“PLUNGER” VREELAND’S GAY LIFE, “UNDER THE ROSE.”
Before the February snows were congealed into those dirty flakes of ice and street mud which are an evidence of the “effectiveness” of New York’s Street Cleaning department, the “top floor” of the Elmleaf bachelor apartment was considered to set the pace for the gayest of the bachelor apartments of Gotham. The hidden programme was even literally carried out.
Outwardly, the daily life of that fortunate individual, Mr. Harold Vreeland, had undergone little change. Once a day he duly occupied his desk at the downtown office, using alternately the morning and afternoon fraction.
He proved a very “tough nut to crack” for the local gossips, however. There was a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde flavor of mystery clinging to the audacious young “Westerner.” The slow trots of the “Locust” and the old senile wiseacres of the “Sentinel” clubs wondered at his calm demeanor, his easily acquired repose of the caste of “Vere de Vere.” Vreeland was posing now as a “fixed star.”
Not even Bradstreet, or Dun, could seize upon any public delinquencies to the detriment of his “business character,” and yet, Harold Vreeland had rapidly acquired the reputation of a “devil of a fellow.” He had, like Byron, his “hours of idleness.”
There was, too, an outward prosperous harmony in the busy office of Wyman and Vreeland, now packed with clerks and forging to the front as a house of unexampled strength.
There was a sober, quiet effectiveness in the firm, which shamed the nervous “bucket shop” decadents, who were only noisy, screaming gulls, clamoring over the financial sea for “any old thing” in the way of floating pabulum.
It was undeniable that the hats went off to right and left, as Vreeland paced the sacred precincts of Wall, Broad and Pine. A rising man—a successful man—a man of mark!
“A safe man, sir! A wonderful young financier! A man whose outside operations are enormous!” gravely said the cashier of the Mineralogical Bank to his esteemed colleague, the cashier of Henry Screws & Company.
“You see!” confidentially said the speaker, between two mouthfuls of “hasty lunch,” “the house is bound not to speculate, but—Vreeland, as an individual, is to-day, perhaps the heaviest single operator of all the young men of New York.” The young man’s fame was duly noised abroad.
“Where does he get all his backing?” grunted the other, as he dashed down a tankard of “bitter.”
“He owns the half of Montana,” dreamily said the Mineralogical’s Cerberus.
“And so, he is founded on the eternal rocks.”
It was not half an hour until this brilliant new canard was traveling like a winged locust—and, it soon achieved the voyage—even to the jungles of Harlem—and spread all over Gotham like the Canada thistle attacking a poorhouse farm. A new financial Napoleon had appeared.
The self-possessed Vreeland was astounded at the many offered social honors, the crowding attractive business temptations, and all the rosy lures now thronging his pathway. He knew not as yet the whole force of a lie “well stuck to,” which often treads down the modest and shamefaced truth.
And even the agnostic sneer of “parvenu” was spared him. He was suave, careful, chary in making enemies, and strictly non-committal.
His conduct toward Elaine Willoughby absolutely disarmed even that vigilant social scavenger, Mrs. Volney McMorris.
For, many other men were just as often seen on parade in Elaine’s opera box. Senator Alynton, General Morehouse, U. S. A., Judge Arbuckle, and other social heavy guns oftener pressed the cushions of her victoria, or nestled under her sleigh robes.
The Lady of Lakemere’s dinners were always stocked with a half dozen masculine “lions” of deep-toned and majestic growl. There were also two or three society swells—“howling swells”—who represented the “froth and foam,” and these young men, with vacuous smiles and heaven-kissing collars, impartially formed the “bodyguard” at theatre parties, and a gilded Spartan band, deftly “cleaned up” the debris of the midnight spread in the Waldorf supper room.
Elaine had a peculiar fashion of segregating the lions and dudes, and sending each kind of social animal forth radiant with self-satisfaction, after a happy five minutes passed with her alone—in the pearl boudoir.
