Mary Regan

Suddenly all conjectures concerning Bradley were swept utterly from his mind. Down the gilded red-carpeted stairway that led from what the Grand Alcazar termed its “ballroom de luxe,” there came—though this was not the figure Clifford first noted—a short, full-bodied, ornately dressed man, with a bald crown and a smile of engaging amiability. Beside him, and a half-head taller,—and this is what Clifford first saw,—walked a slender young woman, in an evening coat of rose velvet, her rounded throat gleaming a dusky marble from the soft shadows of the furred collar. Her face was the rose-tan of early autumn leaves, and her dark eyes gazed straight before her with a composure so complete that it seemed to announce a haughty indifference to all the world.

“Mary Regan!” ejaculated Clifford, stupefied.

Uncle George seemed not the least startled by Clifford’s exclamation. He turned—and then there was surprise enough in his voice:—

“Hello—Peter Loveman with her!”

Clifford, recovered from his brief paralysis, arose and hurried between the tables. But the pair had already turned into the entrance and did not note him. As Clifford came into the gilded and bepalmed lobby, he saw her, aided by four eager Grand Alcazar flunkeys and by Loveman, looking a grotesquely small grand opera impresario in his silk hat and fur coat, stepping into a closed car. By running Clifford could have caught her, or by calling he could have gained her attention. But at that instant he remembered the essence of their bargain, that he should make no attempt to seek her out until she sent for him. That remembrance checked him; the door closed upon the rose-velvet figure, the car slid off through Broadway’s incandescent brilliance, and she was gone.

Forgetful of where he was, Clifford stood bare-headed and stockstill in the lobby. Mary Regan’s sudden reappearance out of the silence, the vacancy, of six months’ absence, sent his mind flashing over the past, the present, the future, touching in chaotic wonderment the high spots of his strange relationship with her.... Daughter of that one-time famous cynic and famous master criminal, “Gentleman Jim” Regan, dead these five years, she had passed her girlhood in the cynical philosophy of the little court surrounding her father,—had made that philosophy her own,—and, grown into young womanhood, she had joined that great crime entrepreneur, her Uncle Joe Russell, in many of his more subtle enterprises. It was at the beginning of this career that Clifford’s life had come into contact with hers. Police Commissioner Thorne had ordered him to “cover” the pair. From the first Clifford had conceived the idea that her criminal point of view was not an expression of her true nature, but was a habit of mind developed in her by association: and he had proceeded upon the theory that a bigger rôle, than merely to make arrests, would be to arouse the real Mary Regan to her true self.... The conflicts between the two!—her hostility to him!—his ultimate success, or seeming success, when he had broken through her shell of defensive cynicism—and last of all, that parting scene down in Washington Square in the dusk of the on-coming dawn!...

He lived through that scene for a briefest moment—he was always living over that scene. He had told her that he loved her; and she, admitting that she loved him, had said, “But that doesn’t mean I can marry you.” “Then, what does it mean?” he had demanded. A look of decision had come into her face—how vividly he recalled every minutia of their one love-scene!—and she had said:—

“Before we can talk definitely about such things, I want to go off somewhere, alone, and think over what you have said about me. If I am not what I used to be—if I am really that different person you say I am, I want to get acquainted with myself. I seem so strange to myself, it all seems so strange. I hope you are right—but I must be sure—very sure—and so I am going away.”

“But when you come back?” he had cried.

“A lot may happen before that,” she had answered gravely. “A lot to you, and a lot to me.”

“But when you come back?” he had insisted.

“When I come back,” she had breathed quaveringly, “if you still think the same way about my being that sort of person—and if I find that it’s really true—”

And then his arms had closed about her and he had kissed her. But even as she had let him, she had murmured almost fearfully: “Remember—a lot—may happen—before then....”

Clifford’s mind leaped forward from that long-gone night to the present. And now she was back—back out of the unknown into which she had disappeared—and back without having sent him a word of any kind! What did it mean, this unannounced return? And what did it mean, her being in company with dapper little Peter Loveman?—man-about-town, and carrying behind that round, amiable smile the shrewdest legal brain of its variety in New York.

Clifford had in reality been standing in the gilded lobby for no more than a minute, though his mind had traversed so wide a space, when a gray-and-black town-car, with a long hood that suggested power ample for a racer, slowed down at the curb and a young man stepped out and hurried into the Grand Alcazar. Fifth Avenue tailors and hatters and haberdashers had equipped him with their best and costliest.

“Sink my ship if it’s not old Bob Clifford!” he cried, giving Clifford a slender, soft hand. “How’s the old boy?”

“Same as always. And how’s Jackie Morton? You’ve been missing for months.”

“I’ve a wonderful tale to unfold—but no time to unfold it now.”

There was that about him which begot an instant liking, though his face was not as strong as it might have been.

“Say—you won’t believe it—but listen. I’ve been on the wagon for seventeen weeks!”

“No!”

