In the swim

THE DRIFT OF A DAY IN NEW YORK CITY.

Sparkling lances of golden morning sunbeams broke and shivered on the fretted golden roof of the Synagogue by Central Park’s eastern wall of living green.

New York was astir once more, and the daily burden of life settled down again upon myriads of galled shoulders. The rumbling trains had rattled away the blue-bearded mechanic, the pale-faced clerk, and the ferret-eyed anæmic shop girl to their daily “demnition grinds” long before Elaine Willoughby opened her eyes, in the Circassia.

“A breeze of morning moved,” and down the Mall early pedestrians wandered, while the bridle bits rang out merrily on the park cantering paths.

Sedentary citizens had strolled along into the leafy shades for a peep at a cherished book, or a glance at the horrible of horribles in the “New York Whirl,” while the recumbent tramp shook himself and hopefully scuttled forth from his grassy lair to search for vinous refreshment and to craftily elude the inexorable “sparrow cop.”

New York City was awakened in the inverse order of rank, and the passion play of Gotham was on once more.

For as burning a flame throbs in the heated maelstrom of Manhattan as in any human eddy of the whole distracted globe.

The congestion of careworn faces had filled the town below Canal Street with its battling disciples of Mammon long before Mrs. Wharton Willoughby stepped into her brougham to seek the counsels of the one man on earth whose integrity was her rock of Gibraltar, Judge Hiram Endicott, her legal adviser and trustee.

For the silver-framed mirror had relentlessly reflected the traces left by the vigil of the night before.

It was the morning after the storm, and no calm had yet soothed the troubled soul of the woman whom thousands envied.

With a fine Gallic perception, Justine, the black-browed, slyest of French maids, had remarked: “Madame n’ a pas bien dormi?” as she arranged the filmy coffee service of Dresden eggshell.

Elaine Willoughby was sullen, but resolute, as she arranged the details of her morning interview by the Ariel magic of her private telephone.

A stock ticker and dial telegraph, binding the central office of the Western Union to the Circassia, were always stumbling blocks to the insidious Justine, who earned a vicious golden wage in piping off every movement of the queen to the adroit Fred Hathorn.

On this particular morning, Hathorn was disturbed at heart as he answered Justine’s spying warning of Mrs. Willoughby’s early departure for her downtown coign of vantage—that room in Judge Endicott’s offices in the Hanover Bank building, which was terra incognita even to him. The corner of Pine and Nassau was an Ehrenbreitstein.

For Hathorn’s acutest schemes had never yet given him the open sesame to the room adjoining Hiram Endicott’s study bearing the simple inscription “Office Willoughby Estate.”

There, Madame Elaine was safe, even from him.

He grumbled: “I don’t half like the way Elaine eyed Alida VanSittart yesterday. There was a storm signal in my lady’s glances. If she should draw away her account—”

He shuddered, for he was well overdrawn in his personal relations with Mr. Jimmy Potter, who had just meekly slunk into his office, with quivering nerves and much pink-eyed indications of the aftermath of “a cosy little evening at Miss Dickie Doubleday’s.”

“I must keep her well in hand till I pull off the marriage. Sugar is on the jump, too. There’s a half million if I follow her sure lead.

“He is a new face, and she may forget to harry Alida in the new man’s initiation at Lakemere. And I’ll go up and see her this afternoon myself.”

When he had telephoned his carefully-worded message to Justine, to be delivered to Mrs. Willoughby on her return, he ordered a basket of orchids to precede his call at the Circassia, and then, with a fine after-thought, telegraphed “Mr. Harold Vreeland, Hotel Waldorf,” to await his call on important business after dinner.

“If I am going to use Vreeland, I may as well put him into play right now,” cheerfully mused Hathorn, as he lit a Prince of Wales cigarette.

“I can pay that devil Justine a bit extra to watch Hod Vreeland’s little game with Elaine.

“A bit of healthy flirtation may cause her to forget Alida shining her down.

“Whirlwind speculator as she is, the Willoughby is one of Eve’s family, after all. ‘But yet a woman!’ I wonder if—”

His reverie was cut off by the entrance of Mr. Jimmy Potter, who calmly remarked: “Sugar is going hellward! You had better get out and see about where we will land!”

Mr. Fred Hathorn had unwittingly passed one of the cross-roads of life and a knowledge of his proposed actions would have been Balm of Gilead to the anxious soul of Harold Vreeland, who was busily engaged with the great tailor, Bell—manufacturer of gentlemen à la mode.

The arched doors of the Circassia, the superb gateways of Lakemere were being slowly swung for him, by the scheming man who cunningly proposed to divert the Montana bonanza into the coffers of Hathorn and Potter.

