CHAPTER IV.
“WYMAN AND VREELAND” SWING THE STREET.
Mr. Harold Vreeland was awake with the birds, and in an early morning walk long communed with himself under the whispering trees of Lakemere. The enchanting prospect of the superb estate delighted his eyes more with every visit. He blessed the goddess Fortune, and smiled truly, “the lines have fallen to me in pleasant places!”
It was only with a severe struggle that he concealed the secret joy now burning in his heart, and he carefully laid out all his plans for the crucial week to come. He must widen the breach.
There was the conference with Senator Alynton, Hiram Endicott, and that strange “big brother,” Hugh Conyers. He felt instinctively that these three men would not share “Madonna’s” enthusiasm.
He aimed to continually efface himself and to allow the resentful woman to goad herself along in the path of social and financial revenge.
“Any fool can stand hard times, but it takes a wise man to keep his head, under a run of winning luck!” he mused, with reminiscences of “Mr. John Oakhurst” and his pithy proverb, that “the luck usually got tired—before the man did.”
He retraced his steps to the house, and was most calmly quiescent and tenderly respectful in his adieu.
“That burst of confidence has fixed her—for good!” he mused.
“You are to report to me, here, by letter, the result of your interview with that man!” hurriedly whispered Elaine Willoughby, as her “knight” turned toward the wagonette. “I will summon you here, when Alynton comes. Do nothing else. Leave all to me.” And his eyes burned into her soul, as he promised a happy slave’s obedience.
The bright smile of the dark-eyed enthusiast haunted him all the way to New York. “Talleyrand was right,” he murmured, at ease in the parlor car, “Point de zèle! She will make all the running for me.” He enjoyed the salutations showered right and left on him, as the train picked up the men of note carrying the hopes and fears of a new week to Gotham. “I am a somebody now!” he grinned.
The rising light of the Sentinel and Locust clubs, the man who had superbly engineered the brilliant Hathorn-VanSittart’s nuptials—“the great Montana capitalist,” was surely a man of mark, and Nature’s easy gifts had earned him a warm welcome in the slightly jaded circles of the Four Hundred. He was, moreover, a “new face,” and several spasms of unrest under aristocratic corsages had already proved that there were eyes “which brightened when he came.”
As for his false rôle of man of leisure and élégant—“custom of it, had made a property of easiness.” “I am a fraud—and—half these anæmic swells are fools as well as frauds!—I am content!” he smilingly decided, as he reviewed his plans for a daring course during the next trying week.
As he had surmised, a telegram awaited him at the Waldorf from the returned Hathorn. It was of a simple directness.
“Meet me to-night, seven. Old York Club. Must have your answer reconsidered. Every inducement possible.” The subtle smile of triumph which played around his lips recalled Private Ortheri’s stern remark, “See that beggar—got him!”—as he dropped the faraway Pathan with the “long shot.”
All day, Frederick Hathorn secretly tormented himself over the curt answer, “Will be there. Vreeland.” There was much before the tortured bridegroom to arrange. The mutinous Dickie Doubleday, phantom of audacious and unrestful beauty, was now driving Mr. James Potter out of his wits.
He longed for a “boat upon the shore and a bark upon the sea!” He had learned that in some distant Afghan hole called “Swat,” there were neither post-offices, telegraphs, banks, detectives, song and dance theatres, nor any of the machinery of a “bastard civilization” which the reckless Miss Dickie could work to ensnare or follow him.
“By Gad! Just the place! I’ll get a white shirt—brown myself up like parched coffee, and turn into a Ghazi, or Dervish, or fighting Mollah—or, any old thing. She is a hummer. Pray God, that some other good-looking fellow will soon catch her ‘wandering eye.’ Her constancy is an ‘abnormal feature’ of later development. This is the only time in her life that she has stuck to a victim—for over three months. Other fellows should help me bear the burden.”
There was all the details of Hathorn’s newly enhanced social state to arrange. The Union and Metropolitan clubs were to be haunt of Benedick—the married man. And—the war to the knife, the fight of Marius and Sylla now lay before him.
