never know the truth. Two years more and he should have the actuality, where he now had only the dream!

But before she was free to enter upon this plan, before she could vanish out of the knowledge of all who had known her, there was a great duty to Larry Brainard which she must discharge. He was hunted by the police, he was hunted by his former pals. And he was in his predicament fundamentally because of her. Therefore, it was her foremost duty to clear Larry Brainard.

Yes, she would do that first! Somehow!...

She was considering this problem of how she was to clear Larry, who had tried to awaken her, who had s.h.i.+elded her, who loved her, when d.i.c.k slowed his car down in front of the Grantham and helped her out. As he said a subdued good-bye and was stepping back into his car, an impulse surged up into her--an impulse of this different Maggie whose birth was being attended by such bewildering emotions and decisions.

"d.i.c.k, won't you please come up for just a little while?"

Three minutes later they were in her sitting-room. Cap in hand d.i.c.k awaited her words in the misery of silence. Her look was drawn, but direct.

"Back in the road, d.i.c.k, you asked me why I couldn't marry you. I asked you up here to tell you."

"Yes?" he queried dully.

"One reason is that, though I like you, I don't like you that way. The more important reason to you is that I am a fraud."

"A fraud!" he exclaimed incredulously.

It had come to her, as she was leaving the car, that the place to start her new life was to start right, or quit right, with d.i.c.k. "A fraud,"

she repeated--"an impostor. There is no Maggie Cameron. I am born of no good family from the West. I have no money. I have always lived in New York--most of the time down on the East Side. I used to work in a Fifth Avenue millinery shop. Till three months ago I sold cigarettes in one of the big hotels."

"What of that!" cried d.i.c.k.

"That is the nicest part of what I have to tell you," she continued relentlessly. "My supposed relatives, Jimmie Carlisle and Barney Palmer, are no relatives at all, but are two clever confidence men. I have been in with them, working on a scheme they have framed. Everything I have seemed to be, everything I have done, even this expensive apartment, have all been parts of that scheme. The idea of that scheme was to swindle some rich man out of a lot of money--through my playing on his susceptibilities."

"Maggie!" he gasped.

"More concretely, the idea was to trick some rich man into falling in love with me, to get him to propose, then to have me confess that I was already married, but to a man who would give me a divorce if he were paid enough. The rich man would then drive a bargain with my supposed husband, pay over a lot of money--after which Barney, Old Jimmie, and I would disappear with our profits."

"Maggie!" he repeated, stupefied with his incredulous amazement. But the unflinching gaze she held upon him convinced him she was speaking the truth. "Then, if that was your game, why are you telling me now? Why didn't you say 'yes' when I proposed a week ago? I would have fallen for the game; you would have succeeded."