Mr. Potter, in his pink-eyed awakening from a night’s folly, was now standing at the bar of the Savarin, gloomily reflecting upon certain rashnesses of his own on the preceding evening.

These little extravaganzas, greatly to the profit and delight of Miss Dickie Doubleday, had been all unsolicited by that sinewy-hearted young beauty.

“The biggest fool in the world is the man who fools himself!” sadly ejaculated Potter, as he shed his burden of care with the half dollar dropped for a “high ball.”

He crept back to watch Fred Hathorn battling in the Sugar pit, with all the admiration of a fainéant for an energetic man.

“Great fellow, Fred!” proudly reflected Mr. Jimmy, with one last wormwood pang for the robbery of that young Diana, Alida VanSittart.

“She outclasses him—ranks him—clean out of sight!” sadly mourned Potter. “Now, if I was only clear of the Doubleday, I might—”

But, an aching head cut short his half-formed determination.

“I suppose that she is like all the others!” sighed Potter.

“These New York girls’ hearts are like a ball of string, unwind the thing—and—there’s nothing left!”

The little hand glass of the brougham told her, with brutal abruptness, that the face she was gravely studying must pale before the moonlight radiance of Alida VanSittart.

Face to face with her own sorrow, she saw the truth at last. Was it envy of the nymph-like girl or a dull hatred of Hathorn, for his cold ingratitude, which racked her heart?

“Perhaps, if I had told him all,” she murmured, “I will find out the lost link of my life yet, and there must be a man somewhere who would prove worthy of a woman’s whole confidence.

“One who could wander in le Jardin Secret, by my side!”

As she studied her own face, with a needless self-deprecation, there came back to her the handsome Western stranger.

“Perhaps,” she dreamily said, as her mind wandered away to the great dim Sierras, “uplifting their minarets of snow,” “he may have caught their majestic secret of truth and lofty freedom.”

And—she, too, drifted on to a cross-road of life.

Elaine Willoughby had finished her inspection of the counterfeit presentment afforded by the little mirror.

Though matters of both head and heart claimed all the exercise of her mental powers on this morning, she was lost in a vexing comparison of her own personal charms with those of Alida VanSittart.

The antique sage wisely refrained from saying, “Woman! Know Thyself!” for, far beyond the clouds wrapping the misty ruins of Greece, Rome and the Nile, the woman of yesterday never had been the woman of to-day, nor her chameleon substitute of to-morrow.

The only thing unvarying in womanhood, is its infinite emotional variety. Not one in a million of that charming sex has ever mastered the secret of their strange enigmas of varying loves, and the one only anchored feeling of motherhood.

The divine Shakespeare’s words, “’Tis brief! Aye—as woman’s love!” are supplemented by the great-hearted Mrs. Browning’s feminine lines, “Yes! I answered you last night. No! this morning, sir, I say!”

Elaine Willoughby did not know herself. She resolutely put away the reason why she ignored all the hawk-eyed young Gibson beauties of Irvington, Tarrytown, and Ardsley, to nourish a resentment alone against that slim Diana, Alida VanSittart.

Woman of the world, throned upon a golden pedestal of wealth—mistress of secrets that would shake the financial world—she had also enjoyed the homage of men long enough to know every one of her own good points.

There had been hours of triumph, too. For, after all, a woman’s heart beat behind the silken armor of her Worth robes.

Still in the bloom of a meridian beauty, no one in Gotham knew but Hiram Endicott that her years were thirty-seven.

Men knew her only as the childless widowed chatelaine of Lakemere, the inheritor of a vast fortune hazily dating from Colorado.

A few cold words from that oracle, Judge Hiram Endicott, had dispelled any doubts as to the authenticity of the late Wharton Willoughby.

The checks of the woman whom all had failed to win were considered among the cognoscenti as gilt-edged as Treasury Certificates.

The grave glances of her sole attorney and trustee were also a no thoroughfare to prying gossipers, and it was only by a long series of stealthy financial sleuth work that the financial world discovered both “sugar” and “oil” to be as granite buttresses to the unshaken pyramid of her solid wealth. On the Street she was a whirlwind operator—with “inside tips!”

As the brougham swung along through Pine Street, Mrs. Willoughby caught a single glimpse of Fred Hathorn, eager-eyed, and hurrying to the Stock Exchange.

The man of thirty-five had risen to be a clubman—a yachtsman of renown—a man of settled fortune—and a social lion, too, in the five years since she had opened the gates of her heart to admit the handsome struggling youth, then paddling feebly in Wall Street’s foaming breakers.

