CHAPTER V.
TOWARD THE ZENITH.
It had been the one haunting dream of Harold Vreeland’s fevered young manhood to finally reach a financial position wherein “the solid ground” would not fail beneath his feet. Before the Christmas snows had whitened the roofs of old Trinity his star was crawling surely toward its zenith. He was, figuratively speaking, “on velvet.”
Though he realized the cogent truth of Jimmy Potter’s maxim that the desire of one’s heart would always finally come around to the patient man, he was yet filled with a vague uneasiness. He was entrenched at the Waldorf en permanence, and his personal bank account had reached the snug sum of twenty thousand dollars.
The status which he held in the firm was that of the office partner, and he was also authorized to draw one thousand dollars per month. “If you need anything else, apply to me directly,” was Mrs. Willoughby’s quiet order. Anxious not to show even the faintest eagerness, he was passively contented, allowing his patroness to make the game. And yet he always watched her, lynx-eyed.
“My duties,” he had simply demanded.
“You are for the present to confer alone with Mr. Wyman,” answered Elaine. “The books and cash will be in the sole keeping of young Noel Endicott. I may say that he alone will sign the firm’s checks and the balance sheets will be privately rendered by him to Judge Endicott, who represents me, as well as the power behind your new associate, Mr. Wyman.
“You are to carry on the current business in agreement with Wyman. Both of you will have access to all the customers’ ledgers, but the conditions of your continuance as a broker is that only a strictly ‘commission business’ shall be carried on. And, above all things, silence and discretion.”
“In other words,” slowly said Vreeland, “Judge Endicott is really the responsible holder of the firm’s assets.”
“Precisely so,” smiled Elaine. “His only nephew is the cashier and the head bookkeeper has been named by the other principal.”
“Am I to confer as to details with Judge Endicott?” was Vreeland’s last query.
“Only with me,” she smiled. “You are to be my own knight, and I lay this last injunction on you: Business is never to be mentioned to me save in our daily interview of affairs. My social hours are sacred.” He bowed and smiled.
“If anything of moment should occur,” he murmured.
“You will be held harmless,” she smiled. “Obey orders, if you break owners.”
Perfectly conscious that Hathorn would probably spy upon him, fearful of over-reaching himself by any rash hurry, Mr. Harold Vreeland assiduously delved into all the daily business details and carefully refrained from urging on the growing social intimacy with his patroness.
Horton Wyman and Noel Endicott were both University Club men; the last, a stalwart son of Eli, was a survival of the fittest from the shock of football and the straining oar.
The cool head bookkeeper, Aubrey Maitland, was Wyman’s daily luncheon companion, and young Noel Endicott always fled away at noon hour to the Judge’s office, where the oak was sported.
It was only in their regularly exchanged uptown social courtesies that Vreeland was enabled to study his partner.
It was, after all, of very little moment to him, for they both seemed to be “personally conducted” by that silvered-haired old solon, Hiram Endicott. Their way was made very smooth.
“It’s a very strange situation,” mused Vreeland. “I am a sort of Ishmael—playing my hand against every man’s. They all think to find me soon growing uneasy and squirming around in curiosity.
“‘Time and I against the whole world,’ said William the Silent. It’s a good motto, and I will let them make the whole game. But, by and by, I will get behind the scenes, and then ‘shove the clouds along.’”
With a rare self-control, he continued his judicious self-effacing policy, and yet slyly watched the impartial welcome extended by Elaine Willoughby to the stream of notable and desirable men who thronged her hospitable halls.
The preliminary skirmishes of the coming battle with the Hathorns had vastly amused him, and “all society” knew now of the impassive prudence of the rising star. It had been Elaine Willoughby’s one fault that her strong nature leaned little on other women. For her strong nature buoyed her up above the petted society dolls around her.
She knew that they were barren Sahara deserts to her; she was perfectly conscious of the absolute dearth of interest in woman natures for each other. The few respectable “relicts” who sought her bounty were always ranged near her, like old battleships on the shores of Time, honorably scarred, but “out of commission” and, unfit for action. Their mild incense of perfunctory flattery was but a prelude to the confession of their thousand little wants. And to them, she played the Lady Bountiful.