There was Oakwood, his wife’s magnificent place at Ashmont, awaiting its social monture. Her Imperious Ladyship Alida had ordered him to go in for the pennant-bearing honors of Vice Commodore of the Ashmont Yacht Club, and her beautiful schooner, “L’Allouette,” was awaiting his practical hand.
A positive mandate for the best box at the Horse Show, and a royal gallery box in the tiara-wearing tier of the Opera, were matters of pressing urgency.
Hathorn was already “broken in” as a “general advance agent” and “heavy man” for his wife’s “Great Moral Matrimonial Show,” and that lady, with the coming Hathorn-Willoughby feud first in her mind, had brought luggage enough for Cleopatra and all her nymphs on that record-breaking voyage of splendor to the Cydnus.
All these and many more things busied the disgruntled Hathorn until the hour set for the meeting with Vreeland. He had posted his wife and her train away up to the Buckingham, for he felt, instinctively, that the handsome groomsman was not just the party to linger around his newly-enclosed sheepfold.
He had already discovered several shades of color in his rosebud not visible to the ante-nuptial eye, and, moreover, he was hungry for news of Elaine Willoughby and of her state of mind. He now saw the “firm’s” interests seriously endangered.
There was the vastly profitable past business connection, and “Sugar,” too, loomed up before him now as a vanishing pyramid of alluring sweetness. He knew that the woman whom he had coldly left had been the very spirit of his own wonderful success.
But Hathorn never knew how eagerly Vreeland, at the Waldorf, his anxiety veiled by a thoughtful smile, watched the clock hands crawl around till seven.
“That fool has but one chance left to ruin me forever—and—to block my little game!” restlessly reflected Vreeland. “If he only had the manly nerve to dash up to Lakemere and to throw himself there on Elaine’s generosity, he might be forgiven—even now. The swaying bosom of womanhood is always ripe for forgiveness. A woman is fondly weak to a man who calls up a lost love. And he has been all in all to her, in the past days.
“She set him up on a high pedestal and fairly worshiped him.
“Perhaps he felt like the Frenchman, that two women are necessary to every man—one whom he loves, and one who loves him.”
But the telegraphed reports of his secret spies arriving every half hour, told the delighted Vreeland that Hathorn was still “at the office.”
“Give me to-night, and just one telegram to reach the Madonna—then—I will have made that breach irrevocable!” gleefully cried Vreeland, as he was driven down to the Old York Club.
The two men met in an apparent cordiality, and the Western man’s poker nerve stood by him, as he calmly enjoyed a dinner, at which Hathorn merely nibbled, with an ill-concealed restlessness.
They exhausted all the usual banalities with regard to the well-beaten paths of the wedding tour, and Mr. Vreeland was graceful in all his perfunctory interest in the young Adam and Eve in their newly found Paradise.
When the cigars and liqueurs brought them around to the “hard-pan” stage of the interview, and a guarded seclusion, with a slow constrained manner—Frederick Hathorn began to carefully interrogate the “devil whom he had let out of the bottle.”
Vreeland keenly eyed the speaker through the blue-curling smoke of a Henry Clay, and, when Hathorn had reviewed all his past arguments as to the proposed business connection, he buried his head in his hands in deep thought.
Hathorn had even offered to aid Vreeland with the capital to qualify him as a member of the projected firm of “Hathorn, Potter & Vreeland.” It was a clear “giveaway” of his temporizing fears of the coming war.
“You see, you could swing Mrs. Willoughby’s account and give it your special attention,” concluded the man who had now shown every card in his hand.
Hathorn noticed, with a growing uneasiness, that Vreeland had been very reticent. The “Montana capitalist” had grown pompously solemn.
Suddenly his old college chum lifted his head, and frankly eyed the anxious banker. “Have you conferred with Mrs. Willoughby on this plan?” he said, curtly. It was pinning his dupe to the cross—this sly thrust.
Hathorn stammered, as he reddened, “Why—no! I have left that all to you. I have not written her nor seen her, since the wedding dinner. The fact is—” and the alert man of the world was left strangely searching for words which seemed to die away on his lips. He dared not betray his wife’s orders.
“I may as well say frankly,” impressively remarked Vreeland, “and, right here—once for all, that I can not enter your firm. I have made other plans. The thing you propose is impossible. I am sorry—but it is impossible.”