“Give you my word! Not a drop in seventeen ages! Had to, you know. My old man—say, he’s one old battleship!—steamed into New York and shut off supplies, and said unless I cut it all out and took a brace, there’d be no more shipments of munitions. Get the situation, don’t you?—case of a sixteen-inch gun shoved into my face and bein’ told it would go off if I didn’t reform. So look and behold and observe what’s happened—I’m reformed! Been off where milk’s all they shove ’cross the bar—isolated, and all that kind of thing—and been behavin’ in a way to make the Ten Commandments jealous. Honest to God, Clifford—”

Abruptly he checked this effervescence. “Say, seen Peter Loveman about here?”

“He’s just gone.”

“Alone?”

“I believe there was a young lady with him,” Clifford replied discreetly—wondering a little what young Morton’s business, if any, could be with the pair that had left.

Morton hesitated; then again was effervescent. “Was to have met him here—but there’s no tellin’ where he is. Come on—let’s have a drink.”

“But you are on the wagon.”

“I am. But I want to give you the grand sight of watchin’ me fall off.”

“You sit tight right where you are,” advised Clifford.

“Now, come on, don’t block traffic with a funeral,” pleaded the young fellow, slipping an arm through Clifford’s. “Just one drink!” Clifford shock his head; and Morton tried to draw him into the restaurant. “Just one little drink, Clifford,—one little drink after a Sahara of milk!”

“Mr. Morton!” a deep, brusque voice called from behind them.

They turned. A man, square of shoulders and deep of chest and with square, forceful face, was advancing toward them.

“Hello, Clifford,” he said.

“Hello, Bradley,” Clifford returned, trying to speak calmly—and for the briefest space these old enemies, who had so often been at grips, stared at each other, with hard, masked gazes.

Bradley turned to Clifford’s companion. “So you tried to give me the slip, Mr. Morton. I heard what you suggested to Clifford. But I guess you are keeping off the booze to-night.”

“Just look this large person over, Clifford,” mourned the young fellow; “and honest, ain’t it hell, my father wishing a party like Bradley on me for a nurse!”

“You need one all right!” Bradley said grimly.

“But even babies get let alone for an hour now and then,” protested the other.

“You forget that the size of my check from your father depends upon my keeping you and booze apart.”

Morton sighed. “You’re a sordid person, Bradley.”

“I might mention incidentally,” continued Bradley, “that your father has just come to town.”

“The devil!” Morton’s face filled with dismay. “I guess, then, it really is good-night, Clifford.” He took Bradley’s arm. “Come on, nursie; let’s hail the captain of my perambulator.”

Clifford watched the two go out, and again he had the sense that he was glimpsing into the complicated maze behind the brilliant surface of Big Pleasure. The relationship between that pair might be strange for any other period in the world’s history, but it was a definite, though small, phase of this great pleasure life—a gay young spender bridled and the reins put in the hands of a private officer. Clifford felt a moment’s uneasiness for young Morton: in what ways could Bradley not twist his client and protégé into predicaments that would bring him profit?

When Clifford regained his table, Uncle George regarded him with amazement. “I thought you had gone!”

“Gone where?”

“With or after Miss Regan.”

“Why?”

“I thought you were—well, I guess you get me. That being the case, I didn’t think you’d pass up the chance to be with her.”

Clifford hesitated, then spoke the truth: “The last time I saw Mary Regan, I promised not to speak to her until she sent for me.”

“And it was your promise that stopped you?” Uncle George asked incredulously.

“Yes.”

“You poor simp! I suppose you thought she’d be thinking of you, only you, with you out of her sight for six months—and that then there’d come a sweet little message like them they flash on the movie screens!”

Clifford did not reply. Uncle George had very nearly expressed his thought.

“No woman ever lived that could keep thinking of one man for six months, and him away!” Uncle George leaned closer, and spoke in a low voice. “See here, son,—while you’ve been keeping your promise and remaining strictly off the premises, what do you think the other people have been doing?”

“What other people?” cried Clifford, in quick alarm.

Uncle George ignored the question. “You think you’ve been an influence upon her. Mebbe so, son. Mebbe so. But she was twenty, and two or three more, before you ever saw her. Don’t you think those twenty years might have some influence with her, too?”

“What other people?” repeated Clifford.

Again Uncle George ignored the question. He looked at Clifford keenly, and spoke slowly.

“’While ago you asked me why I wanted to meet you here. Well, son, my chief reason was because I knew Mary Regan was going to be here—and because I thought, on seeing her, you’d wade right into the situation.”

“See here, George, what do you know?” Clifford cried sharply.

“Mighty little that’s definite,—and telling you that would be giving people away, and that’s against my principles,—and, besides, the little I know might only be misleading. But, son,”—the old man’s voice was grave,—“if you’re at all interested in that girl, you sure ought to be busy. And that’s all I can say.”

Abruptly Clifford stood up. “Thanks, Uncle George,—good-bye—” And he was gone.