But Vreeland honestly, yet silently, gloried in Elaine Willoughby’s brilliant early winter social campaign.
A lovely Napoleon, she rallied her hosts in a changed strategy of audacious energy; she chose her own battle-grounds and vastly outnumbered her enemy at every point of concentration. It was a war to the knife.
Through unknown agents, the Lady of Lakemere had deftly captured the best box in the Horse Show, and eke the same in the Canine Exposition. She had ensnared the one most eligible Opera box upon which Mrs. Alida Hathorn doted, and then, drawing to her splendid halls the most desirable men to battle over, Mrs. Willoughby easily attracted a crowd of bright-eyed beauties there ready to struggle for their selected “eligibles,” “notables,” and desirables. There was music and laughter, the gleam of tender eyes, the sheen of white shoulders, the glow of ivory bosoms, and all the magnetic thrill of rich young womanhood pervading the Circassia.
It was no secret that a house party of forty would keep a “merry Christmas” at Lakemere, and, all in vain, did Alida Hathorn strive to secure the most sparkling pendants of the “inner fringe” for the widely thrown open doors of Oakwood. Her Indian summer antagonist was an easy victor.
Some merry, audacious devil seemed to have roused himself in Elaine Willoughby’s bosom, and she was boldly lancée now. Knowing well what a woman’s war to the finish means, the sly Elaine drew off with her varied and sumptuous entertainments all the desirable men and Beauty’s beautiful Cossacks soon swooped down upon them.
Only Vreeland could trace Senator Alynton’s influence in the vastly enlarged glittering circle of foreign diplomats and well accredited European visitors of rank.
The Army and Navy gallantly charged upon the battalions of Mother Eve’s fairest forlorn hope, and humble but effective ammunition—the canvas-back duck, the terrapin of our beloved land, choicest wines, chilled and warmed in the right order—did all the execution possible.
The delicately ordered beaufets were a “continuous performance” to a star engagement.
And, by a rare self-command, the warring woman with difficulty refrained from all open attacks upon the Hathorns, but yet deftly drawing the “financial swells” to her side by the generally accepted conclusion that there had been something wrong with Hathorn & Potter.
No one suspected the genial James of intermeddling. He had reached no further point in his voyage to Samarcand, or Swat, than gay Villefranche.
On his cozy yacht, the guileless Potter learned that Miss Dickie Doubleday, who had returned all of his “burning letters,” but, none of the sparkling votive diamonds, had dashingly captured and cut out a Western mining man of untold millions who guilelessly had drifted under her guns from a “star” of the Metropolitan opera. And, the festive Miss Dickie was now in the seventh heaven.
The gay Eastern Elijah was overjoyed to see his rosy mantle descend upon the Occidental Elisha, and he cautiously confided to his deported “Gaiety Girl” the opinion that the “sun-burned buffalo of Butte would find out a lot of things before spring.” They drank the health of the faithless Dickie Doubleday in much champagne of rosy tint, as the white stars shimmered around them on the blue waters of the Mediterranean. And so, the “honors were easy” in this little game of hearts.
In vain did many friendly financiers urge Jimmy Potter’s return by the often cabled news that “Hathorn was making a fool of himself in Wall Street.”
“That’s his own lookout,” calmly replied the special partner, who rightly feared that the chasm between him and the all too amiable Dickie Doubleday was not yet quite deep enough for safety.
“By Jove! that girl is capable of running a tandem,” he reflected, and, he had no desire to be hitched up later, even in silken harness, with the robust “brown buffalo of Butte.” For he had drawn a “queen” in the last deal.
He would have quickly turned the prow of the “Aphrodite” homeward, however, if he had known of a strong-hearted woman’s resolute determination to run the firm of Hathorn, Wolfe & Co. ashore, and to sink it under the guns of the unsuspected enemy which was now “swinging the Street.”
And as artful a game as Delilah ever “put up” for Samson, was one element of Mrs. Willoughby’s campaign, for she was now “fighting all along the line.”
The watchful Harold Vreeland was soon made conscious that he was an object of general interest even in the cold-hearted hurry of Manhattan. He knew that he penetrated three varying atmospheres in his daily life.