So, calm and serene, Harold Vreeland duly came and went. Men wondered that he so freely stood back to let “other fellows take up the running,” and Augustus Van Renslayer sagely summed up the verdict of the younger “women hunters” of New York: “He is no marrying man. He lives in an eternal picnic of his own—up there—in the Elmleaf.” It was vaguely understood that Sardanapalus was Vreeland’s patron saint, and Bacchus and Nero his household gods. The charm had worked but too well.
And the women of Gotham, those bright-eyed heart-wreckers, were all fain to agree with the catfish-eyed Van Renslayer. There was a fatal impartiality in the easy gallantry of the wary Princeton graduate.
Liberal, dashing, mindful of all the petits agrémens, he was no woman’s slave—and yet, all women’s friend. If no single heart quivered at his master touch, still, there were many arms open to him selon son métier. A fatal curiosity led many a pretty Columbus on voyages of discovery to the Elmleaf—whereat Bagley duly grinned.
That famous housewarming had been a marvel in its delicate recognition of the monde ou l’on s’ennuie, and the judicious hilarity of the Demi-Vierges.
For the return of Mr. James Potter, now finally severed from the flagging firm of Hathorn & Wolfe, had furnished Vreeland with a brilliant new idea.
There was a superb “First Part,” in which Mrs. Volney McMorris lightly and amiably matronized the bravest ladies of the “swim”—who had long been burning to inspect the splendors of the upper floor of the Elmleaf.
Among the forty guests of the “official” programme, were such undeniably good form clubmen as Potter, Wiltshire, Merriman, and Rutherstone. They and their gilded brothers suggested the names of willing goddesses, and so it was that Miss Katharine VanDyke Norreys, the “staccato” Californian heiress—Mrs. Murray Renton, of Cleveland—and several other detached, semi-detached, and detachable women “of spotless reputation,” joyed with the host’s convives, dipped their laughing, rosy lips in his Roederer, and pattered with their lightly-treading feet over his airy domain of a wondrously refined luxury.
It was nearly one o’clock when the grave Bagley had closed the last carriage door and sent the two policemen away with “a heavenly smile on their faces”—and a five-dollar bill clutched in each brawny hand.
And then, on softly-rolling rubber wheels, came slipping along under the shadows of clubhouse and virtuous mansions of drowsy decorum, the pick of Cupid’s Dashing Free Lances—the very flower of the Light Infantry of Love. This “Pickett’s charge” of these demure Demi-Vierges was successful.
It was the solemn Bagley who marveled as he sped these “shining ones” on their way up the stair at the struggling odors of “Y’lang Y’lang,” “Atkinson’s White Rose,” “Wood Violets,” and “Peau d’Espagne.”
For days, that scented staircase recalled the “informal visit” of the regent moon, Miss Dickie Doubleday; the audacious Tottie Thistledown, the fair queen of light heels; Nannie Bell, the mignonne chanteuse, and several other disciples of the “partly” and, alas, the “altogether.” The girdle of Venus was en évidence that happy night.
It is true that the glass globes automatically shrank up in affright toward the ceiling, as these flashing-eyed birds fluttered in and burst upon the gay banquet “mid the bright bowls.” The Elmleaf never sheltered a lighter-hearted crew.
It was left to the imperturbable Bagley, next day, “to gather up the fragments,” and headaches, heartaches, and visions of “woven paces and waving arms,”—with sky-pointed toes and glimpses ne quid nimis of clocked stockings and sleek tricots, were fairly divided among the gallant swains who “did not go home till morning.”
It was in this jovial manner that Vreeland vindicated the public character of un homme galant, which his strange feverish-hearted patroness seemed to thrust upon him. And he wondered as he obeyed—but, the game went bravely on.