“How does Mrs. Willoughby look at it? I thought that you were getting on splendidly there?” feebly urged Hathorn, conscious that he was very rapidly slipping “down hill.”
There was a fine show of regret in Vreeland’s speaking eyes, as he slowly answered, “My dear boy! You have made the mistake of your life. There are some very ugly social rumors current in my clubs—” he paused, “more in sorrow than in anger.”
“And those stories wafted over the sea do not lose by the telling. I have refrained from even mentioning your name, or that of your wife, to Mrs. Willoughby since this petticoat cabal has taken up the subject of the impending social war. Women’s unbridled tongues are the furies’ whip-lashes.”
Hathorn sprang up in excitement. “By Jove! Hod! I look to you to tell me the whole miserable business. I’ve taken you up and worked you in at Lakemere. You have got to stand by me now.”
“Hold on! Stop right there,” coldly remarked Vreeland, with a vicious gleam in his stony eyes. “I never mention a woman’s name. That is a point of honor with me. I am no club scavenger.
“You know what you owe to Elaine Willoughby. She was the architect of your fortunes. Perhaps she builded better than she knew.
“You can not face the situations publicly. I advise you to keep silent—and—to keep others silent.
“Now, beyond that I will not go. I feel that your references to me, and what you have done for me, authorize me to say that I have more than repaid you in the volunteer labors of your wedding.
“Once for all, let us drop Mrs. Willoughby. I will not, in any way, take sides in this unfortunate affair, save to silently cleave to the Lady of Lakemere, through good and evil report.
“If you dare not face her, if you have abandoned her to the mercies of the pack of be-diamonded old ghouls who are slandering her, you know, of course, that you will close the door of your house to every friend of hers.” The bridegroom was cornered—and his heart was filled with a sullen despair.
Hathorn strode up and down the room in a white rage. He paused, at last, before Vreeland, and then, in a choking voice, said: “I must ask you to return my last confidential letter.”
Vreeland calmly moved toward the door. “I am a free man—am I not?” he quietly said. “I believe a letter is the property of the party to whom addressed when regularly delivered through the mail. When you divide the clans of society you will find me—on the other side.
“And, as my time is of value, you will now excuse me. Don’t force me to tell Potter, whom I respect, that you only wanted to use me as a stool pigeon to entrap the woman who has made you what you are—a solid man—in Wall Street!”
With a mad impulse, Hathorn sprang to the door.
“No! by Jove! No row here!” he muttered, and when he sauntered downstairs with an assumed carelessness, his guest had departed.
There was a “lively interlude in married life” transacted late that evening “behind closed doors,” at the Buckingham, in which Mr. Frederick Hathorn, for the second time that evening, suffered a sore defeat, and “went below” to seek the consolation of Otard-Dupuy & Co.’s very ripe old pale cognac.
That bright-eyed falcon, Alida Hathorn, then and there ran up the red flag of “War to the Knife”—and “No Surrender!”
But the jubilant Harold Vreeland slept not till he had personally, at Broadway and Twenty-third Street, sent off an urgent dispatch to Lakemere. “I think that reads strongly enough,” chuckled Vreeland, as he gazed on the words.
“He played the craven. Wanted me to give him secret reports of your affairs, and then demanded his letters back. All relations are permanently broken off. Will guard absolute silence.”
It was at his leisurely breakfast in the Palm Garden, the next morning, that Vreeland, with a wildly-beating heart, tore open “Madonna’s” answering message.
He stifled the cry of exultation which rose to his lips, for the Rubicon was passed. It was really now “Guerra à cuchillo!”
Elaine Willoughby’s words were replete with that fortiter in re which the unlucky Hathorn was destined later to realize. He only knew her suaviter in modo.
“Ignore him. Be ready to report when I call you. Party from Washington expected in three days. Stand to your colors!” The signature, “True Blue,” was a reminder of their secret pact.
“I think, Mr. Frederick Hathorn, that I have you ‘dead to rights’ now,” mused Vreeland, who determined that the “social war” should blaze up fiercely, but without his hand at the bellows.