The society racket, the dress parade of the Waldorf and the clubs, was one phase of his busy existence; the shaded dignities of his Broad Street office another, and he was now assured that an invisible halo of assiduous espionage now followed him in his down-sittings and uprisings.
There was the maddened Hathorn, the inscrutable Elaine Willoughby, and his cautious and silent partner, Horton Wyman.
“I’m pretty well followed up!” he smiled, with a cunning glee.
Continually on guard in society, and ever straining all his mental powers to familiarize himself with all the details of their growing business and the unwritten lore of the feverish Street, Vreeland was really only uneasy at heart as to his continued probation.
For he felt now, as the holiday season approached, that he was merely being hoodwinked by the dark-eyed benefactress, whose fullest confidence he had not as yet gained.
“Madonna’s” social manner was frankly charming, but he had made no progress toward any further intimacy. Some shade seemed to hold them tenderly apart. And he racked his brains in vain.
“Ami intime de la maison!” He had only learned more of her rare dignity in the repeated business interviews, and in the continued tableaux of her splendid social entourage, he was no nearer to her than others.
There was the cool Conyers, who always came and went at will; he had also seen Senator David Alynton and the silent Wyman out driving with his lovely patroness. There were also tête-à-tête dinners, too, with the old Judge and that young son of Anak, Noel Endicott, and moreover the well-bribed Justine spoke, too, of breakfasts where only Wyman and the handsome bookkeeper, Aubrey Maitland, were guests. All this was dangerous.
“Hang me if I can see why I am kept here,” uneasily fretted Vreeland. “The firm would move along just as smoothly without me,” but yet in his soul he felt that the steadfast woman still held him in reserve for some well-matured purpose of her own.
With admirable sang froid he awaited her orders in an expectant silence.
“She shall not weary me out; but once let the cards come my way, then I will play the queen for all she is worth.”
He knew in the drift of customers gradually drawn in by the now acknowledged solidity of their firm, that there were many spies and stool-pigeons of the angry Hathorns.
He knew, too, what cold resentment burned in his old chum’s heart. He had secretly followed (through his agents) some of these skirmishers directly back to Hathorn, Wolfe & Co.’s office. And the cards were played both from the top and the bottom of the pack.
Once he had himself caught Hathorn’s eyes following him with all the wolfish glare of a murderous heart.
There were, besides, rumors of quarrels in the opposing firm and the early retirement of the returning Potter.
And other sly traps were laid for him with silky scoundrelism. He was well aware that the defiant Alida Hathorn had openly expressed her utter disbelief in the existence of the late Wharton Willoughby. Even the prehensile Mrs. Volney McMorris had waylaid him to confess that she had never observed, in either of Mrs. Willoughby’s establishments, any mortuary bust, portrait, or even an humble photograph of the permanently eclipsed man who had given his name to the Queen of the Street. These things were food for uneasy thoughts harassing to the young schemer.
And this respectable social scavenger had faltered out some indirect javelin thrusts evidently pointed by Hathorn’s willfully reckless wife.
There were at least two men in Elaine Willoughby’s entourage who, for gain and a passion under the rose, might be the source of all that quietly-sustained splendor which had so enraged the young married heiress.
Mr. Harold Vreeland was on guard. He only fixed his fine eyes upon Mrs. McMorris in a pained surprise when that bustling dame hinted that he could easily drag forth the desired information.
“I have always had a penchant, my dear Madame, for minding my own business,” was his most prudent rejoinder.
So, entrenching himself in the towers of silence, he was safe, but Vreeland also left a bitter enemy behind, on the pleasant afternoon when he wondered why Messrs. Merriman, Wiltshire, and Rutherstone had bidden him “to be one of a little party of four” at the Old York Club. It was an able effort at scientific pumping.
He had never entered that gilded fortress of the jeunesse dorée since his last definite quarrel with Hathorn, and he knew, too, that these three “splendid examples of the evolution of American manhood” now made up a little coterie which was a sort of Three Guardsmen brotherhood around Mrs. Alida Hathorn.