There were some seriously tender interludes in the “evening’s hilarity.” Miss Dickie Doubleday, in the empanchement de son âme and, watchfully jealous of that dimpled star, Stella Knox, had quickly effected a truce, of an amatory character, with the loved and lost Jimmie Potter, who had lived to learn that her heart was “a bicycle made for two”—if not more.
“After the ball,” Potter ostentatiously lingered to smoke a last weed with Vreeland, who had opened for him alone the last unprofaned corner of his domain—that Bluebeard chamber which was “strictly business.” He knew that Potter was secret, safe, and gamely silent.
“Ah! my boy!” sighed Potter. “I see how you carry on your own private plunging. What a fool Hathorn was—to quarrel with the Willoughby!
“Now that I’m out I don’t mind to tell you that the old firm is going downhill very fast. Hathorn lost his luck when he cut the golden cord.
“I can’t make him out. He has grown strangely reckless and haggard.
“And the wife is, to say the least, un peu insouciante. You know of that little yacht racket?”—and he whispered a few telling words.
“Well! Alida Hathorn was the Veiled Lady. I have it from the man who is to be the sailing master of the ‘Aphrodite’ next year.
“And the blinded Hathorn is obstinately shadowing Mrs. Willoughby, still following up her game, digging up her past, and backing up all his wife’s acidulated slanders.
“When I found this to be a truth, and saw these damned guttersnipe Hawkshaws slipping in and out of his private office, I decided to quietly withdraw—for a quieter and a gamer woman never drew breath than Elaine Willoughby.
“I wish to God that I had married Alida,” burst out the honest reveler, whose relaxed nerves had unsealed the fountains of truth. “For now, I fear, she will be every man’s woman—if she don’t pull up. She’s left all alone, and Hathorn’s one idea is revenge upon Elaine Willoughby.
“And for her sake, he bitterly hates you. Look out for him. For he has lost all self-control. You are wise to play your outside game here in safety. Hathorn would not hesitate to bribe your own people.
“I know he had that big lump of deviltry, Justine Duprez, in his pay. He even took her over to Paris the summer Mrs. Willoughby went out to Colorado. I’m glad I’m out of the stock business. You’ll tire of it, and with your money why do you fool with it?”
The young Crœsus arose unsteadily, and said, “Come to breakfast with me at the Union to-morrow—that is to say, to-day,” he chuckled. “Well, let us have one hour’s poker—you and me—and with no limit—just for fun.
“You owe me a revenge. Now, remember—I have warned you. Look out that Hathorn don’t get onto your little game—dig a pit—and drop you in it.
“He’s grown to be an ether drinker now, and his wife is as cold-hearted an egoist as breathes. Just dead gone on herself—and her own pretty bodily mechanism. If he ever gets in an ugly money corner, she won’t give him a sou marqué.
“Now, Elaine Willoughby has ‘held up her end of the log’ against some of the stiffest men in Wall Street. She is smarter than a whole stack of Hathorns. I know in the outside companies that I am director of, she has loads of the best paying permanent investments.
“And if she ever catches Hathorn nosing into her affairs, or yours, for I know your firm does a part of her business, she will smash up Fred Hathorn like the ‘Mary Powell’ going over a rowboat.”
With an affected unconcern, Vreeland saw his friend disappear in a night hour club coupé, after swearing fidelity to the poker tryst.
But his heart was beating wildly, as he crawled upstairs in the gray of the dawn. “That’s her game; defense and revenge! I wonder if Hathorn really traced her out to Colorado, and has he an inkling of Alva Whiting?
“He’s not above levying a blackmail. And I am in some strange way her pawn in this veiled duel to the death, a duel between a man and woman who may have often rested in each other’s arms with vows of deathless love.
“It may be only self-protection that made her shove him off on Alida VanSittart. How she hurried on that marriage?
“Was it jealousy, fear, or some of her craft? And I am used—used and only half trusted.
“Wait! Lady Mine! If Justine only plays me fair, I will have got all your game—and then I’ll be master of you, Lakemere and the money. Once inside your lines, then you will never be able to throw me off.” He was beginning to see the threads of the swift current now.