A round of calls in the next three days proved to him that Mrs. Alida Hathorn had harked back on all the old intimacy of the unhappy bridegroom, and was diligently sowing broadcast the Cadmus teeth of merciless and pointed satire upon the “sunset beauty on the retired list.” “A woman old enough to be my mother!”
When appealed to by many bright-eyed banditti, Mr. Harold Vreeland merely sadly shook his head in a vague deprecation. “I know nothing whatever,” he softly sighed. “All this sudden gossip is Greek to me, Greek of Cimmerian darkness.”
In the two clubs which he most affected, Vreeland—in a manly burst of platform oratory—when appealed to by eager quidnuncs—sternly announced his code.
“I never take a woman’s name on my lips in gossip. I know nothing, I have heard nothing—and—excuse me—I will listen to nothing. Both the ladies are valued friends of mine.” He was voted a “thoroughbred.”
But, in his craven heart, he rejoiced at the rapid spreading of the war. Knowing that Hathorn would watch him, he avoided lower New York until after Madame Elaine Willoughby had made one brief downtown visit for a serious consultation with her agent, Endicott.
With a well-judged cautionary wisdom, he also avoided the “Circassia,” which was, indeed, watched by Hathorn’s spies, and he grinned with delight when his growing band of friends re-echoed his own skillfully planted suggestion of a winter trip to Europe.
“I am thinking of an extended tour,” he frankly admitted, and he soon knew that this had reached the humiliated Hathorn, for James Potter, Esq., in a personal visit, urged Vreeland to join him in that memorable expedition to “Swat,” which was to throw the mutine Miss Dickie Doubleday forever “off the track.”
“I’ll give you a carte blanche as my guest, Vreeland,” laughed Potter. “You can take anybody you want on my yacht—save only that bright-eyed devil, Dickie.”
It was evident Hathorn had not “blabbed,” for Potter gaily said: “I don’t blame you for keeping out of business. Lucky dog that you are—Hathorn has got a first-class man, Renard Wolfe, to go in as active, and I relapse into a special partner—but we would have sooner had you.”
When Vreeland hastened back to Lakemere, in answer to a laconic dispatch, “Come up at once,” he knew of the increasing bitterness of the impending war. Mrs. Willoughby, riding through Pine Street, had given her one-time protégé Hathorn the dead cut, before a dozen magnates of Wall and Broad, to their open-eyed amazement.
Every broker on the Street was now eager to snap up “the Willoughby’s” business, and Mr. James Potter, abstracting a “Gaiety Girl” from an inchoate visiting troupe, had hastily set sail for “Swat,” via the Suez canal, with a little partie carrée to avoid a storm of queries—couched with “Say, old fellow, what the old Harry’s all this rumpus between the Hathorns and your ‘star’ customer?”
The placid Potter, far out beyond Fire Island, delightedly left the “high contracting parties” to fight it out between them, à la mode de Kilkenny.
And, the wonder grew as the golden letters “Hathorn, Wolfe & Co.” soon took the place of the conquering device, “Hathorn & Potter,” over the door of the booth in Mammon’s mart where Elaine Willoughby’s helping hand had built up the fortune of the ingrate protégé.
The handsome Vreeland was light-hearted as he approached Lakemere, for he was pondering over a letter of special invitation received to a diner de cérémonie to emphasize the reopening of Mrs. Alida Hathorn’s superb Fifth Avenue mansion, a patrimonial hereditament gloriously embourgeoned for that winter social campaign in which Mrs. Alida proposed to crush “that woman Willoughby.”
The young matron had taken the bit between her teeth and was boldly rallying all her clans, with a fine social programme adapted to both attract the “outer woman,” and charm the “inner man.”
Vreeland’s courteous declination of the dinner on the ground of “his impending departure,” had caused Mrs. Alida to dispatch the energetic Mrs. Volney McMorris to glean from Vreeland, in an artfully contrived “chance interview” at the Waldorf, all these details of the sudden estrangement which the bride of a few months could not extract from the morose Hathorn.
But, always sedate and sly, Vreeland brought all his batteries to bear on the double-faced Madame Janus, who had already earned a diamond bracelet by her Vidocq operations from Hathorn’s reckless wife.
The “McMorris Investigating Committee” was a flat failure. Vreeland—a glib liar—“voiced his yearning” for London and its extensive jungles replete with the social lion, alive or stuffed.