There were rumors of gay little Sunday afternoon frolics at the Hathorns’, justifying Pip’s exclamation, “Such larks,” and these three young fellows now directed the broad-gauge festivities of a home whose master always wore a stern frown like the late lamented “Baron Rudiger” of the German song.
It was Harold Vreeland’s chosen part to be left judiciously uncompromised. He was still playing a waiting game. He knew that certain very dégagée young “married women” afforded much “congenial pabulum” for these three sleek young society sharks, and that the careless Mrs. Alida Hathorn was fast drifting into their hands.
And so, after a long séance, wherein floods of wine drenched the festal board, the sly adventurer found out at last the motive of his sudden popularity.
When Rutherstone brought up the unlaid ghost of the late Wharton Willoughby, Vreeland cynically remarked: “I naturally know nothing of local social biography here. I am only a returned borderer, and am only engaged in making a proper business use of my capital. I stand calmly in the center of your New York circus and see its ‘free show’ swing around.
“My platform is that of the late Simon Cameron of blessed memory, ‘I don’t care a damn what happens as long as it does not happen to me.’”
“But, the lady has intimate business relations with your firm!” babbled Merriman.
“Did Fred Hathorn tell you so?” cuttingly sneered Vreeland. “Perhaps not, as you fellows are only chummy with his smart wife. Let her find it out for herself, by a personal visit to the lady in question.
“You might ask Wyman—he knows all our thousand customers’ affairs. I don’t bother much with the business,” loftily remarked Vreeland, as he hummed an old music hall refrain, “You can get onto an omnibus, but you can’t get onto me.”
He cheerfully departed, leaving his hosts to “a night of memories and sighs.” He was followed with curses both deep and loud.
Vreeland put all these little matters lightly away as a part of the usual “burrowing mole” work of New York high life; but he was really astonished, a week later, when his employer’s physician, Dr. Hugo Alberg, haled him away to a confidential Sunday morning breakfast.
The “German specialist” was an indurated foreign egotist of thirty, and a cunning gleam lingered behind his golden glasses.
His fresh, bewhiskered face was slightly Semitic in its cast, and his record of prosperity was all too evident in that richness of jewelry which has been a legacy of the Biblical times when the Egyptians made such incautious loans of their ornaments.
Harold Vreeland had now an unwritten chapter in his life devoted entirely to the thirsty-hearted Justine, and from that subjugated Gallic beauty he knew of all Alberg’s crafty approaches upon the mistress by a coarsely familiar wooing of the woman who had given herself over, body and soul, to Vreeland’s service.
And so he marveled not that in the cozy private room at Martin’s the Doctor’s slim, white, “sterilized” hand reached out in the direction of a secret which Vreeland himself knew naught of.
“I’ll just let this fool talk,” mused Vreeland, as the intriguing foreigner became both familiar and friendly. “He has his own little scheme. Perhaps he may point me toward what no one seems to know.”
And so, in an affected bruderschaft, the would-be vampire listened with a beating heart to Alberg’s confidences when the strong Rhine wine had loosened the “Medical Arzt’s” slightly thickened tongue.
“We ought to understand each other, mein lieber Vreeland,” urged the Doctor, who had now thrown the mask off. “You and I are the two men nearest to this magnificent woman. You are her confidential man of affairs.
“You know all—you must know all. And a woman’s best friend is always her Doctor,” he grinned, with a suggestive pliancy.
“We are necessary to each other. You and I only want what all New York wants—money!
“Money talks in New York. Life is a hell without money. Now, my dear friend, we are both making money out of her easily. And to me, as well as to you, Mrs. Willoughby’s life is of great importance.
“For my fee bill and your profits depend upon her being kept alive.”
Vreeland started, in a sudden alarm. “Speak out, man! What the devil do you mean?” He saw a black gulf yawning before him.
“She has some concealed source of mental trouble, some eating sorrow, some overmastering secret of her old life,” bluntly answered Alberg. “You, as a man of the world, could easily guess that such a woman should be married. She is rich, still very beautiful, young enough yet—she hardly looks thirty-three—woman’s royal epoch of mental force and bodily attractiveness. Now, she has strange periods of a profound mental depression.