His own expression, “inside your lines,” haunted him through his three hours’ sleep, his bath, and early breakfast. Vreeland had the nerves of the Iron Duke, and he burned for a few words with Justine, who was to seek him that very morning, at her nest in South Fifth Avenue.
For there was a southward trip impending, and he wished to give his one faithful spy her orders.
“If I could only get at the wires in her room! If I could only manage to tap her talk and messages to old Endicott! For this woman here in the office is surely her spy. Bagley may be.
“By Heavens! There is just one chance. And her mail! Justine may help me. What can she not do?”
His heart burned with a dull jealousy of that past when Justine had aided Hathorn on his upward way. “If she could only get around the janitor of the ‘Circassia,’ and the letter carrier. What money can do, I can aid her in, and she must do the rest—” He closed his eyes in a fierce glow of sensual irritation, for the Parisienne had already forged chains upon him which, with all his cold craft, he could not lightly break away from.
“She is not to be resisted—if she plays her own game. First the trip, then the other idea. But I could never handle this pale-faced St. Agnes—this lame bundle of all the virtues. I must have some one else here to watch Miss Mary Kelly—this convent-bred marvel.
“Why not find a smart woman to be my private stenographer and one of the right kind? She could also keep an eye on Bagley and the little dove-eyed devotee. Justine may help me to the right woman. I’ll tell her all.” He began to see Lakemere moving toward him.
The gilded child of fashion was first at the tryst, and Justine Duprez threw herself into her secret lover’s arms with a glad cry of triumph, when ten o’clock brought her to the meeting place. “If I could only come to you,” she fiercely sighed—“in your palace home!
“But wait—wait—till we have netted my lady. I have news now to make your heart dance.”
The panting woman drew from her breast a scrawl of paper, on which she had copied even the office marks. “This telegram came this morning. You see that it is dated Washington.” Vreeland’s heart bounded as he read the words: “Arlington—to-morrow. Don’t fail.” Was it an appointment—a lover’s secret call?
He could have shouted with triumph, as he gazed on the signature, “Alynton,” for a messenger had brought him a note at the moment of his departure to meet Justine. His patroness had fallen into a snare.
“I am going to Pittsburg to-night. Come up and dine. I will give you your orders for a week.”
He drew out the note, and glanced at the firm pen stroke. “Can Alynton be the father of Alva Whiting?” he growled.
He dropped his head on the table, while Justine took off her hat and wraps with the easy insouciance of a Camille. He was mad with mingled greed and jealousy.
“Perhaps! Alynton’s father was an irascible magnate of enormous wealth. They are about the same age. He may have feared his father’s wrath, for he naturally should make a political marriage. Ah! my lady, you have lied to me.
“If it is not the old secret of two guilty hearts, then there is the gordian knot of the great Sugar intrigue in this.”
His thoughts thronged upon him with lightning rapidity, and as her head lay on his arm, he gave the triumphant Frenchwoman her orders.
“Our whole future hangs on your adroitness. You must find out what goes on between them. In a hotel you have a far better chance than in either of her two homes.”
Vreeland murmured that in her ears which made the vicious woman’s cheeks redden.
“Bah! all we women are alike,” she sneered. “But if she slyly sends me out?” There was a gloomy pause.
“I do not think that she suspects you,” finally answered Vreeland. “Telegraph me here what you dare to.
“And bring me all the other news in person. Now, tell me all you know of this very saintly young Mary Kelly.”
His voice had the ring of anxiety. “I have had the janitor and the letter-carrier watch her. They are both friends of mine,” modestly murmured Justine.
“She lives near us, on a side street, with her old mother. And never goes out with a man, except Officer Daly. Daly, the Roundsman. A beau garçon, too; but it may be only a flirtation Catholique à l’Irelandaise.