He gracefully glided out of the buxom gossip’s snares and bore off a full account of Alida Hathorn’s plans, and a true relation of that encounter in the leafy mazes of Central Park, where the watchful Mrs. Elaine Willoughby, from the citadel of her victoria, froze the beautiful Mrs. Hathorn with a pointed ignoring of the woman whose “wedding dinner” had been the vaunt of Lakemere.
The fortuitous presence of Senator David Alynton, with his secret partner, the Queen of the Street—the astonishment of that lovely blonde patrician, Mrs. Mansard Larue, the companion of Hathorn’s imprudent wife, had given the news of the “incident” to all the gentlewomen in Gotham, as well as to clubdom.
Messrs. Merriman, Wiltshire and Rutherstone, in a noisy cabal at the Old York Club, waylaid every “good knight and true,” until, when their discussion had reached its height, the accidental incoming of Hathorn brought about a strained and solemn hush, in which “the beating of their own hearts was all the sound they heard.”
With a whitening face, Hathorn sped away to the Fifth Avenue fortress of the VanSittart tribe, to angrily demand, “What new tomfoolery is on the tapis?” while the three young buzzards of the club spread the news that “the battle is on—once more—” and then, gaily whetted their youthful beaks accordingly upon the succulent elephantine tips of their “sticks.”
Eager leopards of the “society journals” lurking in that dim penumbra between “the high tin gods” and the “toilers of New York,” seized upon the garbled details and, with rending sarcasm, and thinly varnished innuendo, hinted that the “first blood and knock-down” of this finish fight were to be credited to that remarkably knowing matron, Madame Elaine Willoughby, of Lakemere.
“It has gone on too far ever to be healed, this breach between the sundered hearts,” delightedly decided the buoyant Vreeland, as he stepped out of the train at Irvington. “All I have to do now, is not to cross my own luck.”
He was startled as, when about to enter the wagonette, a village lad on watch shyly bade him walk into the ladies’ waiting room, where the adroit Justine was waiting for him with tidings of moment. Mr. Harold Vreeland had won the caoutchouc heart of the piercing-eyed French soubrette by his golden largesse. He had learned the importance of “parting freely” when it was to his profit, and several hundred dollars of Jimmy Potter’s poker money had already enlarged the growing hoard with which Justine proposed to buy a neat cabaret in Paris and set up a bull-throated gamin whom she resolutely adored.
“Be on your guard!” Justine whispered. “Mr. Hathorn has just now tried to bribe me to watch you and Mrs. Willoughby. He has tormented Doctor Hugo Alberg, also. The Doctor is my friend,” modestly admitted Justine, with the deference of dropped eyes to her imperiled “character.”
“I have been down at New York arranging the ‘Circassia’ for our home-coming. Hathorn has offered Doctor Alberg anything to bring him once more accidentally into Mrs. Willoughby’s presence.
“He came up yesterday to Lakemere—and yet Madame absolutely declined to see him, and so she returned his card. And, to the old lawyer, ce brav’ vieux Endicott, he, too, has made the call—‘to demand a hearing’—as an old friend.
“I heard Madame and the Judge talking. And now—to-day—there are the Senator, the journalist, Monsieur Conyers, and the Judge Endicott all day in the library with Madame. So, mon ami, beware!”
The fifty-dollar bill which Vreeland pressed into her hand was an inspirational piece of good judgment, and Gallic prayers from a too-inflammable heart followed him as he darted away to the wagonette.
“I will back the Queen of Hearts to win!” mused the vigilant Vreeland, as he arranged his “society face” for that watchful and nonchalant repose which totally disarmed the three men whom he met at dinner.
There was not an awkward undercurrent of import to the evening in which Harold Vreeland, forewarned and forearmed, knew that he was always “under fire”—that greatest test of nerve—simply bidden to “stand fast and wait for orders.”
He watched the “casement’s glimmering square” long after the house was still, slowly revolving his crafty plans, and as yet ignorant of the day’s secret council so vital to his future career.
He knew not of the sympathetic silence of Conyers, his fine intellectual face hidden in a window’s shadow, while Endicott had frankly related all that he had known unfavorable of the late Erastus Vreeland, Attorney and Counselor at Law, Solicitor in Equity, and Proctor in Admiralty.