“There are dark storms of sorrow. Her heart action is somewhat impaired, and the waves of passion beat too fiercely in her locked breast.
“You must help me! You may, in this way, save your own future. We must work together. Drugs will do her no good. I am at my wits’ ends!” The gloomy Doctor buried his nose again in the Rudesheimer.
“What can I do?” flatly said Vreeland. “Speak out! Don’t mince matters.”
“Find out her past social history. Find out if she ever was really married. Find out if some one has a hold on her. She is an unhappy woman at heart!” cried Alberg. “It may be that damned cold-hearted cur, Hathorn’s, desertion has cut her to the quick! Find out if she really is a free woman!”
“And, then?” said Vreeland, a strange light coming into his eyes.
“Marry her yourself,” pleaded Alberg. “She is one woman in a million! Take her away for a year. Lead her away from her old self. Pride brought low may have maddened her. I think that Hathorn first fathomed her past, and then, coldly left her for the younger and perhaps richer woman. It may have been too heavy a blow to her pride.”
“Is there anything in this babble about Endicott or the Senator?” huskily whispered Vreeland, reddening with shame in spite of himself.
The half-tipsy Doctor laughed. “The old man is only her business Mentor—he is as passionless as a basalt block.
“The Senator is but a cold-hearted money schemer, a Yankee coining power into hard cash. I’ve followed all these trails out.”
“And you yourself are absolutely in the dark?” persisted Vreeland. “I’ve thought at times that old Endicott may be the trustee under some quiet old marital separation. I’ve imagined, too, that Willoughby mari may not be really dead; that she, in spite of herself, learned to passionately love Hathorn, and has ardently desired him, and that he selfishly married after she had pulled him up to fortune, and then, left her powerless and tongue-tied, to pocket his brutal ingratitude.
“Whatever it is, we need each other, Vreeland. I will stand by you if you stand by me. Is it a bargain?”
“I’ll see you here the same time next Sunday. Let me think this thing over,” faltered Vreeland, beginning to see light at last on his way.
“I should have told you that she usually has these attacks after Endicott’s occasional long private visits. It may be that the missing husband is alive, and is bleeding her financially with extortionate demands,” was the Doctor’s last confidence.
“I’ll be ready to talk to you next Sunday. Let me go now,” breathlessly cried Vreeland. “In the meantime, keep a close silence. You will find me to be the best friend you ever had in the world.”
The schemer darted away with a sudden impulse.
Ten minutes later he sat with Justine Duprez, in a hidden little nest of her own in South Fifth Avenue. It had flashed over his mind that Mlle. Justine’s Sunday off, just suited his purpose.
It was not the first time that he had communed with her there, in a room once sacred to Frederick Hathorn’s private information bureau.
The startled maid had barely time to meet her generous new admirer when he questioned her sharply upon the subject of Doctor Alberg’s recent revelations.
And, to his annoyance, he for the first time found the Parisian woman to be obdurate. She had been curtly abandoned by Hathorn, who had forgotten to hand over her final payment in all the hurried glories of the VanSittart wedding.
She alone knew that the vain fool had stupidly imagined that Elaine Willoughby only urged on his marriage in order to be able later to cloak an intimacy which would have later made Justine’s fortune.
And now, she would not be balked out of the harvest of fortune. For an hour, the ardent Vreeland pleaded with the artful woman. Her bold eyes, dulled with the bistre stains, gleamed with triumph as he pleaded with her.
The elegant young man alternately flattered and caressed the brown-faced intrigante, whose coarse beauty had long been the toast of the cabaret which she yearned to possess in Paris.
Her voluptuous bosom and heavy haunches were the antipodes of Vreeland’s beauty ideal, and yet, he knelt to flatter and to sue. For she alone could spy upon the most sacred privacy of the woman he had sworn to rule.
Justine eyed him keenly, and spoke at last. “Give me a thousand dollars and promise that you will give me a free hand if you marry Madame,” she said, as she yielded to his self-abusing pleadings.
“And only you shall know her secrets. I hate that Doctor!” she cried. “I can find out all you want to know, but, you must do as I wish.” Her velvet eyes gleamed in a fierce flame.