“I have often followed her myself to church. And she comes once a week to Madame. They always look over papers together.”
“And that smug devil Bagley,” cried Vreeland, “only comes to the door, leaves me the pacquet of bills, and does not even see Madame. He gets an order for the money, and then returns later with the receipted bills.”
Justine was back at the Circassia before Vreeland left her rooms to engage in his little joust at poker with Mr. James Potter, whose morning diet of red pepper, cracked ice, and soda water had at last brought him up to the normal, after several sporadic cocktails.
All through the quiet duel of cards, Vreeland was haunted by the twin obstacles, Bagley and Miss Mary Kelly. “Bagley is a perfect servant, and I can not get any excuse to rid myself of him. My secrets are not kept where he can reach them,” mused Vreeland.
“The girl I surely dare not displace; but I can get around them both, if I have the right kind of a woman here near me. I have the excuse of my ‘outside correspondence’ and social affairs.
“Miss Kelly is sacred to the affairs of this cool-headed patroness of mine. And even Elaine can not object.
“It would ‘give away’ her veiled espionage on me. Yes, that’s the plan! I can advertise; pick one or two out of a hundred women and then try them on,” he craftily smiled, “and only begin my real operations when I have found the right one and the two young women have struck up an intimacy.” He laughed. “My pretty spy shall watch the placid young saint.”
Vreeland tossed upon his bed that night, and reflected upon the singular methods of his covert business.
A list of stocks sent to him by messenger, or personally delivered by Mrs. Willoughby, to be bought and sold, with seemingly no guiding rule; all the checks signed only by him as “Harold Vreeland, Trustee,” and all the securities daily deposited, after due receipt and tag, in Mrs. Willoughby’s steel vault compartment at the Mineralogical Bank. And she alone knew of gain or loss. He was only a gilded dummy.
But one great house guarded all these covert transactions, and the deliveries to them, in case of sales, were always made by an order on the cashier of the Mineralogical.
A dozen times the wily schemer had verified that Mrs. Willoughby knew all the details of each purchase or delivery long before his own daily report.
For when her account was actively moving, once a day the mistress and her secret agent always met.
But never had Elaine Willoughby’s foot mounted the broad steps of the Elmleaf, neither had the luxury-loving man ever dared to yield to Justine’s mad desire to visit him in his splendid new home.
“It would be simply a financial suicide—our joint ruin!” he had whispered.
“But wait—wait till I marry her!”
And then, their chiming laughter ended the daring woman’s pleadings. For the time was to come when the fortune of the generous dupe would be ruled by the victorious young Napoleon.
Harold Vreeland knew, in his heart, that the Queen of the Street was aware of the wild daily life of the men in the Elmleaf.
For after rout-ball, opera, and theatre there were often stolen visits, aided by the friendly mantle of darkness, and diamonds which had gleamed but an hour before on calm and unsullied brows at the opera glittered balefully in the crepuscular gloom of shaded rooms, where at least one of the passionate lovers was far away from home.
The schemer had, from the first, avoided all intimacies with these light-headed men.
He knew that each of his fellow locataires was a Don Juan, and that tragedy and comedy, sweet sin with shame, were traveling fast upon its heels and satiety stalking along; that aching brows upon rose-leaf couches haunted the decorous interiors of this abode of hidden pleasures. The Elmleaf was a Golgotha of reputations.
And only a fire or an earthquake could reveal the daringly desperate liaisons, which, urged on by the delightful zest of danger, would have made public, by any sudden disaster, a story far more ghastly than the untold record of that hideous night when the Hotel Royal went up in fire and flame.
It was in a dull resentment against Elaine, and spurred on by Potter’s tipsy confidence, that Vreeland, now fearing nothing, drew Mrs. Alida Hathorn aside as he met her by hazard once more in the reception room of the Savoy. He was waiting for a momentary telegram from Justine, when his eyes rested upon the alluring moonlight glances of that provoking young beauty, Mrs. Fred Hathorn. When she had gaily rallied him on the Sardanapalian splendor of his Elmleaf establishment, he whispered in burning words: “Why do you not ever come and see it?”
