The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 34

"What of it?" she quietly repeated.

"I'm afraid there's nothing of it," I admitted, "except in the one point where it impinges on my personal interests. I intend to get that thirty thousand dollars back."

The resolution of my tone seemed only to amuse her.

"But why come to me?" she asked, turning back to her breakfast.

"Supposing I really was a cog in some such machinery as you speak of, how much would be left on one small cog when so many wheels had to be oiled?"

"I have no great interest in your gang and its methods. All I know is a tremendous wrong's been done, and I want to see it righted."

"From what motive?" she asked, with that barbaric immediacy of approach peculiar to her.

"From the most disinterested of motives--I mean from the standpoint of that rather uncommon thing known as common honesty."

She looked at me, long and intently, before she spoke again. I had the feeling of being taken up and turned over and inspected through a lense of implacable clarity.

"Do you know this young man who lost his money on what he took for a fixed race?"

"I have met him," I answered, a little discomfited at the recollection of how tenuous that acquaintances.h.i.+p was.

"And have you known him long?"

I was compelled to confess to the contrary.

"And you understand the case, through and through?"

"I think I do," was my curt retort.

She turned on me quickly, as though about to break into an answering flash of anger. But on second thoughts she remained silent.

"If life were only as simple as you sentimental charity-workers try to make it!" she complained, studying me with a pitying look which I began most keenly to resent. She swept the room with a glance of contempt.

"If all those hay-t.o.s.s.e.rs who come to this town and have their money taken away from them were only as lamb-like as you people imagine they are!"

"Is this an effort toward the justification of theft?" I inquired. For the first time I saw a touch of deeper color mark her cheek. I had been conscious of a certain duality in her mental equipment, just as I could detect a higher and lower plane in her manner of speech.

"Not at all," she retorted. "I'm not talking of theft. And we may as well keep to cases. I don't think very much is ever gained by being impolite, do you?"

I was compelled to agree with her, though I could not shake off the feeling that she had in some dim way scored against me. And this was the woman I had once feared would try to toy with my coat-b.u.t.tons.

"I'm afraid," she went on with her grave abstraction of tone, "that you'll find me very matter-of-fact. A woman can't see as much of the world as I have and then--oh! and then beat it back to the Elsie Books."

I resented the drop to the lower plane, as though she had concluded the upper one to be incomprehensible to me.

"Pardon me, madam; it's not my windmills I'm trying to be true to; it's one of my promises."

"The promise was a very foolish one," she mildly protested. "Yet for all that," she added, as an afterthought, "you're intelligent. And I like intelligence."

Still again her deep and searching eyes rested on my face. Her next words seemed more a soliloquy than a speech.

"Yet you are doing this just to be true to your windmills. You're doing it out of nothing more than blind and quixotic generosity."

The fact that my allusion had not been lost on her pleased me a little more, I think, than did her stare of perplexed commiseration.

"Isn't is odd," she said, "how we go wrong about things, how we jump at conclusions and misjudge people? You think, at this very moment, that I'm the one who sees crooked, that I'm the one who's lost my perspective on things. And now I'm going to do something I hadn't the remotest intention of doing when you came into this room."

"And what is that?"

"I'm going to show you how wrong you've been, how wrong you are."

"In what?" I inquired as she again sat in silence before me.

"In everything," she finally answered, as she rose to her feet. I was at once more conscious of her physical appeal, of her inalienable bodily buoyancy, as I saw her standing there at her full height. The deep flow of color in her loosely draped gown gave her an almost pontifical stateliness. Instinctively I rose as she did. And I could see by her eyes that the courtesy was neither negligible nor distasteful to her. She was about to say something; then she stopped and looked at me for a hesitating moment or two.

One would have thought, from the solemnity of that stare, that she faced the very Rubicon of her life. But a moment later she laughed aloud, and with a mult.i.tudinous rustling of skirts crossed the room and opened an inner door.

Through this door, for a moment or two, she completely left my sight.

Then she returned, holding a cabinet photograph in her hand.

"Do you know it?" she quietly asked as she pa.s.sed it over to me.

It took but a glance to show me that it was a picture of the man whose cause I was at that moment espousing, the man I had followed from the North River pier-end the night before. A second glance showed me that the photograph had been taken in London; it bore the stamped inscription: "Garet Childs, Regent's Park, N. W."

The woman's sustained att.i.tude of antic.i.p.ation, of expectation unfulfilled, puzzled me. I saw nothing remarkable about the picture or her possession of it.

"This, I believe, is the man you're trying to save from the clutches of a wire-tapper named Whelan, c.o.ke Whelan, as you call him?"

I acknowledged that it was.

"Now look at the signature written across it," she prompted.

I did as she suggested. Inscribed there I read: "Sincerely and more, Duncan Cory Whelan."

"Have I now made the situation comparatively clear to you?" she asked, watching my face as I looked from her to the photograph and then back to her again.

"I must confess, I don't quite grasp it," I admitted, thinking at the moment how her face in the strong side-light from the windows had taken on a quite accidental touch of pathos.

"It's simply that the man you are trying to save from c.o.ke Whelan is _c.o.ke Whelan himself_."

"That's impossible!" was my exclamation.

"It's not impossible," she said a little wearily, "because the whole thing's nothing more than a plant, a frame-up. And you may as well know it. It can't go on. The whole thing _was a plan to trap you_."

"A plan to trap me?"

"Yes, a carefully worked-out plan to gather you in. And now, you see, the machinery is slipping a cog where it wasn't expected to!"

I stood there incredulous, dazed, trying to digest the shock.