“Listen, Justine,” urged Vreeland. “To-morrow I will bring you a thousand dollars when I come to the Circassia. Tell me now what you can; I swear to make you rich if you will only stand by me. It is Sunday,” he added. “No banks are open to-day. This first hundred will not count.”
And he thrust a bill into her brown hand.
“I have watched for years to find the secret of her past life,” promptly said the sly Justine, drawing nearer to Vreeland. “I, too, thought of an affaire. It is not. But, a secret there is, and only one man knows—the old lawyer. I hid myself near them on his last visit, for they talked long, and Madame fell down fainting after he had gone away.
“Their talk was of the old times, and it is always so, when they come to that. But, this time I listened carefully while she moaned in her sorrow.”
“And she said?” anxiously cried Vreeland.
“‘My child! My child! Give me back my child!’ she cried. And so there is a child, and it is not of the Senator! Voilà! They are stupidement placide toujours! Les affaires! Only—ze monnaie! She loves him not. And only the old man knows. You shall watch him and her.”
A sudden suspicion of a feminine double life brought a name to Vreeland’s lips.
“Hathorn!” he said, with a meaning look at his partner in an already vicious intrigue. For Justine Duprez knew him in all the pliant baseness of his real nature, and they had groveled toward each other from the very first.
The Parisian gamine laughed a bitter, hard laugh.
“I have been at Madame’s side since the first day when this egoist Hathorn first met her. There has been no love, no intrigue, no child. And he—the hard-hearted brute—schemed only for her money.
“No! It is beyond me. Beyond my seven years of service. I will reach la mystère yet for you,” she smiled. “And you will perhaps find that there was ze old divorce, ze old-time scandale. And the other man, the husband, has perhaps taken away the child. The sorrow, yes; the secret d’amour, no! Elle est trop bravement bête pour l’amour à la mode.
“The journalist? Ah, no! Il n’est qu’un brave ami! Pas plus!” It was dark before the “rising star” dared to steal away from Justine’s little pied à terre, for too well Vreeland knew that the enraged Hathorn was shadowing his every movement.
Justine had fled away, light-hearted, after the sealing of a pact which was to lead her to the splendors of Dame du Comptoir of her own cabaret. And as Vreeland strolled homeward he summed up the situation.
“Her only friend and confidant is Endicott. No thoroughfare there. Alberg, this German brute, knows nothing and Hathorn less than nothing, or he would have already used it against her in this bitter petticoat fight.
“I will hoodwink them all. My time will come when I have gained her cherished secret. And if I do gain her secret, it will be on the market, to the highest bidder, perhaps to the dashing Alida Hathorn, or else be quietly nursed to later bring me in a fortune.” He was satisfied with his day’s work. The light was dawning now.
When the adventurer reviewed the whole situation, he felt that the mystery was as yet hidden in Elaine Willoughby’s ardent bosom. “The day will come when she will need me, when she will tell me all, when she is safe to live a free woman’s heart-life. I will wait on her and give no one my confidence.”
During the long, busy week before the Christmas holidays, Vreeland narrowly watched his strange, silent partner, Horton Wyman, to see if he were bidden to the Lakemere house party.
“He is the only one that I have to fear,” mused Vreeland, “for, with Senator Alynton’s backing and his daily intercourse with old Endicott, I would be bowled out in a moment, if I made a single misstep. Can he yearn for Elaine Willoughby’s money?”
In the daily office associations, the casual meetings at the Circassia, in the feebly maintained exchange of personal hospitalities, Horton Wyman had so far remained to him an unexplored country.
Cool, sturdy, with piercing black eyes, and a marvelous self-control, with a facial mask which even a Jesuit might have envied, Horton Wyman was seemingly devoid of any passion but money-making.
Vreeland had gained the general impression that he was “bookish,” and the silent partner avoided all show society.
Thirty-five years sat lightly on the man, whose scanty references to Senator Alynton’s millionaire father indicated that the “poor relation,” had been trained up in adversity as the dead financier’s private secretary. “He is a fellow to beware of. I’ll let him alone,” mused Vreeland.
Harold Vreeland thanked his lucky stars when Wyman drew him into his private den when the first sporadic Christmas trees were beginning to creep into Gotham.