Senator David Alynton, remembering that the owners of the “Clarion” also owned a good-sized block of “Sugar,” and were the secret press agents of the Trust, tried earnestly to obtain an opinion from the taciturn Conyers. “I know nothing whatever of this man,” gallantly answered the writer. “This thing seems to me to be like a marriage—in which the seal of the bond goes on before anything definite is known of the parties’ real character.”
The formation of a new firm to handle the business lost by Hathorn’s sudden and egoistic plunge into matrimony was the matter under discussion.
“It seems to me, Madame,” said the sagacious Alynton, “that if you intend to put this young man into such a place of grave trust, there should be another partner, provided, one acceptable to our side, and—if possible—one known to me. And we must not, moreover, have a mere tyro. I should like to approve one name in the new firm—if you select the other.”
“Be it so,” gravely said the Lady of Lakemere. “I will only say for Mr. Vreeland, that I know all of the secrets of the life of his late unfortunate father, and of the son’s manly actions in closing up all his father’s scattered affairs. I will back him with all the money needed, and, also, guarantee his good faith, provided he alone controls such ‘private business’ as is handled through me. Judge Endicott has told me nothing new of the elder Vreeland. I think I can suggest a plan to find the other man whom we want, or else a firm already in existence, which will commend itself to you, Senator. Let us advertise, guardedly, for a partner.”
With a sigh, Hiram Endicott drew Conyers out of the room, and while Senator Alynton yielded to the dark-eyed lady’s most ingenious plan, the old lawyer, under the trees, dejectedly said, “Conyers! there is again the woman enigma! A woman with heart certainly needs no head. And—a woman with a head should be heartless.
“The one can only be happy in being deluded, it seems—and the other can be properly left to coldly play the game of life in safety—and then smile at her dupes. This dear woman, unfortunately, has both head and heart, and so, she must suffer.
“This young fellow’s fine eyes have done the business—his mellow, pleading voice carries the day. To be first favorite—vice Hathorn, discharged—Vreeland, promoted from the ranks!”
While Senator David Alynton, a cool, gray-eyed young millionaire wearer of the toga, a senator à la mode, listened to Elaine Willoughby’s earnest arguments, he forgot that he was but forty years of age.
Though he was often an official listener to secrets in the marble capitol which might make or break the future of the Sugar Trust, he was also a raffiné man of the modern world—a luxury-lover—fond of money, and of its concrete power.
He knew, too well, that Elaine Willoughby was “game” to back her own candidate with a fortune as great as his own.
He felt that the past safe connection with Hathorn and Potter was broken for all time. He saw that the secret chief of the vast Syndicate blindly trusted the Queen of the Street, and, moreover, he was a man who was unable to resist the warm, womanly nature which drew him as the moon draws the seas.
“If you will personally watch over your young neophyte, Lady Mine,” he said, at last, “I will side with you. Your interests are mine. I hope that you do not forget what we both have to lose.” The Senator was mindful of the sanctity of his “toga,” now.
With softly shining eyes, she thanked him. “After all,” she laughed, her bosom heaving with the pride of victory, “you and I are the only real parties in interest here. We will let Endicott receive all the answers, and dear old Hugh Conyers can closely examine the whole record of the man whom we select as working partner.
“Between Vreeland and myself, the line of communication to you shall be guarded. As of old, Judge Endicott shall act for me—and I will alone handle all that concerns you. Even Vreeland shall never know—there’s my hand on it. You know that Hathorn has always been secretly kept ‘in the dark’—against the day of his turning—like the fabled worm. You are safe as regards him—while I—”
She sighed, and left the man who was the “missing link” in the great scheme of active operations, wondering if she had ever really loved Hathorn. The young Senator was unconsciously grimly jealous.
“Damned little snob!” wrathfully cried the Senator. “I hope that purse-proud young minx of a wife will make his life a hell. I fancy that she can be trusted to do that.” It was Alynton’s just idea of Nemesis.