She leaned back with a sigh. Hathorn’s sudden apparition had opened her eyes to the reason of her dull hatred of the millionaire fiancée.

“He is the reason why I hate that girl,” she murmured, with misty lashes, and an old saw came back to her.

In the gilded throng at Lakemere, the proprietary endearments of Frederick Hathorn had galled her stormy soul. She knew not that the parvenu broker was only publicly sealing, beyond a doubt, the projected union which would make him the equal in capitalistic reserve of that easy-going Son of Fortune, Potter, to whom all things came around—even Miss Dickie Doubleday’s bills.

A ray of light lit up her darkened heart.

“Alida is innocent of wrecking my happiness. She could know nothing. For I have been silent! And if I held the ladder, can I blame him for climbing? He needs me no longer.

“I have been only a means to an end. Alida will be the last. And then, Frederick Hathorn, Esquire, is safely in the swim!”

A sudden conviction of the uselessness of her affectation of a semi-maternal interest in the fortunes of the hardened man of thirty-five told her that she had left all the doors open to him.

For there was that in her own life, dating back to her girlhood, which she had never even revealed to her half-lover protégé.

With her rich womanly nature sorely shaken, her tender dark eyes drooping, she now owned to the hope, now fled forever, that Hathorn would light the beacon of love in her lonely heart. “I have not trusted him,” she murmured. “He owes me nothing, nothing but gratitude.”

Too late, she saw that mere gratitude does not kindle into love, and a sense of her own lack of frankness sealed her accusing lips.

Still, she suffered from the shattering of flattering hopes long secretly cherished, and saw now the marriage of her financial éleve as a future bar to the confidential relations which had linked him to her fortunes with golden chains.

“They will go on and play the game of life brilliantly without me—these two, whom I have unwittingly brought together. I will go on alone—now—to the end—unless I can find the lost thread.

“Endicott must reopen the search! I will spend a half million—and—that other heart shall know mine!” She was lost in the memories of a buried past.

As she entered the vestibule of the office building, a grave manly voice aroused her.

“I thought that you should know this,” whispered Hugh Conyers, of the New York Clarion. “It has just come over the wires from Washington.

“I was going up to tell the Judge, and have him send for you. You will have a busy day.”

The startled woman read a slip which was the burden of the lightning Ariel which had set “Sugar soaring hellward” in the classic diction of James Potter, Esq.

“Hugh!” gasped the Queen of the Street, as she drew him into a dark corner, “can I never reward you for your loyalty? Is there nothing I can do for you?”

“If there is anything more, I will come around. Shall I tell this to Hathorn?” His eyes were fixed eagerly upon her.

There was a slight ring of hardness in her voice, as she hastily said:

“Not a word to him, in future. He is going to marry—and—go away for a time. I will handle this line alone—after this—only report to the Judge. He is my Rock of Gibraltar.”

She disappeared in the elevator with a hard little laugh. For she was trying to make light of the blow which had told upon her lonely heart.

The newspaper man edged his way up Nassau Street in a brown study.

“Coming events cast their shadows before,” he muttered. “I wonder if she will ever know? Some day, perhaps.”

Darting messenger boys and disgruntled pedestrians eyed wrathfully the high-browed man of forty, who strode along with his gray eyes fixed on vacancy.

One or two “business women” noted the clean-cut, soldierly features, the well-shaped head, with all the intellectual stamp of old Amherst, brightened by the fierce intellectual rivalry of the nervous New York press.

Artist, athlete, and thinker, Hugh Conyers had hewed his upward way through the press of bread winners out into the open, and, still sweet-hearted and sincere, he steadily eyed without truckling, New York’s golden luxury, and saw, with a living sympathy, the pathetic tragedies of the side eddies of Gotham’s stiller waters.

It was only in his faraway summer camp, by the cheery fire, under the friendly stars, or out on the dreaming northern lakes, floating in his beloved birch canoe, that he opened his proud heart to nature—and then, perchance, murmured in his sleep—a name which had haunted his slumbers long.

“So! It’s all over between them!” mused Hugh, as he was swallowed up in a lair of clanking presses and toiling penmen. “Mr. Fred Hathorn has arrived. God help his wife to be! The Belgian granite paving block is as tender as that golden youth’s heart.”

He well knew that the artful protégé had only used the generous woman’s volunteered bounty of the past—“as means to an end.”

“Elaine has simply coined her golden heart for that smart cad!” he sighed, as he grasped a blunted spear of a pencil to dash off an editorial upon “German Influence in the South Seas.”

