Mary Regan

As the taxi-cab spun northward through the two-o’clock streets, Clifford continued to gaze at the taut figure of Mary Regan, and at her white, set face. It had certainly been an hour to try her soul, that experience ending a few minutes since at the Midnight Café.

To Clifford it seemed that all Mary’s shrewd scheming had brought her up at last against an unsurmountable wall. Again Clifford wondered what was passing behind that pale face: wondered what was going to be the ending of her great worldly plan, which thus far had had so many undreamed-of developments: wondered how all this tangled affair was going to come out for her—and again wondered which of the two persons he knew in her was to be the dominant Mary Regan when this matter had played itself through to its unguessable conclusion.

The taxi-cab halted, and Clifford escorted her to the door of her apartment house.

“What are you going to do next, if you don’t mind telling?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet—perhaps nothing,” she said absently. And then, with quiet vigor: “Jack’s not to blame so much for what he is. It’s chiefly his father’s fault. I wish I could make his father pay!” Her dark eyes flashed, her figure tensed with sudden purpose. “Yes, somehow I am going to make his father pay!”

She held out her hand, and gave him a steady look. “At any rate, I want to thank you. You’ve done all you could for me. Good-night.”

“Good-night.”

He watched her in—this strange, confident young woman, so tangled in the web of her own spinning, whom he had drifted into so strangely helping, and whom, though she could now have no part in his life, he knew he still loved. But back in the taxi-cab, his mind at once was on another matter. He had glimpsed Peter Loveman lurking within the doorway during the end of that scene in front of Le Minuit; and he knew that keen little lawyer was no man to give up merely because he seemed to be beaten. In fact Loveman would act all the more quickly for just that reason.

Clifford drove two blocks to the south, a block west, and a block north, then, ordering his cab to wait, he stepped out and walked north to the next corner. He peered around this and waited. Presently he saw what he more than half expected to see—Loveman crossing from a taxi to the entrance of Mary’s apartment house. He saw him press Mary’s button, and after a space saw Loveman push open the door and enter.

Clifford tried to guess what plan the little lawyer, whose wiles he had exposed to Mary only an hour before at Le Minuit, could regard as so important that it had to be undertaken at two o’clock in the morning, without the loss of a single possible minute. He wanted to slip down the street, enter the house, and try to watch and overhear; but the chauffeur in Loveman’s waiting taxi might also be Loveman’s lookout and personal guard. There was nothing for it but to wait where he was and watch.

Within, up on the fourth floor, Mary stood outside her open door, looking down into the dark, narrow stairway, with its sharp turns and tiny landings. When the dim, mounting figure started up the last flight and she saw it was Loveman, she drew sharply back and tried to close her door. But Loveman, quick despite his plump figure, sprang up the final steps and thrust his walking-stick into the closing aperture. He tried to force the door with his shoulder, but Mary’s strength on the other side was fully equal to his own and the door did not budge. He desisted, but kept the advantage held by his walking-stick.

“Come, Mary, my dear, don’t be so inhospitable,” he said through the crack, in a pleasantly complaining voice. “You know, I wouldn’t have come at such an hour unless it was important. And you know I’m your friend.”

The door did not move.

“This is a raw way to treat your old nurse and playmate,” complained Loveman. “Particularly when I’ve come to tell you something that it’s your business to know—something about Jack.”

There was a moment’s silence. Then suddenly the door swung wide open, and Loveman found himself looking at a small automatic and beyond that at the cold face of Mary.

“Come in, but behave yourself,” she said briefly.

He entered and closed the door. “Your suspicion hurts me, Mary, dear,” he said in his amiably injured tone. He raised his two hands, one holding the cane and the other his silk hat, high above his shining dome. “Just to allay your suspicions, so we can talk as good friends should talk, I suggest that you first frisk me.”

“Don’t be a fool, and don’t try to be humorous. Put down your hands. I don’t care how many guns you have—I can beat you to the first shot—and there’ll be only one shot. What do you want?”

Loveman lowered his hands and laid stick and hat upon a table. “Mind if an asthmatic, dropsical, and almost moribund gentleman sits down while he talks?” He eased himself into a chair without waiting her consent. “Sit down, too, Mary. If you’re going to murder me, let’s make it a comfortable affair for both of us.”

She took a chair, and sat alert with automatic held in her lap. “What do you want?” she repeated.

“First?” he replied with a smile of amiable frankness, “I’ve got to say that on the surface you do seem to have every reason to suspect me. The way that business at Le Minuit turned out, and especially the way Clifford twisted it, it did look as though I’d tried to do you dirt. But those were only the looks—they were not the facts.”

“Do you mean to deny that that affair was a frame-up?” she demanded sharply.

“I do not, for it was,” he returned promptly. “Further, it was a frame-up chiefly against you. That brings me to the point that made me hurry here—a point that had to have immediate explanation. It was a frame-up, yes—but, honest, Mary, I framed you for your own good.”

“For my own good!” she exclaimed skeptically.

“Exactly. Listen, Mary. I’ve got to repeat myself—but I can’t help that if I am to make myself clear. Your big idea in this secret marriage with Jack Morton has grown to be to keep Jack at work—to do what no one else has ever been able to do, make a man out of him—so that after a time, when the big blow-off comes and they find out who you are, you will have established yourself so thoroughly by the service you have rendered that the Mortons will have to overlook everything shady about your past and your part in this affair. That’s the way you had it doped out to yourself, now, isn’t it?”

Mary did not answer.