The Senator had gone back to the Capital next morning with a parting pledge to make a flying visit to the “Circassia” in two weeks to settle the vital matter on Mrs. Willoughby’s winter hegira to New York, and the active lawyer and the busy journalist had also fled back to Gotham before Elaine Willoughby in the summer home had listened to all of Harold Vreeland’s accurate relation.
“I can not afford to tell her the whole truth—as yet!” he had rightly decided, and he wisely abstained from adding a shade of color. For she was watching him keenly. It was the turning tide of his life.
“You are my own true knight,” she gaily said, with an assumed lightness. “I wish you to ignore this coming social battle entirely. You are to be strictly non-committal. I will deal with both the Hathorns. Read that.” She handed him a paper. “In this way we will receive tenders from perhaps fifty individuals, and even from some good firms already established.
“I will myself, handle the secret side of the operations, and Judge Endicott will guide you in my general business. When we have found the right man as a partner, our whole party will examine his past through the various mercantile agencies, surety companies, business detectives, and then, Endicott and Conyers, too, can throw on the searchlight.
“The new firm will go ahead—I can answer for that—and I will then be free to openly meet Mrs. Alida Hathorn, on her chosen battle ground of Vanity Fair.
“You are to do nothing but to simply wait at the Waldorf—and come to me daily at the ‘Circassia.’
“As for Hathorn—a strict avoidance of him—that is my one condition.”
“The quarrel—but—the cold oblivion of the grave! Your friendship is dead to him!”
“And—you are never to mention their names in society. Leave them to me.”
“I swear it—by this,” solemnly said Vreeland, as he kissed the knot of ribbon blue. The glistening-eyed woman saw that it had lain on his heart.
She rose and left him to study the strange public call for a collaborator in that fierce fight for “the unearned increment” which was to make his fortune—by a woman’s fondly trusted faith.
He read an advertisement which made a huge increase a week later in Hiram Endicott’s daily mail. For the Herald, in special display, in its financial page, printed the following—in an artful display:
“To Capitalists and Stock Brokers.”
“Wanted.—A gentleman of the highest integrity, who controls one of the largest speculative stock businesses in and around New York City, desires to meet an associate with $200,000 cash, with view of establishing New York Stock Exchange house, or would make partnership arrangement with a New York Stock Exchange firm who desire to increase their business. References given and required. Principals only. Address, for one week,
“H. E., Herald Downtown.”
Mrs. Elaine Willoughby had been a month entrenched in her apartments at the “Circassia,” and the last summer roses had drifted down over the silent walks of Lakemere, before the astute Vreeland had made a surface acquaintance with Mr. Horton Wyman, whose name later headed the sober-looking black and gold sign on a spacious Broad Street office, reading, “Wyman & Vreeland, Bankers and Brokers!” For the new firm had been bravely launched by Alynton and his lovely ally.
All that Vreeland knew was that Mr. Horton Wyman was a near relative of Senator David Alynton, and that he had just given up the cashiership of a respectable bank to enter the New York Stock Exchange.
The adventurer, lost in admiration of Elaine Willoughby’s executive ability, never knew of that tête-à-tête dinner, and the long council of the Queen of the Street with Alynton and Judge Endicott.
Out of fifty applications, Mr. Horton Wyman had been selected. As Senator Alynton pithily said, “It’s my man and my money against your man and your money.” The Senator himself had answered the call for his relative.
He did know that Judge Endicott’s nephew, Noel, was the cashier of the new firm, now in full blast, and that he alone received the orders of the Queen of the Street from the private wires in the Hanover Bank Building.
And he knew, too, that Mr. Frederick Hathorn’s office boasted no longer the “inside tip” on Sugar from the woman who was carrying a social war “into Africa” and had already staggered even the audacious Mrs. Alida.
The checks of the new firm on the “Chemical Bank” were already recognized as those of people “who could swing the Street,” and some daring “deals” had opened the game.
It was Vreeland’s duty to confer once daily with his strangely-found benefactress, and yet, he felt even now that he was but half within the door.
But one bitter hatred followed his rising star, and he soon heard the sneer of Frederick Hathorn: “So he lied to me, and has sneaked into business behind a woman’s petticoats.
“Wait! Set a beggar on horseback—he will ride to the devil.” For all that, “they never spoke as they passed by.” The war was now on in earnest.