In her guarded downtown office, Mrs. Elaine Willoughby resolutely put aside the one subject now nearest her heart, to summon, by signal, the fortunate man who was fast slipping out of her life.

The startled Queen of the Street gave but ten minutes’ time to the consideration of the sudden change in the affairs of a giant syndicate which used two hundred millions of dollars in swaying the world of commercial slaves at its feet.

With keen acumen, she reviewed the hostile probing of a mighty Senate, into the Sealed Book of the great Trust’s affairs.

From her own safe, she then extracted a memorandum book and grimly smiled, as she noted a date—May 17, 1884.

She quickly read over two cipher letters, dated “Arlington Hotel, Washington, D.C.,” which had been silently handed her by Endicott’s only relative, and murmured, “Can it be that the Standard Oil people are going to quietly buy in and wager their vast fortunes on the double event?

“Hiram will know—and—what he knows we will keep to ourselves!”

A sense of absolute safety possessed her when she reflected that the sole depositary of her life secrets—the one man au courant with her giant speculations was a childless widower and had passed the age when passions’ fires glow—and was, moreover, rich beyond all need of future acquisition.

Pride kept Hiram Endicott still in the ranks of his profession, while the acquired taste of money-making filled up the long days darkened by the loss of wife and daughter.

When Hathorn, replying to her summons with an anxious brow, entered the room where the beautiful architect of his fortunes awaited him, he found a strange serenity brooding upon her face.

With a brief greeting, he plunged in media res. His report was quickly made.

The quiet decision of Elaine Willoughby’s orders gave the quietus to the young man’s eager plans for a great coup.

Watching her craftily from the corners of his eyes, he lightly turned to the proposed visit of that interesting Montana capitalist, Harold Vreeland.

“Bring him to see me, by all means!” the Lady of Lakemere cordially said. “He seems to have caught a bit of the breeziness of the pines.”

And then, when Hiram Endicott briskly entered, Mr. Frederick Hathorn fled away to the renewed struggles of the Exchange.

The quondam “only broker” was, however, not deceived. He raced on through the excited street to cover the firm’s large line of the rapidly advancing stock, and reasoned quickly as he went.

In his heart there was the conviction of a coming change in the generous heart which had been so long open to him.

“Elaine is a deep one,” he wrathfully mused. “She is either flying too high for me to follow in this—or else, she is ‘moving in a mysterious way her wonders to perform.’”

He knew her nature too well to question her explicit orders.

The nerve of a duelist, the honor of a caballèro, the courage of a plumed knight—all these were her attributes, and he was not mad enough to doubt that she knew her own mind.

“I was a fool to take Alida up there to Lakemere, and fret my best customer with the ‘billing and cooing’ act! It was a bad play—and—yet, the break had to come!”

He swore a deep oath that he would, when married, hold Alida VanSittart well in hand, and still cling to the desirable business of the woman who had made his fortune.

“Here’s Vreeland,” he hopefully planned. “Just the fellow! Ardent, young, an interesting devil, and, rich. He will help to fill up the measure of her lonely days—and, his game can never cross my own.

“He’s a mighty presentable fellow, too, and I can perhaps strengthen my hold on her through him.”

A cautionary resolve to keep the handsome Western traveler away from Miss Alida VanSittart was born of the slight uneasiness caused by the gilded Potter’s attentions to the tall young nymph of the court of Croesus. “She is my ‘sine qua!’” he smiled. “No fooling around there!”

It was four o’clock before the busy Hathorn could get the nose of his financial bark steered safely over the saccharine breakers of the Sugar market.

And, still, a growing excitement filled the aspiring young banker’s veins.

While he had struggled on the floor of the Exchange, he was suddenly smitten with a fear that his patroness had abruptly abandoned him.

“What is she up to?” he fretted. “I’ll find out if she really goes home!” he then decided, with a growing uneasiness, as he marked the surging tide of Sugar speculation.

He was fortunate enough to attract the personal attention of Harold Vreeland, of Montana, for that new member of the jeunesse dorée was held socially in eclipse, until Bell’s minions should purvey the “robes of price” suited to the swelling port assumed by the bold social gambler.

The hearty assent of the fancied dupe to the evening call, enabled Hathorn to call his patroness by the private wire at the Circassia.

“By Jove! She is lucky to be out of this flurry!” he decided, when Mrs. Willoughby’s voice closed the telephonic interview without even a passing reference to “the market.” “She did go home after all!”

And, so lulled to security, he remembered all the vastness of her varied moneyed interests. He knew only the magnitude of her transactions in the past.