“That was your plan—exactly. And your plan, all the big future you saw for yourself, was based upon your making a man out of Jack. Mary,—I’m talking straight goods now,—I saw you could never make a man out of Jack. Nobody could or can. The stuff’s not there. I saw you were headed toward certain failure—and wasting good months, and big chances, in trying to put your grand dream across. I told you all this and tried to talk you out of it, but you wouldn’t listen to me. So I decided to try to prove my point by showing you the facts. I decided to frame you.

“To-night, I let you stumble across, as if by accident, Jack chloroformed by grape juice and in the company of those ladies. I admit I helped lead Jack into that. But I hoped you would see it as the real thing, see how hopeless any dream was that was based on making a man of Jack—and that you would quit the game right there. But my little act was a fizzle. Still, Mary,”—and the little lawyer’s voice was persuasively emphatic,—“even though Jack was led into this to-night, the picture you saw of him, that wine and woman stuff, is an honest-to-God picture of what Jack will be in a few months. Broadway hasn’t yet got him completely—but Broadway is going to get him! I’m telling you, Mary!”

Mary’s face was expressionless. “You didn’t come here merely to deliver that speech, Peter Loveman.”

“Naturally, there is something else.” His round, large eyes regarded her meditatively; then he leaned forward. “Mary, I’m going to lay all my cards on the table. First, here’s a bit of a confession: I hung around Le Minuit, and heard your offer to Mr. Morton to straighten Jack out, and heard him turn you down flat, and saw him drive away with Jack.”

“Well?”

“Wasn’t that just so much more evidence to show you that your big dream can never, never come true?” he argued, quietly, but with the driving force of the great lawyer that he was. “So I say again, for God’s sake, drop it all! And, Mary,—you’d never have been happy even if you had worked that game with the Mortons. You’re too much the daughter of ‘Gentleman Jim’ Regan for that sort of life—your father’s blood would have sent you back to the old ways.

“Listen, Mary,—the sensible thing to do is for us all to cash in on this Morton affair, before it breaks. I’ve said most of this before, but I’ve got to say it again. Let me discover the secret marriage between you and Jack; I’ll soak Mr. Morton hard for a detective bill, and give you a half of what he pays. And by playing the thing this way, I’ll keep solid with Mr. Morton and will be in a position where I can milk him for a long time to come. And then, of course, you’ll make him pay big for a divorce— Morton will want to hush the matter up as far as he can, and he’ll want to keep details out of court. And since I’ll be representing Mr. Morton, I can put you wise to the very limit he’ll pay. What you get there will be all your own; I’ll get mine out of handling Mr. Morton’s end. And that business all settled, and you with the name of Mrs. Jack Morton—why, there’s nothing big we couldn’t put across as team-mates! And everything safe—and everything big! And a little later, if you wanted it, I could, by watching chances and playing the cards right, help you make a marriage that would be a headliner in regard to wealth and respectability and position. Don’t you see it all!”

She saw it, and it was a dazzling vision of its own kind. Moreover, she knew this shrewd little lawyer could bring it all to pass. And among other things his plan offered was the definite and immediate chance to strike vengefully at Mr. Morton, who an hour before had so coolly rebuffed her when, swayed by unaccustomed emotion, she had made him the proposal to devote herself to Jack.

At length she spoke. “That was another good speech, Peter,” she said quietly, “but you didn’t come here merely to deliver that speech either. Just what is the big thing that’s in your mind?”

“Why, that you should drop your present game, instanter, and switch to something worth while.”

“That’s not what brought you here between two and three o’clock in the morning,” she insisted steadily.

He shifted slightly. “It’s like this, Mary,” he said abruptly, changing from his persuasive tone—“you and I went into this thing together, and I hope we’re going to stick it out together along the lines I’ve just suggested. But matters took such a twist with to-night’s events that I had to know definitely, at once, whether you were going to work along with me.”

“And that’s the question you really want answered?”

“It is. And I’m hoping your answer is going to be ‘yes.’”

“I do not know what I am going to do,” she said quietly, her dark eyes fixed upon his large blue ones. “But whatever I do, I shall do alone and exactly as I please.”

He slowly wet his full, loose lips. “Is that final?”

“It is.”

“You mean that you are going to leave me out of it.”

“I am not going to think of you one way or the other.” She stood up. “If that is all you came for, I suggest you now say good-night.”

His soft hands gripped the arms of his chair. Fury flamed within him; words of menace surged to his lips. But Peter Loveman never had more self-possession than when his situation was most dangerous—and dangerous he certainly now felt it to be. So as he rose he smiled with good-natured regret.

“I’m sorry it’s all off, Mary; it would have been big for us both. But you have the right to do as you choose. Well, good luck to you—and good-night.”

With a look of almost fatherly benignity, Loveman went out. Mary suspected that regretful, genial smile—but she thought of it only for a moment, for the next instant her mind was on other things. She switched out her lights, and stepping to a window she looked out into the deep silence of the night.

What should she do? At last she was alone face to face with her life’s greatest crisis. She had played for big game—for wealth and worldly position—and she had played daringly—and now, at the end, after all her time and bold dreams and care and cleverness, it seemed that she had lost, and lost finally, unalterably. And after all, even had she won, would the winning have been worth the while?...

And then there was a resurgence of that self-confidence, that determination, which were such strong elements of her nature. Should she not make one last desperate effort to carry through her plan, despite them all? Her resentment toward Jack’s cold, worldly father suddenly flamed high. Just to balk the older Morton she would like to save Jack and win out herself.

But how might it be done?... Almost unconsciously her mind began to revert with nervous intensity to certain methods of that period spent under the influence of her father and later of her uncle Joe—that period of artful criminality that she had long thought of as forever ended. By use of her old skill she might so outwit Jack’s father, might so involve him, that he would gladly come to terms.

She stood there in the silent dark, thinking feverishly.