The costly fan trembled and snapped in her hand as she slowly said: “I wanted to ask you something to-day! The time has come!”
“With Mrs. McMorris?” she whispered, vaguely pointing toward his spider parlor.
“Without Mrs. McMorris,” the ardent pleading voice replied.
“I will tell you all. I will lay my life at your feet!”
Alida Hathorn pouted. “I will never find my way.” Her tone was that of light raillery, but her cheeks were deadly pale. She was trembling on the brink of her ruin.
And then, Vreeland, taking her hands in his, whispered to her words whereat the busy familiar devil at his side laughed in glee.
“If you mean to say yes,” he murmured, “give me that red rose from your breast.”
And when he raised his head, the rose in his hand was the pledge of a dark tryst of the devil’s own making.
Before he slept, for his throbbing heart would not down in the crowning victory of his revenge upon the desperate Hathorn, he tore open a telegram which marked another milestone of his life.
“Victory!” he cried, for the words told him of Justine’s success.
“They dined to-day alone at the place named, and I have news for you. Coming home, by Pittsburg.”
The overjoyed scoundrel cried: “Potter was right, after all. Everything comes round to the man who waits.”
For a study of the great journals told him of a forthcoming report fixing the policy of the Government upon the tariff.
“If she has the secret, she will surely act upon it,” he cried. “That ties her to the great Sugar Trust’s secret service. Perhaps he trusts her on account of the old love.
“Justine shall wrest the proofs from her by either fair means or foul. And, as for to-morrow night—” His lips were parched and dry as he thought of the light foot slipping up the stairway of the Elmleaf—“not with Mrs. McMorris!” He seemed to be wrapped in a golden whirlwind of success.
“If she comes once when she wishes to, she will come again when I wish her to!” gloated the schemer, whose mind was now fixed upon detaching Bagley upon some trumped-up errand and making such a feast as “Rose in bloom” laid out when the hoodwinked “Shah Jehan” was “away” at his palace of Ispahan.
“I now hold the cards, and I shall be the victor at last in this game of life,” he swore, as he dreamed of those pleading moonlight eyes.
Harold Vreeland waited for two days in a fever of excitement for some mandate from his artful patroness. “She is a sly one at heart, after all, is Mme. Elaine,” he growled. “Her stay ‘at Pittsburg’ is only to throw me off my guard, and perhaps Hathorn.
“She may have taken any one of a dozen short roads to steal back from her rendezvous with her senatorial confidant. Friend or lover—which?”
He groaned in helpless rage. His mean spirit, his hidden vicious agnosticism, made him doubt every woman.
To him they were all the same! The biting words of that crooked, malignant genius, Pope, came back: “Every woman is at heart a rake.”
“By Jove! I have found them all to be living behind imitation fronts,” he snarled.
He was seated in his office watching the pale-faced and silent Mary Kelly, when a street messenger arrived with a card sealed in an ordinary telegraph envelope.
It bore only these words, scrawled by the artful Frenchwoman: “Come over to the room.”
Stealing a watchful glance at the silent girl in the office, Vreeland hastened away. He had never been able to approach the slightest intimacy with the gray-eyed Irish-American girl.
“Her convent shyness backs up her convent modesty,” sneered Vreeland, who dared not covertly insult his patroness’ protégé.
Plaintively handsome, her steadfast eyes gleaming with a patient resignation, the pale cheeks and slender form told of a life of semi-invalidism. When not employed on her fashionable master’s business, she was ever busied copying literary manuscripts or legal documents.
“She’s another cool hand,” vulgarly imagined the upstart schemer.
“She knows that she is safe as long as Mrs. Willoughby is at the other end of that private wire.