The hidden reasons of her Napoleonic moves he had never penetrated, and he had vainly shadowed her visits to Washington and sifted the guests at her summer palace. But now, his future control was endangered.

The crowd of guests, would-be suitors, financial and political friends hovering around her, embraced judges, generals, senators, governors, national statesmen, and party leaders.

The paid revelations of Justine had so far only rewarded him with the recurring details of the suing of many sighing gallants kneeling before her guarded golden shrine.

In the first months of the cementing of their past friendship, he had even dared to dream of a personal conquest, but the high-minded frankness of her kindness had soon killed that youthful conceit.

And now, to-day, he felt that the golden chain had snapped beyond him, and that he really had never fathomed the inner nature of the queenly woman.

But one unreserved intimacy characterized her guarded life. The union of interest between herself and Hiram Endicott.

Hard-hearted and mean-spirited, Hathorn clung for a year to the idea that the wealthy lawyer was perhaps the Numa Pompilius of this blooming woman whose roses of life were yet fragrant with summer’s incense.

But the vastness of her transactions, and even the results of his mean spying, left him, at last, absolutely persuaded that they were not tied by any personal bond.

The “man who had arrived” lacked the delicacy of soul to know that the prize might have been his, had he been true to the ideal which Elaine Willoughby had formed of him. For, he had never been frank-hearted enough to risk her refusal.

That night, five years before, Elaine Willoughby had whispered to her own blushing face in her mirror, “I can make a social power of him. I can build up his fortunes. Men shall know and honor him—and then—”

She had never completed that sentence, framing a wish that she dared not name in words.

But he had at last coldly passed her by, and knelt before the feet of a mere girl, who valued him only for what the silent benefactress had made him. It was a cruel stroke.

“She is different from all the other women I have ever met!” ruefully sighed Hathorn, who now saw that the great Sugar intrigues were sealed from his future ken. He had watched the artful juggling of government bonds finally make a daring and aspiring New York banker rise to be a rival of the Rothschilds. He knew, by gossipy chatter, of the American Sugar Company’s alleged veiled participation in the great New York campaign of 1892.

He saw the Sugar Trust moving on to a reported influence in national affairs, and, keenly watching every lucky stroke of the Queen of the Street, he was persuaded that the finest threads of the vast intrigue in some hidden way ran through her slender jeweled hands. He saw his fault too late.

“I might have known all—if I had married her!” he decided, as he hid his disturbed countenance in a coupé on his way uptown.

But a last brilliant thought came to the puzzled trickster. It seemed a golden inspiration.

“Here is Vreeland, heart-free and foot-loose. I can exploit him and get him into the best houses in a month. He is not a marrying man.

“If I can work him into our stock business, I may regain her—through him—and I’ll keep Alida out of her sight. She may fancy him. I’ll post Vreeland, and, perhaps, he may find the key to her hold on the Sugar deals.

“With Justine in my pay, and Vreeland well coached, I may yet fathom the inner arcanum of the great impending deal.

“A union of the Sugar Trust and the Standard Oil interests would make the heaviest financial battery of modern times—and—by Jove—they would be able to swing Uncle Sam’s policy at will. Yes! I will push Vreeland to the front.”

With a hopeful glance at a sober banking structure, not far from the corner of Wall and Broad, the day-dreamer murmured, “I might even rise like him,” as he caught sight of a gray-mustached man, now supposed to be comfortably staggering along under the weight of a hundred brilliantly won millions.

“I have Alida VanSittart’s money—as an anchor. I will use this Vreeland as my tool. He’s an open-hearted fellow.”

Hiram Endicott, at the corner, watched the young banker dash by. The old lawyer’s thin form was still erect at sixty-five. His stern cameo face, and steady frosty eye, comported with his silken white hair.

The morning had been given to the calm discussion of new means to unlock a mystery of the past, “to pluck out a rooted sorrow.”

Endicott’s nephew was now in sole charge of the giant battle with loaded dice, in the ring of Sugar speculation. The lawyer alone knew that Hathorn’s sceptre had departed from him. He cursed the retreating gallant.

“Can it be that the marriage of this cold-hearted young trickster has opened her eyes to the folly of educating a husband, in posse?

“Or—is it the shadow of the old sorrow, Banquo-like, returning? God bless her. I fear it is a hopeless quest.”

And yet, with all the fond dissimulation of Eve’s family, Elaine Willoughby was serenely radiant that night as the cautious Hathorn led the “open-hearted fellow” into the splendors of the Circassia. “This plan of mine will work,” mused Hathorn, who did not see the gleam of triumph in Vreeland’s eyes when the hostess asked him to visit her dreamy domain of Lakemere.