“Well, old man,” cheerfully said Wyman, “I’m off for a two weeks’ visit to the Alyntons. Endicott will handle our Board work through his uncle’s private broker, and Maitland and Noel will take their leave after we return. I suppose that you will be at the Lakemere house party.
“Of course, there’s no need of you following up things at the office. Here’s my telegraph address, if anything turns up, and, of course, Mrs. Willoughby will call on you if she needs anything.
“We’ve got the thing running pretty smoothly, so take your full share of mistletoe. Noel tells me that all the prettiest girls in town will be up there at Lakemere.” It was a welcome relief.
“I have now a free field,” jubilantly exclaimed Vreeland. “He is as indifferent to her as if she were only a cloak model. Now, for Lakemere!”
Vreeland never stopped in his trickery to be ashamed of his low truckling with the French maid, whose malleable conscience was at his disposal, in the hopes of much future backsheesh.
And so the adroit Continental Doctor had now two false friends between him and the woman who was his “star patient” and whom he, too, intended for an innocent dupe. The fate of every rich and lonely woman!
It was under the Christmas tree at Lakemere that Harold Vreeland learned for the first time why the Queen of the Street had held him for months in a glittering quiescence in the rapidly built-up firm.
The merry guests were already assembled on the other side of the curtain when the breathless Justine drew Vreeland into a dark corner.
The French woman’s panting bosom heaved as she whispered: “She wants to see you in there, first of all. Now is your time, but don’t forget me, Harold.”
There was the pledge of an infamous pact in the meeting of their guilty eyes. Justine now stood, with flaming sword, between her secret lover and those who would approach the woman who held both their fortunes. Her dark fidelity was doubly bought.
It was a robed queen who stood waiting there by the fragrant Christmas tree and held both her hands out to Harold Vreeland. The Lady of Lakemere at her very best!
With beaming eyes, she handed him an envelope and whispered: “The time has now come when you will have your own part to play, under my sole orders.
“I know your whole record. You have been my own faithful knight.
“Listen! All these merrymakers will go away with the old year. Judge Endicott brings me the firm’s settlement papers on New Years. I will then send for you and make you my secret representative in a momentous affair.
“To protect my interests you must at once leave the Waldorf.
“Trust to me!” she smiled. “I will have your bachelor apartments ready. And no one, not even Wyman, must ever learn of your ‘secret service.’ Silence and obedience, and your fortune is assured. You alone shall battle for me and drive this fool Hathorn forever from the Street.
“Go now! You will leave with the first departing guests, but await my telegram at the Waldorf to come to me here. And so, I have your plighted word. Never a whisper to a living soul. You are to be still only the office partner—to the world!”
Vreeland snatched her trembling hand and kissed it.
It was burning in fever.
But he sped away, and before the curtain rose to a chorus of happy laughter and shouts of delighted surprise, a glance in a corner of the hallway where Justine awaited him showed him a check for twenty-five thousand dollars as his Christmas gift. His patroness had handed him the precious envelope in silence.
In a low whisper he opened the gates of paradise to the French woman, who watched her lover with flaming eyes. “Five thousand dollars of this to you, if you find out for me the secret of that child.”
And he left her, panting with the thrill of a sated avarice.
“I will go through fire and water to serve you,” she faltered. “I will steal the secret from her midnight dreams.”
That night, after the gay dances were done, when the house was stilled, Elaine Willoughby sat before her fire, while Justine laid away the regal robes.
There was the glitter of diamonds and the shimmer of pearls everywhere. With her hands clasped, the lonely mistress of Lakemere gazed into the dancing flames.
“I must crush him—to leave the past buried—that I may yet find the path trodden by those little wandering feet.
“Ah, my God!” she moaned, “it is not revenge that I want. It is love—her love—I burn to know her mine alone. And the past shall be kept as a sealed book, for her dear sake. It must be so. It is the only way. For, Vreeland is brave and true!”
The handsome hypocrite was even then dreaming of a “double event,” a duplicated prize, one beyond his wildest hopes.
“By heaven! I’ll have both her and the fortune!” His busy, familiar devil “laughed by his side.”