“But, perhaps this Daly, the Roundsman, may some day bring a glow to those cheeks. They are all alike—mistress and maid—here in hot-hearted, wicked New York.
“This one’s only a neat, sly little sneak, and a spy on me.”
Vreeland’s every nerve was tingling as he dashed up the stairs to Justine’s nest on South Fifth Avenue.
Standing ready for instant departure, the excited girl told him of how she had stolen away while her fatigued mistress slept.
“You will hear from her at once—probably to come up to-night. Now, once for all, there is no love between them. I found my way as usual. Only business—great business—MONEY AFFAIRS—the play of the stocks. He is to come up in a month and bring a new Senator from the West.
“One of the secret friends; so, mon ami, you may soon have another rival.”
Vreeland gnashed his teeth as the girl said: “They dined together—alone—and talked for hours. Senator Alynton gave her a paper after they had talked about the Government, about lawsuits and troubles, and that I sewed up in her corset for her in her presence before we left. Brother and sister they are, in friendship, but he never even raised her hand to his lips. Elle est bien bête, trop bête, pour l’amour!” was Justine’s parting fling.
“You and I must get that paper, or a copy of it. It’s our fortune!” he cried. But, Justine had fled, only adding: “She saw no other man. She only went there to meet Alynton. Now, back to your rooms. She will soon call for you.”
Justine was a true prophetess, for while Vreeland sat in his rooms immersed in the study of a dozen newspaper articles upon an ominous flurry in the “Sugar” securities, the lame girl tapped at his door. With a bow, she handed him the transcribed telephone message: “Please come up at once. Very important.”
“Compliments, and say that I’ll leave instantly,” gravely replied Vreeland, without lifting his head.
As he hurried on toward the Circassia, he endeavored to frame some idea of the daring woman speculator’s plans.
There were rumors of unfavorable tariff action, of hostile legislation, of adverse decisions of the courts to be expected, of a growing agitation against the “Sugar Trust,” and even of the desire of the great Standard Oil Company to force the value of “Sugar shares” down by the pressure of their heavily-armed capitalistic secret brokers, and to “gobble” a controlling interest, or at least the bulk of the heavy holdings.
“This surely means a slaughter of the little fishes,” mused Vreeland.
Rumors of a reincorporation of the seventy-five million dollar capitalized company in New Jersey, the threatened move to divide its capital stock into common and preferred, were rife on the Street.
“Ah!” growled Vreeland, as he glanced over a tabulated statement of the ratings since its organization. “This may either send the stock, now at seventy, down to forty or fifty, or up to a hundred and twenty-five. If I only knew?”
He laughed mockingly as he dismissed the subject. “It will only be double or quits.”
“Double their wealth for the insiders—and quits for the poor devils squeezed to the wall!” While he waited in the drawing-room for his patroness, the woman whom he began to fear he never would make his dupe or slave, he pondered over her real purposes in the vast hidden speculations.
“Has she not already money enough?” he enviously thought, gazing on the heaped-up splendors of costly taste around him. And then, he remembered that he had never met any man, woman, or child in New York City who had money enough.
“It’s the fashionable craze—money-getting, by hook or crook,” he reflected.
“And once mixed up in the game, it’s hard for her to leave it, especially if she is the go-between who links some of the nation’s statesmen to the great insiders of the Trust.
“This home may be only a sham, Lakemere only a way station for the friendly conspirators, and that paper may be a dangerous document which neither side would dare to hold. And old Endicott, too—what’s his rôle?”
He was the more interested as Justine had swept away all suspicions of an amourette between the two whom he feared.
“Still there is the lost child. If I only knew how old the girl was,” he fretted.
“It may be the child of the last decade, or the fruit of a girlish marriage. That secret, and the paper, I must have.
“But, Justine must steal the one, and I have got to reach her line of secret communications.”
As he met his calmly-smiling secret employer he could not divine the revengeful purposes hidden under her gently-heaving bosom.